Texas Man Gets 30 Years in Prison for Transporting 'Anti-Government' Pamphlets
reason.com47 points by mrtesthah a day ago
47 points by mrtesthah a day ago
This title by Reason seems unreasonable. The man was convicted of "tampering with evidence". In other circumstances, it would have been perfectly legal for him to transport these pamphlets.
As it turns out, when someone (your wife) gets arrested and tells you to do "whatever you need to do" and "move whatever you need to move at the house", it is highly illegal to then proceed to do so.
I totally appreciate this point, but 30 years????
Convicted murderers often get lighter sentences
By tampering he becomes an accessory, which in some juridictions are punished on the same level as the principals. In this case, the principals have been convicted on terrorism charges.
fwiw he wasn't charged as an accessory in this case. He was charged with "corruptly concealing a document or record" and "conspiracy to conceal documents".
In fact federal law provides that accessorys can't be sentenced to more than 15 years if the principal crime is punishable by life imprisonment (like terrorism is).
> or if the principal is punishable by life imprisonment or death, the accessory shall be imprisoned not more than 15 years.
> As it turns out, when someone (your wife) gets arrested and tells you to do "whatever you need to do" and "move whatever you need to move at the house", it is highly illegal to then proceed to do so.
If it was my wife, I'd probably do my best to save her.
This didn't save his wife. You are free to help your wife in non-illegal ways.
Regardless of the legal justification, this is clearly a miscarriage of justice, and evidence of extremely unequal enforcement.
People quibbling about the news coverage only normalizes the unjust sentences imposed on political opponents while the felonious president pardons loyal supporters. It's not normal, not acceptable.
No he did not. He got the sentence for hiding evidence. The article tries very hard to push an agenda.
Hiding evidence is the normal manner of conducting business for a lot of company managers.
Therefore the sentence seems unusually harsh in comparison with the lenience in other equivalent cases.
It does indeed seem like a harsh sentence. Something the article could focus on, instead of being disingenuous.
Hiding evidence of terrorism is something that I hope not many company managers do.
The judge in these cases, Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas has a history of hard right decisions that are overturned on appeal. I don’t know what the options are for these protesters; but I imagine they stand a reasonable chance on appeal.
The indictment can be read at https://media.freedom.press/media/documents/gov.uscourts.txn... if you want to see the charges.
And if the allegations about this being pre-planned (e.g., paragraphs 20 and 21 of the indictment) were supported by enough evidence to persuade the jury (and the jury was persuaded), then it's hard to see how they have a good chance of getting this overturned on appeal. Because unless I greatly misunderstand the law, in jury trials, as opposed to ones where the judge is the one making a ruling, appeal courts don't go over the evidence anew unless actually new evidence has turned up in the meantime (they don't "relitigate the facts", as I've seen it put in civil cases); instead, appeal courts assume that the evidence presented was factual, and what they do is look at the points of law that were used. Was the law properly applied? Were there mitigating circumstances that the judge didn't allow to be presented even though he should have?
And the law on things like attempted murder, or knowingly trying to conceal evidence when you know it's going to be used in a criminal case, is pretty clear-cut; there's not much room I can see for expecting the convictions to be overturned on a point of law. Not unless new evidence turns up that wasn't presented at the trial.
(EDIT to add: Actually, I believe that even in civil cases where a judge has made the ruling rather than the jury, appeal courts don't re-litigate the facts. Just as with criminal cases, in civil cases the judge will say "Hey, if you had evidence to present against that allegation, you had your chance to present it at the first trial." Only if the evidence is truly new, or the guy trying to present it truly didn't know it at the time of the first trial (and had no reasonable way of knowing it), does the appeal court say "Okay, we'll re-examine the facts in light of this new evidence." Otherwise they say "Re-litigating the facts is not our job," and unless the guy can show that the judge did something wrong (such as throwing out evidence that by law he should not have thrown out), then the appeal court won't look at new evidence. They only look at whether the law was actually followed correctly in the courtroom.)
My source for that knowledge, BTW, is a blogger (now deceased) whom I used to read regularly; I'll call him Mr. Smith. He wrote some unflattering things about someone else whom I'll call Mr. Jones, saying things like "Mr. Jones was once convicted of perjury, so you can't trust anything he says." Mr. Jones sued Mr. Smith for defamation. Mr. Smith put every legal filing, both Mr. Jones's complaint and his own defense, on his blog (legal filings, unless sealed by the court, are public domain under U.S. law as I understand it). By reading those filings, as well as the judge's decisions (also public domain under U.S. law), I actually learned quite a bit about how the U.S. legal system works. Including how appeal courts work, because when Mr. Jones appealed his lost lawsuit (Mr. Smith won his case, because Mr. Jones really had been convicted of perjury some thirty years back, sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, and under US law truth is an absolute defense against defamation — which is not the case in all countries, but is the case in the US), Mr. Jones tried to introduce evidence in the appeal and the court said "Nope, you knew about that at the time of the first trial, so you should have presented it then" and refused to consider the new allegations that Jones was presenting.
Why in 2026 do these indictments have the lousiest black and white photographs ever? I've seen the high quality images in color from the government. Can they not be used during the grand jury process?
The indictment PDF shows every signs of being a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy; it's not just the image that was poor quality. But our brains are so used to correcting for degraded text that we auto-correct for it and don't notice it. We do notice, though, when a photograph is degraded. I'm willing to bet that the original photograph was in color, and that the color photographs were what the grand jury was shown. But the copy filed in the archives was done on a black-and-white photocopier, and that's the copy that ended up in the PDF that Reason linked to.
In fact, I bet there are other sources where someone could find the original PDF of the indictment (the one that was NOT a photocopy of a photocopy): it was a pretty high-profile case, covered by lots of people, so I bet someone has uploaded the original to RECAP. I just grabbed the link from the Reason article and didn't do more digging.
Yet Americans have a felon as a president. What a sad joke of a country it has become
Please read the comments in the Reason article. Autumn Billings has a track record of distorting the facts.
"Last Independence Day, several protesters were arrested following a demonstration that turned violent outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Prairieland Detention Center."
This was not a spontaneous act. The Antifa folks set up a deadly ambush of federal officials.
I'm disappointed in Reason magazine. They're usually better than this, but they flubbed the facts on this one. The guy wasn't convicted for "transporting anti-government pamphlets", he was convicted for concealing evidence. His wife called him from the county jail and asked him to hide the documents, and he did it. And that's what he was charged with: not possession of anti-government pamphlets, but trying to hide documents that he knew were going to be used as evidence against someone (his wife) who had been arrested. If you try to hide evidence, you become an accessory after the fact. Reason's article finishes with "possessing "anti-government" documents or ideology is not illegal." Which is totally true, but also irrelevant to this case. That's not what he was charged with, he was charged with trying to hide evidence that he knew the court was going to want. I'm disappointed in Reason for completely failing to report accurately on this one.
As an aside, this was a federal conviction so Texas law doesn't apply to this case. And the defendants are lucky Texas law didn't apply to this case, because in Texas, if you're (for example) the getaway driver for a robbery, but someone is shot and killed during the robbery, then you can be held guilty of murder even though you didn't pull the trigger, if you knew ahead of time that your co-conspirators were likely to end up killing someone. https://www.ericbenavides.com/what-is-the-law-of-parties-in-... has a short discussion of that aspect of Texas law. If the defendants had been charged under Texas law, everyone, including the guy who tried to conceal evidence after the fact (thereby becoming part of the conspiracy in the eyes of state law), could have been convicted of attempted murder: the shooter shot at an ICE officer (and several other people) and hit him in the neck, but the officer survived. But because federal law applied rather than Texas law, only the guy who actually fired the shots was convicted of attempted murder; the jury found the other four, who had been part of the planning but hadn't fired their own guns, not guilty of attempted murder. (But guilty of the other charges, like conspiracy).
Very reasonable. I'm looking forward to the time when such reasonable laws are applied to execs of companies ordering destruction of evidence. 30 years behind bars
EDIT: or elected officials. Imagine Nixon getting 30 years for tampering with evidence
When you get older you sadly find out more and more than all news sources have an ideological bent and a political side they're supporting. I mean if you didn't wake up when Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post, then what does it take?
Which sadly changes the whole situation around, say, the bias of Facebook or Twitter. It's not that these new social media are biased vs. the unbiased traditional media. It's that these are more successful and have a different bias, which currently established parties see as a threat to their power.
Now you may still agree with the parties behind, say, a traditional newspaper and be opposed to, say, Twitter because of that. But you can at least be honest about this being the case.
What you are misleadingly calling "evidence" here is constitutionally protected free speech political materials. It's only "evidence" that he disagreed with the president on immigration, not anything related to a crime.
Take a step back and be honest about this situation, even if you dislike the people or disagree with their political views. This is an authoritarian attack on political opponents.
Everyone, regardless of political views or party affiliation should be outraged and horrified by this. This is the type of government violence against dissidents and opposition that we decry when it happens in other countries, and we shouldn't tolerate it here.
You ... may want to read the indictment before you form an opinion on this one. There were free speech materials in the box, but in the same box there was also evidence of conspiracy to commit violent felonies, and THAT is what the guy's wife had asked him to hide.
EDIT to add: as for a crackdown on dissidents and protestors, how many of the people attending "No Kings" protests have been arrested? How many people attending anti-ICE protests who were not committing other crimes (such as trespassing) in the process have been arrested? And of those arrested, how many of them got length sentences like this?
According to the indictment — and the jury who saw the evidence was convinced enough to convict them on most of the charges — this was a group that had planned ahead to commit violent crimes and claim that they were just protesting. (They showed up with weapons and body armor, clearly prepared ahead of time for violence — and there was more, but the indictment is lengthy and I don't want to repeat all of it). THAT kind of behavior, I want to see cracked down on with as lengthy sentences as the law allows for. Because it endangers everyone, including all the non-violent protestors. (Because at every protest later, the cops will be on edge, wondering at what point someone is going to start shooting at them. And nervous cops are more likely to make mistakes in judgment — and when someone is nervous and armed, mistakes in judgment have a tendency to be lethal.)
I do NOT want peaceful protestors slammed with ridiculous sentences. But these people were NOT peaceful protestors. And I WANT the kind of thing they did cracked down on. My parents lived through the 1970's, with domestic terrorist groups active all over the place, using peaceful protestors as their cover and endangering everyone by their behavior. I do NOT want to live through a repeat of that.
> They showed up with weapons and body armor, clearly prepared ahead of time for violence
How come this argument doesn't hold water in so many other cases? Americans can't be anti-second amendment but only for people who disagree with the government.
Body armor. Showing up with weapons is normal in some places, including Texas. Body armor, not so much. It's the body armor that's the real evidence of preparation.
P.S. Also, there's no inconsistency. Simply apply basic logic. You have the right to be armed. You do not have the right to shoot at law enforcement officials; that's a felony. Nor do you have the right to plan ahead of time to commit a felony, including shooting at law enforcement officials.
Is wearing body armour illegal?
You're shifting the goalposts rather a lot here; at first you said that just bearing arms (allowed by 2nd amendment) and wearing body armour (not forbidden) was proof that they're 'clearly prepared ahead of time for violence', and now you're saying that they're simply not allowed to shoot at law enforcement, which no one disputed.
Which is it? And why don't you apply that standard evenly?
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