‘Whodunnit’ in Zuccotti Park

Out of the 700 people arrested during the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, merely a handful saw the interior of a courtroom. One of them is Cecily McMillan, who on Monday, May 5 was convicted by a jury of hitting a police officer with her elbow—a felony that could put her in prison for two to seven years (sentencing due on May 19).*

The verdict led to anger and consternation among left-wing activists. Nobody denies that McMillan hit the officer who arrested her; video recordings clearly show that. The real question here was: Who attacked whom? According to McMillan the arresting officer pinched her hard in her right breast and her elbow jab was an instinctive response to the unexpected pain. Photographs of bruises on her breast supported her version. Moreover, the officer in question was previously accused of using excessive violence — later on the same day he would push an arrested person’s head against a car — and a video exists that shows how McMillan got sick after her arrest, the result of the brutal treatment she received.

The prosecutor dismissed all this by portraying McMillan as a liar who made up her injuries. This seemed everything but convincing. Yet the jury found McMillan guilty. How was this possible? The incriminating video was frequently mentioned, as was the hostile attitude of the judge. Others suspected that the members of the jury had the tendency to give more weight to the words coming from an authority figure in uniform than those coming from a young activist.

In Dissent Magazine, historian Maurice Isserman, who knows McMillan personally, proposed another explanation for the jury’s verdict: “The very aspect of the case that outraged Cecily’s supporters the most — that she was the victim of a brutal sexual assault and wound up being tried as the aggressor — was too disturbing a reality for the jurors to come to grips with. Who wants to live in the kind of a society where that can happen? Better just to deny it, accept the official version, vote guilty — or risk being part of a ‘losing battle.’”

Most tellingly, nine out of 12 members of the jury, who during the trial only looked at the issue of guilt and did not know that this case might result in a prison sentence, have meanwhile requested that the judge not send McMillan to prison. They wrote: “We feel that the felony mark on Cecily’s record is punishment enough.”

*Editor’s note: Cecily McMillan has since been sentenced to 90 days in prison.