Snyder: A new vision of how criminal JUSTICE might work

 Rachel Louise Snyder writes in The New York Times:

The avenues that lead women to jail tend to differ from those for men. Criminologists have long understood this. What happens with women is often a layering of trauma and abuse. They might have economic instability or mental health challenges that allow them to be exploited by violent partners. They might exchange sex for food or housing, and then get arrested for any number of infractions: prostitution, trespassing, drugs. The criminal-justice researcher Stephanie Kennedy calls these “crimes of survival.”

These avenues have contributed to shocking rates of incarceration for women: Between 1978 and 2015, the number of women in state prisons has grown by 834 percent. The overwhelming majority are primary caregivers. When a woman goes to prison, the downstream effects can be staggering: children might enter foster care, itself often a traumatic system. Aging parents might be put into subpar facilities, or have to find alternative care and housing. All too often, the cost of such upheaval results in a cycle of crime, incarceration, addiction, poverty and broken families.

Courts have long struggled with how to respond. The question is: Can we create a system of justice that looks wholly different from what most of us imagine when it comes to crime and punishment, while still demanding accountability from perpetrators? What if court were a place that afforded someone the opportunity for a complete reset, with entryways to jobs, housing, education? What if instead of punishing people who’ve been broken many times over, we helped to heal them?

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Bail reform being dismantled across the country

According to the  Marshal Project, in 2021 the Illinois' legislature passed a bill abolishing cash bail and replacing it with a system in which prosecutors can seek detention based on public-safety or flight-risk findings. At the time, the rationale for the change was largely built on questioning the logic of wealth-based detention. Commenters argued that a rich person should not have a special right to leave jail compared to a poorer person accused of the same crime.

Earlier this month, after the killing of a Chicago police officer whose alleged shooter had been released on electronic monitoring while awaiting trial in another case, Republican lawmakers renewed calls to change the law, arguing in part that the state needed to come into line with President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting “cashless bail.” But the plans that have been floated have not sought to restore money bail, but rather proposed new means of revoking pretrial release, or creating a presumption of detention for people with violent convictions.

Similar legislative efforts to increase pretrial detention outright have also gained momentum across the country. In New Hampshire, a rollback of the state’s earlier bail reforms lowered the standard prosecutors must meet to deny bail, and state officials have pointed to rising jail populations as proof the new approach is working. Later this month, voters in Alabama will decide whether to expand the list of charges for which judges can deny bail. Similarly, in November, voters in Indiana will vote on a constitutional amendment that would dramatically expand judges’ ability to hold people pretrial if they determine that no conditions of release could reasonably protect public safety.

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Once vaunted DOJ needs incentives to find new talent

 

The Justice Department is taking a new tack to overcome hurdles in attracting qualified legal talent and to prevent current lawyers from leaving: offering signing and retention bonuses throughout the Civil Division, reported Bloomberg Law.

New vacancy postings show signing bonuses of $25,000 are newly available to staff offices investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

The financial enticements are an apparent first for a department that in previous years would be inundated with resumes from lawyers willing to take significant salary reductions compared to private sector legal practice. Padding lawyers’ biweekly paychecks signals a division growing more desperate to stave off further departures of valuable legal minds, including those who’ve expressed discomfort with defending the president’s policies from a slew of lawsuits.

Further, the head of the Civil Division—which plays a crucial role advancing and protecting the president’s policies in court—informed all his attorneys Monday that they’ll begin receiving a “retention incentive allowance” ranging from around $60 to $220 every pay period through Thanksgiving, according to an internal email reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

Trial attorney vacancies posted on DOJ’s website Tuesday for the Civil Division’s recently created enforcement and affirmative litigation branch describe in bold print “a signing bonus of up to $25,000" that may be awarded to “well-qualified candidates.” The job advertisements, which would support a DOJ team that’s been repeatedly losing in court over efforts to subpoena pediatric hospitals for sensitive data on minors prescribed drugs for gender dysphoria, instruct applicants that time is of the essence.

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Autocracy Watch: Undermining the Integrity of the midterm elections

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted President Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden, reported ProPublica. 

In December 2020, just days after AG William Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

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CREATORS: If at First You Don't Succeed, Indict Again

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 5, 2026

The acting Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche, has announced the indictment of former Director of the FBI, James Comey. In any other administration, this would be huge news.

America reacted to the indictment with a yawn. This is the second time, and the second attorney general to appear at a press conference and announce the indictment of Comey. The first indictment didn't go so well for the Trump administration.

Days before Comey's first indictment, he was singled out by name in a social media post wherein President Donald Trump appeared to appeal directly to the Department of Justice to bring charges against Comey and complained that investigations into his political enemies had not resulted in criminal charges.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the first indictment based on allegations that Comey lied to Congress five years prior during remote testimony about Russian interference in the 2016 election. A federal judge dismissed the case, finding that the acting U.S. Attorney who sought the indictment was unlawfully holding her position and lacked authority to do so.

If possible, the second indictment is more suspect than the first. Comey was investigated last year over an Instagram post of a photograph of seashells in the sand on some sunny beach. The shells were aligned in the figures of "86 47." With the image, Comey wrote: "Cool shell formation on my beach walk."

According to NBC News, "the term '86' is used in the restaurant industry, and it can informally mean 'to get rid of.' The number '47' was thought to be related to Trump, the 47th president.

The indictment claims that a "reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances" would interpret the seashell image as "a serious expression of intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

This past Sunday, the acting Attorney General appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he gave "assurances" that not everyone who posts the "86 47" message will be charged with threatening the president.

"That phrase is used constantly," according to Blanche, " ... every one of those statements do not result in indictments." Apparently, only avowed enemies of President Trump will face indictment for posting "86 47" online.

Let's start our examination of this indictment with the Fox News comments of George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley. If you don't know Turley, let's just say you won't find his name on a Trump enemy list, making his comments all the more surprising.

Turley told Fox, "If Comey is charged for the shell picture, it would face a monumental challenge under the First Amendment," Turley said. "In my view, the image itself is clearly protected speech. Absent some other unknown facts or elements, it would be unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge."

This time, Comey is charged with making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. Those charges require the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the former FBI director "knowingly and willfully" issued a threat to "take the life of" the president.

The Conservative podcaster Glenn Beck said recently, "If the seashell thing is the best the D.O.J. has on Comey, we're in trouble."

Alexis Loeb, a former DOJ deputy chief, told The Hill that the term "86" is open to different interpretations. "In the typical case — again, because the government's burden is to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt — you typically wouldn't see threats that are readily open to non-violent interpretations."

The pattern of multiple indictments against Comey is certainly an issue that Comey's defense team will raise. There is clearly an opportunity to argue vindictive prosecution or the weaponization of the Justice Department to settle a score with one of the president's enemies.

However, it may never get to that — Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who specializes in First Amendment law, told CNN, "This is not going anywhere. This is clearly not a punishable threat."

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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Mangino discusses murder and dismemberment case on WFMJ-TV21

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Report: Public perception of crime often diverges from reality

Americans’ views on crime often don’t match reality — and a new report suggests those perceptions are shaped as much by personal experiences and economic conditions as by crime itself, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star..

The analysis, released by the nonprofit think tank Council on Criminal Justice, draws on decades of Gallup survey data to examine how people perceive crime and what drives those beliefs. The report’s authors found that, since the 1960s, public perceptions of crime have frequently diverged from actual crime trends.

Even during periods when crime declined, most Americans continued to believe it was rising. From 2005 to 2024, about 69% of survey respondents on average said crime was higher than the year before, despite overall crime rates falling in most of those years, according to the report.

Fear of crime has remained relatively stable over time. In 2024, 35% of Americans said they were afraid to walk alone at night — the same share as in 1968.

The researchers found that public concern tends to track major shifts in homicide rates more closely than broader crime trends. But overall, people’s views about crime and their fear of it have not matched shifts in crime rates for most years, according to the report.

Instead, the analysis points to other factors that shape how Americans think about public safety.

Household victimization — whether someone in the home has been a victim of a crime — was one of the strongest predictors of both fear and the belief that crime is increasing. 

Property crimes, such as theft, and people’s own experiences with crime were more closely tied to concerns about the issue than actual violent crime rates.

Economic sentiment also played a role. People who said it was a good time to find a job or expected to spend the same or more on holiday shopping were less likely to say crime was rising and less likely to report fear of walking alone at night, according to the report.

Political views showed a more limited effect. While people with more conservative ideologies were somewhat more likely to perceive crime as increasing, political party affiliation itself was not a significant factor after accounting for economic conditions and other variables.

Higher presidential and congressional approval ratings were associated with a greater likelihood that respondents said crime was staying the same or declining, according to the report.

Local conditions, meanwhile, were more closely linked to personal fears than to perceptions of crime overall. The researchers found that neighborhood factors, such as poverty and youth population, were associated with whether people said they were afraid, but did not generally influence whether they believed crime was rising locally or nationally.

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