King was released from federal custody on December 12, 2023. He had served the better part of a decade for an attempted Molotov cocktail throw at a U.S. congressman\'s Kansas City office in 2014, an act of protest against the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson the same year. He had been moved through eight federal prisons. He had spent years in solitary confinement at ADX Florence — the federal supermax — for organizing prison-condition complaints, refusing to be silenced about staff violence against him, and supporting other prisoners. He was 38 when he came home.
What the case actually was
King\'s underlying federal offense was a single attempted incendiary throw at the Kansas City office of Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II in 2014. No one was injured. No property was substantially damaged. He pleaded guilty in 2016 to one count of attempted arson and was sentenced to 10 years. He was not a national-security defendant. He was not a serial offender. He was, in the U.S. federal-prison apparatus\'s own internal classification, a low-to-medium-security custody level.
His time inside was a steady escalation. He was moved more often than almost any prisoner of his security classification in the same period — through Leavenworth, Englewood, Florence, McCreary, ADX, and others. He was repeatedly placed in solitary, in many cases following his filing of grievances about staff misconduct, his correspondence with movement-press and prisoner-support networks, and his refusal to be silenced about the white-supremacist violence he documented from other prisoners and from staff. He survived an assault at FCI Florence in 2018 that the U.S. government later prosecuted him for as a fight he had instigated; he was acquitted at trial in 2022.
Post-release 2024
King\'s first year out was structured around several public projects. He took on paralegal work with the Bread and Roses Legal Center. He continued to write — zines, essays, prison-letter republications, and a series of short pieces on what ADX does to a person\'s ability to be in a room with other people. He participated in the June 2024 Firestorm Books panel "Continuing the Struggle Inside & Out" with Ray Luc Levasseur and Ashanti Alston, the recording of which is now mirrored on Internet Archive and in the NPPC archive. He spoke at multiple movement events and conferences. He continued to do mail and support work with currently-incarcerated antifascist and anarchist prisoners.
His writing in 2024 was — by his own framing — about the slow process of remembering how to be unconfined. The cumulative physiological and psychiatric record of long-term solitary confinement is well-established in the medical literature (the Eighth Amendment litigation on ADX over the past two decades has produced thousands of pages of expert testimony on it), and King\'s public writing has been one of the few first-person accounts published in 2024 by a former ADX prisoner describing what the immediate post-release year is actually like.
The cohort
King\'s release brought him into a small contemporary U.S. cohort of recently-freed antifascist and anarchist political prisoners — including the surviving Green Scare defendants, several U.S. participants in the 2008–2017 anti-fascist defense matters, and the post-Standing Rock pipeline-defense cohort. He has been one of the most visible of that cohort in movement-public-facing work, which has produced both ongoing organizing capacity and ongoing surveillance and harassment from federal agencies still treating him as a person of interest.
NPPC tracks former political prisoners as actively as currently-incarcerated ones. The 2024 King record is part of the U.S. political-prisoner story of the year — and a reminder that for the people who survive, freedom is the next chapter, not the final one.
