Biography
Silvia Baraldini is an Italian-born political activist whose organizing in the United States aligned with Black liberation and Puerto Rican independence movements. She was involved with the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the May 19th Communist Organization and became publicly visible through movement-support work, including organizing around major political trials and solidarity campaigns.
In 1982 she was arrested and later convicted under racketeering and conspiracy theories tied to a network of armed underground actions, receiving a 43-year federal sentence. After years of imprisonment, she was transferred to Italy in 1999, moved to house arrest in 2001, and later received a pardon.
The Summer 1988 Insurgent reports Judge Barrington Parker’s July 15 ruling prohibiting assignment to the Lexington High Security Unit based on political beliefs or associations. It says he ordered Baraldini and Susan Rosenberg transferred into general-population prisons; this is the reported order, not an independently documented physical transfer day or final appellate disposition. The report also states that Baraldini had actually been transferred to the federal medical center in Rochester for a hysterectomy. Its later MCC designation is a designation, not verified arrival.
Libertad’s Winter 1983 news report states that Silvia Baraldini was physically released on $300,000 bail on December 23, 1982 in the federal RICO conspiracy prosecution. It describes a threatened return to custody for refusing hair and handwriting exemplars as a later event, not imprisonment already under way. The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee’s November 1984 directory later places her in Pleasanton, confirming that the initial bail release did not end all subsequent imprisonment. This initial pretrial bail release is recorded as a separate custody phase. The older aggregate prosecution row retains its existing first admission and final 2006 release, but its continuous 8,712-day calculation is withdrawn because it included time outside prison. Later custody admission dates remain unknown; no continuous replacement interval or completed total is invented.
Libertad, volume IV no.V, Winter 1983, English and Spanish edition, PDF page 13; Libertad, volume IV no.V, Winter 1983, English and Spanish edition, PDF page 28; Stop the Grand Jury!, John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, November 1984, PDF page 15; Stop the Grand Jury!, John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, November 1984, PDF page 16.
The translated Italian recognition judgment records Silvia Baraldini’s forty-year racketeering sentence on February15,1984. Its initially printed Eastern District jurisdiction is expressly corrected on physical518 to the Southern District of New York. The separate April19,1984 Eastern District contempt sentence is a distinct prosecution within overlapping imprisonment, not another consecutive custody interval. Her August1999 transfer to Italy continued imprisonment and is not physical freedom; existing actual2006 release remains unchanged.
Breakthrough’s Winter/Spring 1987 report dates Baraldini’s transfer to Lexington to January 1987 and says she received no administrative hearing or prior notice. Those procedural claims remain attributed to the report.
The Summer 1989 account places Baraldini at MCC New York following the Lexington litigation and describes the campaign to obtain transfer to a general-population prison.
The chronology explicitly records November 10, 1982 arrest and a September 3, 1983 federal verdict. It gives a forty-year racketeering/conspiracy sentence, which is a nominal penalty rather than actual time served and does not erase the separate contempt sentence or documented bail interval. Its February 16, 1984 sentence date conflicts with the independently documented February 15; the conflict is retained.
Report of the New York State Policy Study Group on Terrorism, November 1985, PDF page 65.
