The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice

Commentator and author Jeffrey Toobin interviewed Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, for The New York Times--here is the final question and answer: 

Toobin: Final question, Bryan. True or false: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice?

Stevenson: I think it’s true. Of course, it depends on people’s willingness to prioritize justice and refuse to tolerate injustice. But when I look at human history, it’s hard for me to say that it isn’t true. The fact that you and I are having this conversation in a space occupied by The New York Times is, in itself, evidence of that. I think about this all the time. The people who came before me would put on their Sunday best, go out to protest for the right to vote, get bloodied and beaten, then go home, wipe the blood off, change their clothes and go back out again.

My generation has not had to do that in the same way. Future generations, hopefully, won’t have to either. That just means the struggle for justice will take on a new form. So yes, I am persuaded of the truth of that — despite the moment we’re in. I guess one good thing about getting older is that you gain a broader perspective.

For example, in 1995, if you had told me we’d reach a point where the execution rate would drop dramatically, where very few people would be sentenced to death, where 11 states would abolish the death penalty, and where more and more states would choose not to use it — I couldn’t see that. I had to believe it. Or another example: Fifteen years ago, if you had told me I’d be operating a museum, a memorial and a park dealing with slavery, lynching and segregation — and that hundreds of thousands of people would come, that I’d even have to open restaurants and a hotel to accommodate them — I would’ve said that was crazy. And yet, here I am.

So I think that quote is really about whether we believe that truth has the power to be resurrected, even in the face of lies, and triumph. And I believe that, in every aspect of my being: culturally, socially, politically, spiritually. That’s what I’ve experienced. And the fact that there are difficult days, dark days, doesn’t dissuade me of that.

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SCOTUS hiding in plain sight

The best Supreme Court coverage (and coverage of any story, for that matter), is not without nuance—it’s true that some liberals have seen cause for hope in Barrett’s record, that some Trumpers (including, apparently, Trump himself) have been frustrated by it, and that there is at least some statistical grounding for such conclusions, according to The Columbia Journalism Review. Ultimately, though—as the Times journalist Jodi Kantor, who wrote the story with the aforementioned “confounding” headline and statistical analysis earlier this year, noted in a recent write-up of Barrett’s sit-down with Weiss—Barrett has almost never voted with the court’s liberals in “major cases.” And while her book tour is taking in mainstream outlets, Willis argued last week that she will mostly sit before friendly interlocutors. Barrett appears to understand “the particular political and ideological persuasions of people” who are willing to pay for her book, Willis wrote. “A publicity tour that kicks off with an exclusive excerpt in the Free Press is a publicity tour designed to appeal to people who approve of this Court’s agenda, and are glad to express their appreciation by opening their wallets.”

That’s a shame because, perhaps now more than ever, there are sharp questions for the justices to answer. Recently, the court has faced a slew of criticism for enabling Trump’s agenda—parts of which would appear to be out-and-out illegal—not least in a major ruling, for which Barrett wrote the majority opinion, that a majority of justices used to curtail the ability of lower courts to issue sweeping injunctions while failing to address the substance underpinning the case at hand: Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional order unilaterally ending birthright citizenship. At least in that case we got a clear rationale—the court has also recently been criticized for overturning rulings against Trump on its so-called “shadow docket,” sometimes without so much as a word of explanation. Last week, in a sight even rarer than Supreme Court justices sitting for media interviews, ten federal judges complained anonymously to NBC News that such behavior has not only left them struggling to divine the court’s will, but allowed for the impression that the justices think they’re a bunch of anti-Trump hacks. Over the weekend, Stephen Breyer, who retired as a justice in 2022, made an unusual public intervention defending a lower-court judge who had been rebuked from the bench for supposedly failing to follow Supreme Court precedent. Any criticism from Breyer was predictably indirect, but various prominent commentators have been more forthright. Last week alone, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser described the court as “Trumpified,” while Politico’s Ankush Khardori and Ezra Klein, of the Times, both attested to its extraordinary “deference” to Trump. Kate Shaw, a legal commentator and recent guest on Klein’s podcast, said that the court has, among other things, essentially allowed Trump to “refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress, remove heads of independent agencies protected by statute from summary firing, fire civil servants without cause, dismantle federal agencies, [and] call up the National Guard on the thinnest of pretexts.”

On the same episode of his podcast, Klein opened by referring to a widely shared essay that he published in the early days of this administration, making the case that observers shouldn’t take Trump’s various shocking actions at face value since, in doing so, they risk rhetorically imbuing him with powers he doesn’t have. Klein’s admonition was not aimed specifically at members of the press, but I noted at the time that it clearly applied to us; I broadly agreed that the media shouldn’t treat Trump’s power grabs as a fait accompli, but also noted a complicating factor: that time and again, Trump has been able to get away with things he really shouldn’t be able to do. One example that I cited was credulous coverage of the birthright citizenship order; fast-forward six months and Trump has not succeeded in implementing it, but neither has the idea been dismissed out of hand. Returning to his earlier essay last week, Klein noted that, for a time, his “bet looked sort of right,” with the courts intervening to curb Trump. The Supreme Court, however, has since reversed that trend.

A potential silver lining of this development, Klein argued, is that “maybe we’re not going to have the constitutional showdown many feared.” I also wrote about this fear in the early days of the administration, as talk of a “constitutional crisis,” and debate as to whether the US was in one or not, crested in the media; some experts argued that we were already at that point, with the administration appearing to have defied certain lower-court orders, but others cautioned that the sort of big-bang institutional conflict—the Supreme Court telling Trump to do something and him saying “make me,” for instance—that would signal a true crisis had yet to arrive, and straight-news reporters seemed reluctant to definitively use the term in their copy without attributing it to someone else. Since that moment, the debate seems to have quieted down somewhat, though from time to time, it gets revived. Search for the words “constitutional crisis” this morning, and the top results are all about Barrett: last week, Weiss prompted her to weigh in on the debate, and she dismissed the premise, adding, “I don’t know what a constitutional crisis would look like.”

Barrett did then offer up a definition—“We would clearly be in one if the rule of law crumbles,” she said, “but that is not the place where we are”—but her initial skepticism was actually sound: the concept of a “constitutional crisis” is nebulous, so much so, I argued earlier in the year, that the media coverage organized around it risked coming across as fussy, at best, unhelpful at worst. As some journalists did point out at the time, a constitutional crisis need not be ushered in by a big bang to be a crisis: one wisely noted that the idea exists as “a slope, not a switch”; others suggested that the court rubber-stamping Trump’s behavior might represent an even graver crisis than all-out conflict between the two. It is, to be sure, still early in Trump’s second term, and the court has yet to substantively weigh in on a whole host of matters. But it seems peculiar to me—even if I didn’t love the initial constitutional-crisis news cycle—that the volume seems to have been turned down now, given that, by really any credible definition, such a crisis is now here. (Whether the rule of law has yet “crumbled” is, perhaps, debatable, but the administration weaponizing it to go after its bêtes noires looks pretty crumbly to me.) Klein declared over the weekend, in a compelling essay headlined “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal,” that we have already entered the “authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency.” Inconveniently for a media industry that organizes coverage around defined “news pegs,” perceived novelty, and breathless “BREAKING NEWS” hype, such phases can be murky and repetitive and don’t always announce themselves explicitly (though Trump, a master of hype, announces his true intentions all the time). Many media critics have taken the press to task for not communicating the gravity of the threat with sufficient urgency or honesty. So far in Trump’s second term, I’ve been hesitant to endorse that conclusion, at least in its less nuanced forms. But it increasingly feels inescapable.

My hesitation was mostly grounded in the fact that it was still early, and in the clear-eyed coverage that I felt I had seen so far. But the latter often felt delayed itself, after years of more or less complacent media treatment of the institutional threat of Trumpism. And this observation did not apply only to Trump and his movement—as I wrote earlier this year, I also found the constitutional-crisis debate to be unhelpful because it risked obscuring the ways the US constitutional system might have been in crisis already, no few of which have been downstream of the flagrantly political conduct of the Supreme Court. Naive coverage of that conduct has been one form of long-running media complacency. There have been signs that such coverage has grown more hard-headed in recent years, though here, too, pinpointing a “big bang” inflection point is difficult. The death of Antonin Scalia, in 2016; the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, in 2022; and the growing scandal around justices’ extracurricular entanglements, in 2023, could all plausibly stake a claim. But none marked a total rupture with the media practice of putting justices on pedestals.

On CBS yesterday, there were moments to like in Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Barrett; on the whole, O’Donnell teased out at least some of the tension between the public’s increasingly political conception of the justices and the justices’ explicitly apolitical conception of themselves. Equally, however, it was possible to imagine a much more aggressive version of the interview that would have better met this moment—albeit, perhaps, not one to which Barrett would have agreed to subject herself. At one point, O’Donnell pointed out that Barrett is a “scholar of the Constitution” before reading her a section on the power of Congress to levy tariffs. “You’re a scholar of the Constitution, Norah,” Barrett replied, with a beaming smile. “You’re making me one,” O’Donnell laughed. In this exchange, Barrett was dodging a question that O’Donnell was right to put to her. Numerous bigger questions about the state of that Constitution, sadly, went unasked.

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CREATORS: Jails and Prisons Responsible for Brunt of Mental Health Care

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
September 9, 2025

Milton Dusky was 33 years old and suffering from Schizophrenia. He was experiencing visual hallucinations, depression and alcoholism. He was under the influence of alcohol and drugs when he accompanied two teenage boys across state lines and raped a young girl.

He was arrested and charged with a federal crime. He had an evaluation that found he was "oriented to time, place, and person," and competent to stand trial. In 1958, he was convicted and appealed.

In 1960, Dusky's case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. The High Court made a significant ruling regarding competency to stand trial. The court moved away from an analysis that considered whether an accused is "oriented to time and place and (has) some recollection of events" to a finding that an accused has "sufficient present ability to consult with his lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding — and whether he has a rational as well as factual understanding of the proceeding against him."

Competency is often confused with insanity. Competency is a determination of whether an accused can be tried for a crime. Insanity is a determination of whether an accused is responsible for a crime.

The M'Naghten Rule is the legal standard to determine a defendant's legal insanity and criminal responsibility at the time an offense was committed. It is not a clinical assessment of a person's basic awareness. It asks two central questions, based on the defendant's mental state at the time of the crime:

— Did the defendant know the nature and quality of the act they were doing?

— If they did, did they know that what they were doing was wrong?

Although the standards for competency and insanity are different, the impact on the accused can often be very similar and equally troubling. The Marshall Project recently examined what happens to an accused who is suspected of being incompetent. Some people can languish in jail for months and months waiting for a competency evaluation.

As The Marshall Project pointed out, "In the most severe cases, a court can issue a permanent finding of incompetence. Numerous states have long backlogs of criminal defendants waiting for 'competency restoration' before they can be tried in court."

Competency restoration is a term of art in the criminal justice system. An accused who is deemed incompetent is entitled to treatment that can stabilize the individual and enable that person, with medication and therapy, to aid in their defense and stand trial. Ideally, the treatment is provided at a forensic hospital. Unfortunately, those beds are scarce in most states, and individuals suffering from mental illness stay in jail until a bed is available.

One of the states with a waitlist for competency restoration is Pennsylvania. According to an investigation by Spotlight PA, "The (Pennsylvania) Department of Corrections and county jails have unintentionally become the largest providers of behavioral health services in the Commonwealth and are not sufficiently prepared and resourced to meet this population's needs."

To back up the findings, Spotlight PA teamed up with PrimeCare, a private contractor that provides healthcare to 37 jails across Pennsylvania, and the Lehigh Valley Justice Institute to review 10 years of mental healthcare data.

An analysis found that more than 60% of inmates screened for mental health problems needed services while incarcerated.

The nationwide shift away from civil commitment treatment beds toward forensic treatment is a huge part of the problem, Jerri Clark, a research and advocacy manager for the Treatment Advocacy Center, told The Marshal Project. "Punishment is never going to magically create insight for someone who is deeply unwell," Clark said. "You cannot punish someone out of their delusional thinking."

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

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Mangino discusses Ohio cold case murder prosecution on WFMJ-TV

Watch my interview with Leslie Huff on WFMJ-TV21 concerning the long delayed murder trial of Robert Moore in Youngstown, Ohio.

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American prisons are fast becoming the world’s worst nursing homes

 German Lopez writing in The New York Times:

American prisons are fast becoming the world’s worst nursing homes, increasingly filled with aging criminals who can barely walk, let alone commit another crime. The idea that we should lock up people for life, even through old age, is often framed as being tough on crime. In reality, it gives years, if not decades, of shelter, food and health care to convicted criminals and redirects money from programs we know do a better job of protecting the public.

Older people are much less likely to commit crime than the young. They are also much more expensive to lock up. Federal prisons with the largest share of older prisoners spend five times as much per person on medical care and 14 times as much on medications as other facilities, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.

States and counties, which oversee a vast majority of people in prison, cannot run deficits for long or print money, as the federal government can. Every buck that pays for one thing means a dollar less for another. Funds spent on locking up an old inmate could have helped pay for more police officers or other anti-crime initiatives or schools or roads or any of the myriad other demands on local governments.

I have reported on criminal justice issues for more than a decade. If I have learned anything, it’s that crime policy is all about trade-offs, more so than in most other areas. Releasing more old people from prison, however, is close to a free lunch. Not only could it save money, but if the savings are wisely reinvested, it also could improve public safety.

America is heading in the opposite direction. Over the past three decades, the share of prisoners who are 55 or older has multiplied fivefold. Two trends have accelerated the phenomenon: First, young people are committing far less crime, so they are less likely to fill up prisons. Second, tough-on-crime trends led to more life sentences and other long prison penalties, and time is now taking its toll.

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The age-crime curve is the least-appreciated fact of criminal justice. If you chart a man’s likelihood to commit crime over his life, the line will hover near zero until he reaches his teens. Then his chance of committing a crime spikes, almost vertically, over the next decade. Nothing is more dangerous, in terms of crime, than a young man in his late teens or early 20s. But starting around his mid-20s, the line starts to drop. This continues for the rest of a typical man’s life. By the time he’s in his 50s, he is less likely to commit crime than he was as a young teenager.

Those trends are true for the general public. Do they apply to convicted criminals? Yes. One federal study tracked prison inmates after their release in 34 states. Nearly 57 percent of ex-inmates 24 or younger ended up back in prison within five years. Fewer than 15 percent of those 65 or older did. In other words, a vast majority of older inmates don’t reoffend.

On some level, we all recognize this. We know the brain doesn’t finish developing until a person’s mid-20s. Physicality matters, too. As a teenager, I could fall out of a tree, get back up and sprint after my friends without feeling a thing. Now, in my mid-30s, I feel my back hurting for days if I make a wrong turn picking up my cat. Crime follows the same facts of life. The kind of poor judgment that leads someone to commit more crime is more common among the young, and so is the physical ability to make good on that poor judgment.

Outliers do exist. But a vast majority of killers are not serial killers, and a vast majority of criminals are not lifelong offenders. Many criminals, maybe even most, committed a crime under the particular circumstances of their age and the moment. Keeping criminals locked up when they’re young absolutely can stop crime. Older inmates, however, pose little threat to the rest of us.

Supporters of the status quo raise two counterarguments: First, people who commit heinous crimes deserve to remain in prison, no matter their age, to demonstrate society’s moral condemnation. Second, long prison sentences, including those that last through old age and death, are good because they deter others from committing crimes.

The first counterargument is about values. I would argue that criminal justice policies should prioritize protecting the public over retribution. We don’t need to turn prisons into nursing homes to show our disapproval of a crime; decades-long prison sentences do a good enough job. But reasonable people can disagree.

The second counterargument, however, is simply wrong. A thorough review of the research found that longer prison sentences’ deterrence effect is “mild or zero.” As part of his analysis, the researcher, David Roodman, tried to replicate prominent studies that claimed evidence of long sentences deterring criminals. He found they contained serious problems that skewed their conclusions. All told, threatening to lock up people until their late 50s, 60s and beyond does little for public safety.

Lawmakers should address this problem with available policies: Governors should issue pardons for older inmates. Parole boards should put more weight on age. Officials should more aggressively use compassionate release laws that on a limited basis let out inmates who are ill. But lawmakers should go further. They should enact laws that require courts to revisit sentences after, say, 20 years. They should grant inmates the presumption of parole in more cases, meaning a parole board would keep a person locked up only with good reason. Broader reform should reduce the use of longer sentences in general.

Some caution is warranted. People deemed dangerous — the criminal justice system has ways of gauging that risk — should not be let out. Policies might exclude certain kinds of crimes.

With the savings from releases, lawmakers could pay for more effective approaches to public safety. Experts often say the United States is overincarcerated and underpoliced, particularly for violent crime. Police departments across the country have reported serious staffing shortages for years, and we know that having fewer officers around leads to more crime. These shortages are one reason nearly half of America’s murderers now get away with it.

You don’t have to mourn an older killer’s lifelong suffering in prison to think reform is a good idea. You can just think, as I do, that the criminal justice system should protect Americans as efficiently and effectively as possible. Paying for the housing, food and health care of someone unlikely to commit a crime should not make the cut.

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Budget cuts cause chaos for criminal justice practitioners

 From The Marshall Project:

The cuts have caused chaos in criminal justice grantmaking, creating a perception that the process is increasingly aligned with President Donald Trump and the Project 2025 agenda — even as some decisions contradict the administration’s own stated goals.

“We have seen the Department of Justice weaponized to be in service of President Trump's political agenda and weaponized to go after his opponents and critics and enemies,” Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.

DOJ funding under the second Trump administration now serves the president’s agenda of mass deportation and a “law and order” approach to reducing crime, Rahman said. The DOJ terminated $5 million in outstanding funds to Vera, who, for 64 years, has run on a platform of criminal justice reform achieved by research. Rahman said the nonprofit had unwavering support from the federal government in the past. Now, Vera is among those organizations that sued to reinstate the funding.

In addition to grassroots anti-violence nonprofits, local police departments, prosecutors and courts, state departments of corrections, national criminal justice nonprofits and researchers had to pause or scale back programs, find other sources of funding, leave positions open or lay off staff. Equal Justice USA (EJUSA), a national nonprofit whose work included funding grassroots organizations supporting victims of violent crime or working to prevent violence also shut down.

“The opportunity to support a President’s agenda may be greater through OJP grant funding than it is through any of the federal government’s other grant-making components,” Gene Hamilton, a DOJ official during Trump’s first administration, wrote in the chapter about the department in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.

Since its creation in 1984, OJP has aimed to make the federal government a major supporter of state and local governments’ efforts to reduce crime, often through research, evaluation and development — and grants to encourage new programs, or to support promising models. The office is responsible for grants that transfer billions of federal dollars to state and local agencies making up the criminal justice system, as well as research and nonprofit organizations.

OJP provides site-based grants, which fund local governments or nonprofits to implement programs in particular places, research grants to study the effectiveness of programs, as well as training and technical assistance grants that share expertise to help local programs best use their funding. Training and technical assistance grants, often to national nonprofits like EJUSA or Vera, were the hardest hit in the April cuts. They accounted for more than $578 million in original funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found.

The Justice Department told grant recipients that were terminated that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” A termination letter reviewed by The Marshall Project said the department was focusing on direct support and coordination for law enforcement, “combatting violent crime”, “protecting American children,” and supporting victims of trafficking and sexual assault.

However, many of the grant cuts were in these areas. While police departments were not the primary recipients of terminated grants, the Justice Department ended grants aimed at supporting police. The department ended a grant that expanded police officer safety wellness training as part of a broader police mental health and wellness initiative. It also terminated a training and technical assistance grant to help rural law enforcement agencies implement plans to reduce violence. Beyond technical assistance, that grant also funded a few small, focused agency programs to confront violent crime problems.

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DC grand juries resist Trump 'crackdown' on crime

In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents, there have been only a few scattered protests and scarcely a word from Congress, which has quietly gone along with the deployment, reported The New York Times.

But one show of resistance has come from an extraordinary source: federal grand jurors.

In what could be read as a citizens’ revolt, ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president’s immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force. It has happened in at least seven cases — including three times for the same defendant.

Given the secretive nature of grand juries, it is all but impossible to know precisely why this has been happening, but the persistent rejections suggest that grand jurors may have had enough of prosecutors seeking harsh charges in a highly politicized environment.

Courthouse wits have long quoted Judge Sol Wachtler, the former New York jurist who said that prosecutors are in such complete control of grand juries that they could get them to indict a ham sandwich. But that old saw did not hold true in the rebellion in Federal District Court in Washington, where grand jurors seem to have taken a stand in defense of their community.

“First of all, it is exceedingly rare for any grand jury to reject a proposed indictment because ordinarily prosecutors use discretion in only bringing cases that are strong and advance the interests of justice,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Detroit who teaches at the University of Michigan Law School. “I have seen this maybe once or twice in my career of 20 years, but this is something different.”

“My guess,” Ms. McQuade went on, “is that these grand jurors are seeing prosecutorial overreach and they don’t want to be part of it.”

While crime has fallen in Washington since National Guard troops and federal agents started to police the streets in large numbers in mid-August, the deployment has chafed many local residents, who have found their presence to be a source of anxiety, not security. And because of the deployment, a flurry of defendants have been charged with federal felonies in cases that would typically have been handled at the local court level, if they were brought at all.

Many of these cases have recently been downgraded or dismissed altogether after failing in grand juries, a tacit acknowledgment by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington that they were overcharged to begin with. The most prominent example is the case of Sean C. Dunn, a former Justice Department paralegal who was charged with felony assault after he threw a sub-style salami sandwich at a federal agent on patrol near the corner of 14th and U Streets. His charges were knocked down to a misdemeanor last week after prosecutors were unable to indict him. 

While Mr. Dunn’s case has become a cause célèbre, inspiring Banksy-style images of figures hurling hoagies on walls across the city, other cases have also crashed and burned, without as much publicity.

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Gun industry found 'positive feelings' among gun owners to reform

 In 2019, with the horrors of the Parkland mass shooting still fresh in most Americans’ minds, the gun industry funded a study to “determine the most effective ways of communicating with the American public about the benefits of firearm ownership,” reported The Trace/Rolling Stone.                                  

Its findings, which were not shared with the public, indicated that Americans who support gun ownership could be persuaded by the value of reforms that are vigorously opposed by the gun industry, gun rights groups, and Republican lawmakers. Those reforms include universal background checks, red flag laws, and even a gun registry, which vocal gun rights advocates have falsely claimed made the Holocaust possible.

The study, titled “Communicating With The American Public About Firearm Ownership,” was commissioned by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a nonprofit that serves as the gun industry’s trade group, founded to ensure the survival of its dues-paying members, which include firearms manufacturers, retailers, and ranges. An online survey administered to more than 4,000 Americans tested the power of 24 pro-gun and 24 anti-gun messages. The respondents were divided into multiple categories, including those who had a “positive feeling” about gun ownership.

While the study does not cite Parkland or any mass shooting as a reason for its undertaking, it was conducted at a moment when substantial reforms seemed possible. The indiscriminate killing of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had galvanized the nation in a manner not seen since Newtown, and the pressure for regulation and accountability was high. Many young Americans, in particular, who had come of age as mass shootings became commonplace, held a negative view of firearms, according to industry research, and that posed a problem for future business. There was a need, it seemed, to find the most resonant ways to convey the value of gun ownership.  

“While the sports shooting industry devotes substantial funding and effort to communications initiatives to boost participation in and support for sport shooting and firearms,” the study notes, “little reliable data exists indicating which messages and communications themes work best.” 

The Trace and Rolling Stone obtained a copy of the study for an ongoing series that seeks to unearth what the gun industry conceals about its customers and practices from public view. The NSSF declined to provide a comment for this story.

On Wednesday, August 27, a 23-year-old shooter, who legally purchased three firearms recovered by law enforcement, opened fire at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, murdering two children and injuring 14 more before taking their own life. The setting and the ages of the victims evoked the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas. That year, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law, a gun bill that contained politically safe reforms, such as the allocation of funds for mental health resources and school safety. 

After decades of congressional gridlock on the issue, the package was hailed as an epic breakthrough, a valiant example of bipartisan compromise that still mostly relied on Democrats for passage. The NSSF study, then, raises a key question: Why have Republican lawmakers largely stood against more significant reforms, let alone any reform at all? As the study indicates, many people with a favorable view of gun ownership appear open to going further than the lawmakers and special interests who represent them.

For people who the study says have a “positive feeling” about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it. The top arguments in favor almost all revolve around rights, beginning with “Self-defense is a basic right,” followed by “Americans have the right to own a gun,” “It’s people’s right as Americans to own a gun,” and “Gun ownership is protected by the Constitution.” The remaining argument, which came in at No. 3, states, “Owning and training with a firearm teaches important skills, including responsibility, accuracy, safe gun handling, self-defense, and strategies to avoid dangerous situations.”

When told to rank the “most effective arguments against firearm ownership,” these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: “Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.” 

Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included “Guns should be licensed just like cars,” “State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,” “Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,” and “Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.”

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Trump winning the battle at SCOTUS through the shadow docket

 Excerpts from an podcast interview by Ezra Klein and Kate Shaw, posted on The New York Times:

The Supreme Court has since weighed in a number of times. Where are we now?

I think things look worse for the rule of law and better for Trump’s dictatorial aspirations now than they did three or four months ago.

So I think it’s right that in the first couple of months of the administration, Trump was making these wildly broad assertions of executive authority and executive orders and other kinds of actions, and he was running into the kind of buzz saw of the lower courts applying settled doctrine, reading the Constitution and statutes, and saying: No, you can’t do that. That’s not how any of this works.

That is still ongoing. But beginning in about April, the Supreme Court started to get into the mix. In a series of rulings — actually 16 in a row — the Supreme Court has sided with Trump and against challenges to Trump and against lower courts that have ruled against Trump, in this wild streak of victories for Trump that have largely happened under the radar because they’re happening on the shadow docket.

Can you say what the shadow docket is?

Sure. People are most familiar with the Supreme Court’s work on what we call the merits docket. Those are cases the court decides it’s going to take. There are briefs filed, oral arguments, and then the court writes and releases written opinions, usually, like the big ones, at the end of June. That’s the merits docket.

The court also does a lot of work on what we call the shadow docket. Some of that is pretty trivial stuff — how much time people are going to get in oral arguments and things like that.

But increasingly, parties have come to the Supreme Court asking for emergency relief, usually because they’ve been ruled against by the lower courts. And the court, often in the dead of night, often without any reasoning or written opinion at all, disposes of these requests for emergency relief.

That’s this kind of streak of victories that Trump has had, ruling after ruling in favor of Trump, allowing him to do a lot of, I think, wildly damaging and destructive things, even though the only written opinion assessing the lawfulness of his conduct has come from the lower courts and has been against him.

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Mangino discusses unconstitutional use of military for civil law enforcement on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Lindsay McCoy on WFMJ-TV21 on the latest order of court blocking the use of military troops for law enforcement.

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CREATORS: Trump Administration Breathes Life Into Lost Cause of the Confederacy

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
September 2, 2025

The Trump administration is talking about making the nation's capital and places like California and Chicago safe again — reminiscent of the campaign's mantra that evolved into an acronym that represents a political movement MAGA, Make American Great Again.

At the same time, President Donald Trump's acolytes are using the criminal justice system to get even with his political opponents. The FBI raided the home of former national security adviser John Bolton.

According to a carefully calculated leak to The New York Post, Bolton — a major critic of Trump — had the search of his home personally authorized by FBI director Kash Patel. Greg Sargent recently wrote in The New Republic, "Patel had openly declared in 2023 that 'the conspirators,' that is enemies of Trump and MAGA, must be prosecuted, and also that more loyalists with the resolve to see this through would be recruited to carry this out."

The Department of Justice appears to be Trump's personal enforcers. Patel's hit list is common knowledge, and his open involvement in the investigation of Bolten is meant to send a message to Trump's critics. This sounds more like the Mob — who decades ago federal prosecutors successfully crushed — than the Department of Justice.

At the same time, the Trump administration is doubling down on its crime crackdown in major cities. Trump has long painted major U.S. cities as unsafe and lawless. This is nothing new. During 2017 inaugural address, Trump spoke of "American carnage" in urban areas, pointing to crime and poverty, particularly in places led by Democrats.

The focus has not changed. Even though, cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago have been the focus of Trump's wrath, Southern cities like Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi have been ignored.

Not only is it a lie to say that cities like Chicago are "a mess" and dubious at best to suggest that the National Guard needs activated to clean up the mess — the rationale for deploying the National Guard is not about making cities safe it is about creating a "police state."

It has long been a staple of American governance that local and state law enforcement is to be conducted by civilians, not the military.

Ordinarily, a state's governor controls its National Guard. Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the president can "federalize" the National Guard, placing them under federal control and funding for federal missions like overseas deployments or suppressing domestic insurrections.

Trump invoked this authority first in Los Angles in June during immigrations protests. He cited "incidents of violence and disorder" tied to ICE operations. According to Katie Couric Media, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other officials challenged the deployment, "arguing the order violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits U.S. troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. A federal judge agreed, but the ruling was ultimately put on hold by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."

The Posse Comitatus Act was meant to prevent the federal government from using the military as a domestic police force after Reconstruction.

This struggle is again evolving into a fight between red states and blue states — code for rural v. urban. While Los Angeles, Washington, DC and soon Chicago are under siege, there are plans to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops from 19 Republican-controlled states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia and Texas.

This is a modern-day Reconstruction. Major urban areas being occupied by troops from predominately southern states. The Trump administration is breathing life into the lost cause of the Confederacy.

As Ty Seidule, professor emeritus at West Point, described in his book, "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause," the south rebelled against the north because "(T)he Confederate States of America ... refused to accept the results of a democratic election in 1860."

Sound familiar?

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 

To visit Creators CLICK HERE

Trump's deployment of federal troops to California illegal

The Trump administration illegally used thousands of military troops in Southern California, a federal judge said. in a ruling that accused the president of effectively turning nearly 5,000 Marines and National Guard soldiers into a national police force, reported The New York Times.

The ruling, by Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, came more than two months into a contentious deployment that was set off by immigration protests in June and has since dwindled to about 300 National Guard soldiers. Judge Breyer placed his injunction on hold for 10 days.

The judge found that President Trump’s deployment had exceeded the limits of federal laws that generally prohibit the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

The decision was a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a possible presidential candidate who filed the lawsuit and who has rebuked Mr. Trump for sending the military into Los Angeles. But the Justice Department, which defended the Trump administration in the lawsuit, is expected to appeal the decision and could receive more favorable consideration from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The ruling was the latest in a series of judicial battles over claims of expansive unilateral powers by the administration. Mr. Trump and administration officials have deported people without due process, imposed widespread and unpopular tariffs and rolled back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers that have been disputed in federal court.

The president also declared crime in Washington, D.C., to be an emergency in order to send federal troops there in August, although crime rates in the nation’s capital have actually been falling and local officials said the deployment was not needed. Since then, Mr. Trump has publicly mused about sending the National Guard into other Democratic-led cities. Federal law gives the White House more latitude to conduct local law enforcement in the District of Columbia than in the states.

The decision on Tuesday arose from the president’s deployment this summer of about 4,000 members of the California National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, where demonstrations had erupted over immigration raids.

In an executive order that was issued on June 7 over the objections of Mr. Newsom, who normally controls the state’s National Guard troops, the president wrote that “violent protests” had grown into “a form of rebellion,” and that the military was needed to “temporarily protect” federal agents and property.

City officials in Los Angeles vehemently disputed the president’s justification, noting that the police had been capably handling the protests, which were mostly confined to a few blocks in downtown Los Angeles near government buildings.

The White House, the officials said, had unnecessarily inflamed local outrage by sending masked and armed immigration agents into workplaces in a liberal city where immigrants make up roughly a third of the population, and then had used the ensuing demonstrations as a pretext to send in the military.

A 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, generally prohibits the use of the U.S. military for domestic civilian law enforcement, absent an insurrection. But the president did not invoke the Insurrection Act. Rather, he argued that an overarching federal law, Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which lays out the role of the armed forces, allowed him to commandeer National Guard units to execute federal law.

The administration contended that the troops were needed in California for federal agents to do their jobs because protesters were impeding their efforts. California officials quickly challenged the deployment, and Judge Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, temporarily blocked it in June.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ruled that the judge had erred. The protests had been violent enough, they found, that the president could at least make an argument for deployment, and legal precedent required them to give “a great level of deference” to the president in weighing the facts underlying his executive order.

The decision allowed the troops to remain under the president’s control, pending a decision on a secondary request by the state to restrict how the troops could be used. Lawyers for California demanded that the military be limited, at most, to guarding federal buildings, and the appeals court determined that the administration’s use of the troops remained subject to judicial review.

By mid-June, the protests in Los Angeles had largely ended, but instead of releasing the troops, the administration kept them on duty in a sprawling tent city near Long Beach. The administration sent soldiers and Marines out with federal agents executing search and arrest warrants and conducting immigration raids.

Mr. Newsom challenged the administration’s claim that the troops were not conducting law enforcement. During a three-day hearing in August before Judge Breyer’s order, lawyers for California showed numerous photographs of armed National Guard troops engaged in what appeared to be police work — forming security perimeters around cannabis farms and workplaces where raids were being conducted, or wielding batons behind police tape as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents handcuffed people.

In at least two instances, the state’s lawyers noted, members of the deployment briefly detained people. One occasion was early in the deployment in Carpinteria, when National Guard troops prevented a protester from entering an area where a raid was in progress. The other episode occurred later, when Marines held a man for about a half-hour after he tried to enter a Los Angeles federal building.

A field agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles testified that, for at least the first month of the deployment, about 75 percent of ICE operations involved federalized troops.

Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, a 33-year Army veteran who led the task force overseeing the Los Angeles deployment, testified that troops took great care not to cross the line into law enforcement. But the line was fraught.

The general testified at length, for example, about a mission, code-named Operation Excalibur, in which federal immigration agents on foot and on horseback marched through MacArthur Park, a Los Angeles landmark in a neighborhood now largely home to immigrant families with low incomes.

General Sherman said the administration initially wanted to conduct the mission on Father’s Day and to stage troops and military equipment in the middle of the park in a “show of presence,” but he objected. The placement of troops, he said, seemed to inappropriately involve the military in what appeared to be a risky and low-value operation.

Only after federal officials planned to reposition the troops outside the park did he recommend approval. But when he expressed his concerns, he said, Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol chief who is overseeing the federal immigration crackdown in Southern California, questioned his loyalty to the country.

The mission, which General Sherman said was ultimately approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was postponed twice before taking place on July 7. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles condemned it as a callous act of political theater that terrified children in the park as well as social workers who were providing services to homeless people.

Scores of National Guard troops drove to the area and stayed for about 20 minutes in case trouble erupted, the general testified, but never left their trucks.

Trump administration lawyers argued that California’s lawsuit was moot because the Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute that cannot be enforced with a civil lawsuit.

Moreover, even absent an insurrection, Eric Hamilton of the Justice Department argued, presidents have the inherent power to deploy the military to protect federal property and employees.

The Justice Department lawyers defended how the troops were used during the deployment, saying they violated no law and served a “purely protective function” for federal agents who were facing daily assaults from protesters.

Judge Breyer sharply pushed back, questioning how anyone could limit the power of the White House if the president could legally dispatch the military to enforce any conceivable federal function.

Normally, he noted, local law enforcement officers protect public employees going about their duty. Shouldn’t the president have to prove that a threat exists and rises to a specific threshold in order to summon the military?

“Where are the limits?” Judge Breyer repeatedly asked.

To read more CLICK HERE

New York Post: New England serial killer fears warrant ‘review and investigation’ as body count reaches 7 across 3 states, expert says

NEW YORK POST 

Anna Young

April 17, 2025

The eerie discovery of seven decaying corpses across three New England states warrants "review and investigation" after police shut down growing fears the deaths are linked to a serial killer, an expert said.

The eerie discovery of seven decaying corpses across three New England states warrants “review and investigation” after police shut down growing fears the deaths are linked to a serial killer, an expert said.

Matthew Mangino, a Pennsylvania-based defense attorney, said police in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island should be working together after the human remains uncovered in nearby coastal towns between March and April fueled online theories of a ruthless lone-wolf on the loose.

“Whether it’s coincidental or not, I think it merits review and investigation, at least,” Mangino, former Lawrence County District Attorney, told Fox News Digital.

Seven decaying corpses were discovered across coastal towns in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Wangkun Jia – stock.adobe.com

“Collaboration between the different jurisdictions to determine whether or not there is some threat out there to individuals – that may be going on as we speak. We don’t know that, but I think it does merit that kind of scrutiny.”

The decaying bodies were discovered in New Haven, Groton, and Killingly, Connecticut, Plymouth and Framingham, Massachusetts, and Foster, Rhode Island – with authorities identifying the remains of three women.

The causes of death have not been released.

“These different jurisdictions need to get together and compare notes and reports,” Mangino added.

“Were these homicides? I mean, we may find that these are natural deaths or…it could be a suicide, it could be accidental. So, the number one issue: is there enough to determine the cause and manner of death?”

Paige Fannon, 35, was found on March 6 in Norwalk River. Facebook

The body of Paige Fannon, 35, of West Islip, New York, was found on March 6 in Norwalk River, the outlet reported. On the same day, a human skull was located in a wooded area of Route 3 in Plymouth, Boston 25 News reported. 

On March 19, the remains of what appeared to be an adult female between the ages of 40 and 60 were discovered near a cemetery in Groton. Two days later, Denise Leary, a 59-year-old missing mother-of-two, was found in New Haven.

The body of Michele Romano, 56, a missing woman from Warwick, New York, was found on March 26 in the woods in Foster, Fox News reported.

Human remains were then discovered in Killingly on April 9, with another body found in Framingham off the Massachusetts Turnpike the next day, according to FOX 25 Boston.

“There is no information at this time suggesting any connection to similar remains discoveries, and there is also no known threat to the public at this time,” Connecticut State Police said in a statement to Fox.

“The investigation is in the early stages and remains active and ongoing.”

Denise Leary, 59, was a mother of two. Her remains were discovered March 21. Facebook

The startling discoveries prompted a wave of online discussions in a private Facebook group called “New England Serial Killer.”

The group, which has nearly 62,000 members, garnered more than 10,000 new members last week and over the weekend, as MassLive.com first reported.

Romano’s family also dismissed comments her death was the cause of a serial killer.

“In light of the recent comments being made, we know that Michele’s passing is in no way related to any type of serial killer,” the family wrote in Facebook group “Justice for Michele Romano.”

“We have faith in the Rhode Island State Police and our Private Investigator that the person responsible will be brought to justice sooner rather than later!”

To read more CLICK HERE

Trump escalates federal intervention in DC, seizes Union Station from Amtrak

The Trump administration announced  it had seized control of Washington’s Union Station from Amtrak, escalating federal intervention in the nation’s capital as National Guard troops patrol city streets, according to Jurist News.

The takeover was announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who claimed the goal was to ensure sanitary conditions and the absence of unhoused individuals from the busy transportation hub.

Critics have slammed the move as the latest instance of the Administration’s federalization of DC, particularly as it comes on the heels of Trump’s establishment of a “special unit” of the National Guard to address crime in the nation’s capital. Prior to that, Trump issued an executive order to place DC’s police force under federal control. One commentator said that “the federal surge of officers in DC and deployment of national guardsmen on our streets are dangerous, unnecessary, and an affront to Home Rule.” Another blatantly warned that “DC is under siege.”

While DC mayor Muriel Bowser said the heightened presence of federal officers has lowered crime, she said that the presence of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and National Guard members “is not working.” Moreover, she noted the importance of federal officers’ working in tandem with local law enforcement:

The difference between this period, this 20 day period of this federal surge, and last year, represents an 87% reduction in carjackings in Washington DC [but] what we want is local control of our public safety ecosystem… we want federal officers that work in coordination with us, DEA, ATF, FBI, who…work with us on major crime issues all the time. And our officers are familiar with working with them, and they have been helpful in the field.

To read more CLICK HERE

Florida executes man for three murders, the state's record 11th execution of the year

 The 30th Execution of 2025

Curtis Windom, convicted of killing his girlfriend, her mother and a man he claimed owed him $2,000, was put to death by lethal injection on August 28, 2025, marking a record 11th execution in the state of Florida this year, reported The Guardian. 

Windom, 59, was pronounced dead at 6.17pm local time at Florida state prison near Starke, authorities said.

Windom became the 30th person executed this year in the US, with Florida leading the way behind a flurry of death warrants signed by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. A 12th man, David Joseph Pittman, 63, is scheduled to be put to death in Florida on 17 September.

Windom, whose final appeals for a stay were rejected on Wednesday by the US supreme court, was sentenced to die for the 7 November 1992 killing of Johnnie Lee, Valerie Davis and Mary Lubin in the Orlando area.

Court records show a friend told Windom that day that Lee, who supposedly owed Windom the $2,000, had won $114 at a greyhound racetrack. Windom told the friend that “you’re gonna read about me” and that he planned to kill Lee.

Windom went to a Walmart to buy a .38-caliber revolver and a box of 50 shells, according to court testimony. Not long after that, Windom drove to find Lee, located him and shot him twice in the back from his car, followed by two more shots standing over the victim at close range.

Then Windom ran to Davis’s apartment and fatally shot his girlfriend “with no provocation” in front of a friend who witnessed the murder, court records show. Windom randomly shot and wounded another man before encountering Davis’s mother, Mary Lubin, as she drove to her daughter’s apartment. Lubin was shot twice in her car at a stop sign.

Windom received death sentences for the murders and a 22-year sentence for the attempted murder. Davis was the mother of one of Windom’s children, a daughter who has been campaigning to halt her father’s execution.

“We’ve all been traumatized,” the daughter, Curtisia Windom, told the Orlando Sentinel. “It hurt. It hurt a lot. Life was not easy growing up. But if we could forgive him, I don’t see why people on the street who haven’t been through our pain have a right to say he should die.”

Windom’s lawyers have filed numerous appeals over the years, including a claim that evidence of his mental problems should have been introduced at trial. But the Florida supreme court ruled that was not prejudicial against Windom because prosecutors then would have presented evidence that Windom was a drug dealer and the two women he killed were police informants.

Many of Windom’s appeals have focused on claims that he was represented by an incompetent lawyer when it came to presenting mental health evidence.

Since the US supreme court restored the death penalty in 1976, the highest previous annual total of Florida executions was eight, in 2014. Florida has executed more people than any other state this year, while Texas and South Carolina are tied for second place, with four each.

The most recent execution in Florida took place on 19 August when Kayle Bates, 67, was put to death for the killing of a woman he abducted from a Florida Panhandle insurance office.

Florida executions are carried out using a three-drug lethal injection: a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state’s department of corrections.

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Impressive: 'without a doubt the most illegal search I’ve ever seen in my life'

 Veteran defense lawyers and law enforcement experts have been warning about the potential for overreach since the federal government muscled its way into policing decisions in the nation's capital nearly three weeks ago, reported NPR.

Inside the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., on Monday, those tensions broke into open court.

A federal judge dismissed a weapons case against a man held in the D.C. jail for a week — concluding he was subject to an unlawful search.

"It is without a doubt the most illegal search I've ever seen in my life," U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said from the bench. "I'm absolutely flabbergasted at what has happened. A high school student would know this was an illegal search."

The judge said Torez Riley appeared to have been singled out because he is a Black man who carried a backpack that looked heavy. Law enforcement officers said in court papers they found two weapons in Riley's crossbody bag — after he had previously been convicted on a weapons charge.

The arrest — and the decision to abandon the federal case — come at a time of heightened scrutiny on police and prosecutors in the District of Columbia.

President Trump has ordered National Guard members and federal law enforcement officers to "clean up" the city and crack down on crime. He signed a new executive order on Monday to ensure more people arrested in D.C. face federal charges and are held in pretrial detention "whenever possible."

Newly confirmed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro has directed her prosecutors to seek maximum charges against defendants — and to seek to detain them. And the court system is straining to respond.

Riley, who entered the courtroom wearing a white skullcap and a bright orange jumpsuit, had been scheduled for a detention hearing. Instead, on Monday morning, the U.S. Attorney's Office moved to dismiss the case it lodged against him seven days ago.

"The government has determined that dismissal of this matter is in the interests of justice," prosecutors wrote in court papers.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said Pirro moved to dismiss the charges once she was shown body camera footage of the arrest on Friday.

Judge Faruqui, who spent about a dozen years as a prosecutor in that same office, expressed outrage about the charges.

"We don't just charge people criminally and then say, 'Oops, my bad,'" he said. "I'm at a loss how the U.S. Attorney's Office thought this was an appropriate charge in any court, let alone the federal court."

But Pirro pushed back against Faruqui's comments.

"This judge has a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms and on frequent occasions he has downplayed the seriousness of felons who possess illegal firearms and the danger they pose to our community," Pirro said in a statement to NPR. "The comments he made today are no different than those he makes in other cases involving dangerous criminals."

The judge said he had seven cases on his docket Monday that involved people who had been arrested over the weekend — the most ever, he said.

Faruqui also said "on multiple occasions" over the past two weeks, other judges in the federal courthouse had moved to suppress search warrants, a highly unusual move that makes the warrants inadmissible in court.

"Eyes of the world" are on the city

A day after police took Riley into custody, they arrested an Amazon delivery driver who had come under suspicion for having alcohol in his vehicle. The driver, Mark Bigelow, has been charged in the same federal court with resisting or impeding an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

Another man, Edward Dana, was charged last week with making threats against the president. Dana said he was intoxicated and in the course of other rambling — that included singing in the back of a patrol car — he made remarks about Trump, according to the court docket. Dana was unarmed.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya ordered a mental health assessment and competency screening and ordered Dana released last week.

But prosecutors appealed her ruling. On Monday, Chief Judge James Boasberg held his own hearing — and agreed with the magistrate's decision. He ordered Dana's release, with conditions.

In the Riley case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Helfand declined to describe the changed circumstances but instead spoke for a few moments privately with the judge, while the courtroom husher blocked the sound of the exchange.

Later, the judge said Helfand was not the problem and praised him for having "the dignity and the courtesy" to move to drop the case. But he told Helfand to deliver a message to his superiors — that charging people based on little or unlawfully obtained evidence would hurt public safety, not improve it.

"If the policy now is to charge first and ask questions later, that's not going to work," the judge said. "Arrests stay on people's records. That has consequences."

"Lawlessness cannot come from the government," Judge Faruqui added. "The eyes of the world are on this city right now."

The judge also delivered words of warning to Riley about the danger and harsh consequences of carrying weapons. "Yes, sir," the defendant replied.

Riley will remain in D.C. custody for now. Authorities in Maryland have 72 hours to pick him up for allegedly violating the terms of his supervised release there, for possessing a weapon last week near the grocery store in D.C.'s Union Market neighborhood. The DOJ spokesperson said Riley was being held pursuant to a detainer warrant for Prince George's County in Maryland.

Outside the courtroom, Riley's pregnant wife, Crashawna Williams, said she had missed school and had taken on extra responsibilities for their sons, ages 12, 8 and 3, following Riley's arrest.

"It's put everything on me; it's straining me," she said.

Public defender Elizabeth Mullin said the search and arrest by a combination of D.C.'s Metropolitan Police officers and federal agents was patently unlawful.

"This never should have happened," Mullin said. "He was doing nothing wrong. He was just walking into Trader Joe's to get some food."

To read more CLICK HERE

President Donald Trump on the death penalty

 “By the way, speaking of that, anybody murders something [sic] in the Capitol, capital punishment. Capitol – capital punishment, if somebody kills somebody in the capitol, Washington DC, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty. And that’s a very strong preventative, and everybody that’s heard it agrees with it [sic]. I don’t know if we’re ready for it in this country, but we have it. It is, uh, we have no choice.”

                                                               -President Trump

Creators: The Turbulent 1960s Continue to Shape America's Criminal Justice System

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 26, 2025

The 1960s were turbulent. The nation was in the midst of two wars. First, the Cold War with the Soviet Union and later the Vietnam War. Former President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Martin Luther King was killed in 1968 as well as President Kennedy's brother, and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. There was racial unrest and anti-war protests. The tumult of the 1960s changed America forever.

During the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court also experienced a tumultuous evolution. Starting in 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court made a series of decisions regarding the rights of criminal defendants that still reverberate today. Starting with the decision of Mapp v. Ohio, the court issued four decisions that continue to be analyzed, interpreted and adjusted more than 60 years later.

Dollree Mapp refused to let the police enter her house without a warrant. The police returned several hours later with a document purported to be a warrant — it was not. They entered her home, found some illicit material and arrested her. She unsuccessfully challenged the evidence at trial. On appeal, the Supreme Court found in her favor and extended the "exclusionary rule" to state prosecutions.

The exclusionary rule prohibits the police from using evidence illegally obtained. The rule is the primary impetus behind improvements in police training and the general protection of individual constitutional rights.

Ironically, the late Justice Antonin Scalia cited "increasing professionalism of police" as a reason for the exclusionary rule's obsolescence.

Scalia's argument didn't make sense then and doesn't make sense today. Without the exclusionary rule, an individual's constitutional rights would be ignored. Law enforcement training would turn on a dime. Without constitutional guardrails, police would turn a blind eye to individual rights with impunity.

In 1963, the court decided Gideon v. Wainwright. The landmark decision held that state criminal courts must provide counsel to defendants in criminal cases without cost if they cannot afford an attorney. Although most states were already providing free legal counsel to defendants facing a charge that could result in a prison sentence, Florida and a handful of other southern states were not.

Two years later, the court decided Miranda v. Arizona and incorporated Gideon into the decision. The decision requires the police to inform a suspect who is in custody that he has the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney.

Although the Miranda warnings are etched in nearly everyone's consciousness, the decision is still evolving. Little more than a decade ago, a murder suspect in Texas who answered questions for almost an hour was then asked about some incriminating evidence. The suspect stopped talking.

The police made notes of his conduct once he stopped talking. According to the Supreme Court, the suspect "(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 found that silence is not enough to invoke the right to remain silent.

Finally, in 1968, the Supreme Court decided Terry v. Ohio. The court found that it was not an illegal search and seizure if a police officer with "reasonable suspicion" — more than just a hunch — stops a suspect on the street, asks her to identify herself and pats her down for a weapon.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has moved right, these landmark decisions are being tested. Without constitutional guardrails, police could turn a blind eye to individual rights with impunity.

The right to remain silent; the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence; limits on stopping individuals without adequate suspicion; exemplify the integrity of our criminal justice system — even strong evidence of guilt cannot be used if police violated the Constitution to get that evidence.

The 1960s continue to have an impact on the Supreme Court and, more importantly, on the fundamental rights of those 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

To visit Creators CLICK HERE

Autocracy 101: Martial law by any other name . . .

 President Trump directed the Defense Department to take a larger role in domestic law enforcement, including by “quelling civil disturbances,” as he threatens to broaden deployments of the National Guard in cities run by his political enemies, reported The New York Times.

The executive order, released by the White House on Monday morning, also formalizes the creation of specially trained National Guard units in the District of Columbia and all 50 states that can be mobilized quickly for “ensuring the public safety and order.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about the order, which came two weeks after Mr. Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the District of Columbia and deployed National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, over the objections of local officials who have said crime in the city is at its lowest level in decades.

In a statement, the White House said the president was ordering “common-sense measures to ensure long-term safety of our nation’s capital.”

The statement said the executive order would increase “participation across agencies” in enabling more specially trained personnel to deliver on Mr. Trump’s campaign promise and “constitutional obligation to make D.C. safe and beautiful again.”

Mr. Trump has mused openly about expanding the deployments to other cities, particularly Democratic strongholds like New York, Chicago and Baltimore, saying crime there is out of control. On Monday, Mr. Trump said he could “solve” crime in Chicago in a week, though he hedged about whether he planned to move ahead with sending troops there.

While Guard troops have been temporarily mobilized by governors in the past to respond to natural disasters and occasionally for civil unrest, the order appears to carve out a much larger domestic role for the National Guard.

According to government documents, Guard troops can be mobilized for duty within a state or territory by a governor in response to “a crisis or a natural disaster, or in support of special events when local, tribal and state capabilities are overwhelmed, exhausted or unavailable.” The president can also federalize the Guard himself, as Mr. Trump did in deploying members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles in June — over the objections of the state’s governor.

Monday’s order appears to create a force of Guard soldiers that could be called out by the White House regardless of whether state and local law enforcement are available and able to handle civil disturbances, raising significant legal questions.

“Quelling civil disturbances is the responsibility of state and local law enforcement except in the most extreme instances,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. “Having soldiers police protests, as this order envisions, threatens fundamental liberties and public safety, and it violates a centuries-old principle against involving the military in domestic law enforcement.”

Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is normally illegal to use federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes. But Mr. Trump, in federalizing the California Guard, invoked a statute, Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, that allows him to call National Guard members and units into federal service under certain circumstances, including during a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.

In California, where Mr. Trump deployed roughly 4,000 members of the National Guard to Los Angeles, citing protests over immigration raids, state officials opened a legal challenge to the deployment, which a federal judge had ruled to be illegal before an appeals court blocked the ruling.

The order also directs a task force in Washington led by a White House adviser, Stephen Miller, to create an online portal for “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” to apply to join federal agents in enforcing Mr. Trump’s “crime emergency” order in the District of Columbia.

As of Sunday, there were 2,274 Guard troops deployed to Washington. Only 934 of those troops are part of the D.C. National Guard. The rest have been mobilized from units in Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.

On Sunday, Guard soldiers in Washington who were previously unarmed began carrying their service weapons while on patrol, a task that is outside traditional norms for Guard troops on domestic missions. According to a report published by the Congressional Research Service in April, the typical jobs given to U.S. military personnel who have been mobilized to assist civil authorities include transporting supplies, clearing or constructing roads, and controlling traffic during missions such as border security, natural disaster response and public health emergencies.

The specialized force proposed for the Guard in Washington would be deputized to enforce federal law, according to the executive order, which also directs the creation of a standing National Guard “quick reaction force” that would be available for rapid deployment anywhere in the country. (Federal law enforcement entities already maintain a nationwide network of trained special agents who can respond in times of crisis, like the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team based in Quantico, Va., which can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the United States for counterterrorism missions, and special weapons and tactics teams at each F.B.I. field office.)

By directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to train a specialized D.C. National Guard unit dedicated to “ensuring public safety” in Washington, Mr. Trump is essentially requiring the city’s Guard to come up with a rapid-response-style unit that can deploy quickly when he decides the need has risen.

Military analysts say that is what the National Guard trains to do anyway — deploy quickly, although usually in the event of a natural disaster like a hurricane. Guard troops have also deployed to respond to political crises, like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, and during the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020.

It is unusual, though, for National Guard troops to just live on standby waiting for the president to decide he wants to target crime in a city of his choosing. Guard troops train part time, often one weekend a month and two weeks a year, to respond to emergencies. They do not sit around waiting for the president to deploy them as a law enforcement arm.

“Most of them are not full-time soldiers; they have separate jobs,” said Pete Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University. “Maintaining a specialized force at a high amount of readiness is tantamount to mobilizing them.”

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