KEITH OLBERMANN: Some 340 Occupy Wall Street protesters can avoid serving time, meanwhile -- or probation, or a fine -- if they're willing to go along with an unusual offer from Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. The protesters among the 750 or so arrested on disorderly conduct charges, most of them in marches at Brooklyn Bridge on October 1st and a week earlier through downtown Manhattan. The offer -- charges dismissed if you stay out of trouble for the following six months. Get arrested again -- at an Occupy protest, say -- and the original charges would be restored. One protester at Zuccotti Park, who said he'd been arrested at both marches, didn't think many of the protesters would be interested in the offer.
(Excerpt from video clip) PROTESTER: I highly doubt that anybody would take that, because -- for the simple fact -- we're here, we were arrested for no reason in the first place. So, who's to say that won't happen again? You know, it's kinda asinine to even offer that.
OLBERMANN: Kinda simple -- it sounds that way. Yetta Kurland is an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild group that's been negotiating with prosecutors over the Occupy Wall Street arrests and the protests. Welcome back, thanks for your time again.
YETTA KURLAND: Thank you.
OLBERMANN: Is that the deal? Is that described accurately, to your knowledge?
KURLAND: Yes -- well, in fact, over 700 individuals were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1st and -- there were a couple of points to make about this. First of all, half of them -- approximately half of them -- were given desk-appearance tickets, while others were given summons. And it seems that -- that was a totally indiscriminate decision based solely on what the precinct command was deciding and how they were getting charged.
Now, the District Attorney's Office is offering to offer ACDs to half of those folks, folks who got desk appearance tickets, or DATs. So, I mean -- the first thing is that -- that's basically routinely what's given anyway. So, even if you haven't seen the footage that's out there on the Internet -- about the cops leading these folks, basically, onto the Brooklyn Bridge, and the fact they were using the orange netting and the other very suspicious tactics for the arrests -- this is something that they would offer folks anyway. And, the other thing I think you raised in your introduction, was that this has many of the arrestees feeling that it is a chilling effect on their right to continue to protest. So it's concerning.
OLBERMANN: Yeah -- the premise of this is not to be nice guys in Cy Vance's office, the premise of this is to get people to essentially say, "I am not going to be involved in this protest for the next six months?" Isn't it?
KURLAND: Well, that's certainly what our clients are saying they feel, in large part. It's obviously a subjective determination, but that's certainly what people feel.
OLBERMANN: This -- this leads me into the -- what I like to call "The Tom Hayden theory," although he’ll take no credit for it. It's probably a Gandhi theory, and he probably got it from somebody 2,000 years ago. But, it was Hayden's proposition that there are four ways for Occupy to go. And the one that sort of resonates, at this point, was that Occupy might lead to larger groups where the protests are in tens of thousands, and that, at some point, civil disobedience -- no violence, just sitting in a road and refusing to leave and being dragged off -- would result with mass arrests, and then you'd have this whole prospect of clogging the political system, in addition to clogging the court system.
Isn't -- whether or not it gets to that point, even if it's what we are talking about now -- isn't part of protest arrest? Isn't it, sort of, built into the equation?
KURLAND: Well, I mean, I would even step back one step, and say that our First Amendment rights guarantee that we don't get arrested for the type of conduct that you're seeing here -- people actively protesting the government, talking about concerns that they have. The fact that they are arrested really, you know -- there are a lot of folks who say -- who are blaming the protesters for these problems. If the courts are getting clogged up, they're getting clogged up because these cases aren't being dismissed.
You can draw an interesting parallel with the Republican National Convention back in 2004. There were about 300 folks who were arrested at that time during the -- around the Fulton Street area -- for similar charges. And those were all summarily -- in the interest of justice, which the district attorney's office can do -- those charges were dismissed. And that can happen here as well.
So, I mean -- we certainly want to say that folks whose charges aren't dismissed have the right to have their day in court and to defend themselves against these charges. Now, some folks might take those ACDs, especially folks who maybe don't live in the New York City area. But I think that there are many people who are going to object to that because -- if you look again at the tape, if you look at what was happening on the Brooklyn Bridge -- there was certainly mass confusion over what was happening, and where folks were being led or directed and I think a lot of people believe that they were actually following the police's orders to go onto the bridge.
OLBERMANN: In a larger sense -- in terms of the police order about where you could protest and where you could not -- at one point, because people kept asking me this question -- at what point did we all decide that you had to have a permit that designated exactly where you could and could not protest?
I mean, if the police get involved -- whether it's a scheduled protest or an unscheduled protest -- if the police get involved, because there is an actual threat of violence or property destruction -- these are reasonable -- you may be against what they're doing, but they are reasonable reasons for the police to be involved in this. But when did we get to this, "Oh no, I'm afraid you violated of Rule 32 of the 'When You Can Protest in America' law?" When did that happen?
KURLAND: The made-up rules. Well, interestingly, in New York City it was right after the Republican National Convention. We were also seeing thousands and thousands of people summarily rounded up. And at that time, they were being held over on the piers on the West Side Highway, in these abandoned bus depots, which is also very questionable.
After, as a result of that -- unfortunately -- the New York Police Department came out with these parading rules, which, frankly -- the executive branch of government should not be passing laws or making rules about how we exercise our First Amendment rights. And, unfortunately, that has been upheld in New York City, so that if 50 people or more want to come together and protest, they are supposedly required to get a permit. Now, obviously, that is not what is guaranteed in the Constitution and we feel -- you know, our clients feel -- that they have a right to exercise their First Amendment rights, and don't have to get a permit from the police department.
OLBERMANN: So, these rules were designed to round up the Republicans at the convention? I'm deliberately misinterpreting what you said.
KURLAND: It's interesting to see what's happening in Oakland, California, as well -- to hear that they're using the same tactics to try to, like, clean out Oakland's Occupy Oakland facilities and then let them back in. They tried to do that, if you remember, a couple of weeks ago here and you know, they're talking about -- they're trying to find these angles again to shut down operations.
I really feel what our clients are saying is that they're not going away. This movement is only building. And if they want to sit down and try to come up with some solutions -- if they really think that there are rats down at Occupy Wall Street, and frankly, there are rats all over New York City -- sit down with us. We still have not had a face-to-face with Brookfield, or anyone, to come up with some solutions for this stuff.
OLBERMANN: By the way, this is just so people don't -- this is a local story related to this -- because you just brought up -- this is a city that's just decided to take the garbage cans out of the subway stations so the rats don't have anything to eat from, rather than to try to remove the rats. So your point is well taken. But I'm fascinated.
The other thing you may want to pay attention to is -- Baltimore and Atlanta are now being attacked on camping charges. So that may be the next thing in New York -- outdoor camping in the city of New York. I never thought I'd live to see it.
KURLAND: In fact it is --
OLBERMANN: That's their next -- that's the next strategy?
KURLAND: Yes, and what's interesting about that is, you know, folks -- Lady Gaga fans were camping out in the summer for days on end to get Lady Gaga tickets. Which -- nothing against them, they should be able to do that as well -- but we can't be indiscriminately imposing these rules.
OLBERMANN: What is -- what is a camp, and what is just staying out overnight? If you go on -- in line, at a place I used to work where they have a show called "Saturday Night Live" -- a line -- an outdoor line -- would start often as early as Thursday for standby tickets to get in on Saturday. And that was like, "Oh, isn't this nice. Look how loyal the fans are." That's fine. You can't do that anywhere else if you have, like, a roof over your head.
KURLAND: Right, it's called selective enforcement.
OLBERMANN: Excellent. Yetta Kurland of the National Lawyers Guild. Again, great thanks for coming in.
KURLAND: Thank you.
