MANHATTAN (CN) - Seven protesters who refused to sign on to a landmark $18 million settlement related to the 2004 Republican National Convention represent some of the most "egregious" cases of civil rights violations, their lawyers say.
Roughly 1,800 of their peers will split the bounty, minus attorneys' fees, to end nearly a decade of litigation involving the mass arrests New York City police performed after the 2004 renomination of then-President George Bush sparked enormous protests at Madison Square Garden.
Months after the event, dozens of lawsuits poured in alleging that the NYPD indiscriminately roped in protesters, reporters, legal observers and bystanders, using mesh netting and barricades, and tossed them in cold, loud, chemical-strewn, makeshift cells in Pier 57, along the Hudson River. The now-shuttered pier came to be nicknamed "Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson."
Their experiences may pale in comparison to the seven who are not splitting the potentially record-breaking award.
Yusuke Joshua Banno, a then college student in Arizona accused of lighting a papier-mache dragon on fire, was held on $250,000 bail for charges of arson and inciting a riot.
"Josh became the poster child for what they claimed to be the anarchist attempt to take apart the city and justify what the police were doing thereafter," his attorney Jeff Fogel said in a phone interview.
The charges against Banno were dropped, however, when he produced a photograph placing him away from where the dragon first ignited.
Banno currently claims that an undercover officer helped ignite the dragon near Herald Square to burnish his credibility within an anarchist group - and then, fingered him in a cover-up.
In a recent column predicting the settlement, New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer called Banno's case a "lingering mystery" of the 2004 convention. That article cited an anonymous deposition for an officer assigned to "ghost and provide cover" for the undercover officer in question.
Fogel noted that the officer who gave the deposition was allowed to testify in disguise, and wore "a wig, a hat and some stupid-looking glasses" for the occasion.
The officer claimed to have been able to identify Banno, who had been wearing a hat and bandana, from 30 feet away because of his "non-Caucasian eyes," Fogel said.
"How he could see a pair of non-Caucasian eyes through that raises a very serious question," Fogel said.
He called for an investigation within the police department to answer some larger issues.
"Who and how many people in the police department knew about this?" Fogel asked. "Did they really let that happen? Did they really let a cop endanger that many people in order to protect their credibility?"
Fogel's other client among the 2004 settlement holdouts, videographer Brian Conley, claims that he received better treatment from the Chinese government after taping Free Tibet demonstrations during the Olympics than he got from the NYPD.
A New York City police officer arrested Conley on a cobblestone street of Lower Manhattan, purportedly for obstructing traffic that seldom travelled through there.
Fogel alleges that they were actually interested in stopping him from rolling tape, and inexperienced officers slapped flexicuffs on Conley so tightly that the protester's doctor in Massachusetts diagnosed him with nerve damage.
Valarie Kaur, who may have suffered even worse injuries from being cuffed, got diagnosed with reflex sympathetic dystrophy after an officer twisted her arms behind her back, her attorney, Rose Weber, said.