On February 10, the influential Chicago Tribune published a lengthy and extraordinary editorial demanding that the judge in the NATO 3 case impose harsh sentences on defendants Brian Church, Jared Chase and Brent Betterly, who’d been found innocent days earlier of state terrorism charges. The judge successfully encouraged the jury to convict the three of lesser mob action and arson charges. The NATO 3’s ‘crime’ — assembling four primitive Molotov cocktails on the eve of protests to oppose the May 2012 gathering of NATO officials in Chicago — was wholly initiated, incited and put into motion by two undercover cops.
The Tribune op ed could have been scripted by States’ Attorney Anita Alvarez, who vehemently defended her political prosecution of the NATO 3. Dozens of respected activists and groups came together to rebut the Tribune’s endorsement of state-sponsored spying, entrapment and the use of undercover police agent provocateurs to wage war on dissent — a response that the Tribune has refused to publish. Instead, that full response is published below.
At least 36 states that have passed state terrorism statutes — essentially mini-PATRIOT Acts — in the wake of 9-11. Illinois’ law has been applied only once before, to convict a man for ‘inflammatory’ rap lyrics he’d written. That conviction was thrown out on appeal. In 2010, a New York appeals court also threw out a state terrorism conviction in a gang crimes case. Civil libertarians of all political stripes had opposed the law’s use in the case as an undue expansion of prosecutorial power.