If any of yall are new to the circuit of Political Trials, I strongly recommend starting by reading about the Trial of Bobby Seale and the Chicago 7 (originally 8).
Bobby Seale was among a number of activists targetted by police and prosecution in order to disrupt their organizing work. Bobby Seale's treatment during trial was so horrific and blatantly unjust including being brought into the court room bound and gagged. Ultimately, Seale's case was severed from the others and the government declined to retry him, but the other 7 defendants (and Seale, tho this was overturned on appeal) were convicted by the Judge and Jury.
You might also be more familiar with the case of Leonard Peltier, since he's been in the news recently (while his sentence has not been commuted, I have it on authority from a friend involved in rez activism that his house arrest parameters allow him access to the reservation as a whole, not just to a physical building, which I am relieved but still infuriated by) who was functionally exiled from US sovereign territory by Biden earlier this year. Peltier's work with AIM made him and his colleagues targets of state aggression, and Peltier in particular was convicted of killing two federal agents during a shoot out.
Another example which may be valueable to some is Alice Paul, a Quaker activist and suffragette who was arrested and convicted of "obstructing traffic" during her organized resistance to the presidency during wartime. She refused to plead guilty or try and reduce her sentence by paying a fine, choosing instead to publicly disclose her political imprisonment from the courthouse, and organize hunger strikes and other acts of resistance in the jailhouse. She was repeatedly forcefed and harmed along with other prisoners, and the prosecution repeatedly tried to have her declared insane.
What you will notice in every case is that while the "criminal offense" is typically objective fact or complete fabrication, it is also ALWAYS stripped of its context. No one acknowledges that AIM members were also repeatedly murdered by federal agents over the course of their work, and Peltier and co were (reasonably, if not legally) acting in self-defense even IF they did what they were accused of. No one acknowledges the role the police had during the Chicago uprising in ensuring that people were hurt by kettling and beating marchers. No one acknowledges that Alice Paul was pursuing legal representation and legal adulthood in her own nation, and perhaps if she needed to obstruct traffic to do so that was understandable.
So if we as a public believe Luigi Mangione's trial to be political farce, we need to remember how the farce ends: with an unjustified and unjustifiable conviction and the disappearance of an organizing force within the liminality of the prison system. We need to remember that because Mistrial Central over here will not actually be held accountable for its failures of justice unless WE force the issue. Learn from past organizers how they set out to do this.
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