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As Tom Brzozowski, former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice, told KERA News—North Texas’s public radio affiliate—the broad definition of “antifa” employed by prosecutors “introduces a degree of ambiguity that is going to result in Americans choosing to not exercise their constitutional rights for fear of being swept up in some kind of dragnet.” The “Death-Cult” article was found in the home of Daniel Sanchez Estrada, the only defendant on the federal case who wasn’t even at the protest, but who was convicted of corruptly concealing documents and faces up to 40 years in prison for transporting a box of zines from one suburb of Dallas to another. Sanchez and his co-defendants at the federal level are—along with a handful of others who, like Sanchez, weren’t at the protest—on the hook for a state-level case yet to be announced. 

“There will be an appeal,” Patrick McLain, defense attorney for defendant Zachary Evetts, wrote in a statement. He alluded to irregularities during the trial that had “raised many reasons” for doing so: the first and most obvious, that Judge Pittman declared a mistrial hours into the first day of jury selection, expanded the juror pool from around 75 to 130, and singlehandedly selected the jurors on the second go-around, using questions defense attorneys submitted to the court under seal. These moves were all legal, of course. Yet, multiple studies have shown jurors act differently when questioned by a judge versus by an attorney. An attorney close to the case, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, described a “chilling effect” enacted through repeated orders against how the defense can argue their case. Amber Lowrey, older sister to Prairieland defendant Savannah Batten, noted that the first jury pool was more critical of ICE and the Trump administration. (The official reason for Pittman’s decision was a “politically charged” T-shirt featuring Civil Rights icons, underneath a defense attorney’s blazer, which he deemed prejudicial.) “He knew that the first jury was not going to convict these people,” she told me the night after the verdict. 

The odds of a federal judge in Fort Worth, of all places, being some kind of peacenik were always slim, but the fact that the case is being overseen by Pittman, a founder of the Fort Worth-area Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, had already caused dissension. In 2023, Pittman was slammed—by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, no less—for “abuse of discretion” in his courtroom, ruling for at least the third time that he was too quick to sanction litigants, a pattern that has continued in the Prairieland case. And in the middle of the Prairieland trial, Pittman held a private meeting with former Attorney General William Barr, who in 2020 threatened to take “all action necessary” against “far left extremist groups and anarchic groups using Antifa-like tactics.”