Trial Lawyers for the Win

Have you heard the one about people who told the truth about bigot Charlie Kirk winning lawsuits against the employers who fired them?

Well, you have now.

Big props to Drew Pittock and BrieAnna J. Frank of USA Today for sussing out something I’d been curious about for months. You may recall that, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, and in the teeth of gale-force wing-nut keening, some people posted some of Kirk’s own words as a kind of corrective. Some other people posted admittedly tasteless reactions as well. Fearing the vengeance of the cult, major institutions, including government agencies and universities, fired these social-media miscreants. Many of those people turned around and sued the institutions in question. And, with discussion of reparation payments all the rage these days, it’s fit that we point out that some of the victims of cowardice and mob rule are cashing out in a big way.

Settlements totaling more than $1.5 million have been reached so far with people who lost their jobs over social media posts that were critical of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination.

The free-speech cases in Florida, Tennessee, and Indiana highlight a growing debate surrounding the First Amendment, political discourse and social media. It’s “not surprising to see this flurry of settlements,” Aaron Terr, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s director of public advocacy, told USA Today. “I think the size and frequency of these settlements shows that violating the First Amendment is expensive.” ... USA Today reported a little more than two weeks after Kirk was killed, at least 50 people had lost their jobs in the education sector alone. A Reuters investigation also found that 600 people were fired across the private sector for posts they shared about Kirk.

Vice President J Divan Vance, who has demonstrated the democratic soul of an ambitious Stasi recruit, led the mob. He told people to inform on their colleagues who did not memorialize the deceased at a proper volume. Now that everything’s calmed down, the bill is coming due for what happened to people like a Tennessee cop named Larry Bushart.

Mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Headline of the Day

Court To DOGE Bros: Asking ChatGPT ‘Yo, Is This DEI?’ Is Not Proper Legal Process & Also A First Amendment Violation

—Techdirt

We really do live in the stupidest timeline. 

This is the lamest case of letting ChatGPT doing your homework ever. 

Clearly, the Problem is Criticism of the Supreme Court

In writing his opinion emasculating the Voting Rights Act, Samuel Alito used fraudulent data. 

I would argue that this should embarrass the Supreme Court Justice, except that:

• Alito has no shame.
• He doesn't care, and likely know that it was bogus.

The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.

In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists.

“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, where many Section 2 suits arise,” Alito wrote in a majority opinion in the case, which concerned Louisiana’s congressional map, joined by the five other conservative justices on the court. “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.

The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

This is not the first time that Alito has cited fraudulent data, and it will not be the last.  He is a corrupt hypocrite.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

Is anyone surprised that police are using automated license plate readers to stalk their former romantic partners?

I'm not.

Police have routinely done this with other data sets going back decades.

In fact, I would argue that giving cops the ability to do this is a large part of why police like Flock cameras and their ilk so much. 

The cops never change. Only the tech toys do.

That’s the upshot of this report from the Institute for Justice, which has been tracking what cops have been tracking now that they have always-on access to massive networks of security cameras, including Flock Safety’s controversial offerings, which also include automatic license plate readers (ALPR).

The proliferation of police surveillance has led to repeated abuse. One shockingly common form: police officers using ALPR camera networks to keep tabs on their romantic interests, including current partners, exes, and even strangers who unwittingly caught their eye in public.

An Institute for Justice review of media reports has identified at least 14 cases nationwide of officers allegedly abusing ALPR data this way, with the bulk of those incidents happening since 2024.

This is the same stuff that cops have been doing for years. Access to criminal databases, drivers license info, and anything else swept up by government entities has resulted in numerous cases of abuse.

Maybe what cops need is not better spying tech, maybe what cops need is better people on the force.

Thank You Letitia James

The New York Attorney General just ordered NYU Langone Health to resume providing transgender treatment to teens.

That's one way to make the cowards and the hypocrites do the right thing.

The New York attorney general’s office has ordered a major Manhattan hospital to resume providing puberty-blocking medication and hormone treatments to transgender adolescents, just two weeks after the hospital had stopped doing so.

The hospital, NYU Langone Health, had closed its Transgender Youth Health Program after the federal government threatened to pull federal funding from hospitals that provided gender-transition treatments for adolescents. For more than a year, the Trump administration has sought to prevent hospitals from helping adolescents transition, asserting that many of the children are impressionable and confused and that the medical treatments maim and sterilize them. In response, many clinics and hospitals in the United States have scaled back or stopped providing gender-related treatments to children.

In a letter to the hospital, a senior official in the attorney general’s office raised the question of whether NYU Langone’s action violated New York’s anti-discrimination laws, by barring a single category of patients from receiving medications that others could access. The official, Darsana Srinivasan, who leads the office’s health care bureau, wrote in the letter that puberty blockers and hormone treatments remained available to pediatric patients who were not transgender.

“New York state laws prohibit discrimination based on a patient’s membership in a protected class,”

Today in Fascism

The police in Lenexa, Kansas used license plate reader technology in an attempt to retaliate against a critic.

The question has never been whether law enforcement will misuse technology to pursue vendettas and the like, it is only how.

Police in Lenexa, Kansas used automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the police department, according to reporting by Kansas public radio station KCUR. This is a rare public example of exactly the kind of abuse that we’ve long warned against when it comes to mass-surveillance systems like license plate readers. It also comes on the heels of reports about apparent misuse of license plate databases by ICE agents in Minnesota not for legitimate law enforcement purposes but to intimidate observers and protesters, and of a woman who was falsely accused of theft based on data from license plate readers.

The op-ed published by the Kansas man, Canyen Ashworth, was critical of local ICE operations and the role of Lenexa police in them. The same day that piece ran, Lenexa police began to investigate Ashworth, according to internal emails obtained by KCUR. They quickly tied him to an unidentified suspect the police were looking for who had several days earlier put four posters up around town showing a picture of an ICE agent and the words “remember when we killed fascists.” The police alleged that the unidentified “Paper Hanger” had violated an unspecified city ordinance, and the posters were removed.

The Paper Hanger’s arguably aggressive message was nonetheless speech protected by the First Amendment. And while government officials may regulate constitutionally protected speech through “time, place, and manner” restrictions, they can't do so selectively based on the content of the messages. KCUR reports that in Lenexa, “Posters about lost pets and community events were generally not removed.”

In fact, the town’s mayor later told KCUR that the town had no formal policy regarding posters on city property.

City and police officials claimed that they were targeting the Paper Hanger because the glue he used had the potential to damage city property. On the basis of this great crime, the police began using license plate readers to track Ashworth’s movements around town, and several weeks after his op-ed, the police chief emailed patrol officers to announce that “A suspect has been developed in the case of the City Center Posters” and announce a “be on the lookout for” (BOLO) alert for Ashworth.

Perhaps most ominously, when issuing the BOLO the chief declared “This is MYOC,” meaning “make your own case” — which in turn meant essentially, “there is no arrest warrant for him so look for any reason to stop him” and, as the deputy police chief at the time put it, “You need to build your own probable cause, your own reasonable suspicion.”

As my ACLU colleague and head of the Kansas ACLU Micah Kubic put it, issuing a BOLO on someone for putting up posters is “both a rejection of the First Amendment, and a really ridiculous misuse of resources.”

Compared to the blatant targeting of people for their speech and/or political opposition that we’ve been seeing lately from the Trump Administration, this case may look small. But it was scary enough for Ashworth. And it's a particularly clear example of the abusive dynamic that mass-surveillance systems always end up falling into:

1. Target someone who the authorities dislike but have no evidence has done anything wrong.
2. Fire up powerful surveillance technologies that have been sold to the public as a way to stop serious, dramatic crimes and keep the public safe.
3. Use those technologies to watch the disfavored person in the hopes of drumming up something that they can be charged with, even to the point of scraping the bottom of the barrel and going after something like “damaging glue use.”

We’ve seen plenty of this “show me the man, I’ll find you the crime” kind of abuse at the hands of the Trump Administration. But this story is a reminder that such abuse can rear its head in towns across the nation — small, medium, or large. And when it does, license plate reading programs are a natural tool for the authorities to turn to.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  Unless and until politicians are willing to fire police officers and try them criminally for this bullsh%$, it will continue. 

Good News Everyone!

I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

It appears that despite their best efforts, the Supreme Court could not find an adequate bit of hypocritical mental/legal gymnastics to shut down California's redistricting while approving the Texas redrawing of Congressional boundaries, so California's redistricting stands.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed for now a new California voting map that could help Democrats gain up to five seats in Congress, the latest twist in a national fight between liberals and conservatives seeking advantage in this year’s midterm elections.

The justices cleared the state to use a map pushed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and approved by voters that was intended to offset a redistricting effort by Republicans in Texas sought by President Donald Trump. The Texas map could net the GOP up to five additional seats.

The high court’s ruling will remain in effect while a lawsuit challenging California’s map works its way through the courts. The Supreme Court ruled in December that the Texas map was constitutional, so many legal experts expected the justices to approve the California map as well.

The justices did not provide a rationale for their decision in the brief order. There were no noted dissents.

The corrupt 6 right wing Justices could not figure out a way to pit a fog leaf on the naked partisanship involved with making different decisions based on party affiliation,

At least they haven't so far. 

Headline of the Day

The Legal Academy’s Leading Originalists Remain Breathtakingly Full of Shit

—Balls and Strikes, commenting on what has been obvious since the Powell Memo, that Origanalism is just an excuse to put a stamp of approval on bigotry and greed.

It should be noted that the above is the title on the web page. The one in the metadata is, "The Originalists Are Getting the Birthright Citizenship Case Spectacularly Wrong."

In this case, we see their venal hypocrisy in the birthright citizenship case, which requires that one ignore the text of the 14th Amendment, as well as every bit of speech and debate in Congress and the various state legislatures in the process of its approval. 

Last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear oral argument in Trump v. Barbara, a case that challenges the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to redefine birthright citizenship. Although the Court has not yet put the case on the calendar, it will likely do so during this term, and issue an opinion before the justices adjourn for the summer.

The Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress adopted in the years following the Civil War, extended citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Yet Trump declared last January that going forward, persons born in the United States would not be citizens unless at least one parent is a citizen or a lawful permanent resident. If the Court allows the executive order to take effect, it would deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of newborn babies every year, and recreate an antebellum caste system in which social disadvantage is passed down by law from parent to child.

So far, every federal court to assess the order’s legality has recognized it as flagrantly unconstitutional. A federal district court in Maryland, for instance, concluded that the order “flouts the plain language” of the Fourteenth Amendment and “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.” A federal district court in New Hampshire found that the order “contradicts the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the century-old untouched precedent that interprets it.” A federal district court in Washington called the Trump administration’s view of the Fourteenth Amendment “untenable,” and criticized the government for rehashing “losing arguments from over a century ago.” 

………

Nevertheless, several Trump allies recently filed amicus briefs in Trump v. Barbara arguing that the order actually restores the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, for example, characterizes over 150 years of settled constitutional understanding as “longstanding and mistaken assumptions.” The conservative law professor Ilan Wurman contends that the historical rule of birthright citizenship “almost certainly excluded the children born to unlawfully present aliens,” and is “at best unsettled” with respect to the children of “temporary visitors.”

The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, submitted an amicus brief that positions its work at “the forefront of the scholarly research” which demonstrates that birthright citizenship was not originally understood to include children whose parents “owed allegiance to a foreign power,” and were in the United States “only temporarily or illegally.” Claremont’s brief is authored by John Eastman, who is most famous for orchestrating Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. The State Bar of California recommended that Eastman be disbarred and banned him from practicing law in the state, but apparently he’s still welcome to file briefs at the Supreme Court.

What these authors have in common is their professed adherence to some form of originalism, the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was set in stone when its provisions were enacted. Meese, for example, made it the policy of President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department to “resurrect the original meaning of constitutional provisions and statutes as the only reliable guide for judgment.” In a speech before the American Bar Association in 1985, Meese gave away the game a little, presenting originalism as a principled way to ensure that the Court did not “drift back toward the radical egalitarianism and expansive civil libertarianism” of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yeah, that's Ed Meese, saying, "We want to keep the n*****s down, and originalism can help with this.

Fuck them all with Cheney's dead dick. 

This Is Unfortunately Not Tinfoil Hat Stuff

Jenn Bud suggests that the purpose is not to engage in immigration theater, nor is its purpose to deport thousands of people, (though that is a perceived benefit of these people), but rather its primary purpose to create an on the ground law enforcement infrastructure on the ground in Democratic voting areas that will be used to suppress voting.

I know that you may be thinking that this is just a conspiracy theory, but Jeb Bush did this in Florida in the 2000 elections, where state and local law enforcement aggressively impeded and harassed voters in minority areas.

Not only could it happen, it already has.

Believe it or not, there is a purpose behind which cities are raided by ICE that few are discussing.

The immigration enforcement agencies are not simply choosing the biggest, most blue cities to raid just because they hate them. Not even because they believe they are sanctuary cities who refuse to cower and bend the knee to their thugs. Not because they believe that these cities are full of criminal migrants, the worst of the worst as they say. Their own statistics prove this point as 97% of Chicago arrests had no criminal record.

Yet, not a single media outlet has bothered to ask why. If ICE and CBP are not meeting their goals of arresting the worst of the worst. What are they doing? What is the real purpose of these raids?

………

The purpose of these raids is to establish and [maintain? strengthen?] a law enforcement infrastructure to target these specific cities during the upcoming elections.

………

Additionally, the DOJ has issued the new domestic terrorist directive redefining the term to mean essentially anyone who obstructs federal agents, is pro-immigrant and anti-fascist. Secretary Noem recently stated, “American citizens are increasingly under threat from assassination attempts, intimidation tactics, and violence perpetrated by our adversaries, radical Islamist extremists, and radical Left-wing terrorists.” And Trump issued an executive order to expand the jurisdiction of the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to his political opponents and those he deems “radical Left-wing terrorists.”

These are the tools they intend to use soon during elections.

I expect this administration, Secretary Noem and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott to order federal immigration agents to accost voters as they stand in line on voting day. Those of color, specifically Latinos, will have their citizenship questioned. And judging by how the agencies are grabbing people without even conducting on-site citizenship interviews, then taking them into ICE custody for a day, or two or three before letting them go, I expect this will be used to prevent citizens from voting. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Border Patrol set up checkpoints in areas of high Latino populations. 

As I noted above, Jeb Cush did the exactly this in 2000.

That Fucking Paper

On a day where the prosecution in the Luigi Mangione case agreed not to present some evidence because of law enforcement misconduct, the New York Times decided that it to talk about Mangione's fashion choices.

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know." 

The pretrial hearings of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, have finally come to an end. The judge will most likely issue his rulings later, possibly even in January, when Mr. Mangione will be back in a different court for the scheduling of his federal trial. But this hearing has been, in some ways, a dress rehearsal.

Literally.

Witness the defendant’s about-face from crew-neck sweaters to suits. Given the way Mr. Mangione’s looks have become a central part of his narrative in the year since his arrest, the significance of such choices is lost on no one — least of all his legal team.

If you still have a subscription to the Times, cancel it.

^*This is not my term, it was coined by Duncan "Atrios" Black.

SCOTUS Gets One Right ……… For Now

They will not hear the case of homophobic bigot Kim Davis, who refused to provide a marriage license to a gay couple, in violation of state law and Supreme Court rulings.

No explanation was given, which is the norm for the Court when it refuses to hear a case. 

There was at least one Justice, and fewer than 4 Justices, who wanted to hear the case, likely in order to relitigate Obergefell v. Hodges.

If I had to guess, there were two, and that their names rhyme with Scalito and Thomas. 

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

After more than a month, a Tennessee man jailed for posting an accurate quote of Donald Trump as a meme has had the charges against him dropped.

He was charged for posting a meme accurately quoting Donald Trump's quote about a school shooting to an online discussion about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

In a series of shifting narratives from the county sheriff regarding this, he has claimed that:

• This was a threat against a school in his county. (It was not)
• That parents called him thinking it was a threat. (they didn't) 
•  That the Lexington PD was coordinating with his office in an attempt to deescalate the situation. (They hadn't)

On a more serious note, I think that it is time for us as a society to review the wisdom of having elected sheriffs.  It seems to me that this does little to safeguard the populace, creates an incentive for demagogues to misuse their authority. (see Joe Arpai0)

The saga of a 61-year-old man jailed for more than a month after reposting a Facebook meme has ended, but free speech advocates are still reeling in the wake.

On Wednesday, Larry Bushart was released from Perry County Jail, where he had spent weeks unable to make bail, which a judge set at $2 million. Prosecutors have not explained why the charges against him were dropped, according to The Intercept, which has been tracking the case closely. However, officials faced mounting pressure following media coverage and a social media campaign called “Free Larry Bushart,” which stoked widespread concern over suspected police censorship of a US citizen over his political views.

Bushart is now planning to sue, his attorney Joshua Phillips told The Washington Post.

I'm hoping that he bankrupts Perry County Tennessee and its sheriff, Nick Weems.

………

[Perry County sheriff, Nick ] Weems justified the arrest by claiming that Bushart’s meme represented a true threat, since “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community,” The Tennessean reported. But “there was no evidence of any hysteria,” The Intercept reported, leading media outlets to pick apart Weems’ story. 

Perhaps most suspicious were Weems’ claims that Bushart had callously refused to take down his post after cops told him that people were scared that he was threatening a school shooting.

The Intercept and Nashville’s CBS affiliate, NewsChannel 5, secured bodycam footage from the Lexington cop that undermined Weems’ narrative. The footage clearly showed the cop did not understand why the Perry County sheriff had taken issue with Bushart’s Facebook post.

If Weems had considered this to be a credible threat, he would not have offered to make it go away if Bushart withdrew the post.

Weems is a lying fascist thug.

We really need to start jailing law enforcement when they do this.  Consent decrees and training don't work. 

Now Ted Cruz?

Ted "Joseph McCarthy Without the Charm" Cruz has said something that I actually agree with.

Yes, I know, if you chain enough monkeys to typewriters, you will get the complete works of Shakespeare, but his calling describing FCC Chair Brendan Carr's and Donald Trump's behavior as something akin to threats from a gangster was not on my bingo card.

Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, compared Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of ABC stations over late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s commentary to “mafioso” tactics similar to those in Goodfellas, the 1990 mobster movie.

“Look, Jimmy Kimmel has been canned. He has been suspended indefinitely. I think that it a fantastic thing,” Cruz said at the start of the latest episode of his podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz. There were, however “first amendment implications” of the FCC’s role, the senator, a Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for US supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist, added.

Cruz, a formerly fierce political rival of Donald Trump turned strong supporter, called Carr’s comments “unbelievably dangerous” and warned that government attempts to police speech could harm conservatives if Democrats return to power.

“He threatens explicitly: ‘We’re going to cancel ABC’s license. We’re going to take him off the air so ABC cannot broadcast any more’ … He says: ‘We can do this the easy way, but we can do this the hard way.’ And I got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” Cruz said.

 I guess that Cancun Ted had to be right about something eventually.

Wolf Calls for Better Shepherds

I came across this headline today:

Tech giant Palantir helps the US government monitor its citizens. Its CEO wants Silicon Valley to find its moral compass

I can't even.

Support Your Local Police

In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) was flagging customers with "suspiciously" high electricity usage and sending names and addresses to the cops so that the latter could harass people. 

Gee, surveillance state much?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advanced a lawsuit in which it alleges the City of Sacramento misused energy records to accuse residents of growing cannabis, often with disastrous results.

According to a statement from the digital rights group, local law enforcement authorities have worked with local power company, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD), to find households using a suspiciously high amount of energy.

The EFF commenced legal action against SMUD two years ago. This week it finished its discovery and filed a petition [PDF] with the judge in the case along with thousands of pages of evidence, allowing it to move forward with an October hearing.

According to the petition, the Sacramento Police Department (SPS) requested SMUD identify customers in specific ZIP codes whose energy consumption exceeded a monthly threshold, on grounds that the lamps used to grow cannabis indoors use a lot of electrical power. 

Specific ZIP codes?  Only specific ZIP codes?  From a police department that has been repeatedly and successfully sued for using ethnic profiling to harass people?

Yeah, this stinks to high heaven, particularly given the fact that LED grow lights sufficient for a basement pot operation would likely be less than 100W incandescent.

Sounds to me like they were looking for an excuse to hassle Asians:

………

The discovery documents also suggest Sacramento authorities had a preoccupation with race. While law enforcement systematically requested details of suspicious customers, SMUD analysts would apparently ask them to request records for specific addresses. One such text message read: “Send me a request for [two particular addresses]. One is 10k plus, and the other is 4k, Asian….”.

Analysts would also look at credit databases and make racially charged judgments, citing an “interesting thing” about one address was “the multiple Asians that have reported there…” according to one communication from an analyst to law enforcement cited in the petition.

The EFF filed the lawsuit with the Asian American Liberation Network, which advocates for Asian American rights.

One other co-claimant is Alfonso Nguyen, who said police officers visited him and behaved abusively after receiving records from SMUD. Nguyen said he used medical equipment at home to regulate his body temperature. Police called him a liar, the petition says.

As an FYI, Mr. Nguyen is in a wheel chair because of a spinal injury, and needs aggressive air conditioning to control his body temperature.

The EFF mentioned another police visit that saw a resident walk out in his underwear to the sight of police carrying guns. He had been mining crypto.

……… 

This isn't the first time that the SPD has been in court for allegedly targeting Asian Americans for cannabis grow-ops, the document adds. It points to another 2019 case, Wang v. City of Sacramento. 

Yep, seems to me that there is a lot of racial profiling going on here. 

Some Good News

Remember how I wrote that the Trump DoJ was requesting that former Memphis police officer get only one day in prison for killing Breonna Taylor and then lying about it?

The judge called bullsh%$ on the Trump Administration's attempt to declare hunting season on Black people and sentenced Brett Hankison to 3 years in prison.

Not long enough, but better than what the corrupt prosecutors were asking for: 

A federal judge in Kentucky on Monday sentenced a former Louisville police officer involved in the fatal raid of Breonna Taylor’s home to nearly three years in prison, in a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration, which had requested he serve only one day behind bars.

In November, a federal jury in Kentucky convicted the former officer, Brett Hankison, of one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force in discharging several shots through her window during a botched drug raid in 2020. Even though none of the 10 shots he fired hit Ms. Taylor, Mr. Hankison, who is white, was the only officer to be charged for his actions during the botched operation.

………

Last week, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked the judge in the case, Rebecca Grady Jennings, to sentence Mr. Hankison to a single day in prison — essentially the brief time he had served when he was charged — and three years of supervised release.

The request was intended to send the message that the department planned to abandon its longstanding efforts to address racial disparities in policing — and to reorient the civil rights division to pursue President Trump’s culture war agenda at the expense of its founding mission of confronting race-based discrimination.

That's an awfully mealy mouthed way of saying, "Show cops that they can kill black people with impunity.

………

The warrant to raid Ms. Taylor’s apartment was based on shoddy surveillance. Three officers were charged by federal prosecutors with knowingly including false information in an affidavit to get a judge to approve the raid. One of them, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty in 2022. The case against the two other officers, Joshua Jaynes and Kyle Meany, is still open.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Hankison did not have legal justification to use deadly force when he fired through a window and sliding glass door covered by blinds during the raid, ultimately hitting a neighboring apartment.

He could not see anything, but because he was a pants-wetting coward, he fired 10 shots blindly through a window. 

The United States police are a disgrace, and this is by design. 

Headline of the Day

I Don't Know How to Explain to You That You Shouldn't Buy Concentration Camp Merch

—Rafi Schwartz on The Discourse Blog

There is, of course, a American Holocaust Museum gift shop, and there is also an book store run by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau Former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp.

They both contain historical books, memoirs, etc.

I understand this.  It's part of their mission. 

That being said, the new US Everglades Concentration Camp T-Shirt being sold by the Florida Republican Party is something else entirely. 

It's a f%$#ing rock band tour t-shirt. 

Credit where credit is due: It turns out the federal government can still accomplish big things when it’s sufficiently motivated. That’s the good news.

Unfortunately, it seems like the only thing motivating the government these days is the overtly racist desire to purge the United States of whichever bloc of marginalized undesirables Stephen Miller is mad about on any given day. That’s the only possible explanation for how Florida was able to construct a massive migrant detention center on an infrequently used airport tarmac deep in the Florida Everglades in a single week.

“Clearly from a security perspective, if someone escapes, there’s a lot of alligators you’re going to have to contend with,” explained Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “No one is going anywhere once you do that. It’s as safe and secure as you can be.”

In spite of being dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, this remote facility has almost nothing in common with the infamous California penitentiary, which, although a notoriously cruel gulag, was nevertheless part of—and subject to—the laws of the federal penal system. This new Florida installation, on the other hand, seems totally detached from any sort of judicial oversight or pipeline, ostensibly serving instead as a semi-permanent receptacle for people kidnapped by (presumably?) ICE agents. So what do you call a massive “camp” of people “concentrated” together by the government outside the normal judicial system?

The t-shirts and other merch being sold by the Florida Republican Party show us who they are.

They are people who should have been drowned at birth.

They are people who will only make the world a better place when they die.

These are not people you can deal with. 

Headline of the Day

This One Weird Trick Could Keep the Feds Out of Your City

 —The American Prospect

This article suggests that municipalities should end all participation in the Joint Terrorism Task Force program.

Given the degree to which federal law enforcement has been corrupted and politicized in just a few months, I am inclined to agree.

I would also suggest that any officers who had been working on these task forces be kept away from hot-button law enforcement issues, because they are more likely to free-lance for the feds anyway.

One day after President Trump’s inauguration, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memorandum to the Department of Justice activating a much-maligned network of spies that civil liberties advocates have pilloried for the grave threat it poses to basic constitutional rights.

Bove directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state and local governments, “to assist in the execution of President Trump’s immigration-related initiatives.” This series of interconnected task forces, expanded in the wake of 9/11, seeds local and state law enforcement with the powers (and paranoia) of federal agencies.

The directive also ordered multiple federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons to “review their files for identifying information and/or biometric data relating to non-citizens located illegally in the United States.”

It remains to be seen how this directive has been applied to assist in the abduction of foreign students, Venezuelan green card holders, and others snatched off the streets by immigration officials. But the intelligence underlying those abductions could only come from a few sources, and one of them is the Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

………

But since their inception, JTTFs have been criticized for overriding the standard operating procedures of local law enforcement, and incentivizing cops on the street to act less like members of the community they are policing, and more like federal agents parachuting in to communities they know nothing about to stop the next attack. 

………

Since the birth of the JTTFs, three local governments have voted to terminate police force agreements with the FBI to participate in information-sharing. The city councils of Portland, San Francisco, and Oakland all took votes to terminate the memoranda of understanding granting the FBI access to local police, and waiving the state laws that would otherwise safeguard residents.

……… 

While the FBI has used JTTFs in the past to investigate citizens whose activities generally do not conform with the status quo—environmentalists upset with the state of climate change, socialists upset with the state of capitalism, or Muslims perfectly content with the state of things who just want to worship in peace—the Trump administration has blown past these so-called “threat groups.”

Now, the Justice Department is issuing guidance left and right that explodes threat categories and makes clear that enforcement priorities include any citizen who steps out of line. The new federal law enforcement orientation sees any deviation from the policy platform of Donald Trump as a potential act of terrorism and subversion. This includes people who peaceably protest in front of a Tesla dealership, or who write op-eds in favor of Palestinian rights. 

Working with the Feds has been a losing proposition for human rights since (at least) the BW Bush administration. 

If you are wondering if this is just a Republican thing, it isn't.  The Obama administration went all in on a massive law-enforcement take-down of the Occupy movement that rivaled anything that his predecessor did.

If you as a community value the constitution and our civil rights, disband your JTTF. 

Quote of the Day

Apparently, Stephen Miller thinks that Donald Trump can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. There’s just one problem with that idea, as a little known law professor wrote in the Cornell Law Review in 2014: “Congress alone can suspend the writ.” The name of that professor was Amy Coney Barrett.

—Corey Robin

I hope that Mr. Robin is correct here, but we do know that the conservative wing of the court frequently operate under the legal principal of, "It's OK if you're a Republican." (IOKIYAR) 

It is naive to expect conservative Supreme Court Justices to act in a non-partisan manner or with integrity.

Gee, Corruption Much?

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has droped charges against University of Michigan pro-Palestinian protesters after it was revealed that she had what should have been disqualifying ties to the school's board of regents.

This creates the appearance of corruption.  She should have recused herself:

Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced on Monday that she was dropping all charges against seven pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested last May at a University of Michigan encampment.

The announcement came just moments before the judge was to decide on a defense motion to disqualify Nessel’s office over alleged bias. Defense attorney Amir Makled said the motion largely stemmed from an October Guardian report detailing Nessel’s extensive personal, financial and political connections to university regents calling for the activists to be prosecuted.

These ties?

• $33,000 in campaign donations from university regents.
• Her office hired the law office of the regent who chaired her 2018 campaign.
• Her office was more than 8½ times more likely to prosecute protesters than the local DAs. 
  

“This was a case of selective prosecution and rooted in bias, not in public safety issues,” Makled added. “We’re hoping this sends a message to other institutions locally and nationally that protest is not a crime, and dissent is not disorder.”

It certainly seems that way.

………

The Guardian’s investigation revealed concrete evidence of conflicts that defense attorneys argued factored into the prosecutions. Among the findings, the story revealed Nessel’s office charged pro-Palestinian protesters at a higher rate than other state prosecutors.

Nessel was recruited by university regents, who were frustrated by local prosecutors’ unwillingness to crack down on most of the students arrested, to take over the case and file charges, three people with direct knowledge of the decision told the Guardian at the time.

The investigation also found that six of eight regents contributed more than $33,000 combined to Nessel’s campaigns. Additionally, her office hired a regent’s law firm to handle major state cases, and the same regent co-chaired her 2018 campaign. Meanwhile, Nessel received significant campaign donations from pro-Israel state politicians, organizations and university donors who over the last year have vocally criticized Gaza protests, records show.

………

Makled said the judge had told him he was leaning toward granting an evidentiary hearing on the bias allegation, which would have opened Nessel’s office to discovery, or the requirement to turn over evidence.

“I think she didn’t want to open the can of worms that was coming her way,” Makled added.

This is important because the State AG taking over local prosecutions in this way are highly unusual, and in this case it appears to be motivated by political considerations.