Every December, NPPC closes the books on the year: who came home, who didn't, who was added to the roster, and who died inside. This is the 2024 accounting.
Came home in 2024
- Julian Assange — June 25, 2024, Saipan. A time-served plea to a single Espionage Act count ended fourteen years of U.S.-driven confinement: two years of pre-embassy detention, seven inside the Ecuadorian embassy, five in Belmarsh. He flew home to Australia the same day.
- The MOVE 9 release cohort — all six surviving members freed between 2018 and 2020 (Debbie, Mike, Janine, Janet, Eddie, and Chuck) remained out and alive at year's end, nearly forty-six years after the Powelton Village siege.
- Stop Cop City forest defenders — a steady, unglamorous stream of dismissals and non-incarceratory dispositions moved through the Georgia dockets all year.
- Spring encampment defendants — most of the misdemeanor cases from the campus arrests resolved through ACDs, community service, or outright dismissal, sharply narrowing the cohort still facing charges by fall.
Did not come home in 2024
- Leonard Peltier — parole denied July 2, 2024, in his 49th year inside. (The commutation to home confinement came on January 20, 2025, in Biden's final hours.)
- Daniel Hale — Biden left office without acting on the drone whistleblower's clemency petition.
- Reality Winner — home, but under supervised-release conditions that continued to police her speech, travel, and work.
- Mumia Abu-Jamal — his 43rd year; PCRA litigation continued without an evidentiary hearing.
- Marius Mason — year sixteen, with release finally visible on the horizon but not arrived.
- Jessica Reznicek — deep in a terrorism-enhanced eight-year sentence for pipeline sabotage that injured no one.
- Aafia Siddiqui — year fourteen of eighty-six.
- Joshua Schulte — sentenced in February to 40 years for the Vault 7 disclosures.
- Steven Donziger — still disbarred; the Supreme Court denied his cert petition on April 22 without comment.
Added in 2024
- Casey Goonan — federally indicted in July over a UC Berkeley police-vehicle arson.
- The Merrimack 4 — felony state charges pending for the Elbit Systems blockade in New Hampshire.
- The spring encampment arrestees — more than 3,100 in aggregate; the still-pending subset is the year's largest single cohort.
- Weapons-plant blockaders — felony charging in Pittsburgh, Camden, Bethesda, Tucson, and elsewhere.
- Palestine solidarity organizers — swept by the year's federal grand-jury wave: testimony refusals, contempt referrals, and the first outlines of the immigration-detention campaign that 2025 would bring.
Died in 2024
No one. For the first time in roughly five years, the in-custody death line of this accounting is empty. The year's nearest loss was an anniversary: one year since Ruchell Magee — the longest-held political prisoner in American history, free for just three months after sixty-seven years — died on October 17, 2023. This was the first full year the support tradition did not have his name on its inside list.
The balance
The year gave two large victories, Assange's freedom and the slow structural collapse of the Cop City RICO theory, and took more than it gave. New cohorts arrived from the Palestine solidarity prosecutions, the weapons-plant blockades, the antifascist federal cases, and the encampment dockets, and the roster ended the year longer than it began. The machinery grew more refined too: terrorism enhancements, coalition-as-conspiracy theories, material-support designations, grand-jury sweeps. All of it, the cases and the machinery alike, passed intact to 2025.
