From Boise to Nashvile, the movement faces an unconstitutional legal siege
A writer and Occupy Wall Street activist whose tweets have become the subject of a subpoena by a New York prosecutor is seeking to quash the order in court.
The National Lawyers Guild is calling for nearly 300 Occupy L.A. protesters arrested early Wednesday to be released from jail.
The majority of the 292 protesters were taken into custody for failing leave a City Hall park after police issued a dispersal order early Wednesday, city officials said. A smaller number also were cited for resisting arrest.
All are being held on a minimum $5,000 bail until they are arraigned by a judge -- a process that can take up to two days.
WASHINGTON — As copycat Occupy Wall Street encampments around the country confront the inevitable legal tangles that come with a nationwide sit-in style protest, a growing army of First Amendment-loving lawyers is shepherding the demonstrators through the legal system at no charge.
Growing numbers of protesters are being arrested for trespassing, failure to disperse and disobeying a lawful order, as city after city confronts the question of whether individual rights to free speech and assembly include the right to camp out on public property.
The Oakland Police Department may have violated a 2003 agreement for handling street protests when it descended on an Occupy Oakland street protest Tuesday night, say lawyers affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild. That group, which is offering legal advice to protesters
arrested Tuesday, helped draft the 2003 policies on how to manage crowded protests, including appropriate use of rubber bullets, tear gas and other less-than-lethal forces.
“This is the First Amendment come alive,” said Wylie M. Stecklow, a Manhattan civil rights attorney working with the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee. “Nobody is in this for a fee.”
"Someone needs to get over to Bank of America."
The shout—aimed at a handful of National Lawyers Guild members gathered around a folding table—came from a group of some 200 people bunched together in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, a grassless plaza that is the headquarters of the month-old, anti-corporate demonstration known as Occupy Wall Street.
"I'll go," said Zainab Akbar.
The Occupy Wall Street protest grows daily, spreading to cities across the United States. "We are the 99 per cent," the protesters say, "that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent."
When Senator Joseph R. McCarthy held hearings in the 1950s to question witnesses about their supposed ties to communism, critics accused him of fomenting a Red Scare hysteria.
Decades later, the term Green Scare was used to describe a series of sweeping federal prosecutions of people involved in radical environmental and animal rights groups.
Now, perhaps, comes the Nerd Scare.
The police response to protests at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh will be remembered as especially brutal, given the debut of military sonic weapons against civilians. Technology used in Iraq, long range acoustic devices (LRADs), are more insidious than other so called less-lethal munitions because they leave no visible marks and can cause permanent hearing loss.
