By Paul Elias, The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO(AP) - A federal retrial seven years in the making over police use of pepper spray on bound and nonviolent demonstrators got underway here Thursday. Attorneys for both sides promised to revisit the political upheaval over logging that went on behind the Redwood Curtain on California’s north coast a decade ago.
Nationwide broadcast images of Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies and Eureka police officers daubing pepper spray directly into the eyes of writhing and screaming young demonstrators linked with steel pipes outraged television viewers across the nation in the fall of 1997.
An initial trial a year later ended with a deadlocked jury.
At issue now - as in 1998 - is whether police use of the pepper spray was abusive and illegal or whether it was a legitimate law enforcement activity.
The eight protesters who filed the lawsuit argue the pepper spray was used to illegally punish and intimidate them for chaining themselves together and making it difficult for the police to arrest them. They seek unspecified damages.
“There was no need to do this with pepper spray,” said Dennis Cunningham, the protesters attorney, during opening statements Thursday. “There was no need to inflict this pain and suffering on these young people who were standing up for what they believe.”
The two police agencies and two municipalities being sued counter that the pepper spray was a safer and more efficient way to unlock the demonstrators than using power tools.
“The substance, which is claimed to be so odious in this case, can be purchased over the counter at Longs Drugs by an 18-year-old,” defense attorney Nancy Delaney said in her opening statements. “It posed no significant risk of injury whatsoever.”
She also said that none of the protesters have had any lasting health problems because of the pepper spray.
A deadlocked jury couldn’t decide the case after an initial trial six years ago and the judge on that case later tossed it out.
Since then, the case has slowly wound its way through the legal system, ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. In a rare action, an appeals court removed the original judge from the case because of allegations of bias and ordered a new trial.
Now, with a new judge and fresh jury, the political drama of 1997 Humboldt County is again being replayed.
In the fall of 1997, tensions were high on the Northern California coast. Demonstrators from across the country had made their annual trek to sparsely populated Humboldt County to protest the tree-cutting practices of Pacific Lumber Co.
The 150-year-old timber industry is deeply rooted in the region’s economy. After the dominant lumber company began to increase its harvest of ancient redwood trees in the 1990s, political schisms ran deep. after the dominant lumber company began to increase its harvest of ancient redwood trees in the 1990s.
An increasing number of demonstrators began to arrive in Humboldt County in an attempt to slow Pacific Lumber’s annual harvest. Increasingly too, the protesters used more tactics designed to thwart and frustrate police trying to remove them by chaining themselves to trees or linking themselves together with steel tubes in company and government offices.
Looking for alternative ways to force protesters to unlock their hands and arms from pipes police otherwise had to cut off with power tools, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department decided to use pepper spray, an eye and throat irritant designed for self defense.
“At all times, it was used to overcome resistance to arrest,” Delaney said.
On three separate occasions in September and October 1997, sheriff’s deputies and the Eureka Police Department warned protesters chained together at a harvest site, in the local congressman’s office and in Pacific Lumber’s office that they would be pepper sprayed unless they unlocked themselves from the metal pipes.
Ultimately the law enforcement officials swabbed and sprayed pepper spray into the eyes of nine protesters.
Eight of them sued Humboldt County, the sheriff and the city of Eureka.
Cunningham promised he would prove that the “sheriff’s department was aligned with the timber company” and that by 1997, law enforcement officials had grown frustrated with the annual demonstrations.
“In time, they were sick of it,” Cunningham said. “And they wanted to escalate it.”