By: Benyamin Davidsons
Urooj Rahman, who had pleaded guilty last year to tossing a Molotov cocktail at an empty police van in Brooklyn, is begging to have her sentence commuted to time served.
As reported by the NY Post, the 33-year-old lawyer who had been sentenced to 18 months to two years behind bars for torching an unmanned NYPD vehicle during the George Floyd riots, is asking to have the sentence reduced. Court documents show that Rahman gripes that she was just drunk at the time and dealing with “unprocessed trauma”. She spent 28 days in a Brooklyn federal jail and then posted $250,000 in bail to be released. Rahman is due to be sentenced in November.
“Tossing the Molotov cocktail was a way of expressing anger at those police officers around the country for whom black lives did not matter,” her lawyers wrote to Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Brian M. Cogan. “It was an act of protest intended to avoid exposing others to harm.” In a Sept. 9 court filing, Rahman’s lawyers wrote that the human rights lawyer had been drinking vodka “on an empty stomach” and “became quite drunk” before she and her accomplice set the NYPD vehicle on fire near the 88th Precinct stationhouse in Fort Greene.
On May 30, 2020, Rahman and fellow lawyer Colinford Mattis, 34, were arrested in Brooklyn and charged with damaging the New York City Police Department vehicles. Rahman’s lawyer’s letter requesting the commuted sentence lists a whole bunch of excuses for the incident, including “early trauma” from being a Muslim in post-9/11 America; “abusive partnership relationships”; and “the injustices that she has witnessed here and abroad,” including her experience helping refugees in Istanbul and Athens and aiding low-income tenants in NY to avoid eviction.
As per the Post, Rahman spoke articulately and without slurring during a video interview with Loudlabs News NYC, just 45 minutes before committing the crime. She defended the protesters, saying “people are angry because the police are never held accountable”. “This has got to stop. And the only way they hear, the only way they hear us is through violence, through the means that they use,” she had said.
Rahman and Mattis had both pleaded guilty in October 2021 and initially faced up to 10 years in jail. A revised agreement was then reached in June with prosecutors, in which they pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit arson and to making and possessing an unregistered destructive device. This brought their sentence down to 18 months to 2 years in prison. The incident was “a marked deviation from her otherwise exemplary life,” said Rahman’s attorneys, who added that she has been attending therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings since the firebombing. The lawyers also pointed to a different pair of arsonists who had set an empty NYPD homeless outreach van on fire in July 2020 and had received a more lenient ruling.
Prosecutors were quick to reject the latest set of excuses, telling the judge that Rahman should get a stricter sentence because the homemade weapons were also offered to passersby to throw. Mercy is not what Rahman deserves, said Patrick Lynch, head of the Police Benevolent Association. “She remains committed to a violent anti-police ideology and continues to baselessly smear police officers in her bid for a lighter sentence,” Lynch said. “She must receive the heaviest sentence the law allows.”
