Atlanta Eagle Police Raid Case End with Mass Acquittals

The case against the defendants in a trial stemming from a gay bar raid last summer in Atlanta has ended with acquittals. The judge in the case found that the prosecution had not made its case against the Atlanta Eagle Club, a gay bar that was raided by 48 Atlanta police officers last Sept. 10, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a March 11 article.

The ruling followed months of stonewalling by police, who refused to cooperate with the Atlanta Citizen Review Board. The Board had begun to investigate the raid, in which 62 patrons were reportedly detained, and eight employees placed under arrest. When the police proved uncooperative, the board threatened to issue subpoenas, reported an earlier Journal-Constitution article from Feb. 18.

"We have been dealing with this issue of officers' refusal to cooperate for a long time," Seth Kirschenbaum, a lawyer who serves as the board's vice chairman, told the newspaper.

"The union's stance is we're still going to protect officers' due process rights no matter what the members of the citizen review board have to say about that," said the Atlanta Police Union's Lt. Scott Kreher at the time. "We're going to have them follow the [standard operating procedures] of the department, which requires them to go down but doesn't require them to testify." Kreher went on to point out that not only was an internal investigation ongoing, but a civil suit had also been brought against the department.

The police raid ostensibly took place because undercover police saw sex acts taking place in public at the bar. Authorities also said that nude dancing had been taking place without the bar having the proper licenses for adult entertainment. Also, authorities said that drug violations had been seen at the bar. But bar owner Richard Ramey, who was not charged, took issue with how the raid reportedly went down, with officers allegedly forcing patrons to lie face-down on the floor, handcuffing them, and subjecting them to searches. Some patrons claimed that the officers taunted them with anti-gay epithets. "Our problem is with the way our customers were treated," Ramey told the Journal-Constitution in a Sept. 12, 2009 article, published just two days after the raid.

"I'm thinking, this is Stonewall. It's like I stepped into the wrong decade," bar patron Nick Koperski told the paper at that time.

"Before I knew it I was being handcuffed," said bartender Chris Lopez. "[The police] were going from patron to patron, having everyone turn out their pockets."

But the case came to naught in court, when Municipal Judge Crystal Gaines found three defendants not guilty of license violations. Charges against the other five were then dropped. "We always thought from the beginning that we were charged for no reason," Ramey said. "They had no right to be there."

Investigations into the raid continue. With only one officer having cooperated with the Citizens Review Board, the City Council has now intervened and said that it will issue subpoenas to 18 officers. Meantime, the civil suit is still pending in federal court.