I’m just gonna ignore the rambling and talk about the photo, because it’s legendary.

This is Young Thug with his Attorney Brian Steele.

Young Thug was prosecuted for RICO charges. Basically they said he was the boss of a criminal gang who did all sorts of things.

Well it looked like this prosecution merely existed because the state’s attorney got elected for being hard on crime, and wanted to get someone famous in jail to make headlines.

Criminal defenses are hard, because it is well known that the judge is always more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to the prosecution, less so to the defense. However the judge in this case did some genuinely illegal things. He first made the decision that the key witness was credible. A man, who admitted himself to lying to the police just because he was scared of them, and then made fundamentally conflicting statements in court. The judge also gave the production carte blanche multiple times in order to tack on new charges in the middle of proceedings which rarely ever happens in other courts and especially not multiple times. And then finally, he held a meeting with the key witness ex-parte, meaning he, the witness and the prosecution were there, but not Brian Steel, and not Young Thug, and therefore his side was not heard. Ex-parte is rare and it basically only happens at temporary restraining orders or other things that need to be dealt with fast. But this wasn’t that.

Anyway, Brian Steel became aware of this illegal meeting and he talked about it in court. However, he was cut off by the judge repeatedly, then only asked how he learned about this meeting and never heard regarding this procedural and constitutional violation.

Ultimately the judge threw Brian Steel in jail for this. And then said one of the most badass things, to the effect of “Can I be jailed together with my Client, so we can prepare his defense?”.

However this didn’t last long. The legal community was outraged that a lawyer was jailed again (last time this happened was 10-20y ago, it’s frowned upon), and about 10 lawyers showed up representing Brian Steel on a motion to disqualify the judge and ultimately got rid of him when he was forcefully removed by another local court judge.

A new judge was assigned, Brian Steel was released in exchange for community service instead and eventually Young Thug would plea no-contest open to the court, meaning he told the new judge he doesn’t wanna fight the charges anymore and is ready for the judge to make a verdict on the spot. This netted him a fairly mild verdict, perfectly in line with the evidence, and he was only to sit 5-10 more years in prison and a bunch of charges were thrown out.

To me, that first judge and prosecution are representing the incredible injustice happening regularly in some jurisdictions, the new judge represents the slow but creeping change for a more fair world, Young Thug was wrongly prosecuted (if you look at the evidence you will understand how weak this case was from the beginning), Brian Steel is an absolute hero who is ready to sacrifice his freedom for his beliefs.

You can find videos online of this case if you’re interested, just search for “Young Thug trial”. I find these cases extremely interesting for highlighting the amount of prosecutorial overreach, corruption, etc. inherent in the judicial branch, and it helps understand what this actually looks like on a practical level.