https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/lawyers-arrested-molotov-cocktail-nyc-protest.html
Colin [Mattis]-
“My heart — and I speak for many of our friends — my heart has been breaking,” says Tabatha Robinson, who met Mattis through Prep for Prep and has just graduated from Harvard Law. When Robinson was a teenager, Mattis would travel from Princeton to her New Jersey high school to watch her ballet recitals because she’d confessed to him her dream of becoming a ballerina.
“What college boy shows up at their friend’s high-school ballet recitals?” She starts to cry. “Forty-five years to life? Are you kidding me? I want a world in which our sentencing doesn’t look like this.”
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So do I.
***
Colin is like a cute, lovable baby.”
What Mattis and Rahman do share are life circumstances that set them apart from their friends, most of whom were raised with more privilege.
Each of them lost parents comparatively young. Rahman’s father died suddenly when she was 23; Mattis’s died in a stabbing on St. Vincent when he was in law school, and his mother, a powerful presence in his life — and a fervent Christian — died last summer.
So they both know early grief and loss, and as the responsible, high-achieving adult children of immigrant parents, they stepped in to shoulder more than their share of the family obligations, while their peers were far more carefree.
Rahman looked after her mother, doing the shopping and ferrying her to doctor’s appointments.
Mattis took over the raising of his mother’s three foster children after her death. Their relationship is more “like brother and sister,” says Salmah Rizvi, who co-hosted the birthday party where they met. “Like, they take care of each other.”
Rahman with her parents at her Fordham University graduation ceremony in 2011. Mattis holding an award he received from Her Justice while working with Holland & Knight in 2019right: Photo courtesy of Her Justice.
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Good people, bad outcome.
The scales of justice are often far from balanced.
You seem to feel bad for Ms Rahman.
FUCK YOU!
Surely, surely, you don't think 45 years to life is a fair sentence for what they actually did, Ms Rahman included.
She tried to help the poor and downtrodden;
Since last summer, Rahman had been working at Bronx Legal Services, where she belonged to a team of roughly 60 lawyers representing people who want to fight eviction proceedings but can’t afford an attorney. On the Friday night before her arrest, Rahman was on a Zoom call until about 6 p.m.
It was a union meeting. After a months-long hiatus, the courts had begun to schedule hearings so pending eviction cases might resume, and the defender-advocates at Bronx Legal Services objected strenuously. “Everything was happening with George Floyd,” says someone who was on the call. “And I don’t know about you, but I was still hearing sirens. And the courts are like, ‘Get those evictions done.’ ”
About 20 people attended the meeting, the purpose of which was to share information. Rahman didn’t say much, which was typical for her at work. The job at Bronx Legal Services is grinding — many of the clients live in extreme poverty and chaos, processes are sticky, and judges and plaintiffs’ attorneys can be petty, racist, sexist, and mean — but Rahman was always “very chill, very easygoing,” says the same co-worker, a collaborative colleague, compassionate and diligent with her clients and level headed in court, willing to engage with the small-bore, unglamorous work of advocating for the vulnerable within the frustrating constraints of the law.
She's a Pakistani anarchist - and will be made example of for the greater good.
Migrated to America when she was 4.
Became a lawyer.
So you think she's being 'shafted' because she's "Pakistani", and "cute baby Colin" is expendable in the rush to make an example of/get her?
These are people the least deserving of this kind of treatment, their friends say, people who are unfailingly kind, gentle, and decent. Rahman gave a piece of her apartment floor in Athens, Greece, where she was working during the migrant crisis, to a queer Syrian refugee in an abusive relationship;
Mattis turned around on his way to vacation to sit by a friend’s hospital bed after she’d suffered a stillbirth. After college, Mattis worked for Teach for America in New Orleans and later won a prize for his pro bono work helping a single mother get child support.
Rahman worked in Northern Ireland and on behalf of hill-tribe people in Thailand and was a student of South African apartheid. Over the past year, she started attending Friday-night meetings of an informal Sufi spiritual group and had recently given a short talk to a Muslim women’s group about the sacredness of every single life, including those of animals — which is why she tried to be a vegetarian although sometimes fell short. She joked that she was a “slackaterian” or “vegetrying.”#####
Domestic terrorists?
Nah...I'm not buying that one.
Yes, she threw a Molotov cocktail, small glass bottle with some gasoline in it and toilet paper as a wick, into an empty and vandalised cop car.
Bomb? that's a stretch.
He was there, allegedly assisted.
The charges are a crock.
Two young, idealistic lawyers, set fire to an abandoned cop car at a BLM protest, got swept up in the moment. That's all this is.
I ran this by mrs bambu…she of ultimate wisdom:
I told her the story...she went on about "there might've been homeless people living in the car ", it could've been murder".
I said, "but there weren't homeless people in the car".
She; "there could've been moms and kids passing by"
I said " but there weren't, people convicted of just DUI might've killed people too, but didn't.'
I told her about all the two lawyers good deeds, she wasn't very sympathetic.
I said, "what is your judgement"?
Her judgement...
"5 years in prison, can't be lawyers anymore."I said; "what about 45 years to life"?
She thought that was basically very wrong.
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