The city of Louisville has agreed to pay $ 75,000 to a black couple who say police removed them from their car and searched them for their race and that they were driving a nice vehicle.
According to Lusivil’s Courier Magazine, as a condition of payment, the couple and their lawyers are prohibited from criticizing the Louisville subway government or the cops involved in the incident, in the media or on social media.
Michael Abeit, a lawyer with the Courier Journal and the Kentucky Press Association, says the terms of the agreement are “completely wrong.”
“The city is paying to silence its critics,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. And it seems to be aimed at hampering reform. This is a bad policy and really worrying. “
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First Assistant District Attorney Ingrid Geyser said in a statement that the couple “are not prohibited from telling the truth about what happened during their stoppage”, although she added that the language “should more accurately reflect the agreement of the parties”.
In their federal lawsuit, Anthony Parker Sr. and Demetria Firman claim to have been stopped in 2018 because they did not use a turn signal, although footage from the body’s camera shows that they turned it on. On their way home from the church, they were subsequently stopped and searched without reasonable suspicion in front of their 9-year-old son in a “desperate attempt by officers to find weapons and drugs.”
The case also states that Firman was only allowed to leave the scene when it was obvious to the police that Demetria and her now husband were personal acquaintances with a fellow police officer, Courier Magazine reports.
The city agreed to the agreement on September 9, with the stipulation that the subway government does not recognize violations.
Lawyers wrote in the traffic stop case that the couple was stopped “because they were black, were in a nice car and were in a specific LMPD neighborhood.”