No early release for Shabazz in guns case
The Kingston activist lost his accrued ‘good time’ because of an unspecified incident behind bars.
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> Ismail Shabazz will again spend the holidays behind bars.
The community activist who was sentenced to two years in state prison for selling weapons to undercover federal agents had been scheduled for early release on Oct. 24, but according to the Department of Criminal Justices Services, he was involved in an incident in September that resulted in him losing all of his accrued “good time.” Officials did not provide information about the nature of the incident.
The loss of that good time means Shabazz, 64, won’t be released from the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Greene County until Jan. 4, the expiration date of his sentence. In addition to the prison time, Shabazz was sentenced to three years of post-release supervision.
Shabazz was arrested in June 2015 and charged with six counts of selling weapons to an FBI informant, nine counts of criminal possession of a weapon and one count of endangering the welfare of a child during the alleged sale of one illegal weapon. He could have faced up to 35 years in state prison if convicted of all 16 counts he faced.
Shabazz pleaded guilty on Oct. 28, 2016, to one count of attempted criminal sale of a weapon, admitting he sold six illegal weapons to undercover federal agents. In pleading guilty, Shabazz told state Supreme Court Justice Richard McNally Jr. that he sold federal agents handguns, an assault rifle and a sawedoff shotgun, all in working condition, from his home at 80 Prospect St. in Midtown Kingston.
According to authorities, Shabazz became a person of interest in the federal investigation in 2013, when information was developed that he had recruited members of the Bloods street gang into the New Black Panthers Party in Kingston and was advocating violence against police officers.
Shabazz has maintained his arrest was a set-up by police in retaliation for his community activism, some of which opposed police actions. He also has said the undercover agents told him the guns were going to Africa “to aid in a liberation struggle there.”
Authorities said Shabazz sold weapons to agents of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on four occasions between May 2014 and May 2015.
In January 2017, as he was to be sentenced, Shabazz announced he wanted to withdraw his plea, saying he accidentally took cough medicine containing alcohol on the day he entered the plea and was unaware of what he was doing. The following month, however, he dropped that request and McNally sentenced him to two years in state prison.
Prior to his arrest, Shabazz served as chairman of the Kingston chapter of Black Panthers for Justice and president and vice president of the Ulster County Chapter of the NAACP. He has been a frequent critic of police and has participated in local demonstrations regarding attacks on black suspects by white officers in other cities.