Yeah, it’s confusing, his stated political goals and the claims of the state with the clear goal to discredit him seem to clash. Perhaps we should doubt the state, presume innocence of the accused, and ensure he is given a separate trial on the murder for hire charges. They are accusations of a terrible crime. They remain accusations even though evidence about them was included in other (political) charges for which he was convicted.

The state tried to bring separate charges and the case was closed without a conviction. It’s probably fair to say that the convicted corrupt cops planted everything and made it up, if we are just accepting base accusations at face value. I am sure you won’t agree, but my response is also for all the other people who see the injustice of the drug war, who have had enough of corrupt cops, and judges only sympathetic to the harshest of laws handing out sentences that are literally not possible to carry out. A double life sentence, if only he had two lives to give for his country, eh?

If the other charges were sufficient to say he did this horrible crime, why wasn’t double jeopardy invoked for the other case? Perhaps someone who followed the case closely can speak to this as from outside it looks extremely suspect. Since it wasn’t, we can assume it isn’t as settled as some would like except in relation to a conspiracy charge for a drug related crime. Those two things seem awfully political to me, and so I remain unconvinced.

Here’s one theory: people such as yourself were already convinced. He was given a double life sentence. Who on the prosecution side cares to allow a person to confront their accusers who were later jailed for corruption directly related to him and these charges? Nearly no one apparently: it’s fine to not convict him as the allegation served to discredit him for his extremely blatant political criticism and actions against the war on some drugs.

There is probably some truth in what you say about the fact that his best chances were with a plea deal. That is probably one of the saddest facts in the American justice system. It’s a concept that doesn’t really exist in many European legal systems, the right to bargain about justice. So his best bet to be free was to skip exercising his right to a trial… nothing problematic here, just another day in an American court.

Another option for him would have been to have never resisted the drug war. To never have attempted to build a market where people have nearly zero chance to physically harm each other in a transaction. Yes they can harm by consuming the substances, but that is again a clear political action in his written philosophy: people should be free to chose to take that risk. He was clearly a fool for believing he could change any of these matters and he should have known his place, right?

Some of us who watch and have watched our friends and family and other people suffer through the drug war where the police regularly kill or cause immense suffering with impunity are less sanguine than you. A market where people cannot be harmed in a transaction was a remarkable thing at the time, and it has now become a norm. As usual the rich get it with things like a coke taxi dispatched by signal, and the poor continue to buy drugs on the street and suffer violence which is all but intended by the state with it’s structures. We should be doing harm reduction and people who try this, however misguided should not be handled as if they are the same as the Zeta cartel.