Two reporters covering protests in Ferguson charged

Two American reporters who were arrested at a restaurant last year in Ferguson, Missouri while reporting on protests there have been charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer and ordered to appear in court.

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and The Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly were detained in a McDonald’s while they were in Ferguson covering demonstrations sparked by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer.

Lowery, 25, received a court summons dated on August 6 ordering him to appear in St. Louis County municipal court on August 24. The summons notes that he could be arrested if he does not appear in court.

“Charging a reporter with trespassing and interfering with a police officer when he was just doing his job is outrageous,” Martin Baron, executive editor of The Post, said in a statement Monday. “You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident. Wes Lowery should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.

“This latest action represents contemptible overreaching by prosecutors who seem to have no regard for the role of journalists seeking to cover a major story and following normal practice,” Baron continued.

Lowery has returned to Ferguson to cover protests marking the first anniversary of the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, the Washington Post said.

Lowery is being charged with trespassing on private property despite being asked to leave, according to the court summons.

He is also charged with interfering with a police officer’s performance of his duties because, the summons alleges, he failed to comply with “repeated commands to immediately exit” the restaurant.

“I maintained from the first day that our detention was illegal and unnecessary,” Lowery said in a telephone interview Monday. “So I was surprised that a year later this is something officials in St. Louis County decided was worth revisiting.”

Both Lowery and Reilly were quickly released and not charged with any crime at the time. Reilly has not yet received notification, but a spokesman for the St. Louis County executive confirmed he will face the same charges. 

“A crime was committed at the McDonald’s, not by journalists, but by local police who assaulted both Ryan and Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post during violent arrests,” Ryan Grim, the Huffington Post’s bureau chief in Washington, and Sam Stein, the site’s senior politics editor, said in a statement Monday.

On Tuesday, riot police clashed with protesters in the streets of Ferguson over the first anniversary of the death of Brown. Police arrested at least 56 people.

Authorities declared a state of emergency on Monday for the St. Louis suburb and surrounding areas after police officers shot and critically wounded a man in an exchange of gunfire Sunday night.

Brown was shot multiple times and killed last year in Ferguson by white police officer Darren Wilson, sparking months of violent protests across the United States.

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