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Cecily McMillan, the Occupy Wall Street activist who was imprisoned for assaulting a police officer, was released on Wednesday after spending eight weeks at New York’s Rikers Island jail.
McMillan, 25, left the facility after serving two thirds of the three-month jail sentence that she received in May for deliberately striking NYPD officer Grantley Bovell as he led her away from a protest in lower Manhattan in 2012. She now faces five years of probation.
At a press conference on Wednesday afternoon beside the entrance bridge to Rikers Island, in Queens, McMillan read a lengthy statement that she said was on behalf of a group of female inmates in which she called for better access to healthcare, drug rehabilitation services and education inside the jail.
"I am inspired by the resilient community I have encountered in a system that is stacked against us," she said. Promising to continue her activism, she said: "The court sent me here to frighten me and others into silencing our dissent, but I am proud to walk out saying that the 99% is, in fact, stronger than ever. We will continue to fight until we gain all the rights we deserve as citizens".
McMillan has previously said that she was placed in a barracks-like room with almost 100 other women. A friend of McMillan’s told the Guardian that the New School graduate student and community organiser was made to wait almost three weeks before she received a necessary prescription medication, before then being denied it for two days, given it for two days, and then denied it again.
McMillan was found guilty by a jury of intentionally elbowing Bovell in the face as he walked her out of Zuccotti Park, where demonstrators had gathered on 17 March 2012 to mark six months of the protest movement. The police officer, a US navy veteran who typically patrols the Bronx, suffered a black eye and later reported dizziness and sensitivity to light.
McMillan, who had pleaded not guilty, maintained throughout her trial that while stopping at the park briefly to collect a friend, she had swung her arm instinctively after having one of her breasts grabbed from behind. She also said that she suffered bruising and a seizure after being wrestled to the ground during her arrest.
However, assistant district attorney Shanda Strain said at McMillan’s sentencing hearing: “The defendant not only physically assaulted the police officer but also levelled false accusations of misconduct against him in an effort to avoid her own criminal responsibility for the assault.”
McMillan’s felony conviction for second-degree assault is thought to be the most serious against any of the more than 2,600 members of Occupy who were arrested for alleged offences around protests after their movement began in 2011. Most had proceedings against them dismissed or “adjourned contemplating dismissal,” meaning they will not end up with police records.
McMillan, the last Occupy defendant to go through the New York courts system, had rejected an earlier offer from prosecutors that would have seen her plead guilty in exchange for a recommendation to the judge that she not receive a prison sentence. The deal would still have resulted in her being classed as a felon.
On the day of her conviction in May, she told the Guardian that she was “done” with New York. She said that she planned to move back to Atlanta, Georgia, where she spent much of her childhood, to work as a community organiser.
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