Metro

Occupy Wall Street protester gets one penny in excessive force case

An Occupy Wall Street protester who was busted while fighting against the One Percent in 2011 sued the city — and was just awarded a whopping one cent.

A Manhattan federal jury granted plaintiff Eric Gersbacher the penny after he claimed that NYPD cops roughed him up during his caught-on-video arrest in Zuccotti Park.

Three days after the social movement first formed, Gersbacher was at a protest in lower Manhattan sitting on a tarp and banging a metal pot lid as police tried to get the crowd to disperse.

A group of officers can be seen on video grabbing and tossing Gersbacher to the ground, then rushing him before the video cuts out.

On Monday, a jury awarded the Buffalo man the token cent in his excessive-force case against the city and the cops over the incident.

The panel found that NYPD Deputy Inspector Edward Winski used excessive force against Gersbacker — but not that the protester deserved any meaningful money for it.

Winski has been named in nine other Occupy Wall Street-related lawsuits.

Gersbacher, 27, claimed in his 2014 suit that the incident resulted in “severe bruises, scars, and cuts on [his] forehead” and that he “suffered prolonged pain in his back, neck, shoulders, arms, and wrists.”

Gersbacher, currently a grad student at the University of San Diego, said he was forced to drop out of Buffalo State college at the time because of his injuries.

In addition, his suit alleged that when his employers found out about the charges brought against him during the protest, they fired him because of them. The charges were eventually dismissed and his case sealed.

But in a written opinion, Judge Gregory Woods noted weaknesses in Gersbacher’s case — dismissing six of his seven claims before they were even heard by the jury last week.

Woods pointed out that although Gersbacher said he had “a long-lasting abrasion” on his forehead, he “was unable to identify any injury to his head” when he looked at a still frame of himself taken from a video of the incident.

Woods also wrote that Gersbacher later bragged about the incident in Facebook posts, saying he “got arrested like a cool kid” and “did it knowing it’d make the whole [OWS] thing stronger.”

Pat Miller, chief of the city Law Department’s special federal litigation division said, “The penny verdict shows the jury agreed this case had very little merit.’’

But Gersbacher’s lawyer, Wylie Stecklow said, “The jury confusion or jury compromise that resulted in the nominal damage award does not change the result that this NYPD Inspector used excessive force arresting a person involved in expressive speech activity protected by the First Amendment.”