Around New England

Anti-Tax-Cut Protesters Who Occupied Maine Senator’s Office Sentenced To 24 Hours in Jail

May 14, 2018

Anti-tax-cut protesters who occupied U.S. Senator Susan Collins’s office Bangor, Maine in December 2017 have been sentenced to one whole day in jail.

The three women staged the sit-in on December 18, two weeks after a group of five anti-tax-cut protesters occupied the same office and got off with a $100 donation to charity after the Penobscot County district attorney declined to prosecute them.

In the December 4 incident, the three women were asked by Federal Protective Service officers to leave the building after Collins’s office had closed but refused, according to the Bangor Daily News.

The Federal Protective Service is a law enforcement agency that protects property owned or leased by the federal government’s General Services Administration.

Collins is among the Republican senators least likely to support the Republican agenda, but she voted for the Trump tax cut that reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent and also reduced some marginal personal income tax rates.

The judge allowed one of the protesters, Sophia Ridgely Fuller, 71, of Belfast, Maine, to serve her 24-hour sentence on Sunday, May 13. She chose the day because it was Mother’s Day, and she wanted to mark it in jail “in solidarity for those mothers who cannot feed their children in Maine,” she said, according to the Bangor Daily News.

The women could have been sentenced to a maximum of 30 days and a $5,000 fine.