Five plaintiffs in a federal suit against Graham and Alamance County law enforcement officials received a cumulative payment this week of $120,000 in exchange for dismissing their lawsuit.
“We didn’t wrap up until this week,” when the plaintiffs received and cashed their checks, said Jaelyn Miller, an attorney with Emancipate NC, a law firm in Durham that represented the five plaintiffs along with Scott Holmes, director of the Civil Litigation Clinic at North Carolina Central University.
Though the long-running legal dispute was actually settled in a mediation conference in late February, the court file does not yet include any documents outlining the financial terms.
Miller confirmed the financial terms of the settlement for The Alamance News by phone late Wednesday afternoon.
The plaintiffs’ attorney also confirmed that there was no admission of wrongdoing by any of the defendants. A formal notice of dismissal will be filed in federal district court later this week, Miller said.
The suit was filed in October 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina over alleged civil rights violations by officers from multiple local law enforcement agencies during a protest near the Alamance County detention center on Sunday, November 24, 2019.
The five plaintiffs – Xavier Adams; Katelyn Campbell; Lisa Rowden; Ruby Sinriech; and Mark Sfeir – had been arrested while exercising their First Amendment rights that day, according to their suit.
The protest had been organized by three groups: Never Again Action, Siembra NC, and Down Home North Carolina, according to an invitation to the event that had been posted on their social media pages the week prior to the event.
At the time, Never Again Action had described itself as community organizing group that equates the detention of people who have been captured after entering the country illegally with the genocide that Jews experienced in their German homeland during the Holocaust. Never Again Action (NAA) claims as its sole mission to eliminate ICE, or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau.
The Alamance County sheriff’s office had a longstanding agreement, 287(g), to hold ICE detainees at the jail until they could be transported for immigration hearings.
[Story continues below 2019 photos of the protest.]
Also involved in staging the protest was the Raleigh chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). That group had tweeted an invitation on November 19, 2019, stating: “Show up and show solidarity. Migrants, Refugees, Immigrants… all are welcome here, and no amount of state terror can beat the love and kindness the People can provide.”
The plaintiffs in the suit were arrested on November 24, 2019 on misdemeanor charges of failure to disperse and other minor offenses that included disorderly conduct.
Those charges came after law enforcement determined that the organizers had not obtained a required permit that had been required under a since-repealed city ordinance.
The city ordinance that had been in effect in November 2019, but was repealed about a year later, required that “any group of two or more purposes gathering for the purpose of protesting any matter or making known any position or thought of the group” and anyone “marching upon the public streets, sidewalks, parks, or public places” to obtain a permit from the Graham police chief at least 24 hours in advance, the lawsuit noted.
The five plaintiffs subsequently sued Alamance County sheriff Terry Johnson, two sheriff’s deputies, several Graham police officers, and the city of Graham, as well as a Haw River police officer for carrying out “unlawful arrests” that allegedly deprived the plaintiffs of their constitutional rights.
Similar to several other recent civil rights suits filed against the city and county following the BLM riots in downtown Graham in 2020, the five plaintiffs in the latest suit to be settled out of court had argued that Graham’s repealed permit ordinance “an unconstitutional prior restraint and an unconstitutional content-based time, place, and manner restriction of speech in traditional public forums.”
The plaintiffs contended that law enforcement had created barriers along both sides of Maple Street, which unlawfully prevented marchers from accessing the public sidewalk, “a traditional forum,” and later issued several “unlawful orders to disperse.”
They were arrested while engaging in protected, First-Amendment activity, though they had not engaged in any violent conduct or uttered any threats or language likely to provoke violence, according to their suit.
The lawsuit described Adams as an “Afro-Mexican” resident of Durham; Campbell and Rowden as white residents of Mebane; Sinreich as a white residen of Durha; and Sfeir as a white resident of Kannapolis.
Graham city officials confirmed for the newspaper late Wednesday that the terms of the settlement had been negotiated between representatives from the city’s insurance company and attorneys for both sides.
Meanwhile, Miller, the attorney with Emancipate NC, told the newspaper that an event will be held next Wednesday, April 9, from 12:00 Noon 1:30 p.m. at the law school at NCCU, where the plaintiffs will discuss their experiences during the protest and their civil rights suit.
