Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has filed a lawsuit against the City of Birmingham on the grounds that the City’s removal of a memorial to confederate soldiers in Linn Park was a violation of the 2017 Memorial Preservation Act.

The penalty for Birmingham’s transgression will be a onetime fine of $25,000.

The law being broken prohibits the removal or destruction of historically significant structures that have been on public property for more than 40 years.

“On Monday, I advised Mayor Woodfin that the removal of the 115-year-old Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in Birmingham’s Linn Park would violate the law and that I would fulfill my duty to enforce it,” Marshall said in a statement.

He added, “Monday night, the City of Birmingham removed the monument and today I am filing a new lawsuit against the City for violating Alabama law.”

Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said on Monday that he was taking down the statue “in order to prevent more civil unrest.”

Woodfin acknowledged that his directive to take down the statue violated the Memorial Preservation Act, but argued that the fine was a “lower cost than civil unrest in our city.”

The mayor also said he intended to take down the monument with care so it could be placed in a museum or given back to the Daughters of the Confederacy, the group which dedicated the obelisk in 1905.

Birmingham’s decision to take down the monument made national headlines amid the widespread unrest stemming from George Floyd, an unarmed black man, dying while in Minneapolis Police custody.

The City of Birmingham first erected barriers around the base of the monument in 2017 under the direction of then-Mayor William Bell.

The Alabama Supreme Court Decision that ended the legal disagreement over that maneuver determined that violators of the Memorial Preservation Act paid a onetime fee for breaking the law.

An effort to enhance the penalties stalled out in the Alabama State Senate early in the 2020 legislative session.

Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: henry@new-yhn.local or on Twitter @HenryThornton95