Autocracy Watch: Lawfully and non-violently withholding our consent for the attack on America’s governmental fabric

The Situation on Friday,  from Lawfare, urged the impeachment of Judge Emil Bove as soon as a majority in the House of Representatives exists to do it.

Today, my social media feeds are an incoherent melange of stories, some related to one another, some not, some important and meaningful, some emphatically neither. There are tariffs; there’s jobs data and resulting personnel actions; there’s a bit of Sydney Sweeney—of whose good jeans I have now heard; there are Texas Democrats fleeing their state; there are non-Texas Democrats pretending they are up to retaliating against Texas Republicans over redistricting. There’s famine in Gaza. And there’s still a bit of Jeffrey Epstein hanging around.

All of which is to say that it’s a good time to ignore the news and to return to the subject of non-cooperation with The Situation—a matter which I treated back at the beginning of March when I declared that “I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in cooperating any more.”

My point in that column was that we should all figure out ways, lawfully and non-violently, to slow things down, to make society work a little less efficiently, to withhold our consent for the attack on America’s governmental fabric.

I have spent a lot of time since writing this column thinking about what mass non-cooperation with The Situation looks like in practice, and I have been moved that others have gotten in touch with their own thoughts and ideas on the subject. Excellent experiments have taken place.

I have also been reading on the subject and thinking about it conceptually, trying to envision mass action based on highly-distributed forms of non-cooperation that are not destructive, not violent, yet are also more than just holding signs and chanting things. 

I have to say, after studying the problem for a few months, I have not yet come up with a magic bullet.

Let’s consider the pros and cons of a few different forms of non-cooperation:

Denying a quorum to the Texas legislature seems like an excellent form of non-cooperation. It will slow down redistricting in the Lone Star State. It gets a lot of attention. It may spur other actions. And it stands for a larger form of non-cooperation, which others may take up: that is, non-participation in official actions that may require one’s participation to take place at all. It’s great—as far as it goes.

The trouble is that most of us aren’t legislators and thus can’t band together with a few dozen of our colleagues to collectively shut down institutions from which The Situation demands anti-democratic action.

Most of us aren’t in a position to operationalize this particular form of non-cooperation—which is to say that it’s not scalable and can’t be done in a distributed fashion.

Here’s one that can be done in a more distributed fashion: I have exactly no intention of cooperating with ICE in its current roundup of undocumented aliens—and neither, it seems, do a lot of other people, both citizens and officials. What’s more, I would have no hesitation about filming any ICE raid which I might happen to witness and making that public—as many others are doing. 

The non-cooperation of civilian bystanders with these law enforcement activities—some by activists and some by people who just happened to be present—has been a salutary thing, raising a lot of awareness of what “mass deportation” really means. These policies have become increasingly unpopular as more and more people have seen them in action. As long as people are careful not to do more than express their views, take pictures, and film things—not, that is, to dox people or to interfere physically with lawful activity—it strikes me as a constructive form of non-cooperation with a dangerous policy. 

But again, there are limits—and risks to personal safety and liberty. As we’ve all seen, it’s not going to stop what ICE is doing. It’s not going to shame members of Congress into refusing to balloon ICE’s funding. And the administration is actively proud of these videos. It stages this sort of brutality and makes ads out of its own videos.

So again, useful, but not a silver dagger.

Here’s a third area of non-cooperation, one which hits close to home for me: For the first time in my life, there are whole categories of government actions in my field with which I will not assist and upon which I will not advise.

Only a few months ago, I was proud to serve on an advisory board convened by DHS on intelligence matters. I would not serve on such a board today. Similarly, I would not assist on or consult with NSA, FBI, the Defense Department, or the Justice Department on policy matters—all of which I have done proudly in the past under administrations of both parties. It’s not that I don't think that career officials in all of those areas are struggling with hard questions. They are. It’s that I don’t trust the leadership of these agencies to act in an apolitical fashion any more—even, perhaps especially, on national security matters. I don’t trust that my advice will be used for the benefit of the country, rather than for the benefit of The Situation. So I will not cooperate. I will not participate. And in that judgment, I am certainly not alone.

The trouble with this form of non-cooperation is that it is a bit bespoke—precious, even. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard don’t want my advice anyway, so announcing that I won’t show up to a party to which I haven’t been invited is striking a bit of a pose. And that’s true even if to the limited extent my point scales. When I say I’m not alone, after all, what I mean is that there are a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people, who are self-consciously not participating in helping the executive branch with national security work. I imagine that there are a bunch more in other fields—fields like public health and climate science. And as the Lord High Executioner might put it, “they’ll none of them be missed.”

Trumpism is, at its core, a war on elites and expertise, so a small handful of elites declaring that they are withholding their expertise is very far from a pressure point; it is threatening The Situation with a good time.

None of this is to criticize the people who are taking these approaches. They all have a place in the mood of non-cooperation that an active citizenry should be contemplating these days.

There may be no single mass act of non-cooperation that everyone can participate in, that is more than momentary, and that paralyzes The Situation. It may be that diversity of non-cooperation is itself an essential part of the mood.

But I keep thinking about it. I keep stewing on it. 

“In this country,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay published in 1844, “we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history.” Emerson was contemptuous of the preference: “But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

Eventually, every actual state is corrupt—and the corruption of this one is happening before our eyes. The search for ways to undermine that corruption, to withhold consent, to not participate in it and to not cooperate with it, to not obey its laws too too well, strikes me as an essential part of maintaining goodness.

The Situation continues tomorrow.

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Tennessee executed man who killed girlfriend and two daughters

 The 28th Execution of 2025

A man convicted of killing his girlfriend and her two young daughters in the 1980s said he was “hurting so bad” while he was given a lethal injection on August 5, 2025 in Tennessee, where authorities had refused to deactivate his implanted defibrillator despite claims it might cause unnecessary, painful shocks as the drugs were administered, reported The Associated Press.

Black’s attorney said they will review data kept by the device as part of an autopsy.

Black died at 10:43 a.m., prison officials said. It was about 10 minutes after the execution started and Black talked about being in pain.

Asked for any last words, he replied, “No sir.”

Black looked around the room as the execution started, lifting his head off the gurney multiple times, and could be heard sighing and breathing heavily. All seven media witnesses to the execution agreed he appeared to be in discomfort. Throughout the execution, a spiritual adviser prayed and sang over Black, at one point touching his face.

“Oh, it’s hurting so bad,” Black said, as he lay with his hands and chest restrained to the gurney, a sheet covering up past his lower half, and an IV line in his arm.

“I’m so sorry. Just listen to my voice,” the adviser responded.

Black was executed after a back-and-forth in court over whether officials would need to turn off his implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD. Black, 69, was in a wheelchair, suffering from dementia, brain damage, kidney failure, congestive heart failure and other conditions, his attorneys have said.

The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center said it’s unaware of any other cases with similar claims to Black’s about ICDs or pacemakers. Black’s attorneys said they haven’t found a comparable case, either.

Black killed his girlfriend and her 2 daughters

Black was convicted in the 1988 shooting deaths of his girlfriend Angela Clay, 29, and her two daughters, Latoya Clay, 9, and Lakeisha Clay, 6. Prosecutors said he was in a jealous rage when he shot the three at their home. At the time, Black was on work-release while serving time for shooting Clay’s estranged husband.

Clay’s sister said Black will now face a higher power.

“His family is now going through the same thing we went through 37 years ago. I can’t say I’m sorry because we never got an apology,” Linette Bell, Angela Clay’s sister, said in a statement read by a victim’s advocate after the execution.

Black’s lawyer said the execution was shameful.

“Today, the state of Tennessee killed a gentle, kind, fragile, intellectually disabled man in a violation of the laws of our country simply because they could,” attorney Kelley Henry said.

The legal fight over Black’s defibrillator

In mid-July, a trial court judge agreed with Black’s attorneys that officials must have the defibrillator deactivated to avert the risk that it could cause unnecessary pain and prolong the execution. But Tennessee’s Supreme Court overturned that decision Thursday, saying the other judge lacked authority to order the change.

The state disputed that the lethal injection would cause Black’s defibrillator to shock him and said he wouldn’t feel them regardless.

Henry said Black’s defense team will carefully review autopsy results, EKG data from Black and information from the defibrillator to determine what exactly happened during the execution. The lethal injection protocol is still being challenged in court.

She said she was especially concerned about his head movement and complaints of pain because the massive dose of pentobarbital used to kill inmates is supposed to rapidly leave them unconscious.

“The fact that he was able to raise his head several times and express pain tells you that the pentobarbital was not acting the way the state’s experts claim it acts,” Henry said.

Prison officials did not comment on witnesses and Black’s attorney saying he appeared conscious or his complaints of pain.

It was Tennessee’s second execution since May, after a pause for five years, first because of COVID-19 and then because of missteps by state corrections officials.

Twenty-eight men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and nine other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025. The number of executions this year exceeds the 25 carried out last year and in 2018. It is the highest total since 2015, when 28 people were put to death.

Black’s condition

Black had an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, which is a small, battery-powered electronic device that is surgically implanted in the chest. It served as a pacemaker and an emergency defibrillator. Black’s attorneys have said a doctor can send it a deactivation command without surgery.

The legal case also spurred a reminder that most medical professionals consider participation in executions a violation of health care ethics.

Intellectual disability claim

In recent years, Black’s legal team has unsuccessfully tried to get a new hearing about an intellectual disability they say he’s exhibited since childhood. People with intellectual disabilities are constitutionally barred from execution. 

His attorneys have said that if they had delayed a prior attempt to seek his intellectual disability claim, he would have been spared under a 2021 state law. That is because the 2021 law denies a hearing to people on death row who have already filed a similar request and a court has ruled on it “on the merits.”

A judge denied Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk’s attempt to get Black a new hearing. Funk focused on input from an expert for the state in 2004 who determined back then that Black didn’t meet the criteria for what was then called “mental retardation.” But she concluded that Black met the new law’s criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual disability.

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CREATORS: The Tragic Abduction and Murder of Etan Patz is Back in the News

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 5, 2025

In 1979, a 6-year-old boy disappeared on his way to his Manhattan school bus stop. Etan Patz's disappearance changed the way people parent, launching the missing and exploited children's movement. Patz was never found.

Thirty-three years later, Pedro Hernandez was arrested and charged by the Manhattan district attorney's office with second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.

According to The New York Times, "Hernandez was living in New Jersey when a relative told authorities that he suspected him of killing Etan. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hernandez had a history of sexually abusing a family member, drug use and domestic violence."

This arrest was high-profile. As one of the nation's most infamous child abductions, with an arrest decades after the crime, one would think the police would want to make sure everything was done by the book. Not in New York City.

The police elicited a confession from Hernandez after seven hours of questioning. That isn't particularly unusual, but the confession came before he was administered his Miranda warnings. After he confessed, he was mirandized by the police who had Hernandez repeat his confession on tape, according to court filings.

The New York Times reported, Hernandez's first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury after 18 days of deliberation. The lone holdout said that his primary reason had been Hernandez's initial confession, which to the juror seemed "coerced."

In 2017, a second jury convicted Hernandez on the ninth day of deliberations. The jury foreman later remarked that "deliberations were difficult."

Last month, a federal court granted Hernandez a new trial.

A quarter-century after Patz disappeared, Americans were presented with a list of six crimes that could happen in their local communities. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans expressed the greatest concern for their children being abducted and sexually molested.

Child abductions by strangers have consistently remained a concern for parents. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their families in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found nearly one-in-three U.S. parents with children younger than 18 say they are extremely or very worried about their children being abducted.

Etan's disappearance, the murders of Adam Walsh, Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey ushered in, and fueled, an era of hyper-vigilance for parents. Parents' irrational fear of stranger danger changed the way parents care for their children, and the way children interact with adults and their peers for that matter. Politicians jumped on the stranger danger bandwagon. Starting with former President Ronald Reagan proclaiming the day Etan Patz disappeared, May 25, as National Missing Children's Day, politicians have enacted more and more draconian laws to deal with the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Hernandez's arrest and conviction for killing Etan should have provided some closure for a case that had extraordinary implications. His new trial will open wounds festering for 46 years. The upheaval could have been avoided.

Hernandez was arrested and tried in a cold case based on flimsy evidence devoid of any forensic evidence. Then investigators interviewed Hernandez without advising him of his rights. The police then read him his rights and interviewed him a second time, getting a second taped confession. This tactic flew in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2004.

The Court, in a 5-4 decision, found the second confession inadmissible, particularly when the police strategy was to intentionally undermine the effectiveness of the Miranda warnings. That decision is the key to Hernandez's successful appeal and Etan Patz being back in the news.

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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Senate confirms Fox News host as U.S. Attorney for DC

Jeannine Pirro has been among the most prominent and fiercest allies of Trump, including denying the outcome of the 2020 election

The U.S. Senate voted to confirm former Fox News host and prosecutor Jeanine Pirro as U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., reported NBC News.

The vote was along party lines, 50-45, with Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Tim Scott, R-S.C., Peter Welch, D-Vt., and Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., not voting.

Pirro had been serving as interim U.S. attorney for D.C. since May, after Trump appointed her to replace conservative activist Ed Martin as the top federal prosecutor in Washington.

In a Truth Social post announcing Pirro’s appointment, Trump lauded the former prosecutor as a “powerful crusader for victims of crime" and "incredibly well qualified for the position."

Pirro has been among the most prominent and fiercest allies of Trump, previously using her platform as a host of two Fox News programs to push conspiracy theories about voting in the aftermath of Trump's 2020 election loss. She was cited in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems for her role spreading election disinformation. Fox News ultimately reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion in 2023.

Pirro previously served as an assistant district attorney for Westchester County, New York, ultimately becoming the first woman elected to serve as the Westchester County district attorney. During her tenure, Pirro started the first domestic violence unit in a prosecutor's office, an accomplishment Trump cited in his decision to appoint her as a U.S. attorney.

Following her judicial career, Pirro in 2005 launched an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for Senate in New York, aiming to challenge then-incumbent Hillary Clinton. Soon after, she launched a campaign for New York attorney general, but the effort was ultimately derailed by a federal probe over a plot by Pirro to record her then-husband, Albert Pirro, who she suspected was having an affair.

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Trump administration has cut more than half of gun violence prevention programs

The Trump administration has terminated more than half of all federal funding for gun violence prevention programs in the U.S., cutting $158 million in grants that had been directed to groups in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, reported Reuters.

Of the 145 community violence intervention (CVI) grants totaling more than $300 million awarded through the U.S. Department of Justice, 69 grants were abruptly terminated, opens new tab in April, according to government data analyzed by Reuters.

The elimination of CVI programs is part of a broader rollback at the department's grant-issuing Office of Justice Programs, which terminated 365 grants valued at $811 million in April, impacting a range of public safety and victim services programs.

A DOJ official told Reuters the gun violence grants were eliminated because they "no longer effectuate the program's goals or agency's priorities." Thousands of Office of Justice Programs grants are under review, the official said, and are being evaluated, among other things, on how well they support law enforcement and combat violent crime.

The majority of CVI grants were originally funded through the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and part of a push by former President Joe Biden to stem the rise of gun violence in America, including establishing the first White House Office for Gun Violence Prevention.

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Things can always be worse: Iranian authorities severed the fingers of three men convicted of theft

Iranian authorities severed the fingers of three men convicted of theft, said Human Rights Watch (HRW) as reported by Jurist-News. HRW Iran researcher Bahar Saba denounced the punishment, stating, “Amputation is torture, plain and simple. Yet Iran persists in carrying out cruel and inhuman punishments that fly in the face of its human rights obligations.”

Mehdi Shahivand, Mehdi Sharafian and Hadi Rostami were detained in August 2017 following accusations that they had burglarized several houses and robbed safes. The court sentenced all of the individuals to amputations of four fingers of their right hands, leaving only the palm and the thumb. In April of 2022, HRW stated that there was evidence that the trials were unjust:

Evidence strongly suggests that the trial was grossly unfair. According to case information review by Human Rights Watch and accounts of informed sources, the men did not have access to lawyers during the investigation phase and only saw a lawyer twice–once when they signed the retention documents and once during the court hearings. The men have also said that the authorities tortured and ill-treated them while in the custody of the police’s Investigation Unit (Agahi) in Urmia… beating and flogging them and suspending them from their hands and wrists.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner in June 2022 called on authorities to cancel the planned amputations of these three men, along with five others. The UN reported that, per Iranian civil society organizations, at least 237 people who were “mostly from poorer segments of society” were sentenced to amputations between January 2000 and September 2020, with sentences being carried out in at least 129 cases.

Hand amputation is grounded in Article 278 of the Islamic Penal Code, which permits this type of punishment for “Hudud crimes” such as theft, adultery, slander and drinking alcohol. Iran’s Human Rights Monitor detailed some of the history of amputation in Iran, emphasizing that despite “widespread international condemnation, Iranian authorities have continued to enforce this brutal punishment beyond 2020.” Critics maintain that this penalty is a stark violation of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). While Iran has ratified the ICCPR, it has not signed or ratified the CAT. The ICCPR explicitly mandates that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Iran has recently been subjected to strict international scrutiny due to record executions and other purported violations of international law.

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Florida carries out state's 9th execution of 2025

 The 27th Execution of 2025

A man convicted of the 1994 killings of his wife and their two children became the ninth person put to death in Florida this year, his death on July 31, 2025 marking a state record for a single-year execution total since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the death penalty decades ago, reported The Associated Press.

Edward Zakrzewski, 60, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. After the return of the U.S. death penalty in 1976, Florida carried out a high of eight executions in 2014, a one-year total only matched this year with a mid-July execution and now exceeded.

“I want to thank the good people of the Sunshine State for killing me in the most cold, calculated, clean, humane, efficient way possible. I have no complaint,” Zakrzewski said after the curtain to the death chamber went up shortly after 6 p.m.

He was lying on a gurney covered with a white sheet. Before the drugs began flowing, he also quoted from a poem as 14 witnesses looked on, plus media reporters and prison staff.

Once the drugs were administered, Zakrzewski began breathing deeply, surrounded by three Corrections Department staffers in dark suits. One of them shook Zakrzewski by the shoulders and shouted his name. There was no reaction, and then he was still.

Florida this year has carried out more executions than any other state, while Texas and South Carolina are tied for second with four each. A 10th execution is scheduled in Florida on Aug. 19 and an 11th on Aug. 28 under death warrants signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

No members of the victims’ family spoke with reporters after Thursday’s execution.

Twenty-seven men had died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., while nine other people are set to be put to death in seven states during the rest of 2025. Florida also was the last state to execute someone, giving Michael Bernard Bell a lethal injection on July 15.

Zakrzewski was sentenced to die for the June 9, 1994, killings of his 34-year-old wife Sylvia and their children Edward, 7, and Anna, 5, in the Florida Panhandle. Trial testimony showed he carried out the killings at their Okaloosa County home after his wife sought a divorce, and he had told others he would kill his family rather than allow that to happen.

The woman was attacked first with a crowbar and strangled with a rope, court testimony showed. Both children were killed with a machete, and Sylvia was also struck with the blade when Zakrzewski thought she had survived the previous assault, according to court records.

Zakrzewski’s lawyers filed numerous unsuccessful appeals over the years, including a final plea for a stay of execution that the Supreme Court denied on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning, Zakrzewski awoke at 5:15 a.m. and later in the day had a meal that included fried pork chops, root beer and ice cream, state Department of Corrections spokesman Paul Walker said. He said Zakrzewski had one visitor and “remained compliant” as his execution time neared.

Kayle Bates, who was convicted of abducting a woman from an insurance office and killing her in 1982, is next scheduled to be executed in Florida on Aug. 19. DeSantis also has signed a death warrant setting an Aug. 28 execution date for Curtis Windom, who was convicted of killing three people in the Orlando area in 1992.

Florida uses a three-drug cocktail for its lethal injection: a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Before Thursday’s execution, opponents pointed to Zakrzewski’s military service as an Air Force veteran and the fact that a jury voted 7-5 to recommend his execution, barely a majority of the panel. They noted that under current state law, he could not have received the death penalty with a split jury vote.

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30,000 juveniles are reported missing annually, less than 200 abducted by strangers

It was 1979, and Nils Johnson-Shelton had a lot in common with a classmate named Etan Patz. Both were 6-year-old boys with bowl cuts, the sons of artists living in lofts in SoHo. They rode the same bus to the same elementary school, where they both attended first grade, reported The New York Times.

On the morning of May 25 that year, Etan went missing and was never found. His disappearance not only shocked New York City; it was later credited as the event that forever altered parenting, a word that had only recently entered the lexicon. From that terrible day, the notion that children in America should be left to their own devices — to run with their friends, climb trees, fall down, get up and keep running — changed. Parenting transformed, too, as mothers and fathers grew more intense, more fearful, more riddled with anxiety about threats, real and imagined, that children newly seemed to face.

“Etan’s case is foundational,” said John E. Bischoff III, a vice president at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “It made parents more aware and concerned for their own children’s safety.”

The biggest change Mr. Johnson-Shelton recalls from his childhood was that he no longer rode the bus to school. Instead, he would clamber onto his father’s bike and the two of them would rattle across the cobblestone streets of TriBeCa.

“I was so young that I didn’t put the two together,” he said recently. It never occurred to him that the bike rides were a result of what had happened to Etan. “I just thought it was an awesome thing to do with my dad.”

Last week, after a federal appeals court reversed the conviction of Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega worker who was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and killing Etan, the case returned to the spotlight, inspiring a new round of conversations about how to raise children.

At Pier 51, a park along the Hudson River not far from the Patz family’s former home, the playground scene was vibrant last week as dozens of children played and their guardians kept vigilant watch. Parents and older siblings moved around their young charges like shadows, ready to jump and save any falling children before their heads hit the bouncy rubber playground floor.

Keshia Gerrits, who is originally from Amsterdam and is living in SoHo, watched her children, ages 4 and 6, run around. She wanted them to feel “a type of independence,” Ms. Gerrits, 34, said. “But only if I’ve got eyes on them.”

Little fear of kidnapping was evident. A sign outside the locked gate to the playground warned that adults were not permitted to enter without a child. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, a number that experts say is unreliable, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their family in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

“I think that phenomenon is somewhat exaggerated,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author of the study.

But in the view of experts like Jessica McCrory Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the lives of American parents and children have changed so drastically since the 1970s that it is impossible to peg such broad cultural shifts on the disappearance of a single boy nearly 50 years ago. People who study parenting culture argue that declining labor unions, rising income inequality, more women in the work force, the defunding of social programs and an increase in competition to win admission to top universities all contributed to a heightened belief among many parents that they alone were responsible for the welfare of their children.

“In the U.S., we put the burden on families, and especially mothers, to D.I.Y. a social safety net to keep their children safe from risk,” said Ms. McCrory Calarco, author of the 2024 book “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.”

The ubiquity of smartphones has seemed to soften the divide between “helicopter” and “free-range” parents.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times

Nonetheless, singular tragedies have proved far more galvanizing than broad socioeconomic trends. Anine Colaire was the mother of two children, ages 8 and 11, living in Portland, Ore., when she learned about the murder of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who was kidnapped from her home in Petaluma, Calif., in 1993. When relatives from California visited Ms. Colaire’s home, they criticized her for continuing to allow her children to walk to a nearby park and ride their bikes without adult supervision.

“The Polly Klaas case had a huge impact,” said Ms. Colaire, 64, whose children are now adults. “I had some relatives and friends with kids that were just scared to death to let their kids out of their sight.”

For Jennifer Pimentel, it was the abduction and murder in 1995 of 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce in Redland, Fla., that fundamentally changed her family’s approach to child safety. As an 8-year-old in nearby Miami at the time, she remembers that family trips to the mall or to her brother’s baseball practices became terrifying ordeals, as her mother labored to keep her children physically close at all times.

Three decades later, Ms. Pimentel has children of her own, and even though Jimmy’s killer, Juan Carlos Chavez, was executed in 2014 for the crimes, the fear remains. Every time her teenage son or daughter goes to a Starbucks or has a sleepover, Ms. Pimentel, her husband and all their friends demand constant electronic check-ins.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “It’s an unwritten agreement. We just do it.”

This intensive style, sometimes called “helicopter parenting,” was challenged by a different model, “free-range parenting,” in which adults strive to provide a base line of support and protection, while also giving children opportunities to explore, fail and learn on their own.

“I don’t blame parents for being terrified,” said Lenore Skenazy, author of the 2009 book “Free-Range Kids.” “I blame a culture that has gradually taught them that the most responsible way to parent is to basically conjure up Etan every time they’re deciding whether their kid can do anything on their own.”

Over time, the ubiquity of smartphones seemed to soften the divide between “helicopter” and “free-range” parents, as adults who favored either parenting style found themselves using apps like Life360 to keep constant tabs on their children — even as those phones and social media made children more vulnerable to bullies and predators.

As children in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, Vanessa Wyeth and Etan Patz attended each other’s birthday parties. When Etan disappeared, Vanessa and her father walked the neighborhood with Stanley Patz, Etan’s father, distributing fliers and asking for information about the missing boy.

For the next two years, Vanessa was terrified that a stranger would break into her bedroom window as she slept, even though the family lived in an apartment on the 20th floor. In part to help her feel less afraid, her parents moved the family in 1981 to Bangor, Maine, where she enjoyed more freedom to explore, she said.

Her experiences of fear and safety as a child caused her to raise her children, now 16 and 18, with a careful mix of independence and surveillance, Ms. Wyeth said.

“We want to know where our kids are in a way that I didn’t experience as a kid in Maine,” said Ms. Wyeth, 52, who returned to Manhattan and now lives in Chelsea. “But I think that has more to do with having cellphones than it does with having my childhood friend kidnapped.”

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CREATORS: Florida's Convoluted Death Penalty Process

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
July 29, 2025

Last week, a Florida jury deliberated for one hour and 42 minutes before recommending the death penalty for Shelby Nealy. If a state is going to have a death penalty, it would be for people like Shelby Nealy. He was already serving a 30-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter for killing his wife, Jamie Ivancic, in January of 2018.

He then pretended to be Jamie in the months that followed, corresponding with her family through texts and social media messages before they became suspicious.

In December 2018, he went to Jamie's parents' home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and killed her parents, Richard and Laura Ivancic, along with Jamie's brother, Nick.

What is interesting about Nealy's fate is that the jury voted 11-1 in favor of death for all three victims. The jury was not unanimous, and that is only possible in two states — Alabama and Florida.

Alabama has not required a unanimous jury decision for a death sentence since 2017. Prior to that, Alabama was the only state that allowed judges to override a jury's recommendation for a life sentence and impose a death sentence.

Between 1976 and 2017, Alabama judges overrode jury verdicts 112 times, with 91 percent of the overrides changing a verdict of life to a death sentence. Currently, Alabama allows a death sentence if at least 10 out of 12 jurors recommend death.

In Florida, the path to non-unanimous jury verdicts in death penalty cases is even more convoluted.

Across the country, 27states allow death sentences. Although the United States is considered a death penalty country, executions are rare, or non-existent, in most of the nation. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, two-thirds of U.S. states — 33 out of 50 — have either no death penalty or have not carried out an execution in at least 10 years.

Prior to 2016, Florida did not require a unanimous jury verdict to impose death. Rather, according to Taylor Evans writing in the University of Miami Law Review, a simple 7-5 majority was sufficient under state law to sentence a criminal defendant to death. Additionally, judges could override a jury's sentencing recommendation.

That changed after a Florida case made its way to the United States Supreme Court in 2017. The high Court, by an 8-1 majority, held that "(t)he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death. A jury's mere recommendation is not enough."

The United States Supreme Court required a unanimous jury verdict in capital sentencing. However, in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court issued a new interpretation of the law. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the Florida Supreme Court found, "while a unanimous jury must find the existence of an aggravating factor in a capital case (which are the factors that make a first degree murder charge eligible for the death penalty), there was no requirement that the jury's recommendation for death must be unanimous."

The Florida Supreme Court decision opened the door to an even more bizarre standard. In January of 2023, only a month after three jurors declined to impose the death penalty on Nikolas Cruz, the mass shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, legislation was proposed to change Florida's unanimity requirement in death penalty sentencing to a mere supermajority.

Today, a person convicted of first-degree murder in Florida, followed by a jury finding that the alleged aggravating factors have been unanimously proven, can be sentenced to death by a mere 8 votes out of 12 jurors. That is not progress and certainly not justice.

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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Media challenges constitutionality of Tennessee 'police buffer zone' law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

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

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

Could it happen here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was wrong.

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

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

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Harsh and callous tactics used and condoned by masked ICE agents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chokeholds, stun guns and laughter

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frustration from prosecutors over dropped cases

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

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

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

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

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

Dispute revolves around pay

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

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

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

The pay of public defenders is a national issue

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

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

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

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

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

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