?On Thursday, just after noon, the Tufts historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was arrested by Atlanta police as he crossed the middle of the street between the Hilton and Hyatt hotels. After being thrown on the ground and handcuffed, the former Oxford don was formally arrested, his hands cuffed behind his back. Several policemen pressed hard on his neck and chest, leaving the mild-mannered scholar, who’s never gotten so much as a parking ticket, bruised and in pain. He was then taken to the city detention center along with other accused felons and thrown into a filthy jail cell filled with prisoners. He remained incarcerated for eight hours…
In court even the prosecutors seemed embarrassed by the incident, which got out of hand when Fernandez-Armesto requested to see the policeman’s identification…. Officials finally agreed to drop all charges.
Professor Fernandez-Armesto provided HNN with a riveting account of his day in an Atlanta jail. We have broken the interview into several parts to make the download quicker.
So says a January 4, 2007 History News Network report, which contains links to video of Professor Armesto describing what happened.
(Thanks to investigator Terri Yardley for bringing this to our attention.)