Biography
Susan Rosenberg was a New York-born radical who joined the May 19th Communist Organization in the late 1970s and went underground after being implicated as an accessory in the 1979 prison escape of Assata Shakur and the 1981 Brink's robbery. On November 29, 1984 she and Tim Blunk were arrested in Cherry Hill, New Jersey while unloading 740 pounds of dynamite, weapons, and false-identity documents at a storage locker. Sentenced to 58 years for weapons and explosives possession — an unprecedented sentence widely condemned by legal observers — she pled guilty in 1990 to conspiracy in the Resistance Conspiracy Case with no additional time. President Clinton commuted her sentence on January 20, 2001 and she was released after 16 years; she has since worked in HIV/AIDS advocacy and prisoner rights. Rosenberg became involved in radical left politics in the late 1970s and 1980s, aligning herself with anti-imperialist causes and prisoner advocacy. She was associated with networks connected to the May 19 Communist Organization and was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during a period when underground groups carried out bombings and robberies framed as political action. She also had associations with the Weather Underground milieu.
In 1984 she was arrested in New Jersey after authorities discovered a large cache of weapons, explosives, and false identification. She was convicted on weapons/explosives-related charges and sentenced to 58 years in federal prison; in 2001, Bill Clinton commuted her sentence to time served. After release, she remained active in social-justice work and continued advocacy related to incarceration and political repression.
The April 1986 report reproduces coverage identifying Rosenberg as one of the women whom demonstrators sought to prevent being placed in the planned Lexington control unit. It reports her nominal fifty-eight-year sentence. A planned placement is not an executed transfer date, and that nominal term is not time already served. Source: Report on the Marion/Lexington demonstration, April 19, 1986, PDF page 13. https://freedomarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/3.report.demo_.4.19.1986.pdf#page=13
The Summer 1988 Insurgent reports that Susan Rosenberg was then actually held at the Washington, D.C. Detention Facility in the Resistance Conspiracy prosecution. It describes Judge Barrington Parker’s July 15 ruling against political-belief-based Lexington High Security Unit assignment and his transfer order. The order is not a physical discharge or proof that the ruling survived appeal; no additional release or admission date is inferred.
The Spring/Summer 1986 report places Susan Rosenberg with Alejandrina Torres in the restrictive women’s section at MCC Tucson, Arizona. It describes limitations on movement and allegations of surveillance and degrading treatment. This supplies a contemporary custody-location observation before the separately documented Lexington and Washington proceedings. It does not date the Tucson arrival or departure, establish a new prison admission, or add an overlapping served-time total.
The distinct Cherry Hill weapons and explosives prosecution began with Susan Rosenberg’s November 29, 1984 arrest. Rosenberg v. Meese specifically establishes incarceration at MCC New York since December 1, 1984, a March 17, 1985 jury conviction and May 20, 1985 sentencing by Frederick B. Lacey to fifty-eight years. December 1 is the documented MCC admission, not an assumption that arrest and prison admission coincide. This prosecution overlaps the separately recorded 1990 conspiracy case; no additional continuous duration or release is inferred, and the later Lexington transfer does not begin a new custody term.
Breakthrough’s Winter/Spring 1987 report dates Rosenberg’s actual transfer into Lexington’s women’s control unit to November 1986, with Alejandrina Torres. This did not begin a new prison term.
The report’s chronology explicitly dates FBI arrest November 29, 1984; the narrative describes an explosives seizure. Those are contemporary investigative claims, not proof that she was convicted of every Brink’s allegation. Her individual final discharge and total service are not supplied here.
Report of the New York State Policy Study Group on Terrorism, November 1985, PDF page 66.
