Mangino discusses Joseph Duggar charges with Jesse Weber on Law & Crime's Sidebar

Watch my interview on Sidebar with Law & Crime's Jesse Weber as we examine the criminal charges against Joseph Duggar,

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Pennsylvania inmates serving LWOP for 2nd degree murder face uphill battle to gain release

While 19 states, including New York and California, allow the governor unilateral clemency power, Pennsylvania is among 10 states that require the approval of its pardon board. Without the board’s recommendation, the governor is barred from commuting a person’s sentence, reported The Appeal. Three members—a victim advocate, a corrections expert, and a medical or mental health expert—are nominated by the governor and approved by the state senate. The lieutenant governor and attorney general comprise the other two members.

Acknowledgment of an application can take up to 18 months. Only then does an applicant undergo an institutional review, including a psychological review as well as an interview with the prison superintendent. Former DOC secretary John Wetzel instituted the policy of interviewing applicants. His successors have continued the practice.  

Then the process continues to a merit review. In 2026, the board scheduled three merit reviews for commutations. At each review, the board votes on hundreds of applications, reviewing the person’s institutional record, program participation, staff support, their personal statement, future plans, and letters supporting or opposing their release. For applicants serving life without parole, three of the five members must approve before they can proceed to a public hearing.

Before the public hearing, board members interview the applicant over Zoom. Each interview lasts no longer than 30 minutes. At the hearing, which is also virtual, family members of their victims as well as the applicant’s loved ones have the opportunity to testify.

Until the 1990s, an applicant needed a majority vote for commutation. Then, in 1994, however, Reginald McFadden, who had been granted commutation two years earlier, killed two people and raped a third. Recidivism among clemency recipients for any offense is extremely low. Nonetheless, his acts prompted widespread fears of second chances and a 1997 legislative change requiring a unanimous vote for all commutations. Between 1967 and 1994, over 360 life sentences had been commuted. 

Since 1995, the board has reviewed 190 applicants serving life without parole. Of those, 80 (or fewer than half) were recommended to the governor. Seventy-eight have been granted commutation. 

Celeste Trusty, now the state legislative affairs director for FAMM, served as secretary for the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons during previous governor Tom Wolf’s last year in office (December 2020 to January 2022). “It really does matter who’s in office, who’s on the board, what the public sentiment is about commutation [and] the political ambitions of the people involved in the process,” she told The Appeal. She noted that, because Wolf had no plans to run for higher office, “the political liability that people generally associate with second chances and clemency was removed, and he was able to boldly go forward.”

During Wolf’s two terms as governor, the board held 114 hearings for lifers and recommended 55. Wolf granted commutation to all of them.

As attorney general, Shapiro was a member of the pardon board. In 2019, he cast the fewest votes for commutation. Since becoming governor in 2023, the board has conducted 46 hearings for lifers and recommended 15 people. Shapiro granted commutation to all 15. (During his first term, Wolf granted commutation to 19 people, more than his past four predecessors combined.)

Bolden initially applied at his mother’s urging. The board denied his first two applications. 

Since then, he has developed multiple sclerosis, which has progressed to the point where he requires a wheelchair. It also greatly limits the use of his left hand and causes constant pain. 

This past March, Bolden learned that he received support from the Department of Corrections Secretary Laurel Harry. His merit review is scheduled for July 9. If approved, his public hearing will be on September 11. 

“Little by little, I’m starting to have more hope,” he said. Decades behind bars, including four years with execution hanging over his head, made it impossible to envision a life beyond the prison door. 

“The gravity and weight of prison is so hard to put into words,” he said. 

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SCOTUS grants new trial to condemned man who spent 20 years on death row

The question in the case was whether defendant's lawyer had a meaningful chance to challenge the prosecutor’s stated reasons for striking Black jurors

A divided Supreme Court sided with a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who accused the white prosecutor in his case of intentionally and illegally striking potential Black jurors from the panel that heard his case, reported The New York Times.

Terry Pitchford was convicted in 2006 for his role in the murder of a shopkeeper by a 12-member jury that included only one Black member. At the time, the county where his trial took place was 40 percent Black.

In its 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court said Mr. Pitchford’s lawyer should have had an opportunity to challenge the prosecutor’s reasons for striking all but one potential Black juror, consistent with a 40-year-old landmark precedent barring race discrimination in jury selection. The decision means that Mr. Pitchford, 40, who has served on death row for more than two decades, is entitled to a new trial, his attorney said.

The dispute in Mr. Pitchford’s case involved the same prosecutor whose jury-selection practices were condemned by the Supreme Court in a separate decision in 2019 that drew considerable public attention.

In that case, the prosecutor Doug Evans spent decades trying to convict Curtis Flowers, a Black man, of the 1996 murders of four people inside a furniture store. During six trials, Mr. Evans repeatedly ensured Black people were excluded from juries. The case was featured on a season-long podcast, as well as in episodes of a documentary series. Mr. Flowers spent 23 years in prison until he was released in 2019 following the court’s decision. Charges against him were dropped the following year.

The question in Mr. Pitchford’s case was whether his lawyer had a meaningful chance to challenge the prosecutor’s stated reasons for striking Black jurors.

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In general, prosecutors have leeway to remove a certain number of potential jurors, by issuing challenges that are discretionary and cannot be second-guessed. Forty years ago, the Supreme Court carved out an exception in the case Batson v. Kentucky. Under that ruling, when lawyers are accused of discriminating based on race in jury selection, they must provide a different, race-neutral explanation for their actions.

In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has turned away most appeals from death row inmates. But writing for the majority, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the state judge had failed to provide Mr. Pitchford’s lawyer “sufficient opportunity” to dispute the prosecutor’s race-neutral reasons for striking four of five potential Black jurors, and had failed to explore if the prosecutor’s reasons were “pretextual.”

Justice Kavanaugh, who wrote the court’s 2019 decision in Mr. Flowers’s case as well, has had a longstanding interest in race and jury selection. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Joseph Perkovich, one of Mr. Pitchford’s lawyers, praised the court for recognizing the “extreme failure of the state courts to enforce essential protections under the Constitution.”

In a statement, Megan Byrne, a lawyer at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the decision “properly recognizes that potential racial discrimination in jury selection deserves meaningful scrutiny and careful review.”

Mr. Evans, the prosecutor, has retired from the Montgomery County district attorney’s office. The Mississippi attorney general’s office, which defended the conviction, did not respond to a request for comment.

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15 years of pretrial hearings for Guantanamo detainees

Prosecutors portrayed the prisoners as unrepentant jihadists who bragged about their roles in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to federal agents during their first months in military detention at Guantánamo Bay, reported The New York Times.

Defense lawyers cast the men as so broken by violence and solitary confinement in their years in C.I.A. prisons overseas that they were groomed to involuntarily confess to U.S. agents.

Over eight days this month, the two sides offered these stark, clashing views to a military judge who is now confronted with the overarching question in the long-running capital case: Did Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of hatching and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, and two co-defendants voluntarily incriminate themselves to F.B.I. agents years ago, and can their statements be used against them?

The case is in its 15th year of these pretrial proceedings, and no date has been set for the trial to begin. But the judge’s decision could be a turning point almost 25 years after the attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

Stephan Gerhardt, whose brother Ralph was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center, said the judge’s decision would provide “a major step forward as it answers probably the biggest legal question that needs resolution before a trial date being set.”

He watched some of the arguments in the court at Guantánamo this month.

The legal question before the judge is not about the crime itself, the largest terrorist attack ever in the United States. That will be left for a trial.

It is whether the prisoners were so thoroughly conditioned after more than three years of incommunicado detention, which started off with brutality and continued with years of questioning by U.S. government agents, that they involuntarily told their captors what they wanted to hear.

A crux of the question confronting the judge is the legal principle of attenuation, how to get an untainted confession after a coerced one. Prosecutors say the “clean” interrogations at Guantánamo in 2007 met the legal standard of a change in time, change in place and change in identity of questioners.

Transfer to Guantánamo

To make his decision, the judge is reviewing years of testimony and reams of classified evidence managed by four previous judges in the case against Mr. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi to decide whether there was a clear moment of attenuation.

Or, as the judge called it, the pivot.

Military judges have so far thrown out the confessions of two other capital defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, because of what the C.I.A. did to them. Prosecutors are appealing to reinstate Mr. Baluchi’s statements.

“Mr. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed could not shut up about his role as the emir of the 9/11 attacks,” the lead prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., said on the first day of the hearing. Mr. Trivett said Mr. Mohammed boasted about the attacks to C.I.A. interrogators after he was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and then to F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo in January 2007.

It was in March 2003 when Mr. Mohammed was in C.I.A. custody that he was waterboarded 183 times. His lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, said that after his client was tortured, he was questioned hundreds of times, sometimes three times a day, by C.I.A. investigators.

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CREATORS: President Settles Extraordinary Lawsuit With Himself

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 26, 2026

Never has there been a more egregious abuse of power in American history than the settlement of President Donald Trump v. the Internal Revenue Service. The President sued the IRS — essentially suing himself — while the lawyers defending the government against the lawsuit also work for him. Trump was well aware of the incongruous nature of his lawsuit, telling reporters, "I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself."

Let's put that in perspective. The president oversees the Department of the Treasury. The IRS is an agency of the Department of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury serves at the pleasure of the President. The Department of Justice is also an agency of the executive branch of government — headed by the president's former attorney — whose attorneys must adhere to the president's opinion on matters of law.

The Justice Department announced that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has established a $1.776 billion fund to settle Trump v. IRS. According to Lawfare, the name "Trump chose for this instrument of partisan self-dealing — conjured by a president suing his own government and settling with himself, a product of the politicized use of the legal system he claims to deplore — is 'The Anti-Weaponization Fund.'"

As the fund is currently configured, Trump will not be entitled to compensation directly from the fund. According to Lawfare, "the money will be doled out by a five-member board he effectively controls, operating under procedures that need not be disclosed, with the identities of recipients potentially kept secret."

Before you cheer for the president's magnanimous decision to not accept monies for himself, consider that the settlement directs that the government would be "forever barred and precluded from prosecuting or pursuing" pending tax claims against Trump, his family members and businesses.

According to The New York Times, the addendum to the settlement agreement was posted, without fanfare, on the department's website. According to The Times, the addendum "revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government."

The immunity from IRS auditing ignores that the IRS is required by regulation to audit the president's tax returns every year. It is also worth noting that The New York Times reported in 2024 that an audit of Trump by the IRS could cost the president more than $100 million.

His $10 billion lawsuit and the resulting $1.8 billion settlement do not pass constitutional muster. In 1937, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes reasoned that justiciable cases and controversies not only require that disputes be of the types specified in Article III of the U.S. Constitution, but the controversy must be definite and concrete, "touching the legal relations of parties having adverse legal interests."

There are no adverse interests in this settlement. The president's IRS made a deal with the President's DOJ to use taxpayer money to compensate supporters of the president. This lawsuit and settlement should have been laughed out of court.

The judge overseeing Trump's suit, Kathleen Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, raised the case and controversy concern. To avoid briefing and arguing the matter, Trump withdrew the suit in exchange for the "slush fund" and IRS immunity.

If Congress does not act — both houses having been emasculated by the President's influence with the extreme wing of the GOP — the Courts will need to step into the void. The slush fund is being challenged by police officers who helped defend the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This money grab must be thwarted.

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 prison in Pennsylvania under scrutiny for restraints and healthcare failures

The Department of Justice found several “serious issues” with treatment of inmates, contraband and employee practices at USP Canaan in Waymart during an inspection of the federal prison last June, reported WVIA.

According to a reporty, the Office of the Inspector General found issues including concerning use of restraints on inmates, issues with the prison’s ability to provide healthcare to inmates and inappropriate imagery and demeaning language in employee spaces.

In a video released Thursday, Deputy Inspector Bill Blier said inspectors, while on-site from June 2-5, 2025, observed employees applying four-point restraints to inmates in a “manner that caused inmates severe discomfort and posed serious risk of lasting injury.”

The prison has capacity for 1,536 inmates, and had a population of 1,357 at the time of the inspectors' visit.

“Multiple USP Canaan employees told us they had seen four-point restraints applied too tightly, which caused the hands of restrained inmates to swell and become discolored,” Blier said. “While BOP (Federal Bureau of Prisons) policy allows for use of restraints in certain situations, it is impermissible to cause physical pain or extreme discomfort.”

In regard to inmate healthcare, the report states USP Canaan had been without an on-site, full-time physician since November 2022 at the time of the inspection. The inspection also found inconsistencies with medication administration practices, expired medical supplies and delays of healthcare and lab testing.

“We also observed unsafe practices in dental services, specifically sharp dental surgical tools and chloroform stored in unlocked cabinets near inmates,” a release from DOJ states.

Blier said the inspectors also observed prison employees using "inappropriate and demeaning language” toward inmates and other employees, as well as inappropriate imagery in employee areas.

“Our team observed several instances of imagery associated with designated criminal groups, white supremacy and anti-semitism in employee-only areas,” he said in the video statement.

The report makes nine recommendations for BOP to correct the issues found at USP Canaan. The BOP agreed with all of them, and in the appendices of the report, outlined the steps that have been taken over the past year to rectify each situation.

The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General publishes the progress of its recommendations online as reports become available.

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Vindictive Prosecution: Criminal charges dismissed against Kilmar Abrego Garcia mistakenly deported to El Salvador in 2025

Federal Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ruling that the charges were punitive for challenging his deportation last year, reported Juristnews..

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March 2025, despite an October 2019 “withholding of removal” issued by the Board of Immigration Appeals. Abrego Garcia originally entered the United States irregularly after fleeing his home country, El Salvador, to escape the notorious Barrio 18 gang, which had threatened his family with death.

In March 2025, Abrego Garcia was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers while driving home from work in Maryland and arrested despite the fact that the officers did not have a warrant. The officers simply told Abrego Garcia that his status had changed, and he was promptly put on a plane bound for El Salvador, where he was placed in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). His case received much media attention and was eventually brought to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that Garcia had to be returned to the United States.

Court documents later released revealed that Garcia had been arrested under suspicion of involvement with the gang MS-13, allegations denied by Garcia and his wife. Despite the April 2025 decision by the Supreme Court, Garcia remained incarcerated in El Salvador until June, when the Trump administration indicted him on charges of human trafficking in connection with a November 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee.

In March 2026, Garcia moved to dismiss the criminal charges against him, alleging vindictive prosecution. Vindictive prosecution occurs when the government prosecutes a person in retaliation for exercising a legal right. This charge can be difficult to prove, but Garcia prevailed. In the judgment, Judge Crenshaw wrote:

The Court does not reach its conclusion lightly. The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution. The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation. What the Government labels as “new evidence” was not new as a matter of law. The prosecutor’s subjective good faith does not cure the retaliatory taint.

In a statement published by We Are Casa, a community organizing group that has supported Abrego Garcia, he said this about his case: “Thank you to God, my attorneys, We are CASA, and everyone who has continued to support the fight for justice. Justice is a big word and an even bigger promise to fulfill, and I am grateful that today, justice has taken a step forward.”

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Mangino discusses Dr. Ebony Parker trial on Court TV

 Watch my interview with Matt Johnson on Court TV discussing the trial of Dr. Ebony Parker.

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Florida carries out its 26th execution in little more than 15 months

 The 14th Execution of 2026

Richard Knight from Florida was convicted of fatally stabbing his cousin’s girlfriend and the couple’s 4-year-old daughter was put to death on May 21, 2026, the seventh person executed by the state this year, reported The Associated Press.

Knight, 47, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. Knight was convicted of first-degree murder in the June 2002 killings of Odessia Stephens and the couple’s daughter, Hanessia Mullings.

When the death chamber curtain went up at the scheduled 6 p.m. execution time, Knight was already strapped down with arms extended and an IV line in place. Asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Knight said, “I want to give thanks to Yahweh, who is the most high.”

The execution began immediately afterward. Knight closed his eyes and barely moved as the drugs began flowing. After about 10 minutes, a medic was called in and Knight was declared dead.

Florida’s seventh execution of the year followed a record 19 executions in the state in 2025. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw more executions in a single year in 2025 than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The previous record was eight in 2014. And all told, a total of 47 people were executed in the U.S. in 2025.

According to court records, Knight had been living in Coral Springs, near Fort Lauderdale, with his cousin, his cousin’s girlfriend and their daughter in 2000. Knight and Stephens frequently argued about Knight living there. One evening while Knight’s cousin was at work, Stephens told Knight he would have to move out the next morning. Knight became angry and stabbed Stephens multiple times and then attacked the young girl, the records show.

Hans Mullings, who was Stephen’s boyfriend and the father of the 4-year-old, told reporters after witnessing Thursday’s execution that his family still grieves the loss.

“The pain never leaves,” Mullings said. “We love them still, and we can’t stop loving them. We miss them a lot.”

Stephen’s sisters and mother didn’t attend the execution, but provided a statement exprssing closure.

“Words cannot express the profound sense of peace and finality we feel today,” it said. “While this does not fill the empty space in our hearts, the closing of this long, painful chapter allows us to fully focus on honoring the beautiful lives of Odessia and Hanessia.”

“Richard, may our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ grant you the mercy you failed to give our loved ones whom you so brutally took from us that night,” the statement added.

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Knight’s final appeal without comment.

That came shortly after the planned execution of a Tennessee inmate, Tony Carruthers, was called off. Tennessee officials said a team quickly established Carruthers’ main IV line for a lethal injection but couldn’t find a suitable vein for a backup line required under the state’s execution protocol. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee later announced the state would not try again for at least a year to execute Carruthers, who was convicted of killing three people.

Also this week, an Arizona prisoner convicted of killing another man by throwing gasoline at him and lighting a match was put to death Wednesday. Leroy Dean McGill, 63, received a lethal injection at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence for the death of Charles Perez, who was attacked at a north Phoenix apartment in 2002.

Florida, meanwhile, is preparing to conduct another execution on June 2. Andrew Richard Lukehart, 53, was convicted of fatally beating of his girlfriend’s infant daughter in 1996. All Florida executions are by lethal injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, officials say.

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Arizona carries out its first execution of 2026

 The 13th Execution of 2026

An Arizona prisoner convicted of killing another man by throwing gasoline at him and lighting a match was put to death on May 20, 2026, the first of three executions planned this week around the U.S., reported The Associated Press.

Leroy Dean McGill, 63, was pronounced dead at 10:26 a.m. PDT following a lethal injection at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. McGill was convicted of murder in the death of Charles Perez, who was attacked with his girlfriend in a north Phoenix apartment on July 13, 2002.

It was the first lethal injection carried out this year in Arizona, and McGill didn’t appear to be resisting at any point during the procedure. After a lethal dose of pentobarbital began flowing, he began breathing heavily and made a snoring sound. And, about 21 minutes after the IV insertion process began, he was pronounced dead.

While the state was criticized for having difficulty in inserting IV lines during executions in 2022, it took just one attempt on each of McGill’s arms to successfully insert IVs.

“Today’s process went according to plan,” said John Barcello, deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry. Barcello quoted McGill’s last words as: “I just want to thank everyone for being so accommodating and nice.”

Before the injection began, McGill looked at the witnesses, smiled and nodded. Media witness Josh Kelety from The Associated Press said he heard McGill at one point say: “I’m going home soon.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, whose office pressed for the execution to be carried out, said her thoughts were with the victims.

Media witness Sean Rice from Phoenix television station KPN said the execution was carried out smoothly.

“I didn’t see any issue at all finding a vein on either arm,” he said. Rice said he also observed a slight twitching on the right side of McGill’s head about four minutes before the inmate was pronounced dead.

Authorities said that in 2002 McGill threw gasoline at Perez and Perez’s girlfriend, Nova Banta, as they sat on a sofa in the apartment, setting them on fire. Perez and Banta had accused McGill of stealing a gun from the apartment before the attack. At the time, McGill was using methamphetamine and hadn’t slept in several days.

Banta survived, but Perez died.

Thirteen people have been executed so far this year in the United States.

At the Arizona trial, Banta testified that McGill had told her and Perez not to talk behind people’s backs. Before they could respond, McGill lit them on fire, authorities said.

Perez and Banta ran out of the apartment. Another man who lived in the apartment used a blanket to put out the flames on Banta, who suffered third-degree burns over three-quarters of her body. Perez died later at a hospital in extreme pain, prosecutors said.

Banta identified McGill as the attacker at trial.

Jurors deliberated for less than an hour before convicting McGill of murder in Perez’s death in October 2004. He also was convicted of attempted murder for attacking Banta, arson and endangerment of people who escaped without injuries when the fire forced them to flee the apartment and a nearby unit where flames spread.

McGill’s lawyers had argued for leniency by presenting evidence about abuse he suffered as a child as well as mental impairment and psychological immaturity. The jury ultimately returned the death sentence.

This spring, McGill’s lawyers made a last-ditch bid to get him resentenced, but a lower-court judge rejected it. The Arizona Supreme Court also declined a request from McGill’s lawyers to postpone the execution.

McGill, who declined an interview request from The Associated Press, waived his right to seek clemency.

Arizona last applied the death penalty in 2025, executing Richard Kenneth Djerf for the 1993 killings of four members of a Phoenix family and Aaron Gunches for the 2002 fatal shooting of his girlfriend’s ex-husband.

The state carried out three executions in 2022 following a nearly eight-year hiatus brought on by difficulties obtaining execution drugs and by criticism that a 2014 execution was botched. In that 2014 execution, Joseph Wood was injected with 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours, leading him to snort repeatedly and gasp hundreds of times before he died.

The state’s current execution protocol calls for administering two syringes of pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.

With McGill’s death, Arizona now has 108 prisoners on death row.

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Corruption by any other name is still corruption

Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order? Certainly not in modern times, suggests The New York Times Editorial Board. President Trump’s Justice Department is using taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund. Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have “suffered weaponization and lawfare,” it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.

The fund manages to combine three of Mr. Trump’s most alarming behaviors. One, it is an obvious form of corruption, coming from a president who has used his office to enrich himself, his family and his allies. Two, the fund continues his pattern of using the Justice Department as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies. Three, the fund is his latest attempt to rewrite history about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

It is worth pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power.

Mr. Trump’s project has not yet succeeded, at least not fully. Many Americans — in the judicial system, in Congress, in state governments and elsewhere — continue to stand up for democracy and oppose his autocratic ambitions. By now, though, nobody should have illusions about 

The fund’s existence is a story of political self-dealing. It is nominally the product of a flimsy personal lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed this year against the Internal Revenue Service, which he oversees, over the leaking of his tax returns during his first term. That lawsuit led to an absurd negotiation, in which the lawyers on one side worked for Mr. Trump the citizen and those on the other side worked for Mr. Trump the president.

Adding to absurdity, the government lawyers reported to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, who previously worked as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. A federal judge in Miami helping to oversee the case, Kathleen Williams, pointed out that the two sides were not adversaries, which called into question the process. Even Mr. Trump acknowledged the situation shortly after filing the suit by saying, “I am supposed to work out a settlement with myself.”

Yet the talks proceeded because Mr. Trump’s Justice Department was in charge. Unsurprisingly, they led to a deal that was extremely favorable to him.

In exchange for the president’s dropping the suit against the I.R.S., both he and his supporters will receive government handouts. For Mr. Trump, the handout comes in the form of permission to have cheated on his taxes. The government has granted him and his family immunity from ongoing audits of his tax payments. He has a long history of using questionable accounting maneuvers, and the audits could have cost him more than $100 million, experts have said. Now they will cost him nothing.

For his supporters, the handouts will come from the slush fund. The Justice Department will tap a permanent stream of revenue that Congress created in 1956, known as the Judgment Fund, to settle lawsuits against the federal government. As Paul Figley, a former Justice Department official, noted, the new fund appears to be both legal and at odds with Congress’s intent. “It’s horrible policy,” Mr. Figley told The Times.

The department has allocated $1.8 billion for what it calls, in an Orwellian flourish, an Anti-Weaponization Fund and invited applications from people who have been targeted for “political, personal or ideological reasons.” Mr. Blanche — who holds his position as acting attorney general largely because of his willingness to use federal power in service of Mr. Trump’s personal whims — will appoint a five-member board, with congressional leaders given input on one of the five. Mr. Trump can fire any of the members at any time.

To understand who is likely to receive payments, look at who has previously received settlements from the Justice Department. Michael Flynn, who was briefly Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in 2017, received $1.25 million, even though he pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents. The family of Ashli Babbitt, who participated in the Jan. 6 riot, and whom federal agents shot as she and others approached the House floor, received nearly $5 million, even though investigators cleared the shooters of wrongdoing. The Trump administration is paying off people who committed violence and crimes, as long as they are Trump allies.

The fund’s timeline is the giveaway of how Mr. Trump plans to use it. The Justice Department said the fund would stop processing claims on Dec. 15, 2028, weeks before the president is to leave office, ensuring the money is distributed while he still holds the power to fire anyone who objects. The window is precisely the window of Mr. Trump’s authority.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s usual defenders are unhappy. Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, meekly said that he was “not a big fan” of the fund. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury Department’s general counsel, resigned within hours of the announcement, seven months after the Senate had confirmed him.

Providing payoffs is only part of the point. Another, according to Mr. Blanche, is “ensuring this never happens again.” What, exactly, is “this”? The evenhanded enforcement of the law.

The Trump administration has already fired federal agents who did their duties by investigating the president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Mr. Trump has issued blanket clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters, some of whom may soon receive payments. His Justice Department secured an indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on dubious charges as retribution for his role in the investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia ties. The fund continues the effort to turn law enforcement into a tool of raw political power.

The fund also encourages future lawlessness on Mr. Trump’s behalf. It sends the message that he will use his power not only to shield people who break the law from accountability but also to shower benefits on them. Just as punishment is a deterrent, rewards are an incentive.

After President Richard Nixon’s abuses in the Watergate scandal, Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.

In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.

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'Philadelphia Lawyer' a misnomer in criminal post-conviction realm

A Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found case after case in criminal post-conviction actions where court-appointed attorneys did minimal work to examine their clients’ claims and rejected what later turned out to be legitimate legal issues. The findings reveal that Philadelphia’s post-conviction system repeatedly delayed or denied justice for wrongfully convicted people who then spent years or decades behind bars.

The news organizations reviewed 250 of Philadelphia’s reversed convictions and sentences since 2018 in violent felony cases. Wagner was one of at least 50 people whose lawyers said there was no basis to challenge their cases, only for judges to later decide they deserved new trials or sentences. 

While in some cases the exonerating evidence did not emerge until years after the no-merit letter was filed, a majority were tossed out based on issues the PCRA lawyers overlooked or rejected. 

Three years of invoices appointed attorneys submitted to the court, covering 83 homicide PCRA cases in which the lawyers filed no-merit letters, show the extent of lawyers’ efforts.

Those attorneys did not arrange a single phone call with the client, contact the trial lawyer or obtain the police or prosecution case files about three-quarters of the time. Those case files have been a key source of evidence in overturned convictions since Philadelphia’s district attorney began making them available to lawyers six years ago.

Lawyers Did Little Before Declaring Cases Meritless

Homicide cases are the most serious ones a lawyer can handle. But many lawyers handling homicide Post Conviction Relief Act cases never spoke with their clients before rejecting their claims. Here’s how often they took basic steps in 83 cases.

Data is drawn from all invoices submitted in 2023, ’24 and ’25 for no-merit letters filed in a total of 83 homicide cases.

In some cases, records show the attorneys rejected their clients’ claims just days or weeks after being appointed and submitted filings with factual errors, including the wrong defendant’s name. They filed no-merit letters despite red flags, such as a client’s co-defendant having already been exonerated or a detective who locked the client up having been arrested for assaulting witnesses or tampering with evidence. 

Daniel Anders, the administrative judge who oversees Philadelphia’s court-appointed counsel system, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Judge Barbara McDermott, who oversaw many PCRA cases before recently retiring from Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, defended the system and said it is working as intended. 

“We’re never going to be a perfect system, but within the system we’ve had we’ve done the best we can,” she said, adding that no-merit letters play an important role in shutting down pointless challenges. “At some point, there has to be finality to cases.”

In Pennsylvania, a person looking to challenge their conviction starts by filing a PCRA petition, often handwritten on a state-issued form. If it’s a person’s first PCRA, a judge will assign a lawyer to amend it. 

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CREATORS: Mangione Ruling Spurs Re-Examination of Exclusionary Rule

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 19, 2026

Why would material evidence in the possession of a murder suspect be inadmissible at trial?

Simple — the exclusionary rule. The recent decision by Judge Gregory Carro of the New York Supreme Court in the Luigi Mangione prosecution has spurred interest in what the exclusionary rule does and if it is still needed.

The rule was first established in federal court in 1914. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal law enforcement officers could not use evidence obtained in violation of a suspect's Fourth Amendment rights in federal criminal trials. Prior to 1914, law enforcement officers, although compelled by the U.S. Constitution not to violate an accused's rights, could nonetheless violate those rights with impunity.

The state version of the rule didn't come about for another 47 years. I wrote about the exclusionary rule for Creators in 2025, and it is worth reexamining. In 1957, Cleveland, Ohio, police officers went to the home of Dollree Mapp looking for a suspect in a criminal investigation. She refused to let the police in without a warrant.

The police left, and when they returned, they were armed with a "fake" warrant. Chicanery took the place of real police work. Instead of going to a judge to get a warrant, the police drew up their own. After entering Mapp's home, police conducted a search and confiscated obscene material, resulting in Mapp's arrest.

As a result of the police misconduct, the U.S. Supreme Court provided a remedy — the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence from admission in a criminal prosecution — resulting in a dismissal of the charges.

Many Supreme Court observers suggested that the Mapp decision would be detrimental to law enforcement. The courts would be inundated with challenges and the guilty would go free in droves. That never happened.

What the exclusionary rule accomplished was a higher standard of police training and, in turn, police work. Ironically, the late Justice Antonin Scalia cited "increasing professionalism of police" as a reason for the exclusionary rule's obsolescence.

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

For now, the exclusionary rule is still around. Mangione's case is illustrative of why it is still needed. There was a nationwide manhunt for Mangione after the brazen assassination of insurance executive Brian Thompson on a New York City sidewalk. Mangione was recognized by a McDonald's Restaurant employee in Altoona, Pa.

The police were called and Mangione was detained after they arrived. Mangione had a backpack that was moved to a table approximately nine feet away. He was patted down for officer safety, both of which are appropriate under the Fourth Amendment.

However, the police went further and searched his backpack without obtaining a search warrant. They said they needed to make sure there was not a bomb in the bag. Prosecutors argued that the circumstances created an exception to the rule requiring a warrant. The court didn't buy it. Judge Carro ruled that the search of Mangione's bag at McDonald's violated his constitutional rights.

As a result, by way of the exclusionary rule, evidence including a gun magazine, a cellphone, a passport, a wallet and a computer chip, all found in the backpack, is not admissible at trial.

However, a second search of the bag at the police station revealed a gun linked to the crime and Mangione's manifesto attacking the insurance industry. The second search of the same bag without a search warrant is constitutionally permissible. The police may conduct a warrantless inventory search to record the suspect's belongings. As a result, the gun and manifesto are admissible at trial.

The exclusionary rule promotes integrity in the criminal justice system — even strong evidence of guilt, in a high-profile killing, cannot be used if police violate the Constitution to get that evidence.

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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Texas reaches dubious milestone--the state's 600th execution since 1982

 The 12th Execution of 2026

A man who experts for both prosecutors and defense attorneys had said was intellectually disabled became the 600th person executed in Texas since 1982, put to death on May 14, 2026 for the killing of a 77-year-old retired college professor, according to The Associated Press.

Edward Busby Jr. was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m. following a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay over his disabilities claims. The execution capped a series of last-minute legal efforts by Busby’s attorneys seeking to spare his life.

Busby was condemned for the suffocation death of Laura Lee Crane, a retired professor from Texas Christian University. Prosecutors said she was abducted from a grocery store parking lot in January 2004 and left to suffocate in the trunk of her car with duct tape wrapped heavily around her face, covering her mouth and nose.

The execution was the 600th in Texas since it resumed carrying out the death penalty in 1982. Busby also was the fourth person executed this year in Texas and the 12th nationwide. Earlier Thursday, Oklahoma executed Raymond Johnson for killing his ex-girlfriend and her 7-month-old daughter nearly 20 years ago.

When asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Busby repeatedly apologized and asked for forgiveness.

“I am so sorry for what happened,” he said while strapped to the death chamber gurney. “Miss Crane was a lovely woman. I never meant anything bad to happen to her.” He said he wished he could “take it all back” and added he had “no right to get in that car.”

“I’ll take the blame if that helps.”

He said he had surrendered his life to God and urged a sister, who was praying and watching through a window a short distance away, to find a church and “pick up your cross.”

“I’m here because this is the will of God,” he said before the injection got underway.

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began flowing, he took a sharp breath, closed his eyes and gasped. Then he made snoring sounds that got progressively quieter. Within 40 seconds, all movement and sounds ceased. He was pronounced dead 38 minutes afterward.

Busby’s execution had been in doubt after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued a stay of execution to further review his claims of intellectual disability. But the Supreme Court overturned the stay Thursday at the request of the Texas Attorney General’s Office. The attorney general’s office had argued that similar appeals were previously rejected and were “meritless” and based on “conflicting evidence.”

Busby’s lawyers quickly sought another stay but it was denied by a lower court.

The Supreme Court in 2002 had barred the execution of intellectually disabled people. But it has given states some discretion to decide how to determine such disabilities.

Busby’s attorneys had argued against putting him to death because a defense expert as well as one hired by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, both found he was intellectually disabled.

The district attorney’s office had previously recommended Busby’s sentence be reduced to life in prison. But the trial judge in Busby’s case disagreed with the findings of intellectual disability and in 2023 upheld the death sentence.

In a statement Wednesday, the district attorney’s office said it requested Thursday’s execution date because it believed that under current law Busy was not intellectually disabled.

Two other prior execution dates for Busby had been delayed by courts.

Prosecutors have said Busby and his co-defendant, Kathleen Latimer, abducted Crane in her car from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot and later put in her vehicle’s trunk as they drove around. Prosecutors said she died in the trunk after suffocating from having 23 feet (7 meters) of duct tape wrapped over her entire face.

Busby was subsequently arrested in Oklahoma City driving Crane’s car and led authorities to her body in Oklahoma just north of the state line with Texas.

Latimer is in prison serving a life sentence for murder.

Bryan Mark Rigg, an author and historian who represented the Crane family as a witness to the execution, said they “neither support or oppose the death penalty. However, they are united in their respect for the rule of law.”

Rigg said as a child he was a student of Crane, who for decades helped children overcome learning disabilities and “was discarded in a field like a piece of trash.” He said the execution was not about vengeance but “accountability under the law and about remembering the life of an extraordinary educator.”

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Firing squads make a comeback, stripping away the 'veneer of medical theater'

 Maurice Chammah writing for The Marshall Project: 

There is no tidy way to kill someone. But for the last century, Americans have searched for a way to carry out the death penalty that minimizes suffering while lessening trauma for executioners and witnesses. Those efforts have gone so poorly that we’re returning to a visceral execution method from the past.

Last month, the Justice Department encouraged federal prison officials to consider execution by firing squad amid a nationwide struggle to secure lethal injection drugs. South Carolina has already used firing squads three times recently, placing hoods over the prisoner’s head and firing rifles at a red bull’s-eye placed over the heart. Four other states have authorized the method, and Idaho is renovating its execution chamber to accommodate firing squads.

This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.

There is no question that killing a person in this manner is brutal. Witnesses have described the crack of rifles and the eerie silence as blood spills from the condemned person’s chest. It is a testament to the brutality of our execution system that firing squads may also be more effective and reliable than lethal injection, which is the most widely used execution method. Dr. James Williams, an emergency room physician and a firearms expert who has testified about firing squad executions in courtrooms across the country, told me last year that “there is a lot of evidence that the near-instant loss of blood pressure means no blood gets to the brainstem, and there is a rapid loss of consciousness.”

Williams is largely opposed to capital punishment, and he believes in minimizing suffering for executions that do occur. He told me an even faster method would be to fire a bullet into the brainstem, leading to death in milliseconds. As horrifying as that sounds, it shows how much we’ve shrouded the inevitable violence of the death penalty with syringes and barbiturates. Autopsies have indicated that many prisoners who looked peaceful as they were dying were actually paralyzed and may have felt as if they were drowning.

Firing squad executions strip away the veneer of medical theater.

Some Americans point to the horrific nature of the crimes being punished in death penalty cases and say: The more violent the execution, the better. But support for capital punishment, which is legal in 27 states, has been declining for decades. Polling shows that just over half of Americans support it, down from 80 percent in 1994. There are many reasons for this drop, among them high-profile botched executions. A wave of bloody spectacles, in multiple states and at the federal level, would be a clearer test of how deep support for the death penalty actually runs.

Before the early 20th century, the United States did not have much trouble accepting the gruesome sights, sounds and smells of executions. At the country’s founding, the violence of firing squads was part of the point; deserters were executed this way during the Revolutionary War and Civil War to deter other soldiers from absconding. In 1936, around 20,000 people attended the country’s last public hanging, an event that newspapers later decried as a “carnival of sadism.”

Firing squads and hangings mostly disappeared in the early 20th century, as public officials moved executions behind closed doors. There was a concern that public executions looked too much like the lynchings they were supposed to supplant.

Firing squad and gas executions resurface in U.S.

While reporting for a book on the death penalty a few years ago, I learned that we turned away from more brutal methods like firing squads and hangings because of the country’s growing uneasiness about the death penalty itself.

Over time, lawmakers gave voice to the public’s collective queasiness as they tried to move away from lurid spectacles. “We’ve gone from stoning to crucifixion, to quartering, to burning people at the stake, to hanging,” a Texas state legislator, Ben Z. Grant, told his colleagues in a 1977 hearing. He worried that the latest method, the electric chair, had “become a circus sideshow.” Prison officials had to place masks on prisoners to spare witnesses from having to see their eyes pop out.

Grant proposed that Texas move to lethal injection — which had proven effective in veterinary medicine — as a more modern and humane method, and many states followed suit. But the effort to improve executions eventually had the opposite effect: In recent years, a significant number of people have convulsed on the death chamber gurney. (Firing squad executions are less likely to be botched, although last year South Carolina executioners missed a condemned man’s heart, according to a study of his autopsy.)

These botched lethal injections are an indirect consequence of wariness from the medical industry, as some doctors and nurses, citing ethical concerns, refuse to play a role in setting intravenous lines or administering drugs, leaving those with less training to do their best. Most drug companies have refused to let their products play a role in killing people, which has forced prison officials to turn to less reputable manufacturers and use more experimental drug cocktails.

During this period, some states abolished the death penalty and a few governors paused executions, often citing issues with lethal injection protocols. Many leaders also looked to more transparently harsh methods. Alabama started pumping nitrogen gas through face masks. Arizona refurbished a chamber to fill with cyanide gas, a method so similar to the gas chambers in Auschwitz that a Jewish community group sued the state, saying they were being asked “to subsidize and relive unnecessarily the same form of cruelty used in World War II atrocities.”

The firing squad was available all this time. The most logical explanations for avoiding it have to do with the upsetting visuals, the feeling that it’s old-fashioned and the possible effect on executioners. But people who participate in lethal injections routinely suffer psychologically in the long term. In 2022, Chiara Eisner at NPR interviewed over two dozen people who were involved in executions. Many were so affected by the experience that they suffered insomnia, anxiety and sui­ci­dal thoughts.

President Donald Trump oversaw 13 executions in his first term, all carried out by lethal injection. President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of most of the people on federal death row, so it’s not clear whether Trump will have anyone to execute this term.

But someday federal prison officials may train rifles on someone like Dylann Roof or Robert Bowers, both of whom committed high-profile mass shootings at places of worship. Americans will then finally have to decide what we can tolerate, after decades in which we have been able to pretend that we can kill people without a cost — to our executioners and to our own sense of ourselves.

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After two trips to the Supreme Court former death row inmate Richard Glossip is out on bond

Oklahoma District Judge Natalie Mai ordered former death row inmate Richard Glossip to be released from prison while awaiting a retrial, after 29 years behind bars. During these 29 years, Glossip famously faced several execution dates and ate his “last meal” three times, reported Juristnews.

Mai set the bail at $500,000, with release contingent upon Glossip complying with certain conditions, such as wearing an electronic monitoring device, observing a curfew, remaining within the state of Oklahoma, and refraining from speaking to any witnesses.

The order cited a letter written by the attorney general in April 2023 to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, which stated that the record does not support that Glossip is guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Under the Oklahoma Constitution, bail must be granted unless there is clear and convincing evidence of guilt, leading the court to conclude that it could not reasonably deny bail.

The case stems from a murder-for-hire plot targeting Glossip’s former boss, Barry Van Treese, in 1997. Purported co-conspirator Justin Sneed confessed at trial to beating Van Treese to death, and claimed Glossip offered him money to do so. Glossip maintained his innocence throughout his defense, denying that he had any involvement with the murder.

While Glossip was imprisoned, his case faced a series of legal challenges surrounding his right to a fair trial, eventually culminating in the February 2025 decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn his conviction and order a new trial. The court’s 5-3 ruling was largely based on the prosecution’s failure to consider evidence that Sneed’s testimony was false.

Following the decision, the prosecution indicated its intent to retry Glossip on the existing first-degree murder charges, but not to pursue the death penalty.

Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, stated that he is grateful that Judge Mai granted bond:

In doing so, she rejected the State’s claim that there is a strong case for guilt. For the first time in 29 years of being incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, during which he faced 9 execution dates and at 3 last meals, Mr. Glossip now has the chance to taste freedom while his defense team continues to pursue justice on his behalf against a system that the United States Supreme Court has found to be guilty of serious misconduct by state prosecutors.

In the bond order, Mai stated that “the Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.”

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Politics or training, why the increase in questionable prosecutions?

Excerpts from Shaun Ossei-Owusu’s, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, article at Bloomberg Law:

In the past year, several high-profile federal investigations and prosecutions under Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department have dissolved as soon as they came under basic scrutiny. Those failures reportedly contributed to her removal.

As a law professor who teaches criminal law and legal ethics, I often hear a version of the same question from students and non-lawyer friends: “How could anyone prosecute that case?”

Commentators often note political motivations, but those explanations are incomplete. The confusion underlying that question points to a deeper feature of lawyering which extends beyond any particular administration and is easy to miss when the focus stays on politics.

At its core, legal training teaches lawyers to take a set of facts and construct a legally plausible argument, even when the underlying claim may be weak. Beginning in law school, students are given hypotheticals—sometimes far-fetched—and asked to frame legal claims in ways that make a weak position seem plausible. Over time, this becomes a professional habit.

The ability to stretch an argument serves an important function in the adversarial system. It ensures that competing positions are tested and that even unpopular views can be heard. But as I note in my recent book on lawyers and inequality, that elasticity has a less comfortable implication: It can stretch the boundaries of what prosecutors pursue, even when the case itself is thin.

Of course, individual resistance matters, as in the cases where prosecutors in both Trump terms were reassigned, stepped down, or were fired rather than having to push forward a case they didn’t believe served justice. Still, it doesn’t eliminate the underlying dynamic. As long as a case can be framed in legal terms and meets the minimal burden required by the grand jury, often someone within the system can be found to carry it forward.

And this is to say nothing of the less visible parts of the system. Every day, prosecutors across the country bring charges that raise similar questions about the strength of the case and basic fairness. The system allows government lawyers to turn contested facts into legal claims in ways that can produce real inequality.

This is especially true in the more common criminal prosecutions where defendants are not high-profile targets. They are not like Comey, James, Powell, or Cook—all of whom are well-connected, white-collar professionals with advanced degrees and the resources to defend themselves in court. In everyday cases, judges and jurors often aren’t viewing these low-profile defendants with the same skepticism brought to overtly political cases, making weak cases more likely to succeed. The media and the public aren’t closely scrutinizing these cases, but they reflect the same dynamic.

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