Join us on Thursday, August 28th from 7-9 pm at the Coffee Garden(2904 Franklin Blvd, Sacto). We’ll be sending birthday cards to 2 political prisoners, and a ‘We Support You’ card to 6 others to remind them that we are out here thinking of them. We’ll have plenty of cards that we can fill with individual notes from everyone. If there are other prisoners you’d like to write, we’ll have envelopes and paper for that, too. Hope to see you there! -Sacramento Prisoner Support ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Happy Birthday! Ronald Reed (August 31st) – Ronald is a former member of the Black United Front and was convicted of the 1970 shooting of a St. Paul police officer. Twenty-five years after the killing, Reed was arrested and convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first degree-murder. He is serving Life in prison. Joel Bitar (September 4th) – Joel is one of 5 U.S citizens who were arrested and later extradited to Toronto over a year ago to face charges stemming from the protests that took place there against the G20 meeting in 2010. He was sentenced to 2 years in prison earlier this year. supportjoel.com We support you! Brent Betterly- Brent has been in jail since May of 2012. In Aprilthis year he was sentenced to 6 years in an Illinois State prison. He is one of the NATO 3 – three anarchists that traveled to Chicago to join the protests against NATO only to be entrapped by an informant. The three were acquitted of all terrorism charges but were convicted of possession of incendiary devices. freethenato3.wordpress.com Alvaro Luna Hernandez – Alvaro is a Chicano political prisoner. He was sentenced in Odessa, Texas on June 2-9, 1997 to 50 years in prison for defending himself by disarming a police officer drawing a weapon on him. The trial evidence clearly showed Alvaro was the victim of “witchhunts” and a police-orchestrated conspiracy to frame or eliminate him. freealvaro.net Larry Hoover – Larry Hoover is a former gang member and street level Black liberation organizer currently serving concurrent sentences resulting from a prison uprising in 1978. Sister Megan Rice – Sister Megan Rice, Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael R. Walli succeeded in a disarmament action at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Nuclear facility before dawn on July 28, 2012. Calling themselves Transform Now Plowshares, they hammered on the cornerstone of the newly built Highly-Enriched Uranium Manufacturing Facility (HEUMF), splashed human blood and left four spray painted tags on the recent construction which read: Woe to the empire of blood; The fruit of justice is peace; Work for peace not for war; and Plowshares please Isaiah. In February 2014, Boertje-Obed and Walli were sentenced to just over 5 years each in federal prison; Rice was sentenced to about 3 years. transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com Dr Abdelhaleem Hasan Ashqar – A Palestinian nationalist who has fought for liberation both in Palestine and here in the US. Jurors acquitted Ashqar of racketeering and conspiracy, but he was still sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison for refusing to testify before a grand jury that was investigating money-laundering and non-profits funding “terrorist” organizations. Chelsea Manning – On April 4, 2010, whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks published a classified video of a United States Apache helicopter firing on civilians in New Baghdad in 2007. In late July 2010, the U.S. Military alleged that Manning was the chief suspect in the “Afghan Diaries” leak of U.S. Military combat and incident reports from the occupation of Afghanistan. The Afghan Diaries is the largest collection of leaked intelligence records in U.S. history, and details what Wikileaks and others have described as “countless war crimes” by U.S. and NATO forces. On August 21, 2013, Pvt. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison. chelseamanning.org