CLEVELAND, Ohio — The city of Cleveland agreed to pay $225,000 to a well-known protester arrested during a flag burning at the 2016 Republican National Convention, attorneys for the protester said Tuesday.

The agreed-upon payment will settle a lawsuit Gregory “Joey” Johnson filed in January 2018 that said officers violated his free-speech rights when they stepped in after Johnson lit a flag on fire surrounded by a throng of people at Prospect Avenue and East 4th Street on July 20, 2016.

Police arrested more than a dozen people at the time and charged Johnson, a San Francisco resident, with first-degree misdemeanor assault.

City prosecutors dropped the charge against Johnson in January 2017. Fifteen others arrested that day eventually had their charges dismissed.

A rush of people descended on a circle formed by members of the Revolutionary Communist Party after Johnson, a member, set the flag on fire.

An officer doused the blaze with a small fire extinguisher.

Police Chief Calvin Williams said at the time that officers intervened because Johnson lit himself on fire. Johnson and his attorneys, however, said that statement was false, and posted video footage they said contradict the city’s statement.

Instead, they said officers stepped in to snuff out the protesters’ First Amendment rights.

Johnson was also arrested at the RNC in Dallas in 1984 for burning a flag. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Johnson in 1989 and said flag burning constituted free speech.

"Instead of protecting RNC protestors' constitutional rights, Cleveland police stalked them, literally extinguished their speech rights, and then arrested and prosecuted them – violating 30-year-old Supreme Court precedent taught to schoolchildren,” Johnson’s attorney Subodh Chandra said in a news release.

Chandra said the city failed to hold officers accountable.

Cleveland Law Director Barbara Langhenry said the city denied liability for Johnson’s claims, and the settlement agreement does not constitute an admission by the city. She said the settlement will be paid through protest insurance bought for the RNC.

Cleveland previously settled a lawsuit with Steven Fridley, another protester arrested during the flag burning, for $50,000.

While prosecutors dropped Johnson’s charge, a Cleveland Municipal Court judge made his feelings known about the protesters’ arrests that day.

Judge Charles Patton, in dismissing the charges against 12 protesters in October 2017, wrote that the defendants charged were engaging in constitutionally protected speech at the time of the incident. He rejected arguments from city prosecutors who said the charges stemmed from failing to disperse once the flag burning ended.

Johnson also sued the conspiracy theory-peddling website InfoWars and its operator Alex Jones.

Joseph Biggs and Jordan Salkin, who worked for InfoWars, were also named as defendants because their names were in charging documents in Johnson’s case. However, Biggs made a YouTube video that said he was an aggressor, not a victim, according to Johnson’s suit.

U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. dismissed the claims against Jones and the InfoWars defendants in March.

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