30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech

> Or are you saying you'd be happy to have one of these shot at your face? Given the choice between the fireworks and an actual grenade? Yeah, absolutely.

This is like insisting a butter knife is a knife

The cops actually shoot people in the face and you're afraid of some fireworks, while wearing full body armor? BS

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Just to be clear, the January 6 defendants: - were a group of at least 1000 people - who, among other things, erected a noose on the capitol grounds, brought zip ties and weapons - forcefully overran several capital police barricades intended to deter their entrance - used any weapon available including poles etc to violently attack any police in their way Granted they did not explicitly shoot any federal agents with a firearm, but in the J6 case, I’d say I’d lay blame for the subsequent deaths of the police officers who did die at the hands of the rioters. To be clear I do not condone violence in either case. However those 1000+ individuals on January 6 were ultimately pardoned for their actions. The family of one was in fact paid $5 million in taxpayer money because she was shot in a vain attempt to repel the crowd. Why then should these defendants be treated completely differently? One gets the law, the other has their convictions overturned completely and history rewritten in their favor. Btw I do not believe the individual who was charged in the article shot the federal agent or was part of the “concealed position” etc. So bringing that up is just an appeal to brush that individual with the actions of others.

Fwiw some of the people sentenced to decades in prison went home before your bullet points happened. And although the second amendment may not cover first aid kits, that's a super lame justification for sending people to prison for the rest of their lives. I guess it's a good thing Boy Scout troops don't coordinate over signal or they'd all be locked up.

I don't know what they signal chats were, but ignoring those, only the last one of those I view as a crime. This is the US, people have second amendment rights and are allowed to possess guns and armed protestors have been a thing since forever. It is also a good idea to wear body armor when you are hanging around any US law enforcement or cops, doubly so when protesting them. Carrying a first aid kit is just a good idea in general, especially for something like a protest, and again for one where cops are likely to be shooting rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at people.

Huh. None of your first three points is meant to be illegal. - coordinating using a Signal group - bringing firearms, body armor, and first aid kits to a location just outside a federal facility - taking up a concealed position along a tree line For you to even list them shows a fascist bent. As for fireworks, they might not be illegal either. The only possible crime is the shooting, and only if it was not done in self defense.

Can anyone seriously define “antifa”? What would the pardon read? “Anyone who is anti-fascism is hereby pardoned…”? Edit: downvoting me doesn’t answer the question. If you have a definition please reply! If nobody can define “antifa” how the heck can you prosecute someone for being a member of it?

Imagine a Democratic president with a spine like that.

Imagine having to pardon an anti-fascist in the USA.

“That guy” had a name. His name was Alex Pretti. He was disarmed before he was shot in the head. He was not even holding his weapon at any point. Are you implying that simply carrying a legal firearm while at a protest means you can be murdered, without any subsequent investigation? Again the Overton window has shifted so far just in my lifetime. This would have been front page news with congressional investigations just 10-15 years ago. Pictures of protesters openly carrying weapons at demonstrations who were not subsequently murdered by federal agents. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/politics/michigan-stat... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/us/kyle-rittenhouse-ar15-... https://www.reuters.com/article/world/black-armed-protesters... Picture of Alex pretti before he was murdered. https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/ice-shootin...

And you think that's worth a 30 year sentence? I think the founders of the US would disagree. Also worth noting that the husband did not conceal evidence of the wife committing a crime. Having political zines isn't illegal. The zines were circumstantial evidence that the prosecution wanted to use to characterize her general political views. They had no direct relation to the events at the ICE detention center.

If I were transporting copies of this magazine, am I concealing evidence? What is special about this guy? Is there anything he could have legally transported, or is everything she's written banned? The irony of The Intercept requiring my identity is funny.

How would possession of political material be evidence one way or the other? She can own, read, share, publish, disseminate all the revolutionary literature she wants

The wife was charged with: Rioting with the intent to commit an act of violence, providing support to terrorists, and conspiracy to use and carry explosives. In what way would a box of magazines be evidence of any one of those crimes? I very much doubt there was an article called "My plan to commit an act of violence by Maricela Rueda" in any of them. The ones they choose to photograph for inclusion in their criminal complaint (likely because they were the most scary looking ones) appear to have been written many years ago. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Literatu... Two of those pictured are on archive.org and War in the streets : the story of urban combat from Calais to Khafji is available at amazon.com https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/ItsVacantTakeIt/its-... https://ia601803.us.archive.org/29/items/the-anarchist-libra... It sounds to me like she was just making arrangements with her husband from jail to handle their property. She told him to have her car towed because it was left on the street by someone else's house and she told him to "move whatever you need to from the house" which is a pretty sensible heads up to give someone when you know that their house will likely be ransacked later by police who could take or destroy anything.

Isn't the purpose of zines to publish them? Then how could that even be considered concealment?

Is protesting a crime now?

Well then it’s a great thing that no one attempted to do that.

You presumably need to convict the conspirator on evidence that doesn't consist of having published documents on your person.

This depends a lot what evil you're protesting.

No. The shooter shot someone.

An individual shot someone, unless you think multiple people were helping pull the trigger.

Yes. That evidence was presented to the jury and found to be true.

Enough to convince a jury of their peers.

Well, too bad. Shouldn't have done it.

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It's one of those irregular verbs. My demonstration, your freedom fighting, their act of terrorism

Per Wikipedia, at least at one point in time, it was supposed to be. Quote: Prosecutors produced group chat logs showing that the participants had debated at length whether they should bring guns. The former reservist allegedly wrote that "Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle, so it tends to make them back off." Other chat participants argued that a noise demonstration was low risk and the assumptions about how police would respond were "way over the top".

That's really hard to swallow when the current president, who is responsible for the extreme uptick in ICE activity, pardoned 1,600 people who conspired against the federal government in favor of his agenda, but then that same government hands life-ruining prison sentences to people who weren't even present for conspiring against ICE. Especially when the crux of this entire case was that the convicted are members of a terrorist organization - a fact that was declared at the whim of this same president. I'm not saying that some of the people convicted don't deserve consequences for their actions, especially violence like shooting at officers. I'm not saying that this was a lawful assembly, especially given the documented intent to breach the facility and use pyrotechnics offensively. I am saying that this is an extreme escalation in action against dissent against the Republican agenda, with a highly visible inequality in enforcement against those who dissent similarly against the Democratic agenda. If this kind of heavy-handed action was taken against everyone who challenges our government, I would still be concerned, but it is doubly concerning that some members of our society appear to have the permission to do these things, while we destroy the lives of others with different politics.

Are ICE detentions legal? Is what ICE under the current administration behaving legally? The shooting an officer is the one crime, assuming the protestor wasn't shot at first. This administration has repeatedly lied about these sort of events, so I have a hard time believing the official account.

Stop conflating two different unrelated events. It is nauseating.

They didn't shoot a cop. A single individual did. What you're calling for is collective punishment (a war crime in Geneva convention), and guilt by association (a perversion of justice). Kindly, abscond and desist.

a police officer was shot in the neck by one person. nineteen people have been criminally charged. including seven people who were not at the scene at the time of the shooting. [0] you can have whatever subjective opinion about these prosecutions that you want. but at least try to get the underlying objective facts right. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Prairieland_ICE_detention...

This is an oversimplification. I am not in favor of shooting the police in the neck but I absolutely will not tolerate an hindering of peaceful first amendment expression even when it happens in proximity to violence. What are the police even protecting us from at that point?

Still dont see how people could have watched the videos and not seen a clear self defense angle.

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*Murderer

You might have been misled by the media. If you watch the video footage and the trial it's pretty clear that he acted in self defense.

Shouldn't the punishment for obstruction, in many cases, be higher than the base offense to prevent that as a default strategy to beat the base offense? Granted, not that much higher, but there is some logic to it being a greater offense.

> A sentence of 30 years in prison for obstructing an investigation is excessive Being excessive is the point. It's to deter others from trying to copy their actions.

I don't disagree, but our justice system is absolutely rife with unequal sentences. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't mean we should go crazy over an individual instance of it when the whole system should somehow be overhauled.

I have not enough imagination to come up with a scenario where making a sandwich would create concern that it might obstruct an investigation. But obstruction is defined by intent and outcome, not the exact means. Abstractions like this are common and necessary in law. So, in your example you'd still be guilty.

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? He moved them because his wife asked him to, because his wife didn't want the police to find them, because they spoke to her motive. So it would have obstructed the investigation by making it harder to prove her motive. Like how is this complicated? Somebody commits a crime and then calls you and says "Hey can you hide X so the cops don't find it?" Always a crime to hide X in these circumstances.

The link above literally says: > Conspiracy to Conceal Documents (Count 12) and other objects that would implicate Maricela Rueda in the riot and shooting at the Prairieland facility. > Defendants convicted: Sanchez Estrada and Maricela Rueda Obviously prosecutors always present things in the worst possible way for defendants, but I think the GP poster's point is pretty valid: > Being aware that he was moving the zines to obstruct a federal felony investigation is surely relevant. Intent is an important aspect of crime.

HN has become a cesspit of fascists. They don't care about rule of law or consistent principle. They only care about it as a stick to beat their opponents with, if their side breaks it, it gets swept under the rug or defended with the thinnest of excuses.

Can it be defense of self or others, to shoot a cop who draws a lethal weapon on someone who's not an immediate threat? If it can't, the second amendment is even more pointless than it already appears to be.

Just moral, not legal.

Who had much more firepower? That the cops knew about? The shooter was accused of ambushing the cops, but didn't fire until the cop drew on and aimed at a retreating protester (that part wasn't in dispute, it was part of the cop's testimony). AFAIK none of the other protesters had firearms, just the single shooter hiding on the edge of the woods. This was shortly before two people got murdered on camera by cops in Minneapolis, and after/around the same time as several other attempted murders (that would have been successfully spun as something chargeable on the victim, if not for video evidence showing plainly that the cops were lying)... so... it doesn't seem like a totally crazy notion to me, that a person might have shown up armed intending only to fire if it looked like a cop was going to shoot someone without a great reason. Maybe a jury would still have convicted (there was a bunch of fuckery with jury selection on this case, incidentally, and I mean way more than usual, even, it's worth reading about; like after what the court selected for on the jury, I believe they almost certainly would still have convicted) but not even being able to raise that defense seems nuts.

> it's illegal because "you had a court order to provide things that are relevant and you instead hid things you thought were relevant" And yet when Trump does it with classified documents its not a problem. Where's his 30 years? Did he even have a warrant issued to him related to these documents? Are these zines even relevant evidence? Is everyone who has these magazines also now a criminal? What about other radical anti-government political pamphlets like Common Sense? > If I hide someone who I think did a crime to help them escape police Seems like quite a different thing than moving some political pamphlets. If they were shredding financial documents while being charged with financial crimes I'd agree. If they were hiding guns with a gun trafficking charge, I'd understand. Flushing drugs down the drain, sure. Moving political zines though? Really? What's the relevance again for the ownership of political pamphlets to committing crimes?

Intending to murder someone is often directly a crime though, so yes. And murdering people is illegal. Moving some magazines isn't normally illegal. I wouldn't normally assume having some magazines is evidence of a crime. And if they are, what crime was owning the magazines involved in? That you happen to read some of the same articles as someone else who committed a crime? Is sharing the same books as others now implicating you as a terrorist?