Live data from Hacker News

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

theintercept.com

411–420 of 577 posts

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

#411
post #401

USA is such a weird place these days. Is there a way back to sanity once this administration ends?

The way back to sanity would've required the opposition party to be worth anything. Right now they're busy writing up their own project 2029 plan which involves cracking down on the internet and whining about the old guard getting voted out of office for being feckless.

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

#412
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that this was a protest then yeah it's worrying. The feds case, which they did win convictions based on, was that they were terrorists who set off fireworks to lure police into an ambush, and there weren't more casualties because one of the members shot early and only injured one cop. An accessory to this who hid evidence is also part of the crime in the Feds case Is this embellished by the Feds? I think…

"Lure police into an ambush" is quite a stretch. It's quite normal to do noise demonstrations outside jails/prisons to show solidarity with the captives, the captives will often times knock on the windows to communicate back. In fact there were noise demonstrations outside the Delaney Hall ICE jail in New Jersey just this month, which you may have heard about. The mischaracterization of fireworks as "explosives" is a…

Fireworks are explosives, and people are hurt by misusing them. Just because they are less harmful than grenades doesn't mean that they are harmless, and throwing them at someone is clearly with the intention of harming them. And well, shooting them with rifles is also clearly intended to harm them.

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

#413
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Underselling it by omission - was it intentional? Zines related to a shootout and murder by an armed group after retrieving them from the home of one of the parties involved, discussing it on a jail call, and placing them in a third person's apartment.

>murder by an armed group Oh yes, how could we have forgotten the crucial detail that every single person in the group had their hands on the trigger . Wait, that's because it didn't happen. One individual fired their weapon. (And whether that's a murder is very questionable, but let's set that aside). Nobody else should've been facing prosecution in this case.

Following that principle, Bin Laden wouldn't be responsible for 9/11, ISIS shouldn't have been restricted or attacked in any way, and the mafia should be fully legal. That would be absurd.

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

#414
post #401

USA is such a weird place these days. Is there a way back to sanity once this administration ends?

No country has ever recovered from this sort of thing. At best the empire collapses and the country survives as a country and becomes a vassal of a different empire (likely China, or BRICS). If recovery was possible, we wouldn't have gotten this far already.

Can you name a single relevant historical example for this claim?

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

#415
post #227

A lot of people in these Hacker News comments are accepting the framing that moving the zines is evidence tampering and therefore deserves a 30 year sentence. What crime are zines evidence of?

>What crime are zines evidence of? Not quite the right framing. Look at the chain of events in the probable cause affidavit: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.41... Rueda was in the jail following arrest in an armed group after a firefight at the detention center where 20-30 rifle rounds had been fired, with a police officer killed as a result. In jail, Rueda called her mother to contact Sanch…

At worst, the zines are evidence of Rueda's political opinions. They are not evidence of conspiracy to set off fireworks near the compound, nor shoot an officer.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say someone is driving 35MPH. They think "oh snap, I think the speed limit is 30MPH here!". The posted speed limit is actually 40MPH. Was this person speeding or not? Should a cop ticket them for thinking they're doing something wrong, even if everything they were doing was legal? Did they even think the zines were implicated as evidence? Were the zines implicated as evidence? What crimes were being committed b…

It's not illegal "because you think its illegal", it's illegal because "you had a court order to provide things that are relevant and you instead hid things you thought were relevant". If I hide someone who I think did a crime to help them escape police, I've now implicated myself in the crime, whether or not my trying to hide them actually caused them to get away with it.

The crimes here are the injuring of an officer, and causing a disturbance near the ICE facility.

How could the zines be evidence for those crimes?

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

#418
post #398
post #5

It's pretty straightforward that if someone tells you to hide something because they've been arrested and they think it ties them to some criminal act, and then you hide it, you're an accessory to the crime. 30 years for that seems harsh though I anticipate they will be pardoned by the next Democratic Party President. Describing such an act without the obvious context is a pretty good way to point out that it's parti…

> 30 years for that seems harsh though I anticipate they will be pardoned by the next Democratic Party President. I really doubt it.

The writing on the wall is pretty clear now: Undoing Trump-policies and Trump-legacy should be priority for any potential presidential dem candidate, no mater how center or left leaning.

I don't think we'll get a Ocasio-Cortez type front runner, but I don't think you can be a total milquetoast "water under the bridge" candidate to win either.

If there is one thing the Trump 47 presidency has shown, it is that traditional decorum will not get you anywhere. It is the reason the Trump investigation didn't end up with anything - Biden and the DOJ were too fixated on decorum, and doing things as impartially as possible.

The Prairieland case is a direct product of Trump. They are terrorists because Trump has designated them as terrorists.

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

#419
As someone living in a non-US country, I get the impression that Russians and Chinese seem to be safer from their respective governments, than residents of the US.

I hope that your country recovers from it's experiment with dictatorship.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that this was a protest then yeah it's worrying. The feds case, which they did win convictions based on, was that they were terrorists who set off fireworks to lure police into an ambush, and there weren't more casualties because one of the members shot early and only injured one cop. An accessory to this who hid evidence is also part of the crime in the Feds case Is this embellished by the Feds? I think…

The pardoned Jan. 6 rioters had a lot of far worse plans that were foiled which could have resulted in more casualties. There was lots of evidence several of them planned to kidnap sitting congressmen and women. Do you know why they were pardoned and this zine hider got 30 years? Must just be a quirk of the justice system...

[flagged]
Post reply on HN