The on going saga of former Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip

 It was almost 10 a.m. and the eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Oklahoma City was nearly empty, save for a few onlookers and reporters. A Thursday morning hearing had been scheduled in the case of Richard Glossip, but he wasn’t there — neither were his attorneys nor the attorneys for the state. Minutes later, the gaggle of lawyers emerged from a door leading to the judge’s chambers, and Don Knight, Glossip’s longtime lead attorney, approached Glossip’s wife Lea in the front row of the gallery to deliver some news: Judge Heather Coyle had just recused herself from Glossip’s case. There was no explanation why, reported The Intercept.

The recusal came as a surprise — not only because trial judges rarely willingly step away from a case, but also because there was no recusal request on the official court docket. Coyle was previously a prosecutor in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office under the former DA who sent Glossip to death row, and the recusal was likely rooted in concern about those ties. It was the latest twist in Glossip’s case since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction at the urging of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond — only for Drummond to announce that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder.

Glossip was twice convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside room 102 of the rundown motel his family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

Glossip, who has always maintained his innocence, faced execution nine times as the Oklahoma courts repeatedly denied his appeals. He may well have been executed if Drummond hadn’t intervened. In early 2023, Drummond ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that rampant prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case, and, when that failed, joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed — that the state has described as its “indispensable witness” — had lied on the witness stand.

Drummond’s concessions about the flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy in support of overturning Glossip’s conviction made his announcement in June that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrayed a long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and set Glossip free.

The alleged agreement, first reported by The Intercept, was at the heart of an explosive court filing last month, which included a 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight laying out the deal. According to the email, Glossip would agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge and would be immediately released in exchange for a promise that Glossip would not sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

The state has since denied that any deal was ever reached, writing in a court filing that the first anyone in the AG’s office had heard about it was just before Glossip’s team filed their brief that included the email exchange. “Needless to say, the defendant is not entitled to enforcement of a non-existent plea agreement,” prosecutors wrote.

Thursday’s court hearing was meant to figure out how to proceed with the matter.

In anticipation of the hearing, Glossip’s attorneys on August 11 filed a lengthy affidavit from Knight that outlined his ongoing communications with Drummond and members of his staff regarding the deal. The filing shed new light on the negotiations, including that Drummond, who is currently running for governor, told Knight that the timing for carrying out the deal “was based on his own political calculus.”

In fact, it was Drummond who initially approached Knight in the spring of 2023 asking if they could strike a deal, Knight recalled. Drummond was preparing to admit that Glossip’s trial had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct and to ask the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the conviction.

Drummond’s “big fear was that the court would grant it,” Knight told The Intercept, and that Glossip would walk free and would sue the state. “So Drummond did what a good lawyer does for his client and looked for an insurance policy. This agreement was that insurance policy.” Knight noted that if Glossip had been released as planned and then had gone on to sue the state, “the shoe would be on the other foot, and Drummond would be asking for this agreement to be enforced now, instead of me.”

In his affidavit, Knight lays out how after the Supreme Court ruled in Glossip’s favor in February, Drummond was quick to lay out a plan to follow through with the deal in a way that would avoid too much publicity — by releasing Glossip on the Friday before Easter. “I was informed that AG Drummond planned to effectuate the agreement on April 18, 2025,” Knight wrote. Knight recalled that he told Drummond’s solicitor general that he had shoulder replacement surgery scheduled in March, which would preclude him from traveling. Knight said he’d be willing to put off the surgery if Glossip’s release date was firm and was told that it was. “Having been assured that it was a firm plan, I rescheduled my surgery to May 13, 2025,” Knight wrote.

During a phone call in early April, however, Drummond told Knight that he would need additional time, but assured him the deal was still on. Just days before Knight’s surgery, the two talked again, and Drummond “reaffirmed he was still working on timing,” Knight wrote. Instead, a few weeks later, Drummond put out a press release announcing he would be retrying Glossip for first-degree murder.

Drummond’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In their most recent brief, Glossip’s legal team argues that prosecutors’ characterization of the deal merely reveals their own ignorance about what was happening behind the scenes.

“The thing that makes me kind of chuckle about the situation,” Knight told The Intercept, “is that I believe the people in Drummond’s office who are writing these petitions are learning about the truth of this matter from us … rather than from Gentner Drummond.”

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Gibsonia and Cranberry, PA restaurants raided and damaged by masked ICE agents

A local Mexican restaurant chain in Western Pennsylvania is trying to forge ahead a week after a worksite immigration raid left property damage at two of its storefronts and a workforce afraid to show up to their jobs, according to two employees and a witness who spoke with NBC News.

It all started Aug. 7 when immigration authorities showed up at two Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant & Bar locations in the Pittsburgh area. As many as 16 workers were detained — nine worked at a location in Gibsonia, a suburb north of Pittsburgh, and seven others worked at another location in the nearby township of Cranberry.

In a social media post that same afternoon, which included a video taken by a worker, the business accused agents of storming into its restaurants and leaving “a trail of fear, confusion, and destruction” that included a burned kitchen, torn ceiling tiles, broken doors, a safe cut open by an agent and trashed food. The incident raises questions over the tactics used by authorities at this particular raid.

This week, gas plumbers fixed a stove that was damaged during the raid, according to two people working at the restaurant chain. Staffing was also thin at the locations targeted by immigration authorities as employees who witnessed the raid, including those who are U.S. citizens, remain “in shock,” they added. “No one wants to go back, everyone is scared.”

Both workers who spoke with NBC News requested to not be named to protect their family’s privacy because of an ongoing federal investigation in connection with last week’s events.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania declined to clarify what the investigation it is leading is about.

As the immigration arrests were happening last week, someone alerted an emergency response immigration hotline run by Casa San Jose, a local nonprofit that advocates for Latino and immigrant communities.

The organization quickly dispatched about 20 volunteers to both locations to act as legal observers, collect testimonies and provide support to the workers and families affected, according to Jaime Martinez, a community defense organizer at Casa San Jose.

At the Gibsonia location, “the raid actually caused a kitchen fire that agents were unable to extinguish at the beginning, which put people in danger,” Martinez told NBC News on Tuesday.

Employees who spoke to Martinez and his volunteers said the stove was on when agents entered the kitchen because workers were cooking food as they prepared to open the restaurant Thursday morning. The restaurant’s manager warned agents that the open burners were on, but witnesses alleged that agents didn’t do anything until a fire sparked, he said.

The detained employees, who had their arms and ankles shackled, were the ones who directed the agents to find the fire extinguisher and instructed them on how to use it after initially failing to operate it, according to employees who spoke to Martinez and his volunteers.

“By the time the fire department got there, the fire had already been put out with a dry chemical extinguisher, but only after this delay,” Martinez said.

A spokesperson with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News in an email Thursday that the “damage to the restaurant, including the small fire, was created by the illegal aliens themselves while they were trying to escape or hide from law enforcement officers.”

According to ICE, the agents showed up at the locations in Gibsonia and Cranberry to execute federal search warrants based on information it got alleging that the restaurants were employing undocumented workers, WPXI, NBC’s affiliate in Pittsburgh, reported. The agency added that the 16 people detained lack legal status and are now in ICE custody, undergoing immigration proceedings.

“But in the process of coming in with that warrant, they also terrorized the community, pointed guns at people and destroyed a local business,” Martinez said.

In response to this, the ICE spokesperson told NBC News, “All agents and officers followed established legal procedures while executing the warrants.”

At the Cranberry location, Casa San Jose volunteers interviewed a worker who described seeing officers come into the restaurant, shouting “police” and pointing their long guns at the employees. One female employee who was in the kitchen said an agent “pointed the gun at her head” while telling her to stop cooking, according to Martinez.

While she was not detained after showing proper documentation, “this lady is now going to have to live with the trauma of having law enforcement point a gun at her head while she was at work,” Martinez said.

Martinez and one of the workers who spoke with NBC News said agents lined up all of the cuffed employees and made them kneel while pointing their weapons at them.

“Agents and officers operated within established law enforcement standards in order to ensure the safety of law enforcement officers, the public and the illegal aliens themselves,” the ICE spokesperson said in response to this allegation.

Last week was not the first time immigration authorities attempted to detain employees from Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant & Bar. The ICE spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that a June incident was part of “an investigation that ultimately led to the execution of the warrants” this month.

Martinez said that on a night in June, he got a call on the hotline, reporting unmarked vehicles surrounding a nearby apartment complex. When the volunteer who was dispatched arrived at the area, she noticed the vehicles were parked with their engines still running, in front and behind the restaurant.

According to Martinez, it looked like federal agents inside the vehicles were waiting for workers to come out of the restaurant as it was closing. The vehicles left once TV crews arrived on the scene, he said.

“There were nine people in that restaurant on lockdown,” Martinez said, adding his group doesn’t know the immigration status of those workers since it doesn’t ask people about that as part of its policy. “But you don’t have to be undocumented to be afraid of getting detained.”

Since launching the hotline in March, Casa San Jose has received more than 650 calls reporting more than 100 immigration detentions in the area and has dispatched volunteers in at least 70 instances, according to Martinez.

In the wake of the raids at Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant and Bar locations, the community came together and collectively donated more than $133,000. The workers who spoke with NBC News said the business plans to use the funds to cover bond expenses, one month worth of salary for each employee detained and repair damage done to the restaurant.

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Autocracy 101: 'Mortal danger and unbridled chaos'

 Moustafa Bayoumi of The Guardian writes:

A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.

Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.

Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.

But the sad truth is that many, if not most, of Trump’s justifications for his policies, are unsurprisingly based on bald-faced lies or gross exaggerations simply to further his pursuit of absolute power. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. With each new announcement, Trump continues to prove how excellent he is at crafting the illusion of problems where there basically are none and leading his followers down an often-violent path of retribution. (Remember January 6, DC’s most violent day in recent history?) By doing so, he seeks to constantly expand his authority while also deflecting from all the substantial problems that are staring him in the face. And these problems are not insignificant. Think of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the continuation of global conflicts that he promised months ago he would uniquely be able to end.

The federal takeover of the Washington DC police department, announced with loud fanfare by Trump on Monday, is the latest example of this phenomenon. About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president, “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”

This does sound rather frightening. Fortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter.

First, the facts. Crime in DC is at historic lows. “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the justice department announced earlier this year. And crime numbers for 2025 are even better, substantially lower than 2024. Violent crime in 2025 is down 26% compared with 2024.

The DC council understands this. The council responded to Trump’s announcement with an angry joint statement: “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the DC police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency. Further, the National Guard has no public safety training or knowledge of local laws. The Guard’s role does not include investigating or solving crimes in the District. Calling out the National Guard is an unnecessary deployment with no real mission.”

Such facts ought to matter. So why don’t they to Trump?

Facts don’t matter for Trump because facts have always operated as nothing more than an inconvenience for him. Just ask Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was recently fired by Trump after accurately reporting employment statistics, and those specific numbers contradicted Trump and his policies. But with every new policy enacted by this administration, Trump’s fact-free worldview becomes a lot more worrisome.

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Police use AI to prepare reports, may be cannon fodder for defense attorneys

Police reports sit at the heart of the criminal justice process — officers use them to detail an incident and explain why they took the actions they did, and may later use them to prepare if they have to testify in court, Reported CNN. Reports can also inform prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and the public about the officer’s perspective on what took place. They can influence whether a prosecutor decides to take a case, or whether a judge decides to hold someone without bond, said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, an American University law professor who studies the intersection of technology and policing.

“Police reports are really an accountability mechanism,” Ferguson said. “It’s a justification for state power, for police power.”

For that reason, proponents of Draft One tout the potential for AI to make reports more accurate and comprehensive, in addition to its time-saving benefits. But skeptics worry that any issues with the technology could have major ramifications for people’s lives. At least one state has already passed a law regulating the use of AI-drafted police reports.

Draft One’s rollout also comes amid broader concerns around AI in law enforcement, after experiments elsewhere with facial recognition technology have led to wrongful arrests.

“I do think it’s a growing movement. Like lots of AI, people are looking at how do we update? How do we improve?” Ferguson said of AI police report technology. “There’s a hype level, too, that people are pushing this because there’s money to be made on the technology.”

An efficiency tool for officers

After an officer records an interaction on their body camera, they can request that Draft One create a report. The tool uses the transcript from the body camera footage to create the draft, which begins to appear within seconds of the request. The officer is then prompted to review the draft and fill in additional details before submitting it as final.

Each draft report contains bracketed fill-in-the-blanks that an officer must either complete or delete before it can be submitted. The blank portions are designed to ensure officers read through the drafts to correct potential errors or add missing information.

“It really does have to be the officer’s own report at the end of the day, and they have to sign off as to what happened,” Axon President Josh Isner told CNN.

Draft One uses a modified version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Axon further tested and trained to reduce the likelihood of “hallucinations,” factual errors that AI systems can randomly generate. Axon also says it works with a group of third-party academics, restorative justice advocates and community leaders that provide feedback on how to responsibly develop its technology and mitigate potential biases.

The idea for Draft One came from staffing shortages that Axon’s police department clients were facing, Isner said. In a 2024 survey of more than 1,000 US police agencies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that agencies were operating at least 10% below their authorized staffing levels on average.

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Balko: Trump's DC police state, testing the limits of his power — and our democracy

Radley Balko writes on The Watch:

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in Washington, D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024. So far this year, it’s down an addtional 26 percent. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes dictators and whose entire worldview is perpetually stuck in the 1980s can provide.

The motivation for Donald Trump’s plan to “federalize” Washington, D.C., is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles, deporting people to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months: He is testing the limits of his power — and, by extension, of our democracy. He’s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he’s been able to do what he pleases.

The incident that apparently precipitated Trump’s D.C. crackdown was entirely pretextual. It wasn’t the overall amount of violent crime, it was that the wrong person had fallen victim to it. Both Trump and Elon Musk declared D.C. to be a crime-infested wasteland after photos emerged of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, formerly of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, beaten and bloodied from an alleged carjacking. The attackers ran off when a Metro police officer arrived on the scene — which is far more protection than crime victims usually get from law enforcement.

In response, Trump raged on social media over the weekend. He immediately sent hundreds of agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the city (who then responded to a fender bender as if someone had detonated a dirty bomb.)

Trump is now deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the city too. While state National Guards report to governors, the D.C. National Guard reports to the president. The federal government also has jurisdiction over Washington. Oversight power is supposed to lie with Congress, not the president. But this Congress has essentially dissolved itself into Trump’s agenda.

These legal distinctions mean that Trump’s “federalization” of D.C. isn’t quite as extraordinary a power grab as his deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June. But as he made clear at an unhinged press conference on Monday, Trump himself is either unaware of that distinction or doesn’t acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well.

But as with Washington and Los Angeles, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has fallen dramatically this year. New York, meanwhile, remains one of the safest big cities in the country, despite what the trembling cowards on Fox News may tell you.

There was no emergency in Los Angeles, either. With the aid of the right-wing media bubble, the administration exploited a couple incidents of property destruction with a surge in peaceful protests against the administration’s immigration raids to depict the city as a dystopian hellscape.

The important thing Trump learned from Los Angeles is that the federal courts failed to intervene. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objections of a state governor is reviewable by federal courts, the court also took at face value Trump’s claim that the protests presented a threat to immigration enforcement.

There’s little evidence that this was true. But more importantly, that was never the real reason Trump cracked down on the city. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump himself, and internal documents made clear, the real reason was to intimidate protesters, terrify immigrant communities and their advocates, and “liberate” blue cities and states from the “socialists” elected to office. It was a projection of power.

If this were all truly motivated by Trump’s deep commitment to fighting crime, he wouldn’t have cut security funding to D.C. by 44 percent. (I’m dubious of the link between such funding and crime rates, but the important thing here is that Trump thinks they’re linked.) If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have released a convicted triple murder on the streets of Orlando. If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have hired a man who told his fellow January 6th protesters to kill the Capitol police to a top-level position at the Justice Department. It this were about crime, Trump would have said something — anything — about the shooter who fired 150 rounds into the Center for Disease Control building in Atlanta.

This is about projecting power. Trump has long disparaged cities with large Black populations and Black leadership. New York, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles are all cities with large Black populations who are run by Black Democrats. The front-runner to be the new mayor of New York is a Muslim Democratic socialist. Trump isn’t planning to “protect” the residents of these cities from crime. He’s planning to impose his will on them.

The crackdown in D.C. comes 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s brother, laying out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.” The Washington Post then reported just today that the Pentagon has developed a plan for a “reaction force” of National Guard troops Trump can deploy to any city on a moment’s notice.

These policies would end once and for all this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement, it would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution, and it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens. (If you’re wondering what — other than being the brother of the least qualified person ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency — makes Phil Hegseth qualified to plan and implement a policy that would fundamentally alter the relationship between America and its military, the answer is apparently that he once started a podcasting company.)

Tough-on-crime politicians have long used Washington, D.C., and its residents as political pawns rather than real Americans with real constitutional rights. When Richard Nixon was pushing a crime bill that would make the D.C. the test city for his crime policies in 1970, his Justice Department suppressed statistics showing that crime in the city had been falling for five months. They needed people to fear the capital to get the bill through Congress. The bill passed, but D.C.’s progressive police chief at the time refused to implement policies like no-knock raids, preventative detention, and aggressive crackdowns on protest. Crime would continue to fall in D.C. even as it rose in the rest of the country.

In 1989, in his first televised speech as president, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that he claimed had been seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the White House. It had not. It hadn’t even been “seized.” Undercover agents from the DEA had persuaded a small-time, 18-year-old drug dealer to sell them crack at the park so they could give it to the White House for Bush to use in his speech. In other words, the DEA arranged for an illegal drug sale near the White House that otherwise wouldn’t have happened solely so Bush could say an illegal drug sale had just taken place near the White House.

Demonizing Washington, D.C., then, is an old tactic from an old playbook. But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren’t attacks on democracy.

This most certainly is.

The memo reported by the New Republic seeks to replicate what Trump did in Los Angeles in other cities. It conflates peaceful, constitutionally protected protest with international crime syndicates and Al Qaeda or ISIS. And it puts heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president’s bidding.

This is what Trump has always wanted. He has always expressed his envy of and respect for authoritarians who could sic the military on protesters and critics.

One of the healthier things about our democracy is that when politicians have advocated to get the Pentagon more active in domestic policing, the strongest resistance has tended to come from the Pentagon itself. It’s long been a core principle in U.S. military culture that soldiers should not be deployed against their fellow citizens. It’s a bright red line.

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CREATORS: Eyewitness Identification Under Scrutiny

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 12, 2025

For decades, eyewitness identification was considered the gold standard when it came to evidence used to gain a conviction.

In the famous courtroom drama "12 Angry Men," rated by the American Bar Association as one of the 25 greatest legal movies of all time, juror No. 8, played by Henry Fonda, earnestly advocated for a not-guilty verdict.

Fonda started out as the only not-guilty vote. The turning point of the deliberations occurred when an older juror recalled that the state's prized eyewitness, who had observed the murder through her window as she lay in bed, had red marks on her nose left from wearing eyeglasses. The older juror asked a reserved, bespectacled juror, "Do you wear your glasses when you go to bed?" The bespectacled juror responded, "No, I don't. No one wears eyeglasses to bed."

Eyewitness identification can be convincing, but is it reliable?

More than 75,000 prosecutions every year are based entirely on eyewitness identification. Some of those identifications are erroneous. Advances in the social sciences and technology have cast a new light on eyewitness identification.

Hundreds of studies on eyewitness identification have been published in professional and academic journals. One study by University of Virginia Law School professor Brandon L. Garrett found that eyewitness misidentifications contributed to wrongful convictions in 76% of the cases overturned by DNA evidence.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has acknowledged the shortcomings of eyewitness testimony. She wrote, "eyewitness identifications' unique confluence of features - their unreliability, susceptibility to suggestion, powerful impact on the jury, and resistance to the ordinary tests of the adversarial process — can undermine the fairness of a trial."

What can cause an eyewitness to misidentify a suspect? There are a number of factors: Poor lighting, the crime occurred quickly, the presence of a gun and the fact that the perpetrator is a different race than the witness. The police can, as well, intentionally or unintentionally influence an eyewitness's identification.

There are four basic rules proposed by researchers to help promote valid police identifications, including: Who conducts the lineup; instructions on viewing the lineup; the structure of the lineup or array; and immediately obtaining a confidence statement for the eyewitness.

When it comes to the "who," research supports double-blind lineups administered by a police officer who is not familiar with the suspect and who is not one of the primary investigators on the case. The instructions are equally important. For instance, a photo array should be presented sequentially rather than as a group without comment by the officer displaying the array. Research studies have revealed that both practices decrease the pressure on witnesses to pick someone and guard against undue influence.

The structure of the lineup is another area where bias can seep into the process. If the eyewitness described the suspect as a white male with long hair, approximately 6 feet, 4 inches tall, with a thin build, it would not be fair to have the suspect and four short, overweight, bald men in a lineup.

Finally, a confidence statement taken from the witness immediately after the array or lineup will provide the police, the suspect and ultimately jurors with a clear understanding of just how sure — or confident — the eyewitness is in her identification of the suspect.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in a dissenting opinion nearly 35 years ago, "There is almost nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant, and says, 'That's the one!'"

No one can challenge the impact of eyewitness identification. However, it is clear from the research and the growing number of exonerations that the reliability of eyewitness identification falls far below its impact. Without meaningful reform, the threat of convicting the innocent continues.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Trump invades Washington, DC based on a big lie: Crime is ravaging the district

President Donald Trump’s unprecedented decision to take over the Metropolitan Police Department and order the National Guard to help fight crime in Washington, D.C. is based on a big lie.

The big lie: crime is ravaging the district. In reality, crime is at its lowest level in decades in the nation’s capital. In early January, federal prosecutors in Washington released a press bulletin with the subject line: “Violent crime in D.C. hits 30 year low.” And since then, it has plummeted 26%, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Yet Trump on Monday portrayed D.C. as a crime-infested hellscape and said Attorney General Pam Bondi would “take command of the Metropolitan Police Department as of this moment.”

In making his case, Trump ticked off recent violent incidents in Washington, including the fatal shooting of a congressional intern and the attempted carjacking of Edward Coristine, an original Department of Government Efficiency staffer known online as "Big Balls."

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said.

A senior law enforcement official told NBC News that an initial federal effort this weekend was chaotic. As many as 120 FBI agents, mostly from the FBI Washington Field Office, worked shifts with the Metropolitan Police Department this weekend, the official said. But agents were confused about their exact role on the streets and who they reported to at any given time.

A second federal official said that confusion continued on Monday. "No one knows who is in charge or what they're supposed to do," the official said.

Unmarked federal law enforcement vehicles are trailing patrol cars in Washington to provide support if needed, another federal official said. Some agents dismissed such efforts a waste of resources, with one jokingly calling the processions "a federal funeral."

One notable group, the D.C. police union, said it supports the takeover by the president, saying the department has been beset by "chronic mismanagement" and "staffing shortages."

“The union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety,” it said in a statement. “However, we emphasize that federal intervention must be a temporary measure, with the ultimate goal of empowering a fully staffed and supported MPD to protect our city effectively.”

Concern from former chiefs

The announcement of the federal takeover was met with alarm by Art Acevedo, a retired police chief who led departments in Houston, Austin and Miami.

“Not only is it unprecedented, it’s unwarranted,” Acevedo said. “There’s no reason for it other than the political optics sought by the administration to pretend that crime is out of control and they are the saviors.”

Trump said that he had appointed the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole, as the head of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Cole will report to Bondi, but it is unclear whether Cole will bring in his own staff to run the various divisions of the roughly 3,500 office police department.

At her own press conference later in the day, Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump’s actions “unsettling and unprecedented.” The attorney general of D.C., Brian Schwab, had also blasted the move and said that he was exploring legal options, but Bowser acknowledged that Trump had the authority to temporarily seize control of the police department.

She noted, however, that “nothing about our organizational chart has changed.”

Trump must notify certain members of Congress within 48 hours about the reason for taking over control of police and the estimated timeline for federal control, according to the D.C. Home Rule Act. The act also indicates that Trump can take control of the D.C. police for 30 days, unless Congress authorizes an extension.

Flooding the streets

The policing experts interviewed by NBC News noted that crime is a nuanced problem that requires a multi-faceted solution that includes the strengthening of social services.

“To just flood the streets of D.C. with law enforcement” and “taking over D.C. local police, it seems like a half-baked idea looking for a problem,” Donell Harvin, a former homeland security and intelligence chief for Washington, D.C., said on MSNBC.

Snider, the retired NYPD officer, said local police agencies are far better equipped to address local crime than federal agencies or the National Guard.

“They know the players. They know the streets. They know where the violence occurs,” said Snider, who is an adjunct lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a policy director of criminal justice and civil liberties at the R Street Institute, a think tank in D.C.

“Any aid from federal agents or the National Guard should be supportive measures,” Snider added. “They shouldn’t be coming in and taking over local policing.”

Acevedo, the retired police chief, said the administration would be able to make an impact on crime by setting aside more money for local enforcement, as it has for its migrant crackdown.

“If the administration truly wanted to make a difference at the state and local level and help make communities safer, it is as simple as increasing the total federal budget dollar investment for local law enforcement to recruit, train, equip, and retain the best and the brightest to serve as peace officers,” he said.

Trump’s penchant for calling in military personnel to tackle domestic unrest is by now well-established. He did so five years ago during the George Floyd protests. And just this summer, he ordered the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles to help quell large-scale protests sparked by ramped-up immigration raids.

But the National Guard doesn’t have arresting powers, so there is a limit to how involved they can be in fighting crime in D.C.

Retired Army Col. Jack Jacobs said National Guard troops are typically better trained than active duty soldiers to help in urban settings for things like crowd control.

“But they’re not trained to do the things that police do, which is a, patrol, and b, investigate,” Jacobs, an NBC News analyst, said in an interview. “In my view, this is mostly theater, and nothing necessarily useful will come of it.”

Questions about January 6th

Trump’s takeover of the D.C. police force comes several months after he pardoned about 1,500 people convicted of crimes, some of them violent, in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Daniel Hodges, one of dozens of Metropolitan Police Department officers who were brutalized during the riot and whose assailants were among those pardoned by Trump upon his return to office, woke up to the news that Trump had taken over the MPD after working an overnight shift.

“It’s a big photo op. It’s not going to change anything,” Hodges said, speaking while off-duty in his personal capacity.

Hodges, who was in the National Guard for six years, said that National Guard members are not trained in local law enforcement. While D.C. had law enforcement issues that could be better addressed, Hodges said, he doesn’t think Bondi is going to have grand insight into how to deploy MPD officers.

“It’s terrible, it’s disgusting,” Hodges added, “but it’s not a surprise.”

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