Thread: This the story of one of the most remarkable cases in U.S. history, and you’ve probably never heard of it. The story of what the U.S. government did to Ezell Gilbert is important because it explains how our legal system works as well as any case I have ever seen. (1)
In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh. (2)
At sentencing, Gilbert saw an error that increased his sentence by about **ten years** based on a misclassification of a prior conviction. In 1999, without a lawyer, he filed a petition complaining about the mistake. The Clinton DOJ opposed him, and a court ruled against him. (3)
Ten years later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in another person’s case, confirming that Gilbert had been correct about the error in his case. A public defender helped him file a new petition for immediate release from prison back to his family. He had served his time. (4)
But Obama/Holder DOJ argued to a federal judge that even if his sentence was illegal, Gilbert must remain in prison. They said the “finality” of criminal cases was too important to allow prisoners to file more than one petition, even if the first one was wrongly denied. (5)
The federal judge sided with Obama/Holder, and Ezell Gilbert remained in a cage even though everyone agreed he was now in prison illegally. He had the audacity to hope that courts would follow the law. (6)
A federal appeals court disagreed with Obama/Holder, and in June 2010, three judges set Gilbert free after more than 14 years in prison. (7)
The judges rejected the DOJ’s argument as a departure from fairness and common sense. They said that it could not be the law in the U.S. that a person had to serve a prison sentence that everyone admitted was illegal. Ezell Gilbert went home and stayed out of trouble. (8)
Here’s where it gets interesting. There are many people like Gilbert in federal prison whose sentences are illegal. Did you know that? Instead of rushing to ensure that thousands of people illegally separated from their families were set free, DOJ decided to fight and appeal. (9)
The Obama/Holder DOJ argued: If prisoners were allowed to file more petitions, the “floodgates” would open and many others — mostly poor, mostly Black — would have to be released. They asked a larger group of judges to reverse Gilbert’s victory. (10)
In 2011, a larger group of judges, led by a Republican majority, agreed with Obama/Holder that the “finality” of sentences was too important to allow prisoners to be released on a second rather than first petition, even if the prisoner was correct all along. (11)
An 87-year-old Republican judge wrote a dissent. Having served in WWII, he called the explicit decision to illegally keep a human being in jail “shocking.” He wrote that a “judicial system that values finality over justice is morally bankrupt.” (13)
Addressing Obama/Holder argument directly, he said: “[T]here are many others in Gilbert’s position — sitting in prison serving sentences that were illegally imposed. We used to call such systems ‘gulags.’ Now, apparently, we call them the United States.” (14)
Major media ignored Ezell Gilbert’s case at the time. (15)
In 2013, two years after sending him back to a cage, Obama granted Gilbert clemency, and the media praised Obama for his leniency. Tens of thousands of other human being remained in prison illegally. You’ve never heard their names. (End.)
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Yesterday's New York Times story on how fascism may be the only way to stop antisemitism looks like it was conceived by Rupert Murdoch, written by the person who wrote the Willie Horton campaign ad, edited by a neo-Nazi Seinfeld fan, and sponsored as a full-page ad for AIPAC.
It's another, related example of a broader phenomenon of the NYT trying to exploit the ignorance of its audience. These articles are not written only, or even primarily, for zionists.
THREAD. Over the last four years, I have published a lot of critiques of the New York Times. I have never read anything more depraved than today's morning newsletter about why aid is not getting to Gaza.
The premise of the article is it's an objective news "explainer" for liberal readers about why aid is not arriving in Gaza. NYT needs to say something to those who might have been hearing about mass child starvation, amputations without anesthetics, and other horrors of genocide.
NYT says we are not witnessing intentional and strategic collective punishment, genocide, and war crimes for which Israeli leaders were charged by ICC. But rather, genuine effort to deal with complex and serious security concerns, obstruction by Egypt, + decisions by aid groups.
THREAD. Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times is having a public breakdown before our eyes. It's like watching a small child emerge from the wild after having been raised by a pack of far-right wolves.
Kristof's brain is like an AI algorithm told to absorb every right-wing trope and then to regurgitate them in words more familiar to liberals. I will hand it to him though, he is right about one thing:
The whole article is impressively ignorant, but I want to focus on one thing. Kristof uses the anecdote of a charitable bail fund paying the cash bond to release a person from jail as the central example in his story.
THREAD. Last week, I had one of the great honors of my career representing a group of children in Flint. The brave kids are bringing one of the most important civil rights cases of our time, arguing that they have a constitutional right to see, touch, and hug their parents.
The courtroom was packed with kids who are suing the Sheriff and a large jail telecom company, alleging a conspiracy to profit from forcing families into expensive calls instead of free in-person visits with their parents, most of whom are jailed only because they can't pay cash.
The jail that confined and confines their parents was visible from the courtroom windows. When I first went, I saw desperate messages of love in chalk on the sidewalk from kids to their parents up in the jail, since they couldn't visit each other anymore.
THREAD. The New York Times just published a diary entry about the moment a liberal realized he was a fascist. It's very very weird.
This will come as no surprise to many of you, but the premise of the entire article--its unstated moral core without which it disappears into thin air--is that the lives of "native born Americans" are worth more than the lives of immigrants.
The immigration issue, as Harsha Walia @HarshaWalia so brilliantly illustrates in her book Border and Rule, is one of those areas where conventional wisdom is so outrageous, so brutal, so founded on senseless horror, that liberals like Kristof can't see how depraved they sound.
There is a campaign by some Democrats to portray the U.S. as “underpoliced” despite historic cop budgets. They also omit that U.S. now has a record of *1 million* privately employed cops. Here’s a photo from my local dc metro. These armed private cops apparently don’t count.
A couple years ago, two Harvard professors even published an academic article claiming the U.S. was underpoliced where they sneakily omitted several hundred thousand cops and also *all private police* from their numbers. (Ironic given the private police employed by Harvard.)
This is a huge deal. People who want to waste billions on the violent, wasteful, + undemocratic police bureaucracy are often the same people quietly supporting the explosion of private, armed cops. It’s one of the great threats to human life, especially the most vulnerable.