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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Occupy / News Occupy the Courts

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 4:00 PM

The Occupy Seattle trials are starting to wend their way through the court system. Five people who occupied Chase Bank on Broadway last November had their first hearing yesterday, where they pled* not guilty to criminal trespass.

Why would people who (according to police reports and lots of witnesses) entered a Chase Bank, formed a human chain with pipe over their arms, and blocked teller windows plead not guilty? Take it away, defendants' statement:

Defendant Douglas Van doesn't dispute the basis of the charges. Instead, he openly wonders why he and his four fellow co-defendants... are being held accountable for their alleged misdeeds while powerful banking officials seem to enjoy legal immunity... "People in this country are forced to live by certain rules," she [one of the defendants] said. "The banks don't play by the same rules. There have been no consequences, and it's outrageous.

When I asked their pro bono attorney David Hancock for an example of banking officials not being punished for banking-related misdeeds, he pointed me to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's suggestion that Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke, Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, and Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis committed bank fraud.

These Occupy trials—and there are several of them, including that of the 16 people who were arrested occupying an abandoned building at 10th and Union—could get interesting.

It's the second, legal phase of the process: first it was Occupy Seattle, then Occupy Your Handcuffs, and now it's Occupy the Stand.

*For those of you who give a care about pleaded vs. pled, please see here. Shorter version: prescriptive grammarians will tend to favor "pleaded"; linguists and others who see language as a mutable and living thing will tend to favor "pled."

Comments (18) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

Language may be a mutable and living thing, but I don't think a vacant building can be called "abandoned" just because someone would like to get inside it.

Posted by gloomy gus on January 24, 2012 at 4:09 PM

prEscriptive not prOscriptive

Posted by bradll on January 24, 2012 at 4:33 PM

"But that guy over there did something a lot worse than me" is not usually a successful courtroom strategy.

Posted by Fnarf

on January 24, 2012 at 4:46 PM

I dunno, I find the "someone else committed a more worser crime than the one I'm not guilty of" defense more tiresome than interesting. I guess that's why I'm not making the big bucks on the Stranger courthouse beat?

Posted by robotslave on January 24, 2012 at 4:46 PM

Damn it, Fnarf.

Posted by robotslave on January 24, 2012 at 4:47 PM

Pled is a natural form of plead according to Oxford.

If you're going to both explaining grammar usage then both grammarians and linguists would like the Stranger to stop capitalizing the S in "Washington state" because the S isn't part of a proper noun. For whatever reason the grey lady does it, probably equating it to New York City, where the City is part of the proper noun.

Posted by SchmuckyTheCat on January 24, 2012 at 4:49 PM

@ 2. Aw, hell. Thanks. Fixing.

Posted by Brendan Kiley on January 24, 2012 at 4:52 PM

@7 I can't believe my first slog comment after years of reading would be so petty and unfunny.

Posted by bradll on January 24, 2012 at 4:59 PM

Slog does that to people. Welcome to the party!

Posted by Brendan Kiley on January 24, 2012 at 5:12 PM

Pro bono? For that swell defendant's statement Mr. Hancock deserves compensation of Romnian (sp?) proportions. Just brilliant.

Posted by BLUE on January 24, 2012 at 6:01 PM

I wonder if their lawyer is being paid in those fake Orca Nope cards.

Posted by Kinison

on January 24, 2012 at 7:25 PM

@3 & 4, The defendants' (and their attorney's) comments here do not sum up their entire legal defense. Pretty certain there's that whole first amendment thing in there too. You know that one? It still exists in the US right?

Posted by CoreyWlodarczyk on January 25, 2012 at 3:59 AM

@12

Ah yes, the first amendment, which guarantees the right to trespass.

Posted by robotslave on January 25, 2012 at 4:13 AM

@12

This isn't First Amendment Jeopardy where doing anything in the form of a protest magically makes whatever you are doing legal.

Posted by Kinison

on January 25, 2012 at 6:38 AM

What has Occupy Seattle done lately?

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger on January 25, 2012 at 7:35 AM

I've heard "pled" my whole life (four decades plus). Pleaded only hit my ears a few years ago and it sounds wrong, wrong, wrong. Like what a 3rd grader would imagine the past tense of "plead" was.

Away with your revisionist history and bogus google ngram charts.

Posted by He Leaded The Cows Home on January 25, 2012 at 8:23 AM

Lest we forget, the point of blocking the entrance to the bank while chained together was to get arrested, and then be afforded the opportunity to make statements about the fundamental inequities in the system. If the cops really wanted to ruin the action, they would have put some traffic cones around them and let them stay as long as they could hold out.

And FWIW, I've never heard a prosecutor, judge or member of the defense bar use, "pleaded." And a lot of people use "impact" as a verb. Deal with it.

Posted by Mr. Happy Sunshine on January 25, 2012 at 8:59 AM

How about a workshop to teach morons what the "A" in ARM stands for?

Posted by It's adjustable muthafucker on January 25, 2012 at 1:38 PM