[bawolff]

> Let's say someone is driving 35MPH. They think "oh snap, I think the speed limit is 30MPH here!". The posted speed limit is actually 40MPH.

There is a difference between incorrect belief in what the law is vs incorrect belief in what actions you are taking. Although maybe that is not the most compelling. If you see the speed limit is 40, but you want to go faster so you hit the gas until you are going 60 and then brag with photo evidence about how you don't believe in speed limits on on facebook. Unbeknownst to you your spedometer was broken and you only hit 40. Should you get a ticket?

That seems like a tougher call, but still a bit silly to give a ticket.

a different example.

You intend to murder someone. The intended victim puts their clothes on a manequin in hopes of distracting you while they make their escape. You shoot the manequin. Did you commit a crime?

[vel0city]

Intending to murder someone is often directly a crime though, so yes. And murdering people is illegal. Moving some magazines isn't normally illegal. I wouldn't normally assume having some magazines is evidence of a crime.

And if they are, what crime was owning the magazines involved in? That you happen to read some of the same articles as someone else who committed a crime? Is sharing the same books as others now implicating you as a terrorist?

[bawolff]

> Moving some magazines isn't normally illegal.

Neither is shooting a gun (at e.g. a gun range). This case has about as much to do with moving magazines as a murder charge has with discharging a firearm. Its intrinsic to the crime, but not what the actual crime is.

> I wouldn't normally assume having some magazines is evidence of a crime.

If someone called you up and told you that the magazine contained evidence of a crime, the police ard looking for them, and asked you to hide the magazines, would your assumptions change? Because that seems to be what happened here.

> And if they are, what crime was owning the magazines involved in? That you happen to read some of the same articles as someone else who committed a crime? Is sharing the same books as others now implicating you as a terrorist?

That is not even remotely what happened here. Nobody got in trouble for owning or reading the magazines in question.

[flossposse]

> If someone called you up and told you that the magazine contained evidence of a crime, the police ard looking for them, and asked you to hide the magazines, would your assumptions change? Because that seems to be what happened here.

Is it? I've read the testimony provided by the FBI agent who was surveilling Rueda and Sanchez, and the quote he provided from her phone call (presumably he would have selected the most incriminating one) was, "whatever you need to do. Move whatever you need to move from the house."

There are many other reasonable interpretations of that sentence other than "please remove incriminating evidence from the house". Like, that could just mean, "If YOU need anything from the house, go ahead and get it."

As far as I've been able to tell from the publicly available documents I've seen, the materials he moved from the house didn't contain any evidence of any crime. I haven't seen any indications as to whether they belonged to Rueda or Sanchez. It seems plausible that he moved the zines from the city of Garland to the city of Denton because Denton is a college town where political demonstrations and the distribution of pamphlets and whatnot is extremely common, and he was intending to distribute the zines there in the coming days.

It seems to me like law enforcement had justifiable cause to be suspicious and to seize the materials, but I haven't yet seen compelling evidence that the investigation was actually hindered by Sanchez or that he had intent to hinder it. I'm open to revising that conclusion if other evidence is provided.

[BeetleB]

> Intending to murder someone is often directly a crime though

Not at all.

Committing an act with the intent to murder is a crime. Actual intent alone isn't.