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Title: Surviving a Grand Jury Author: CrimethInc. Date: 27th December 2017 Language: en Topics: how to, grand jury, trial, narrative Source: Retrieved on 9th September 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/12/27/surviving-a-grand-jury-three-narratives-from-grand-jury-resisters Notes: Originally appeared as episode #59 of the Ex-Worker podcast.
Grand juries serve the state as a sort of auxiliary legal proceeding to
force people to inform on each other. A grand jury isn’t a criminal
trial; there’s no judge present. It takes place entirely in secret. As a
witness, you can’t even obtain transcripts of your testimony.
Only the prosecutor and the jurists are allowed in the room with the
witness. The jurists are chosen according to the prosecutor’s agenda and
not screened for bias. The grand jury doesn’t have to inform you about
the details of what they are investigating; you have no way to know what
information might be incriminating for you or another person.
Grand juries suspend Fifth Amendment rights. They can subpoena you and
give you “immunity” in order to force you to testify; if you refuse,
they can jail you for up to eighteen months. This immunity does not
protect you from prosecution; it only stipulates that the information
you personally provide cannot be used against you, although the same
information provided by someone else can be.
All this explains why people who do not want to be complicit in enabling
the state to persecute communities refuse to give any information to a
grand jury whatsoever. You never know what detail might be used against
someone else. Even if no one is guilty of any crime, providing
information to a grand jury can result in ongoing legal harassment that
can ripple out and affect many people.
Grand juries serve to gather information on dissidents far beyond what
police and prosecutors could gather on their own; they have been used to
isolate, divide, and destroy social movements since the 1960s. Grand
juries are currently being used to target anarchists, anti-fascists, and
indigenous water protectors who struggled at Standing Rock.
If you’re subpoenaed by a grand jury and you decide to resist, you have
two options: show up in court and refuse to testify, then serve time in
prison for contempt, or go on the run before your first court date.
The following stories are from three comrades: Esme, who served jail
time for resisting; Devlin, who went on the run rather than cooperate;
and Cora, who was the partner of a grand jury resister and supported
them before, during, and after imprisonment.
We’re deeply inspired by the choices these people made in resisting the
state. We hope that if you ever have to face a grand jury, criminal
charges, or police harassment, their words will give you strength and
faith in yourself. It can help to learn from the experiences of those
who walked in your shoes before you—to know that you are not alone.
Esme: I remember when those douchebags first came to my door. I
particularly remember the tall man with sharp features and creepy blue
eyes. He knocked on my door at 6 am. When I answered, still half-asleep,
he said, “Oh, hi, sorry to wake you. I saw through your window that you
were sleeping. You know this is my least favorite part of the job.” He
was there to subpoena a friend of mine. I slammed the door in his face.
Over the following months, my friends got served their subpoenas and had
to go to court dates. I helped to organize support for them. At the time
it felt like an agent was lurking behind every corner—and the tough part
was sometimes they were.
Cora: I was awoken that morning by my partner, who was in shock. Federal
agents had come looking for a friend and former housemate of ours. They
wanted to serve him a subpoena to testify before a grand jury. The days
that followed were a flurry of hushed conversation, larger displays of
solidarity, crying, and panic.
Our house was awkwardly built with four doors to the outside and many
windows. It wasn’t the greatest layout for feeling protected when
paranoia struck. I was home alone one evening when I heard car doors
slam outside our house. This wasn’t strange for our neighborhood, but my
fear of the feds turned every sound into impending arrest or another
subpoena. This time, it was federal agents. A group of five
medium-to-large men with flashlights, in black clothing, began assessing
our home from the outside, starting near my partner’s bedroom door,
around to our backyard, around the side yard and completing the circle
up front. I stayed hidden. I was afraid they would enter the house,
thinking it to be empty, and corner me there alone—but they only seemed
interested in our yard and our home’s exterior.
It was after this that all of us—my partner, and housemates, and
I—decided it was absolutely necessary to move. They had already
subpoenaed the people they had originally been searching for. Why were
they still coming around? What did they want with our house? We weren’t
under the illusion that a new house would provide more safety, but the
anxiety mounting in that space was beginning to feel overwhelming and we
needed a change of environment. We found a new home quickly and eagerly
moved in. We had just begun to settle in when the FBI visited us again.
Esme: One day two men were lurking outside my house. I pushed away what
I thought was an irrational paranoia. I let myself believe they were
Mormon missionaries. I walked outside to my car and they addressed me by
my name. I shut the car door and ran into my backyard. I couldn’t think
fast enough. I fumbled with the latch on the gate and they yelled after
me that they had positively identified me, so the subpoena had been
officially served. I turned around and grabbed it out of their hands.
They offered to take me into the grand jury right then. I didn’t answer
them, but walked into my house and burst into tears. I remember crying
and repeating the words “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do
this” over and over again as my friends read the subpoena. I knew what
it meant by that point, as several of my friends were already in jail
over this shit. It never occurred to me to do anything other than
resist, but I was terrified.
Cora: When my partner was issued a subpoena it felt like a nightmare. It
was the same grand jury that had already subpoenaed our friends, who
were now serving jail time for resisting. None of us felt we had the
tools to navigate what was ahead of us. I treated it like a job, because
there was so much we didn’t know.
Esme: I called a public defender and explained the situation. I told him
that I intended to not cooperate. He said in a condescending tone, “Oh
you can’t just NOT cooperate with a grand jury subpoena.” I explained
that I knew exactly the consequences: eighteen months max in jail for
civil contempt, and that I was prepared to do it. I told him that if he
was going to represent me he would have to respect that. After that he
never questioned my resolve once. Ultimately, I would have to educate
him about how grand jury resistance works.
Cora: It surprised me how little the defense lawyer understood about
grand juries. Maybe that was just me giving too much credit to lawyers,
cause I was like, you go to school for eight years for this, you should
know what’s going on. It boggled my mind. Luckily, we were able to talk
to other, radical lawyers. There wasn’t a lot of information online, and
a lot of it was contradictory. So we talked to lawyers who had explicit
experience in political cases. It’s not that our lawyer was incompetent,
it’s just that grand juries are so outside the scope of regular court
cases—to the point that the lawyers can’t even be in the room.
Esme: Just like my lawyer, my parents initially encouraged me to
“consider my options.” I told them flatly that I knew I was going to go
to jail over this and that if they wanted to visit me while I was in
jail they were going to need to respect my decision. In this one
conversation, our relationships changed from a parent/child dynamic to
one of adults. Being clear and upfront with both my parents and lawyer
about how this was going to go it made it much easier for all of them to
support me in the ways I needed. This meant they never pressured me to
cooperate even if they didn’t understand my ethical reasons for
non-cooperation.
Cora: No one knew how long punitive detention for refusing to cooperate
with a grand jury subpoena would actually be. One isn’t sentenced to a
particular length of time, but attorneys told us that eighteen months
was the maximum. We were told to expect the maximum because of my
partner’s public refusal to cooperate and the overt political nature of
the investigation. We went from meetings amongst friends, to meetings
amongst family, to meetings with attorneys, to phone calls with comrades
trying to gather as much information as possible in the short time
before inevitable incarceration. We stayed busy.
The wait was agonizing. No matter what we did amongst friends, amongst
our political milieu or in our romantic relationship, I never felt
prepared to have my partner’s physical and emotional presence stripped
from my life. I never felt prepared to watch them experience detention
and isolation. We talked with people who had experienced similar
repression, made plans for communication, strengthened our relationship
while supporting one another through the trauma of uncertainty and
constant harassment from the State. We made big banners for
demonstrations and, after, hung them in our house as encouragement. We
even got married in order to grant ourselves some luxuries and legal
rights regarding prison visits and attorney-client privileges.
Esme: We’d had some time to talk out scenarios before this happened, and
we decided to get married—not out of love, but practical necessity. We
knew that was the only way Cora would be able to visit me. They would
continue to be an unwavering support person to me through the hard
months to follow. Thankfully, they were not the only person to rise to
the occasion. Many friends and loved ones showed up to hold me up and
support me. Friends would come by our house and drop off food and treats
and gifts on the regular. This isn’t to say everything was rosy—the
stress of the time definitely reverberated throughout our friendships.
Many stepped up to mediate conflicts—it really did take an extended
community to support us.
Cora: In those days leading up to Esme’s incarceration, we were hardly
ever alone. It would have been easy to be isolated as a couple, to feel
trapped in this intense experience that was effecting the two of us most
intensely, but luckily that didn’t happen. I think that’s part of why
our relationship has stayed as strong as it is through all of this—even
when friends couldn’t always show up in the ways I wished they would, we
were really held by a large community.
Esme: After the subpoena, the prosecutor hurled all kinds of threats at
me. I was told I would be charged with criminal as well as civil
contempt and other crimes if I refused to cooperate. The paranoia that
had been a dull roar in my mind increased to full-blown panic. I blamed
myself for lack of vigilance for letting myself get subpoenaed. I had
been anxious before, but now I started to experience more intense panic.
It was getting more difficult to determine which fears were worth paying
attention to.
We knew from affidavits in the case that some of us had been followed,
so it would make sense to believe I was being followed. Sometimes I
would see an SUV with government plates parked outside my house—but that
blue-eyed man who came to my door the first time had been driving a beat
up old Pontiac. So there was really no way of knowing how deep the
surveillance went.
Sometimes clearly absurd fears would enter my brain and I couldn’t push
them away. Once I was driving and heard a series of ticks and beeps. I
began to fear a bomb had been planted under my seat. I sat stopped at a
red light and considered my options. I was almost certain this wasn’t
real, but the Feds had bombed Judi Bari’s car this way in 1990. But
surely I was not as high a priority as she had been. Waiting for the
light to turn, I couldn’t reason my way out of this. I pulled over into
a Burger King parking lot and got out of my car. I walked a safe
distance away I waited a few minutes before cautiously approaching the
vehicle again. I checked under the seat, then under the car itself:
nothing. I felt the seat for anything inside it: nothing. I got back
into my car, took a deep breath, and got to work just a couple minutes
late.
Experiences like this helped me develop a framework for how to handle
these kind of fears. I created a set of four questions, and for each one
I’d either ask a friend’s advice or imagine what advice they might give.
The questions were:
How likely is it that what I fear right now is real? What evidence do I
have for it? Has this happened to others?
If what I fear is real, how serious of a threat is it to me in this
situation?
Can this situation be addressed? Is there anything that I can do to make
myself safe from this?
How costly or inconvenient is this precaution? Is this response illegal?
Could I get hurt or get in more trouble?
Using this framework, it made sense to get out of the car to check for a
bomb. Though the likelihood of the threat being real was remote, the
precaution I took was low cost and only made me slightly late to work.
Having this structure helped me feel like I was doing all I could to
keep myself safe.
Often, in scary repressive situations people oscillate between feeling
strong fear and then pushing it out of their mind—without taking basic
precautions to handle what they’re afraid of. Dealing with repression is
about risk management. We can’t be completely safe from the state or
from the far right, but there are steps we can take to mitigate some of
the potential harm. Since then, I’ve used this framework with households
and other groups to assess risk from both feds and neo-Nazis.
Cora: As Esme’s court date approached, we rented a hotel room with
friends and talked all night. It was moments like this that kept us
going, and something worth doing if you’re facing any kind of
repression, because everything will feel like shit. In hindsight, I
realize there are a few things I would have done differently, especially
around asking for support. I mean we got amazing support, especially all
the fundraising and one friend who gave us a few hundred dollars to
cover Esme’s rent and car insurance and stuff. At the time I didn’t want
to ask for support just for me because it felt like a finite resource.
Thinking about asking close friends for more than just basic friendship
felt like taking something away from others. I didn’t really realize how
the experience was affecting me. I also don’t know how receptive I would
have been to someone saying “this is just time for you.” On a certain
level, I wasn’t able to do all the intense support I was doing and also
check in with all my emotional needs. Esme was the same way, and we
brought that out in each other. We both stayed really task-focused.
Esme: That night in the hotel I could feel my freedom slipping out from
under me. I hadn’t seriously considered going on the run, but in that
hotel room it suddenly seemed so appealing. How was I going to walk into
the hands of my enemies the next day, when I could just as easily breath
the free air for another day? I thought about trying to live underground
in the States or leave the country and start a new life under a
different identity—but both would have to be indefinite if not lifelong
exile, which seemed hard to imagine. Jail time at least had a max of
eighteen months, and it seemed like most people usually did more like
six. And I could get letters from my loved ones, something much harder
to pull off from underground. So, going on the run seemed like the
harder option, although it perhaps represented an even larger middle
finger to the law. I reconciled myself to my choice.
I spent the night embracing my friends and watching Mean Girls 1 and 2
(spoiler: the second one is terrible, don’t bother). I appeared at the
courthouse the next day delirious from lack of sleep but ready to face
my incarceration.
Devlin: I didn’t decide to become a grand jury resister on the day the
federal agents emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, forcing their subpoena
into my unwelcoming hands. Decisions like this are rarely made in the
moment. For me, it would be more reasonable to say I started to make
this decision five years before I was subpoenaed, when I first learned
of Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar. At the time, he had just been sentenced to
eleven years and three months for resisting grand juries in New York and
Chicago. A fighter for Palestinian liberation, Dr. Ashqar was jailed
several times between 1998 and 2007 on civil contempt charges. These
were intended to coerce his testimony to a perennial grand jury
investigating Palestinian nationals on racketeering charges. As
exhausting as the protracted struggle must have been, Ashqar was
unyielding in his defiance, refusing to implicate anyone, saying in
court that he refused “to live as a traitor or as a collaborator.”
In 2007, the case came to a head. As they admitted defeat in turning
Ashqar into a state agent, the law played their final trump card: a
punitive prison sentence, meant to strike fear into all of us watching
from the sidelines. For me, as I’m sure for many others, it didn’t have
that effect.
I was in awe of Ashqar, of his contempt, in the choices he made to
reject his status as innocent witness and take on the complicity of
solidarity. Resistance felt alive and real to me in that moment. I
decided then that if ever I was called upon to resist a grand jury, a
thought that seemed impossibly far away to a young anarchist who had yet
to see the inside of a jail cell, I would try to breathe as much fire
into the legacy of grand jury resistance as I was capable of.
I wanted my resistance to be as defiant as it could be. I didn’t want it
to be based on the fact that I was “innocent,” but rather to be a clear
and outright refusal of everything they wanted from me. I hoped that
this complete defiance would inspire others as Dr. Ashqar had inspired
me.
I also thought about it from a security standpoint: my brain was like a
hard drive that stored valuable information, and I had no way of knowing
what stray detail I remembered could be used to incriminate comrades of
mine. So my perspective was that the best way to prevent the state from
having access to that information was not only to encrypt the
information (stay silent) but also to never give them physical access to
the hardware (in this case my body). Thus, I went on the run.
Esme: On the morning of my court date, my parents, my partner, my lawyer
and I got coffee across the street from the courthouse. My lawyer
noticed a stocky man with a military haircut holding a newspaper in
front of his face and staring at us. My lawyer said we should talk
outside. For my parents, this one fairly minor act of surveillance
seemed to shatter their cherished view of a benevolent government.
A number of people had shown up to the courthouse to support me,
including some older folks who had done support for grand jury resisters
in the 70s. I met two who had been part of an urban guerrilla group back
then and wished me their support. One of them told me about an oath that
they used to say to each other back in the day:
If ever I should break my stride, or falter at my comrade’s side
This oath shall kill me.
If ever my word should prove untrue, should I betray the many or the few
This oath shall kill me.
If ever I withhold my hand, or show fear before the hangman
This oath shall surely kill me.
It was powerful to feel like included in a tradition of resistance, even
if some of our political inclinations were different.
I walked in to the courthouse with my lawyer. We were led to the third
floor where two men introduced themselves as prosecutors. One of them
was the man with the creepy blue eyes and sharp features I had seen
months earlier on my doorstep. When my lawyer introduced himself, the
blue-eyed man identified himself as the lead agent on the case.
I remained silent while my lawyer schmoozed with the prosecutors, and
then I entered the grand jury room with them. My lawyer, of course, had
to stay behind.
The room resembled a community college classroom. It had an overhead
projector and the dozen or so jurists sat in chair/desk combos arrayed
in rows facing me. I was at the front of the room as though I was a
guest lecturer. The prosecutor asked me my name and date of birth. I
told him. Then he asked me where I worked and I figured it was as good a
time as any to start resisting. I stammered out a refusal. He then asked
me a slew of questions: peoples names, where I was on certain dates,
where others were on specific dates. With growing confidence, I refused
to answer each question. As I wasn’t allowed to have my lawyer present
or record any of the questions, I would ask for a break after every
three questions and go into the other room and write them down so I
wouldn’t forget them. This way I could share what they were asking about
with everyone else, and make this secret process more transparent.
Leaving the room frequently was also a way of demonstrating to my lawyer
and others that I wasn’t answering their questions, so there would be no
doubt.
After a dozen or so questions and refusals, the prosecutor said he had
heard enough. As I got up to leave the room, a jurist in the front row
smiled and raised his fist in salute to me. I still wonder to this day
what that guy’s deal was. Maybe he had something to do with the outcome
of things? But I may never know—that’s the thing about repression, there
are so many bizarre unknowns that you just have to accept.
After that I was taken in front of a judge, granted immunity, questioned
by the grand jury again and refused again. By the time all this was over
the workday was over and I was given another court date a few weeks
away. It felt a bit anti-climactic. I had prepared myself to go to jail.
I had packed up all my stuff, found someone to rent my room, and now I
had to go back to my house where I no longer really had a room and kill
time until I went to jail.
As I waited, I searched for ways to prepare for what really can’t be
prepared for. I talked to more former political prisoners who offered
incredible advice and emotional support. I made plans with my partner,
parents and friends about my support.
After another court date I was given a self-report date and at 9 am on a
grey morning, after all that waiting, I gathered with a small group of
comrades and my parents to say goodbye. As the time approached for me to
go in I started to hug people goodbye I started crying and an older
comrade grabbed me by my shoulders and looked into my tear-filled eyes
and said “Hey, you’ve got this! Seriously, don’t doubt it for a second,
you’ve got this!”
That phrase would come back to me often in the following months.
Cora: I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like to have my partner
be so physically absent from my life. While Esme was in jail, I focused
all my emotional energy on supporting them. This involved writing long
letters every day, micro managing their support, talking with friends
about our visits, meticulously planning my trips to visitation and
really trying not to plan for life after they got out. I tried not to
think about the future. They could be in for over a year, and at the end
of that could end up indicted as part of the ongoing investigation.
There was also the fear that I would be indicted as a result of the
grand jury’s findings. The future was so unclear that the present was
all I could grasp.
I buried myself in work every other day of the week. Shortly after my
partner’s subpoena, I took on a second full-time job. I used my 60- to
70-hour work week as a way to exhaust myself and dissociate from the
trauma I was incurring. It gave me purpose while I felt aimless and
heartbroken. I withdrew from many friendships and stayed firmly in
high-functional crisis mode. If you had asked me at the time what kind
of support I needed, I wouldn’t have been able to say. I felt like any
care someone gave me was taken away from Esme. In retrospect, I’d do a
few things differently. But I do think it was important for both of us
to focus on practical details and things we could control. It wasn’t
until much later that we both realized how not okay we had been.
Esme: When I walked through the front door of that jail, I was shuttled
between various booking rooms for hours. Around 11 am, I was given a ham
sandwich and some pudding in a brown bag. I decided that if the state
wanted to lock me in a cage and attempt to ruin my life, I would resist
by making my time in jail the best thing that had ever happened to me. I
looked at that ham sandwich on white bread and decided that I was going
to eat as healthily as I could for this meal and all the ones to follow.
So I left the white bread and pudding in the bag. It sounds weird but
this helped me feel like I was regaining some amount of agency.
They took me in front of a guard sitting at a desk who called himself a
counselor. He asked me a slew of questions to figure out if I was
eligible for placement in General Population. I tried to answer every
question so that I would qualify. I remember him smirking and rolling
his eyes when I told him I was straight. But at the end he said I looked
like I was eligible for GP. He sent me back to a holding cell, then came
back a while later and inexplicably took me into the solitary
confinement unit and put me on cell alone status. The guards told me,
“Since you haven’t committed a crime, and you’re being held here
coercively not punitively, we can’t house you in GP with criminals.” I
responded that my co-defendants were in GP, but they didn’t offer any
other explanation. I found out later that at that same time my
co-defendants were being transferred to other solitary confinement units
as well. It’s clear to me that the prosecutor was trying to apply extra
pressure to us to get us to break.
I woke up the next morning at 6 am to a tray of warm food being slid
through the trapdoor inside my door. I again picked through for the less
processed seeming parts and ate them, even though I wasn’t hungry and
wanted to keep sleeping. I figured I would take what I could get.
After breakfast, they asked me if I wanted to go to the rec yard. I had
assumed I would be in this one cell all day and jumped at the
opportunity to get out. They put me in what passed for a rec yard in
solitary, which turned out to be a triangular cell with chain link fence
on all sides and a vent through which cold air blew but you could see
the sky if you stood in the right place. It was barely larger than my
cell and it was so cold I couldn’t really do anything other than shiver.
After that, I stayed in my cell during rec time.
I started journaling: planning out workouts and other self-improvement
activities. In the evening a cart came by my cell and I was told I could
pick two books from it. I picked out the longest one I could see. Then
scanned the titles for anything familiar, to my surprise I found an
Octavia Butler book I had been meaning to read. The familiar author
brought warmth and joy to me when I was confused and alone. Her writing,
bleak but yet so honest and nuanced, felt like just the emotional tone I
needed set going into the next few months of my life.
I asked about phone calls and was told that I could make one 15-minute
phone call each month. It seemed unbelievable, but it was true. I would
have to be sustained by letters. On the third day, when I started
receiving them, everything got so much better. The guards seemed
resentful of having to read all my mail but their resentment just made
me feel better and better. The first book I received was Vida by Marge
Piercy, which follows a woman in a fictionalized Weather Underground
type group as she tries to survive living on the run. I knew some of my
comrades who had also faced repression had gone on the run, but I had
tried to avoid any contact with them or knowledge of what they were
going through so as not to lead the authorities to them. Vida made me
feel connected to what they might be going through. The story doesn’t
glorify life on the run—it left me feeling like I was the lucky one to
be safe in a cell rather than precariously waiting for the cops to come
busting my door down like my comrades surely were.
Devlin: At the beginning of my time on the run, my comrades and I had to
leave the area quickly and figure out a more concrete plan along the
way. Much of the work hinged on having a network of solidarity and
computer skills. It’s actually quite a bit of work to protect yourself
digitally. I won’t go into specifics, but the skills we needed were not
those we could have learned on a whim. We were able to do it because we
had years of experience to draw from.
At one point, a security breach meant that we had to relocate for fear
of being tracked. We relied on the quick thinking and very generous
solidarity of comrades from all over who helped tremendously with our
transition. This type of anarchist solidarity was invaluable and without
it we would never have been able to do what we did.
Getting needs met like health care and money were major obstacles. Over
time, living in a situation not of our own choosing was physically and
emotionally detrimental. We had organized our lives around fighting the
state. Suddenly, when we didn’t have any fight to do or decisions to
make, our camaraderie eroded. Bonds between close comrades started to
break down and I felt trapped and without an outlet or shared fight to
channel my energy into.
Those stresses caused health problems which became harder and harder to
address because I was on the run. These compounding effects became major
obstacles.
At home, I had lived through highs and lows of struggle and repression
but they were shared highs and lows. All of a sudden, no one around me
understood the constant crisis I was going through or even why I had
moved to that place at all. People didn’t even know my real name, yet I
was trying to build authentic bonds of camaraderie with them.
I remember once a cop showed up at my house and they waited at my door
and wouldn’t leave. My mind raced. I remembered that I had mapped out a
way to escape by jumping between rooftops, but I hadn’t tested it and
didn’t know if it would work. I had this internal freakout but I quieted
my fears because I would have to deal with the implications later. Right
now, I just needed to get out. My body became weirdly calm as I went
through the house burning everything that could be used to identify me.
I also ate a package of cookies cause I didn’t know the next time I
would be able to eat. I sent word to let friends know what was going on,
got a backpack together for my rooftop journey, and looked out the
window one last time—and the cop was gone.
Friends later found out through social engineering that the cops were
involved in something entirely unrelated, and we were able to return to
that spot. Even so, it was incidents like that that shook my nerves so
much. The simple act of interacting with a cop—something many people
would consider routine—would have completely changed my life at that
time. I lived in constant fear of having to interact with law
enforcement.
I see how I needed every moment of that build up, all of the
reinforcement of self that I put into the previous ten years to get me
through the experience intact. When the focus of the radical left had
moved on to the next crisis, when I hadn’t seen my dearest friends in
years, when I was puking blood from a mysterious illness with no way to
see a doctor, when I didn’t even have my own name to give coherence to
my words, what I did have to hold onto was the promise I had made to
myself—and implicitly to all others engaged in struggle—that I would put
everything I had into the fight. Prolonged psychological dissonance can
really disorient, subjecting what seems like our strongest foundations
to deterioration. Anarchy became the one place to which I could recede
that remained intact; resistance struggles the thread that connected my
past to a possible future.
Esme: As the days became weeks, I got some basic stuff on commissary and
had a routine planned in half-hour increments so I would always be busy.
I was teaching myself to eat and write with my left hand, practicing
Spanish in the evening, reading Foucault in the morning, writing three
long letters after dinner, and starting to meditate.
My cell looked west out over a park, but the tiny window was opaque and
foggy. There was one corner, though, where the clear epoxy that sealed
the window hadn’t been fogged over. Through that tiny gap I could make
out two trees in the distance on a hill, silhouetted against the sky. I
would watch them for hours as the light changed. I still feel a happy
sense of nostalgia when I think of how beautiful those two trees were.
Since my release I’ve gone back and tried to find them, but none of the
trees really seem right. Maybe they have been cut down, or maybe I
imagined them.
Every now and then the guards would transfer me to another cell. None of
the others had a view like the first one. One cell was so cold my bones
ached from the pain of it, and I couldn’t sleep. I asked for a second
blanket but they never gave me one. This was the hardest time: I felt so
alone and sad, and not being able to sleep much made everything harder.
If I slept during the day when it was warmer, I’d be up awake at night
with no light, unable to read or distract myself from my thoughts, which
were often dark. When the dark thoughts came, I would do ten burpees and
then sit for a minute and scan how I felt, and do it again, as
necessary. As bad as that was, I could hear other inmates having harder
times—once I heard one pounding the walls and screaming about being
suicidal. A unit of cops in riot gear beat them until they were quiet.
Incidents like this were impossible to ignore, because they stood out so
starkly from the monotony of my days, but each time they happened I was
plunged into much darker thoughts.
After the cold cell I was transferred to one with a window that faced a
wall, and no mirror. This detail may seem insignificant, but my ability
to see my reflection had previously allowed me a sense of identity that
was suddenly lost. Without an image of myself or a companion, my mind
became a stranger and stranger place. I looked inwards and saw nothing.
So instead I turned to my letters. It was these correspondences that
gave me a sense of self. I was not an island but an amalgam of my
relationships, conversations, and collective passions. Whether I was
working out, meditating, eating, reading, or writing letters, I was
doing it to strengthen my interactions with the outside world. I lived
off of the letters, zines and books I received.
Right when I’d learned how to handle the cold isolation and identity
crisis of solitary confinement, when I felt ready to endure this for the
next sixteen months, I was transferred to General Population.
It was nothing like what you see on television.
People were initially suspicious of me, as I didn’t have the normal
paperwork that other inmates had. My story didn’t quite make sense to
some. Most people had never heard of civil contempt. Once I was able to
show them a newspaper clipping about my case people started to trust me.
Then I met an older bank robber, John who said he had been in prison in
the ’70s, the same prison, in fact, as the ex-urban guerrilla folks who
had come to my court date and shared their oath with me. I asked John if
he knew those people and he did a double take. He said, “Holy shit,
you’re into that stuff?” I said “No, no, no, they are just friends of
mine—but we believe in a similar cause.”
After that John, dedicated himself to looking out for me. He said that
he missed the old days of principled convicts who didn’t betray each
other and he saw me as staying true to that legacy, I was flattered.
I made other friends in general population, kept up with my workouts,
started to fall behind on my correspondence, played cards, tried to
explain anarchism to people and generally had an OK time. One thing that
I found difficult to navigate ethically was racial politics. I am white
and thus I had to sit with white people at lunch, watch the white TV,
etc. I tried my best to buck these rules and build friendships with
people of color, since I’m ideologically opposed to white
separatism—moreover, some of the other white inmates were affiliated
with white supremacist gangs. One way I managed to do this, oddly
enough, was by hanging out with evangelical Christians. The Christians
were organized on a multiracial basis. Though I didn’t go to their Bible
study I would work out with them, and play cards and chess with them.
In some ways time went by fast as I started to build real friendships
with other inmates based on emotional support and vulnerability. I was
also able now to have hour-long contact visits with my partner and my
family.
Cora: The waiting room, the same room where I last saw my partner before
they were taken into custody, was grey. The walls were large, painted
brick interrupted by the occasional bulleted list of rules and
expectations. I always arrived right when visitation hours began. We
waited there until the guards called visitors up in groups to go through
security.
I and handful of others, often families with children, were led through
a long series of heavy doors to the visitor area. As we entered the
room, I watched as people recognized one another, briefly hugged and sat
to talk with their incarcerated loved ones. I didn’t see my partner, but
thought maybe they would be one of the few inmates trickling in. Over
the following few minutes, my mind went directly to the worst-case
scenarios. I knew they were in solitary confinement. Were they hurt?
Were their visitation privileges rescinded? Did I misunderstand the
visitation guidelines?
A guard came from behind and asked me to follow him. I was led into a
small room off the main visitation room. This room had two small
television screens with telephones attached. The visitation wouldn’t be
in-person but over the screen. My heart sank as I waited for a familiar
face to appear on the screen. Their body was small on the screen, the
camera was an awkward distance from where they sat. This made our
communication feel less personal. I remember moving closer and closer to
the screen instinctively, trying to hear their words more clearly and
see their face more clearly. The visit was brief. It was hard to know
what to talk about with one another. I can’t quite remember how long
visitations were, but I do remember that video visitation was shorter
than in-person ones. Our time together was via video for the majority of
their incarceration. Two visits in a row, the video wasn’t working, so
we could only communicate over the audio.
Esme: At a certain point, my co-defendants had all been released after
refusing to cooperate. I was the last of us left inside. After a few
more months the judge finally determined what my comrades and I had
known: that my incarceration had become punitive since there was no way
I was going to cooperate. Much earlier than I’d expected, I was released
back into the world.
Cora: I had almost no warning that Esme would be released. It was so
surreal. It might have been the day before, or the day of—I ended up
getting a call for our friend letting me know. I was preparing for
eighteen months; we’d gotten married, I had my schedule down for
visitation. We had a system, and we’d been getting good at it, and then
it was suddenly over. I hadn’t planned for what would happen after. I
felt like if I started to think ahead, I’d get caught up in longing for
that. So when they were released, I didn’t even know what to do. It was
hard to even feel relief, since the grand jury was still convened and
the possibility of future subpoenas and indictments still hung over us.
It seemed impossible that three or four people would be incarcerated
over this for months and no indictments would follow. Esme was home for
now, but would it even last? Or would I be the next one taken in? A lot
of us had experienced being detained or mass arrested, things that were
a direct result of certain conflicts with the police and state, but this
felt like a different category. It’s not like there was a sentence to be
served and then it was over. We had no timeframe for how long we had to
wait. One lawyer identified the date they thought the grand jury
convened, but because they could always reconvene and subpoena more
people, it never felt like there was an end. It just hung over us until
it eventually dissolved into our past. But I put it in the back of my
mind because there wasn’t a lot I could do except keep functioning.
Esme: The shock of release was intense. Riding in a car felt so bizarre.
I had lost so much weight none of my clothes fit. I had picked up
strange mannerisms and new anxieties. But I was overjoyed to be with my
comrades in the flesh again. The collective trauma we all experienced
brought us much closer and forged powerful bonds that continue today.
Some of my friends would stay on the run for years after, but that’s
another story. There were some who betrayed their comrades and
capitulated to the state’s demands. I won’t waste my breath on them,
except to say that their mistake was tremendous. They lost all their
friends and endured just as much trauma as any of us, but they cut
themselves off from any support because they chose to throw others under
the bus. Not only was their decision unethical, but in the end it wasn’t
even self-serving. My experience was painful and lifechanging. Many
years have passed and I’m still healing from it, but I do not regret my
decisions for an instant.
Cora: Now that this is as behind me as it will ever be, I can see the
ways it has shaped me. I moved out of town and onto a farm, in part
because of my fear of the police. I had so many traumatic experiences
about having them in my home. On the other hand, I feel much stronger
and more capable than I did before—specifically, I know exactly how to
do this and I could do it again. I know how to navigate the prison
system, and I have much more empathy for incarcerated people. When I
write them letters now, it feels more personal. I’m also proud of how I
was able to build relationships that held a foundation for us all to
hold each other through this experience. It helped us get out of the
theoretical realm and solidify what we really think and believe. Being
able to watch someone I love so much make those decisions based on their
personal beliefs was inspiring. We can also say of course we would never
crack, but it’s interesting to see someone actually rise to that
challenge. It made it seem possible for me, because I was terrified I
was going to through the same thing.
Esme: When I first got out, I thought I was fine. It wasn’t until years
later that I realized how not okay I had been. Thanks to therapy,
hallucinogens, learning about trauma, writing and the loving patience of
friends I’ve healed a lot. I’m forever changed but in many ways I am
stronger and I’m able to come to anarchist struggles with a focus and
intention that I learned from my experience.
Devlin: After several years had passed we assumed that the grand jury
had ended, since usually they have expiration dates. But even so lawyers
I had talked to suggested that if I ever interacted with police again in
my life I would certainly go to jail—so the question of coming out of
hiding could not be taken lightly. But the life I was living on the run
felt so difficult and I didn’t feel like I could keep living it. I had
repressed my feelings during this time so much that I had in a sense
lost my ability to feel, I started taking more and more dangerous risks
because I didn’t see the point in anything.
But some part of me was aware of the self-destructive path I was on and
I discussed it with my comrades. We made the decision that the cost of
staying underground was no longer viable.
None of this is to say that it was all bad. It’s easy to emphasize the
negative, but there were so many incredible high points I may not have
experienced otherwise. Like when I drove for hours in a car full of
friends and swam with dolphins in the ocean I remember thinking, “I’m
supposed to be in jail right now!” It made the joy feel that much more
intense.
Returning to my life felt like exiting one dream world for another. My
first run-in with the police felt like the real test of whether or not
things could settle down for me for awhile. I had no idea if I would be
in jail just for a few hours or if I would be in there for way longer. I
wondered to myself, “What do the cops know? How much info did they share
between agencies?” But in the end I was released.
Coming back to my life and seeing people was hard, seeing how their
lives had moved on. Distance had grown between us. I had to immediately
find a job and a place to live. I got a bizarrely normal job in an
office and just went through the motions of a functioning person. Over
time, it’s grown to feel more and more like my life again.
I still feel rootless and disconnected in big ways at times, but I’m
starting to feel comfortable with that. I have been able to make deep
friendships with people all over, engaged in disparate but consistently
inspiring work. I feel appreciative of the people and struggle around me
even if I don’t entirely know where I belong. I embrace emotionality and
a more communicative process of dealing with the difficulties of
lifelong anarchist struggle. I expect to face harder things in the
future than my experience on the run and I think now I’m more prepared
to deal with what may come. I feel really strong now and as committed to
my politics as I ever was. In some ways I feel less isolated that I did
before I went on the run.
Being on the run brought contradictions between many of us, between who
we wanted to be and who we are on the surface. So many people set aside
their own needs and did support to make resistance to repression
possible. At the same time, there were people who I feel let us down and
that added to the pain of the whole experience.
If I had to offer anything resembling advice to someone who was thinking
about grand juries or repression more generally, from the comfort of a
home or stable life, it would be to decide right now who you are going
to be. Know what your struggle looks like and spend every fucking day
building that context in one way or another. If you are serious, you
will be tested. In those moments, you can lean on the continuity of your
resistance, and on the rest of us and our experiences. You, too, will be
fanning the flames of someone else’s defiance.
Our thanks to all of these comrades for sharing their stories with us.
State repression affects everyone, even those who aren’t directly in the
line of fire, but there are ways to survive. Years after the ordeal,
Devlin has reassumed every aspect of their old identity, as far as the
state is concerned, and has a decent paying tech career, despite their
stint on the run. Esme is directing amateur theater companies, and Cora
is tending to animals on a farm while studying to be a nurse
practitioner. Esme and Cora’s relationship with each other and with most
of the friends who supported them through this time is still incredibly
strong.
As Devlin said, if you’re serious, you will be tested. We may not all
face the same kinds of repression, but it’s easy to live in fear when we
see what happens to our comrades. We hope these stories have given you
some tools and perspectives to use if you or your friends are ever in
this situation. As a side note, Dr. Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was such an
inspiration to Devlin, was released this June!
Part of how the grand jury holds its power is through secrecy. The
people in charge of these proceedings want us to be mystified and
terrified. They want us to live in fear, knowing that fear can keep us
docile and contained. The more we learn about how grand juries work and
how we can keep ourselves whole and sane as we navigate them, the less
power they can hold over us.
“The state demeans everything that we hold dear when they threaten us in
this way. The most free and wild thing we have in this world is our love
for each other, and we know that our health, our safety, and our
liberation can only exist in a world without their cops, their courts,
and their cages. Our strength lies in knowing that we can provide that
for each other, and that nothing they offer or threaten is worth
betraying our commitment to our communities.
“As state repression escalates, I know that all of us are struggling
with the trauma and the grief that comes from the forces we fight
against, and the vulnerability that we feel to the state in its
despicable efforts to attack us. What I also know, what I believe with
all my heart and everything I have, is that we have the strength we need
to take care of each other and to fight back until we win.”
-Katie Yow, grand jury resister