She is crazier than when she went in. Update to this story.
Via The Guardian
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.