Free Sherman!

international | anti-capitalism | news report Monday September 01, 2003 08:25 by adrienne

the selective prosecution of Sherman Austin

A young activist and webmaster in the US is headed to prison for hosting an "illegal link."

www.raisethefist.com

Sherman Austin, a twenty year-old in Los Angeles, is going to federal prison on Wednesday for having an "illegal link" on his website, www.raisethefist.com. The link in question, which included bomb-making information, was authored by a white boy, the son of wealthy and conservative parents. That boy was never charged with any crime, but Sherman, who is a young Black activist, has been hounded by the FBI and will start serving a one-year prison sentence on Wednesday for linking to this other kid's website.

The prosecution maintained that while writing or hosting bomb-making information isn't illegal, doing so with the "intent" to use that information is. (I'm assuming the Feds called in the same psychics to determine Sherman's intent that they used to verify that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.)

Sherman has been selected for prosecution based on reasons that have everything to do with his politics, his effectiveness as an activist, and his race. Sherman is also a very tenderhearted, gentle, and expressive young man. I urge you to learn more about the details of this case -- about how the FBI surrounded his mother's house and how Sherman ended up in Oklahoma for a while. It's all just horrible.

The list of outrages is already a long one, and rather than send you all the details, I'll just say that the federal public defender pushed Sherman to accept a plea bargain and told him to think of his upcoming time in prison as "going to camp for a year." (This attorney has a son the same age as Sherman who will be attending Columbia University in the Fall.) The judge was worse; he sentenced Sherman to a term even longer than what the prosecution recommended, stating in court that he wanted to "send a message to other revolutionaries," and the terms of Sherman's probation are every bit as outrageous as the sentence itself.

You can learn more about Sherman's case by visiting his site:
http://www.raisethefist.com.
There's also an interview by Merlin Chowkwanyun up on Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/merlin08162003.html
Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's statement:
http://www.eff.org/br/20030807_eff_pr.php
And finally check out:
http://la.indymedia.org

You can subscribe to a listserv for Sherman's supporters too:

http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/shermanaustinlegal

Please do whatever you can to support Sherman, his family, and his loved ones. Tell everyone you know, jam up internet chat rooms and forums with his story, make stickers, make your own links, and spread the word.

The information linked to Sherman's site was essentially a "cut and paste job" -- nothing given the availability of much more detailed and thorough information. (Anarchist's Cookbook) With just a little effort, anyone can get a hold of instructions on how to make bombs (on Google, at a library, through Amazon.com, etc.), and some sources, such as the CIA, are particularly credible given the number of explosives they are responsible for producing. Last night, Zack de la Rocha, formerly of Rage Against the Machine, described that band's first promotional t-shirt, which featured cartoon instructions on how to make a molotov cocktail. This was a cartoon the CIA used for training Contras -- what was that phrase of Reagan's "freedom fighters"?