Pubdate: Thu, 01 May 2003
Source: Charleston Gazette (WV)
Copyright: 2003 Charleston Gazette
Contact:  http://www.wvgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/77
Author: Christopher Tritto
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/raids.htm (Drug Raids)

THREE STUDENTS SUE CITY FOR ALLEGED RACIAL PROFILING

Three black West Virginia State College students who say they were racially 
profiled by Charleston police officers one year ago filed suit against the 
city Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of 
Drew Williams, Jason Price and Courtney Shannon. The men were stopped by 
nine police officers on their way home from a barbershop in Charleston's 
East End.

"Through this lawsuit the ACLU hopes to put an end to the substitution of 
skin color for evidence by law enforcement officers in Charleston," state 
ACLU Executive Director Andrew Schneider said in a press release.

On April 30, 2002, the three students were returning from one of the last 
seminars for their West Virginia State College Student Leadership Program, 
the suit says.

The program accepts only the top 5 percent of the 6,000 students at the 
college, Don Gresby, professor and coordinator of judicial affairs and 
special programs at the college, told the Gazette last year.

The program exposes students to minority entrepreneurs as role models, and 
is a nationally recognized program for honor students, according to the ACLU.

Male members of the class had been at Trey's Barbershop on the East End, 
getting haircuts and facials and getting tips on how to appear properly in 
public, Gresby said.

Shannon, then 22, of South Holland, Ill., was driving the others away from 
the shop when police pulled him over on Washington Street near Interstate 
64, just past the Greyhound bus station.

Nine police officers, wearing uniforms and street clothes, surrounded the 
car with guns drawn at about 9:30 p.m. and ordered Shannon to toss his keys 
out the window.

The three students were then ordered from the car one at a time, ordered to 
kneel on the ground and handcuffed.

As police searched the men and the car for an hour, all three said at least 
one officer kept insisting someone had handed the students a plastic bag 
with something white in it before they pulled away from the barbershop. The 
students said no one had walked up to the car.

The three had purchased toiletry items before they left the barbershop in 
the 1500 block of Washington Street East. Drug unit officers doing 
surveillance in a nearby Toyota Camry watched them get in their car.

Officers said they saw one of the men hold up a vial. They thought the vial 
contained crack cocaine, Charleston Police Maj. Jerry Pauley said at the 
time. Pauley is now Charleston's police chief.

The vial turned out to be the just-purchased toiletry items.

Officers said Shannon violated several traffic laws as they followed him in 
a patrol car. No citations were issued after the stop. The three were 
released after no evidence of criminal misconduct was discovered.

Williams, a Grayson, Ga., resident who was enrolled in ROTC and was on the 
dean's list at State, said at the time that with the police car's lights on 
him "all I could see was guns."

Price, the third man in the car, is from Kimball, McDowell County.

Days after the stop, then-Police Chief Jerry Riffe said he started an 
internal investigation of allegations the officers used racial profiling 
when they pulled the students over. No results of that investigation have 
been released.

The lawsuit says that the city violated the students' 14th Amendment 
guarantee of equal protection under the law as well as their 4th Amendment 
right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

The police actions also violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that requires 
federally funded agencies to conduct activities in a racially 
non-discriminatory manner, according to the suit.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom