Dear Friends,
We have several updates this month.
COURT DENIES PETITION
On September 26,2022, US District Court Judge Mitchell Goldberg denied Mark’s motion to vacate his 1994 firearm convictions. See ORDER. In 1994, Mark was convicted as a first-time offender of several bank crimes and two counts of use and possession of a firearm in relation to a crime of violence. He was given a six-and-a-half-year sentence on the bank crimes and a 20-year sentence on the firearm counts. Since 2015, the Supreme Court has issued a string of decisions that significantly limited the legal definition of “crime of violence.” If the bank crime statute for which Mark stands convicted no longer meets the legal definition for “crime of violence,” then the court would be obligated to vacate Mark’s firearm convictions and sentence. Judge Goldberg recognized the apparent validity of Mark’s arguments going to the illegality of his firearm convictions and 20-year sentence, but ultimately concluded that the Third Circuit US Court of Appeals would have to decide whether to overturn its prior decisions based on the more recent rulings of the Supreme Court. We are currently seeking appellate counsel. The best way to support this particular effort is to make a donation via out secure DONATE page.
PETITION DRIVE CONTINUES
Our drive to expand Mark’s support base and gather additional signatures to the petition calling on President Biden to commute Mark’s sentence continues. Since our last newsletter, we have posted a petition letter on Change.org asking the President to do just that.
Last month, Biden did grant 75 sentence commutations, but these were largely nominal as most of the offenders who had their sentences commuted had already been released from prison or had very little time remaining to their sentences. And most were very low-level drug offenders. As a practical matter, and though it seems a hollow excuse to ignore doing justice, it is uncertain we could expect much more during an election year.
If you haven’t already done so, please sign the petition letter calling on President Joe Biden to commute Mark’s prison term at https://www.change.org/p/free-mark-jordan. Be sure to share that petition letter on all your social media presences and apps.
TRANSFER REQUESTS
The BOP has not imprisoned Mark in a general population within 500 miles of his hometown (Philadelphia) since 1996. He remains imprisoned thousands of miles away at the US Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona despite a provision in the First Step Act of 2018 that requires the BOP to incarcerate prisoners within 500 miles of their residences.
The problem is that Mark has a medium security level assignment but remains in a high security penitentiary, and since 2020 the BOP has placed a moratorium on transfers to recently include all transfer requests from high to medium security prisons. The actual reason for the moratorium remains unclear, though a BOP memorandum to prison case managers indicates its purpose involves the Biden administration’s directive that the DOJ not enter into any new contracts or renew existing contracts to warehouse federal prisoners in private prisons. But when we examine the numbers against existing BOP capacity and bed space, that rationale doesn’t hold much water. We suspect the actual motivations are cost and covid related. The impact on Mark and his family (and thousands of other prisoners and their families) is the same; he is too far from home, making visitation impractical.
PODCAST
The promised podcast is coming soon. We plan to do one half-hour recording each week involving a relevant criminal justice theme. Mark will be paired up with someone from the community for each recording, and Q+A’s will follow on the blog. We are really excited about this project and hope it will help to bring more attention to our campaign and demonstrate why prisoner voices must be considered when tackling social issues, particularly those with a substantial impact on enslaved populations in the United States.
GOOD LILLY LLC
Mark has partnered up with a longtime supporter to form Good Lilly LLC, which is intended to provide a vehicle through which to further our criminal and social justice ideals in a fiscally self-sustaining manner. More on this in the next update as we transfer some existing organizational work and operations. But Good Lilly products will be coming soon on all platforms Mark is officially involved with and please, when they show up on your Google searches, buy Good Lilly products. In capitalist societies such as ours, purchasing power is political power.
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