First, heartfelt thank you goes out to Mercer County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Ingraham for answering prayers for leniency. Wisdom, kindness, compassion. Justice as it should be.

There’s a story here, one that winds through small town America, Halloween, a drug bust, qualifying medical conditions, hostile prosecution, an arduous three years, a half million dollars and justice for patients in the end.

It all began in Rockford, a village of 1,120 people in Mercer County on the far west side of Ohio.  White rural Republican red state, it’s a place where miles of soybeans, wheat and corn align razor straight roads. A “Mayberry” of the Midwest.

Ghosts and goblins have been known to haunt Halloween, usually as costumed kids ringing nearby doorbells in pursuit of candy and cookies. A knock on the door of the Keeling family on October 31, 2017, however, took on more ghoulish proportions. 

Recently I've become aware that OSU wants to build a new power plant that runs on fracked gas, and it's got me pretty angry both as a student and as a taxpayer. I’m a third-year undergraduate student at OSU's School of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. The global climate crisis is no new topic to me. I've been hearing about it, its causes (chiefly fossil fuel usage) and its solutions (replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources), since the 1st grade. It's always been a looming problem in my mind but I always assumed that our society would adjust and solve the problem. Evidently, the steering wheel is still in the hands of people who don't feel the same urgency that my generation feels. I enrolled at OSU because I thought of it as a cutting edge research school. I thought it'd be part of the solution to the biggest problems of this era. This proposal has shown me that the reality is much less promising.

In 1795, indigenous nations ceded much of the Ohio Country to the U.S. government as part of the Treaty of Greenville. The territory ceded as part of this treaty includes the land Ohio State University (OSU) resides on. The cession, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz wrote, was “a victory based on vicious irregular warfare.” She recounts U.S. forces “destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men.” The decisive defeat for the indigenous nations that spurred their acceptance of the treaty was the Battle at Fallen Timbers, yet even after their victory, U.S. forces “continued for three days laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields.”

Activists have been under heavy surveillance through body cams, street cameras and their social media, and many were explicitly targeted for arrest while on downtown streets over the previous several weeks, but Columbus police have entered a new strategic phase to end the protests and kill the movement.

The Free Press has confirmed the Columbus police began issuing warrants about a week ago against activists without the individual knowing, which is common practice for some serious crimes, but not for peacefully protesting.

After one warrant was secretly issued, the activist was then arrested several days later while protesting.

Several more activists, after discovering a warrant had been issued for their arrest, decided to turn themselves in, said a defense attorney who is representing these activists.

But instead of turning themselves into police, says the defense attorney, they decided on seeing the duty judge. The judge then set the warrant aside, or they plead not guilty and a recognizance bond was set.