Wesley Lowery, OU alumnus and former Post editor-in-chief, is faced with criminal charges a year following Ferguson arrest.
Almost a year after being arrested at a McDonald’s while reporting on protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Ohio University alumnus and former Post editor-in-chief Wesley Lowery is faced with criminal charges.
Lowery, a reporter for the Washington Post, is being charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer.
Lowery was in Ferguson this past year reporting on conflict and protests that occurred following the killing of Michael Brown. He and other reporters had been using a local McDonald’s as a place to work close to the demonstrations, the Washington Post previously reported, when police entered and asked them to leave.
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While Lowery and others were being escorted out of the McDonald’s, he was directed out of multiple different doors, dropped his bag and was then arrested, Lowery told the Washington Post last year.
Now, nearly a year after the arrest, charges have been filed.
The charges were brought forth through a court summons that was delivered to Lowery on Aug. 6, which orders him to appear in a St. Louis county municipal court on Aug. 24, the Washington Post reports. The summons says he could be arrested if he does not appear in court.
The charges could carry a fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail, the Washington Post said.
Lowery has been public about the issue, announcing that he received the summons on his Twitter account on Monday.
He added the charges came about a week before the statute of limitations ran out.
In a statement released on Monday, Martin D. Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, said that pressing these charges “when [Lowery] was just doing his job is outrageous”.
“You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident,” Baron said in the statement. “Wes Lowery should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.”
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Ryan Reilly, a reporter for the Huffington Post, was with Lowery and was also arrested that night.
In a statement from Ryan Grim, the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, and Sam Stein, the site’s senior politics editor, both officials said the only crime committed in the McDonald’s was that of the police officers who “assaulted both Ryan and Wesley Lowery … during a violent arrest”.
“If Wesley Lowery and Ryan J. Reilly can be charged like this with the whole country watching, just imagine what happens when nobody is,” the statement said.
Several groups including the National Association of Black Journalists have expressed their concern and disagreement over the charges.
“The association is troubled by the action taken by prosecutors and believe it to be a direct assault on the free exercise of the First Amendment, which ensures journalists can practice their craft,” the NABJ said in a statement.
The Society of Professional Journalists also issued a statement saying the charges are “ridiculous — not to mention a violation of the First Amendment”.
“When law enforcement, military or government agencies prevent journalists from doing their jobs, through force, intimidation or other unwarranted unethical practices, it creates a slippery slope in which democracy is compromised,” the statement said.
Lowery told the Washington Post on Monday that he has maintained from the beginning that his detention was “illegal and unnecessary”.
The Post could not reach Lowery for comment at the time of publication.
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