RFK, Jr. asked FDA to revoke Covid vaccines during deadly phase of pandemic

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to lead the nation’s health agencies, formally asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke the authorization of all Covid vaccines during a deadly phase of the pandemic when thousands of Americans were still dying every week, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Kennedy filed a petition with the F.D.A. in May 2021 demanding that officials rescind authorization for the shots and refrain from approving any Covid vaccine in the future.

Just six months earlier, Mr. Trump had declared the Covid vaccines a miracle. At the time Mr. Kennedy filed the petition, half of American adults were receiving their shots. Schools were reopening and churches were filling.

Estimates had begun to show that the rapid rollout of Covid vaccines had already saved about 140,000 lives in the United States.

The petition was filed on behalf of the nonprofit that Mr. Kennedy founded and led, Children’s Health Defense. It claimed that the risks of the vaccines outweighed the benefits and that the vaccines weren’t necessary because good treatments were available, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which had already been deemed ineffective against the virus.

The petition received little notice when it was filed. Mr. Kennedy was then on the fringes of the public health establishment, and the agency denied it within months. Public health experts told about the filing said it was shocking.

To read more CLICK HERE

New Jersey Governor wants to reduce locking up technical parole violators

New Jersey officials would return potentially hundreds fewer parole violators to prison and cap how long they could be held under changes Gov. Phil Murphy will announce in his annual state of the state address next week, reported the New Jersey Monitor.

Murphy will urge lawmakers to pass legislation that would reduce how many people get hauled back to prison for technical parole violations, which is when someone violates the conditions of their parole rather than commits a new crime. Between 1,100 and 1,200 parolees are in state custody on any given day for technical parole violations.

“Right now, roughly 10% of our state’s entire prison population consists of people who are being held behind bars for committing a technical parole violation, like missing a scheduled meeting or forgetting to report a move to a new town,” Murphy is expected to say in his speech Tuesday afternoon at the Statehouse in Trenton. “Nobody should lose their freedom because of a technicality.”

The state Parole Board decides who is granted parole, under what conditions, and when, as well as whether to charge someone with a parole violation that will land them back in prison. Murphy included $1 million in the current state budget — which runs through June — for a consultant to examine how those decisions get made, although that work hasn’t yet started.

New Jersey law gives the parole board little discretion.

To read more CLICK HERE

AG nominee: 'The investigators will be investigated'

Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, faced questions on Capitol Hill Wednesday over her loyalty to the Republican president-elect, who has vowed to use the agency to pursue revenge on his perceived political enemies, reported The Associated Press.

The former Florida attorney general and corporate lobbyist told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee that politics would play no part in her decision-making as the country’s chief federal law enforcement officer, but also refused to rule out the potential for investigations into Trump’s adversaries.

If confirmed to lead the department that charged the once and future president in two separate criminal cases, Bondi would become one of the most closely scrutinized members of Trump’s cabinet.

She’s a close Trump ally and long-time defender

Bondi has been a fixture in Trump’s orbit for years, and a regular defender of the president-elect on news programs amid his legal woes.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones,” Bondi said in a 2023 Fox News appearance. “The investigators will be investigated.”

As Democrats repeatedly questioned Wednesday whether she would maintain a Justice Department that’s independent from the White House, Bondi insisted that “no one should be prosecuted for political purposes.” But she also refused to say what she would do if the president directed her to drop a case or answer whether she would investigate Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who charged Trump.

To read more CLICK HERE

Tulsa Race Massacre not a mob but 'coordinated, military-style attack'

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report, according to The New York Times.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

In Texas 'tough on crime' impacts the guilty as well as the innocent

Politicians like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton project an image of being tough on crime, but they’re also tough on those who are innocent, per a year-end report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, as reported by The Austin Chronicle.

The annual report tells the stories of several individuals who faced execution in 2024 despite evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. Three of the eight people the state planned to execute this year tried to present evidence of innocence. The state killed Ivan Cantu on Feb. 28, despite evidence not heard by his trial jury – or any court – which demonstrated that the main witness against him lied on the stand about important details of the case. In July, Ruben Gutierrez received a last-minute stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether he should be allowed to sue the state of Texas to compel them to conduct DNA testing on items involved in his conviction. Gutierrez has said for years that such testing will show he is innocent. The state of Texas has fought the testing every step of the way.

The most glaring example of that kind of intransigence was the case of Robert Roberson. Roberson was convicted in 2003 of killing his chronically ill 2-year-old daughter Nikki on the basis of the dubious medical hypothesis known as “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” now regarded in many circles as junk science. Roberson’s advocates have tried for years to get Texas’ criminal justice system to consider evidence showing that Nikki died of undiagnosed pneumonia, not being shaken. The courts have refused to grant him a new trial. Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles have supported his execution.

The Texas Supreme Court stayed the execution on Oct. 17 at 9:45pm, four hours after it was to have begun, to allow the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence to bring Roberson to the Capitol to testify on his innocence. Paxton stopped the testimony last month, allowing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to ignore a subpoena from the committee. Roberson’s supporters expect another execution to be set for him in the coming year.

In two other death penalty cases, courts decided that Melissa Lucio and Kerry Max Cook were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is considering whether to accept the recommendation of Lucio’s trial court and overturn her death sentence. She remains locked up as she awaits the decision. Cook was officially exonerated by the TCCA nearly 50 years after his conviction and is now free.

The TCADP’s report shows that Texas juries are continuing to sentence fewer and fewer people to death. Only six new people were sent to death row this year. However, as death sentences decline, they continue to be applied disproportionately to people of color. Five of the six men sentenced to death this year are people of color: three are Black, one is Hispanic, one is Native American. According to the report, nearly 70% of death sentences over the last five years have been imposed on people of color. More than 40% were imposed on Black defendants. This disparity hasn’t changed over the years. Although Black people constitute about 13% of Texas’ population, they represent 47% of death row.

But the total number of people awaiting execution is down. As of Dec. 16, TDCJ lists 174 people on the row, the lowest number since 1985.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

ABA Journal's Top Words in Law for 2024

The ABA Journal's Top Words in Law for 2024 include catchy ways to describe minimal workplace attendance and expert-witness conferences, according to the list recently unveiled by Burton’s Legal Thesaurus.

Law360 has the story on the top new words, chosen by a select committee led by Margaret Wu, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, who teaches legal writing.

According to Law360, the words include:

  • “Coffee badging,” in which a worker shows up at the office for a minimal amount of time to comply with in-person work mandates.

  • “Hot-tubbing,” in which expert witnesses for both parties in a bench trial discuss the case with a judge in an attempt to reach agreement. The procedure is also known as “concurrent expert evidence.”

  • “Word salad,” meaning nonsensical verbiage.

  • “Cybersmear,” which is online defamation, usually contained in an anonymous post.

  • “AI washing,” which is misleading advertising regarding the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence product.

Other AI-related terms include “slop” and “sea of junk,” which refers to poor-quality AI content.

Wu told Law360 that her colleagues and William C. Burton, the creator of Burton’s Legal Thesaurus, look for terms that were brand-new in the past year, that changed in meaning, or that took on different importance.

“We go through and try to find words that we think are interesting and seem to be growing in popularity and words that we think would be helpful for both practicing lawyers as well as legal scholars to be aware of,” Wu said.

To read more CLICK HERE

Professor files legal brief challenging lethal injection for condemned man who wants executed

Death by lethal injection looks like the condemned person just went to sleep. But looks can be deceiving, reported the AZMirror.

Anesthesiologists know that an overdose of pentobarbital, the barbiturate used for executions by lethal injection in Arizona and other states, renders the prisoner unresponsive — but not necessarily fully anesthetized — before it kills by “flash pulmonary edema.”  

The drug causes part of the heart to fail, makes the brain obstruct breathing and floods the lungs with fluid. Autopsies show that the lungs of prisoners executed with pentobarbital are two to three times heavier than normal. 

In short, the prisoner drowns in his or her own body fluids, which one expert told the federal courts in a 2019 deposition is “one of the most powerful, excruciating feelings known to man.”

Lethal injection was once thought to be the least painful, most humane form of execution. Now, experts liken it to waterboarding, a form of torture considered too cruel to use in wartime.

To be specific, eight of the 27 autopsies cited in that 2019 deposition were of men executed in Arizona. Aside from problems inserting IV catheters in some of the executions, there were no apparent signs reported of what the anesthesiologist called “outward calm, inner terror.”

Virginia law professor Corinna Barrett Lain filed an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court” brief, advocating for condemned Arizona prisoner Aaron Gunches, who doesn’t want anyone advocating for him.

Gunches is on Death Row for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, his girlfriend’s ex-husband, and he has repeatedly petitioned the courts to go forward with his execution, saying he would rather be dead than rot in prison.  

the Arizona Supreme Court is supposed to set a briefing schedule that will likely lead to a death warrant so that Gunches’ execution can go forward.  

On Dec. 30, Gunches, who is representing himself in the case, filed a handwritten motion asking the court to forgo the formality of briefing and just set an execution date to “have his Long Overdue Sentence carried out.”

“Gunches asks this court why is AG (Kris) Mayes’ motion necessary?” he wrote. “It is pointless and just more ‘foot dragging’ by the state.”  

In a response filed Monday, Mayes’ office held firm on the formality of briefing.

But Lain argues in her brief that Gunches may not know what he is in for.

“Arizona is asking for a death warrant, and Mr. Gunches apparently agrees,” she said in an interview with the Arizona Mirror. “But the interests at stake when a state kills its citizens — in your name, and mine — are larger than those of the parties. One might very well support the death penalty and oppose executions in the name of expediency that inflict a torturous death.”

Lain is a former prosecutor and a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.  She spent seven years researching lethal injection for her book, “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection,” which will be published in April.

Her amicus brief covers the pain likely inflicted by pentobarbital overdose (a subject that has not yet been litigated in Arizona), the history of troublesome and botched executions in the state and Gov. Katie Hobbs’ sudden dismissal of an independent investigation into the state’s execution processes in favor of a report the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry conducted on itself.

Whether Lain’s argument will sway the justices — or Gunches— remains to be seen.

Gunches is adamant that he would rather die, and he almost succeeded once. In 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who had already overseen the executions of three prisoners in the last year of his tenure while running for U.S. Senate, obtained a death warrant for Gunches. But he didn’t have enough time in his term for the execution to take place.

When Hobbs became governor and Mayes became attorney general in January 2023, they let the warrant run out and appointed David Duncan, a retired federal magistrate judge, to evaluate the state’s troubled lethal injection protocol.

Lain starts her brief with Mayes’ remarks at the time.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that we inherited one of the worst, most incompetent and most ill-funded Department of Corrections in the country,” as Mayes told the media. “I don’t think it takes a leap to suggest that we should understand whether they are capable of carrying out the death penalty before we do it.”

Indeed, there had been botched executions, repeated difficulties in setting IV lines, instances in which the Corrections department tried or succeeded in importing drugs illegally from other countries and failures to be transparent.

In that brave new administration, executions were put on hold, indefinitely. Or so it seemed.

But Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell intervened, asking the Arizona Supreme Court to let her carry out the death warrant, so that justice could go forward, even though the state constitution reserves that job for the AG.  Nonetheless, after two years of back and forth, the high court was willing to entertain arguments on the matter.

In December, Duncan, the independent investigator, sent a summary of his preliminary findings to Hobbs — and was summarily fired.

In a preamble of sorts to his unfinished draft report, he listed all the reasons the death penalty is impractical  — expense, long waits, exonerations — but then gets to the matter at hand: the disaster that is lethal injection. 

Among the findings, as Lain points out, were “‘Corrections officials seeking to learn on the eve of an execution what doses of lethal drugs to administer from Wikipedia.’ That’s outrageous.”

Pharmaceutical companies will not supply drugs for executions, so corrections departments have to have them custom-made or “compounded.”

Lain adds, “In 2023, (Corrections Director Ryan) Thornell went on record saying he had ‘serious concerns about the qualification and competency of the compounding pharmacist and the process used to compound the current supply of lethal injection drugs.’ Today, the State tells Arizona’s highest court not that it changed compounders, but that it changed its mind. The very same compounder that it had ‘serious concerns’ about two years ago is now just fine.”

A completed report promised to be scathing, and Duncan even suggested that death by firing squad, as barbaric as it is, was less likely to be botched than lethal injection.

“The ending of a life and overcoming that person’s will and biological command to live is by nature a violent act in every case — even lethal injection,” he wrote in a parenthetical aside.

Duncan suggested to reporters that he was fired after he asked about witnessing execution rehearsals conducted by Corrections staff, and after discovering that the executioners were paid tens of thousands of dollars in cash that the state was not reporting with proper tax documentation.

“Arizona has a long history of execution failures,” Lain said. “Against that backdrop, in 2023, the state promised to bring transparency and accountability to the execution process by conducting an independent review of its entire lethal injection process, but that review was terminated before the judge could complete it.”

But there had also been a political shift since the beginning of the Hobbs administration.  Mayes settled with Mitchell and said executions would go forward under the aegis of her office.  And Donald Trump, who had 13 federal prisoners executed during the last year of his first term, was coming back into office, already enraged about outgoing President Joe Biden commuting the death sentences of most of the prisoners on federal Death Row. Executions, after all, are one way that politicians prove to voters that they are tough on crime. It might have been awkward for Arizona to go forward with them after a particularly damning report commissioned during an earlier, more enlightened political moment.

Instead, Hobbs offered up an assessment by Thornell, who assured her that the department he leads had improved its team and its control over the drugs it procures to carry out executions.

“This is a new team, a team that wasn’t here in the past where we had botched executions,” Hobbs told the media. “And the whole point of doing the thorough review that has been done is to avoid that.”

Lain is not convinced.

“The initial draft summary prepared by the judge identified seriously problematic processes,” Lain said.

“Instead, the state relies on a review it conducted of itself, and says “trust us,” everything is fine.”

To read more CLICK HERE

 

U.S. gun violence continued to decline significantly in 2024

Gun violence in the United States continued to decline significantly in 2024, providing yet another signal that the pandemic-era surge has come to an end, reported The Trace. Firearm deaths and injuries dropped for a third straight year. Homicides in major cities, mass shootings, and child and teen gun deaths also fell.

Yet the toll of gun violence remains. Even as shootings decline, tens of thousands of lives continue to be lost or permanently changed by guns.

Data helps provide a clearer picture of gun violence trends, informing prevention efforts and highlighting both the progress made and the challenges that remain. 

Here are two of 13 statistics offered by The Trace that help shed light on America’s gun violence epidemic.

16,576

The number of firearm deaths, excluding suicides, in 2024

Gun deaths decreased for a third consecutive year, dropping 12 percent from 2023’s total of nearly 19,000. While still slightly above pre-pandemic levels, gun deaths this year were 21 percent lower than the pandemic-era peak of more than 21,000 in 2021. These figures, compiled by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, include murders, accidental shootings, and homicides deemed legally justified. GVA does not track suicides, which account for more than half of all gun deaths. [Gun Violence Archive]

-14 percent

The decrease in firearm injuries in 2024

Firearm injuries fell to 31,409 in 2024 — down nearly 14 percent from 2023, when there were 36,338. Tracking gun injuries is challenging. The Gun Violence Archive attempts it by monitoring media reports, which may not capture all incidents. Still, the data suggests a significant overall decline in firearm injuries. [Gun Violence Archive]

To read more CLICK HERE

Creators: Rewriting History on the Anniversary of the Jan. 6 Insurrection

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
January 6, 2025

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) recently released his "Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee." As the title suggests, the report seeks to rewrite what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when insurrectionists, encouraged by then-President and current President-elect Donald Trump, attacked the U.S. Capitol.

It seems fitting that Loudermilk should be from the state of Georgia. He wants to do to Jan. 6 what his Southern forefathers did in the decades following the Civil War. He wants to rewrite history.

The South was vanquished after the Civil War. The Confederates could not deal with massive and total defeat. As Ty Seidule wrote in "Robert E. Lee and Me," a new narrative had to be created to explain their failure. Seidule explained, "Today, historians call the series of lies, half-truths, and exaggerations the 'Lost Cause of the Confederacy' myth."

Loudermilk's report includes lies, half-truths, exaggerations and omissions. As historian and writer Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote, quoting former Rep. Liz Cheney, Loudermilk's report "intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee's tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did." Cheney continued, "Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth."

The Lost Cause was not just a passing effort to rewrite history. Seventy-one years after the war, Loudermilk's fellow Georgian Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone with the Wind," a playbook for the Lost Cause. Made into an Academy Award-winning movie, "Gone with the Wind" sanitized the reasons for the war, shaping perceptions of the Civil War for generations.

The FBI classified the Jan. 6 attack as an act of domestic terrorism that injured approximately 140 police officers and endangered the country's peaceful transfer of power. According to NPR, in the immediate aftermath, a bipartisan group of political leaders condemned the violence. "American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like, "said Sen. Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate at the time.

The attempted coup was not a spontaneous act, according to American Oversight. "The invasion of the U.S. Capitol ... was stoked in plain sight." ProPublica reported that Trump supporters had discussed openly for weeks their plans for a violent overthrow. Their goal of stopping the election certification was based on unfounded conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud.

Trump has rejected those arguments and is complicit in attempting to rewrite the history of the insurrection. He refers to Jan. 6 as a "day of love" and calls the rioters "patriots." He announced his intention to pardon those charged and convicted in connection with the attack — that will be a lot of pardons.

Nearly 1,000 Jan. 6 offenders pleaded guilty; more than 250 were convicted in court. The historical record established by the vast, nationwide legal effort cannot just be erased by a wholesale pardon. The endless video clips — logged and verified — and the volumes of court records have helped prosecutors turn Jan. 6 into the best-documented riot in history.

Seidule wrote, "[T]he Lost Cause became a movement, an ideology, a myth, even a civil religion." He went on to write, "This lie came at a horrible, deadly, impossible cost to the nation, a cost we are still paying today. The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws."

Loudermilk seeks to do the same with Jan. 6. As America marks the fourth anniversary of Jan. 6, we would do well to remember that Loudermilk's flawed and misleading report and demand that Liz Cheney be prosecuted for her work on the investigating committee is ripped from the playbook of the postbellum South.

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 X @MatthewTMangino

To visit Creators CLICK HERE

Fire science under scrutiny in review of 40 year old conviction

The  man who has been serving consecutive life sentences for the 1984 rooming house fire in Beverly has the opportunity for a new trial, according to WBGH in Boston.

Last week, Essex County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Karp overturned James Carver’s convictions for second-degree murder and arson. In the decision, Karp wrote a new trial was necessary because advances in fire science and eyewitness testimony “cast real doubt on the justice of his convictions.”

The fire killed 15 people. During the trial in 1989, prosecutors claimed Carver acted out of jealousy when he discovered a tenant of the rooming house was dating his ex-girlfriend. An investigator said the fire started from a stack of gasoline-soaked newspapers aflame in the only exit of the building. Witnesses said they saw Carver by the newspapers before the blaze.

Carver, 60, has maintained innocence and appealed, claiming new evidence would prove that other people set the fire. He has multiple chronic conditions and has used a wheelchair since 2006. He sought medical parole in 2021 but was denied.

This year, the court heard testimony from fire science and memory experts.

Karp’s decision mentions the fire marshal failed to “adequately rule out an electrical source.” On eyewitness memory, he noted experts revealed “the risk of misidentification significantly increases each time a witness is exposed to a suspect or the suspect’s photograph.” His decision mentions one witness was shown Carver’s photo three times before identifying him in a lineup.

Attorney Charlotte Whitmore of the Boston College Innocence Program said over 25 students have worked on Carver’s case in the past nine years.

“A lot of the evidence that the prosecution used in the 1980s to attempt to prove that this fire was an arson are now outdated, you know, sort of myths that fire scientists no longer rely on,” said Whitmore.

She and attorneys Lisa Kavanaugh, director of the Innocence Program at Committee for Public Counsel Services drove to Old Colony — where Carver is currently housed at — on Christmas Eve to let him know of Karp’s decision.

“Charlotte and I each took one of his hands and told him, 'we’re here with really good news,'” said Kavanaugh. “His face sort of lit up and he was like, 'Really?’ Then we told him 'the judge allowed your motion for new trial.’ It was a very emotional moment. He started crying. He was really just completely overwhelmed.”.

Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker has 30 days to decide whether to retry the case. In a statement, he said his office has received the court’s decision allowing Carver’s motion for a new trial.

“This was the defendant’s fifth such motion,” Tucker wrote. “His four prior motions were denied. We are carefully reviewing the ruling and exploring options. We are also attempting to locate and notify the families of the fifteen victims who were killed in the fire.”

A CVS and memorial stand at the rooming house site. Amanda Mazzaglia of the Elliott Chambers Fire Memorial Foundation said the foundation has “always been about the victims and never served as an interest in the legalities of the crime,” but declined further comment.

Within the next few weeks the court will also likely hear “the issue of his release conditions,” said Kavanaugh, who said they’re working on a release plan for Carver, in hopes that can occur during the time the commonwealth decides whether the case can be tried.

To read more CLICK HERE

North Carolina governor commutes 15 death sentences to LWOP

 Across the country, death sentences began a steep and steady decline twenty-five years ago. Today, just a relic of the prior practice remains in a handful of scattered counties, which maintain the practice at great public expense. North Carolina is no exception to this national trend, reported the Raleigh News & Observer. 

The death penalty is at the end of its rope. There are good reasons why. As a law professor who works to promote effective policy, it is clear to me that many of our responses to crime are based on inertia and emotion rather than solid evidence. That is especially true for the death penalty, which has no deterrent effect, costs taxpayers dearly and is riddled with errors and biases. 

That is why Gov. Roy Cooper’s commutation of 15 death sentences to life without parole sentences bears great significance. Cooper is the first governor in the history of North Carolina’s modern death penalty to grant more than two such commutations. With his action, Cooper acknowledged, in detailing a series of factors these cases implicated, the death penalty’s flaws and the responsibility of elected leaders to move away from this failed policy. 

Before these 15 commutations, it housed 136 people, nearly all of whom were sentenced more than 20 years ago. Today, capital trials are rare and juries almost never choose death sentences. In 2024, just three death penalty trials occurred with no new death sentences. A new Gallup poll found death penalty support continuing to erode among all groups, but especially among young people.

The death row commutations, alongside other commutations and pardons, are part of a larger effort to move toward smarter approaches to public safety. In 2020, Cooper created the Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice, a huge step towards addressing racial inequities embedded in our criminal system. In 2021, he created the Juvenile Sentence Review Board to begin to ameliorate excessive sentences imposed on children. In 2023, he formed the Office of Violence Prevention, which takes a public health approach to preventing violence by strengthening communities. 

 To read more CLICK HERE

New gun laws take effect with the new year

Gun laws across the US states are undergoing changes in 2025, with many states strengthening gun safety laws while others have expanded the rights of firearm owners, reflecting the polarization on the issue of gun control in the country, writes Sean Nolan for Jurist.

While new laws taking effect January 1, 2025 in California, Colorado, New York, Delaware and Minnesota have focused on increasing gun control in various ways, laws in New Hampshire and Kentucky have expanded in favor of strengthening the right to own and use firearms. Legislation enacted during 2024 in South Carolina and Louisiana that legalized open carry without a permit further paints a picture of a country moving in two different directions.

In California, several laws are taking effect, including AB1483, AB1598, and AB2917. New rules include the strengthening of limitations pertaining to the purchase of handguns, including consumer warnings on firearm sales, and creating guidance for courts when considering restraining orders related to gun violence. New York has enacted a similar law to California’s, requiring consumer warnings when purchasing firearms.

Colorado’s new law requires gun owners who store their weapon in an unoccupied vehicle to do so in a locked out-of-view hard-sided container. Colorado also increased training requirements for concealed carry permits while prohibiting particular misdemeanor offenders from obtaining the permits. The new concealed carry laws will go into effect later this year in July.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s new gun laws for 2025 bar employers from preventing employee storage of firearms in locked vehicles, and increase privacy protections for gun owners. The new Kentucky law similarly increases privacy protections by prohibiting use of merchant category codes for firearms dealers. The codes are used to help financial institution track where a purchase is made from but do not necessarily detail what is being bought.

In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which represented the first comprehensive gun reform bill undertaken by Congress in 30 years. The bill expanded background checks and restrictions on who can own a gun but fell short of the goals set by progressive lawmakers. Last year the administration issued an executive order intended to reduce gun violence, and in July the Department of Justice expanded firearms background check requirements for gun dealers.

With the pro-gun Trump administration, Republican majority Congress, and a gun rights friendly US Supreme Court, the country stands to face a potential reckoning over the widening gap in the treatment of gun violence and safety issues across the nation.

To read more CLICK HERE

After terrorist attack in New Orleans President-elect wrong on the undocumented, again

Hours after a man drove a pickup truck into New Year’s Eve revelers in New Orleans, killing 15 people, President-elect Donald J. Trump falsely suggested on social media that his condemnations of undocumented immigrants had been validated, reported The New York Times.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Mr. Trump said on his website, Truth Social. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before,” he added falsely. “Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”

Mr. Trump, who will be sworn in on Jan. 20, added in his post, “The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”

Some early reports about the attack said the truck was driven across the border from Mexico into the United States. Officials have since identified the suspect as a U.S.-born citizen and Army veteran who lived in Texas, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar.

He drove what appeared to be a rented truck that carried an Islamic State flag, officials said. He died after exchanging gunfire with authorities.

Mr. Trump made concerns about undocumented immigrants crossing the border central to his 2024 campaign, and has promised the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history once he takes office.

A Trump transition spokesman did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment after the suspect’s history was made public.

Federal officials said they were investigating whether anyone else was connected to the attack and were running down leads about the suspect’s associates.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

Chief Justice: Reject 'dangerous' talk of ignoring court rulings

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts slammed what he described as “dangerous” talk by some officials about ignoring federal court rulings, using an annual report weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office to stress the importance of an independent judiciary, reported CNN.

Officials “from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings,” Roberts wrote in the report, released by the Supreme Court on Tuesday. “These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

The chief justice didn’t detail which officials he had in mind – and both Republicans and Democrats have hinted at ignoring court rulings in recent years. Still, Roberts’ year-end message landed days before the January 20 inauguration of a president who has repeatedly decried the federal judiciary as rigged.

Trump’s agenda – particularly on immigration – could put the incoming president on a collision course next year with a Supreme Court he has helped to build by naming three conservative justices during his first term.

“Every administration suffers defeats in the court system – sometimes in cases with major ramifications,” Roberts wrote. And yet, he added, “for the past several decades,” both parties have respected court decisions and have headed off the kind of constitutional confrontations that arose during the civil rights era when some southern states declined court orders to integrate.

Roberts, in particular, pointed to decisions by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to enforce school desegregation rulings. In 1957, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to integrate its schools after officials sought to defy Supreme Court decisions that found segregated schools unconstitutional.

Roberts lamented that “public officials,” whom he also did not name, had “regrettably” attempted to intimidate judges by “suggesting political bias in the judge’s adverse rulings without a credible basis for such allegations.” Those attempts, he warned, are “inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.”

As in past years, the chief justice avoided direct mention of the controversies and challenges brewing within the Supreme Court itself – including lingering questions about ethics, a weekslong scandal this year over controversial flags hoisted at Justice Samuel Alito’s properties and sagging public confidence in the nation’s highest court.

In a series of interviews before the election, Vice President-elect JD Vance raised doubts about his fidelity to Supreme Court decisions. In a 2021 podcast, as The New York Times previously reported, Vance urged Trump to respond to adverse court rulings “like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

The likely apocryphal quote came in response to an 1832 decision Jackson opposed that dealt with Native Americans.

Trump himself has often blasted federal courts – including the Supreme Court – over adverse decisions. A spokesman for Trump’s campaign earlier this week slammed the “political weaponization of our justice system” in a response to a federal appeals court ruling in New York that upheld a jury’s verdict finding that the former president sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll.

Democrats, too, have toyed publicly with declining to enforce court decisions. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew criticism last year for suggesting on CNN that the Biden administration “ignore” a district court decision that would have halted Food and Drug Administration of the abortion pill mifepristone. The Supreme Court paused that decision and, in June, tossed the lawsuit challenging wider access to the drug.

Roberts has repeatedly used his year-end report to tout the importance of an independent judiciary and to sound an alarm about threats of violence against judges. Two years ago, in a similar vein, he stressed that “a judicial system cannot and should not live in fear.”

In this year’s report, Roberts added that “hostile foreign state actors” had accelerated attacks on the judiciary and other branches. In some instances, he said, “bots distort judicial decisions, using fake or exaggerated narratives to foment discord within our democracy.”

The report lands at the end of a year in which the conservative 6-3 majority granted former presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution – and on a timeline that allowed Trump to avoid a trial on federal charges in two cases before the November election. This fall, the court is delving into transgender care bans and a First Amendment challenge to a bipartisan ban on TikTok.

“The role of the judicial branch,” Roberts wrote, is “to say what the law is.”

But, he added, “judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court’s decrees.”

To read more CLICK HERE