Trump pursues desperate removal of hush money case to federal court

Former US President Donald Trump filed a motion to move his New York hush money case to federal court, an attempt that could overturn his conviction and delay his sentencing date until after the presidential election in November, reported Juris.

Trump’s legal team asked the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to take the case, claiming the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office “violated the Presidential immunity doctrine … by relying on evidence of President Trump’s official acts” while in office. The motion cited a recent decision by the US Supreme Court that ruled former US presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for their actions taken within their “official responsibility.”

The motion stated:

These ongoing harms must be stopped. The impending election cannot be redone. The currently unaddressed harm to the Presidency resulting from this improper prosecution will adversely impact the operations of the federal government for generations.

Trump’s attorneys also requested New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s recusal from the hush money case. The motion cited public statements made by Justice Merchan’s daughter in 2019 that “indicat[ed] that [Justice Merchan] had been critical of President Trump’s use of Twitter during his Presidency.” Trump’s team argued that these statements “confirm judicial bias and hostility towards President Trump’s 2018 Tweets, which are a core issue in the pending Presidential immunity motion.”

Trump’s team claimed Justice Merchan had a “conflict of interest” in the case since he “made improper contributions to Democrat interests” in 2020. The former president’s attorneys further claimed issues of bias because Justice Merchan’s daughter worked on current Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2019 presidential campaign and her company worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

In March 2023, a grand jury returned an indictment charging the former president with 34 violations of falsifying business records in the first degree. Trump was convicted of all 34 felony counts in May. Trump had sent $130,000 in reimbursements to his attorney Michael Cohen for a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and prosecutors argued that he falsified records to conceal the hush money payments to unlawfully influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

The former president filed a motion to dismiss the indictment and vacate the jury’s verdicts under the claim of presidential immunity, and the motion is currently pending before Justice Merchan. In July, Justice Merchan pushed Trump’s sentencing date in the case until September 18 so he could consider the presidential immunity claim. Trump’s team then requested the sentencing in his hush money case be postponed until after the November election, claiming the current scheduling would constitute election interference.

This is not Trump’s first attempt to remove the case from New York’s jurisdiction. A federal judge in 2023 rejected Trump’s first attempt, finding that the former president failed to show that the alleged conduct was related to his official responsibilities as the president. US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein stated, “Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the president’s official duties.”

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Florida executes man for 1994 rape and murder of college freshman

 The 13th  Execution of 2024

A Florida man convicted of killing a college freshman and raping the murder victim’s older sister while the siblings camped in a national forest 30 years ago was executed on August 29, 2024, according to The Associated Press.

Loran Cole, 57, received a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. at Florida State Prison for the 1994 killing of the 18-year-old student. Cole also was serving two life sentences for rape.

Cole did not have a last statement. “No sir,” he said when asked if he had some final words.

After the procedure began about 6 p.m. Cole briefly looked up at a witness in the front row. After three minutes, he began taking deep breaths, his cheeks puffing out. For a brief moment, his entire body trembled. Five minutes into the procedure, the warden shook him and shouted his name. Cole then appeared to stop breathing and then was declared dead.

Cole and a friend, William Paul, befriended the two college students in the Ocala National Forest, court records showed. After talking around a fire, the men offered to take the siblings to see a pond. While away from the campsite, Cole and Paul jumped the victims and robbed them, according to the records.

The brother, 18, who was a student at Florida State University, was beaten and had his throat slit and left in the forest. His sister, then a 21-year-old senior at Eckerd College, was taken back to the campsite, where Cole tied her up and raped her, according to the record.

The woman was left tied to a tree overnight and raped again the next day. She eventually managed to free herself and flagged down a driver for help. Police found her brother’s body lying face down on the ground, according to court records.

Paul and Cole were both convicted of first-degree murder. Paul was sentenced to life in prison.

Although they did not attend the execution, the parents of the victims had a statement read afterward by corrections officials. They wrote about how the murder of their son and the attack on their daughter had shattered their lives. But they said their daughter had gone on to become a wife, teacher and professor.

“Though invisible to others, our daughter bears internal scars that will never go away. She battled years of fear, pain and sorrow,” the statement said. “She is our hero.”

“We are void of feelings and empathy for Mr. Cole. He placed himself into this arena,” it added. “He does not deserve mercy.”

The Associated Press does not generally identify victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the death warrant for Cole last month.

The execution was the first in Florida since Michael Zack was put to death last October for the 1996 killing of Ravonne Smith.

Department of Corrections officials described Cole as “compliant” in the hours before his execution and said he had two visitors, including his son.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Cole’s final appeal earlier Thursday.

His lawyers had raised several points in seeking a stay of execution, including the fact that Cole was an inmate at a state-run reform school where he and other boys were beaten and raped. The state has since apologized for the abuse and this year passed a law authorizing reparations for inmates at the now-shuttered reform school. The lawyers also argued Cole shouldn’t be executed because he was mentally ill and had brain damage and Parkinson’s disease.

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Mangino discusses Telegraph founder's arrest on NTD

Watch my interview on NTD Television Network about the arrest of Telegraph founder Pavel Durov.

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Creators: If Things Are Too Perfect, Then Something Must Be Wrong

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
August 27, 2024

In Waterbury, Connecticut, a police officer detained the driver of a vehicle who had safely pulled to the side of the road to reset his iPhone GPS.

The driver had done everything by the book. Instead of resetting his destination while driving down the road — you know, distracted driving — he pulled to the side of the road. While plugging data into his iPhone, a police officer walked up to his window.

The officer requested his license and registration. The driver turned over the cards, informed the officer that he had a concealed carry permit, showed it to the officer and told him where to find the firearm.

Instead of reviewing the information and saying, "Thanks, have a nice day," the officer ordered the driver out of the vehicle. He was handcuffed and thrown face down in the back seat of the cruiser while his vehicle was searched.

After finding nothing, the officer asked his supervisor, "What should I write him up for?" The trumped-up charges were dismissed and the officer got sued. During the suit, the officer claimed he was protected by qualified immunity, which allows state and local officials to avoid personal consequences related to their professional interactions unless they violate "clearly established law."

The officer claimed he had the legal right to detain the driver and search the vehicle. According to Tim Cushing, writing for Techdirt, the officer actually testified "that someone respecting every single law applicable to them at the point of this unwelcome interaction was at least reasonable suspicion for a search, if not actual probable cause."

The prosecutor, through the officer's testimony, argued that if things are too perfect, then something must be wrong.

Fortunately, the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit didn't buy it — but this case could end up before the United States Supreme Court. Eleven years ago, with fewer conservative justices, the high court made the remarkable finding that a suspect cannot invoke the right to remain silent by, well ... remaining silent.

The case, Salinas v. Texas, arose from the murder of two men in Houston. The police found shotgun shells discarded at the crime scene.

The police questioned Genovevo Salinas, who was said to have attended a party at the victims' apartment. When Salinas met with police, he was not under arrest. He voluntarily submitted to questioning and was free to leave the police station at any time.

He answered questions for almost an hour, but when asked by police if the shotgun shells found at the murder scene would match a shotgun found in Salinas' home, he stopped talking.

The police made a record of Salinas' conduct once he stopped talking. According to the Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Salinas "[l]ooked down at the floor, shuffled his feet, bit his bottom lip, cl[e]nched his hands in his lap, [and] began to tighten up."

That conduct was used at his trial as evidence that he was hiding his guilt. The Supreme Court agreed, finding that silence is not enough to invoke the right to remain silent.

When the Salinas case was argued, his attorney suggested that it would be unfair to require a suspect untrained in the law to do anything more than remain silent in order to invoke his "right to remain silent."

The Supreme Court has made the right to remain silent more complicated, and it will require those accused of a crime to be more informed about their rights and, more importantly, the decision will require an accused, under enormous pressure, to articulate the desire to invoke those rights.

The Connecticut case presents the same dilemma for someone falsely accused of wrongdoing. Would a person need to know if and when his statement or conduct is too perfect? Should a suspect be worried that his cooperation may lead to an officer's "reasonable suspicion"?

A suspect who encounters the police and worries his explanation is too good may become nervous, fail to maintain eye contact, or awkwardly shift in his seat. Maybe a bead of sweat forms on his upper lip — accepted indicia of lying.

Are we evolving into a country where a suspect who has done nothing, and admitted nothing, can be convicted of a crime?

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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'If it bleeds it leads' media ignores dramatic decline in violence

 According to The New Republic, in the first half of 2023, Boston had 18 homicides. In the first half of 2024, it had four—a 77 percent drop. Mesa, Arizona, saw a drop of more than 70 percent, from 21 to six. Homicides in New Orleans fell by almost 40 percent. In Baltimore City, Cleveland, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, homicides declined by around 30 percent. 

These dramatic numbers come from a midyear crime report published by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which takes data from 69 police and sheriffs’ departments. In aggregate, the study documented a 17 percent drop in homicides. If the trend persists in the latter half of the year and holds true for the whole country, the total number of homicides will end up where it was in 2015, at around 15,500, and will represent the largest single-year decline in at least 65 years, exceeding the previous record decline—of 12 percent, set just last year—by almost a third. Meaning: The entire Covid-19 homicide spike will have vanished.

It may seem risky to extrapolate the midyear data from just 69 departments to the year-end results from 18,000 local departments, but historically, midyear data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association and national year-end data track each other surprisingly well. (For those who want to dig into the weeds, I dive deep here.) Barring some sort of shocking shift, 2024 seems on pace for historic or near-historic declines.

The plunge is unambiguously good news. It is also unexpected good news. Rising homicide rates create the very real risk of vicious cycles that do not end simply because we’ve started a new statistical year. Homicide trends tend to be quite long. From 1963 to 1980, homicides rose every year except one. After a brief decline in the early 1980s, they rose again most years between 1985 and 1994, at which point all violent crime began a steady, decade-long drop.

There are clear reasons for the cyclical nature of the phenomenon. One study in Chicago found evidence that each shooting led to an average of three more retaliatory and counter-retaliatory shootings; some led to dozens more; at least one led to over 100 more. Slowing and then reversing these cycles of revenge can be challenging, yet it happened over the past few years, not long after the chaos and violence of 2020–21, and with surprising rapidity.

This is the sort of news that should spawn dozens of media pieces digging into what, exactly, caused so quick a reversal. Yet that is not what we have seen. Excluding pieces in Axios and Bloomberg, the MCCA report has largely gone unnoticed (and neither of those articles dug into why the decline occurred). To the extent these declines have popped up elsewhere in the media, it is less as a newsworthy development in and of itself and more as a means to fact-check false claims from Donald Trump. (Take, for instance, Vox on August 12: “Trump says crime is out of control. The facts say otherwise.”) Contrast this reticence with how the media handled the Covid-era homicide spike, which was covered by major outlets like The New York Times and NPR in multiple extensive pieces.

That attention made sense: The 2020 surge was the largest increase in homicides in at least 55 years; no other year’s increase comes within half its size. It had huge human costs. But the present decline demands equal attention—and could be put to good political use by the Harris-Walz campaign, should it want to.

There are important stories here. One of the most compelling explanations for the homicide declines that started in 2023 is a story of defunding—but not of the police. Contrary to claims that “defund the police” decreased budgets, police employment and especially police budgets have remained fairly constant; it was local nonpolice employment that was decimated during the pandemic. John Roman, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, has argued that the surge in homicides seems closely linked to the Covid-driven layoffs of civilian government employees, whose jobs are not framed as “law enforcement” but who regularly help reduce crime and victimization: teachers, social workers, drug counselors, people running after-school programs. Furthermore, the timing of the homicide decline lines up with local nonpolice government employment returning to its pre-pandemic levels.

Now, I’m not saying Roman’s theory is the only explanation (and I doubt he would either), but it merits careful consideration. Yet as far as I can tell, it has received almost none. The asymmetry here—deep explorations of rising homicides, passing references in political stories to sharp declines—has very real political costs. Crime is a powerful issue politically, but also one that is quite geographically concentrated. Most people go through their days with little direct exposure to it. Unlike other politically salient topics such as the economy and employment, most people’s understanding of crime is heavily shaped by how the media chooses to frame and discuss a phenomenon they do not personally experience. If the media highlights the increases and downplays the declines, it will help produce an electorate that is excessively pessimistic about crime and how to respond to it.

The politics of crime in New York in 2021 and 2022 highlights the role the media can play. In the wake of the Covid homicide spike, the state’s bail reform law faced intense opposition—and legislative rollbacks—from politicians and other defenders of the criminal legal system’s status quo. And it’s likely that appeals to people’s fears about crime helped propel Mayor Eric Adams to his razor-thin victory in 2021. They may have flipped just enough upstate House seats to give the GOP its increasingly narrow control of the House. As a 2022 Bloomberg piece pointed out, however, violent crime in New York City was far lower than in the 1980s and 1990s, and actually pretty stable during the Covid era. Media coverage does not correlate much, if at all, with actual crime trends. It does, however, seem tightly linked to politicians’ efforts to exploit crime as a political tool.

That the media is not covering a decline in violence as much as an increase is perhaps unsurprising: “If it bleeds it leads” has been an adage for a long time. 

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The U.S. is inching toward a gerontocracy, a society in which elderly people rule

When Democrats decided after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance that he was no longer fit to serve at the top of the ticket, a multifaceted pressure campaign was able to convince him to step aside, reported NBC News.

But federal judges, as well as Supreme Court justices, have lifetime appointments and there is no easy process for easing them aside.

At the age of 97, Judge Pauline Newman is the oldest full-time federal judge on the bench, but despite concerns about her ability to do the job, her colleagues are struggling to get rid of her.

With people generally living longer, a lifetime appointment can now last many decades. The average age of a federal judge is 69, according to a recent study, and there is no clean way to force someone to step down.

“That’s a feature, not a bug,” said Greg Dolin, a former Newman law clerk who is now working as her lawyer. “There’s no way to get rid of a judge, but I don’t think that’s something to amend. That’s something to celebrate.”

On the other hand, some judges have no wish to stay on the job for life out of fear they may lose their faculties, and courts have put measures in place to assist them.

“The judges are engaged in very challenging work. We have a responsibility to the public to try to be at our best both mentally and physically as we perform and discharge those duties that can have very wide impact,” said Judge Phyllis Hamilton, a long-serving federal district judge in Northern California.

Acute problem

Pressure on judges to retire often becomes public only when it concerns a Supreme Court justice. When President Barack Obama was in office, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rebuffed calls from liberals that she step down. At the time, she was in her early 80s and had faced multiple bouts of cancer.

She died in September 2020 at the age of 87, giving then-President Donald Trump the chance to replace her with staunch conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a huge change that shifted the court to its current 6-3 conservative majority.

While the Supreme Court attracts the most attention, “the problem is probably even more acute” on lower courts because of the sheer number of judges, said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a judiciary watchdog.

As of last year, there were 870 active federal judges, including the nine Supreme Court justices and judges serving on the 13 appeals courts and the 94 district courts, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Of those, 70 district judges and 34 appeals court judges are eligible to take senior status, whereby judges take on a lesser role but maintain their title, or retire on full pay, according to an NBC News analysis of data on judges from the Federal Judicial Center, the research arm of the judiciary.

It is not just in presidential races and the judiciary where advancing age is a factor. The average age of members of Congress has also risen, reaching almost 60 for members of the House of Representatives and 64 for senators, according to the Congressional Research Service. Last year, the focus fell on Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who showed signs of cognitive decline while in office before dying in September at the age of 90.

It has led some to claim that the United States is inching toward becoming a gerontocracy, a society in which elderly people are in charge.

“I think there’s something special for old people who, once they’ve enjoyed a lot of power, fear irrelevance and neglect if they give it up — you know, they’ll be less important, and they’ll be marginal,” said Samuel Moyn, a law and history professor at Yale University who recently wrote an article on the issue. “I think there’s a gerontocratic crisis across all branches of government and frankly many other places too.”

In the judiciary, Newman is just one of 14 judges still listed as actively hearing cases on a full-time basis and who are older than Biden, according to the NBC News survey.

By coincidence, all three of the oldest active judges sit on the same appeals court. Joining Newman are Judge Alan Lourie, 89, and Judge Timothy Dyk, 87.

At the district court level, Judge David Hurd of the Northern District of New York, who turned 87 this year, is the oldest active judge, according to the Federal Judicial Center data. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and recently announced plans to take senior status. He had previously rescinded a pledge to step aside.

The second oldest is Massachusetts-based Judge Nathaniel Gorton, born in 1938, who was appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992. (The Federal Judicial Center database includes year of birth but not specific dates.)

The judges all declined interview requests.

Hundreds more aging judges are still in office but have taken senior status. The judiciary does not have exact numbers on how many senior judges are still actively working on cases, but a 2023 judicial business report said there are 520 senior judges who have staff assigned to them, indicating that they are conducting at least some judicial duties.

These so-called “active” judges are the ones who get more scrutiny about stepping down, or refusing to do so, because when they announce their retirement, the president gets to pick a much younger replacement.

Leaving active status does not necessitate giving up the judicial salary. Under judiciary rules, any judge can retire or take senior status at age 65, which means they still get paid as long as they have served for 15 years.

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Mangino on Law and Crime Network

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Colorado voters to decide on increase length of sentences

Colorado voters will decide whether to force people convicted of certain so-called crimes of violence — like murder, assault and kidnapping — to serve out more of their prison sentences before they are eligible for parole, reported the Colorado Sun. 

Initiative 112, which qualified Thursday for the November ballot, would require anyone who commits those crimes after July 1, 2025, and is convicted, to serve 85% of their sentences before they are eligible for parole, up from 75%. It would also prevent them from being eligible for good-behavior or other reductions in their sentence until they have served 85% of their prison penalty. 

Other felony convictions that would be affected by the change are those for:

• Second-degree murder
• First-degree assault 
• First-degree kidnapping
• First- and second-degree sexual assault
• First-degree arson
• First-degree burglary
• Aggravated robbery

Initiative 112 would also make it so people convicted of those offenses committed after July 1, 2025, ineligible for parole if they have been twice-previously convicted of a crime of violence.

To make the ballot, supporters of the initiative had to collect signatures from roughly 125,000 Colorado voters.

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Law & Crime--George Santos: A cautionary tale in an important election year

Matthew T. Mangino
Law & Crime News
August 22, 2024

 As we move toward Labor Day and the traditional start of the election season, the run-up to the 2024 election has not disappointed in its historic twists and turns. President Joe Biden is out, Vice President Kamala Harris is in, and former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and is about as agitated as he has been since losing his reelection bid in 2020.

The recalibrated Democratic National Convention is underway in Chicago. It’s not quite the show we expected several weeks ago, when there was talk of an open convention to force out Biden. Instead, Biden magnanimously stepped down and is being exalted by Democrats far and wide.

While all this is going on, there is little mention of the guilty plea of George Santos – a cautionary tale for everything that is wrong, misleading and impossible to understand about modern American politics.

Santos, whose trial on 23 felony charges was scheduled to begin on Sept. 9, entered a guilty plea on Monday. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, and admitted he committed other crimes that could land him in prison for about seven years under the terms of a plea agreement, ABC News reported.

When Santos flipped New York’s Third Congressional District in 2022, he became the first openly gay non-incumbent Republican elected to Congress. Although his campaign biography said he lived in Long Island with his husband and four dogs, his husband never campaigned with Santos and there was no marriage license on record for a marriage to a man.

There was a marriage license to a woman in 2012 and a divorce in 2019.

That was only the beginning of the lies that Santos apparently told. He created a bio out of whole cloth. He was running for Congress, for the second time, in New York City. NYC may have one of the greatest newspapers in the world, The New York Times, and Santos’ deceit wasn’t exposed to the voters.

It wasn’t as though Santos had a sophisticated cover story that insulated him when he told mistruths. Santos apparently lied about everything. He lied about where he went to high school, where he went to college and where he worked.

This is the 21st Century — I can do a search to find out what Donald Trump had for breakfast this morning.

Santos said his mom was at the World Trade Center on 9/11. She was not.

He said his grandmother died during the Holocaust. She didn’t.

He said four of his employees died as a result of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting. Not true.

Don’t forget this guy got elected to Congress! Then he used campaign money for Botox, travel and clothes. He deposited campaign contributions into private accounts. He used donor credit card information to make unauthorized charges.

He lied to Congress, and became only the sixth member of the House of Representatives to be expelled — although 114 members of Congress voted not to expel him.

Then, he was indicted.

He showed up for Biden’s State of the Union this year and announced he would be running for Congress in 2024, but that did not happen — and now he is more than likely headed to prison.

In Santos’ wake of lies and crimes, we are reminded of a couple important failures. As newspapers struggle to sustain their important role in American politics — remember Watergate? — failure to vet candidates opens the door to charlatans like Santos.

Social media has blurred the line between truth and fiction. Trump has reminded us, time and time again, that it does not matter what the media says about you as long as they keep talking about you.

Voters need to demand answers. There are red flags when things seem too good to be true. In the case of Santos, the red flags were revealed long before his election — but simply ignored. As former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters in January 2023, “I always had a few questions” about Santos’ resume.

However, McCarthy needed every vote he could get to become Speaker of the House, including Santos’ vote. McCarthy was apparently willing to overlook, downplay or hide the truth about Santos – and in politics, acts of omission can be as dangerous as the commission of mistruth, lies or deceit.

Voters — as the 2024 election approaches, keep up your guard.

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

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Obeying all laws is not reasonable suspicion for police to detain and search

It’s about the stupidest thing anyone could claim in defense of an unlawful detention and search, but Waterbury, CT police office Nicholas Andrzejewski did it anyway. He actually told a court (twice!) that someone respecting every single law applicable to them at the point of this unwelcome interaction was at least reasonable suspicion for a search, if not actual probable cause, wrote Tim Cushing in techdirt.

Here’s how this started, taken from the Second Circuit Appeals Court’s rejection [PDF] of the officer’s attempt to walk away from this civil rights suit:

At approximately 8:43 p.m. on November 12, 2018, Basel Soukaneh stopped his car with the engine running on the side of a street in Waterbury, Connecticut. Soukaneh’s iPhone GPS, located in a holder mounted to the car’s dashboard, was frozen, and he stopped his car to fix it. The area “was dark and [known as] a high crime area well known for prostitution, drug transactions and other criminal activity.”

Ah. The old boilerplate. These assertions about dark, high crime, drug area, blah blah blah presumably autofill whenever a cop starts a sentence explaining their reasonable suspicions on their incident report. It’s so overused and so devoid of actual facts that it’s become a parody of itself. Here’s Scott Greenfield’s take on this part of the officer’s narrative:

Was there articulable suspicion that a crime was being committed because Souhaneh stopped his car on the street? It was dark, as nights tend to be. It was in a high crime area, as is every area in pretty much any city anywhere. And yet, the court saw no problem with Andrzejewski demanding his license, for doing exactly what drivers are instructed to do by pulling over rather than driving while their attention is focused elsewhere. 

Any reasonable person will read this and realize that this self-proclaimed reasonable cop’s narrative has at least a couple of strikes against it. And that’s well before Officer Andrzejewski decided to convert this truly unnecessary non-stop into a full blown invasion of the interior of Soukaneh’s car and a constantly escalating series of rights violations.

Within seconds after Soukaneh stopped his car, Officer Nicholas Andrzejewski approached the vehicle, knocked on the driver’s side window, and according to Soukaneh, loudly demanded Soukaneh’s driver’s license. The interior vehicle light was on, so although the area was dark, Andrzejewski could see the activity inside of the car when he approached the window. As Soukaneh complied and handed his license over, he also provided Andrzejewski with a facially valid firearms permit. While doing so, Soukaneh also disclosed to Andrzejewski that, per the permit, he was in lawful possession of a pistol that was located in the driver’s side door compartment.

That this is being recounted in a court decision means the officer didn’t just take a look at the permit and wish Soukaneh a good evening. No, it went the other way. And it’s the sort of thing you need to shove directly in the eyeballs of every bootlicking person, police union rep, politician, and law enforcement official who claims police brutality only exists because people “don’t comply” and should just stop “breaking the law.” All laws were followed. Soukaneh did better than simply comply, he volunteered information. And this is what he got for being a model law-abiding citizen.

Following that exchange, Andrzejewski ordered Soukaneh out of the vehicle. According to Soukaneh’s description, Andrzejewski then violently “dragged [him] out of the car,” pushed him to the ground, yelled and screamed at him, handcuffed him, and pat-searched his person, recovering neither a weapon nor contraband. Andrzejewski then “shoved [Soukaneh] into the rear area of [Andrzejewski’s police] cruiser,” and left Soukaneh “bent over and partially on the floor of the vehicle.” Soukaneh remained “in that position, facing down and unable to see, until another police officer came along several minutes later and helped him sit up.”

Once the other officer repositioned Soukaneh in the cruiser, Soukaneh saw Andrzejewski search his “entire car, both front and rear,” as well as the car’s trunk. After the search, Andrzejewski returned to the cruiser and kept Soukaneh handcuffed and detained in it for an additional half hour, during which time “a group of seven to ten police officers gathered.” Id. At one point, Andrzejewski began writing on his onboard computer and turned to a fellow officer who had arrived at the scene and asked, “What should I write him up for?” The other officer laughed and the sergeant, who had also since arrived, told Andrzejewski what to write.

Unsurprisingly, the lower court rejected the officer’s request for immunity, pointing out that while the initial encounter may have been justified, nothing that followed that (pulling Soukaneh from the car, handcuffing him, searching his vehicle, detaining him for another half-hour while trying to figure out what to cite him with) was supported by probable cause.

The Second Circuit comes to the same conclusion. Simply being made aware Soukaneh possessed an item millions of Americans also own legally is not probable cause for anything the officer did past that point.

On the facts before us, Andrzejewski does not provide an articulable reason why he, or any
other reasonable officer, could conclude that there was probable cause to believe that Soukaneh possessed his firearm unlawfully in violation of Section 29-38(a). To find otherwise would consign those validly carrying firearms pursuant to a license to automatic detention because it would effectively presume that gun permits are invalid until proven valid, or that lawfully owned guns are per se contraband until proven otherwise. Such a finding would effectively render armed individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights meaningless when they are lawfully carrying firearms.

The same goes for the officer’s attempt to invoke qualified immunity by claiming no case on point would have made him aware he was not allowed to so thoroughly and lengthily violate this person’s rights. The Second Circuit says it’s not even sure why it’s spending so much time discussing this because it’s blatantly clear what happened here isn’t permissible under the Fourth Amendment.

This is not a close case, about which reasonable officers could differ. The law as it stood at the time of the events in question left no doubt that a person in possession of a firearm and a facially valid permit for that firearm had a clearly established right to be free from the kind of forcible and prolonged detention to which Soukaneh was subjected, absent any objective reason to suspect that the permit was forged or otherwise invalid.

That covers the forcible removal of Soukaneh from his car, his handcuffing, the search of his car, and his extended detention while the officer tried to come up with something to justify his actions after the fact.

It goes back to the lower court. But I imagine it will only be there briefly before Soukaneh is offered a settlement. Hopefully, that settlement will come hand-in-hand with the firing of Officer Andrzejewski. If this is the one time he got caught, just imagine what he’s gotten away with.

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Missouri Supreme Court blocks plea agreement for man scheduled to be executed next month

The Missouri Supreme Court has blocked an agreement that would have resentenced death row inmate Marcellus Williams to life without parole after new testing of DNA evidence complicated his innocence claim, reported CNN.

A St. Louis County Circuit Court judge has now set the agreement aside and scheduled an evidentiary hearing for August 28, court records show. The lower court may seek an administrative stay of Williams’ September 24 execution date while the proceedings unfold, the chief justice wrote.

The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision caps a whirlwind 24 hours in the case that has pitted Wesley Bell, a local prosecutor running for Congress as a Democrat, against state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican seeking reelection.

Williams, 55, has long maintained he did not murder Felicia Gayle, a one-time reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found stabbed to death in her University City home in 1998. He was convicted in 2001 of first-degree murder, burglary and robbery, among other charges, and sentenced to death.

Twenty-three years after his conviction, Williams’ innocence claim is championed by attorneys for the Innocence Project and the Midwest Innocence Project.

In January, the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, led by Bell, filed a motion to vacate Williams’ conviction, saying DNA evidence that could purportedly exclude Williams as the killer had never been reviewed by a court. Prosecutors were expected to present DNA evidence in court Wednesday that they say would exclude Williams as the person who wielded the knife used in the murder. The motion cited the analysis by three DNA experts.

However, the results of new DNA testing showed the evidence had been mishandled, complicating Williams’ innocence claim, the Associated Press reported.

The key hearing Wednesday did not get underway as scheduled, and after several hours, Bell’s office announced a consent judgment, an agreement between Williams and the prosecutor’s office. The deal dictated Williams receive a life sentence after entering a so-called Alford plea of guilty to first-degree murder. An Alford plea generally allows a defendant to maintain their innocence while acknowledging it is not in their interest to go to trial given the evidence against them.

A copy of the judgment said it was reached after a conference Wednesday in which a representative of Gayle’s family “expressed to the Court the family’s desire that the death penalty not be carried out in this case, as well as the family’s desire for finality.” Gayle’s widower declined to comment on Thursday.

The Missouri attorney general had fought Bell’s motion and opposed Wednesday’s agreement, saying in a statement new DNA test results indicated the evidence would not exonerate Williams.

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GOA Conference: 'Trump with halo around his head, a bloodied ear, and a crown of rifle rounds'

On the morning of August 17, Donald Trump appeared on a large screen in the Knoxville Convention Center’s Grand Ballroom as the first-ever Gun Owners Advocacy and Leadership Summit got underway, reported The Trace. “We’re now running against the most radical gun-grabber that has ever been nominated for president of the United States,” Trump warned. “Kamala Harris has supported gun confiscation schemes throughout her career, and she does it constantly. That’s really putting her right up alongside some of the most dangerous dictators anywhere in history.”

Trump then delivered a message repeated often at the two-day event. “The one thing with gun owners, and I don’t know why, maybe they just have a certain way about them, maybe they are rebellious, but they don’t vote. They gotta get out and vote,” he said. “If the gun owners of this country voted, just a small percentage of them, we would have a victory like you’ve never seen.”

Trump’s appeal and the summit itself underscore the increased clout of Gun Owners of America, the group behind the event. Founded in 1976, GOA has always billed itself as a more extreme, no-compromise alternative to the National Rifle Association. It opposes all firearms restriction, wants the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives abolished, and believes its mission is rooted in the Christian Bible. Since 2019, when revelations about misuse of funds began to erode the NRA’s membership, revenue, and status in the gun movement, the GOA and an array of smaller organizations have moved to fill the void, spending more on lobbying and wading deeper into electoral politics. 

Steven Inglima, a member of both groups who had driven to the summit from North Carolina, said that while the NRA remains bigger and more varied in its programs, the GOA is “by far the more important organization” because of its hard line. “Once you start compromising a right, it stops being a right,” said Inglima, 71. “The GOA is on point, far more on point, than the NRA.”

Some speakers made digs at the NRA, including the group’s former spokesperson, Dana Loesch, who drew cheers with a reference to the controversial spending habits of former NRA leadership. “There are organizations that worry about wardrobe and makeup more than lobbying for your rights in Washington, D.C.,” Loesch told an audience. “And if they have any problem with what I just said, they can email me at kiss my A double-snakes dot com.”

The summit was an amalgam of pro-gun absolutism, religiosity, and commerce. (GOA’s senior vice president, Erich Pratt, ended one prayer session by thanking the Lord and Brownell’s, a firearm’s company and the event’s primary sponsor.) Many panelists were so-called gun influencers, social media personalities who get firearms industry cash to produce content geared toward gun enthusiasts. One influencer, Johnny B, kicked the summit off with an event he called “Spicy Friday.” “They hate you and they hate America, but I am not going to tone it down,” Johnny B vowed before showing memes to a chuckling crowd. One meme — “Kamala Harris Hits the Campaign Trail” — depicted a young woman in a skin-tight blue dress soliciting a trucker. Another showed Michelle Obama holding a sign that read, “Black Dudes for Harris.”

On an exhibition floor, firearms and accessory makers displayed a range of goods, from hunting arms, self-defense pistols, and AR-15-style rifles to Second Amendment-themed bourbon, ballistics dummies, and high-powered rifle scopes. Browsers wore T-Shirts emblazoned with statements like “ATF is Gay,” “Taxes are Gay,” and “Guns Don’t Kill People, Feds Do.” One T-shirt for sale identified the wearer as a “Waterboarding Instructor.” Also on display was a 1969 Ford Mustang driven by John Wick, a fictional hitman featured in a series of revenge fantasy films that have served as product placement vehicles for the firearms industry. Nearby, a large poster showed Trump with a halo around his head, a bloodied ear, and a crown of rifle rounds, his torso bare, tattooed, and muscular. “It Was God Alone,” the poster read, a reference to the belief among many attendees that a divine hand had saved the candidate from assassination.

On panels, speakers urged parents to take their children out of public schools, where “the feminist education cult” holds sway and “the male spirit is crushed.” Kids who stay in public school will ultimately reject their parents’ values, an audience was told. Millennials are proof. “They are voting for Kamala,” a speaker said. “They don’t even know what bathroom to use.” 

GOA regional political directors held a discussion on organizing, describing how their real fight was not with Democrats, but with Republicans willing to strike deals. “They’re fine wearing the boots of oppression,” one panelist said, “so long as they get to do the curb-stomping.” 

Sam Paredes, a GOA board member who leads Gun Owners of California, gave a talk highlighting the threat posed by “radical humanists,” whom he denounced as corrupt because they base their ethics on sources not supernatural. “We are fighting evil,” said Paredes, who advocated a combative stance when dealing with opponents. “If you act by nature and respond politely,” read one slide in his presentation, “the liberal will crush you!”  

Behind the sometimes bizarre rants there was a deep political conviction, summarized early in the summit by Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, known as ‘Kane’ in his pro-wrestling days: “Our Constitution contains a fail safe, our Constitution contains what I call a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency clause.’ Our constitution contains the Second Amendment.” 

Jacobs was clear that he does not want that glass broken, but views it as an essential deterrent. “Any petty tyrant that thinks and dreams that they can oppress us has to contend with their worst nightmare,” he said, “millions of everyday people, standing in opposition to them, armed to the teeth.”

Many at the summit saw Harris as a threat to the continued vitality of that deterrent, not least because of her perceived determination to confiscate guns. Rallying gun owners to defeat her in November was the chief talking point of several speakers. (Of course, animus in GOA ranks to Harris predates her rise to Democratic presidential candidate. The group’s longtime attorney, William J. Olson, has supported a conspiracy theory that Harris does not meet the constitution’s citizenship requirement for the presidency.) Speakers claimed that there are 10 million hunters and gun owners in America who are not registered to vote. “If the gun owners of America show up on Election Day, we will wipe them out,” said Kash Patel, who served on Trump’s National Security Council and has promised that Trump will exact revenge on enemies should he regain office.

Harris has a lengthy record of supporting firearms restrictions. In 2019, she expressed support for AR-15-style rifle buybacks, but has recently dropped that position. Harris has said that as president, she will work to pass universal background checks, red flag laws, and a ban on AR-15-style rifles. While no such ban has been worked out in detail, it’s not likely to involve confiscating or buying back rifles already in circulation, but would prohibit their future sale. 

Inglima, the attendee from North Carolina, said that by prohibiting him from purchasing a certain firearm, such a ban would be tantamount to confiscation and a step toward Harris’s real goal of seizing guns. “Do I think that would be the endgame?” he said. “Of course.”

While Inglima’s view was widely held, it was not universal. Thomas Grant had traveled from Michigan for the event. While not a GOA member, he described himself as a gun rights supporter who was made uneasy by the rhetoric and partisanship on display. He said that to gain advantage, both sides in the gun debate tended to argue that they were on the verge of a cataclysmic defeat at the hands of their enemies, when the real picture was more complex. “I’m 35, so I remember that every time there is a Democratic candidate, it’s ‘They are coming for our guns! They are coming for our guns!’ and it did not happen,” Grant said. “Will they try to put in place tougher restrictions? Yes. But actually come in and confiscate guns? No.”

The inaugural summit had moments of buzz and a busy exhibition floor, but also sparse crowds for some events. In response to a request for attendance figures and comment on whether the summit met expectations, GOA spokesperson Luis Valdes provided a written statement that referred to the event by its acronym: “We don’t have exact numbers yet, but I can tell you this. There were more people who understood what “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED” means at GOALs than at the DNC convention right now. The people who attended GOALS actually understood what liberty and freedom is, unlike anti-gun Democrats who want to eviscerate one of the clear protections in the Bill of Rights.”

The convention center’s Grand Ballroom has a capacity of 2,640 and there were brief periods when the room appeared two-thirds full. But there were only about 50 people there to hear Pratt, the GOA’s senior vice president, end the event with a prayer. “Lord, we commit it to you — we commit these upcoming elections to you. We thank you that you are sovereign and that no matter what happens, we can rest in the fact that you are sovereign in history,” Pratt said. “Lord, we look forward to next year, to an even bigger and better convention.” 

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Creators: Trial by Jury Is Vital to American Democracy

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
August 20, 2024

In colonial America, the British deprived colonists the right to jury trials. This prohibition was cited as one of the causes of the American Revolution. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence, the document that delineated the Founders' grievances with Britain, included, "Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury." With that document, America's Founding Fathers made trial by jury a right for which they pledged "[their] lives, fortunes, and sacred honor."

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, "I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

Jury trials represent an important and expanding symbol of American democracy. With the advent of questioning the outcome of elections, the idea of one person, one vote is demonstrated by the jury trial.

The jury system, both civil and criminal, is vital to the American way of life. The United States Constitution provides through the Sixth Amendment, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to ... trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed."

Unfortunately, from that simple sentence, jury trials have become extremely complex and exceedingly rare. In the criminal realm, state jury trials occur in less than 5% of cases, and in federal court, there are even fewer trials.

On the civil side, trials have become so costly and unwieldy that cases are often settled, not on the merits but instead on the cost of seeing the case through to a verdict.

Although juries and jurors are sacrosanct to the justice system, a significant majority of people would rather expend time and effort at evading service than just doing their civil duty and serving — in much the same way that a significant number of people don't bother to vote.

There are hardships with serving as a juror. Getting away from work, following behind in class or scrambling for child care are just a few of the barriers to jury duty. However, the absence of working people, young people or child-rearing parents skews the jury pool. The idea of a jury of one's peers does mean a pool of jurors who don't work or can't work, are retired or disabled, or are older jurors with adult children or no children.

A robust and thriving justice system conducts trials. Forcing the government to prove an accused guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is vital to a democracy. Yet in the U.S., few people are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In a typical criminal prosecution, the first stage is a probable cause hearing. The burden of proof at that stage: "Is it more likely than not that a crime has been committed and the accused may have committed the crime?"

That is not a very demanding burden, and yet if the defendant pleads guilty, that is the only burden the government must meet. Although we speak in glowing terms of the state having to prove someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, very few prosecutions are ever tested at that threshold.

Jurors can also be an important check on overreaching by the government and prosecutors. Jury nullification has long been a means to protect defendants from unjust laws. Juries have the power to nullify the law in individual cases by finding a defendant not guilty even when there is enough evidence to prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.

During prohibition, it was alcohol laws. In the late 1990s, it was Dr. Jack Kevorkian and assisted suicide. Today, it is marijuana.

In this era of bashing long-standing institutions — elections, the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress — we would do well to double down on support for our system of trial by jury.

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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Court: Police may not seize property indefinitely without arrest

The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to the length of a seizure, a federal court ruled last week, significantly restricting how long law enforcement can retain private property after an arrest, reported Reason.

"When the government seizes property incident to a lawful arrest, the Fourth Amendment requires that any continued possession of the property must be reasonable," wrote Judge Gregory Katsas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in a unanimous ruling.

Most courts of appeal to pass judgment on the issue—namely, the 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 11th circuits—have held that, once an item is seized, law enforcement can retain the item indefinitely without violating the Fourth Amendment. These precedents have allowed police to retain personal property without clear legal grounds, effectively stripping people of their property rights merely because they were arrested. The D.C. Court of Appeals' ruling complicates this general consensus.

Though law enforcement does not have to return property "instantaneously," Katsas wrote, the Fourth Amendment requires that any "continuing retention of seized property" be reasonable. So while police can use seized items for "legitimate law-enforcement purposes," such as for evidence at trial, and are permitted some delay for "matching a person with his effects," prolonged seizures serving no important function can implicate the Fourth Amendment, the court ruled.

Given that the D.C. court finds itself in the minority on the question, some say that the case may be primed for the Supreme Court if the District chooses to appeal. "This case has potential to make national precedent," Paul Belonick, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco law school, tells Reason. "The influential D.C. Circuit deliberately intensified a circuit split and put itself in the minority of circuits on the question, teeing it up cleanly for certiorari."

The plaintiffs each had their property seized by D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). Five of the plaintiffs were arrested during a Black Lives Matter protest in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. on August 13, 2020.

As they were arrested, MPD officers seized their phones and other items. Though the protesters did not face any charges and were, in Katsas' words, "quickly released," MPD retained their phones for around a year. Some of the plaintiffs had to wait over 14 months to get their property back.

In the meantime, the plaintiffs say that they were forced to replace their phones and lost access to the important information on the originals, including personal files, contacts, and passwords. "The plaintiffs have alleged that the seizures at issue, though lawful at their inception, later came to unreasonably interfere with their protected possessory interests in their own property," Katsas explained.

"MPD is aware of the ruling and will continue to work with our partners at the United States Attorney's Office to ensure that our members are trained appropriately to ensure compliance with recent rulings," a spokesperson for MPD tells Reason.

"Practically, this case is important because police have been exploiting a gap in the Fourth Amendment," Andrew Ferguson, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law, tells Reason. "In situations where there is a lawful arrest, but no prosecution, there are no clear rules on retaining personal property. In these cases, police have been confiscating phones to punish protestors."

Michael Perloff, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, agreed that the D.C. Circuit's decision could set an important precedent going forward. "Nationally, we've seen litigants attempt to challenge similar practices only to fail because the court concluded that the Fourth Amendment does not limit the duration of a seizure," he tells Reason. "Moving forward, we are hopeful that the D.C. Circuit's opinion will lead courts to reconsider those rulings and, instead, enforce the Fourth Amendment as fully as the framers intended."

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Murder declines nationally at record pace

 There is a lot of evidence that murder is falling faster nationally than it has ever before — with the caveat that official murder data only exists through 1960, according to Jeff Asher at Jeff-alytics.

We won’t know just how fast murder fell in 2023, but all of the available data points to a decline that was at or near the fastest pace ever recorded last year. Murder was down 11.7 percent in our sample of 214 cities (see the link to 2023 data at the bottom) with available data, it was down 13.2 percent in the FBI’s quarterly data through Q4 2023, and it was down 12.2 percent in the 31 states that had published data as of about a month ago. Other sources such as CDC’s WONDER and the Gun Violence Archive also point to large declines in homicides and fatal shootings respectively.

One reason to suspect that last year was at or near the largest ever recorded is that murder usually doesn’t decline all that fast from one year to the next. The largest decline ever recorded came in 1996 and that was just 9.1 percent (by contrast, there had been 7 one-year increases that were larger than 9.1 percent before 2020’s monumental increase), so even a double-digit decline in murder would be the largest ever recorded.

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Study: PA State Police cite drivers at comparable rates for various races and ethnicities

Pennsylvania drivers were pulled over and cited by state police last year at roughly comparable rates for various races and ethnicities, according to information about 450,000 vehicle stops released by The Associated Press.

“The findings across multiple analyses demonstrated no substantive racial and ethnic differences in the initial reason for the stop by the Pennsylvania State Police,” Robin Engel, a researcher now at Ohio State, said in releasing the $194,000 study at the state police academy in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Researchers also found that trooper decisions about how to enforce the law after they stop someone are most strongly based on legal factors and not the drivers’ or troopers’ race or ethnicity.

However, troopers in the field were slightly more likely to engage in “discretionary” searches of Black drivers’ vehicles than those of white or Latino drivers when the drivers’ criminal histories were factored in, the report said.

Troopers do not ask drivers their race or ethnicity but record that information based on their subjective perceptions.

The state police and the American Civil Liberties Union in Pennsylvania two years ago agreed to settle a federal civil rights complaint alleging that seven troopers targeted Latino drivers for vehicle stops and detained them to check their immigration status. The 10 people who sued, all Latino, said troopers demanded “papers” from drivers and passengers.

To settle the case, the Pennsylvania State Police enacted a regulation prohibiting troopers from stopping anyone based on immigration status, citizenship or nationality, and stopping them from questioning people about their immigration status unless answers are needed for a criminal investigation unrelated to civil immigration laws.

The new report on traffic stops echoed last year’s findings that racial and ethnic disparities in Pennsylvania State Police traffic stops have become rare, likely because of increased scrutiny and supervision in the field. Authorities have also changed training tactics and prioritized treating people equally.

In an effort to make their work more transparent, state police have also been expanding the use of body cameras. Nearly half the force is now equipped to wear them.

Wider information about Pennsylvania traffic stops may soon become available. A law passed by the Legislature in May mandates other local police departments that serve populations of at least 5,000 people also must collect and make public traffic stop data. The measure takes effect at the end of next year.

Rep. Napoleon Nelson, D-Montgomery, chair of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus, called the newly released data “neither comforting nor extremely surprising.” He said the study will be closely reviewed and that information from smaller departments is needed to form a full picture.

“We don’t know the regional differences in statistical analyses yet, we haven’t seen that,” Nelson said. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

A review of nearly 4.6 million vehicle and pedestrian stops by 535 California law enforcement agencies in 2022 found that Black people accounted for nearly 13% of traffic stops in that state, where they make up about 5% of the total population. A 2022 study in Massachusetts found no evidence of racial disparity in the decision to pull over drivers, but Hispanic and Black motorists were more likely than white drivers to be cited and white drivers more likely to get off with a just a warning.

In Missouri, a 2018 review concluded African-American drivers were 85% more likely to be pulled over than whites and that white motorists were less likely to be searched than Black, Hispanic and American Indian people but more likely to be caught with contraband. The report also concluded that 7.1% of Hispanics and 6.6% of Black people were arrested after stops, compared to 4.2% of whites.

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Expelled former GOP congressman George Santos to enter guilty plea

George Santos, the former Republican congressman from New York undone by a mind-bending array of biographical lies and moneymaking schemes, has told prosecutors that he intends to plead guilty and avoid a federal trial that was expected to begin next month, according to two lawyers involved in the case and two other people with knowledge of the matter, reported The New York Times.

The plea, which is expected to occur on Monday in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y., would spare Mr. Santos from a trial that almost certainly would have been a colorful spectacle.

Mr. Santos, whose trial on 23 felony charges was scheduled to begin on Sept. 9, could still change his mind. But this week, two lawyers representing multiple witnesses in the case were told by federal prosecutors that Mr. Santos had decided to plead guilty.

Two others with knowledge of the plans confirmed that he intends to plead guilty on Monday; one of the people said Mr. Santos is expected to give a statement in court acknowledging his crimes. The terms of his expected guilty plea and what sentence he might face were not clear.

Public court records show that an in-person hearing has been scheduled for Monday afternoon at the request of prosecutors and Mr. Santos’s lawyers. The records did not explain the purpose of the hearing. Mr. Santos and one of his lawyers, Joseph Murray, did not respond to requests for comment.

The expected plea was first reported by Talking Points Memo.

Mr. Santos, 36, was first indicted on 13 charges in May 2023 after a lengthy investigation into a series of financial crimes that federal prosecutors accused him of. Ten more counts followed in October.

Mr. Santos had initially pleaded not guilty to all counts, and, in an apparent effort to invoke former President Donald J. Trump, declared the prosecution to be “a witch hunt.” His apparent decision to change course comes months after two-thirds of his colleagues in the House of Representatives voted to expel him in December — making him only the sixth member of the House to be expelled in the body’s history.

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SCOTUS temporarily blocks new Title IX rules in some states

The Supreme Court temporarily continued to block Education Department rules intended to protect transgender students from discrimination based on their gender identity in several Republican states that had mounted challenges, reported The New York Times.

The emergency order allowed rulings by lower courts in Louisiana and Kentucky to remain in effect in about 10 states as litigation moves forward, maintaining a pause on new federal guidelines expanding protections for transgender students that had been enacted in nearly half the country on Aug. 1.

The order came in response to a challenge by the Biden administration, which asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a number of Republican-led states sought to overturn the new rules.

The decision was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency petitions. But all nine members of the court said that parts of the new rules — including the protections for transgender students — should not go into effect until the legal challenges are resolved.

“Importantly,” the unsigned order said, “all members of the court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The decision handed a victory to the Republican-led states that had challenged the rules. A patchwork of lower court decisions means that the rules are temporarily paused in about 26 states.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the liberal wing and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, issued a partial dissent arguing that the court should have allowed other, undisputed parts of the new regulation to go into effect immediately.

“A majority of this court leaves in place preliminary injunctions that bar the government from enforcing the entire rule — including provisions that bear no apparent relationship to respondents’ alleged injuries,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Those injunctions are overbroad.”

The attorney general of Tennessee, one of the states challenging the regulation, welcomed the outcome. “This is a win for student privacy, free speech and the rule of law,” the attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, said in a statement.

Critics said the order erased crucial safeguards for young people.

“It is disappointing that the Supreme Court has allowed far-right forces to stop the implementation of critical civil rights protections for youth,” said Cathryn Oakley, the senior director of legal policy for the Human Rights Campaign.

The issue of transgender rights has become hotly debated as conservative state legislatures have passed a record number of stringent laws, including denying certain medical care and regulating bathroom use and pronouns.

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Trump's lawyers seek postponement of sentencing until after election

Attorneys for Donald Trump asked the judge overseeing the former president’s Manhattan criminal case to postpone his sentencing on 34 felonies, now set for Sept. 18, until after November’s presidential election, according to Politico.

In a letter to the court, Trump’s lawyers noted that the sentencing for the Republican presidential nominee’s conviction on falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star is currently scheduled to take place after the start of early voting.

And they argued that the sentencing should be delayed in order to allow Trump to weigh appellate options in response to Justice Juan Merchan’s upcoming ruling on whether Trump’s conviction should be tossed out in light of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision on presidential immunity.

Merchan is set to rule on Sept. 16, two days before the scheduled sentencing, on whether the presidential immunity decision should have an impact on Trump’s conviction. If Merchan — as many legal observers expect — rejects Trump’s bid to overturn the conviction on immunity grounds, the judge should not proceed to sentencing until higher courts can review that ruling, Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote.

“[S]etting aside naked election-interference objectives,” they wrote, “there is no valid countervailing reason for the Court to keep the current sentencing date on the calendar.”

Trump’s lawyers bid is likely a long shot. Merchan already pushed the sentencing from July to September in order to weigh the immunity ruling, and noted in a recent filing that the Sept. 18 sentencing date “remains unchanged.”

But Trump has succeeded in some of his numerous attempts to delay aspects of the proceedings in the Manhattan case, including pushing back the start of the trial in the spring by three weeks due to a document dispute.

For his conviction on 34 felony counts, Trump faces a range of possible punishments, including community service, home confinement and up to four years in prison. Legal experts have said they believe it is unlikely Trump will be sentenced to prison, in part because he is a first-time offender. And even if he is sentenced to prison he is unlikely to have to serve time until after the appeals process has been exhausted, which could take at least several months — and if he’s elected president after being sentenced to prison, the sentence almost certainly would be suspended while he’s in office.

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Mangino discusses wrongful death suit against Disney

Watch my interview with Lindsay McCoy on WFMJ-TV21 discussing Disney's unique defense to wrongful death suit.

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Creators: The Right to Bodily Autonomy

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
August 13, 2024

The art of movie making can be provocative, a glimpse of the past as a harbinger of the future. There is a scene in the classic film "Judgment at Nuremberg" where defense attorney Hans Rolfe, played by Maximilian Schell, is cross-examining a German judge about the Nazi sterilization of undesirable women. Schell cites a case where the high court of another country authorized the sterilization of a "feeble-minded" woman who was the daughter of a "feeble-minded" mother. The court opinion concluded, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Schell dramatically concluded his cross-examination by revealing that the author of the opinion was the vaunted American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Judgment at Nuremberg" was a fictional account of the war crime trials of German judges. However, Justice Holmes' opinion in Buck v. Bell — which upheld the sterilization of women in the state of Virginia — was indeed cited in Nuremberg.

Carrie Buck became pregnant at age 16. Her foster parents had her institutionalized as a "feeble-minded moral delinquent," despite her claims that she had been assaulted by their nephew.

After she gave birth, Buck was sent to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded in Lynchburg. Buck's mother was already a resident there.

Virginia had a law authorizing sterilization of, among others, the feeble-minded and the socially inadequate. With three generations available for examination, the colony set out to prove that the Buck women were defective. They sought to have Carrie Buck sterilized under the new law.

The Supreme Court supported Buck's sterilization by a vote of 8 to 1. Holmes' 1927 opinion is remembered as containing some of the most infamous language ever delivered by the high court.

Here we are 97 years later and America is embroiled in the same debate. Do women deserve the right to make decisions over their own bodies and decide when and if they want to have children?

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 abortion decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held "that Roe [v. Wade] must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision."

"The Dobbs case and the Buck case can both be boiled down to an issue about bodily autonomy," wrote Livia LaMarca, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, in 2022.

In Buck, the court acquiesced to the involuntary sterilization of women, and in Dobbs the court rescinded a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices. The decisions are about control. In both cases, according to LaMarca, the Supreme Court decided "that the right to one's own body isn't important enough to protect and that it isn't protected by the constitution."

According to USA Today, Buck was the first victim of Virginia's sterilization law. As a result, about 8,300 Virginians were involuntarily sterilized. The law was repealed in 1974, but Buck v. Bell has never been overturned.

The government — at different levels — continues to take away the right of women to make reproductive decisions. In 2015, a 36-year-old Tennessee woman had been charged with neglect after the death of her 5-day-old baby. The prosecutor would not move forward with a plea bargain to keep her out of prison unless she agreed to undergo a sterilization procedure. According to The Tennessean, the case ignited outrage over the proposed use of sterilizations as a bargaining chip in a criminal prosecution.

Seven years later, that very state enacted a total ban on abortion. The Tennessee law, with few exceptions, went into effect on Aug. 25, 2022. Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in their dissent in Dobbs, "The majority would allow States to ban abortion from conception onward because it does not think forced childbirth at all implicates a woman's rights to equality and freedom."

The Buck court, in much the same way, thought forced sterilization did not implicate a woman's right to due process and equal protection — a decision ignominiously invoked by the Nazis in defense of crimes against humanity.

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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