No jail for Miami mom who posted articles about cop who shot her son. At least for now

Gamaly Hollis has been given a reprieve from prosecutors’ request to send her back to jail for posting news articles about the police officer who shot and killed her mentally ill son feet from where she stood in her Kendale Lakes apartment.

But the measure of Hollis’ freedom remains to be decided by a Miami-Dade judge.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office on Monday withdrew its request that Hollis be returned to jail just a week after she was freed on bond while awaiting trial on charges of stalking and resisting arrest — charges that carry a possible penalty of two years imprisonment.

Prosecutors had asked Circuit Judge Cristina Rivera Correa to order 51-year-old Hollis to stay off the Internet while she remains on bond — a restriction with which Hollis has found it difficult to comply in the past. Prosecutors late last week asked to revoke her bond after she posted news articles, without any commentary, about her plight on Facebook.

Her attorneys at the Public Defender’s Office say such restrictions violate Hollis’ First Amendment right to speak openly about the officer who, she says, killed her son unnecessarily. Richard Hollis, who suffered from severe mental illness, was shot by a Miami-Dade officer six times on June 15, 2022, after a neighbor called to complain about shouting in the Hollis apartment.

Hollis gained national attention after she was prosecuted for, among other things, calling Officer Jaime Pino a killer for shooting her son. In a confrontation that is now eerily prophetic — and was caught on body-worn camera video – Pino had warned Hollis less than a year earlier about what would happen if her son brandished a weapon in front of police.

“I’m telling you. If your son takes a BB gun or a real gun out on me, I’m gonna kill your son. So if you have a problem with that, don’t call us,” Pino was recorded saying to Hollis on body-worn camera footage.

“If you have a problem with the way the police deal with your son,” Pino also said, “don’t call us,”

In the weeks after Richard Hollis died, his mother visited the substation where Pino worked — without ever actually seeing him — and then confronted him at the scene of an unrelated arrest of another man with mental illness. There, Hollis called Pino a “murderer” in Spanish. She was later forcibly removed from her car and arrested.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, in a review standard after fatal police shootings, later cleared Pino of any wrong-doing.

Above the objections of Pino and the union that represents him, the Police Benevolent Association, Rivera Correa released Hollis on $1,000 bond on April 19. Prosecutors and defense attorneys disagree about whether the judge ordered Hollis to stay off her computer keyboard, or intended to, when she set bail.

Once out, Hollis posted news stories to Facebook following her release, prompting prosecutors to seek her return to jail.

On Monday, rather than requesting to put Hollis behind bars, prosecutors asked another judge, Jennifer Azar, to clarify the terms of her pretrial release. For her part, Azar left that to Rivera Correa.

The dispute over Hollis’ social media activity rests on what, precisely, Rivera Correa intended when she offered Hollis two alternatives to getting out of jail: She could have been released on house arrest, where she would have been supervised by an ankle monitor. Rivera Correa’s house arrest order prohibited Hollis from posting about the officer on social media.

But that option was unfeasible because Hollis’ earlier incarceration – for violating a judge’s order to halt posting about Pino on social media – left her homeless. Rivera Correa also ordered that Hollis could be released on a $1,000 bond – $500 for each of two criminal charges. Hollis made bail, but then posted news stories about her case, first reported by the Miami Herald, on Facebook.

Assistant State Attorney Alecsander Kohn said such social media postings violated the judge’s order.

Assistant Public Defender Chandra Sim suggested that restricting Hollis from reposting news articles is a prior restraint of speech. She also argued that Rivera Correa’s social media restrictions were a condition of house arrest, the release option Hollis could not choose, not bail, which she did.

Kohn disagreed. “It would serve no purpose that if she would be released to house arrest she would have the condition of not using the internet but if she were to post a monetary bond then she would have free use of the internet,” he said.

Unitil Rivera Correa provides further clarification on these restrictions, Azar did order Hollis to stay off social media.