Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman are two lawyers who were arrested in Brooklyn in May 2020 while protesting for racial justice. (I taught Mattis at NYU Law, but I am not on his defense team.) Mattis and Rahman allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at an empty NYPD car during a night of mass protest after George Floyd’s murder.
Mattis and Rahman can hardly be called peaceful protesters; trying to destroy a police car, even if empty, crosses the line. So I am not questioning the decision to bring criminal charges. But the decision to bring federal rather than state charges is a different matter. No one was in the car, and no one was harmed. A case involving this kind of property damage would typically be pursued by a local district attorney, and first-time offenders like Mattis and Rahman would likely receive little if no jail time for their offense.
Instead, federal prosecutors under the Trump administration charged Mattis and Rahman with seven felony counts that collectively carried a 45-year mandatory minimum sentence. Theirs was one of at least 326 federal prosecutions initiated by the Trump DOJ over alleged conduct during the Black Lives Matter protests — but it was one of the earliest and most aggressive of those prosecutions.
45 years to two educated first time offender lawyers for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail into an empty car :amerikkka-clap:
whats wild to me is that theyre both lawyers
This week, Mattis and Rahman will be taking a plea deal to resolve their case. The plea avoids the extreme and indefensible mandatory minimum sentence that attached to the original charges. But prosecutors, even under this new administration, have made clear that they will seek a terrorism enhancement at Mattis and Rahman’s sentencing — an extraordinarily rare and harsh tool that applies only when the offense was “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct” and that the government has historically sought in cases that did, or could have easily, resulted in mass death and destruction.
so theyre gonna just do the plea deal and then the government is gonna overrule the judge and fuck them over anyways lmao what a reasonable country
also the guy that wrote this article personally knew one of the people, as he was a law professor and one of them was his student
Tbf educated people with radical ambitions are exactly the type you want to execute or throw in deep, deep solitary for many decades. These people are actually threats to a regime, halfway smart ones crush them.
45 years to two educated first time offender lawyers for allegedly throwing a molotov cocktail into an empty car :amerikkka-clap:
whats wild to me is that theyre both lawyers
so theyre gonna just do the plea deal and then the government is gonna overrule the judge and fuck them over anyways lmao what a reasonable country
also the guy that wrote this article personally knew one of the people, as he was a law professor and one of them was his student
In communist China dissidents are thrown in labour camps for half a century.
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Tbf educated people with radical ambitions are exactly the type you want to execute or throw in deep, deep solitary for many decades. These people are actually threats to a regime, halfway smart ones crush them.