STUDENTS ANNOUNCE LAWSUIT AGAINST CU OVER 4/20 PHOTOS

Civil rights attorneys Perry R. Sanders, Jr. and Robert J. Frank
announced plans on May 10 to file a federal lawsuit against CU on
behalf of several students who say their rights were violated by the
CUPD at the 4/20 pro-marijuana gathering on Farrand Field.

"We were not advocating a federal civil lawsuit, we were advocating
peace," Sander said in a press release. "The university has forced
our hand in this matter."

The attorneys are representing three CU students: Megan Malone, a
sophomore integrative physiology major, Makenna Salaverry, a
sophomore sociology major, and Somerset Tullius, a sophomore art
history major, who were among 2,500 people who gathered on the field
for the un-official annual celebration at 4:20 p.m. April 20.

The university closed the field from noon to 5 p.m. that day and
posted signs notifying students of the closure. The signs also read
that Farrand Field was under surveillance.

On April 27, the CUPD posted pictures on their Web site of the three
women at the rally along with 197 other individuals who police say
were trespassing. Some of the photos also depicted individuals
smoking from a pipe or rolled-up paper.

CU was offering a $50 reward to anyone who could positively identify
any of the people in the photos. By the time site was taken down on
May 10, over 70 of the photographs were labeled as "identified."

In the announcement, Sanders said the Web site is one example of how
the university has gone too far. "These are people that the worst
thing they did was trespass, and there is a $50 reward by their
picture," he said. "This isn't okay. This is killing ants with a
sledge hammer."

The university has "come after people like these three ladies right
here who were not doing anything illegal that day," he said. "They
didn't see any no-trespassing signs that I'm aware of. They
certainly weren't using any illegal drugs out there that day, they
were like many hundreds, if not thousands, of people who were
out there expressing themselves freely on a free university campus."

"The photographs of the women, which are now posted on the Internet
for the entire world to see, are a violation of these students
rights," Sanders said. "They've gotten calls from (people) as far
away as Europe that they've seen (the) picture on the Web regarding
being associated with using illegal drugs," he said. "These people
were not using illegal drugs at all. They were merely part of a
peaceful protest."

The police were well within their right to try to identify students
who were on the field, said CUPD spokesman Lt. Tim McGraw. "There's
a university regulation that says people on the campus of the
University of the Colorado at Boulder shall not violate state,
federal or local laws while here. To do so is a university
violation," he said. "The people that trespassed onto the field that
we identified that are students have been referred to the Office of
Judicial Affairs for violation of that university regulation."

The university did a number of things to inform students that the
field was closed, McGraw said, including handing out fliers hours in
advance of the event, posting security personal and event staff,
barricading the field and posting signs regarding the closure. "I
don't know how more reasonable the university could act," he said.

Sanders and Frank, who are also currently representing the estate of
deceased rapper Notorious B.I.G. in a wrongful death suit against
the Los Angeles Police Department, initially came to CU May 4 to
speak to students who participated in the 4/20 rally about
their rights and legal options.

The attorneys contacted university representatives to ask that the
CUPD's investigation be stopped and the conflict resolved peaceably.
"We offered the university an olive branch," Sanders said in a
prepared statement. "We, on behalf of clearly innocent students,
asked them to take down the Web site and purge information related
to it. We advised that the university would continue to harm these
individuals if they acted on any of this information. The university
not only rejected the olive branch, but picked up their bully club
during finals and began telling students to come into the police
station for questioning."

Although the lawsuits are not prepared yet, the attorneys plan to
file petitions with the federal district court in the next few days.
They could not give any specific details about the lawsuit or the
complaints against the university because of legal and ethical
issues, Frank said.

One of the other general concerns the attorneys expressed was
whether the university had the right to close Farrand field in the
first place. "We're talking about First Amendment violations of
assembly, association and freedom of speech at a minimum," Sanders said.

For a government entity to close a public place like Farrand, Frank
said, they have to prove that the decision was content neutral,
meaning that it wasn't because of the content of the speech. But he
doesn't believe the university did this. "They were closing this
field because a group of people, students and non-students, were
going to gather together to discuss, identify and to demonstrate a
really big political issue, and the government can't do that," he said.

"Even assuming what they did was content neutral, they need to do it
in the least burdensome manner to speech," Frank said. "What that
means is if they think that there were people engaging in illegal
conduct, then they need to come and they need to take the
appropriate measures relating to the people engaged in illegal
conduct." One appropriate measure, he said would have been for the
police to hand out individual citations to drug users as they found them.

The university did not violate any civil rights, said CU spokesman
Barrie Hartman. "What rights were we violating?" he asked. "I mean
the field was closed, and we have a right to close the field."

Hartman also added that the university considered the option of
handing out citations but ultimately decided to close down the field
to everybody because "it was safe, and it was a way to tell the
students that this was not an appropriate event," Hartman said.

University administrators decided it would be best for safety
reasons not to hand out individual citations to drug users, Hartman
said. "We didn't want to do something that would cause a
confrontation between police and students because that's how people get hurt."

McGraw added that citations would not have been a pragmatic option
with the limited amount of resources available to CUPD. "The last
thing we want to do is create a bigger problem than the one we were
trying to solve," he said. "If we go out and start citing some
people, and people become resistive, if people are high and not in
as rational state of mind as they typically might be, we could touch
off a powder keg, and we don't want to go down that road."

The people who were photographed were not allowed to be where they
were in the first place, McGraw said. "Nobody in the state of
Colorado has the right to break the law," he said. People "don't
have the right to trespass onto a closed field."