Ryan, like many youth in Ann Arbor, was
outraged that the Ku Klux Klan had come to his town. First he went to Wheeler Park and
participated in the events there, listening to bands with other high school and middle
school youth. Then, along with other youth who had gone to Wheeler Park first, he went to
city hall to the site of the KKK rally to join with the youth there directly protesting
the appeals of the Klan for racist violence and genocide.
Ryan is being prosecuted simply because he made a decision to stand
shoulder to shoulder with other youth trying to keep the Klan from spreading to Ann Arbor
the kind of hate and violence that led to the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas just a
few weeks after the KKK rally in Ann Arbor and the massacre of high school students that
happened on April 20 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Police photographs of the anti-KKK protest show Ryan present at the
rally doing nothing but standing around, skateboard in hand. In the several hundred
pages of police reports there is not a single witness who claims to have seen Ryan do
anything illegal.
Ryan has faced a pattern of harassment from the Ann Arbor Police
Department; he has received a large number of tickets for the sort of petty things many
youth get harassed for in Ann Arbor, like skateboarding. He is now facing the very serious
charge of "riot". The attack on Ryan is an important test case on the democratic
rights of youth.
The process by which the police ended up charging Ryan with a 10-year
felony was cynical in the extreme and illustrates the unscrupulous and overreaching
character of the witchhunt against the antiracist protesters. For the Ann Arbor Police
Department, Ryan is a stand-in for every youth who attended the protest of the KKK at city
hall.
The police decided to bring the felony "riot" charge against
Ryan only after he refused to identify other youth in police photographs to
detectives.
Using felony charges against a then 15-year-old as retribution for
refusing to be disloyal to his friends is shameful, cynical behavior on the part of the
AAPD, the Washtenaw Co. Prosecutor and the city government. The prosecutions
intention is presumably to try to make up for what they lack in evidence with a
presentation of irrelevant and prejudicial stereotypes about youth.
Everyone who cares about civil liberties, youth rights and opposes the
genocide plans of the KKK should be at the courthouse to support Ryan against this
prosecution.
HEARING ON EVIDENCE DESTROYED BY POLICE
The last round of court hearings, in addition to securing some delay
from threatened June trial dates in the non-juvenile felonies, also won an evidentiary
hearing in the bulk of the misdemeanor charges.
On Friday, July 16, at 1:30PM the misdemeanor defendants who are
accused of having damaged a chain link rental fence will have an evidentiary hearing. This
will be a turning point in the whole set of witchhunt prosecutions.
Given the fact that the only physical evidence in these cases was
destroyed with the authorization of the police, the evidentiary hearing to determine
whether and if so, when, how, where and by whom the fence was damaged should prove very
difficult for the prosecution.
NO EVIDENCE & NO RECORD
The police and prosecutors office are claiming that the fence was
damaged, but the police department never made any assessment of the condition of the
fence. The fence company made a casual and entirely cursory assessment of the
fence. Knowing they had a standard blank-check insurance policy from the city for any
assessment of material loss they had a financial incentive to bend the stick in the
direction of assessing damage. No record was ever made of the alleged damage by either the
police or the fence company. No video, no still photographs, not so much as a leaf from a
police notebook is to be found in the extensive police reports that documents the damage
that defendants are alleged to have caused.
The police then allowed the subject of these charges to be scrapped and
melted down, leaving only the bill from the fence company as "evidence" of
damage.
witchhunt, n. A
political campaign launched on the pretext of investigating activities subversive to the
state. Houghton Mifflin 1995. witchhunt,
n. search for witch(es), (fig.) search for suspected Communists or other persons
with unorthodox views. Oxford University 1976.
witchhunt, n. an intensive effort to discover
and expose disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, or the like, usually based on slight,
doubtful, or irrelevant evidence. Random House 1980. |
This bill is now the lynch pin of ten misdemeanor charges. The fence
company, of course, could have no notion that the bill they wrote up on the basis of this
cursory assessment of the condition of the fence would later be the central piece of
evidence in criminal charges against ten people. Now the company has a vested interest in
maintaining the position that the fence was damaged.
Police photographs of the fence after the rally, still images secured
from police video, eyewitness affidavits of neutral observers, including several Peace
Team members, and an expert witness affidavit from the owner/operator of a fence company
who viewed the fence in question on multiple police videos all indicate that there was no
damage done to the rental fence. In fact, the Peace Team re-erected the fence after it
was pulled from the poles by the counter-demonstrators.