cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/66839767
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/66670892
Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto and Meagan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison. Maricela Rueda, another demonstrator, was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Benjamin Song, who fired the gun at the police officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
The sentences handed down on Tuesday were unusually long, said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who served as the US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan during the Biden administration.
“Most often, judges will sentence defendants for separate counts concurrently. Here, it appears that the judge stacked the sentences for each count consecutively. I would have expected lengthy sentences here, more in the ballpark at 15 to 25 years, but nothing like 50 to 100 years,” she wrote in an email.
The punishment for the protesters exceeds the lengthiest prison sentences given out for the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right group the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
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Unlike Jan 6th people I would be extremely surprised if these people get pardoned if democrats get back in power.
I always think of stuff like this when the Yankee left is criticized for not doing enough. The people who are willing to risk more than walk in a pre-approved circle keep getting imprisoned or assassinated. And instead of the left as a whole standing up for them, they tend to quickly get forgotten as adventurist, disjointed, and ineffectual.
Of course I am not trying to suggest people go randomly do illegal stuff. The point I’m trying to make is that the state defines what is legal and illegal and to a certain extent, it has the power to change that at any time. It can call an old grandma crossing the street with a walker illegal if it wants to and if she’s black, well the way the US state operates, I wouldn’t put it past the state calling such a grandma a danger to others.
It goes back, I guess, to something I’ve mulled over on here before. That until/unless Yankees accept that they don’t live in a democracy and that their rights have never been guaranteed, nor for the purpose of protecting the majority of people in the region, they will keep having too much good faith acceptance in the law as something that can carry out justice. Rather than it being, in the US context, an instrument of genocidal exploitation. If you view it as originating from that and for the purpose of that, the frequent inconsistencies and contradictions become a feature instead of a bug. And then it becomes very obvious why they are doing a sentence like this.
Because it’s an intentionally unfair and overly punitive sentence applied by people who recognize it as a political power struggle and have no conscience at all about what it takes to do that. It’s supposed to be unfair. It’s supposed to discourage similar resistance, instill fear and intimidation, and quite literally restrain people who are willing to take immediate, direct action toward liberation. It is not supposed to be justice and the people doling it out do not give a rat’s ass about human rights. What they care about is whether they can continue systemic exploitation with impunity. And it isn’t a Trump thing, it’s a colonizer thing, from the very start.
Some say both parties are the same, but I can see one major difference - Trump pardoned the J6 insurrecrionists, but there’s no way a Dem president will have the balls to pardon these heroes.
Absolutely, except in reality it has nothing to do with the parties but the fact that those activists pose a threat to capitalism but Jan6ers do not.
