Two Occupy Wall Street protesters filed the first federal civil rights lawsuit brought against the NYPD in connection with the OWS movement on Monday, claiming they were falsely arrested and subjected to excessive force last month during a protest at a Manhattan bank.
Heather Carpenter, a 23-year-old Port Jefferson Station nursing student, and her fiancé Julio Jose Jimenez-Artunduaga, a 23-year-old Colombian immigrant who works in bar-tending and construction, were arrested Oct. 15 in front of a Greenwich Village Citibank branch.
The arrest, which was captured on video and posted to YouTube, shows the couple standing in front of the Citibank branch at 555 Laguardia Place, where protesters were still inside after Carpenter had closed their accounts with the bank.
Heather Carpenter is the woman shown in this video being forcibly carried into the bank by an undercover officer. This same under cover officer was later outed by witnesses inside the bank as the loudest and most disruptive protester inside the bank.
The charges against her were later dropped but that is not sufficient compensation for being forced into a bank against here will for engaging in her right to freely engage in commerce.
I hope this will be the beginning of many Federal suits against police agencies across the nation as civil rights should not take a back seat to protecting the 1%.
Brought under 42 U.S.C. §§1983 and 1988, and the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments, the lawsuit by the engaged couple state that they were part of a group of 20 protestors who entered the bank and held a "teach-in" on student loans and debt and closed their accounts because of a new $17 fee the bank was charging customers who maintained a balance of less than $6,000. After the branch manager asked them to leave, they were arrested on the instructions of New York City Police Chief Joseph J. Esposito outside the bank along with several others who were arrested inside the bank. The couple claim police brutality and allege they suffered injuries while being taken into custody in Carpenter v. The City of New York, 11 civ 8414.