Biography
David Campbell is being unjustly imprisoned for events that unfolded at the protest of a New York City alt-right event on January 20, 2018.
A lover of language and the arts, David was two weeks away from moving to Paris to study French translation. It was his commitment to antifascism and his community that brought him out to the protest that night.
At the protest a brawl broke out in which a 56-year-old intoxicated alt-right man was knocked unconscious. During the brawl a police officer, unannounced, threw David to the ground breaking his leg in two places. With no other arrests made on either side, the officer alleged that David had stalked, punched, and strangled the alt-right party attendee, and then tried to strangle the officer himself. These fabrications went on to be circulated by right-wing media.
The initial charges were dropped after surveillance footage failed to back up any of the above allegations. However they were replaced with a more vague and heavy-handed charge of Gang Assault. Gang Assault makes any group of three or more people involved in a fight legally responsible for each other’s actions, and carries a steep mandatory minimum of 3.5 years.
After almost two years of legal maneuvering, David took a non-cooperating plea for a sentence of 18 months in a local facility, to avoid a trial and a much longer sentence in a facility far away from his friends and family. During this period the Manhattan DA inexplicably offered much more lenient plea deals involving only community service to a number of alt-right gang members arrested and charged in a separate but very similar case about ten months after David. No justification for these disparate outcomes has been given by the Manhattan DA. The arresting officer in David’s case has not been held responsible for breaking David’s leg and lying about David’s actions.
David was released from prison on October 16, 2020.
In an October 27, 2019 first-person account reproduced by NYC ABC, Campbell dates his arrest and leg injury to January 20, 2018. He says initial strangulation and obstruction-of-oxygen charges were dropped after surveillance footage became available and were replaced with gang-assault and assault charges; he describes accepting a felony-assault plea carrying an eighteen-month sentence. His account of police misconduct is his allegation. The eighteen months is an ordered term, rather than an independently measured custody total. Source: https://nycabc.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/updates-12-nov-2019-1.pdf#page=4
Custody record reviewed October 12, 2026: Campbell's first-person Fifth Estate interview identifies the plea counts and Rikers confinement, not robbery or San Quentin. The unsupported 381-day calculation derived from an October 1 month placeholder was removed. Exact initial arrest remains unresolved because the interview introduction dates the incident January 19 while contemporary support reporting says January 20; October 23 planned surrender is not by itself proof of actual admission.
