A Decade After Rights Case, Man Held on Same Charges

It must have seemed like deja vu to Edward Lawson.

A decade ago Lawson was the focus of a landmark U. S. Supreme Court decision that overturned a California law allowing police to arrest an individual for failing to produce identification on demand.

On Monday, the 46-year-old Venice resident was arrested again, this time outside the Beverly Hills home of a business associate. Misdemeanor charges filed against Lawson included the failure to produce a driver’s license on command.

During the mid-1970s, Lawson, an African-American with dreadlocks, had been arrested repeatedly while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods in the San Diego area. Charging that his race was the real reason that Lawson was stopped, he and his lawyers argued that the law was unconstitutionally vague and that it violated the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

The Supreme Court overturned the law as being unconstitutionally vague and in violation of the 5th Amendment.

Lawson, who spent Monday night in jail, said the arresting officers in Beverly Hills approached him as he pulled into a parking space in front of his friend’s home and asked to see Lawson’s identification. Lawson asked why he was being stopped. Lawson said police told him a Beverly Hills woman had seen what appeared to be his car driving slowly past a nearby school.

Lawson said he was asked to get out of his car and immediately told police he believed he was under arrest. He said he told police he understood that in post-Rodney King Los Angeles anything he said could provoke the police. “I said I wanted to remain completely silent consistent with (his) Miranda (rights) and raised my hands above my head,” Lawson said.

He said that four officers were present when he was arrested and that he had not expected to encounter the police when he drove to his friend’s home. The two were meeting, Lawson said, because they are trying to help a 12-year-old white boy in North Carolina who has received nationwide media attention for his effort to save the family farm of his former nanny, an elderly black woman.

“At the very time I was going to a meeting to fight Jim Crow in the poorest county in North Carolina, the same kind of racism struck me down in Beverly Hills,” Lawson said.

Lawson was awaiting arraignment Tuesday in Beverly Hills Municipal Court.