DOJ will pursue guardianships in state courts for homeless veterans

The Trump administration announced a new effort to initiate legal guardianships for hundreds of veterans, including some who are homeless or “at risk of homelessness,” that could be used to force more of them into involuntary or institutional care, reported The New York Times.

Under the new arrangement, the Justice Department would give officials at the Veterans Affairs Department authority they currently lack to initiate guardianship proceedings in state courts for veterans who have no family and are “unable to make their own health care decisions.”

If a state court determines that a veteran is incapable of making health care decisions, it would appoint a third-party guardian not employed by the V.A., who would be charged to act in the veterans’ best interests, said Pete Kasperowicz, the V.A. press secretary.

The initiative comes amid a push by the Trump administration to compel more homeless people into institutional treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.

President Trump identified homelessness as a priority during the 2024 presidential campaign and promoted it last July in an executive order that called on agencies to use civil commitment to move homeless people into “long-term institutional settings.”

Critics say the policy shift raises significant civil liberties concerns, noting that in earlier generations, people with severe mental illness were routinely stripped of their legal rights and confined to state hospitals.

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CREATORS: Forget Habeas Corpus at Your Own Peril

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
March 10, 2026

Normally, when someone is confronted with a Latin legal term their eyes glaze over and their brain shuts down. Well, here is a Latin term you need to know — habeas corpus.

The term is a legal concept meaning "that you have the body." Known as "The Great Writ," habeas corpus has been around a long time, dating back to England's Magna Carta in 1215. It is a procedure that allows any person detained on a charge "without sufficient cause" to challenge their detention in court.

The founders included habeas corpus in Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

In the spring of 2025, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller responded to a question from reporters about the Trump administration suspending habeas corpus in regard to immigration law enforcement. "The Constitution is clear and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus could be suspended in time of invasion ... (s)o that's an option we're actively looking at."

When the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice adopted a policy that made most detained immigrants who entered the country without permission — including those who had lived in the United States for years and had no criminal history — ineligible for a bond hearing, lawyers responded with habeas corpus. According to Mother Jones, habeas corpus, "once an emergency legal remedy against unlawful imprisonment ... is now an everyday tool."

The authority outlined in Article I is vested in Congress, and that includes Section 9. Suspending habeas corpus is an extraordinary response to an extreme crisis. The writ has been suspended only four times in our nation's history.

Former President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1861 during the Civil War. According to the Brennan Center, that move was challenged in court and led to a constitutional showdown between the executive and judicial branches. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that only Congress had the power to suspend habeas corpus, not the president. It took two years to get Congress to act — but in the meantime, Lincoln never followed Taney's ruling.

The three other instances, according to the Constitution Center, include Congress granting former President Ulysses S. Grant the ability to suspend the writ during an ongoing crisis involving the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War.

In passing the KKK Act of 1871, lawmakers made it clear that the president had authority to suspend habeas corpus within any state or territory where persons sought to "overthrow, or to put down ... the government of the United States." Grant used that authority; he deployed the 7th U.S. Cavalry to work with U.S. Marshals to detain suspected Ku Klux Klan members.

The United States had annexed the Philippines under the terms of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War. In 1902, Congress passed a law that allowed the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended by the president or governor if needed in the Philippines.

In 1905, the appointed Gov.Luke Edward Wright used the law to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in two provinces. Wright believed the independence forces had caused "a state of insecurity and terrorism among the people, which makes it impossible in the ordinary way to conduct preliminary investigations before justices of the peace and other judicial officers."

Hawaii was a territorial possession of the United States when Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941. After the attack, the Territorial Governor declared martial law, and suspended habeas corpus. Two days later, former President Franklin Roosevelt approved the suspension of the writ and martial law remained in place until October 1944.

Can the president convince Congress to suspend habeas corpus for illegal immigrants or how about American citizens who smuggle drugs or sell drugs on the streets? Could Congress, at the behest of the president, suspend habeas corpus for people protesting the war in Iran or the release of the Epstein Files?

Forget habeas corpus at your own peril.

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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Justices Jackson and Kavanaugh spar over SCOTUS emergency orders

Sharing a stage, Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanaugh sparred recently over the many emergency orders the court has issued allowing President Donald Trump to move ahead with key parts of his agenda, reported The Associated Press.

The setting was extraordinary, a federal courtroom filled with legal luminaries, including the federal judge singled out by Trump after blocking part of the president’s immigration crackdown.

Kavanaugh, 61, and Jackson, 55, sat a few feet apart in a courtroom in which they both heard cases when they served on the federal appeals court in Washington. They were separated only by a federal judge who asked questions of them both. The occasion was an annual lecture in memory of a former federal judge and prosecutor, Thomas A. Flannery.

Trump appointed Kavanaugh to the high court in 2018. Jackson moved up from the appeals court in 2022, appointed by President Joe Biden.

The issue in emergency appeals is whether a policy that has been challenged in court should be allowed to take effect while a legal case that could last for years continues.

Jackson, a frequent dissenter from the emergency orders, said Kavanaugh and the other conservatives who repeatedly sided with Trump last year were not serving the court or the country well.

“The administration is making new policy ... and then insisting the new policy take effect immediately, before the challenge is decided. This uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved in cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem,” Jackson said to loud applause.

The court is “creating a kind of warped” legal process by intervening in an early stage of a case and essentially predicting the outcome before arguments are fully developed, she said.

The Justice Department’s rush to the Supreme Court is not unique to the Trump administration, Kavanaugh said, explaining that as enacting legislation through Congress gets harder, administrations “push the envelope in regulations. Some are lawful, some are not.”

He said some critics of the recent orders had no objection when the justices allowed challenged Biden administration policies to take effect even as court cases were proceeding.

Many of the judges in attendance have been involved in high-profile challenges to administration policies, including U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. His clash with the administration over deportation flights to a notorious prison in El Salvador prompted Trump to call for Boasberg’s impeachment.

Also on hand was U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who ruled two days ago that Kari Lake, Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, did not have legal authority to take the actions she’s done to largely dismantle the Voice of America.

Neither Jackson nor Kavanaugh mentioned judges by name. But Jackson repeated a complaint she and the other liberal justices have made in their dissents.

“Should the Supreme Court be superintending the lower courts when they are hearing and deciding the issues?” she asked.

Kavanaugh, who joined an opinion criticizing lower-court judges for ignoring Supreme Court rulings, said the issues for the justices are often complicated and cases, close.

“None of us enjoys this,” he said.

To read more CLICK HERE

Maurer: OLC memo on boats strikes is 'bullshit'

 Dan Maurer of Lawfare describes the difference between a lie and “bullshit” in the context of the military boat strikes which continued yesterday with six more deaths:

The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has become a flashpoint in the public debate over the Trump administration’s compliance with federal laws, the Constitution, and foundational rule-of-law principles. The Justice Department’s resistance to publishing the OLC opinion on the lawfulness of the military’s counternarcotic boat strikes is one such lingering controversy. But lack of transparency is not always the problem. On Dec. 23, 2025, the OLC provided its opinion on the “Proposed War Department Operation to Support Law Enforcement Efforts in Venezuela” (called “Operation Absolute Resolve”) to the legal adviser for the National Security Council.

This particular OLC memorandum—more specifically, the argument it makes based on an interpretation of law and many now redacted facts—contains “bullshit”: in the technical sense of the term first described by philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his classic book, On Bullshit. Frankfurt’s chief accomplishment is lexicographically and conceptually distinguishing a lie from bullshit, an approach that has been applied since in many disciplines, including ethics, international relations, and rhetoric.

Inspired by other legal scholars’ use of Frankfurt’s “bullshit” concept to address serious controversies, including constitutional interpretation, I aim to apply Frankfurt’s definitional clarity to another legal methodology target: national security-related OLC opinions that rely extensively on previous OLC opinions as support for their key propositions. This matters because those key propositions in turn result in legal conclusions aligned with known policy preferences of the president. As Michael Smith put it: “Bullshit is worth calling out wherever it may be.”

This piece takes up that challenge and finds that “the President’s law firm” is as guilty of purveying bullshit as any other group of legal professionals. This is an especially dangerous practice for a government agency. It often results in a superficial legal argument that supports a presidential policy preference well known to the OLC, that may or may not reflect the “best view” of the law, and provides a veneer of authority masking its objectionable “truthiness.”

In the national security context, the danger of a bullshit OLC argument is elevated for four reasons: (a) The OLC’s influence and authority within the executive branch enables it to claim its own conclusions are quasi-precedential and conclusive unless the OLC, the attorney general, or the president chooses to override them (see this important law review article by Trevor Morrison, a former OLC attorney); (b) the actions analyzed frequently deal with life and death decisions involving the U.S. military; (c) the relevant facts are often classified and kept from public scrutiny; and (d) the decisions these OLC opinions validate often avoid judicial review.

 

Frankfurt defined “bullshit” as a fouler version of “humbug,” which Max Black defined as “short of lying,”  but a “deceptive misrepresentation ... of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes” and “especially by pretentious word or deed.” Frankfurt does not say “bullshit” is better or worse than a lie. In fact, the bullshit statement may actually be true. Rather, Frankfurt distinguishes its purveyors’ goals and methods. A lie is a deliberate statement of a falsehood. The speaker knows the statement to be false or at least thinks he knows. And the liar’s intent is to keep the listener or reader away from the truth of the matter via his deliberately false statement. Delivering an effective lie takes “craftsmanship.” But, unlike a liar, the bullshitter does not care if the statement is false, has no intent to lasso the listener or reader away from the truth, may accidentally be stating the truth, and may not even know if the statement is true or false. The bullshitter has a different objective:

[T]he bullshitter hides ... that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him …. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

 To read more CLICK HERE

DOJ wants to screen prosecutor misconduct complaints before adjudicated by state disciplinary authorities

The US Department of Justice (DOJ)  introduced a proposed rule that would establish a formal procedure for reviewing complaints and allegations of professional misconduct against department attorneys before they are taken up by state disciplinary authorities, reported JuristNews.

The proposal, which comes amid increasing scrutiny of the department’s attorneys and their adherence to ethical obligations in implementing Trump administration policies, seeks to empower Attorney General Pam Bondi to request the suspension of state bar investigations until the Department of Justice conducts a review of any originating complaint. The department said the proposed rule reflects concerns about what it described as the increasing “weaponization” of bar complaints against government lawyers, including complaints filed by political activists against senior DOJ officials and career attorneys.

The department argued that such complaints risk interfering with the attorney general’s statutory responsibility under 28 U.S.C. 519 to supervise DOJ litigation and legal activities.

The proposal would amend 28 CFR Part 77 to allow the Attorney General to review allegations that a current or former DOJ attorney violated ethics rules while performing federal duties. Under the proposal, if a complaint is filed with a state, territorial, or District of Columbia bar disciplinary authority, the DOJ could request that the authority pause investigative steps requiring participation from the attorney until the department completes its review.

Hilary Gerzhoy, chair of the rules of professional conduct review committee for the District of Columbia Bar, said the proposal “is incredibly concerning, adding that it “is inconsistent with all precedents,” and that attorney discipline in Washington, DC, is conducted through an independent process overseen by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals rather than the federal government.

Public comments on the proposed rule will be accepted through April 6, 2026.

To read more CLICK HERE

Mangino discusses Ohio school's video game lawsuit on WFMJ-TV21

 To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Mangino discusses murder of new born on Law and Crime's Scandal

Watch my interview with Sierra  Gillespie host of "Scandal" on Law and Crime Network.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

The 'Iran War' may be remembered as the end of restraint on a president's use of the military

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, said President Trump’s unilateral launch of the Iran war may be remembered as the death of any pretense that law and executive branch lawyers can be counted on to meaningfully constrain a president who wants to use military force on his own, reported The New York Times.

“By using the military on such a large and dangerous scale with foreseeable U.S. casualties, this operation kills the idea of any effective legal constraint on the president’s use of force,” he said. “It’s been very close to dead for years, I think.”

In 2007, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. argued in a presidential candidate survey that presidents have no legitimate power to bomb another country without congressional authorization, unless the United States is about to be attacked. Senator Barack Obama said the same thing. But executive power can look different from the vantage point of the Oval Office.

Mr. Obama bombed Libya without authorization in 2011. And, running for president again in 2019, Mr. Biden argued that the Constitution empowered presidents to order limited military strikes on their own. In 2024, Mr. Biden ordered several large-scale strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen who were menacing Israel and shipping in the Red Sea.

Against that backdrop, Mr. Biden’s approach to Iran over time is instructive. In 2007, he had singled out an attack on the country as particularly dangerous and unpredictable, writing, “Let’s not kid ourselves: any military conflict with Iran is likely to become major.”

In 2019, he maintained that “any initiation of the use of force against Iran,” unless in response to an imminent attack, “could certainly result in a wide-scale conflict and constitute a ‘war’ in the constitutional sense that would require authorization by Congress.”

But as president in 2023, before he dropped out of the 2024 race, Mr. Biden sidestepped Iran in responding to a similarly worded survey.

Mr. Trump had already joined Israel last June in bombing Iranian nuclear sites, in what has become known as the 12-day war. Since then, he has unilaterally “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels, and launched a brief invasion of Venezuela to seize its president, Nicolás Maduro.

Now, without going to Congress, Mr. Trump has joined Israel in killing Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials at the start of a massively larger bombing campaign that he said he intended to last “four to five weeks.” He has urged Iranians to rise up for a regime change.

Ahead of the operation, Mr. Trump made scant effort to persuade lawmakers and the public that such a war had become necessary. He delivered no Oval Office address and barely mentioned Iran in his State of the Union speech, a sharp divergence from how past presidents sought to build a case for wars they wanted to launch.

Those past campaigns have drawn accusations of spin and deception, as when the George W. Bush administration’s warnings about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction proved false after the war began. But even propaganda is a backhanded nod to democracy — an implicit acknowledgment that buy-in from Congress and the public matters when it comes to taking the country to war.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

Florida carries out another execution

The 5th Execution of 2026

Billy Leon Kearse convicted of fatally shooting a police officer with his own service weapon during a traffic stop was executed on March 3, 2026 in Florida, becoming the third person put to death by the state this year after a record 19 executions in 2025, according to The Associated Press.

Kearse, 53, was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was condemned for the 1991 shooting death of Fort Pierce Police Officer Danny Parrish.

The execution started just after 6 p.m. When a warden asked Kearse if he had any final words, he said all he could do was ask for forgiveness from Parrish’s family.

“To his family, I sincerely apologize for what I’ve done,” Kearse said. “There is no way I can ever repay that.”

More than a dozen family members and police officers gathered to observe the execution.

Kearse twitched briefly after the lethal drugs began entering his system but stopped moving several minutes later. It was another quarter of an hour before a medic entered the room and pronounced Kearse dead.

After the execution, Parrish’s widow, Mirtha Busbin, said she has found peace.

“It’s been a long, long 35 years,” said Busbin. “We didn’t win anything though; we lost another life, but we did get justice.”

Busbin, who works as a victim advocate for the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, said she didn’t expect Kearse to apologize, but she did appreciate it.

“I can forgive him, I can move on,” Busbin said. “It was the right thing to do.”

Court records show Parrish had pulled over Kearse for driving the wrong way on a one-way street in January of that year. After Kearse couldn’t produce a valid driver’s license, Parrish ordered Kearse out of his vehicle and attempted to handcuff him when a struggle ensued.

Kearse grabbed Parrish’s firearm during the struggle and fired 14 times, striking the officer nine times in the body and four times in his body armor, prosecutors said. A taxi driver heard the shots and called for help on the officer’s radio, but Parrish died after being rushed to a hospital. Police used license plate information called in by Parrish during the traffic stop to arrest Kearse at his home.

Kearse was initially convicted of first-degree murder and robbery with a firearm and sentenced to death in 1991. The Florida Supreme Court later found the trial court failed to give jurors certain information about aggravating circumstances and ordered a new sentencing. Kearse again drew the death penalty in 1997.

A total of 47 people were executed in the U.S. in 2025. Florida led the way with a flurry of death warrants signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, far outpacing Alabama, South Carolina and Texas which each held five executions last year. The 19 Florida executions that year outstripped the previous high totals of eight in both 1984 and 2014.

Besides the three Florida executions to date this year, Texas and Oklahoma have each executed one person each so far in 2026.

Two more Florida executions are scheduled soon, starting with Michael Lee King on March 17 for the 2008 kidnap and killing of a mother of two. Former police officer James Duckett is set to be executed March 31 for the 1987 killing of an 11-year-old girl.

All Florida executions are carried out via lethal injection using a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.

Hours before Tuesday’s execution, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Kearse’s final appeal without comment. And last week, the Florida Supreme Court denied appeals filed by Kearse.

To read more CLICK HERE

CREATORS: 'Partisan Political Theater' Disguised as a Congressional Investigation

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
March 3, 2026

Last week, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State, one-time democrat nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, testified under oath before the House Select Committee investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The depositions took place behind closed doors in Chappaqua, N.Y. Bill Clinton was deposed for 4 hours and 33 minutes and Hillary Clinton testified for 4 hours and 35 minutes. The Committee recently released video of the depositions.

The Epstein scandal has pulled in a number of prominent men from around the world. They include Britain's Prince Andrew; Elon Musk; Steven Bannon; Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Group; Steven Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants; Casey Wasserman, president of the 2028 Summer Olympics; Ehud Barak, former Israel prime minster; Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary; Howard Lutnick, current Secretary of Commerce; billionaire Sergey Brin; Mirosalav Lajcak, former Slovak foreign minister and of course President Donald Trump.

Yet none of these men have been deposed by the House Select Committee. The GOP-run committee chose to depose the former Democratic president and his spouse, the former 2016 Democratic nominee for president. Her opponent — Donald Trump.

Never mind that references to President Trump are everywhere in the Epstein files. The New York Times identified more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references to Mr. Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, and other related words and phrases in the latest batch of emails, government files, videos and other records released by the Department of Justice.

Never mind that no former president has ever been compelled to testify before Congress. Bill Clinton and his wife were hauled before Congress when there are so many more compelling targets of this investigation.

Hillary Clinton accused House Republicans of using her as a prop in "partisan political theater." Her written statement to the committee emphasized that she "had no idea about their criminal activities. I do not recall ever encountering Mr. Epstein. I never flew on his plane or visited his island, homes or offices. I have nothing to add to that."

She accused the committee of compelling her testimony "fully aware that I have no knowledge that would assist your investigation, to distract attention from President Trump's actions and cover them up despite legitimate calls for answers."

Bill Clinton said in his written testimony that he "had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing."

"No matter how many photos you show me, I have two things that at the end of the day matter more than your interpretation of those 20-year-old photos. I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn't see. I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn't do. I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong."

So, when will the Select Committee have President Trump testify?

When asked about the Epstein files on a recent flight back from Mar-a-Logo on Air Force One, Trump responded, "You know, I've been totally exonerated on Epstein. And it's really interesting because they've (Clintons) been pulled in. Think of it. They've been pulled in. Clinton and many other Democrats have been pulled in."

Trump feigns surprise that the Clintons have "been pulled in." This is the point: On nearly every topic, the President suspends reality. He is "shocked, shocked" that the GOP-controlled Congress has pulled the Clintons, Democrats, into the Epstein scandal.

According to The Hill, Democrats are saying that by compelling Clinton's testimony, the dynamic between Congress and the president has changed. Democrats are calling for the same standard for President Trump.

"Trump defied, as all of you know, a congressional subpoena with the Jan. 6 Committee. He said, 'presidents don't have to testify,'" Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said, according to The Hill. "Now we have the Clinton rule, which is that presidents and their families have to testify when Congress issues a subpoena, and that means that Donald Trump needs to come before our committee."

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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Federal judges feel under siege by current political rhetoric

When the Supreme Court recently struck down President Trump's tariffs, he lashed out at two Justices he had nominated calling them fools and lapdogs. The president has frequently railed against judges when they rule against him. What often happens next is a barrage of violent threats from his followers against those judges. 

CBS News spoke with 26 federal judges – nine Democratic appointees, 17 Republican, both sitting and retired. The sitting judges told us they feel under siege. Most would not appear on camera, fearful for their safety. Judge John Coughenour – appointed by Ronald Reagan - is one of the few who would. He blocked President Trump's bid to end birthright citizenship. He wasn't prepared for what happened next.

Judge John Coughenour: My wife and I are at home. And the doorbell rings. And I go to the door. And there's, I think, five sheriff's deputies there with long rifles –

Bill Whitaker: And they show up with guns drawn?

Judge John Coughenour: Oh yeah. Yes, yes. Long guns, very intimidating guns. And they said to me, "Sir, could we see your wife?" And I said, "whatever for?" And they said, well, sir, we've had a report that you've murdered your wife."

It was a cruel hoax. The next day? A bomb threat. For John Coughenour, a federal district court judge in Washington state, it didn't end there.

Judge John Coughenour: There was a congressman that had a wanted poster. It just said Wanted in big letters at the top and then a picture of several of us. It said everything except "dead or alive".

His trouble started when President Trump signed an executive order to end the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship for infants born on U.S. soil to non-citizens. Judge Coughenour ruled it, quote, "blatantly unconstitutional." The threats poured in.

Judge John Coughenour: Some of it was very very ugly, and very threatening.

Bill Whitaker: Death threats?

Judge John Coughenour: Oh yes, yes dozens of em. Dozens if not hundreds.

Judge Coughenour told us threats come with the turf. He has sentenced an al Qaeda bomber and Montana militia members and needed round the clock protection. But he said he'd never had as many death threats as with the birthright citizenship case.

Judge Coughenour: I've been at this for 44 years. I have never encountered the hostility toward the judiciary that has existed in this country in the, the last year. And I don't think it's' because we're making bad decisions. I think it's because there are people who think that they can make a lot of political hay out of criticizing the federal judiciary.

President Trump (in 2025): "And also we cannot allow a handful of communist radical left judges to obstruct the enforcement of our laws and assume the duties that belong solely to the president of the United States."

When President Trump lost a battle in court to deport migrants, he called the judge a lunatic. When immigration crackdowns were ruled illegal, he called the judges monsters. It's incendiary comments like that that have provoked a torrent of death threats. 

Our reporting found hundreds of threats were left on judges voicemails. This one after a judge ruled the president had violated the First Amendment:

Recording of threat: I hope your whole family and everybody you love is raped in front of you and has their heads cut off.

And this one after a judge ruled the president couldn't cut certain government benefits.

Recording of threat: I wish somebody would f****** assassinate your ass.

To read more CLICK HERE

Florida was underdosing 'expired' drugs during prolific run of executions

In a small, piercingly bright room inside a state prison in northeast Florida, Frank Walls was strapped to a gurney and injected three times: first with a sedative meant to render him unconscious, then a paralytic to prevent any visible movement, and finally potassium acetate to induce cardiac arrest, reported Mother Jones.

Walls’ execution on December 18, 2025, capped Florida’s deadliest year in modern history. With 19 executions last year, Florida more than doubled its own record, and put more people to death than Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina combined. This execution spree came even as Florida’s lethal injection protocol has come under scrutiny, prompting fears that those executed are at risk of complications and needless suffering. 

In his final appeal, Walls asked Florida to review its three-step protocol, arguing that the way the state’s been carrying out executions would violate his Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys documented allegations that even though men in the death chamber couldn’t physically show the effects due to Florida’s three-drug protocol, some may have suffered and died with the feeling of drowning. And an analysis of court records, prison logs, redacted autopsy reports, and eyewitness testimonies by Mother Jones found documented issues in half the executions last year before Walls.

In at least nine executions from February to September 2025, there were signs of underdosings, the use of expired drugs, drug substitutions, or flaws in drug logs maintained by the Florida Department of Corrections. 

“Mr. Walls will die a needlessly cruel death if Florida insists on trying to kill him with Florida’s version of lethal injection,” wrote anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot, who met Walls at the Florida state prison five months before his execution, in an affidavit Walls’ defense team submitted to the District Court in Tallahassee. 

Autopsy results for Walls, who was sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of an Air Force airman and his girlfriend, have not yet been released. But Zivot feared the three-drug protocol could cause pulmonary edema, a condition that’s been found in previous autopsies of people executed by Florida, and which Zivot said causes “the terror that accompanies drowning and asphyxiation as they choke on their own blood.” 

The Florida Attorney General’s office didn’t dispute Walls’ assertion that he could experience the sensation of drowning and gasping for air after the second drug is injected. They called it “irrelevant.” 

The state has been similarly unmoved by problems in recent executions. 

In June 2025, logs included in a lawsuit showed that one man was executed with half of the required amount of paralytic, and another man didn’t receive a full dose of the drug meant to swiftly induce cardiac arrest. 

The Florida Department of Corrections’ own records indicated that the execution team used expired sedatives in four deaths, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the drugs and the risk of complications, including severe pain. They also recorded the use of a local anaesthetic that’s not part of the state’s execution protocol, and listed dates for use of the drugs that don’t match execution dates. 

Each of these issues would violate Florida’s own protocol. Rather than order an investigation, the state’s governor and past presidential candidate, Republican Ron DeSantis, has already scheduled four executions this year.

The death penalty has waxed and waned in public opinion over the years, with botched executions, racial disparities, and wrongful convictions under scrutiny in recent years. Florida alone has seen at least 30 exonerations from its death row. 

But reviving the federal death penalty is a key tenet of President Donald Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda—and DeSantis has positioned Florida at the vanguard of the Trump-led Republican Party. His own political future is unclear after his failed presidential run, but he’s echoing loud and clear the president’s enthusiasm for harsh and swift executions. Florida is leading the death penalty’s resurgence.

“The exact reasons as to why DeSantis has chosen to ramp things up now—I don’t think we know,” said Hannah Gorman, who teaches death penalty law at Florida International University’s College of Law.

But she said the pace of Florida’s executions have ramifications nationally and internationally. In 2025, executions in the United States nearly doubled, and 40 percent of them were in Florida alone. 

“Florida is an outlier in the U.S.,” said Gorman. “But this is also a massive message coming out of America.” 

DeSantis has issued death warrants for 32 people since he took office in 2019, and 250 people remain on Florida’s death row. 

DeSantis’ office didn’t respond to a list of questions by Mother Jones. But in November 2025, DeSantis said he was doing his “part to deliver justice” to victims’ families by executing those who have been on death row for decades. And the governor has unusually broad power to enact this penalty: he both sets execution dates and proceeds over the clemency hearings that could halt his own execution orders.

The last review of lethal injection protocol by Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon was in February 2025, after the year’s executions had already begun. Dixon wrote in a letter to Gov. DeSantis that his department’s lethal injection procedure was in line with decency standards and “dignity of man.”  

“The foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a humane and dignified death,” Dixon wrote. “The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering.”

The one-page letter didn’t explain what Dixon’s review entailed, and the Florida Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions about the review. 

A month after this letter was sent to Tallahassee, in March 2025, Florida executed Edward James. Prison drug logs disclosed in court records show James was given a local anesthetic—lidocaine—that’s not mentioned in the 14-page protocol signed off by Dixon. 

It’s unclear why that drug was administered or who authorized it. 

To Ron McAndrew, a former Florida State Prison warden who led Florida’s executions from 1996 to 1998 and oversaw three electric chair executions, Florida ought to slow down and examine its protocol before executing anyone else. 

“To put a warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing for the Governor to do.”

Now an anti-death penalty advocate, McAndrew’s concerns extend beyond procedure. He worries about the toll on staff. The ones doing the “dirty work.” 

McAndrew has overseen and witnessed executions gone wrong. He was in charge in 1997, when Pedro Medina’s head burst into flames on the electric chair. The former warden said he wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially prison staff. 

“To put a warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing for the Governor to do,” McAndrew said. “These are the people that are going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. These are the people that are going to suffer for the rest of their lives because the people they have killed are going to come visiting with them on a regular basis. They’re going to sit on the edge of their bed at night and talk to them.” 

In the past, botched executions or deviations from established execution procedures have prompted death penalty states to pause. Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida prison officials botched a lethal injection in 2006, and Bush temporarily halted executions. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin had to delay executions twice, after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and again after the revelation that the state substituted a new drug to stop Charles Warner’s heart in 2015. Warner’s final words, the Associated Press reported, were: “My body is on fire.” A grand jury investigation found “negligence” and serious errors in the state’s executions. 

In 2022 in Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee paused all executions and sought an independent review of its execution protocol over concerns about independent testing of the lethal drugs. When the review ended in 2024, citing fewer opportunities for mistakes, Tennessee moved from a three-drug protocol to a single drug, as at least 1o other states and the federal system have now done.  

Florida has been using the same three-drug combination since 2017. Florida’s governor, however, has yet to announce any investigation into this method or its recent executions, let alone slow his pace in signing death warrants, despite repeated pleas and public accounts. 

In 2025 alone, media coverage described troubling scenes in at least three executions in Florida. In April, Michael Tanzi’s chest heaved for about three minutes, the Associated Press reported. Tanzi was given the unauthorized sedative, lidocaine, prison logs later showed. 

During the execution of Thomas Gudinas in June, media reported that his eyes rolled back and his chest spasmed. Drug logs filed in court records showed that Gudinas was injected with half the amount of paralytic required by Florida’s protocol. Then in November, NBC News reported that former Marine Bryan Jennings’ chest heaved and his arms twitched. Jennings’ autopsy report found that he experienced pulmonary edema—which mirrors the feeling of drowning, and the condition a medical expert feared would happen to Walls at his December execution. 

After Walls’ execution, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said there were no complications with his three-step lethal injection. There were close to 30 witnesses in attendance, including relatives of Walls’ victims. The Pensacola News Journal reported “about six minutes of labored breathing.” 

And Maria DeLiberato, Walls’ former attorney and the legal and policy director for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she saw Walls gasping and his chest heaving: “Like he’s choking.” What she witnessed, she said, didn’t match the state’s media briefing from the Raiford prison. 

“I thought something was wrong,” DeLiberato said.

In January, Gov. DeSantis signed his first death warrant of this year for Ronald Heath, who was convicted for the 1989 armed robbery and murder of a traveling salesman near University of Florida. A jury sentenced him to death in a 10–2 vote.

Unanimous jury decisions were not required when Heath was convicted. They became law in Florida after a landmark 2016 Supreme Court judgment, but in 2023, Gov. DeSantis signed a bill into law requiring only 8 of 12 jurors to vote for death. 

Heath’s final appeal urged the US Supreme Court to look into Florida’s three-step lethal injection method, citing previous use of expired drugs, inconsistent dosing and inaccurate logs about what happened in the death chamber. The state argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, “not inaccurate bookkeeping.”

The Supreme Court denied Heath’s request, and Heath’s execution was quick and without outward signs of complications, according to news coverage and a witness. Two weeks later, as Melvin Trotter’s execution date loomed for the murder of a grocery store owner in 1986, he asked for a stay of execution based on the risk of a mangled execution. Though the Supreme Court also rejected Trotter’s petition, this time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed her concern about Florida’s “troubling” execution records. 

Sotomayor agreed with denying Trotter’s petition, but acknowledged that prisoners like him are caught in a catch-22: Because they don’t have enough evidence of cruel and unusual punishment, they have been denied the records they’d actually need to prove it. “The very reason” they are seeking these documents, she noted in a four-page statement, is to prove their claims. 

“By continuing to shroud its executions in secrecy, Florida undermines both the integrity of its own execution process and, potentially, this Court’s ability to ensure the State’s compliance with its constitutional obligations,” Sotomayor wrote. 

As Trotter was executed on February 24, he breathed heavily and his body twitched, PBS News reported. Details about the drugs used in Trotter’s execution won’t be revealed until the autopsy reports are made public. 

DeSantis has already ordered two more executions, Billy Kearse on March 3 and Michael King on March 17. And Sotomayor’s words are already reverberating on the busy death row. Within a day of Sotomayor’s statement, her critique of Florida’s secrecy had already been cited in a new appeal—and state officials had already dismissed the justice’s concerns as “speculation.”

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