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hrmjustin

(71,265 posts)
Thu Mar 20, 2014, 01:11 PM Mar 2014

Judge decides not to release police officer's disciplinary file in occupy activist trial.

In Occupy Activist Cecily McMillan's Trial, Judge Rules NYPD Doesn't Have to Hand Over Officer's Disciplinary File

Anna Merlan

In two weeks, the last trial of an Occupy Wall Street activist will begin, when 25-year-old Cecily McMillan faces charges that she assaulted a police officer, Grantley Bovell, on March 17, 2012, during a 6-month anniversary demonstration at Zuccotti Park. In a decision issued yesterday, State Supreme Court Judge Ronald A. Zweibel decided that the information contained in Bovell's internal disciplinary file isn't relevant to the case and that the defense can't see any part of it. But McMillan's lawyer argues that this officer has assaulted and falsely arrested people before, and that the file can help them prove it.

McMillan's lawyer and her supporters say Officer Bovell was the one who assaulted her, grabbing her by the breast from behind and dragging her backwards. When she threw up her arms in an instinctive defensive gesture, they say, she hit the officer's temple. In response, Bovell and other officers beat her severely, causing her to suffer a series of seizures. (A few days later, a shaken-looking McMillan appeared on Democracy Now to describe the incident.) But the NYPD argues in their court filings that McMillan deliberately elbowed Bovell in the face while he was arresting someone else. McMillan was charged with assault on an officer, a felony that carries a maximum of seven years in prison.

McMillan's lawyer, former National Lawyer's Guild president Martin Stolar, has been pressing for access to Bovell's internal personnel file from the NYPD, arguing that it contains crucial evidence about previous allegations against Bovell.

In court filings, Stolar says that Bovell was part of a 2010 incident in which a young black man named Reginald Wakefield was run down by an unmarked police car while riding his dirt bike. Bovell was a passenger in the car, and has been named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city, the NYPD and several additional officers. (You can see the complaint here; court records show the case was closed in February of this year. Wakefield's attorney appears to have moved for a dismissal, and the matter was apparently settled out of court.)

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2014/03/cecily_mcmillan_occupy_wall_street_trial_assault_marty_stolar_grantley_bovell.php

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