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MOBILE, Ala. -- A lawsuit against the city of Mobile and Dollar General was filed today on behalf of Antonio Love (pictured), a deaf and mentally disabled man whom Mobile police forced from a store restroom using pepper spray and a Taser last year, his lawyer said.
On July 24, 2009, Love was inside a Dollar General store restroom, feeling sick to his stomach, when police arrived in response to a call from a store manager who thought Love was inside too long.
"It is clear that what happened to Antonio should have never happened," said his attorney Tommy James in a news release. "He has never had any run-ins with the law and he was not a threat to anyone. Once Antonio realized that it was the police trying to get into the bathroom, he put up no resistance and yet police still Tasered him three times."
A Mobile police internal investigation last year ruled that police were justified in using a Taser and pepper spray to forcibly remove him because officers at the time did not know he was deaf, but a lieutenant erred by trying to send Love to jail after getting him out.
City officials didn't immediately return a message for comment.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The Press-Register in Alabama:
