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.