Attorneys for Tianna Arata seek gag order against SLO police, CHP: ‘They had an agenda’
Attorneys for local Black Lives Matter activist Tianna Arata, who is facing 13 misdemeanors related to a July protest, are asking a judge to impose a gag order on the San Luis Obispo Police Department and California Highway Patrol.
That’s due to what the attorneys call “blatantly false narratives and prejudicial misinformation” the agencies have released that the defense team says threaten Arata’s right to a fair trial.
If successful, the city and state would be precluded from commenting publicly about the case. The gag order would not, however, prevent the defense from continuing to comment.
According to the motion, filed in San Luis Obispo Superior Court on Monday, the legal move was motivated by a series of posts on the official San Luis Obispo Police Department and CHP Coastal Division Facebook pages during and in the days following the July 21 protest. That’s when marchers blocked traffic on Highway 101 for about an hour.
Those Facebook posts sought to identify alleged victims and seek information about people of interest related to a pair of incidents in which motorists ran into protesters. Though the posts portrayed the motorists as victims, protesters in the crowd have told The Tribune that the motorists were the aggressors.
“They’ve been uniquely involved in skewing public opinion,” Arata’s attorney, Patrick Fisher, told The Tribune on Thursday. “It’s inappropriate on so many levels.”
The motion comes on top of another previously filed motion that seeks to dismiss the entire case against Arata. Both will be heard in an Oct. 22 hearing before Superior Court Judge Matthew Guerrero.
Arata is facing 13 misdemeanors including five counts of false imprisonment, six counts of obstruction of a thoroughfare, one count of unlawful assembly and one count of disturbing the peace by loud noise. She has yet to enter a plea.
The San Luis Obispo Police Department had recommended the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office file five felonies and three misdemeanors against Arata about two weeks after her controversial arrest immediately following the July 21 march.
She is one of roughly a dozen local leaders of numerous protests over the past four months demanding racial and social justice, and has been out of custody since shortly after her arrest.
Specifically, the motion for the gag order filed Monday argues that the two police agencies characterized the protesters as violent, making it appear that marchers attacked people and their vehicle, which the defense calls a “patently false narrative.”
The motion cites one incident in which a motorist stopped on Highway 101 accelerated into a crowd of protesters, launching one marcher up onto the hood of the car, according to eyewitness accounts. Arata was approximately 60 feet away during the encounter, the motion says.
A second incident occurred on Palm Street, when a motorist stopped at an intersection suddenly accelerated into a crosswalk, again striking a demonstrator, and was chased away by protesters.
San Luis Obispo police drone footage appears to show Arata swinging a flagpole at the car, but it is unclear whether the car was hit. A police Facebook post referred to the motorist in the video as a victim.
“There are specific posts where it’s clear they hadn’t even spoken to the supposed victims,” Fisher said of the latter incident. “They were asking the quote un-quote victims to come forward. The content of the postings assume what is going on in this person’s head. And that’s what’s really disappointing.”
Fisher said the San Luis Obispo Police Department in its post was “basically broadcasting to the driver of the vehicle, ‘Hey, here’s what you tell us if you want to avoid prosecution.’” The motion states that the driver contacted the agency and asked if he could face jail time.
Arata’s attorneys list a host of other social media posts made by the two agencies about the two incidents, including one that mentions their client by name and essentially accuses her of vandalism.
“It’s not the place of law enforcement to try to get people behind a particular arrest they’ve made. It’s their jobs to look unemotionally, dispassionately at a set of facts,” Fisher said. “It’s not to repeatedly post things online that are really unbalanced view of what happened.”
Adding that Arata’s case has drawn national attention, the defense says that it is highly likely that officers from the San Luis Obispo Police Department and the CHP will be called to testify as witnesses.
The motion is appropriate, the attorneys write, because the court retains the power to impose reasonable restrictions on First Amendment-protected free speech “in order to safeguard other important and competing constitutional imperatives, including foremost the right to a fair and impartial trial.”
“They had an agenda,” Fisher said. “We have a client whose interests we have to look out for, and we don’t want to taint a jury pool.”
