(Reuters) – The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri sued the city of St. Louis in federal court on Friday, alleging police misconduct against demonstrators protesting the acquittal of a white former officer in the killing of a black man.

The civil rights lawsuit was filed in U.S. district court in St. Louis and names Maleeha Ahmad, Alison Dreith and “a class of similarly situated individuals” as plaintiffs.

“Everyone deserves the same rights as I do. I just want peace and justice,” Ahmad said in an ACLU of Missouri statement. It said Ahmad was pepper sprayed by police without warning.

The lawsuit asked the court for an order requiring St. Louis not to arbitrarily declare assemblies unlawful and order protesters to disperse.

“The mayor has not personally seen the lawsuit yet, and we are not commenting on pending litigation,” Koran Addo, Mayor Lyda Krewson’s spokesman said in an email.

The protests were in response to a judge’s decision Sept. 15 finding former officer Jason Stockley, 36, not guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith, 24.

“A common theme of the protests has been that, in the view of the protesters, the verdict reflected institutional racism and unwarranted bias in favor of law enforcement officers,” the lawsuit said.

The protesters committed no crime and posed no threat to the safety of police or others, the lawsuit said.

The city retaliated against people engaging in activities protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, interfered with the right to record police officers in public places, unreasonably seized them and used excessive force, the lawsuit said.

“The City of St. Louis has a custom or policy of retaliating against protesters expressing disapproval of the actions of law enforcement officers, and has done so on occasions before these particular protests, including in 2014,” the ACLU of Missouri lawyers said in the lawsuit.

The 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, touching off riots and fueling the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.