User:Viriditas/Cecily McMillan



Cecily McMillan (born 1989) is an American activist and advocate for prisoner rights in the United States. On March 17, 2012, McMillan was in the proximity of an Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park when she claims that a New York City Police Department officer grabbed her breast, at which point she swung her elbow into the officer's face. According to McMillan, she was then beaten by police and arrested. During the arrest, McMillan said she suffered a seizure and had to be hospitalized. McMillan was subsequently convicted of assaulting an officer and sentenced to 90 days in prison and five-years probation. She was released in July 2014 after serving 58 days at Rikers Island.

Critics were surprised by McMillan's conviction, noting that the physical evidence of her injuries were ignored during her trial. At one point during the proceedings, the arresting officer "repeatedly identified the wrong eye when testifying as to how McMillan injured him" and the judge refused to allow evidence about his past. The officer who arrested McMillan had been accused of excessive force in three previous cases, including one on the very day McMillan was arrested. McMillan's highly publicized arrest and trial led to her being called a "cause célèbre of the Occupy Wall Street movement". Her imprisonment brought increased attention to the plight of inmates and their living conditions at Riker's Island.

Early life and education
McMillan is of Irish and Mexican descent. She was raised by her single mother in Beaumont, Texas, and spent summers in Atlanta, Georgia, with her father and his family. She graduated Lawrence University and actively participated in the 2011 Wisconsin protests where she fought to save collective bargaining from its dismantling by Governor Scott Walker. In New York, she enrolled in graduate school at the New School for Social Research in the fall of 2011 and worked as a nanny for several families. At the New School, she studied nonviolent movements and found inspiration in the works of Bayard Rustin. McMillan was known as a "dedicated pacifist" who had many discussions with her thesis adviser about the topic of nonviolence. She planned to write her master's thesis on Jane Addams and the settlement movement, but Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began at the end of her first week of school.

Occupy Wall Street
McMillan continued her studies at the New School, held a part time job, and became active with the OWS Demands Working Group. During one protest, she occupied the school buildings along with other demonstrators, but objected to the destruction of property. "I realized there was a serious problem between anarchists and socialists and democratic socialists. I wanted, like Bayard Rustin, to bring everyone together. I wanted to repair the fractured left. I wanted to build coalitions," McMillan recalls. Her nonviolent approach caused a riff with other OWS protesters who advocated trashing the building, leading them to label her a “bureaucratic provocateur". Nick Pinto of The Wall Street Journal noted that McMillan's political views were "relatively moderate" and that the Occupy Wall Street movement "alienated [her] for insisting the group disavow violence."

Zuccotti Park arrest
On March 17, 2012, McMillan was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with friends in Lower Manhattan when she went to Zuccotti Park to meet up with more friends. On that day, hundreds of people were in the park commemorating the six-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. To prevent another encampment, the police began trying to remove demonstrators from the park. According to Chris Hedges, the police "heavily shielded, stormed into the gathering in fast-moving lines. Activists were shoved, hit, knocked to the ground. Some ran for safety. More than 100 people were arrested".

As the police rounded up protesters, McMillan was caught up in arrests. According to McMillan, in the middle of this turmoil, a man wearing plainclothes, not identified as a police officer, allegedly grabbed her breast from behind. In reaction, McMillan apparently elbowed him in the face, but she does not remember the incident. The Guardian reported that multiple witnesses to the arrest saw the police throw her to the ground, and then kick and club her for approximately one minute, after which she began convulsing in the street. Witnesses said McMillan's head lacked support and that "her skull repeatedly struck the pavement". Her injuries were bad enough that she was taken to the hospital where she was chained to the hospital bed.

According to Hedges, "numerous activists would call the police aggression perhaps the worst experienced by the Occupy movement". The Mass Defense Coordination Committee of the National Lawyers Guild called for an investigation of the arrests that day, noting that the "egregious behavior" of the police department in their treatment of protesters was part of a "larger program of the arbitrary and brutal behavior that disrupts the health and welfare of communities city-wide."

Trial and conviction
The trial was held at the New York City Criminal Court and McMillan was defended by Martin Stolar, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild. Her supporters argued that she was defending herself from sexual assault by the officer she was convicted of assaulting; McMillan alleged that a bruise on her breast, shown in photographs at trial, was inflicted by Officer Bovell. Prosecutors argued that Bovell did not cause the injury, and noted that McMillan did not report the alleged assault at either of two hospitals where she received treatment the night of the arrest.

Stolar explained to the jury that her beating by police was enough of a punishment. "You touch a police officer and get the hell beat out of you. That's what happened to her. That's enough of a deterrent."

After a month-long trial, the twelve-person jury reached their verdict after deliberating for three hours on May 5, 2014, finding McMillan guilty of assaulting a police officer. The court convicted her of second-degree assault, a felony that could result in a prison term of seven years. Justice Ronald A. Zweibel order her detained without bail until her sentencing on May 19.

The Guardian reported that nine of the twelve jurors who found McMillan guilty wrote to the trial judge expressing their opinion that she not be given a prison sentence. "We would ask the court to consider probation with community service. We also ask that you factor in your deliberation process that this request is coming from 9 of the 12 member jury," the jurors wrote in the letter to the judge.

Lucy Steigerwald of Vice magazine argued that the conviction was "stunning and ridiculous", citing The Guardian's Molly Knefel, who said that photographs of McMillan's bruises were ignored during her trial and complained that prosecutors were allowed to cast doubt on McMillan's claims. At one point during the proceedings, according to Knefel, the arresting officer "repeatedly identified the wrong eye when testifying as to how McMillan injured him" and the judge refused to allow evidence about his past. The officer who arrested McMillan had been accused of excessive force in three previous cases, including one on the very day McMillan was arrested.

McMillan was later sentenced to three months in prison and five-years probation.

Imprisonment at Rikers Island
McMillan served her sentence at Rikers Island Penitentiary. On May 9, members of the Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot, who were jailed in Russia for performances critical of President Vladimir Putin, visited McMillan on Rikers Island as part of a campaign by The Voice Project petitioning for leniency. She was released in July 2, 2014, after serving 58 days at Rikers. Upon her release, McMillan told Democracy Now! that deplorable conditions existed in the prison, and that an inmate had died while she was there.