Media challenges constitutionality of Tennessee 'police buffer zone' law

A media coalition, represented by attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is challenging the constitutionality of a new Tennessee law that makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer after being told to stay back in certain situations.

In a federal lawsuit filed this week, seven news organizations — Gannett, Gray Local Media, Nashville Banner, Nexstar Media Group, Scripps Media, Tennessee Lookout, and TEGNA — argue that the law grants law enforcement officers limitless discretion to bar journalists and the public from reporting — for any reason or no reason — on protests and other newsworthy events, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

This is the third lawsuit Reporters Committee attorneys have filed on behalf of news media coalitions challenging so-called police “buffer zone” laws. In Indiana and Louisiana, news outlets won preliminary injunctions prohibiting the states from enforcing nearly identical laws that federal district courts found to be unconstitutionally vague.

“These buffer laws jeopardize reporters’ ability to bring their communities some of the news that matters most — about crime, disaster response, police misconduct, and more,” said Reporters Committee Staff Attorney Grayson Clary, who is representing the media coalition alongside Paul McAdoo, RCFP’s Local Legal Initiative attorney for Tennessee. “When law enforcement pushes the press out of eye and earshot, it’s the public that ultimately loses out.”

Tennessee’s law, which went into effect on July 1, makes it a misdemeanor for journalists and others to approach within 25 feet of an officer while the officer is engaged in official duties at a traffic stop, the scene of an alleged crime, or “an ongoing and immediate threat to public safety” — scenarios broad enough to sweep in most of what officers do in public, from enforcing the law at a public assembly to conducting disaster response. It authorizes officers to order individuals to back up even if they don’t pose a safety risk and are not obstructing law enforcement. And it also does not require officers to accommodate the First Amendment right to report on government activity.

In its lawsuit, the media coalition notes that journalists in Tennessee routinely come into close contact with police officers during the course of their reporting, including at crime scenes and football games. But under the new law, they could be forced to move far enough away from a newsworthy event that they are unable to record audio or video, speak to sources, or simply observe an officer’s actions. 

“With the Act now in effect,” the lawsuit argues, “whenever one of Plaintiffs’ journalists is told to retreat while standing within 25 feet of law enforcement, that reporter is put to a choice between committing a crime or forgoing newsgathering.”

In addition to its First Amendment arguments, the lawsuit alleges that the buffer zone law violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it fails to specify what kinds of behavior by a journalist or other member of the public might prompt an officer to issue an order to stay back.

“This law just gives officers too much discretion to pick and choose who is and isn’t violating the law, to the point where officers are essentially writing the law themselves,” Clary said. 

In Indiana and Louisiana, the district courts focused their decisions on the Fourteenth Amendment arguments, concluding that the laws in those respective states were unconstitutionally vague. 

Both states have appealed the rulings. In Indiana, the appeal is fully briefed, and the parties are awaiting a decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In Louisiana, attorneys for both sides are in the process of briefing the case in advance of oral argument, which hasn’t yet been scheduled.

Even as we await the appeals court rulings, the media coalitions’ victories at the district court level appear to be pushing lawmakers toward narrowing the scope of police buffer zone laws. In response to the district court’s opinion in Indiana, for example, state lawmakers passed a new buffer zone statute that only applies if officers in fact have reasonable grounds to believe that an individual threatens to interfere with the performance of their duties. Florida recently adopted a similarly narrower law. 

“The message is getting through,” said Clary, who has helped litigate all three media coalition lawsuits. “I still don’t think those laws are perfect. I think there’s still a risk that they’ll sweep in more legitimate speech and newsgathering than necessary in practice on the ground. But I do think it’s encouraging that outside the courtroom, there’s clearly been a shift towards a narrower and less speech suppressive version of these statutes, even if I wish states weren’t going down this road at all.”

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American Concentration Camps: Rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes

 Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

When it comes to the topic of concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer wrote the book — literally. The Washington, D.C.-area writer’s own personal curiosity about the origins and history of this inhumane practice — and her sense that many people view the subject too narrowly through the lens of Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin’s USSR — sparked her 2017 book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Although her book traces the long arc of cruel and often disease-ridden detention camps beginning in 1890s’ Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War, one question loomed largest, especially when it was published in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term and a crackdown on immigrants at the southern border.

Could it happen here?

Eight years later, Pitzer has no doubt: The push for a network of American concentration camps — rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes, holding them indefinitely without due process, in crowded, squalid conditions — isn’t just underway. It’s happening faster than the veteran author could have imagined, especially when compared with the growth of Germany’s camps between when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933 and the start of World War II six years later.

“I’m particularly concerned about where we are now, because we’re well into that five-year period in terms of we’re already doing sweeps, right?” Pitzer said. “We’ve already got masked guys. We’re already disappearing hundreds of people to … foreign countries, or to the Everglades, or now to Fort Bliss” — the El Paso, Texas, military base, which the Trump regime just awarded a $1.2 billion contract for a large new camp.

When I connected with Pitzer this week, she was trying to finish an unrelated project, but kept getting interrupted by pesky journalists like me wanting to talk about One Long Night and the rapid push to erect a U.S. gulag archipelago of camps like the large one hastily thrown up by Florida officials in the fetid swamps of the Everglades.

Anyone clinging to their belief that a democracy like the United States could never go down the trail of large-scale inhumanity blazed by 1930s’ Germany or Russia should have had that faith shattered by the $600 million-a-year, constructed-in-days immigrant detention camp that opened on July 1 in the swampland west of Miami.

Just the quasi-official name bestowed on the new camp by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others — “Alligator Alcatraz,” reinforced by government tweets of fierce reptiles wearing “ICE” caps and Trump’s jokes about immigrants running from the Everglades’ man-eaters — is the cruelty-is-the-point exclamation mark. Pitzer and other critics of the regime’s mass deportation agenda refuse to call it by the sadistic name, but the alligator branding is hardly the only clue to intentional inhumanity.

“It’s like a dog cage,” a detained Cuban immigrant, Rafael Collado, said by phone to reporters in Miami, describing a wetlands facility that floods frequently, where detainees lack showers, the food is rancid, the overhead light is continuous, and the mosquitoes are voracious.

For Pitzer, the mosquito plague at the Everglades camp is a revelation of its common bond with the worst camps of the last 130 years. “Mosquitoes have likewise long had a starring role in concentration camps around the world, starting with the first reconcentrados in Cuba in the 1890s,” she posted recently on Bluesky. Malaria was endemic at early camps there and with America’s early 20th-century detainees in the Philippines, but later the USSR and China would intentionally torture their prisoners with exposure to the biting and disease-bearing insects.

One of Pitzer’s goals in writing One Long Night and her follow-up works has been to define what exactly a concentration camp is.

She called it “the mass detention of civilians without any real trial. So if there’s a trial, it’s a show trial.” Detainees are held “on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or some aspect of identity instead of as a consequence of a specific crime that they’ve done and been convicted of. And it was almost always done for political gain. And what I saw all over, but also in the U.S., was the way, particularly after 9/11 in ‘the war on terror,’ that it was used to sort of consolidate political power.”

The most famous case study, in Nazi Germany, is also the source of many current misconceptions, since the “final solution” death camps, such as Auschwitz in Poland, where some of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in gas chambers, have often been what people think of. But the first well-known German concentration camp, Dachau, opened less than two months after Hitler took power in early 1933, and was used to detain — not slaughter — the Nazis’ political opponents.

“It was used in a kind of social engineering way,” Pitzer said of Hitler’s early camps. “There were a lot of homeless people, there were a lot of career criminals that they put in the camps to kind of dilute the percentage of political prisoners. So it would be more of a PR thing. People would support it more. You saw detention, particularly, of gay men.”

For Pitzer, the controversial but ultimately unpunished methods America used on Muslim detainees after the 2001 terror attack, including torture tactics such as waterboarding detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba or CIA “black sites” around the world, established a baseline of depravity the Trump regime is now building on.

It’s clear the unsanitary Florida detention camp isn’t a one-off, but rather a model for what the 47th president and his immigration guru, Stephen Miller, hope to accomplish over the next three-and-a-half years.

Right now, the surge in raids on unauthorized immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already created an all-time high number of detainees at more than 56,000, which is far more than the federal government can handle. That’s led to horrendous makeshift situations like an ICE office in Manhattan, where leaked videos show detainees held in what’s supposed to be an office, as a man shouts that “they’re treating us like dogs in here.”

The Florida concentration camp model will expand, now that Congress has approved a massive $45 billion appropriation for new immigration detention sites, with another $29 billion to hire more masked agents to arrest people and fill them.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a plan for a new network of sites in military bases across the country, including one at New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst that a critic has already dubbed “the Garden State Gulag.” A 5,000-bed camp planned for Fort Bliss, near the border with Mexico, has already raised red flags after the contract went to an inexperienced firm, but Pitzer noted this isn’t the only problem with using military sites.

“It’s not like it’s a secret prison, but it is a closed space,” she said. “And it’s going to be harder to know what’s happening and to keep track of it.” The author shares my concern that as the concentration camps gain momentum, the purpose of them will shift — maybe to incarcerate protesters or political prisoners, or Americans stripped of their citizenship.

Pitzer said her research has shown these camps “almost always transcend whatever were the original goals of even the very bad actors that imposed the camps in the first place. And so what we are looking at potentially happening here is not just sort of Stephen Miller’s visions being fulfilled. We could be looking at something much worse over time that we aren’t even imagining yet.”

With Pitzer, I share a fascination with the history of concentration camps and a sense of horror watching this story unfold on U.S. soil, in my own lifetime. We do need to be honest about American history: This has happened before, not just overseas, but here during World War II, when approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved into camps. Still, the growing prevalence of Holocaust education with its rallying cry of “Never Again,” and a U.S. apology over that Japanese internment made me hope — even believe — that I’d never have to write a column like this.

I was wrong.

Pitzer told me that while she is worried about the speed with which concentration camps are being implemented, and about the weakness of institutions like Congress or the media that could play a role in stopping this, she also feels some hope in sinking public support for Trump’s immigration agenda and the protests that have occurred.

“What they don’t have in place yet is that there’s actually still a tremendous amount of personal liberty and ability to dissent among most of the American population,” she said. Yet, if we don’t raise our voices immediately, that ability could disappear quickly. The moment to scream “Never Again” is right now, not during your grandchild’s history class.

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Harsh and callous tactics used and condoned by masked ICE agents

On the morning of 2 May, teenager Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio was driving to his landscaping job in North Palm Beach with his mother and two male friends when they were pulled over by the Florida highway patrol, according to The Guardian.

In one swift moment, a traffic stop turned into a violent arrest.

A highway patrol officer asked everyone in the van to identify themselves, then called for backup. Officers with US border patrol arrived on the scene.

Video footage of the incident captured by Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen, appears to show a group of officers in tactical gear working together to violently detain the three men*, two of whom are undocumented. They appear to use a stun gun on one man, put another in a chokehold and can be heard telling Laynez-Ambrosio: “You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother.” Afterward, agents can be heard bragging and making light of the arrests, calling the stun gun use “funny” and quipping: “You can smell that … $30,000 bonus.”

The footage has put fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used by US law enforcement officials as the Trump administration sets ambitious enforcement targets to detain thousands of immigrants every day.

“The federal government has imposed quotas for the arrest of immigrants,” said Jack Scarola, an attorney who is advocating on behalf of Laynez-Ambrosio and working with the non-profit Guatemalan-Maya Center, which provided the footage to the Guardian. “Any time law enforcement is compelled to work towards a quota, it poses a significant risk to other rights.”

Chokeholds, stun guns and laughter

The incident unfolded at roughly 9am, when a highway patrol officer pulled over the company work van, driven by Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother, and discovered that she had a suspended license. Laynez-Ambrosio said he is unsure why the van was pulled over, as his mother was driving below the speed limit.

Laynez-Ambrosio hadn’t intended to film the interaction – he already had his phone out to show his mom “a silly TikTok”, he said – but immediately clicked record when it became clear what was happening.

The video begins after the van has been pulled over and the border patrol had arrived. A female officer can be heard asking, in Spanish, whether anyone is in the country illegally. One of Laynez-Ambrosio’s friends answers that he is undocumented. “That’s when they said, ‘OK, let’s go,’” Laynez-Ambrosio recalled.

Laynez-Ambrosio said things turned aggressive before the group even had a chance to exit the van. One of the officers “put his hand inside the window”, he said, “popped the door open, grabbed my friend by the neck and had him in a chokehold”.

Footage appears to show officers then reaching for Laynez-Ambrosio and his other friend as Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard protesting: “You can’t grab me like that.” Multiple officers can be seen pulling the other man from the van and telling him to “put your fucking head down”. The footage captures the sound of a stun gun as Laynez-Ambrosio’s friend cries out in pain and drops to the ground.

Laynez-Ambrosio said that his friend was not resisting, and that he didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the officer’s commands. “My friend didn’t do anything before they grabbed him,” he said.

 

In the video, Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard repeatedly telling his friend, in Spanish, to not resist. “I wasn’t really worried about myself because I knew I was going to get out of the situation,” he said. “But I was worried about him. I could speak up for him but not fight back, because I would’ve made the situation worse.”

Laynez-Ambrosio can also be heard telling officers: “I was born and raised right here.” Still, he was pushed to the ground and says that an officer aimed a stun gun at him. He was subsequently arrested and held in a cell at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station for six hours.

Audio in the video catches the unidentified officers debriefing and appearing to make light of the stun gun use. “You’re funny, bro,” one officer can be overheard saying to another, followed by laughter.

Another officer says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”

Later in the footage, the officers move on to general celebration – “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” – and talk of the potential bonus they’ll be getting: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.” It is unclear what bonus they are referring to. Donald Trump’s recent spending bill includes billions of additional dollars for Ice that could be spent on recruitment and retention tactics such as bonuses.

Laynez-Ambrosio said his two friends were eventually transferred to the Krome detention center in Miami. He believes they were released on bail and are awaiting a court hearing, but said it has been difficult to stay in touch with them.

Laynez-Ambrosio’s notice to appear in court confirms that the border patrol arrived on the scene, having been called in by the highway patrol. His other legal representative, Victoria Mesa-Estrada, also confirmed that border patrol officers transported the three men to the border patrol facility.

The Florida highway patrol, CBP, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

Laynez-Ambrosio was charged with obstruction without violence and sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course. While in detention, he said, police threatened him with charges if he did not delete the video footage from his phone, but he refused.

Scarola, his lawyer, said the charges were retaliation for filming the incident. “Kenny was charged with filming [and was] alleged to have interfered with the activities of law enforcement,” he explained. “But there was no intended interference – merely the exercise of a right to record what was happening.”

In February, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed an agreement between the state and the Department of Homeland Security allowing Florida highway patrol troopers to be trained and approved by Ice to arrest and detain immigrants. While such agreements have been inked across the US, Florida has the largest concentration of these deals.

Father Frank O’Loughlin, founder and executive director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, the advocates for Laynez-Ambrosio, says the incident has further eroded trust between Florida’s immigrant community and the police. “This is a story about the corruption of law enforcement by Maga and the brutality of state and federal troopers – formerly public servants – towards nonviolent people,” he said.

Meanwhile, Laynez-Ambrosio is trying to recover from the ordeal, and hopes the footage raises awareness of how immigrants are being treated in the US. “It didn’t need to go down like that. If they knew that my people were undocumented, they could’ve just kindly taken them out of the car and arrested them,” he said. “It hurt me bad to see my friends like that. Because they’re just good people, trying to earn an honest living.”

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Massachusetts judge dismisses more than 120 cases due to lack of public defenders

More than 120 cases, including some for assault on family members and police, were dismissed recently in Boston, the latest fallout from a monthslong dispute over pay that has led public defenders to stop taking new clients, reported The Associated Press.

At a mostly empty courtroom, Boston Municipal Court Chief Justice Tracy-Lee Lyons invoked the Lavallee protocol in dismissing case after case. It requires cases be dropped if a defendant hasn’t had an attorney for 45 days and released from custody if they haven’t had one for seven days. Tuesday was the first time it was invoked to drop cases, while suspects in custody have been released in recent weeks.

Most were for minor crimes like shoplifting, drug possession and motor vehicle violations.

But several involved cases of assault on police officers and domestic violence. One suspect allegedly punched his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach and slapped her in the face. Another case involved a woman who was allegedly assaulted by the father of her child, who threatened to kill her and tried to strangle her. A third case involved a suspect who allegedly hit a police officer and threated to shoot him.

The judge, repeatedly invoking the Lavallee protocol, dismissed almost all of the cases after being convinced public defenders had made a good-faith effort to find the defendants an attorney. No defendants were in court to hear their cases being dismissed.

“This case will be dismissed without prejudice,” Lyons said repeatedly, noting that all fines and fees would be waived.

Frustration from prosecutors over dropped cases

Prosecutors unsuccessfully objected to the dismissal of many of the cases, especially the most serious being dismissed.

“The case dismissals today, with many more expected in coming days and weeks, present a clear and continuing threat to public safety,” James Borghesani, a spokesperson for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, said in a statement. They vowed to re-prosecute all the cases.

“Our prosecutors and victim witness advocates are working extremely hard to keep victims and other impacted persons updated on what’s happening with their cases,” he continued. “These are difficult conversations. We remain hopeful that a structural solution will be found to address the causal issues here and prevent any repeat.”

Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, speaking to reporters in Fall River, said the situation needed to be resolved.

“This is a public safety issue and also a due process issue as people need representation,” she said. “I know the parties are talking. They have got to find a way to work this out. We need lawyers in court ... and certainly they need to be paid fairly.”

Dispute revolves around pay

Public defenders, who argue they are the lowest paid in New England, launched a work stoppage at the end of May in hopes of pressuring the legislature to increase their hourly pay. The state agency representing public defenders had proposed a pay increase from $65 an hour to $73 an hour over the next two fiscal years for lawyers in district court, an increase from $85 an hour to $105 an hour for lawyers in Superior Court and $120 an hour to $150 an hour for lawyers handling murder cases.

But the 2026 fiscal year budget of $60.9 billion signed early this month by Healey didn’t include any increase.

“The dismissal of cases today under the Lavallee protocols is what needs to be done for those individuals charged with crimes but with no lawyer to vindicate their constitution rights,” said Shira Diner, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law and the immediate past president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It is, however, not a solution to the deep crisis of inadequate pay for bar advocates. Until there are enough qualified lawyers in courts to fulfill the constitutional obligation of the right to counsel this crisis will only intensify.”

The pay of public defenders is a national issue

Massachusetts is the latest state struggling to adequately fund its public defender system.

In New York City, legal aid attorneys are demanding better pay and working conditions. Earlier this month, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a two-year state budget into law that increases the pay of public defenders and district attorneys in each of the next two years. That comes after the Legislature in 2023 also increased the pay to address rising caseloads, high turnover and low salaries.

Public defenders in Minnesota averted a walkout in 2022 that threatened to bring the court system to a standstill. A year later, the legislature came up with more funding for the state Board of Public Defense so it could meet what the American Bar Association recommends for manageable caseload standards.

Oregon, meanwhile, has struggled for years with a critical shortage of court-provided attorneys for low-income defendants. As of Tuesday, nearly 3,500 defendants did not have a public defender, a dashboard from the Oregon Judicial Department showed. Of those, about 143 people were in custody, some for longer than seven days.

Amid the state’s public defense crisis, lawmakers last month approved over $2 million for defense attorneys to take more caseloads in the counties most affected by the shortage and over $3 million for Oregon law schools to train and supervise law students to take on misdemeanor cases.

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Law&Crime: Donald Trump's latest legal effort may escalate fight over Jeffrey Epstein files

Matthew T. Mangino
Law&Crime News
July 23, 2025

President Donald Trump has all sorts of problems with the criminal justice system.

He pardoned hundreds of men and woman who were convicted of storming the capitol on Jan. 6, and his Department of Justice has purged career prosecutors who effectively conducted the prosecutions.

The Trump DOJ, headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, has launched an investigation into the former director of the FBI James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan who looked into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump has fared much better with civil lawsuits — not those litigated, but those settled. His record with civil verdicts — those verdicts rendered by a jury — is not so good. New York Attorney General Letitia James got a verdict for the people of New York for $355 million against Trump for business fraud.  E. Jean Carroll was awarded $88.3 million as a result of two successful defamation jury verdicts against Trump.

On the other hand, Trump received a $15 million settlement – not in the form of a jury award, but money forked over by ABC Disney Entertainment. Paramount CBS did the same, handing Trump $16 million, and then announced the end of the popular "Late Show," hosted by Stephen Colbert, after Colbert called the payment a bribe to secure an upcoming merger.

No wonder, then, that Donald Trump has filed another lawsuit against a big-time media company. The president has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.

President Donald Trump, from left, speaks while signing an executive order as Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, listen in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The lawsuit was filed in a Florida federal court seeking $10 billion in damages. According to The Guardian, the suit came only a day after the WSJ "reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared."

The card reportedly concluded with "Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret."

Trump has denied the report and claimed the letter is a fake.

This lawsuit may be more about trying to extract Trump from the center of the Epstein scandal than to cash in another cowering media outlet.

A little more than a week ago, a two-page memo from the Department of Justice and the FBI said they found no evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful people or kept a "client list," and they reiterated that he died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019.

According to NPR, Epstein's death and imprisonment have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, including a "prominent belief amplified by numerous right-wing figures who now serve in the Trump administration that the sex trafficker's death is proof, in part, that the government is run by shadowy figures out to undermine Trump."

As the outrage on the right grows, Trump posted a lengthy message on his Truth Social website telling his supporters to "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about," and spread baseless conspiracies that the so-called files were created by Democrats to go after him. That post didn't go over well with Democrats or Republicans.

While pressure from Democrats is the norm, dissent from within the Trump administration is not. The President's inner circle — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino — have been at odds with each other over the handling of the Epstein files. Prominent GOP leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have suggested the files be released.

Then, on Friday, the president capitulated, ordering Bondi to seek the unsealing of grand jury testimony from the prosecution against Epstein."

Will the grand jury testimony calm the storm — or just fuel the growing tumult facing Trump and his administration?

(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. He is a regular contributor to Law&Crime. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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Mangino discusses Kohberger sentencing on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Derek Steyer of WFMJ-TV21 discussing the Idaho sentencing of Bryan Kohberger.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Trump's case against Wall Street Journal faces hurdles

 Donald Trump's legal case against the Wall Street Journal over a story about the U.S. president and Jeffrey Epstein could face hurdles, one of which is that it does not appear to comply with Florida state rules over the timing of defamation lawsuits, legal experts told Reuters.

If the case proceeds, Trump would need to clear a demanding "actual malice" standard that must be met by public figures to win in U.S. defamation cases. The standard means Trump must prove the paper knew the article was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth.

The Wall Street Journal lawsuit is the latest in a series of cases Trump has filed against news outlets, and experts said his demonstrated willingness to sue could have a chilling effect on coverage of his administration even if the suit was ultimately unsuccessful.

Trump sued the Journal and its owners including Rupert Murdoch in Miami federal court on Friday, seeking at least $10 billion on each of two defamation counts. He said the newspaper defamed him in a July 17 report that said Trump's name was on a 2003 birthday greeting for Epstein that included a sexually suggestive drawing and a reference to secrets they shared.

A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent, said on Friday the company was confident in the accuracy of its reporting and would vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty and the case was dismissed after his death.

Backers of conspiracy theories about Epstein have urged Trump to release investigative files related to the disgraced financier and sex offender.

Two lawyers with experience in defamation law said Trump did not appear to have complied with a Florida law requiring anyone bringing a defamation case against "a newspaper, periodical, or other medium" to notify the defendant at least five days before filing suit.

That means the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, would have no option but to dismiss the case if the Journal asked him to do so, though Trump may be able to re-file it, the experts said.

The Journal published its story on Thursday. In his lawsuit on Friday, Trump's lawyers said the Journal informed Trump about the forthcoming article last Tuesday, and they sent the paper an email that same day asserting that the article would be false and defamatory.

That timeline does not appear to comply with Florida's five-day notice law, said Marc Randazza, who said he had been practicing defamation law in Florida for more than 20 years.

"I don't even need to look at the merits of the case. The game is over," said Randazza of law firm Randazza Legal Group in Las Vegas. Randazza said Trump's case was "at least colorable" on the merits.

The White House deferred comment to Trump's lawyer in the case, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dow Jones declined to comment.

TRUMP MUST CLEAR HIGH BAR

In addition to the five-day notice hurdle, Trump would likely struggle to prove that the Journal acted with "actual malice," said Andrew Fleischman of law firm Sessions & Fleischman in Atlanta.

To back Trump's claim that the Journal knew the story was inaccurate, his complaint says the president informed the Journal before publication that the reporting was false.

Fleischman said a disagreement about the truth of an assertion is not enough to prove actual malice. Instead, Trump would need to demonstrate that the paper was deliberately lying.

The billions in monetary damages Trump was seeking is a "PR figure" designed to attract attention, said Fleischman, who frequently defends clients against defamation claims.

The figure would far exceed the largest defamation judgments and settlements in recent history, including a $1.3 billion judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Fox News' settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million.

Trump, a Republican who has pledged to "straighten out the press," has a mixed record in the numerous lawsuits he has filed against media outlets.

Judges have dismissed cases he brought against CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. More recently, television network ABC and CBS parent company Paramount (PARA.O), opens new tab have opted to settle cases brought by Trump.

Walt Disney (DIS.N), opens new tab-owned ABC News in December paid $15 million and publicly apologized for comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who inaccurately said Trump had been found liable for rape. Trump had been found liable of sexually abusing, but not raping, the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.

Paramount's $16 million settlement came as the company seeks approval from U.S. regulators for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump had initially sought $10 billion in his lawsuit, which alleged CBS deceptively edited an interview with Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris to favor her rival presidential bid.

Even if the Journal prevails, Trump's willingness to file claims against news organizations could have a chilling effect on journalists given the costs of defending against them, experts said.

BONGINO CASE DISMISSED

Trump would not be the first member of his administration to run up against Florida's five-day notice provision.

In 2019, podcaster Dan Bongino - who is now the deputy director of the FBI - sued online news outlet the Daily Beast for defamation over a story about his departure from the National Rifle Association's online video channel.

The case was dismissed the next year. U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez in Miami sided with the Daily Beast in finding that Bongino did not comply with the provision, but said the basis of his decision was that Bongino's case lacked merit.

Neither the FBI nor Bongino's personal lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.

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Crime rates fell considerably in the first six months of 2025

Crime almost certainly fell considerably in the United States in the first six months of 2025, reported Jeff-alytics. The decline in crime that began in 2023 and picked up steam in 2024 has accelerated even faster so far in 2025. Both violent and property crime likely fell with large drops in both murder and motor vehicle theft leading the way.

The national decline in murder stands out due to extraordinary drops in many cities. New Orleans recorded fewer murders through June 2025 than any year since 1970 even in spite of the January 1st terrorist attack. New York City has only recorded fewer murders once through June since 1960 (136 in 2017). Philadelphia recorded the fewest murders since 1969, Los Angeles since 1966, Baltimore since 1965, Detroit since 1964, and San Francisco had the fewest ever recorded (monthly data available to 1960).

As a reminder, murder rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2020 and it stayed at that consistently higher level in 2021 and 2022. Murder began dropping in 2023 and ended up falling at the fastest rate ever recorded that year. Then murder likely fell even faster in 2024 though we won’t have official FBI data on that for a few months. Now, just five years after the largest one-year increase ever, the US is on track to have the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded for the third straight year in 2025.

The assessment of national crime trends can be made thanks to a variety of independent data sources which have historically closely aligned with FBI national estimates. These alternative sources are needed because the FBI has reported no data on national crime trends since reporting Q2 2024 data last year.

Relying on sampling is a workaround to the traditional slowness of FBI data, but there is always a risk in interpreting the results of 18,000 agencies from a sample of 400+ agencies. That said, the size of the crime declines articulated by independent sources and the historical accuracy of those sources suggests that large declines will hold up even if the unofficial sources are off by more than usual.

The most recent formal FBI data is 18 months old now while the CDC is just finishing up its provisional 2024 count. Fortunately, both the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) and Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) tend to mimic the annual changes seen in the official sources. As such, these unofficial tallies can tell us what is happening without having to wait 9 or more months for the official word.

Both the GVA and RTCI point to massive declines in fatal shootings and murders occurring in 2025, the third straight year of large declines. The RTCI is now available through May 2025, and that reporting can be supplemented by sampling large cities with publicly available data to see that the trend continued through midyear.

The bottom line is that crime is falling in the United States led by the largest one-year percentage point decline in murder ever recorded. If that sentence sounds familiar it’s because it’s basically identical to what I wrote last year about our crime trends.

It is late enough in the year and the declines are large enough to feel confident that these trends will generally hold through the rest of the year. The exact degree of downward motion in the nation’s crime stats will still take some months to tease out, but a large decline is almost certainly inevitable at this point.

Real-Time Crime Index

The Real-Time Crime index was updated last week through May 2025. The new RTCI sample has data from 421 agencies representing more than 102 million people. This sample makes up around half of all the murders that occur in the US in a given year, so it’s a reliable bellwether of the nation’s murder trend. (As an aside, this is our biggest sample yet in terms of agencies and population covered).

The RTCI through May 2025 shows murder down 20 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2024, down 37 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2021 (at the height of the murder surge), and down 9 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2019 (pre-surge). Murder rolling over the last 12 months in this sample has fallen below 2019’s level

Violent crime is down roughly 11 percent in the RTCI while property crime is down 12 percent. There is undoubtedly some underreporting occurring as agencies still have 9 or so months to correct missing reports. But that issue does not impact the finding of large scale declines in every crime category even if the degree of the decline is likely slightly overstated by the collection methodology.

The decline is fairly uniform across cities/counties and population sizes. In 13 agencies covering 1 million people or more, murder is down 20.1 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent and property crime is down 12 percent. In 192 agencies covering under 100,000 people, murder is down 36 percent, violent crime is down 9 percent and property crime is down 14 percent.

Aside from murder, the motor vehicle theft decline stands out. Motor vehicle thefts surged in 2022 but have been plunging ever since. The decline in motor vehicle thefts started at the very end of 2023 and has been steady ever since. The surge in auto thefts that kicked off in 2020 has not been falling as long so it is still higher than pre-COVID levels, but we aren’t yet seeing signs of a slowdown.

Gun Violence Archive

The Gun Violence Archive data through June paints a similarly rosy picture of our nation’s gun violence trend (though even a large decline leaves gun violence far too prevalent). If a picture is worth 1,000 words then the next three graphs tell the story in 3,000 words.

The GVA isn't exact but it's another strong indicator that the historic drop in gun violence is continuing through June 2025.

Sampling Cities

The RTCI is updated through May which obviously isn’t quite midyear (though it's close!). I grabbed publicly available murder data from the 30 cities with the most murders in 2023 plus Jacksonville (which didn’t report in 2023 but would have been on this list if they had) to clearly see that the RTCI trend carried through midyear.

And…yep. That’s a huge decline through midyear in a decently large sample of cities. Violent and property crime are harder to sample because fewer agencies publish aggregated counts, but there’s no reason to suspect any change from the available May data once June is counted.

The Midyear Final Word

The final word on crime through midyear is that there is a sizable decline in every category of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime. The declines in crime shown by the RTCI data through May suggests crime may decline at or near record levels in every crime type we have measured since 1960. It’s also plausible that multiple crime types will feature the largest drop ever recorded moniker in 2025.

Not every crime is reported to police, there are still six months left in the year for these trends to moderate, and not every city or county is seeing historic declines (or declines at all). Yet the data so far this year paints the picture of declines that began in 2023 and 2024 continuing (and accelerating) through the first half of 2025.

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CREATORS: Overburdened Public Defense Puts Justice at Risk

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
July 22, 2025

Lawyers are personally responsible for the quality of representation they provide. Public defenders — those who provide criminal defense to indigent defendants — are, like their colleagues in private practice, bound by ethical responsibilities to limit their workloads to ensure competent representation.

More than six decades ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Gideon v. Wainwright. In Gideon, a landmark decision, it was unanimously ruled that state courts are required to provide legal counsel for those defendants accused of a crime who cannot afford a lawyer.

The spirit of Wainright not only requires that an attorney be present, but that the attorney be competent. With that in mind, public defenders with excessive caseloads cannot give appropriate time and attention to each client. According to a 2023 report by RAND, "Overburdened attorneys are forced to choose cases or activities to focus on, such that many cases are resolved without appropriate diligence."

The Wainwright decision is recognized as one of the most important of the 20th century. Now, more than 60 years later, is the decision falling short of its original edict?

In January, a Maine Court ruled that the state is violating the Sixth Amendment rights of hundreds of people by failing to provide attorneys to people charged with a crime. According to the ACLU of Maine, the court wrote the "Sixth Amendment demands continuous representation in Maine from the time the right attaches, and at all stages of the criminal process."

Private attorneys representing indigent defendants in federal courts across the country are either working for free or have stopped taking cases because the federal program that pays has run out of money, reported Source NM. The funding for independent indigent defense stopped at the beginning of July, after Congress froze all judicial branch funding at last year's levels as part of its continuing budget resolution.

The Sixth Amendment provides, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

In 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Powell v. Alabama. It was ruled that the U.S. Constitution requires defendants in capital cases to be given access to counsel upon request.

Ten years later in Betts v. Brady, the court refused to extend the right to counsel to criminal charges other than capital murder. In Betts, it was held that a refusal to appoint counsel for an indigent defendant charged with a felony did not violate the U.S. Constitution.

Then came Clarence Earl Gideon, a 51-year-old drifter and petty thief. He was charged with breaking and entering in Florida. The charge was a felony, and when Gideon first appeared before the court without funds or counsel, he asked the court to appoint him a lawyer.

The judge apologized to Gideon and said that Florida law only provides counsel in capital cases. Gideon replied, "The United States Supreme Court says I am entitled to be represented by counsel."

Gideon represented himself, was convicted and appealed. His appeal was denied, and his case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court appointed a very capable attorney, Abe Fortas, to represent Gideon. Fortas would one day take a seat on the Supreme Court.

In his successful argument before the high Court in 1963, Fortas adroitly pointed out that 37 states already provided for the appointment of counsel by statute, administrative rule or court decision. Eight states provided counsel as a matter of practice. Only five states — Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina — did not provide counsel for indigent defendants.

Unfortunately, today, there remains a clear distinction between the defense of poor litigants and litigants with resources. The quality of legal counsel is not the problem. But the challenge is enormous — an unyielding workload, stagnation or loss of funding and the disparity in access to investigators, experts and other litigation-related resources.

The convergence of those factors makes competent legal representation beyond the reach of many men and women accused 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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Is ICE evolving into a masked domestic military force?

Six months into the second Trump administration, two things are becoming clear: First, the president remains a nearly entirely non-strategic actor, motivated only by an abiding desire to accumulate ever greater power, adulation, and wealth. And second, he’s fundamentally changing the nature of the United States in ways that threaten to bring an end to the nation’s 249 year old status as the world’s leading democracy, reported Public Notice.

Despite Trump’s consistently haphazard “governance” style, it’s becoming easy to foresee how his regime could effectively void our democracy. The now fully MAGA-fied GOP is increasingly likely to lose the next presidential election after incurring bracing losses in the midterms and other intervening state races. And as the nation learned before and following the 2020 election, Trumpists are more than willing to use force and other extra-legal actions to attempt to cling to power.

For Trump and his cronies, the prospect of losing power — or even sharing it with Democrats in the event control of the House shifts in 2026 — could prove to be catastrophic because of their reasonable fear of being held accountable for criminality that dwarfs Trump’s first term. And unlike January 2021 — when the Big Lie scheme failed — Trump and his cohorts will have new tools to carry out a coup, including a massive federal police force with a proven willingness to engage in systemic illegality.

Trump’s brownshirts

From its outset, Trump 2.0 has been grounded on systemic illegality and unilateral executive actions, a course of (mis)conduct the administration has succeeded in pursuing because of pliant GOP majorities in Congress the Supreme Court. It’s all but certain that the administration’s authoritarian conduct will grow in scope and intensity over the succeeding months, in no small part because the GOP reconciliation bill will hand over a staggering $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security.

The bill includes nearly $30 billion in new “enforcement” funds. DHS boasts that it is already the largest federal law enforcement agency, with over 80,000 officers spread across nine organizations. But DHS says it plans to use the new funding to quickly hire 10,000 more more ICE thugs. And in recent months, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has systematically dismantled DHS’s oversight offices, thereby paving the way for a lot of corner cutting.

The bill also includes $45 billion for expanding detention facilities comprised of both government and privately contracted facilities, meaning DHS is working with a jail budget that far exceeds that of the federal prison system.

With this infusion of cash, the US for the first time will have a massive federal police force with its own rapidly growing concentration camp system, with a reach that extends directly into the nation’s largest states and municipalities, potentially displacing local governance in critical respects.

We do not have to wait to find out how ICE and other agencies will conduct themselves within the US, and particularly in blue states and municipalities with Democratic (and demographically diverse) populations. Just look at what began as a quasi occupation of LA County and has now expanded to encompass large swathes of the state of California. There, the new ICE is focused on creating a state of fear and uncertainty among entire communities, including with militarized assaults on workplaces, complete with chemical munitions.

Last week, for example, a phalanx of masked ICE thugs marched into LA’s MacArthur Park, smack in the middle of one of the city’s largest Hispanic communities, accompanied by California National Guard troops that Trump had dragooned over the governor’s objection.

After parading around MacArthur with assault rifles and other military paraphernalia that served no apparent purpose, the invading force retreated.

Also in recent days, masked and heavily armed thugs have descended upon such dangerous locations as farms at harvest time and car body shops, where they have used force, and in some cases beaten, immigrants and citizens alike.

With his mélange of ICE, FBI, DEA and — importantly — military agents and troops, Trump has finally succeeded in creating what he longed to establish during his first term: A huge, domestic militarized force answerable only to him and his cronies.

The nation has never had a national police force, let alone a lawless one that’s singularly committed to the political agenda of the president. While the rapidly growing ICE force is not yet operating as an authoritarian arm of a dictatorship, it is more than plausible that it could be transformed into that type of Gestapo-like “law enforcement” entity, as Thor Benson has argued.

In that regard, Trump has recently spoken about taking over one or more major cities, including New York, asserting that they need to be “straightened out.” While such Trumpian musings are dismissed by some, they must be viewed in the context of what amount to ongoing militarized invasions of several such municipalities.

Unpopular populism

Trump is frequently described as a “populist” leader, but few pundits address the definition of the term. Hitler and Mussolini were populists who took power without democratic mandates and quickly destroyed institutions. Likewise, there’s every reason to expect that Trump and his crew will attempt another coup given the increasing likelihood they’ll have a hard time winning again in free and fair elections.

While Trump did win the popular vote last year, his victory was narrow, and his popularity began to slide immediately after he took office. A current average of polls indicates he’s disapproved by around 52 percent of voters and approved by 44 percent. This is a near reversal of where Trump stood in January, when he (briefly) had net positive approval rating. Also, Trump’s approval on immigration, his signature issue in the 2024 race, has taken a huge tumble into negative territory, with as many as 51 percent of voters disapproving the gratuitous brutality and performative sadism they’ve witnessed in recent months.

Trump is losing the most ground with the independent voters who often determine the outcome of elections — his current disapproval rate among this critical cohort is nearly 61 percent. Likewise, his approval rating among Hispanic voters, who played a key role in the GOP’s success last year, has descended from negative two in February to as low as negative 26. All of this is predictably leading to a corresponding decline in Trump’s approval rating in several of the swing states that allowed him to prevail last year in the Electoral College.

Given that midterm elections are increasingly referendums on the party in power — and considering that the GOP has devolved into little more than a personality cult — it’s all but certain that the 2026 midterms (assuming they are remotely free and fair) will be determined by the electorate’s souring view of Trump’s governance. There’s also increasing reason to believe that voters’ opinions of Trump’s regime will be even more negative by November 2028, when the GOP presidential nominee will almost certainly run as Trump’s anointed successor. That’s because the policies Trump is pursuing are both increasingly unpopular and wildly destructive.

Trump talked a big game on the campaign trail about lowering costs for consumers. Instead, his economic “policies” have focused nearly exclusively on two areas: an increasingly irrational and likely illegal tariff regime, and the expansion of tax cuts heavily favoring the very rich (paid for in part by slashing healthcare coverage and food support for low-income people). Both of these were centerpieces of the regressive reconciliation bill he signed into law earlier this month.

A major midterm loss is hardly unusual for a president, particularly one in his final term in office. After Trump’s unpopular 2017 tax cuts and his failed effort to repeal the ACA the following year, the Republican Party (especially House Republicans) took a drubbing in the 2018 midterms. If, as seems increasingly likely, the economy is in a downturn a year from now, Republican losses in November 2026 could be even worse. Particularly if the midterms turn out badly for the GOP, Trump and his cronies will inevitably begin to fear the consequences of a loss at the polls in the next presidential election and to consider their options.

Given the already massive scale of criminality in the Trump regime from the White House on down, Trump and all of his cronies have even more reason to be concerned about the prospect of being held to account. Additionally, as Anne Applebaum recently observed, Trump’s massive expansion of executive powers will make the prospect of a Democratic president all the more frightening for the members of the administration. They will have every reason to expect that a Democratic successor to Trump in the White House will use the newly enhanced powers of the office to hold Trump and company accountable in ways they didn’t during the Biden years. Against that backdrop, Trumpers may consider ensuring the victory of Trump’s designated successor in 2028 to be essential as a matter of self-preservation.

As anyone who lived through January 6 remembers, Trump and his cronies have already shown themselves willing to attempt to hold on to power illegally. More recently, by pardoning the J6 insurrectionists en masse, Trump took a major step toward legitimizing right-wing coup schemes, much as Hitler rendered his failed Munich putsch into an event worthy of annual celebration.

 Therefore, it is not only possible, but must be viewed as likely that in the wake of an 2028 electoral loss, Trumpists will take every step available to them to maintain control of the White House — including, if necessary, illegal ones.

But by then, Trump and his crew will have new tools at their disposal, including a beefed up ICE that will include large phalanxes of masked thugs who are experienced in using violence at the president’s behest. Thus, if the time comes for Trumpers to effectuate yet another post-election coup, they will have a ready and willing militarized federal police force to back them up and will not have to rely on a ragtag array of right-wing tourists.

While many are currently rightly concerned about the impact Trump’s brutal “immigration crackdown” will have on undocumented persons, the danger of his creation of a massive, non-law-abiding federal police force could extend far beyond the immigration. Congress has just handed the coup leader in the White House new, dangerous tools that he and his cohorts could use in their next attempt to overturn the nation’s democracy once and for all.

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