George Clooney arrested for crossing a police line while protesting at Sudanese embassy

Academy Award-winner George Clooney proved Friday that even megastars aren't above the law.

The actor was arrested outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington while protesting the government attacking it's own people and blocking humanitarian aid.

Clooney, 50, was taken into custody and charged with a misdemeanor offense of crossing a police line. Secret Service spokesman George Ogilvie said he was taken to a police station to be processed. He paid a $100 penalty and was released.

The Descendants star wasn't alone in his quest for justice. Sixteen others were arrested alongside Clooney, including NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, Martin Luther King III and Democratic U.S. representatives Jim Moran and Jim McGovern.

"We need humanitarian aid to be allowed into the Sudan before it becomes the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," Clooney told reporters just before his arrest.

"The second thing we are here to ask is for the government in Khartoum to stop randomly killing its own innocent men, women and children. Stop raping them and stop starving them. That's all we ask."

Clooney and his comrades were asked three times by Secret Service to step off of the lawn of the embassy. After refusing, they were restrained with plastic handcuffs and carted off in a waiting van.

Clooney testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 14, saying the Sudanese government is "taking the oil and keeping most of the profits, buying bombs and rockets and using them on Darfur, the Blue Nile, Abyei and the Nuba mountains."

That same evening, Clooney sat next to first lady Michelle Obama at a state dinner honoring U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.