Markeshia Ricks Photo
Victorious Segui with Attorney Wolak (right) and legal intern Ruel Jerry.
A jury decided Friday that Betsy Segui was within the scope of her duties as a police officer to arrest Ideat Village co-founder Bill Saunders for interfering, inciting a riot, and disorderly conduct at a downtown concert.
Jurors made that decision after a couple of hours of deliberation Friday at state Superior Court on Church Street and after viewing evidence and two days of testimony of people who were present on that day of the arrest including Saunders and Segui.
The case came down to whether Segui had probable cause to arrest Saunders on June 30, 2012. Saunders filed a civil suit alleging that Segui had falsely arrested him on that day and had battered him in the process of that arrest. (The charges of interfering, inciting to riot and disorderly were eventually dropped when Saunders instead pleaded guilty to creating a public disturbance, an infraction.) His arrest took place during an event called Ideat Village that Saunders used to stage on Pitkin Plaza off Orange Street an alternative to the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
City Assistant Corporation Counsel Michael Wolak, who represented Segui, said he was obviously happy with the outcome.
“I also think that Sgt. Segui was forceful in her testimony,” he said.
Saunders in court Friday.
Saunders was, of course, disappointed with the outcome but he said he believed that the process had been fair.
“That’s all you can ask for,” he said. “That you get your shot. I don’t really understand the verdict but I hope it doesn’t continue to embolden the police department and their poor practices regarding the community.”
Wolak had urged the jurors in his closing statements Friday to pay attention to the evidence, including Segui’s police report, which he noted that she’d written at a point when she was not being sued. He pointed out that by Segui’s own testimony, had Saunders produced a permit for the festival he would have ended the need to investigate the noise complaint that day. (Unaware that the festival had received a permit, she asked Saunders to show he had one; he didn’t have one on him at the moment and couldn’t immediately retrieve it.)
“They never stopped the music,” Wolak said. “They never took any action to shut this down. They let Mr. Saunders leave the venue to try to find the permit.”
Wolack in action Friday.
He noted that it was Saunders’ choice to make an announcement about the police encounter to the crowd. Saunders has said that he jokingly suggested that if the police couldn’t wait for Shea, then they might have to arrest a lot of people that night. Segui said Saunders actually told the festival goers to attack the officers and go to jail if he was arrested that night. Some in the crowd booed, Segui said.
“Why did he feel it was necessary to go to the microphone that point,” Wolak asked the jurors. “There had been no threat made to arrest him at this point. He admitted that Sgt. Segui had taken no action to shut the venue down.”
Though Saunders said it had been a joke, Wolak said it wasn’t a joke to the two officers who were outnumbered by the nearly 70 people gathered there. And still, officers did not approach Saunders after his announcement; he approached them, Wolak said.
He said by Saunders’ own testimony he never had medical treatment for his injuries. And despite his need to be available within 24 hours for trial, he managed to go to Germany with his band three and a half weeks after the incident.
“Consider that the person in this courtroom who had to receive medical treatment was Betsy Segui,” Wolak said to jurors. “In fact, she was out on workman’s compensation as a result of her contact.”
Saunders’ attorney, Chris DeMarco, told jurors in his closing statement that their decision was important because “it affects everybody” and “deals with bigger issues.”
“It deals with basic civil liberties,” he said. “It deals with freedoms that we’ve all grown accustomed to. Freedoms that were violated.”
“This should have never happened,” DeMarco argued. “It simply should never have happened.”
DeMarco: It’s about freedom.
DeMarco called what happened in the last few hours of the last day of the very last Idea Village Festival was the messy result of a misunderstanding on Segui’s part about Bill Saunders, whom he described as a “gadfly” and “pain in the ass of the powers that be in the city who wasn’t going away.” He also suggested that the arrest resulted from a lack of any attempt by Segui to actually investigate a noise complaint that drew officers to the scene in the first place. He said Segui had no probable cause to arrest Saunders that day and thus falsely arrested him.
And the missing permit? DeMarco told jurors that it was simply a red herring in the absence of any statute or ordinance that requires that it be on the premises of the festival in the first place. Despite everything that happened that day, the police never actually shut the festival down, he noted.
DeMarco urged the jurors to send the City of New Haven a message that the way Segui made the arrest and how Saunders was handled during that arrest won’t be excused or condoned, by awarding him damages in the amount of $25,000.
“We’re not trying to be greedy here,” DeMarco said. “There are police cases … that warrant a hell of a lot more money than this.”
DeMarco said the case wasn’t about money.
“It’s about what’s right and wrong, it’s about being safe and keeping safe,” he said. “It’s about freedom.”
Cop On Stand: “We Never Got That Far”
Segui in Superior Court Thursday.
Betsy Segui testified that if Bill Saunders had readily produced an event permit six years ago for the Ideat Village festival he organized in Pitkin Plaza, she’d never have arrested him.
“If everything was in order, I would have thanked him for his cooperation and radioed to dispatch to ask if the complainant wanted to speak to an officer,” she said.
Segui made that admission Thursday during the second day of testimony in the trial.
After listening to testimony from Saunders and his witnesses the day before, jurors in the courtroom at 235 Church St. Thursday got to hear from Segui about how her responding to a noise complaint ended with Saunders in handcuffs. (Read about the first day of the first day’s court proceedings here.)
The jurors also got to listen to the 911 call that brought Segui and her former partner Matthew Marcinczyk to Pitkin Plaza that day, hear the transmissions between Segui and the dispatcher, and view the video of Saunders’ eventual arrest.
Segui testified Thursday that on the day in question, she was working B squad, from 4 p.m. to midnight. A patrol officer at the time, she was just two years outside of having completed all of the probationary requirements of becoming an officer. She responded to a call that someone living at 360 State. had called to complain of noise coming from the adjacent Pitkin Plaza.
The caller, who only identified himself as “David,” told the dispatcher that there was music so loud coming from downstairs that he “couldn’t hear himself think.” He told the dispatcher that the music had been loud all week. Segui and Marcinczyk arrived at the scene in separate cars at about 8:19 p.m.
Prior to that day, she had never heard of the festival, which had been running for years. No one in the department told her it was permitted.
When she arrived she was unaware that it had been going on all week and was in fact just a couple of hours shy of closing out its last day. The festival traditionally ran concurrently with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which was happening just blocks away at the New Haven Green.
Segui said she immediately asked a man who was working the soundboard who was in charge. The man pointed out Saunders. Saunders previously testified that someone had tapped him on the shoulder and alerted him to police presence. He made his way over to the officers.
There’s little dispute about what happened next. The officers met with Saunders and let him know that they’d been asked to look into a noise complaint and needed to see his permit. He didn’t have it on him because his festival partner, Nancy Shea, who he thought was around the corner setting up a gallery space for an after party later that night on Court Street, had it. He went off to get the permit from Shea and was gone for about 15 minutes.
The officers didn’t accompany him to get the permit. They didn’t threaten to arrest him, and they didn’t shut down the festival. They waited.
When Saunders returned to Pitkin Plaza, he was empty-handed. He tells the officers he couldn’t find Shea but he was trying to reach her.
What Saunders did next also isn’t in dispute. While a band continued to play, he went to the mic and made an announcement alerting the crowd to the officers’ presence and their desire to see the festival permit. He told festival goers that the event was permitted and Nancy Shea would bring it.
But what he said next is very much in dispute.
Divergent Tales
Saunders.
Saunders has said that he jokingly suggested that if the police couldn’t wait for Shea, then they might have to arrest a lot of people that night. Segui said Thursday that in fact Saunders actually told the festival goers to attack the officers and go to jail if he was arrested that night. Some in the crowd booed, Segui said.
With about 70 people in the plaza, Segui and Marcinczyk didn’t take Saunders’ words lightly. The jurors got to listen to Segui call the dispatcher to say officers would shut down the festival because Saunders couldn’t produce the permit.
They also got to listen to dispatch communications of Segui twice asking for first a district manager and then a shift supervisor and eventually additional units to come to the scene. The backup never arrived.
A supervisor eventually came to Chapel Street, where the officers would ultimately bring Saunders.
Segui testified that when Saunders got off the mic he quickly made his way over to the officers. She described him as red-faced, hands clenched, waving his finger directly at her and then yelling specifically at her. She said he was moving toward her in such a way that she had to take a step back and demand that he stop coming toward her or she was going to arrest him.
Saunders stopped, Segui said, ultimately pivoting as if he were going to make his way back to the mic. He was commanded not to leave at risk of arrest. Saunders allegedly started to run away from the officers. That’s when Segui and Marcinczyk each grabbed one of his arms.
“He does not get far,” she said. “And what he does is dead his weight so that he falls forward and then all three of us go to the ground.”
Saunders alleged that the officers tackled him with both of them landing on top of him. He testified that he locked an arm around one of Segui’s legs to keep his head from being bashed into the brick pavers of the plaza, resulting in the head injury he suffered and the scrapes he received on his arms and legs.
Segui testified Thursday that Saunders locked both his arms around her leg and she was hitting his arm, punching him in the head and pulling his hair to make him turn her loose and submit to being handcuffed. They eventually get Saunders cuffed but both officers were injured in the process.
By this time people in the crowd were outraged by Saunders’ treatment. In a video shown to the jurors, officers finally stood him up. People could be heard shouting. Someone could clearly be heard asking why Saunders was being arrested. Neither officer responded to the question.
When Segui demanded that people back up, someone screamed, “Fuck you!” Then someone started to chant,“Bill Saunders! Bill Saunders! Bill Saunders!” The band on stage, momentarily silent, eventually took up the cadence of the chant.
People followed the officers as they took Saunders through the alley to Chapel Street. When the crowd started to follow, Segui could be seen on video physically pushing back one crowd member. She also could be seen deploying her pepper spray.
Segui said the interfering charge was a result of Saunders attempting to get away from officers. She testified that she charged him with inciting to riot charge because of what he said to the crowd, and the disorderly charge for the cumulative effect of all of his actions that day.
But What About The Noise?
Segui explains where officers were positioned that fateful day six years ago.
Saunders attorney, Chris DeMarco, had a question: How did Segui know that the noise complaint was legit?
The city’s noise ordinance requires a decibel reading to be taken from the place where the complaint originated. Had she done that?
She had not done such a reading, she testified.
“We didn’t think we had to do that,” she said. A supervisor would have to do that anyway, she said. Patrol officers are not provided with such equipment.
“But you said that you arrested Bill for interfering with your investigation of the noise complaint,” DeMarco pressed.
“That’s not the only reason,” Segui replied.
“Ok, we can play that game,” DeMarco said.
He had another question: Where does a statute, or an ordinance, say that the permit has to be kept on the premise of an event?
Segui said she believed she’d seen that language on the permit itself. When DeMarco showed her a copy of the Ideat Village permit without that language, she said that it was the first time she’d ever seen that specific permit because Saunders, nor anyone affiliated with the festival, ever provided it to her.
She also indicated that it wasn’t a complete representation of the permit packet, which the chief of police has to sign off on, and therefore she couldn’t say where the language requiring that the permit to be kept onsite might be but she believed that the language did exist.
DeMarco next let her see the city’s rules regarding permits for special events like festivals which can be exempt from certain restrictions of the noise ordinance. He had her read aloud part of “Sec. 18 – 78. — Exemptions and special conditions,” of the city ordinance. It exempts “noise created by any lawful recreational activities, and for which the city has granted a license or permit, including but not limited to parades, sporting events, outdoor concerts, firework displays and non-amplified religious activities.”
“Never Got That Far”
Attorney DeMarco re-enacts his client pivoting away from officers six years ago.
Before DeMarco wrapped up his cross-examination he elicited testimony from Segui that called into question what she’d originally documented in her report six years ago and her testimony on Thursday.
For instance, in the report, she’d indicated that Saunders had been intoxicated. She did not say that in her testimony Thursday when describing his demeanor on that day. In the report, the man working the soundboard was identified as a drummer, and the person who called in the complaint was identified as more than one complainant.
“It was six years ago,” Segui said. But she indicated that she believed her report was accurate.
In all that happened leading up to Saunders arrest, DeMarco asked, was the music still playing?
“Yes,” Segui replied.
“Did you determine that in fact, there was a violation of the city noise ordinance?” he asked.
“We never got that far,” she said.
It takes special skill to turn a peaceful, legal music festival into a violent encounter.
A noise complaint never merited the hostility this then officer exhibited. She didn't shut the music down, but she did tell someone at the other end of her transmission that they were going to do that well before the arrest.
A uniform does not entitle any police officer to bully any one. The law is supposed to protect us from an arrest without probable cause. Segui never identified a specific reason for the arrest prior to doing it.
That the office of the State's Attorney in New Haven kept Saunders on 24 hour alert for trial for over a year shows how politicized the entire process has become. The State doesn't dismiss these marginal cases, but disrupts the individual's life long enough to hope that they will be worn down and plead to something. In this case Saunders ultimately pled to an infraction.
This bullying system has been exposed, regardless of the outcome.