Anarchism

SM: And tell me about the judge.

AH: The trial judge is actually a man named Mark Pittman. Pittman is a Trump appointee, and throughout our trial, I would say he made rulings which [were] very nakedly preferential to the prosecution. You know, the the easiest example that I can see that is just very, very glaring, is on the first day of our trial, Pittman declared a mistrial on the basis of the fact that one of the defense attorneys was wearing a shirt to celebrate the lives of civil rights advocates like Shirley Chisholm and Martin Luther King Jr., and he said that he, on the basis of her wearing this T-shirt, Pittman said that this was a trial about political protest, and on the basis of that, he could find no other remedy for the bias that it could potentially have on the jury, than to declare a mistrial. You know, then he moved the trial to a different courtroom, and we came back a week later, and there was a great big mural of the Texas Rangers on the back wall of the courtroom in the area where the jury panel sits, and, you know we pointed out like, “Hey, you know, Texas Rangers are going to be prosecutorial witnesses in this case, and you have this great big propaganda mural for the Texas Rangers on the back wall, isn’t that gonna bias the jury in favor of the state?” And he said, “Well no, we can easily remedy that by asking the jury if they can put aside their biases and not be influenced by that.” He’s confirmed to have had an ex-parte meeting with William Barr, Bill Barr, who you may remember as Trump one’s attorney general and the principal architect of Trump one’s attempt to, you know, terrorify antifa. He said that he gave William Barr a tour of the courthouse during the trial, and ultimately, in spite of the fact that he sat through the whole trial, saw all of the evidence and, you know, made kind of grumbling noises about what he saw, he never explicitly said he believed that the case had been overcharged, but he definitely made grumbling noises about the way that the state had charged the case. He ultimately decided to give everyone a maximum sentence.