Sarah Stillman
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sarah Stillman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So the judge in the sentencing stage said, really, I don't think there's anything I can do. You just are going to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Yeah, but actually one of the main things that drew me to Sadiq's story was really actually the children of one of the victims, Dina Malkin, who sounds like he was just a truly remarkable person. And he had these three kids who had a really wonderful relationship with him who were obviously incredibly devastated when their dad died.
But then what they told me was that they were even further devastated when Sadiq They found out that two other people were also going to be losing their children in another way, which is going to prison for life for the death.
So Ian Amalkin, the son of Dean Amalkin, actually spoke with me in depth, as did his two sisters, really describing how they felt the sentence for Sadiq and O'Brien, the other person who was sent to prison for life for this, was just terrible. not only unjust, but also just another source of pain for them. It wasn't what they wanted to see in coping with the grief of losing their father.
Yeah, that's right. They're a very unusual, very smart and compassionate family. So I think they really stand out to me having, you know, written a letter to the judge on Sadiq's behalf and really clearly articulating their stance as people who know the legal system and saying, like, we really think this is an overextension of what is appropriate.
I've been amazed that all around the country there are movements. And again, sometimes those movements among the voices within them are actually the families of the victims who've been speaking up, saying like this, we don't believe this serves us. This is not our sense of justice.
Minnesota, I met some really incredible mothers whose daughters have been incarcerated on these charges for something, a murder that they themselves did not commit, that they had no idea was going to take place. These two moms, Linda and Tony, they knew nothing about the criminal justice system. One of them was working as a real estate agent. They were just living their lives.
Their daughters were quite young and had gone along on a situation where they had suffered a lot of trauma in high school. They had wound up using drugs. Someone had, I believe, like taken some drugs from them and they went with some guys to try to get it.
back or something along those lines and then when they arrived at the house one of the guys they'd gone with wound up suddenly becoming violent and they themselves were terrified and this man ended up killing one of the guys there and the girls who had had no idea that was going to happen and who were actually being threatened in the process and who were scared for their own lives they wound up being due to the felony murder doctrine prosecuted for and found guilty of murder tell us about minnesota because they've they've made made some changes right
Yeah. So those the two moms I just mentioned, they did a lot of work. And then I think last year they brought about a significant legislative change that actually got their own daughters out of prison and also many other people who are in the process of appealing their convictions based on that change.
And they got bipartisan support for that bill because it is an issue that I found there is a lot of room across political divides to make changes around.
Yeah, I think it does make a lot of intuitive sense that people need to be held accountable for the things they do and the cascade of events that can unfold when you choose to engage in something dangerous. I think the question is, is our current system as it's set up,
pushing, due to these hyper-punitive sentences that really kind of came out of the war on drugs era, these crackdowns of such extreme sentences, even just the construct of mandatory life in prison without parole, without any capacity to have discretion about what really took place, what really was the fact pattern at play here.
I think most people who look at a case like Sadiq's think that it is not serving us as a society, even just the costs alone to incarcerate a man for the his family for something that he was not even present for. It just doesn't really ring as justice to most people that I've spoken with across the aisle, really.
Yeah, he learned at the very beginning of the process, right? When he got locked up pre-trial, there was a man, Eric Redeemer, who was there in another jail cell who decided to basically offer almost like a law class inside the jail where he was showing, here's how I fought my case. Here's how you can fight your case.
And so Sadiq became very disciplined about studying the law, studying his rights and bringing these legal filings. So when I first found him, I mean, I found a lot of handwritten legal filings because he doesn't have access to all the different legal resources that you or I might have as a free person.
But he would systematically each day go to the law library and download what he could get and come up with legal theories. And he's still pushing and he has been for years. And now he finally does have a shot.
Another wild thing about our system is that we really do not, as a public, have a transparent window into who is locked up for what and why. I would have thought that's one of the more basic pieces of information in the criminal justice system. But what I found in looking at felony murder, I thought, I very naively thought at the beginning, oh, I'll just file some FOIA requests.
I'll get these public records. I'll find out how many people are locked up across America on a felony murder conviction. Instead, what I found is many states said they kept no records on this. Many states like Florida, they would actually change the charge on the books. So if you look at what Sadiq was originally charged with, it says, you know, first degree felony murder.
But then when you are convicted, it just becomes first degree murder. So a lot of the people I spoke to who were incarcerated on this charge also felt just like the pain of knowing that when someone looks at their case, it looks like they made an intentional decision to murder, which is, I think, what most of us think the word murder means. But in the records... That's simply not how it's kept.
Showing 81–100 of 106 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →