True Feminists Should Find this Incredibly Horrifying........Can We Unite in Support?
Cecily McMillan: 'I stand resolved to keep fighting because your love ethic props me up and allows me to do so'- Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Cecily McMillan, the Occupy Wall Street organizer convicted of felony assault of the police officer she says sexually assaulted her, was sentenced Monday to three months in prison, five years of probation and community service.
In a case that has shined a spotlight on what critics charge are systemic failures in the U.S. justice system, the sentence was met with immediate condemnation on Twitter:
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Now 25 years old, McMillan was one of approximately 70 people detained late the night of March 17, 2012, when police violently cleared a memorial event marking the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. McMillan, who had stopped by the park to meet a friend, says she was sexually assaulted by police officer Grantley Bovell while she attempted to leave the area.
"Seized from behind, she was forcefully grabbed by the breast and ripped backwards," according to a statement by support group Justice For Cecily. "Cecily startled and her arm involuntarily flew backward into the temple of her attacker, who promptly flung her to the ground, where others repeatedly kicked and beat her into a string of seizures." Following the attack, McMillan underwent treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Despite numerous allegations that Bovell has inflicted excessive force while on duty, as well as photograph and video evidence of injuries sustained by McMillan—including a hand-shaped bruise on her chest, it was McMillan who was put on trial for felony charges of assaulting Bovell.
According to McMillan's supporters, what followed was a trial riddled with injustice, in which Zweibel showed repeated favoritism towards the prosecution. Zweibel imposed a gag order on McMillan's lawyers, excluded key physical evidence, and ruled that information about Bovell's past violent behavior, and violence the night of McMillan's arrest, was not relevant to the case.
Upon her guilty verdict, McMillan was denied bail and immediately sent to Rikers Island, where she is currently detained.
According to Justice for Cecily, "The message this verdict sends is clear: What Cecily continues to endure can happen to any woman who dares to challenge the corporate state, its Wall Street patrons, and their heavy handed enforcers, the NYPD."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/19-3
= new reply since forum marked as read
Fuck the crooks in the NYPD.....and every other big city PD at that! 
Time to clean house, and take them back, for the people. 
Shouldn't be using this horrible misogynist/ police-state decision as a litmus test for feminists. 
Where is the outrage here from Women's Rights Supporters?
I've not seen it and hoped my post would encourage the to reach out and join efforts to support McMillan.
Why is that?
I can't understand the lack of support for here on DU from the Strong Voices of folks who Declare they Support Women in all walks of life for freedom from ABUSE.
There are strong voices here on DU...but, when it comes to this...they stay silent or in some cases want to say SHE was the Perpetrator of the Violence the Cop did on her.
Is it because she is a POLITICAL ACTIVIST that they SEEK to make her into some kind of LAWLESS WOMAN who STRUCK A COP when Video shows else wise and when the videos of her bruises prove that she was ATTACKED?
Three Months at Rickers Island. The only Occupy Wall Street Activist to be sentenced like this?
Why is she less important to be Supported?
It's somewhere here.
And, thank you for remembering watching it. Amy got into the fact that her Attorney was barred from mentioning that the Cop had been involved in other abuses. It seems to go back into not allowing evidence to be presented about a person's "past deeds" to be entered into evidence because it could be seen as "previous offenses" prejudicing a jury...(which I can understand) but in this case if the cop had prior abuses against "Activist Protestors or Women" it would seem that as a Public Servant that that SHOULD have been entered into evidence. I
I can understand why when someone is a Victim that prior incidences they've been involved in might Prejudice a Jury...but she had no prior incidents but the Police Officer DID and that his record couldn't be put into evidence for the "Defense" seems to be some kind of backwards view of the law.
Why should a Police Officer (employed by Public Funds) not be allowed to have his own record entered when someone he arrested now faces a jail term when she has evidence that something was very wrong in his conduct to her before the arrest.
probably be out of her 3 months at Rikers before she can get another hearing. 
with Sputnik. But we caught up and surpassed them and went to the moon. Today the Russians are in charge of the space station and getting there and back.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/cecily-mcmillan-jurors-judge-occupy-activist-jail
Occupy Wall Street on Trial: Cecily McMillan Convicted of Assaulting Cop, Faces Up to Seven Years
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/6/occupy_wall_street_on_trial_cecily
Cecily McMillan's guilty verdict reveals our mass acceptance of police violence
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/cecily-mcmillan-occupy-guilty-police-violence
Truthdigger of the Week: Cecily McMillan
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_cecily_mcmillan_20140511#
"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.
“It’s all out in the open here,” said the 25-year-old student, who was to have graduated May 22 with a master’s degree from The New School of Social Research in New York City. “The cruelty of power can’t 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 Manhattan’s 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 photographs—mostly not permitted by the trial judge to be shown in the courtroom—buttressed 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.
“I am prepared mentally for a long sentence,” she told me this past weekend when I interviewed her at the Rikers Island prison in the Bronx. “I watched the trial. I watched the judge. This was never about justice. Just as it is not about justice for these other women. One mother was put in here for shoplifting after she lost her job and her house and needed to feed her children. There is another prisoner, a preschool teacher with a 1-year-old son she was breastfeeding, who let her cousin stay with her after her cousin was evicted. It turns out the cousin sold drugs. The cops found money, not drugs, that the cousin kept in the house and took the mother. They told her to leave her child with the neighbors. There is story after story in here like this. It wakes you up.”"
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/19-0
Great OP KoKo.
Response to KoKo (Original post)