This went on for several years after they arrested me a couple more times. Different agencies but same prosecutor's office, who insisted on taking every case to trial, offering me pleas deals, only for me to reject them.
If it wasn't for my blog, I would have felt so alone but my readership kept growing the more I fought back. When I needed donations for legal support, my readers would come through.
I also found a good lawyer who did not charge very much because he believed in my case.
JB: I'm so glad you got support from your readers. I've worked with enough whistleblowers over the years to know that being harassed and marginalized is painful, not to mention isolating and expensive. How did the other arrests fit into this? Were they also harassment-based, to get you to throw in the towel?
CM: The second arrest took place during Memorial Day Weekend on Miami Beach in 2009, a controversial weekend where hordes of young, black people come down to party, which leads to tons of arrests and accusations of racial profiling.
I was there documenting the weekend to see how bad it is when I ended up arrested. They insisted on taking the case to trial without offering me a deal, but the cop did not show up. That trial was also going to be presided by the judge in my previous trial, so we had him recuse himself after I had the previous conviction reversed upon appeal.
He recused himself and the second judge threw the case out when the cop did not show up to trial again.
My third arrest took place while I was documenting the Occupy Miami eviction in 2013 where they were evicting the protesters that had converged at county hall during that period where activists were doing that throughout the country.
I ended up arrested by a public information officer named Miami-Dade Major Nancy Perez, who then had my footage deleted, which I recovered.
That became a national story. Police and prosecutors claimed I was arrested because I was an activist, not a journalist (they did not arrest any other journalist).
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