For Kenneth Stover, his work is about maintaining the integrity of the Constitution. Recently, the City of Reno abruptly dropped charges against a group of individuals who had protested on a patch of grass at Believe plaza for one week during the summer 24/7 against ongoing sweeps.
“My motivation to go to law school was based on the Yucca Mountain project,” Kenneth Stover said from his second floor office overlooking Arlington Ave. He did not want high level waste to be stored in that region spurring his career into action. The site about 100 miles from Las Vegas had been proposed as a geological repository storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States, but challenges reversed those goals.
In the beginning of his career, Stover, who got a B.S. at UNR at the start of his college journey in the early 1990s, focused on environmental remediation but then became a defense lawyer. More recently, he has represented protesters, including those arrested or cited during and after last year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
The anti-sweeps community members, Stover said, were only exercising their 1st amendment rights, concerning freedom of expression, assembly, and the right to petition.
“Fortunately, these four individuals are very strong with their voice,” Stover said. In the last two years, Stover has represented 14 protesters. “I’ve won every one with dismissals,” he said. “So these four were special to me because I thought we were actually going to have to go to trial and at the last minute the city folded.”
Stover was curious as to who ordered the “sweep” of the protesters themselves “and if any of them would have testified that they themselves were responsible, they certainly would have been on the hook,” he explained.
But the city prevented that by dropping the case and making the defendants promise they would not sue the city.
Stover does not believe the sweeps are ethical in the way they are done. He expressed disgust at how local police sometimes throw away the belongings of the unhoused community.
Martin vs Boise was a pivotal 2018 case that went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The ruling that came out of this appeal made it illegal for cities across the country to enforce anti-camping ordinances when area homeless shelters are full. But, whatever the legal justification, Stover believes the way the unhoused community has been swept “has been somewhat inhumane.”
“Even the CARES Campus people themselves, [they] want the sweeps to stop until they are adequately staffed to take more people in,” Stover said. “We can’t treat people inhumanely nor could we sweep them under the rug.”