Three more people arrested during anti-war protests at the Port of Tacoma two years ago have sued the city’s police department, alleging officers illegally restricted their constitutional rights to peacefully assemble and speak out.

That brings to six the number of demonstrators seeking damages from the department as a result of 12 days of protests at the port in March 2007.

The federal lawsuit, originally filed in March 2009 by Thomas McCarthy, Phan Nguyen and Elizabetha Rivera Goldstein, seeks unspecified damages from the city and several individual officers for alleged violations of civil rights, false arrest, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution and other grievances.

Patrick Edelbacher, Leah Coakley and Charles Bevis joined the suit Monday, according to newly filed court documents.

City attorneys contended in pleadings filed in June that police officers acted in accordance with the law and that at least some of the plaintiffs “knowingly and voluntarily consented to arrest, thereby waiving their right to challenge the validity of the arrest or its circumstances.”

A key contention in the lawsuit is that police restricted protesters from carrying backpacks into certain areas of the ports during the demonstrations, when dozens of people protested the use of the port to send Army Stryker vehicles to Iraq. More than 30 people were arrested.

Among those arrested were protesters who defied the backpack band.

“The rule prohibiting backpacks in a fenced-off protest area provided no real security for people or property, and it severely limited demonstrators’ ability to have necessary items including food, water and medications,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Larry Hildes of Bellingham said in a statement issued Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Assistant city attorney Jean Homan is representing the police department.

She wrote in her June 3 answer to the initial lawsuit that restrictions put in place by police during the protests “were reasonable in time, place and manner and were content neutral … and left open ample alternative channels of communication” to demonstrators.

Homan has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed and the department awarded its costs and attorneys fees.

A jury trial in the case is set for February 2011.

Adam Lynn: 253-597-8644

adam.lynn@thenewstribune.com

blog.thenewstribune.com/crime