This title by Reason seems unreasonable. The man was convicted of "tampering with evidence". In other circumstances, it would have been perfectly legal for him to transport these pamphlets.
As it turns out, when someone (your wife) gets arrested and tells you to do "whatever you need to do" and "move whatever you need to move at the house", it is highly illegal to then proceed to do so.
The judge in these cases, Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas has a history of hard right decisions that are overturned on appeal. I don’t know what the options are for these protesters; but I imagine they stand a reasonable chance on appeal.
And if the allegations about this being pre-planned (e.g., paragraphs 20 and 21 of the indictment) were supported by enough evidence to persuade the jury (and the jury was persuaded), then it's hard to see how they have a good chance of getting this overturned on appeal. Because unless I greatly misunderstand the law, in jury trials, as opposed to ones where the judge is the one making a ruling, appeal courts don't go over the evidence anew unless actually new evidence has turned up in the meantime (they don't "relitigate the facts", as I've seen it put in civil cases); instead, appeal courts assume that the evidence presented was factual, and what they do is look at the points of law that were used. Was the law properly applied? Were there mitigating circumstances that the judge didn't allow to be presented even though he should have?
And the law on things like attempted murder, or knowingly trying to conceal evidence when you know it's going to be used in a criminal case, is pretty clear-cut; there's not much room I can see for expecting the convictions to be overturned on a point of law. Not unless new evidence turns up that wasn't presented at the trial.
(EDIT to add: Actually, I believe that even in civil cases where a judge has made the ruling rather than the jury, appeal courts don't re-litigate the facts. Just as with criminal cases, in civil cases the judge will say "Hey, if you had evidence to present against that allegation, you had your chance to present it at the first trial." Only if the evidence is truly new, or the guy trying to present it truly didn't know it at the time of the first trial (and had no reasonable way of knowing it), does the appeal court say "Okay, we'll re-examine the facts in light of this new evidence." Otherwise they say "Re-litigating the facts is not our job," and unless the guy can show that the judge did something wrong (such as throwing out evidence that by law he should not have thrown out), then the appeal court won't look at new evidence. They only look at whether the law was actually followed correctly in the courtroom.)
My source for that knowledge, BTW, is a blogger (now deceased) whom I used to read regularly; I'll call him Mr. Smith. He wrote some unflattering things about someone else whom I'll call Mr. Jones, saying things like "Mr. Jones was once convicted of perjury, so you can't trust anything he says." Mr. Jones sued Mr. Smith for defamation. Mr. Smith put every legal filing, both Mr. Jones's complaint and his own defense, on his blog (legal filings, unless sealed by the court, are public domain under U.S. law as I understand it). By reading those filings, as well as the judge's decisions (also public domain under U.S. law), I actually learned quite a bit about how the U.S. legal system works. Including how appeal courts work, because when Mr. Jones appealed his lost lawsuit (Mr. Smith won his case, because Mr. Jones really had been convicted of perjury some thirty years back, sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, and under US law truth is an absolute defense against defamation — which is not the case in all countries, but is the case in the US), Mr. Jones tried to introduce evidence in the appeal and the court said "Nope, you knew about that at the time of the first trial, so you should have presented it then" and refused to consider the new allegations that Jones was presenting.
I'm disappointed in Reason magazine. They're usually better than this, but they flubbed the facts on this one. The guy wasn't convicted for "transporting anti-government pamphlets", he was convicted for concealing evidence. His wife called him from the county jail and asked him to hide the documents, and he did it. And that's what he was charged with: not possession of anti-government pamphlets, but trying to hide documents that he knew were going to be used as evidence against someone (his wife) who had been arrested. If you try to hide evidence, you become an accessory after the fact. Reason's article finishes with "possessing "anti-government" documents or ideology is not illegal." Which is totally true, but also irrelevant to this case. That's not what he was charged with, he was charged with trying to hide evidence that he knew the court was going to want. I'm disappointed in Reason for completely failing to report accurately on this one.
As an aside, this was a federal conviction so Texas law doesn't apply to this case. And the defendants are lucky Texas law didn't apply to this case, because in Texas, if you're (for example) the getaway driver for a robbery, but someone is shot and killed during the robbery, then you can be held guilty of murder even though you didn't pull the trigger, if you knew ahead of time that your co-conspirators were likely to end up killing someone. https://www.ericbenavides.com/what-is-the-law-of-parties-in-... has a short discussion of that aspect of Texas law. If the defendants had been charged under Texas law, everyone, including the guy who tried to conceal evidence after the fact (thereby becoming part of the conspiracy in the eyes of state law), could have been convicted of attempted murder: the shooter shot at an ICE officer (and several other people) and hit him in the neck, but the officer survived. But because federal law applied rather than Texas law, only the guy who actually fired the shots was convicted of attempted murder; the jury found the other four, who had been part of the planning but hadn't fired their own guns, not guilty of attempted murder. (But guilty of the other charges, like conspiracy).
Very reasonable. I'm looking forward to the time when such reasonable laws are applied to execs of companies ordering destruction of evidence. 30 years behind bars
EDIT: or elected officials. Imagine Nixon getting 30 years for tampering with evidence
When you get older you sadly find out more and more than all news sources have an ideological bent and a political side they're supporting. I mean if you didn't wake up when Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post, then what does it take?
Which sadly changes the whole situation around, say, the bias of Facebook or Twitter. It's not that these new social media are biased vs. the unbiased traditional media. It's that these are more successful and have a different bias, which currently established parties see as a threat to their power.
Now you may still agree with the parties behind, say, a traditional newspaper and be opposed to, say, Twitter because of that. But you can at least be honest about this being the case.
As it turns out, when someone (your wife) gets arrested and tells you to do "whatever you need to do" and "move whatever you need to move at the house", it is highly illegal to then proceed to do so.