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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsChris Hedges: They Can’t Outlaw the Revolution
from truthdig:
They Cant Outlaw the Revolution
Posted on May 18, 2014
By Chris Hedges
RIKERS ISLAND, N.Y.Cecily McMillan, the Occupy activist who on Monday morning will appear before a criminal court in New York City to be sentenced to up to seven years on a charge of assaulting a police officer, sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.
Its all out in the open here, said the 25-year-old student, who was to have graduated May 22 with a masters degree from The New School of Social Research in New York City. The cruelty of power cant hide like it does on the outside. You get America, everything America has become, especially for poor people of color in prison. My lawyers think I will get two years. But two years is nothing compared to what these women, who never went to trial, never had the possibility of a trial with adequate legal representation, face. There are women in my dorm who, because they have such a poor command of English, do not even understand their charges. I spent a lot of time trying to explain the charges to them.
McMillan says Grantley Bovell, who was in plainclothes and did not identify himself as a police officer, grabbed her from behind during a March 17, 2012, gathering of several hundred Occupy activists in Manhattans Zuccotti Park. In a video of the incident she appears to have instinctively elbowed him in the face, but she says she has no memory of what happened. Video and photographsmostly not permitted by the trial judge to be shown in the courtroombuttressed her version of events. There is no dispute that she was severely beaten by police and taken from the park to a hospital where she was handcuffed to a bed. On May 5 she was found guilty after a three-week trial of a felony assault in the second degree. She can receive anything from probation to seven years in prison.
.......(snip).......
McMillans case is as much about our right to nonviolent protest as it is about McMillan. It is about our right to carry out such protest without being subjected to police violence intended to crush peaceful and lawful dissent. It is about our right to engage in political organization without our groups being monitored and infiltrated by the security and surveillance state. It is about our right of free speech and free assembly, guaranteed under the Constitution but effectively stripped from us in a series of judicial rulings and through municipal ordinances that make it impossible to protest in many U.S. cities. ...........................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/they_cant_outlaw_the_revolution_20140518#
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)It's only lawful until the police order them to disperse. If they refuse to disperse then they immediately become criminals. The order to disperse will be given as soon as the upstarts start getting uppity. That's how the game is rigged.
Javaman
(62,530 posts)Don't like what they say?
charge them with something else and throw away the key.
the soviet union had a thing called article 58. it was the catch all charge used incase they couldn't get whomever with their bogus trumped up charges.
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)starroute
(12,977 posts)Less than expected but still a travesty of justice.
Twitter hashtag #justice4cecily.
https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%23justice4cecily&src=hash
Demonstration at Zuccotti Park at 7:30 tonight.