Some rare good news today as activist Eric McDavid was released from prison after serving nine years of a near 20 year sentence. He went free due to the government’s failure to disclose documents to his defence at his trial in 2007.
He was convicted of conspiring to sabotage federal property which threatened the environment but always maintained he and his two co-defendants were entrapped by an “overzealous FBI” and its 19 year old informant, “Anna”, who literally “herded the group together from around the country, paying for their transportation, food and lodging,” according to one of his attorneys.
She admitted she was trained by the FBI to exploit Eric’s romantic desire for her by telling him: “We need to put the mission first. There’s time for romance later.” But at the trial she downplayed his feelings towards her and the government concealed this and other material from the defence. Records showed the FBI gave the missing correspondence to a special unit to “analyse…for behavioural insight into Eric McDavid.”
Documents which surfaced only after the trial show the FBI urgently ordered then inexplicably cancelled a lie detector test for Anna, and that extensive surveillance of Eric prior to him falling under Anna’s influence did not reveal any inclination to commit the offence for which he was charged.
His attorney stated: “There has never been a case in America that has involved this much entrapment, this much pushing by an informant, by the U.S. government and by the FBI behind it.” But at his trial, the judge said “It’s a new world since September 11, 2001” and sentenced him to nearly 235 months.
“Since 9-11, the United States government has mercilessly entrapped people, destroying their lives just to make political examples of them, especially in Muslim communities,” said Jenny Esquivel, Eric’s partner and one of the organizers of his support committee.
“The government has targeted leftists and anarchists with similar fervour. This, like so many other alleged conspiracies the public hears about, are FBI inventions from the start,” Esquivel said.
Enjoy your freedom Eric!
Here is a link to the page on Eric’s trial from the website Green is the New Red: http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/mcdavid-sentenced/434/
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