Sidney Lori Reid was acquitted after a three-day trial plagued with evidence issues.
WASHINGTON — A jury found a woman not guilty Thursday of assaulting an FBI agent during an ICE arrest outside DC Jail.
The verdict comes after less than two hours of deliberation on the third day of the trial of Sidney Lori Reid, which had been marred by several issues with prosecutors’ evidence. Reid smiled and hugged her attorneys as cheers came from the gallery when the verdict was announced.
Reid was accused of assaulting FBI agent Eugenia Bates back in July while being detained. She was outside DC Jail filming Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who were waiting to arrest two people. As she was filming, ICE officer Vincent Liang grabbed her arms and began to detain her against a wall, surveillance video shown during the trial showed.
While he was struggling with Reid, Bates got involved. Prosecutors argued that though there was no contact, a jerk movement that Reid made with her knee near Bates’ groin during that struggle constitutes simple assault.
During closing arguments, assistant federal public defender Tezira Abe painted the group of ICE officers and FBI agents as a “goon squad” that thinks they are above the law.
“You should be livid that the government brought this case,” Abe told the jury.
A felony version of the charge was rejected three times by grand juries, before U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro’s office moved to bring this lesser, misdemeanor charge. During grand jury testimony, Liang claimed that Reid was the one who made first contact. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said Wednesday that video evidence showed that wasn’t true. He was not brought as a witness during the trial — something Abe questioned in closing.
Bates was the sole witness called by prosecutors and spent more than five hours on the stand across two days. Much of the questioning centered on her text messages following the incident, where she downplayed it and disparaged Reid as a “libtard.” She didn’t turn over additional text message evidence until early Wednesday morning, and in the middle of cross examination, Abe discovered one message was missing.
“Conveniently, the most damning one wasn’t there,” Abe said. “… Agent Bates’ story is riddled with holes.”
The missing message was just one of many issues with evidence. Just the night before trial, surveillance footage from a camera that was previously said to be inoperable turned up. Sooknanan grew increasingly frustrated with prosecutors, chastising Assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolfe multiple times for playing games in her courtroom.
After the verdict, Sooknanan thanked jurors for being “especially patient,” after they had to wait and leave the courtroom various times so she could discuss the evidentiary issues with the attorneys.
The rare case was possibly the first time a defendant has been charged federally in D.C. with misdemeanor assault on a federal officer, Sooknanan said. Assistant federal public defender Eugene Ohm said Wednesday he believed the government was stuck with the case after Liang claimed Reid initiated contact to the grand jury and didn’t want the embarrassment of dropping it.
“They overplayed their hand on this one,” Abe said.