At the six-month anniversary demonstration in Zuccotti Park in March 2012, organizer Cecily McMillan elbowed the officer who had seized her from behind by the breast, leaving her bruised; she was beaten in the ensuing arrest and suffered a seizure on the pavement. New York charged her — not the officer — with felony assault. At trial the judge excluded most evidence of the officer's documented history of misconduct, and in May 2014 a jury convicted her, though a majority of jurors, learning afterward what sentence she faced, wrote the court urging no prison at all.
McMillan was sentenced to ninety days on Rikers Island and served fifty-eight — the only Occupy Wall Street defendant imprisoned for protest-related assault, in a movement whose own injuries at police hands produced no prosecutions. She used the platform her case created to testify about conditions facing the women jailed with her at Rikers. Supporters from Pussy Riot to the National Lawyers Guild treated the case as the movement's political trial: the state's need, after evicting the park, for one conviction that recast the policed as the aggressor.