Agaric Tech Collective12h ago

"If prosecutors are correct that Sanchez moved zines because he feared they’d try to use them against his wife, that’s a commentary on prosecutors’ lawlessness, not Sanchez’s. Under the First Amendment, possessing literature cannot be criminal, so what legitimate evidence could he possibly have been concealing?"

https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years-for-transporting-pamphlets/

Texas man sentenced to 30 years for transporting pamphlets

Draconian sentence threatens journalists and news consumers

Freedom of the Press
Show threadAgaric Tech Collective

This is an authoritarian regime criminalizing dissent, punishing freedom of speech and assembly with draconian prison sentences.

The (despicable) legal trick is to spin a literal conspiracy theory to rope a bunch of lawful activities in with one that is against the law by making it part of a "conspiracy". (And then, in this case, also make the sentence lengths so outlandish that this is clearly not the already repressive system operating as normal but fascism bending the system to be orders of magnitude more repressive.)

2:18pmWeb
Show threadAgaric Tech Collective11h ago
Compare this use of conspiracy to sentence people opposing the government's immoral and frequently illegal rounding up of immigrants into concentration camps to our last boost about #Uber allowing sexual assaults so their profits could continue unbothered. Far more actual crimes, far more serious harm, and far more evidence of conspiracy to continue the harm— the executives and board members of every large corporation in the country could be locked up for life on the same legal logic the prosecutors applied to the #Prairieland defendants. The legal system is what it does, not the actual laws, and what it does is lock up Black and brown people and now people who would stand with immigrants against #ICE — even if that standing is not even a protest action but simply #communication of the evils the #government is doing.