NEW YORK (AP) — A woman who climbed the base of the Statue of Liberty last July 4 to protest the separation of families at the Mexican border came to her sentencing Tuesday with her face entirely covered with clear sticky tape, irritating a judge who refused to proceed until she removed it.
After she did so, U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein spared Therese Okoumou from prison for her conviction on multiple misdemeanor counts though he berated her for what he thought was a lack of concern for rescuers whose safety he said she jeopardized.
As she stood before him with a white headband across her forehead scrawled with the phrase “I care!” he ordered her to perform 200 hours of community service and five years of probation, leading her attorney, Ron Kuby, to suggest the judge might be seeing a lot of them in the future.
“I think there’s hope” otherwise, the judge responded, saying he would be willing to shorten the probation term at a later point if Okoumou did not commit more crimes.
Given a chance to speak in court, Okoumou called the case against her “a fraud against injustice,” an explanation for her continuing protest and the tape she had earlier painfully pulled off her face.
“I’m not a criminal,” she told Gorenstein.
When Gorenstein took a break from the bench before announcing the sentence, Okoumou stood and turned around to face several dozen supporters before raising her fist in the air.
The gesture silenced the supporters, who raised their fists in return as everyone stood for a moment before Okoumou blew a kiss to them and turned around to await sentence.
Outside court, she was surrounded by supporters as she railed the immigration policies of Trump administration, saying they’re what prompted the Statue of Liberty protest.
“We have people in cages? What was I supposed to do?” she said. “I made my point. … Find your own conscience. Don’t look up to me.”
The nearly four-hour demonstration forced an evacuation of 4,330 people from the statue grounds on one of its busiest days of the year.
As he announced sentence, Gorenstein noted that Okoumou repeatedly ignored orders to descend from a perch at the feet of the statue that was high enough that a prosecutor said it could have seriously injured or killed her or tourists below. New York Police Department rescuers were forced to climb a rickety ladder and gird themselves like mountain climbers to safely bring her down.
The judge said she tried to push down the ladder, jeopardizing rescuers.
Kuby said Gorenstein was overestimating the danger to rescuers. The lawyer called them the most elite rescuers “on the planet.”
“We have people in cages? What was I supposed to do?” she said.
Well said.
The Left tends to do these protests all wrong.
Had she sat up there with an AR-15, nobody would have come near her.
Had she brought a white buddy along with a second AR-15, they’d have left peacefully whenever they felt like it, with no bother from the cops.
Actually, they both would have been shot down…
True. She just needs to stay out of protests due to the wrong complexion. If it was two white kids up there, they’d be fine.
“I’m not a criminal.” Sorry, Ma’am, but when you commit a criminal act, you are a criminal. That you may have done it for creditable reasons may affect your sentence, as it did here, but not your guilt.
(How would we feel if instead of her a protester had climbed up with signs for MAGA or QAnon?)