Clemency in the Mortify
recently released prisoners wrongly convicted
Leonard Peltier – original sentence: until death; time served: 46 years
Throughout the sentence, several prominent religious leaders and legal scholars called for Peltier’s release. After nearly half a century of time in a claustrophobic space where the perception of time takes forever, this innocent man was freed.
Julian Assange – original sentence: indefinite detention; time served: 14 years
Julian Assange is a principled information security expert. No doubt, if his enemies had their way, he would never have been set free. He had a wife and children and would never have been able to grow old with his family in freedom.
Assange once penned, “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.” I would say that, today, every citizen is “weak” in comparison to predatory national and international spooks like the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence community.
Ross Ulbricht – original sentence: two and a half lifetimes; time served: 12 years
Ross was supported by many people including libertarians and technologists. He kept busy while imprisoned, making art and penned several technical and creative writings.
His essay about meditation and cosmology is definitely worth thinking about—and trying to put into practice—whether you find yourself in a (at times violent) trappist cell or outside in a distractable freedom.
Two concepts in his cosmology essay can be juxtaposed to form a plentiful source for further elucidation. One is the idea of discrete “observer moments” (reminiscent of Zeno’s Paradox and Parmenidies pointillism) being universal like an interchangeable digitization of sensory qualia. The other is the idea of the universality of mind freed from the sensory digit (samatha or “witnessing”). Is this shared universality between the discrete eternal moments of an personal ego across many observers resolved with the universality of the extensible spacetime multiverse like quanta and gravity? Is sunyata or the immanent-transcendental “emptiness” of mind devoid of first-person quality? There is some “one” there there in nothingness and nowhere, isn’t there? And, finally—this is my addition—what about maya or lila and the continuity of experience, as Heraclitus emphasized, as opposed to the discrete, interoperable conscious digit? What is the play of illusion doing here anyway? Some of us would do well without the torment and misery.
Hopefully, like Assange, there will be more writing and work to be shared with an eager public. Returning to Ulbricht, I feel like there is something more to draw about the concept of an eternal moment (isn’t it right to be reminded of discrete digits and Turning’s universal machine?) considered alongside the meditative disassociation (disillusionment) from a particular ego found in meditation.
Perhaps it is this: If the probability of of a unitary physics means that the morality of any event is described as the probabilistic distribution of that event in the inevitable multiverse, who are they to judge with such severity?
The FOP and the Feds didn’t much approve of the return to freedom of these men, their liberation from a cruel and unusual fate, but then again, perhaps this is only more evidence that we should rectify justice and
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