From: RT
An Occupy Wall Street activist was acquitted of assaulting a police
officer and other charges on Thursday after jurors were presented with
video evidence that directly contradicted the NYPD’s story.
Michael Premo was found innocent of all charges this week in
regards to a case that stems from a December 17, 2011 Occupy Wall
Street demonstration in Lower Manhattan. For over a year,
prosecutors working on behalf of the New York Police Department
have insisted that Premo, a known artist and activist, tackled an
NYPD officer during a protest and in doing so inflicted enough
damage to break a bone.
During court proceedings this week, Premo’s attorney presented a
video that showed officers charging into the defendant unprovoked.
The Village Voice
reports that jurors deliberated for several hours on Thursday
and then elected to find Premo not guilty on all counts, which
included a felony charge of assaulting an officer of the law.
Since his arrest, supporters of Premo have insisted on his
innocence. “They're trying to make something out of nothing and
they're trying to charge him with something that didn't actually
occur,” colleague Rachel Falcone told Free Speech Radio News
this week.
After being arrested, the Manhattan District Attorney's office
presented Premo with a deal that would have let him off the hook by
pleading guilty to lesser charges. Maintaining his innocence,
however, he was determined to fight the case in court.
Premo was “facing serious charges and potential substantial
jail sentence, even though he never should have been arrested at
all,” his supporters claimed in a post published on The
Laundromat Project website.
Nick Pinto of the Village Voice says he was nearby during the
December 2011 rally and recalls watching Premo’s arrest from a
distance. In his report from court this week, Pinto explains how
the details provided by the NYPD in this trial have been fabricated
to such a degree that the allegations presented by the cops turned
out to be literally the opposite of what occurred.
“Premo charged the police like a linebacker, taking out a
lieutenant and resisting arrest so forcefully that he fractured an
officer's bone. That's the story prosecutors told in Premo's trial,
and it's the general story his arresting officer testified to under
oath as well,” Pinto writes. He adds that attorneys for the
defendant underwent a lengthy search to try and find video that
verified their own account yjpihj, and found one in the hands of
Democracy Now. “Far from showing Premo tackling a police
officer,” writes Pinto, that video “shows cops tackling him
as he attempted to get back on his feet.”
The footage obtained from Democracy Now also showed that an NYPD
officer was filming the arrest as well, but prosecutors told
Premo’s attorney that no such footage existed.
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