C.S. Muncy

A scene from yesterday's anniversary protests. See the whole slideshow.

For those who have been tracking Occupy Wall Street since its earliest days, yesterday's anniversary often felt familiar to the point of deja vu.

Lower Manhattan was once again transformed into a city under siege, with metal barricades at almost every intersection, police trucks, vans, scooters, horses, and legions of police officers and corporate security.

And when hundreds of people mustered in the early hours of yesterday morning to ring the New York Stock Exchange and protest the widening gulf between rich and poor and the growing control of government, the canyons of the Financial District again rang with drumbeats and familiar chants: "We! Are! The 99 percent!" "Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!"

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Tomorrow, it will be one whole year since a group of anti-corporatist raiders met for the first time in Zuccotti Park and deemed themselves Occupy Wall Street. Since then, the national explosion of 99-versus-1 Percent politics has had its ups and downs - in New York, Bloomberg's army of police officers shut down the Park in a late night raid but the movement has sprung legs in numerous other cities. More »

Jackie Barcliff, an Occupy Wall Street protester, turned himself in late Friday to police, and was charged with the rape and assault of another protester.

Barcliff, 44 and homeless, was not only charged with rape and attempted murder in the attack on the 56-year-old OWS protester in the Pier 15 park next to the East River, he was also charged with the rape of a 14-year-old girl on Aug. 12, the police said.

Our previous coverage of the case is here.

In an unusually dramatic and verbose posting from police spokespeople, the NYPD says detectives are looking for a man identified as 44-year-old Jackie Barcliff (at right) in connection with an appalling rape and assault of a female Occupy Wall Street protester on Monday.

Barcliff appears to be the same man filmed back in November at another Occupy Wall Street goading police into arresting him for disorderly conduct in a video posted to youtube by OWS supporters.

"As protestors begin to filter into New York City over the weekend to commemorate the anniversary Monday of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the NYPD is hunting for a rapist among them," the NYPD statement begins.

The 56-year-old female victim was forced to go with her attacker to a section of the Pier 15 park overlooking the East River, raped and then thrown over a second-story railing. She suffered a broken pelvis and other serious injuries.

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Nicole Carty was one of two people convicted today for lying down in the sidewalk in April.

When seven people lay down in the sidewalk across from the New York Stock Exchange in April, holding up signs, they thought they were acting within their rights.

A ruling by Judge James Burke today suggests that they were wrong. Burke found two of the protesters guilty of two counts each of disorderly conduct for blocking the sidewalk and disobeying a police order to disperse.

Prosecutors say the guilty ruling was necessary to maintain order and safety. Occupy Wall Street protesters see it as one more nail in the coffin of the right to protest in public in New York City.

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C.S. Muncy

Police clearing Zuccotti Park November 15th.

When the police forced Occupy Wall Street protesters out of Zuccotti Park in November, they were accompanied by Department of Sanitation employees in big trucks who hauled off the demonstrators' belongings. Some of that property was ultimately recovered, but thousands of dollars worth of books, computers, and other property were destroyed, prompting lawsuits against the city, the NYPD, and the Department of Sanitation.

Now, as those lawsuits wind their way through federal court, the city's lawyers are claiming that police and Department of Sanitation employees had nothing to do with the lost or destroyed property. Instead, the city is blaming Brookfield Properties, the owner of the park.

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Three Occupy Wall Street protesters announced today that they are suing the New York Police Department in federal court over officers' use of pepper spray on marchers last September 24.

Two of the plaintiffs, Damien Crisp and Julie Lawler, were sprayed by Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, whose actions were documented on the widely circulated video seen above. You can read their complaints here and here.Chelsea Elliot and Jeanne Mansfield, two other protesters sprayed by Bologna while already kettled by police have already filed suit against the police and the city.

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C.S. Muncy

Police carrying a minor whose shirt was torn off during arrest at a March Occupy protest.

A newly released report by human rights lawyers documents widespread police abuse of the rights of Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Over 195 pages, the report offers the most detailed and comprehensive accounting yet of the New York Police Department's response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, from its first gatherings in September of last year through ongoing protests earlier this month.

The report, downloadable here and embedded below, is a joint project of New York University Law School's Global Justice Clinic and the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice.

Some of the incidents documented in the report, including the unprovoked pepper-spraying of two kettled women by Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna and the suppression of press attempting to report on the dead-of-night November eviction operation, will be familiar to readers of the Voice and other media coverage of Occupy Wall Street.

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Unnamed sources sparked a media furor -- now being questioned -- linking DNA from an Occupy-Wall-Street-affiliated protest to an eight-year-old murder.

The story was so peculiar that you knew there had to be at least one more shoe poised to drop.

Last night, the local NBC affiliate ran a story based on an unnamed source leaking the following information: There had been a break in the eight-years-cold investigation of the murder of Sarah Fox in Inwood. DNA evidence recovered from her CD player, found near her corpse, matched DNA taken from a chain used to hold open a subway door in the fare strike conducted by wildcat transit union members and Occupy Wall Street affiliated activists.

The appeared to be based on a single unnamed source, seemingly speaking from within the NYPD investigation, though the NBC story didn't so much as identify the basis of the source's expertise.

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Sarah Fox

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been linked to the 2004 murder of a 21-year-old Julliard student -- and that link is in a chain occupiers used to wreak havoc at a Brooklyn subway station earlier this year.

Police have linked DNA recovered from a chain occupiers used to hold open a gate at the Beverly Road subway station in East Flatbush in March to DNA recovered from a CD player found near the murder scene of Sarah Fox, an aspiring actress who was found murdered in Inwood Park in May of 2004.

Just because DNA found at the crime scene also was found on the chain, it doesn't necessarily mean the killer is an occupier. While it could be, the DNA also could belong to anyone who passed by the open gate and made contact with the chain.

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