Activists accused of being part of antifa get long prison terms in case seen as test of Trump’s crackdown on dissent

The demonstrators arrived late at night with a plan to set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with those detained inside. A few of the protesters spontaneously broke off from the main group and vandalized cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his weapon, one of the activists fired an AR-15 from the woods, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

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 ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest, but was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record after prosecutors said he moved leftwing zines and other materials at the request of Rueda, his wife, after she was arrested. Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday.

————

30 years for moving some pamphlets.

desolate

  • tocopherol [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    Yeah true, it is possible, I shouldn’t say never use digital comms, I mainly meant if you want to be sure that the message won’t be intercepted or read back to you in court. Even if you have your own encrypted system, a person could be compromised and share the messages with authorities, or there could be some kind of other monitoring like a camera watching your screen. I just have trouble trusting that there isn’t some kind of backdoor that could expose you that we don’t know about yet. I doubt these people were thinking it was going to be that serious of an event though, it sounds like it wasn’t exactly that planned out.