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.

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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."

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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

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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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A sure sign the death penalty doesn't work

A man convicted of murder in Bay County who was sitting on death row has committed suicide in prison, reported WJHG-TV.

In 2008, Matthew Caylor raped and killed a 13-year-old girl named Melinda Hinson. She was staying with her family at a local motel, where she met Caylor. The motel maid found her body under the bed two days later.

The Georgia man was convicted of First-Degree Murder, Sexual Battery Involving Great Physical Force, and Aggravated Child Abuse in October 2009, and sentenced to death by an 8-4 jury vote. The case was one of dozens across the state where new sentencing hearings were ordered after a 2016 Florida Supreme Court ruling that death sentences required unanimous votes.

He was given a new sentencing hearing, and the judge determined he would remain on death row.

State Attorney Larry Basford confirmed Matthew Caylor committed suicide on Tuesday night. He says he committed suicide the same day as convicted killer Kayle Bates’ execution.

“Matthew Caylor was a sexual predator that had violated his parole in Georgia and came down here for a last hurrah in Bay County. After a trial and numerous appeals, he knew he was facing the same inevitable fate as Kayle Bates. By committing suicide, he saved the taxpayers of Florida a lot of money,” said Basford.

Matthew Caylor tried appealing his case once more earlier this year but got rejected by the state supreme court.

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Court rules New Jersey U.S. Attorney has no legal authority

The US District Court for the District of New Jersey issued a ruling that Alina Habba, who was appointed as the interim US attorney for the District of New Jersey, has had no legal authority since July 1, reported Jurist News.

According to the court’s decision, the US Senate has not approved Habba’s appointment to the post. Her temporary appointment, limited to 120 days, ended on that day. Chief Judge Matthew Brann wrote in his decision, “Faced with the question of whether Ms. Habba is lawfully performing the functions and duties of the office of the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, I conclude that she is not.”

Brann added, “Trump Administration officials, believing that Ms. Habba’s term did not end until midnight on Friday, July 25, 2025, conceived a multi-step maneuver to keep her in the United States Attorney role.” The judge further detailed five steps that he said the President Donald Trump’s administration used to keep Habba in the post, ruling that those steps were prohibited by 5 U.S.C. § 3345 and 28 U.S.C. § 546.

On July 22, the court appointed Desiree Grace, Habba’s first assistant, as the US attorney. US Attorney General Pam Bondi dismissed Grace hours later.

In response to Brann’s ruling, Bondi said the administration would appeal, saying Habba was “doing incredible work in New Jersey — and we will protect her position from activist judicial attacks.”

Chief Judge Brann stayed his order in the case pending the outcome of the expected appeal.

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Mangino discusses fashion designer's death with Nancy Grace on Crime Stories

Watch my appearance on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace as the panel discusses the mysterious death of Irish fashion designer.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Lawsuit: DC roadblocks unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment

Residents of Washington, D.C., are turning out in force to protest the Trump administration's takeover of the city's law enforcement, which has included police checkpoints on popular streets staffed by federal agents, reported Reason Magazine.

NBC News and other outlets reported that more than 100 protesters turned out on Wednesday night to heckle federal law enforcement at a checkpoint on 14th Street Northwest and warn drivers of the police ahead. 

And good for them.

Leaving aside the dubious overall legality of the White House's takeover—the D.C. attorney general filed a lawsuit over that issue Friday—the use of such generalized roadblocks is obnoxious, impinges on Americans' traditional freedom to travel, and is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. 

Scott Michelman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of the District of Columbia, tells Reason police checkpoints "are inherently problematic."

"They're evocative of a police state where law enforcement stops ordinary people going about their business for no reason at all," Michelman says.

And that's why, Michelman says, the Supreme Court sharply limited the use of police checkpoints. "They can't be used as a pretext for general crime control activities, and they can't be used just to harass the community, which is what I fear was happening this week on 14th Street," he says.

The Court ruled in the 2000 case City of Indianapolis v. Edmond that police roadblocks or checkpoints are only legal when they serve a specific road safety concern—such as stopping drunk drivers—not when they're used for general crime control.

"We cannot sanction stops justified only by the generalized and everpresent possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any given motorist has committed some crime," the Court wrote.

A Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) spokesperson told The Washington Post that the roadblock was a "traffic safety compliance checkpoint," which the department has been setting up around the city weekly since 2023. The spokesperson said officers "stopped 28 vehicles, issued 38 infraction notices and arrested one man for driving without a permit and counterfeit tags," reports the Post.

The focus on car safety would at least arguably pass muster under Indianapolis v. Edmond, but that then raises the question of why federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations, who are typically tasked with investigating complex international crimes, were spending their time enforcing local traffic laws and checking vehicle tags.

However, The New York Times reported that federal agents were running sobriety checkpoints, not vehicle safety checkpoints.

"It's hard to take any of these conflicting explanations very seriously," Michelman says. "Instead, it appears that in keeping with President Trump's general contempt for the people of D.C., he's just interested in a campaign of harassment."

It's this sort of ambiguity that could get D.C. in trouble, as it has in the past. MPD used to operate "Neighborhood Safety Zone" checkpoints in the Trinidad neighborhood until a federal appeals court ruled they were unconstitutional in 2009.

Despite the fairly clear rule from the Supreme Court, police departments across the country still try to get away with setting up general anti-crime checkpoints.

In 2022, the Mississippi Justice Center filed a lawsuit challenging Jackson, Mississippi's use of "ticket, arrest, and tow" checkpoints, causing the city to overhaul its policies. 

In 2019, Madison County, Mississippi, also settled a lawsuit over police roadblocks that happened to predominantly appear in black neighborhoods. As Reason reported in a 2017 investigation, black residents of Madison County had felt under siege from their sheriff's office for generations.

Several New England ACLU chapters also successfully sued to shut down a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) checkpoint in New Hampshire in 2023 that was nearly 100 miles from the Canadian border. The civil rights groups argued that the CBP was using the checkpoint to detain and search motorists, well beyond its authority and far from its jurisdiction.

Using vehicle safety regulations as a fig leaf to allow federal law enforcement to harass and investigate drivers shouldn't be tolerated by courts, and from the looks of it, it rightfully won't be tolerated by D.C. residents.

To read more CLICK HERE

The 'execution state' Florida's record 10th execution of the year

 The  29th Execution of 2025

Kayle Bates convicted of abducting a woman from a Florida Panhandle insurance office and killing her received a lethal injection on August 19, 2025. Not to be out done, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has presided over the state’s record 10th execution this year, reported The Associated Press.

Bates, 67, was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke under a death warrant signed by Gov. DeSantis. The execution extended Florida’s record for total executions in a single year, and two more are planned in the state within the next month.

Bates was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and attempted sexual battery in the June 14, 1982, killing of Janet Renee White in Bay County in the Florida Panhandle. The woman’s husband, Randy White, was one of the witnesses to Tuesday’s execution.

At the scheduled 6 p.m. execution time, the curtain to the death chamber promptly went up. Bates was already strapped to a gurney with his left arm extended and the IV line for the drugs already in place. When asked if he wished to make a last statement, Bates replied ‘no.’

The execution then began at 6:01 pm. Bates began breathing more rapidly about a minute after the drugs began flowing, and then he stopped after about another minute. At 6:05 p.m., the warden touched Bates’ face, shook his shoulders and shouted his name with no response. Several minutes later, he was declared dead.

At a briefing following the execution, Randy White thanked DeSantis for signing the death warrant and also thanked members of law enforcement and prosecutors for working on his wife’s case.

″I am truly humbled by the outpouring of love and support from so many who didn’t know either one of us. I thank you from my heart. It means more than you will ever know,” he said.

Since the U.S. 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.

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With Tuesday’s execution, a total of 29 men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and at least nine other people were scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025.

According to court documents, Bates abducted his victim from the insurance office where she worked, took her into some woods behind the building, attempted to rape her, fatally stabbed her and tore a diamond ring from one of her fingers.

Attorneys for Bates had filed appeals with the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as a federal lawsuit claiming DeSantis’ process for signing death warrants was discriminatory. The lawsuit was recently dismissed by a judge who found problems with its statistical analysis.

The Florida Supreme Court recently denied Bates’ pending claims, including arguments that evidence of organic brain damage had been inadequately considered during his second penalty phase. The court ruled Bates already had three decades to raise these claims. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Bates’ last appeal Tuesday.

Two more executions are planned in Florida in coming weeks.

Curtis Windom, 59, is scheduled to become the 11th person executed in Florida on Aug. 28. He was convicted of killing three people in the Orlando area in 1992.

David Pittman, 63, would be the 12th person executed in Florida if his death sentence is carried out as scheduled Sept. 17. He was found guilty of fatally stabbing his estranged wife’s sister and parents at their Polk County home before setting it on fire in 1990.

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 Department of Corrections.

CREATORS: Has The Death Penalty Become Arbitrary and Capricious?

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 19, 2025

Those who write about the death penalty often do so from a certain bias. I wanted to take a crack at writing about the ultimate punishment without bias. McFarland & Company helped me make that effort a reality.

My book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" examined every execution in 2010. One of those executions was that of Cal Coburn Brown. His perspective on the death penalty was both disturbing and provocative.

Brown was executed by the state of Washington. He had brutally sexually assaulted, tortured, and murdered a young woman. He left her body in the trunk of a car at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

Brown then jumped on an airplane and went to meet a woman in Palm Springs, Calif. He was torturing her when she managed to escape and notify the police.

Brown spent more than 16 years on Washington's Death Row. As he lay strapped to a gurney awaiting lethal injection, he protested what he perceived to be the unfairness of his sentence. He complained that criminals who had killed many more people, such as "Green River killer" Gary Ridgway, were serving life sentences while he was about to receive the death penalty.

Ridgway is a serial killer, both diabolical and prolific. He was convicted of murdering 49 women in the northwest between 1982 and 1998. Ridgway's victims were women in vulnerable circumstances, including underage runaways. Ridgway strangled his victims and dumped their bodies in secluded areas, often returning to the bodies to engage in acts of necrophilia.

In his final words, Cal Brown said, "I only killed one victim ... I cannot really see that there is true justice. Hopefully, sometime in the future, that gets straightened out."

There does seem to be some inconsistency in the application of the death penalty. Let's start with the fact that 23 states don't have the death penalty, and another 10 that have not carried out an execution in the last 10 years.

For instance, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer escaped death at the hands of the government because Wisconsin had outlawed the death penalty in 1853.

David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, escaped the death penalty in New York. Berkowitz killed six people in New York City in the 1970s. He terrorized an entire city, and for that matter, an entire nation.

Berkowitz was not sentenced to death. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder; as a result, the death penalty was not an option under New York's sentencing scheme. It didn't matter — New York had not executed a killer since 1963.

Charles Manson, responsible for ten murders, including the gruesome murder of pregnant movie star Sharon Tate, was sentenced to death but never executed. Manson's sentence was commuted to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the imposition of the death penalty arbitrary in 1972.

Those serial killers who didn't escape the executioner include John Wayne Gracy who murdered 33 women in Texas between 1972 and 1978; Ted Bundy who murdered as many as 30 women across the country, often sexual assaulting them and engaging in necrophilia with their dead bodies; the "Freeway Killer," William Bonin, responsible for 14 killings and the rare female serial killer Aileen Wuornos who was executed for six murders in 2002.

There seems to be no explanation for sparing the life of the diabolical modern-day mass killer — Byran Kohberger.

Kohberger was offered a plea bargain to life without parole, without being required to explain his motive for killing four young college students in Idaho. It is not as though Idaho doesn't have, or use, the death penalty. Just this year, the state adopted the firing squad as its primary form of execution.

To further complicate matters, the evidence against Kohberger was overwhelming. He had recently purchased a KA-BAR knife — the alleged murder weapon. His DNA was on the knife sheath. He was observed on video surveillance near the victims' apartment. Kohberger's cellphone put him in the vicinity of the murders. Even more surprising, no mitigating evidence was presented by his lawyers.

Kohberger dodging the death penalty supports, yet again, that the death penalty has become arbitrary and capricious.

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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The on going saga of former Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip

 It was almost 10 a.m. and the eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Oklahoma City was nearly empty, save for a few onlookers and reporters. A Thursday morning hearing had been scheduled in the case of Richard Glossip, but he wasn’t there — neither were his attorneys nor the attorneys for the state. Minutes later, the gaggle of lawyers emerged from a door leading to the judge’s chambers, and Don Knight, Glossip’s longtime lead attorney, approached Glossip’s wife Lea in the front row of the gallery to deliver some news: Judge Heather Coyle had just recused herself from Glossip’s case. There was no explanation why, reported The Intercept.

The recusal came as a surprise — not only because trial judges rarely willingly step away from a case, but also because there was no recusal request on the official court docket. Coyle was previously a prosecutor in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office under the former DA who sent Glossip to death row, and the recusal was likely rooted in concern about those ties. It was the latest twist in Glossip’s case since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction at the urging of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond — only for Drummond to announce that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder.

Glossip was twice convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside room 102 of the rundown motel his family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.

Glossip, who has always maintained his innocence, faced execution nine times as the Oklahoma courts repeatedly denied his appeals. He may well have been executed if Drummond hadn’t intervened. In early 2023, Drummond ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that rampant prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case, and, when that failed, joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed — that the state has described as its “indispensable witness” — had lied on the witness stand.

Drummond’s concessions about the flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy in support of overturning Glossip’s conviction made his announcement in June that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrayed a long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and set Glossip free.

The alleged agreement, first reported by The Intercept, was at the heart of an explosive court filing last month, which included a 2023 email exchange between Drummond and Knight laying out the deal. According to the email, Glossip would agree to plead guilty to a lesser charge and would be immediately released in exchange for a promise that Glossip would not sue the state for anything related to his “arrest and incarceration.”

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied.

The state has since denied that any deal was ever reached, writing in a court filing that the first anyone in the AG’s office had heard about it was just before Glossip’s team filed their brief that included the email exchange. “Needless to say, the defendant is not entitled to enforcement of a non-existent plea agreement,” prosecutors wrote.

Thursday’s court hearing was meant to figure out how to proceed with the matter.

In anticipation of the hearing, Glossip’s attorneys on August 11 filed a lengthy affidavit from Knight that outlined his ongoing communications with Drummond and members of his staff regarding the deal. The filing shed new light on the negotiations, including that Drummond, who is currently running for governor, told Knight that the timing for carrying out the deal “was based on his own political calculus.”

In fact, it was Drummond who initially approached Knight in the spring of 2023 asking if they could strike a deal, Knight recalled. Drummond was preparing to admit that Glossip’s trial had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct and to ask the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the conviction.

Drummond’s “big fear was that the court would grant it,” Knight told The Intercept, and that Glossip would walk free and would sue the state. “So Drummond did what a good lawyer does for his client and looked for an insurance policy. This agreement was that insurance policy.” Knight noted that if Glossip had been released as planned and then had gone on to sue the state, “the shoe would be on the other foot, and Drummond would be asking for this agreement to be enforced now, instead of me.”

In his affidavit, Knight lays out how after the Supreme Court ruled in Glossip’s favor in February, Drummond was quick to lay out a plan to follow through with the deal in a way that would avoid too much publicity — by releasing Glossip on the Friday before Easter. “I was informed that AG Drummond planned to effectuate the agreement on April 18, 2025,” Knight wrote. Knight recalled that he told Drummond’s solicitor general that he had shoulder replacement surgery scheduled in March, which would preclude him from traveling. Knight said he’d be willing to put off the surgery if Glossip’s release date was firm and was told that it was. “Having been assured that it was a firm plan, I rescheduled my surgery to May 13, 2025,” Knight wrote.

During a phone call in early April, however, Drummond told Knight that he would need additional time, but assured him the deal was still on. Just days before Knight’s surgery, the two talked again, and Drummond “reaffirmed he was still working on timing,” Knight wrote. Instead, a few weeks later, Drummond put out a press release announcing he would be retrying Glossip for first-degree murder.

Drummond’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In their most recent brief, Glossip’s legal team argues that prosecutors’ characterization of the deal merely reveals their own ignorance about what was happening behind the scenes.

“The thing that makes me kind of chuckle about the situation,” Knight told The Intercept, “is that I believe the people in Drummond’s office who are writing these petitions are learning about the truth of this matter from us … rather than from Gentner Drummond.”

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Gibsonia and Cranberry, PA restaurants raided and damaged by masked ICE agents

A local Mexican restaurant chain in Western Pennsylvania is trying to forge ahead a week after a worksite immigration raid left property damage at two of its storefronts and a workforce afraid to show up to their jobs, according to two employees and a witness who spoke with NBC News.

It all started Aug. 7 when immigration authorities showed up at two Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant & Bar locations in the Pittsburgh area. As many as 16 workers were detained — nine worked at a location in Gibsonia, a suburb north of Pittsburgh, and seven others worked at another location in the nearby township of Cranberry.

In a social media post that same afternoon, which included a video taken by a worker, the business accused agents of storming into its restaurants and leaving “a trail of fear, confusion, and destruction” that included a burned kitchen, torn ceiling tiles, broken doors, a safe cut open by an agent and trashed food. The incident raises questions over the tactics used by authorities at this particular raid.

This week, gas plumbers fixed a stove that was damaged during the raid, according to two people working at the restaurant chain. Staffing was also thin at the locations targeted by immigration authorities as employees who witnessed the raid, including those who are U.S. citizens, remain “in shock,” they added. “No one wants to go back, everyone is scared.”

Both workers who spoke with NBC News requested to not be named to protect their family’s privacy because of an ongoing federal investigation in connection with last week’s events.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania declined to clarify what the investigation it is leading is about.

As the immigration arrests were happening last week, someone alerted an emergency response immigration hotline run by Casa San Jose, a local nonprofit that advocates for Latino and immigrant communities.

The organization quickly dispatched about 20 volunteers to both locations to act as legal observers, collect testimonies and provide support to the workers and families affected, according to Jaime Martinez, a community defense organizer at Casa San Jose.

At the Gibsonia location, “the raid actually caused a kitchen fire that agents were unable to extinguish at the beginning, which put people in danger,” Martinez told NBC News on Tuesday.

Employees who spoke to Martinez and his volunteers said the stove was on when agents entered the kitchen because workers were cooking food as they prepared to open the restaurant Thursday morning. The restaurant’s manager warned agents that the open burners were on, but witnesses alleged that agents didn’t do anything until a fire sparked, he said.

The detained employees, who had their arms and ankles shackled, were the ones who directed the agents to find the fire extinguisher and instructed them on how to use it after initially failing to operate it, according to employees who spoke to Martinez and his volunteers.

“By the time the fire department got there, the fire had already been put out with a dry chemical extinguisher, but only after this delay,” Martinez said.

A spokesperson with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News in an email Thursday that the “damage to the restaurant, including the small fire, was created by the illegal aliens themselves while they were trying to escape or hide from law enforcement officers.”

According to ICE, the agents showed up at the locations in Gibsonia and Cranberry to execute federal search warrants based on information it got alleging that the restaurants were employing undocumented workers, WPXI, NBC’s affiliate in Pittsburgh, reported. The agency added that the 16 people detained lack legal status and are now in ICE custody, undergoing immigration proceedings.

“But in the process of coming in with that warrant, they also terrorized the community, pointed guns at people and destroyed a local business,” Martinez said.

In response to this, the ICE spokesperson told NBC News, “All agents and officers followed established legal procedures while executing the warrants.”

At the Cranberry location, Casa San Jose volunteers interviewed a worker who described seeing officers come into the restaurant, shouting “police” and pointing their long guns at the employees. One female employee who was in the kitchen said an agent “pointed the gun at her head” while telling her to stop cooking, according to Martinez.

While she was not detained after showing proper documentation, “this lady is now going to have to live with the trauma of having law enforcement point a gun at her head while she was at work,” Martinez said.

Martinez and one of the workers who spoke with NBC News said agents lined up all of the cuffed employees and made them kneel while pointing their weapons at them.

“Agents and officers operated within established law enforcement standards in order to ensure the safety of law enforcement officers, the public and the illegal aliens themselves,” the ICE spokesperson said in response to this allegation.

Last week was not the first time immigration authorities attempted to detain employees from Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant & Bar. The ICE spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that a June incident was part of “an investigation that ultimately led to the execution of the warrants” this month.

Martinez said that on a night in June, he got a call on the hotline, reporting unmarked vehicles surrounding a nearby apartment complex. When the volunteer who was dispatched arrived at the area, she noticed the vehicles were parked with their engines still running, in front and behind the restaurant.

According to Martinez, it looked like federal agents inside the vehicles were waiting for workers to come out of the restaurant as it was closing. The vehicles left once TV crews arrived on the scene, he said.

“There were nine people in that restaurant on lockdown,” Martinez said, adding his group doesn’t know the immigration status of those workers since it doesn’t ask people about that as part of its policy. “But you don’t have to be undocumented to be afraid of getting detained.”

Since launching the hotline in March, Casa San Jose has received more than 650 calls reporting more than 100 immigration detentions in the area and has dispatched volunteers in at least 70 instances, according to Martinez.

In the wake of the raids at Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant and Bar locations, the community came together and collectively donated more than $133,000. The workers who spoke with NBC News said the business plans to use the funds to cover bond expenses, one month worth of salary for each employee detained and repair damage done to the restaurant.

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Autocracy 101: 'Mortal danger and unbridled chaos'

 Moustafa Bayoumi of The Guardian writes:

A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.

Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.

Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.

But the sad truth is that many, if not most, of Trump’s justifications for his policies, are unsurprisingly based on bald-faced lies or gross exaggerations simply to further his pursuit of absolute power. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. With each new announcement, Trump continues to prove how excellent he is at crafting the illusion of problems where there basically are none and leading his followers down an often-violent path of retribution. (Remember January 6, DC’s most violent day in recent history?) By doing so, he seeks to constantly expand his authority while also deflecting from all the substantial problems that are staring him in the face. And these problems are not insignificant. Think of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the continuation of global conflicts that he promised months ago he would uniquely be able to end.

The federal takeover of the Washington DC police department, announced with loud fanfare by Trump on Monday, is the latest example of this phenomenon. About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president, “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”

This does sound rather frightening. Fortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter.

First, the facts. Crime in DC is at historic lows. “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the justice department announced earlier this year. And crime numbers for 2025 are even better, substantially lower than 2024. Violent crime in 2025 is down 26% compared with 2024.

The DC council understands this. The council responded to Trump’s announcement with an angry joint statement: “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the DC police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency. Further, the National Guard has no public safety training or knowledge of local laws. The Guard’s role does not include investigating or solving crimes in the District. Calling out the National Guard is an unnecessary deployment with no real mission.”

Such facts ought to matter. So why don’t they to Trump?

Facts don’t matter for Trump because facts have always operated as nothing more than an inconvenience for him. Just ask Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was recently fired by Trump after accurately reporting employment statistics, and those specific numbers contradicted Trump and his policies. But with every new policy enacted by this administration, Trump’s fact-free worldview becomes a lot more worrisome.

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Police use AI to prepare reports, may be cannon fodder for defense attorneys

Police reports sit at the heart of the criminal justice process — officers use them to detail an incident and explain why they took the actions they did, and may later use them to prepare if they have to testify in court, Reported CNN. Reports can also inform prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and the public about the officer’s perspective on what took place. They can influence whether a prosecutor decides to take a case, or whether a judge decides to hold someone without bond, said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, an American University law professor who studies the intersection of technology and policing.

“Police reports are really an accountability mechanism,” Ferguson said. “It’s a justification for state power, for police power.”

For that reason, proponents of Draft One tout the potential for AI to make reports more accurate and comprehensive, in addition to its time-saving benefits. But skeptics worry that any issues with the technology could have major ramifications for people’s lives. At least one state has already passed a law regulating the use of AI-drafted police reports.

Draft One’s rollout also comes amid broader concerns around AI in law enforcement, after experiments elsewhere with facial recognition technology have led to wrongful arrests.

“I do think it’s a growing movement. Like lots of AI, people are looking at how do we update? How do we improve?” Ferguson said of AI police report technology. “There’s a hype level, too, that people are pushing this because there’s money to be made on the technology.”

An efficiency tool for officers

After an officer records an interaction on their body camera, they can request that Draft One create a report. The tool uses the transcript from the body camera footage to create the draft, which begins to appear within seconds of the request. The officer is then prompted to review the draft and fill in additional details before submitting it as final.

Each draft report contains bracketed fill-in-the-blanks that an officer must either complete or delete before it can be submitted. The blank portions are designed to ensure officers read through the drafts to correct potential errors or add missing information.

“It really does have to be the officer’s own report at the end of the day, and they have to sign off as to what happened,” Axon President Josh Isner told CNN.

Draft One uses a modified version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Axon further tested and trained to reduce the likelihood of “hallucinations,” factual errors that AI systems can randomly generate. Axon also says it works with a group of third-party academics, restorative justice advocates and community leaders that provide feedback on how to responsibly develop its technology and mitigate potential biases.

The idea for Draft One came from staffing shortages that Axon’s police department clients were facing, Isner said. In a 2024 survey of more than 1,000 US police agencies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that agencies were operating at least 10% below their authorized staffing levels on average.

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Balko: Trump's DC police state, testing the limits of his power — and our democracy

Radley Balko writes on The Watch:

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in Washington, D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024. So far this year, it’s down an addtional 26 percent. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes dictators and whose entire worldview is perpetually stuck in the 1980s can provide.

The motivation for Donald Trump’s plan to “federalize” Washington, D.C., is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles, deporting people to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months: He is testing the limits of his power — and, by extension, of our democracy. He’s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he’s been able to do what he pleases.

The incident that apparently precipitated Trump’s D.C. crackdown was entirely pretextual. It wasn’t the overall amount of violent crime, it was that the wrong person had fallen victim to it. Both Trump and Elon Musk declared D.C. to be a crime-infested wasteland after photos emerged of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, formerly of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, beaten and bloodied from an alleged carjacking. The attackers ran off when a Metro police officer arrived on the scene — which is far more protection than crime victims usually get from law enforcement.

In response, Trump raged on social media over the weekend. He immediately sent hundreds of agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the city (who then responded to a fender bender as if someone had detonated a dirty bomb.)

Trump is now deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the city too. While state National Guards report to governors, the D.C. National Guard reports to the president. The federal government also has jurisdiction over Washington. Oversight power is supposed to lie with Congress, not the president. But this Congress has essentially dissolved itself into Trump’s agenda.

These legal distinctions mean that Trump’s “federalization” of D.C. isn’t quite as extraordinary a power grab as his deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June. But as he made clear at an unhinged press conference on Monday, Trump himself is either unaware of that distinction or doesn’t acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well.

But as with Washington and Los Angeles, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has fallen dramatically this year. New York, meanwhile, remains one of the safest big cities in the country, despite what the trembling cowards on Fox News may tell you.

There was no emergency in Los Angeles, either. With the aid of the right-wing media bubble, the administration exploited a couple incidents of property destruction with a surge in peaceful protests against the administration’s immigration raids to depict the city as a dystopian hellscape.

The important thing Trump learned from Los Angeles is that the federal courts failed to intervene. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objections of a state governor is reviewable by federal courts, the court also took at face value Trump’s claim that the protests presented a threat to immigration enforcement.

There’s little evidence that this was true. But more importantly, that was never the real reason Trump cracked down on the city. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump himself, and internal documents made clear, the real reason was to intimidate protesters, terrify immigrant communities and their advocates, and “liberate” blue cities and states from the “socialists” elected to office. It was a projection of power.

If this were all truly motivated by Trump’s deep commitment to fighting crime, he wouldn’t have cut security funding to D.C. by 44 percent. (I’m dubious of the link between such funding and crime rates, but the important thing here is that Trump thinks they’re linked.) If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have released a convicted triple murder on the streets of Orlando. If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have hired a man who told his fellow January 6th protesters to kill the Capitol police to a top-level position at the Justice Department. It this were about crime, Trump would have said something — anything — about the shooter who fired 150 rounds into the Center for Disease Control building in Atlanta.

This is about projecting power. Trump has long disparaged cities with large Black populations and Black leadership. New York, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles are all cities with large Black populations who are run by Black Democrats. The front-runner to be the new mayor of New York is a Muslim Democratic socialist. Trump isn’t planning to “protect” the residents of these cities from crime. He’s planning to impose his will on them.

The crackdown in D.C. comes 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s brother, laying out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.” The Washington Post then reported just today that the Pentagon has developed a plan for a “reaction force” of National Guard troops Trump can deploy to any city on a moment’s notice.

These policies would end once and for all this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement, it would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution, and it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens. (If you’re wondering what — other than being the brother of the least qualified person ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency — makes Phil Hegseth qualified to plan and implement a policy that would fundamentally alter the relationship between America and its military, the answer is apparently that he once started a podcasting company.)

Tough-on-crime politicians have long used Washington, D.C., and its residents as political pawns rather than real Americans with real constitutional rights. When Richard Nixon was pushing a crime bill that would make the D.C. the test city for his crime policies in 1970, his Justice Department suppressed statistics showing that crime in the city had been falling for five months. They needed people to fear the capital to get the bill through Congress. The bill passed, but D.C.’s progressive police chief at the time refused to implement policies like no-knock raids, preventative detention, and aggressive crackdowns on protest. Crime would continue to fall in D.C. even as it rose in the rest of the country.

In 1989, in his first televised speech as president, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that he claimed had been seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the White House. It had not. It hadn’t even been “seized.” Undercover agents from the DEA had persuaded a small-time, 18-year-old drug dealer to sell them crack at the park so they could give it to the White House for Bush to use in his speech. In other words, the DEA arranged for an illegal drug sale near the White House that otherwise wouldn’t have happened solely so Bush could say an illegal drug sale had just taken place near the White House.

Demonizing Washington, D.C., then, is an old tactic from an old playbook. But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren’t attacks on democracy.

This most certainly is.

The memo reported by the New Republic seeks to replicate what Trump did in Los Angeles in other cities. It conflates peaceful, constitutionally protected protest with international crime syndicates and Al Qaeda or ISIS. And it puts heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president’s bidding.

This is what Trump has always wanted. He has always expressed his envy of and respect for authoritarians who could sic the military on protesters and critics.

One of the healthier things about our democracy is that when politicians have advocated to get the Pentagon more active in domestic policing, the strongest resistance has tended to come from the Pentagon itself. It’s long been a core principle in U.S. military culture that soldiers should not be deployed against their fellow citizens. It’s a bright red line.

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