Happy Birthday, Jennifer Kerkhoff: The Pettiness of Justice vs the Justice of Pettiness

The following photo and communique marking the 41st birthday of Jennifer Kerkoff was anonymous sent to It’s Going Down, which we reprint here. Despite her total failure on the J20 case, Kerkoff has recently been promoted.

The message reads:

Dear Jennifer,

Today, September 2nd, is your 41st birthday. And what a year it has been. You ushered in your midlife crisis more than 18 months ago, when your office indicted 217 people with felony rioting charges for resisting the Inauguration of Donald Trump. Never one to do things halfway, you doubled down the following April, charging everyone with 8 felonies, and having the MPD raid the houses of organizers who were not even present at the protest. You pursued these charges ruthlessly and obsessively for well over a year, despite never convicting a single person at trial. This was an unprecedented display of state repression on a scale that the anarchist movement in the US had not experienced in most of our memories. You threatened hundreds of people with more than 70 years in prison over a handful of broken windows. You pressed forward through two botched trials, a storm of bad press coverage, and countless setbacks, and finally dismissed the charges only after you were caught illegally withholding evidence from the defense. Any way you slice it, yours was a staggeringly petty pursuit.

Earlier today, a few of our comrades paid a visit to your idyllic suburban home on W Braddock Rd in Alexandria, VA. They tied a banner reading “YOU LOST JERKHOFF HBD!❤️” across the street from your house. We hope our act of modest pettiness, while it might pale in comparison to yours, can bring some small measure of joy to our freed comrades.

As we write this, prisoners across the US and Canada are rising up. The mass incarceration machine is gripped by the largest prisoner strike this country has ever seen, which started on August 21st and will go through September 9th. We know that while you put some of us through a traumatic year with your overreach, what happened to our friends is nothing compared to the collective trauma the criminal justice system inflicts on whole communities every day. People like you ruin lives and tear apart families for a living.

Regarding the J20 case, you may have succeeded in fucking up our lives for over a year, but in your larger aim of stifling resistance, you failed. Our movement is growing, and, sooner than you know, we will be unstoppable.

Happy birthday,
some anarchists