DOJ drops subpoenas for NYT reporters after challenge by judge

The Justice Department is dropping the subpoenas it filed demanding grand jury testimony and phone records from New York Times journalists after sharp questioning Thursday from a federal judge who challenged almost every facet of the government's approach, reported NPR.

The government had insisted that it was acting solely in the interest of national security. It filed subpoenas on July 10, just two days after the Times published the first of two stories about concerns that led to the U.S. Secret Service interceding to prevent President Trump from flying home from Turkey on the new Air Force One jet.

But at the hearing, the presiding judge, U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian, made clear he believed the Trump administration had violated protections given to journalists in black and white to uphold First Amendment principles. He also pointed to several instances of what he considered slipshod legal work and threatened to levy sanctions against federal attorneys for failing to follow the law and misleading the court in signed filings.

The case highlighted the Trump administration's ongoing assault on press rights and the free flow of information to the public. It also provided another glimpse of the White House's eagerness to assert an expansive definition of executive authority, as prosecutors argued the U.S. attorney general has the power to set aside legal protections for journalists when he deems necessary.

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Cut pretextual stops, reduce racial bias by police

A markedly different approach to preventing racial bias and use of force in policing is being implemented to great effect in jurisdictions across the country, reported Inquest. Rather than trying to “fix” policing, this approach demonstrates that the surest way to prevent police violence is to eliminate the occasions to inflict it. Pretext stop policies move beyond failed reforms and take a new approach: Instead of trying to change the way individual officers think, why don’t we restrict their ability to act on their biases?

Pretext traffic stops are one of the most common and consequential ways police officers exercise discretion and act on racial bias. These stops—in which officers pull drivers over for low-level traffic violations, such as expired registration tags, often as an excuse to fish for evidence of unrelated crimes—overwhelmingly target people of color and are regularly escalated by police. According to the New York Times, from 2017 to 2021, police killed more than 400 unarmed civilians in these types of stops—a rate of more than a death a week.

According to findings by Pamambir Dhillon in the Berkeley Public Policy Journal pretext stop restrictions in San Francisco immediately led to large, statistically significant reductions in stops and searches for Black and Latino drivers in the city—all without generating changes in drug, gun, or contraband discoveries. Latino drivers saw a 68 percent reduction in weekly pretext stops immediately after policy implementation, while Black drivers saw a nearly 50 percent decrease. These large reductions reversed the previous trend, which was steady increases in pretext stops across all racial groups and held constant even after accounting for changes in crime rates, police staffing levels, and driving activity in the city.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, at least sixteen cities across the country, including Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have implemented comprehensive policies limiting a wide range of non‑safety‑related traffic stops, and Virginia was the first state to do so in 2021. As research continues to emerge, we see that targeting officer discretion can achieve what hundreds of millions of dollars spent on implicit bias training and body-worn cameras have been unable to. Moreover, empirical evidence demonstrates that you cannot meaningfully reform the scale of discriminatory policing—you can only reduce the scale of policing itself. Pretext stop policies are a key component to achieving this reduction, but not the only one: alternative response programs and civilian traffic enforcement are part of the same project, which seeks to replace police encounters rather than refine them.

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America is on track for the lowest annual homicide rate in over a century

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) released a midyear crime trends report which illustrated that homicides in large American cities fell by 18 percent in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year, effectively putting the country on track for its lowest annual homicide rate in over a century, reported JURISTnews.

The CCJ analyzed 13 crime categories across 336 cities that have consistently reported monthly crime data for the past nine years. Nine of these offenses declined in the first half of 2026, with carjackings showing the largest decrease at 47 percent. Homicides have dropped 51 percent since their peak in early 2022, and carjackings have decreased 73 percent since their 2023 peak. The report also noted a 13 percent year-over-year reduction in residential burglaries and a 56 percent decline compared to their 2018 peak.

However, not all categories improved. Drug offenses increased by 12 percent compared to the first half of 2025, and domestic violence incidents rose by 8 percent. Shoplifting remains the only offense still elevated above pre-pandemic 2019 levels, up by 5 percent.

Roughly a third of the 36 sample cities recorded an increase in homicides compared to the first half of 2025, including Norfolk, Virginia, which saw a 64 percent rise, and San Francisco, which saw a 55 percent increase.

The CCJ said that there was no single explanation for the broadly declining trends, pointing to a range of possible influences including changes in criminal justice operations, technological advances, alongside broader shifts in society and culture. Commentators have pointed out that this decline could also be attributed to shifts in how people go about their daily lives, with many favouring digital transactions over cash payments, making it less likely for opportunistic thefts and street robberies to occur.

With the end of the pandemic, where millions of people had lost their livelihood, economic security has since stabilized and this inevitably reduced the financial desperation that often motivates survival-driven violence. Additionally, an influx of funding, with hundreds of billions of dollars in federal pandemic recovery funds being channeled into stabilizing local city budgets have allowed for more targeted efforts in identifying youth populations facing the highest risk of violence.

The organization has tracked crime trends since the emergence of the pandemic, which brought a historic surge in homicides before the subsequent decline began in the second half of 2022.

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The struggle for adequate indigent defense continues

When America’s Founding Fathers were debating the Constitution, they realized that it didn’t do enough to protect individual rights, according to The Greenwood Commonwealth.

Thus, three years after its adoption, they added the document’s first 10 amendments, collectively known as the Bill of Rights. Amendment No. 6 concentrated on providing criminal defendants with a fair judicial process, including the right to be assisted by an attorney.

In 1963, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Sixth Amendment to dictate that this right to counsel applies to all felony defendants in state courts, not just those wealthy enough to hire an attorney. Thus, for more than six decades, any defendant too poor to afford an attorney has been guaranteed that one would be provided at the government’s expense.

As a comprehensive story from The Greenwood Commonwealth this past weekend explains, it is unclear how well Mississippi is living up to this constitutional obligation. An analysis of the documents filed by the state’s 23 circuit court districts, where felony criminal trials are held, exposed wide variations in how and when the courts provide indigent defendants with an attorney. Only about a third of the court districts have clear plans that closely follow the guidelines to provide defendants with an attorney soon after their arrest to discuss the charges, request a preliminary hearing and petition for release on bond while awaiting trial.

The variations in the public defender system exist not just from district to district but can also exist from county to county within a court district. For example, in the 4th District, which covers three counties in the Delta, Washington County operates with a full-time public defender’s office, Sunflower County contracts with two private practice attorneys to provide indigent counsel, and Leflore County appoints the public defenders from a list of private practice attorneys willing to do the work.

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Senators call for investigation into ICE hiring, vehicle pursuits and body cameras

Dozens of Democratic U.S. senators and the Independent senator from Maine pushed for more details Monday from Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the agency’s vetting practices for new agents and how officers conduct vehicle pursuits, even as they demanded that body cameras be swiftly rolled out to all officers, reported The Associated Press.

The demands came in a letter spearheaded by Maine’s Independent Sen. Angus King, signed by 38 Democratic senators and sent to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. The demands follow two deadly shootings in which ICE officers shot and killed immigrants in Houston and Maine.

The Associated Press reported last week that the ICE officer in Maine who opened fire and killed a man from Colombia had a history of violent behavior toward family members that was detailed in family court records.

His first ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, told AP he was physically violent with her, including once throwing boiling water at her while she was holding their child.

His second ex-wife, Lucinda Brouillette, sent a statement over the weekend alleging “a persistent pattern of abuse, intimidation, manipulation, fear, and control.”

“Throughout our marriage and in the years that followed, I have feared for a long time that his anger, aggression, and escalating behavior would eventually result in severe, life threatening violence, and I often believed I would be the one on the receiving end of it,” she wrote.

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Judge: Forcing states to enforce federal immigration laws violates the Tenth Amendment

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration challenging Minnesota’s state and local “sanctuary” laws, policies and ordinances, reported Courthouse News Service.

In the 56-page order, Chief U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud said forcing state and local officials to enforce federal immigration law violates the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes a balance of power between federal government and individual states.

Though the Trump administration argued state law was preempted by a federal statute allowing local officials to enforce immigration laws under formal agreements, Tostrud rejected that claim.

“This statute does not require a state or any of its political subdivisions to enter into this type of agreement; these agreements are voluntary,” Tostrud wrote, also ruling immigration detainers are requests, not mandates. “At the same time, the statute does not forbid a state or any of its political subdivisions from voluntarily cooperating with the United States.”

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Maine senator says citizens don't trust FBI of DHS

“The people of Maine are not going to buy an investigation that’s strictly run by the F.B.I. or D.H.S.,” Senator Angus King, an independent, reported The New York Time. “I’m sorry. They just don’t have the credibility.”

Senator King was referring a killing in Maine by ICE of  a man legally in the U.S. ICE has said victims in Maine and other states were brandishing a gun, “weaponizing” a car or attacking with a shovel. But these explanations, which federal immigration officials gave for shooting people, were swiftly undercut or contradicted by video evidence.

Now, local officials and some members of the public are meeting the Department of Homeland Security’s accounts of the fatal shootings this month in Houston and Biddeford, Maine, with intense skepticism. In Maine on Monday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian living in Biddeford. The department said little more than that he had tried to flee a traffic stop and that an officer, “fearing for public safety,” had fired at him.

Videos that capture the shooting have not surfaced. Maine officials have called for state law enforcement officials to help determine what occurred.

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