A Gay Gatesgate: Pepin Tuma Speaks

onAugust 10, 2009 at 1:47 PM

Last month, we wrote about the questionable arrest of a gay Washington lawyer — a controversy we dubbed A Gay Gatesgate, referencing the furor over Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’s arrest by Cambridge police. We expressed the view that the police sometimes abuse their authority in dealing with outspoken citizens (and it seems that many of you agree with us, based on the results of our opinion poll).
Yesterday the gay lawyer who was arrested in D.C., Pepin Tuma — a former associate at Milbank Tweed and Gibson Dunn, so he’s part of the Biglaw tribe — wrote about his arrest in the Washington Post. After describing the conduct that led to his arrest, which should be familiar to readers of our earlier post, Tuma writes:

I am in fact a gay man. And because I have been involved in civil rights work, I know my rights, and I calmly asserted them [to the arresting officer]. I asked why I was being detained. I explained that, as a lawyer, I knew it was not a crime to offer a public opinion about the police. But the troubling police conduct did not end there. Other officers have acted to bolster Culp’s fabricated version of the incident. One of his superiors attempted to induce witnesses to attest that I resisted arrest when I had not. Another superior falsely wrote to Internal Affairs that I confirmed that Culp had advised me to move along before arresting me; he did not. It appears that officers simply lied over and over to cover up an unconstitutional arrest.

Tuma builds his case, after the jump.

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Tuma shares some interesting statistics about the D.C. police:

The city has a longstanding problem with police abuse of “disorderly conduct” arrests, and it knows it. A 2003 report concluded that the District’s disorderly conduct arrest rate was two to four times the rate nationwide. In 2000 alone, D.C. police made 10,600 disorderly conduct arrests — more than one in every five arrests made and nearly twice the number in the next largest category.

To the commenters who criticized Tuma for mouthing off in the first place, he concedes that it wasn’t his finest hour, but explains why it wasn’t “disorderly conduct”:

My behavior was juvenile, but nothing I did was illegal. I never cursed; no crowd of bystanders formed; I was not drunk. Because I am innocent, and importantly — because I understand the legal system and can defend myself — I am confident my name will be cleared and the charges dismissed.

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