#the marshall project

[joe-england]

Dungeons and Dragons is a lifeline for some Texas prisoners on death row

Wow.

[xipiti]

The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. Strangers talked funny, and El Paso was half desert. But he could skateboard in all that open space, and he eventually befriended a nerdy White kid with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Ford fell in love with the role-playing game right away; it was complex and cerebral, a saga you could lose yourself in. And in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be playing it.

D&D had come out a decade earlier with little fanfare. It was a tabletop role-playing game known for its miniature figurines and 20-sided dice. Players were entranced by the way it combined a choose-your-own-adventure structure with group performance. In D&D, participants create their own characters — often magical creatures like elves and wizards — to go on quests in fantasy worlds. A narrator and referee, known as the Dungeon Master, guides players through each twist and turn of the plot. There’s an element of chance: The roll of the die can determine if a blow is strong enough to take down a monster or whether a stranger will help you. The game has since become one of the most popular in the world, celebrated in nostalgic television shows and dramatized in movies. It is played in homes, at large conventions and even in prisons.

By the time Ford got to high school, he had drifted toward other interests — girls, cars and friends who sold drugs and ran with gangs. Ford started doing those things, too. He didn’t get into serious trouble until Dec. 18, 1991. Sometime before 9 p.m., two Black men knocked on the door of a small home on Dale Douglas Drive in southeast El Paso, asking for “the man of the house.” The woman who answered, Myra Murillo, refused to let them in. A few minutes later, they returned, breaking down the door and demanding money and jewelry. One opened fire, killing Murillo’s 18-year-old son, Armando.

Within hours, police picked up a suspect, who said Ford was his partner. They arrested Ford, who was 18 at the time, the following day. He has maintained that the two men who entered the house were brothers, and that he was outside in the car the whole time. There was no physical evidence clearly connecting him to the crime. He was so confident that a jury would believe him that he rejected a plea deal and took his case to trial in July 1993. He lost. By October, at age 20, he was on death row.

Back then, death row for men was located in a prison near Huntsville, Texas, where hundreds lived in tiny cells. The men were allowed to hang out together, watch television, play basketball and go to work at prison jobs. And because they were locked behind bars rather than solid doors, they could call out to one another and talk. That was how, one day, Ford caught familiar words drifting down from the cells above him, phrases like, “I’ll cast a spell!” “Aren’t there too many of them?” and “I think you have to roll.”

It was the sound of Dungeons & Dragons.

[wausaupilot]

A Wisconsin board says the real victim of police misconduct is … the government

Michael Bell Sr. has believed for years that Kenosha police officers victimized his family — first by killing his son in 2004 and then, he alleges, by covering up what really happened.

By Joseph Neff This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook. Michael Bell Sr. has believed for years that Kenosha police officers victimized his family — first by killing his son in 2004 and then, he alleges, by covering…

[free-eddie]

The Notre Dame Exoneration Justice Clinic has assigned Eddies’s case to a team of student lawyers!

[delta7of96]

"The Prison Soul Band That Opened for Stevie Wonder"

:https://l.smartnews.com/p-4KyVS/h4uxte

[biglisbonnews]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week Our Top 5 stories of the week from Maurice Chammah, Benoît Morenne, Amanda Gefter, Jane Miller, and Cheryl Katz and our first-ever audience award. https://longreads.com/2023/03/10/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-456-2/

[mearchy]

Fox's reports are the most sardonic, passive aggressive reports anyone in the Senate Security Office has ever read. But they have to accept them because they are all technically by-the-book correct and unnervingly thorough, and nobody can find fault with them as hard as they try. The less caf he has had, the worse it is. He goes from "As per Coruscant Guard records..." and "As all Senate employees are aware..."

to "As one might be able to assume by means of basic observation and an approximately swamp-rat level of intelligence-" and "To elaborate on that, as one is required by Report Administration Regulation Clause 365:1a to do, despite a statistically proven decline in reading comprehension among government employees-*"

My man is hitting the keys one by one so hard his keypad breaks. He's got reflexive tears of manic rage in his eyes. He's imbuing his incident reports with so much hysteria the next Jedi who comes into contact with them gets a headache. Free him

*he has a source for this, by the way. Fox includes citations in his reports like a maniac. Like Cody. This is because if he has to countenance one more follow-up email than is necessary he will brain himself against the desk. He will commit lobotomy by pencil. Just you try and fucking stop him, Thorn.

[oyiiixenia]

i think i played the wrong Timekilling Time event

You Don't Stand A Chance, Pal.

[neylo]

Done with this crap!

My very own marshal uniform for the Larp is ready (my character is based off Michel Ney). Enjoy the details:

The whole ordeal took two months. Would take more if I decided to go for historical accuracy (but I know how to do it now!)

It was a fun ride.

[elmushterri]

Like I said in the video, Idk if I want the Project PAW dogs to have their powers. Though, I did change Skye’s from flight to wind/electricity control entirely because dogs being able to fly has a look that I feel is genuinely too goofy 😭 (like, they’re just in the standard ‘dog standing up’ pose but in the air 😭). Here are their powers anyways. I think I’m keeping them as the canon cause it’s more interesting for the dawgs to have them!

[dwcmarshalarts]

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown

Per Aspera timeline and fanart by DWC Marshal Arts

Adastra and Cassius by Echo Project

[temeyes]

What's the TF 141 Halloween costumes?

omg this was kinda late but here's what they wore!!

hc'ed that Soap is like, a closet cosplayer, Gaz wouldn't go all out, Price would go for beard representation, and obv Ghost is the mf that puts all his salary to his halloween costumes LMAO

[delatoid]

Villager practice

[unsafescapewolf]

Summer Kofi doodles part 11!