PHOENIX (CN) — A jury of eight will soon decide whether Phoenix police officers violated the First Amendment rights of two people they arrested at a 2019 protest.
In his closing argument, the protesters’ attorney Mart Harris called the defendant, Phoenix Police Lt. Benjamin Moore, a liar.
“We told the truth like we’re supposed to,” Harris, of the Trial Law Firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told the jury Tuesday morning. “The truth is the defense brought us jokes. The defense brought us games.”
Jorge Soria and Phil Martinez say in a lawsuit that Moore unfairly ordered their arrests for failure to follow a dispersal order while he let others who didn’t disperse walk free. Over the course of the five-day trial, Harris told the jury that Moore only ordered the arrest of the two defendants in retaliation for their constitutionally protected anti-police speech.
“Ben Moore and the tactical response unit didn’t like what they had to say,” Harris said of the plaintiffs. “So they shut them up and covered it up.”
According to Moore, he arrested the two simply because they didn’t leave after he declared the protest an unlawful assembly.
“All they had to do was leave,” defense attorney John Masterson told the jury. “They were told over and over and over and over again to leave. And they didn’t.”
Soria attended a protest in downtown Phoenix against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s treatment of migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border. Soria carried a large Soviet Union flag and a sign calling police “child killers.”
Moore and his officers who were called to testify said Soria was targeted for arrest because he was violently waving his flag at officers. Moore said a sergeant reported an aggravated assault to him, prompting him to order Soria’s arrest.
But that sergeant, Douglas McBride, testified last week that he never saw Soria violently wave the flag, and never reported an aggravated assault. Harris played more than an hour of video for the jury, and police weren’t able to identify the supposed violence in any of the video or audio. Moore said he must have seen the assault in a different video that wasn’t entered into evidence.
“Supposedly there’s a video that completely proves your innocence, and you didn’t bring it to court,” Harris said to Moore. “Thirty years as a police officer and he’s never had to gather evidence for court,” he continued, returning his attention to the jury. “That’s what he tried to tell you.”
Masterson dismissed the arguments over the claimed assault and the message on Soria’s sign as red herrings to distract from the fact that Soria didn’t leave when told to.
But Harris said Soria did leave — video evidence shows that Soria had moved dozens of feet away from the officers’ skirmish line to give an interview to a TV reporter before he was tackled and arrested. Harris, walking across the courtroom to demonstrate, suggested it was reasonable for Soria to assume he was far enough away from the area because eight minutes passed between the last dispersal order and Soria’s arrest.
Martinez, a well-known critic of the Phoenix Police Department, was riding the light rail through the area and was forced to get off and walk along the sidewalk to the next stop because of the disruption. Walking past police officers, Martinez scoffed at their helmets and riot gear, calling them “fucking pussies.”
He was standing near Soria, recording with his phone when police arrested them simultaneously.
After Martinez’s arrest, officers claimed that he was targeted not for his speech, but for throwing a “hammer fist punch” at one of them while he was being apprehended. But Moore and other officers weren’t able to identify the punch in the video evidence either.
Again, Masterson said whether the assault happened didn’t matter because Martinez was arrested for failure to disperse. Moore said he ordered a third arrest on a counterprotester who failed to leave the area as well. His attorneys played video and audio files out of sync to suggest that a person standing to Martinez’s left was also ordered to be arrested.
But Harris synced the audio and video to show that there was no person to Martinez’s left, and the “person to his left” referred to Martinez standing to Soria’s left. Later in the video, the man who Moore said he ordered to be arrested returned to the scene, and Moore gave the all-clear sign.
“He came into this court and lied to every single one of you,” Harris told the jury.
The trial began seven months after the U.S. Department of Justice declared the Phoenix Police Department engaged in patterns of civil rights violations and excessive force. While the plaintiffs presented the full investigation to the jury, certain parts, such as the finding that officers unlawfully restrict free speech and expression, were redacted from the jury’s view to maintain neutrality.
The jury began deliberating Tuesday afternoon.