30-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech

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 partisan text and likely misrepresents other things. Listen, we've all been on the Internet a few decades. This kind of understatement of things is not new to any of us. "Oh so just because your country thinks it's not a big deal for someone to go to America to fly a plane means it should get bombed?" No, champ, it's the flying of the plane into the WTC and subsequent sheltering of the guy who planned it that does that.

Up until now these crazy cases have been rejected by the courts. But this feels like a crack in the dam. A judge actually sentenced someone to 30 years for hiding zines, zines that had been published for years. This was under the pretense hiding those zines was hiding evidence of criminality. And the criminality was worth 75 years. For someone who was at a protest where a federal agent was shot, but was not the shooter.

Does anyone have a link to details on the case because there must have been more details, like these two were accused of planning a murder in advance, because otherwise this seems insane. It seems insane no matter what, but if this was a judge making a bunch of logical leaps while guided by DOJ lawyers, something is really broken

5 days ago, 90 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48649884