Eight Young Protesters Receive 30-to-100-Year Sentences in Fort Worth Prairieland Case

The Prairieland sentencing handed down in a Fort Worth federal courtroom on Tuesday turned eight young Americans into some of the most heavily punished protesters in recent American memory, with prison terms running from 30 years all the way to a full century.

The people at the center of this case are not abstractions.

They are a former Marine reservist, students, and twenty somethings whose faces are now printed on bright posters that their friends and families held up on the courthouse steps, each one reading FREE above a name.