Two Young Lawyers Are Accused of Damaging A Police Car. Each Face a Minimum 45 Years In Prison 

It's quite a long read so I'll summarise the main points:

Ms. Urooj Rahman is a 31-year old lawyer working in legal aid, representing people who need to fight eviction proceedings but can't afford an attorney. She has also helped in the Palestinian Territories. Her family immigrated from Pakistan when she was 4. Mr Matis is a 32-year-old corporate lawyer, and the son of immigrants from the Caribbean.

It is alleged that after a Black Lives Matter protest, the two were in a car together, and Ms Rahman threw a beer bottle filled with gasoline though the broken window of an abandoned, already-vandalised cop car. The government say that a photographer caught her holding the bottle before the incident. Mattis is alleged to have been driving.

Ms Rahman had been previously interviewed at the protest. When the journalist asked what she thought of the objects being thrown and the fireworks, she replied "This is the way that people show their anger and frustration.... Because nothing else works. Nothing else."

The two were arrested, interrogated and taken into federal custody. They were charged with seven crimes, and if found guilty, face a minimum sentence of 45 years (to life) each. Because prosecutors have categorised the molotov cocktail as an "incendiary device" (a categeory that icnludes grenades and missiles), their alleged crime carries a minimum sentence three times what it would have been if they had instead used a gun. This, in combination with the classification of a police car as "government property" (despite it already having been heavily vandalised), is what has given prosecutors the ability to press charges for a minimum sentence of 45 years imprisonment (my own note: It pains me to say that the only way they're escaping that sentence is if there is insufficient evidence that she threw the molly)

The prosecutors must have celebrated when they saw the NYPD record of the arrest. “This case was so juicy for them,” says a public defender who is familiar with it. “It’s a perfect storm of ‘Antifa is a terrorist organization, and here are two lawyers of color we can hang out to dry.’ ”

"Today, some of Mattis and Rahman’s friends may concede in private that throwing a Molotov cocktail represents a lapse in judgment, but none are willing to discuss the degree to which their friends may have been ethically, professionally, morally, or legally out of bounds. Instead, they emphasize that violence against government property, especially in the midst of political upheaval, is not the same as violence against a person; that the prosecution of their friends for an act of what amounted to political vandalism is far more extreme than the crime itself; that it amounts to a criminalization of dissent and reflects a broader right-wing crusade against people of color and the progressive left — and, as such, demonstrates precisely the horror of the system they were out in the streets that night to protest."

"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."

So apparently damaging "government property" as an expression of political dissent is worse than literally shooting someone dead. If found guilty, these 30-year olds will spend almost their entire life in prison. With the minimum sentence, Ms Rahman will be 76 and Mr Mattis will be 77 when released.

Bit of an authoritarian hellscape you've got going on there guys.