Jury Absolves Police in Destruction of Film

A federal jury in Los Angeles Friday rejected a free-lance journalist’s claim that police violated his civil rights by forcing him to destroy his own film after he took photographs at a reception for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

After three hours of deliberations, the jury absolved a police detective and a federal agent of any wrongdoing alleged in the 1988 lawsuit filed by journalist Terrence Mulgannon.

Mulgannon, 38, of West Los Angeles, asserted that Detective David Weller, now head of the Police Department’s bomb squad, confronted him at the gathering at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and threatened to arrest him if he did not turn over film of photographs he had taken. Rather than allow police to confiscate the film, Mulgannon broke the film cartridge and exposed it himself.