‘Activist’ Councilman Found Guilty of Blocking Ambulance at Protest

NEW YORK — Prosecutors said a city councilman who blocked an ambulance at an immigrants’ rights protest earlier this year had acted “irrationally and unreasonably” and was guilty of disorderly conduct and other misdemeanors, no matter how just he believed his cause to be.

But on Monday, a jury delivered a mixed verdict. The panel convicted the council member, Jumaane D. Williams, D-Flatbush, of obstruction of an emergency vehicle, but found him not guilty of disorderly conduct and obstruction of governmental administration.

Judge Steven M. Statsinger immediately sentenced Williams to time served — the few hours spent in police custody after his arrest. The misdemeanor conviction will not affect his ability to run for office or vote. “I believe and still believe your heart was in the right place, and your moral compass, which is otherwise as far as I could tell completely accurate, went a little awry,” the judge said.

Williams, who declined a lenient plea offer from the Manhattan district attorney that would have left him with no criminal record, used the trial as a bully pulpit to spotlight what he has described as an example of President Donald Trump’s unfair immigration policies. He sat at the defendant’s table for days in a sterile fourth-floor courtroom in the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building, listening to police officers give evidence against him, before taking the stand in his own defense.

The councilman, who is also running for lieutenant governor, faced up to a year in jail if convicted on the top charge. He acknowledged that opting to go to trial “was a risky decision,” but maintained he “always tries to do what is right.”

Williams was among a crowd of protesters on Jan. 11 who tried to block an ambulance carrying his friend Ravi Ragbir, an immigrant rights leader. A citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, Ragbir had been fighting deportation for more than a decade, and he fainted during a meeting with immigration officials after they told him he was to be detained.

Police officers testified that Williams ignored repeated commands to make way for an ambulance. “There is a time and a place for protest and for politics, and there is a time when it has no place,” Ryan Hayward, an assistant district attorney, said during closing arguments in Manhattan Criminal Court on Monday. “When an ambulance is coming down the street with lights and sirens, you move.”

Some jurors who spoke with reporters after the trial ended said they sympathized with Williams’s political stance, but said he did not have the right to stop an ambulance. Several said prosecutors failed to present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Williams had obstructed government administration. They also questioned the use of city police resources in a federal immigration matter.

“We had a lot of trouble with it morally,” Eric Declercq, the jury foreman, said.

More than a dozen protesters were arrested with Williams, including Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who, like many others, accepted a plea deal in which the charges will be dismissed in six months if he is not arrested again. The protesters had gathered at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, then marched down Broadway to City Hall.

Williams testified on Friday as his mother, Ragbir and other supporters crowded the gallery. He said his intention was to slow down Ragbir’s deportation by buying “any time we could get for someone to intervene, and stop this from happening.”

“What was happening, I believed firmly, was wrong,” he said.

His attorney, Ronald L. Kuby, said in his closing argument that Williams’ actions were lawful given what he knew at the time and that his intent was to stop what he believed to be an illegal deportation.

“The next person who gets deported will be very, very fortunate indeed if they have someone like Jumaane Williams standing by their side having their back and putting his body in between the machine and its destiny,” he said.

Kuby argued that immigration officials were trying to use a Fire Department ambulance to transport Ragbir to a detention center, and that Ragbir was not actually in need of medical attention. He said police officials who were trying to manage the crowd should have done more to learn why the protesters were there instead of helping immigration officials detain Ragbir.

Hayward, the prosecutor, said the police officers were doing their jobs when they tried to keep protesters from blocking the ambulance. He said the defense was playing on the jurors’ emotions by highlighting the role of immigration officials that day.

Jurors saw videos of the arrests in which police officers tried numerous times to block Williams and other protesters from stepping in front of the ambulance. Jurors also heard from emergency medical technicians and police officials who testified that Williams was warned repeatedly to stop.

Williams said he was “pushed” by officers and described the police response to protesters as “extremely aggressive.”

During his testimony, Williams held back tears when a defense attorney, Rhiya Trivedi, asked him about his motives that day and if, in hindsight, he would have acted differently. “There was nothing else to do,” he said.