Malcolm Harris has been waging a big fight over a pretty small charge stemming from his arrest in an Occupy Wall Street protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011, but on Wednesday he finally surrendered. Harris agreed to plead guilty, his lawyer told Reuters, thereby keeping secret a series of deleted tweets he’s been fighting to keep out of prosecutors’ hands. The very toughest penalty he faces for a disorderly conduct charge is fifteen days in jail, but he almost certainly won’t get that as it’s his first offense. The real issue in the case was New York prosecutors’ subpoena of Harris’s deleted tweets, which Twitter fought in court but ultimately acquiesced. Judge Matthew Sciarrino had ruled that what Harris said on Twitter was public, even though he erased it. Harris’s lawyer, Martin Stolar, “said Harris had some concern that the tweets could implicate other Occupy defendants,” Reuters reported. So even though he had previously described their contents as “a lot of nonsense,” he’s giving up the ghost instead of letting them be entered into evidence in court.
