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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Murders declined sharply across the U.S. in 2024

 The number of murders across the United States declined sharply for much of 2024, continuing a recent downward trend, according to data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reported The New York Times.

Murders spiked during the pandemic, and crime became a central focus of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s campaign message. Polls show Americans still see it as a major problem. And several high-profile homicides this year, including the recent killing of a homeless woman who was set on fire in a New York subway, may fan concerns.

But in 2023, the number of murders fell at the steepest rate ever recorded, according to the F.B.I.’s data.

That trend may be continuing, according to data from a mix of sources covering most or part of 2024. In some major cities, the numbers are at or below what they were before the pandemic.

Through October, data collected by the Real-Time Crime Index, based on reports from hundreds of law enforcement agencies, showed a nearly 16 percent decline in murders from 2023. The F.B.I.’s preliminary data for the first half of the year showed an even steeper decline.

But the F.B.I.’s data for the year is not yet complete, and it will not be until next year. Even with all of the statistics, the data set may not reflect the fullest picture on crime across the nation, as some law enforcement agencies do not report their numbers to the F.B.I.

Even with the data limitations, experts said the overall trend of declining murders nationally was clear. And several major cities saw striking reversals in the number of murders over the last two years.

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Significant increase in pending criminal cases since pandemic

A sampling of large prosecutors' offices around the U.S. found a 62% increase in the number of pending cases after the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was commissioned by the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA) to understand the phenomenon of case backlogs, according to the National Criminal Justice Association.

As the pandemic began in 2020, 14 of the largest prosecutors’ offices reported just under 9,000 cases awaiting trial on average. After various court disruptions caused by COVID-19, there was an average increase of 5,565 cases per office.

"Case backlogs present a serious challenge to not just prosecutors’ offices, but the functioning of the entire criminal legal system," APA said in a report. "We find that caseloads have grown post pandemic and remain higher than pre-pandemic levels despite the resumption of normal operations and a varied programmatic response to address backlogs that remains in place in many offices today."

APA said that "morale challenges during the pandemic and lack of funding to hire and retain prosecutors are

the most salient reasons that offices are not able to act to the fullest extent possible to address their case backlogs."

The association noted that the caseload handled by specific prosecutors is "extremely varied" because of differing prosecution models.

Excessive caseloads for individual prosecutors, a report issued by the association said, "can result in longer case processing time, a greater risk for decision-making errors, increased plea bargains and dismissals, career burnout, and employee turnover."

“Our office struggles with the same issues plaguing prosecutor’s offices around the country. My attorneys each have caseloads in excess of 3-times the national standards and I have hundreds of felony cases waiting to be reviewed for prosecution," said Audrey Cromwell, County Attorney in Gallatin County, Mont.

Caseload levels have been influenced by government "funding shocks" in the past two decades. The 2008 financial crisis and its resulting recession reduced state budgets, employee rank and payroll, shrinking the staff available to carry out prosecutors' requests for help.

APA also cited changing legal requirements and new technologies, as well as victims’ rights laws that require prosecutors to spend more time working with victims.

Some 46 states have enacted "open discovery" laws, up from about a third of the states in 2004. The measures generally increase the requirements for timely evidence collection.

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Homicide rates take a tumble in 2023

The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions . . . that urban downtowns are out of control 

Detroit is on track to record the fewest murders since the 1960s, reported The New York Times. In Philadelphia, where there were more murders in 2021 than in any year on record, the number of homicides this year has fallen more than 20 percent from last year. And in Los Angeles, the number of shooting victims this year is down more than 200 from two years ago.

The decrease in gun violence in 2023 has been a welcome trend for communities around the country, though even as the number of homicides and the number of shootings have fallen nationwide, they remain higher than on the eve of the pandemic.

In 2020, as the pandemic took hold and protests convulsed the nation after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, the United States saw the largest increase in murders ever recorded. Now, as 2023 comes to a close, the country is likely to see one of the largest — if not the largest — yearly declines in homicides, according to recent F.B.I. data and statistics collected by independent criminologists and researchers.

The rapid decline in homicides isn’t the only story. Among nine violent and property crime categories tracked by the F.B.I., the only figure that is up over the first three quarters of this year is motor vehicle theft. The data, which covers about 80 percent of the U.S. population, is the first quarterly report in three years from the F.B.I., which typically takes many months to release crime data.

The decline in crime contrasts with perceptions, driven in part by social media videos of flash-mob-style shoplifting incidents, that urban downtowns are out of control. While figures in some categories of crime are still higher than they were before the pandemic, crime overall is falling nationwide, including in cities often singled out by politicians as plagued by danger and violence. Homicides are down by 13 percent in Chicago and by 11 percent in New York, where shootings are down by 25 percent — two cities that former President Donald J. Trump called “crime dens” in a campaign speech this year.

Just as criminologists attributed the surge in murders in 2020 and 2021 to the disruptions of the pandemic and protests — including the isolation, the closing of schools and social programs and the deepening distrust of the police — they attribute the recent drop in crime to the pandemic’s sliding into the rearview mirror.

“Murder didn’t go up because of things that happened in individual neighborhoods or individual streets,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans who tracks homicides in nearly 180 American cities. “It went up because of these big national factors, and I think the big national factors are probably driving it down. The biggest of which is probably Covid going to the background.”

In a country awash in guns, the normal that many cities are returning to is still a violent one, with the biggest still enduring hundreds of fatal shootings a year. And some cities are bucking the positive trend, including Washington, where the murder toll continues a grim multiyear climb. The homicide tally this year is the highest in two decades, and there have been more than 900 carjacking incidents.

Washington is an exception this year even in the Mid-Atlantic region. Baltimore is on track to report the fewest murders in nearly a decade, and Philadelphia to post a homicide count more than 25 percent below its 2021 record of 562.

Several community activists in Philadelphia attributed the surge of violence in recent years to the sudden vacuum of civic resources at the onset of the pandemic. “We got to see what happens when there are no programs available,” said Jonathan Wilson, who runs the Fathership Foundation, a nonprofit in southwest Philadelphia.

Schools, recreation centers and libraries were closed, and grass-roots groups like his were not equipped to fill the gaps. But the city’s budget last year included more than $150 million for anti-violence efforts, some of it in the form of grants to organizations that could match teenagers with jobs or provide safe places for students after school.

The city of Detroit is on track to record the lowest number of homicides since 1966, a remarkable milestone even given its substantially smaller population today. Local officials credited an aggressive effort to jump-start the criminal justice system, which had largely stalled in the pandemic.

“We know why violent crime soared in America,” said Mayor Mike Duggan at a news conference this month. “The criminal courts shut down. You couldn’t put 12 jurors in a room.”

Chief Michel Moore of the Los Angeles Police Department said that while he was encouraged to see such steady declines in violent crime — murder and rape are down markedly and robbery is down slightly this year — the city was struggling with property crime. Burglaries, car thefts and personal theft are all up substantially.

In Los Angeles, much of the decline in murders comes from a drop in the number of killings of homeless people; in both 2021 and 2022, more than 90 homeless people were killed, according to Crosstown, a nonprofit news outlet. So far this year, 35 fewer homeless people have been killed, a 55 percent reduction, according to Chief Moore. While the trend is encouraging, he said, violence in L.A., like in many cities, is still up compared with just before the pandemic.

“We still have far too much violence and we have more work to do when we look at the pre-Covid period,” he said.

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Police departments are solving far fewer crimes than they did before pandemic

The F.B.I. released data this fall that gives us a glimpse of how policing in America has changed since the disruption of the pandemic years. The evidence is clear: Police departments across the country are solving far fewer crimes than they did before 2020, reported The New York Times.

The clearance rates — essentially the percentage of crimes leading to arrests — for violent or property crimes have dropped to their lowest levels since the F.B.I. started tracking them in the 1960s (though lower arrest standards probably drove the high clearance rates in the 1960s and 1970s).

In 2022 police departments, on average, solved only 37 percent of violent crimes, just over half of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters and only 12 percent of property crimes.

While headlines tend to focus on falling clearance rates in large liberal cities, the decline occurred nationwide in both red and blue cities, counties and states. The violent crime clearance rate, for example, fell considerably between 2019 to 2022 in big cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, as well as in small cities and suburban and rural counties, which tend to be led by Republicans.

Rising crime rates are unlikely to be the culprit. More crime could certainly lead to lower clearance rates — if a department makes the same number of arrests but crime doubles, then the clearance rate would fall as a matter of mathematics — but in fact, the F.B.I. reports that violent crimes fell between 2020 and 2022.

The exact causes of the decline in arrests are difficult to pinpoint, but the timing is clearly tied to the summer of 2020, suggesting that changes in policing and America’s dwindling confidence in law enforcement since the killing of George Floyd played a role.

Sentencing and judicial reform tend to make up the bulk of our policy responses to crime and policing, but this new data suggests that increasing the share of crimes that are solved — especially violent crimes — should be a major focus of policymakers nationwide.

Studies of crime and punishment have shown that a police force’s ability to solve crimes is more effective in deterring crimes than the severity of punishment.

If you were considering stealing a car, the primary factors guiding your choice probably aren’t the charges you’d receive or the time you’d serve if convicted. Instead, you’d be more concerned with the immediate question of witnesses, anti-theft devices and cameras that might bring the police to your doorstep. Moreover, imprisonment may even increase the chance a person will go on to commit crimes after being released.

Unfortunately, police departments are struggling in their efforts to improve their crime-solving abilities.

Many police departments — especially in cities — are much smaller than they were before the pandemic. Low morale and extreme stresses in the departments have led to high levels of resignations among older and more experienced officers and significantly fewer recruits to replace them. This year the number of police officers in New Orleans reached its lowest level since the 1940s, and the numbers in Los Angeles and Seattle declined to levels not seen in decades.

Having fewer officers available to respond to the scene of a crime means fewer clues, fewer witnesses and fewer tips for detectives to go on. It also means significantly longer response times, leaving clues to grow stale and witnesses to disappear before officers arrive.

Staffing shortages also trickle down to the investigative work that happens in offices and labs long after a crime has been committed. For a long time, conventional wisdom pointed to factors beyond the control of law enforcement — such as whether a witness was present or whether physical evidence was left behind — as the primary drivers of solving crimes. The work of the investigator was perceived to matter less.

But newer research from a criminologist, Anthony A. Braga, presents a clear connection between the amount of investigative resources dedicated to a crime and the likelihood of its being solved. It may seem obvious, but it takes bodies, time and sustained effort to work a case.

Another important factor is the change in national attitude toward the police in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder in 2020. Polling from Gallup shows that public support for the police has fallen significantly over the past few years. This year only 43 percent of people said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the police — a 10 percentage point drop from 2019.

The solution to this problem is not as simple as hiring more police officers, especially considering the challenging hiring environment for police departments. Agencies should consider improving their clearance rates by employing more current officers as investigators.

Some agencies have also begun to hire more civilians to help. Civilians can respond to low-level incidents that don’t require an officer, take reports over the phone and aid investigators in solving cases. Civilians are easier and cheaper to hire than officers. They reduce officers’ workloads, allowing agencies to dedicate more time to improving investigations.

An unsolved crime cuts twice: It erodes people’s trust in law enforcement and could encourage others to commit similar offenses. It should be in the interest of all Americans for as many crimes as possible — especially heinous violent crimes — to be solved. It’s unclear whether the recent decline in clearance rates will be permanent, but we should consider the drop to be an early warning sign that police effectiveness nationwide may be in decline.

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During pandemic guns and ammo flew off shelves 'as much a run on guns as on toilet paper'

In November 2019, just as a novel virus began circulating in Wuhan, China, the United States entered year four of the so-called “Trump Slump,” a sustained decline in domestic firearm sales that began after the 2016 election, precipitating several bankruptcies and much hand-wringing among industry executives, according to The New Republic. The slump wouldn’t last much longer. Amid Covid lockdowns, a looming recession, and an ambient feeling of social collapse, demand for guns skyrocketed. In late March, when the Trump administration announced that it would allow gun stores to remain open as “essential” businesses, guns and ammo flew off shelves, resulting in, as one Los Angeles legislator told The New York Times, “as much a run on guns as on toilet paper.”

Over the course of 2020, more firearms were sold than during any year on record, and the surge continued well into 2022, bucking the usual boom-and-bust cycle that the industry has seen for decades. By year three of the pandemic, nearly one in five U.S. households had purchased a firearm, according to one measure. Many did so for the first time. Gun lovers, ran a Vice headline, were claiming “a huge ‘I told you so’ moment.” 

The Covid buying spree arrived at the tail end of a half-century development in American politics: the steady movement of guns to the red-hot core of the political right. By the end of Obama’s second presidential term, gun possession was a more reliable voting indicator than race, class, gender, and age, and support for gun rights better predicted party affiliation than views on any other single issue. Gun advertisers, stoking the political fires, found themselves “addicted to conspiracy-theory-fueled political partisanship,” as one former gun exec put it in a 2022 Atlantic essay. Over the past decade, and with predictably deadly results, lethal weapons became an unnerving and ubiquitous sight at political protests around the country, as right-wing fantasies of political violence and celebrations of armed vigilantism reached new heights.

Studies of American gun culture have often focused on the top-down influence of large organizations, such as gun manufacturers or the National Rifle Association. But these accounts only tell one part of the story. Sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues that we would learn just as much by examining how gun enthusiasts have constructed a political style from the ground up. During the febrile spring and summer of 2020, Carlson conducted remote interviews with 50 gun sellers in two red states (Arizona and Florida) and two blue ones (California and Michigan). She wanted to know how these dealers experienced the dramatic uptick in firearm sales and consequent expansion of their normal clientele against the backdrop of the pandemic, the summer’s racial justice uprisings, and the presidential election.

The book-length product of these interviews, Merchants of the Right, treats gun sellers as “merchants not just of guns but also of gun culture.” The stores they preside over serve as spaces like “nineteenth-century coffeehouses and salons,” where political conversation and conversion abound (perhaps over a cup of Black Rifle joe). In a year of Black Lives Matter, Covid, and the 2020 election, gun sellers furthered a culture of armored individualism, unhinged conspiracism, and extreme partisanship. The gun-buying surge of 2020, in Carlson’s sobering portrait, is both a culmination of these tendencies and harbinger of a perilous, illiberal future. 

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Cleveland struggles with the pandemic, poverty and violence

According to The New York Times, here are plenty of numbers that quantify the combined impact of the pandemic and the recession that have battered the country: At least 7.8 million people have fallen into poverty, the biggest plunge in six decades; 85 million Americans say they have had trouble paying basic household expenses, including food and rent; there are roughly 10 million fewer jobs now than there were in February and more violence.

As in Cincinnati, Wichita, Kan., and several other U.S. cities, 2020 was the worst year for murders in Cleveland in decades. The police reports corroborate this: more violence, more harrowing details about the way people are now surviving. A man living with his son in an abandoned house was beaten and shot by thieves; an Amazon delivery truck was carjacked and abandoned. House burglaries are down across the city while the number of shootings has exploded.

But the numbers do not capture the feeling of growing desperation in neighborhoods like some on Cleveland’s east side — communities that had already been struggling before the pandemic. These days people who have long lived and worked in these neighborhoods talk of a steady unraveling.

Gunfire echoes almost nightly, they say. The Cleveland police reported six homicides in one 24-hour period in November. Everyone talks about the driving — over the past few months in the Cleveland neighborhood of Slavic Village, cars have crashed into a corner grocery store, a home and a beloved local diner. In Cuyahoga County, 19 people recently died of drug overdoses in one week. All as the virus continues its lethal spread.

“Sometimes,” said the Rev. Richard Gibson, whose 101-year-old church stands in Slavic Village, “it feels like we’re losing our grip on civilization.”

The relief measures signed recently by President Trump — $600 stimulus checks, an extra $300 per week to unemployment benefits, a one-month extension to a federal moratorium on evictions, $25 billion in rental assistance — offer some help, though there is no direct state or local aid. And from the ground, the whole system can feel impossibly opaque.

Legal Aid lawyers in Cleveland say many of their clients had not even heard about the eviction moratorium, some only learning of it after being evicted. One client, a 30-year-old mother of four, showed up to plead her case at rent court only to be turned away because new pandemic protocols, which she had never heard about, forbade children on courtroom floors. The places where many would ordinarily have gone to learn about new benefits and new rules — where they might have access to a decent internet connection, for example — are now closed.

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Business interruption suit due to COVID-19 permitted to move forward against insurance company

A Missouri federal judge allowed a lawsuit to go forward against an insurance company for a coronavirus pandemic business interruption claim, reported Law.com. 

U.S. District Judge Stephen Bough of the Western District of Missouri denied Cincinnati Insurance Co.’s motion to dismiss a complaint filed by Studio 417, which operates hair salons in Springfield, Missouri, along with a group of salons and restaurants there and in Kansas City. Bough ruled Aug. 12 that the 54-page complaint with 253 separate allegations adequately states claims that can be litigated.

Bill Cash of Levin Papantonio Thomas Mitchell Rafferty Proctor in Pensacola, Florida said hr tried and failed to survive a motion to dismiss in a couple of similar cases, but sees this one as a hopeful sign for hundreds of other clients.

“These cases could come out differently in different states, but we are encouraged,” Cash said. “We are heartened by this decision.”

The prevailing legal team on the Missouri case certainly shares that sentiment.

“This is a significant early win in our case against Cincinnati Insurance Co.,” said Brandon Boulware of Boulware Law in Kansas City, Missouri. “And because the key language in the Cincinnati policy is similar to language in policies offered by other insurance companies, the court’s decision in our case will likely have a rippling effect in other lawsuits filed against other carriers.”

He represents the businesses along with Jeremy Suhr of Boulware Law, Jack Hyde, Tom Rottinghaus and Tyler Hudson of Wagstaff & Cartmell and Todd Johnson of Votava Nantz & Johnson, all in Kansas City.

“Our case, like others on file, seeks to compel the carrier to abide by the terms of the insurance policies that the carrier itself drafted,” Boulware said. “It is a well-established rule in insurance law that where a policy is ambiguous, such ambiguity is construed against the carrier and in favor of coverage. Our position is that the Cincinnati policy is not ambiguous and provides coverage, but even if ambiguity is found, that ambiguity benefits the policyholders.” 

The businesses purchased all-risk policies, which means anything not expressly excluded is covered, the judge said.

“Plaintiffs seek coverage under the policies for losses caused by the coronavirus (‘COVID-19′) pandemic. Plaintiffs allege that over the last several months, it is likely that customers, employees, and/or other visitors to the insured properties were infected with COVID-19 and thereby infected the insured properties with the virus,” Bough said. “Plaintiffs allege that COVID-19 ‘is a physical substance,’ that it ‘live[s] on’ and is ‘active on inert physical surfaces,’ and is ‘emitted into the air.’”

The judge said the businesses also have alleged that the presence of COVID-19 “renders physical property in their vicinity unsafe and unusable,” and that they “were forced to suspend or reduce business at their covered premises.”

Of course, he noted, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “civil authorities in Missouri and Kansas issued orders requiring the suspension of business at various establishments,” including those owned by the plaintiffs. Those orders “have required and continue to require” ceasing or significantly reducing operations and access. The businesses claim the virus and the closure orders “caused a direct physical loss or direct physical damage to their premises,” the judge said.

“The court finds that plaintiffs have adequately stated a claim for direct physical loss,” Bough said. He added that because the policies do not define a direct “physical loss” he must “rely on the plain and ordinary meaning of the phrase.”

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Individual freedom vs. The greater good

 At the turn of the 20th Century, Massachusetts was going through an outbreak of smallpox, and some of the citizens there were refusing to get the smallpox vaccine.

The city of Cambridge ordered adults to get the free vaccine or face a $5 fine. One objector, Henning Jacobson, took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the city.

Justice John Marshall Harlan authored the majority opinion in the 7-2 ruling in the Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

“In every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand,” Harlan wrote.

“Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own,” Harlan continued, “whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

Wear a mask it is duty and the right thing to do.

Crime rates have dropped significantly during pandemic

David Abrams, a University of Pennsylvania law and economics professor, has been keeping an eye on a dramatic drop in the overall crime rate across the country, reported NPR. The website he created details what's been happening with crime in more than 25 major cities during the COVID-19 crisis.

"People have reacted to the pandemic in all sorts of ways in decreasing economic activity," Abrams says. "They stopped going to work, they stopped driving their car. They stopped walking around the city, and crime also stopped."

Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Chicago all have witnessed a drop of more than 30%. Violent crimes such as aggravated assaults and robberies also fell substantially.

That wasn't true of homicides and shootings though. In some cities, there's a troubling rise compared with last year.

Shauntavius Sims, 35, lives in a Chicago neighborhood that has been plagued by gun violence. That reality makes the news of an overall drop in the crime rate irrelevant.

"Seem like it got worser to me. Just yesterday, I saw it behind my house," Sims says, as the sounds of firecrackers — not guns — filled the air. "Some boys just came and shot while me and my baby was in the back. Like every day, it's constantly on the news. Every day, it's something."

There has been a surge of homicides over recent violent weekends, and several children have been shooting victims. It's that type of tragic crime news in Chicago and other cities such as Houston, Cincinnati and Fresno, Calif., that's gotten the most attention.

Even though the numbers are tragic, Abrams says it's difficult to determine any trend in murder or other crimes over a short time span. He says for a more accurate statistical count it takes comparing what takes place from year to year over a longer period of time.

"When you look at the homicide data and compare it to levels over the past five years," he says, "we didn't see any significant impact because of the pandemic."

Even so, University of Chicago professor Jens Ludwig, the head of the university's Crime Lab, says it's a big puzzle why shootings and murders haven't dropped while other crimes have.

"Murders make up far less than 1% of the crimes in these cities," Ludwig says, "but murder is so damaging to families and communities, and I don't think we have a great understanding of why

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot agrees it is complicated. She says in some ways the pandemic created the perfect storm by compelling people to stay inside, but it also stymied the normal operations of jails and courts. More people intent on causing harm may be out on the streets instead of in the criminal justice system. She adds the underlying causes of violence are also factors.

"That's poverty, lack of hope, despair, not enough access to the things that build healthy and strong families and communities," Lightfoot says. "And we have way too many guns on the street."

There's more positive news when it comes to drug crimes. They plummeted by more than 60% compared with previous years, according to Abrams' website.

Arizona State University criminologist Ojmarrh Mitchell says there are several reasons why.

"First, drug crimes are measured by arrests, not citizen reports to police," Mitchell says. "During a pandemic, police aren't necessarily employing the pro-active police tactics and practices that typically result in discovering drugs."

The pandemic seems to be driving a lot of the reduction in crime, including home burglaries. But in commercial spaces, there's been a bump in burglaries, up by almost 30% on average across the cities examined.

Abrams says there was also a dramatic jump in car theft in Philadelphia, with increases as well in Denver, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. Baltimore was the only city that saw a substantial decline.

"So if people are leaving cars on the street, they have no need to use them," he says. "They aren't checking on them as frequently. There's also just less foot traffic around and fewer people to observe. I think that makes for more attractive targets for would-be thieves."

Those targets and any COVID-19 impact on crime will likely change altogether as more cities try to reopen their economies and people again adjust their lives.

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Texas executes first inmate since the onset of pandemic

The 7th Execution of 2020

The state of Texas executed Billy Joe Wardlow on July 8, 2020 for a 1993 East Texas robbery and murder. It was the state's first execution since the coronavirus swept through the state, reported the Texas Tribune.

In late appeals, Wardlow's lawyers argued that his death should be stopped because of the dangers presented by the rising pandemic and his young age at the the time of the crime. Neuroscientists and a group of Texas lawmakers also raised concerns with sentencing people who had committed crimes under 21 to death because of brain immaturity. All of Wardlow's appeals were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court just after 6 p.m., the scheduled time of execution.

Sitting in a holding cell, Wardlow was then taken into the Texas death chamber at a Huntsville prison, placed on a gurney and connected to an IV. His fiancee, lead attorney and two other friends stood nearby in another room, according a prison witness list. A friend of the murder victim was also present.

At 6:28 p.m, Wardlow was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. He was pronounced dead 24 minutes later.

During Texas executions, witnesses for the inmate and the murder victim regularly stand closely together with prison officials, chaplains and reporters in separate but adjacent rooms. Because of the coronavirus — including active cases of infected inmates and employees at the prison housing the death chamber, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson said Tuesday that all witnesses would have their temperatures checked, be required to wear masks and stay 6 feet apart. He did not say how that would be possible, citing security concerns. Twenty-six people were named on the witness list.

Wardlow, who declined to give a final statement in the death chamber, sent a letter last month to the parole board and spoke of how he changed during his quarter of a century on death row.

“I came to death row a scared boy who made poor choices; I will leave death row a man that others admire because I weathered the storms of life with the help of people that loved me,” Wardlow wrote the board. “We should all be so fortunate.”

Wardlow was 18 when he killed 82-year-old Carl Cole in Cason. Wardlow shot Cole during an attempted robbery in which he said he had planned to steal Cole’s truck to leave the rural town and start a new life with his girlfriend.

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Prosecutors argued Wardlow intentionally killed Cole, shooting him between the eyes. Wardlow said he hadn’t planned to fire the weapon and shot Cole during an unexpected struggle. After the killing, Wardlow and his girlfriend fled and were later arrested in South Dakota.

After 25 years on death row, Wardlow, aided by neuroscientists, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that at 18, he was too young to face Texas’ death penalty. Nearly 60 Texas lawmakers also informed the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which could recommend a delay to the execution, that they plan to take up the issue of age and the death penalty in the 2021 Legislature. But on Monday, the board voted against halting the execution until then.

The parole board also received letters from two jurors at his trial who said they now believe Wardlow should have gotten a life sentence based on new research.

“I have since that time … come to the conclusion that because of Mr. Wardlow’s youthful age at the time this crime was committed, we could not have predicted how he would turn out when he grew into adulthood,” Bob Seale wrote in a letter to the board after Wardlow’s legal team reached out to him.

Since 2005, the Supreme Court has held that death sentences are unconstitutional for those 17 or younger at the time of the crime because of their vulnerability, comparative lack of control and still-undefined identity. Some state and lower federal courts have questioned in recent years whether the upper limit of 18 is too young as new science emerges that shows the brains of people ages 18 to 20 are “functionally indistinguishable” from those of 17-year-olds in terms of moral culpability, according to Wardlow’s brief.

In a plea to stop his execution and invalidate his death sentence, Wardlow asked the high court to rule that the death penalty is unconstitutional for those under 21 — but just in Texas. That’s because a Texas death sentence requires a jury to unanimously agree that a person convicted of capital murder would likely be a future danger to society — a decision Wardlow’s attorney and a group of brain researchers said is impossible to make for an 18-year-old.

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Pandemic complicates efforts to reform Colorado's mental health system

PBS's Insight with John Ferrugia  investigation found that untreated mental illness is overwhelming the state’s criminal justice system, and leaving many in a position where getting arrested is the only way to access mental health treatment.

The documentary ended with the promise of reform from government leaders. But like many aspects of American life during this pandemic, these existing problems are getting worse because of the COVID-19 outbreak and the associated economic fallout.

When Governor Jared Polis took office last year, he established a behavioral health task force, and asked them to reform the state’s troubled mental health system.

Robert Werthwein, the state’s director of the Office of Behavioral Health, says the task force was motivated to make big changes — then COVID-19 struck.

Now, with the state budget in tatters, Werthwein says the short-term focus has shifted from overhauling the system to simply trying to preserve what is already in place.

“Any time we’re talking about reducing or not being able to evolve our services, it sets us back and it sets Coloradans back in getting the services they need. It’s gonna probably take a little longer for the vision that we have to help all Coloradans. I don’t know what that looks like exactly though at this time,” Werthwein said.

He said the task force has proposed using some federal opioid grants to help offset proposed cuts to jail-based mental health programs. The state will need to find other ways to cut costs and fill gaps left by the budget crisis.

“It means that we’re going to have to be creative in how we mitigate, and look at the best fiscal options that are available to us, telehealth being one of them, and do our best to mitigate as much as possible the impact of budget cuts and COVID,” Werthwein said.

There may already be a road map on how to cut some costs. Before the coronavirus hit, the state completed a fiscal analysis examining how the state’s mental health budget was being spent. Werthwein said the analysis identified several costly inefficiencies that put obstacles between Coloradans and the mental health care they need.

“I think there are ways for us to be more strategic across the state and work together more collaboratively so we can make a single dollar go further, which is more important now than ever before,” Werthwein said.

The behavioral health director said the people who shared their stories in Breakdown made a big impact on the task force and “re-energized” their work.

“Putting real faces and real names and real people struggling day in and day out through all the communities in Colorado … we cannot stop our work. And that’s why you feel me pushing a little bit. When we talk about budget, it’s going to have an impact. But for me, we can’t stop moving forward because there are real lives here,” Werthwein said.

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California community ignores COVID-19 outbreak in local prison to meet state guidelines for reopening

Officials in Santa Barbara County, California, wanted to start reopening the local economy as the state’s coronavirus epidemic began to ease. But they had a problem.

This coastal county, known for its vineyards and stunning ocean views, is also home to the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex, which has one of the country’s largest COVID-19 outbreaks in a prison. Nearly 1,000 prisoners have tested positive. Two have died.

California’s governor had set clear requirements for counties to emerge from lockdown. The prison outbreak made it hard for Santa Barbara to meet those standards. So local officials proposed a solution: Don’t count the prisoners.

“The individuals in the Lompoc prison are not out in the community, so it’s really a whole separate population,” said Suzanne Grimmesey, a county spokeswoman.

County officials prevailed. The California Health and Human Services Agency agreed last week to exclude COVID-19 infections of federal and state prisoners when it decides whether a county can loosen up on lockdowns. Before Memorial Day weekend, Santa Barbara announced it had been approved for limited reopening. Shoppers can now go to malls and swap meets. Restaurants can offer dine-in service.

The state made the decision because “inmates of state and federal prisons generally do not return to the counties in which they are incarcerated,” an agency spokeswoman said.

The situation in Santa Barbara, a county with close to 450,000 residents, could play out in communities throughout the country. Prisons account for many of the “hot spots” for COVID-19 infections, from Trousdale County, Tennessee, to Liberty County, Florida, to Marion County, Ohio. And many local officials, from Pennsylvania to Arkansas, have raised the idea of separating out the prison cases.

Some advocates for prisoners called the decision to exclude the cases problematic, raising concerns that the move could reduce political pressure to address the COVID-19 crisis behind bars. They were also dubious about the idea that prisons are separate from the larger community, noting that staff come and go each day.

“It's a fiction,” said Kate Chatfield, a senior advisor at the Justice Collaborative, a criminal justice advocacy group. “The virus doesn’t stay within the walls of the prisons, as we know.”

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Violent crime down during pandemic, but the tide is starting to turn

The Coronavirus has ushered in a steep drop in major crimes, reported the New York Times.

“The dynamics of street crimes, of street encounters, of human behavior are changing because people are staying home,” said Philip M. Stinson, a former police officer turned criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University.

Crime, say those who study it and those who fight it day to day, requires three things — a perpetrator, a victim and an opportunity.

With tens of millions of Americans off the streets, would-be victims and opportunities for crimes have vanished, causing a drop in the number of perpetrators committing infractions. The dip in crime is compounded by the fact that some police departments have been hampered by quarantines, or have made fewer arrests to limit interactions or to avoid filling the jails.

Arrests in Chicago, where the Cook County jail became one of the nation’s largest-known virus hot spots, were down more than 73 percent during roughly the initial month of the lockdown, said Deputy Chief Thomas Lemmer of the Chicago Police Department.

Crime did not entirely disappear, of course, and some of the worst offenders remained undeterred. Homicides in numerous cities remained flat or even rose.

Not so fast, Chicago’s Memorial Day weekend was the deadliest in five years, with 10 people killed and 39 wounded, said Sally Bown, a spokeswoman for the city’s police department. Temperatures were in the 80s, she noted, and even without a lockdown, warm weather tends to send people outdoors and drive up crime rates. According to The Crime Rport, violence on Memorial Day weekend is not a new phenomenon.

At the beginning of Memorial Day weekend — the unofficial start of summer — Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown announced opening a Summer Operations Center to centralize police resources in an effort to tamp down on summer gun violence. The most recent fatal shooting was Monday evening in Garfield Park on the West Side. Two men, 45 and 52, were standing on the sidewalk about 8:30 p.m. when someone in a white sedan fired shots. On Sunday afternoon, a person was fatally shot in Rosemoor on the South Side. Sunday morning, a man was killed in Humboldt Park on the Northwest Side. A 45-year-old man was killed several hours before that in Grand Crossing on the South Side. The newspaper detailed a string of other shootings.

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Ohio has a new prison hot spot for COVID-19

Belmont Correctional Institution is emerging as Ohio’s latest prison hot spot for the coronavirus as COVID-19 cases soar and conditions at the minimum-to-medium security facility in eastern Ohio deteriorate, reported the Columbus Dispatch.

But the public may never know it because the state has stopped the mass testing that showed prisons in Marion and Pickaway counties were the top COVID-19 hot spots in the nation.

Since Belmont’s first positive case of an inmate on April 13, 132 inmates and 66 staffers have tested positive, up from 30 inmates and one staff member just two weeks ago. And on Tuesday, Belmont reported its first COVID-19 fatality with the death of inmate Ronald Wanyerka, 62, of Cuyahoga County.

Statewide, 58 inmates and two prison employees have died.

Those on the front lines say the virus almost certainly is more widespread than reported because the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is no longer conducting widespread testing in prisons. Instead, the state is primarily testing inmates exhibiting symptoms of the disease.

Corrections officers at Belmont complain that they aren’t given adequate personal protection equipment, no longer have space to keep sick inmates apart from healthy ones, and are forced to go to a drive-through facility in nearby West Virginia to be tested themselves.

Scott Stevens, who has worked as a corrections officer at Belmont in St. Clairsville for 24 years and is chapter representative for the Ohio Civil Services Employees Association, the union representing 8,000 prison employees statewide, said Belmont consists of 10 dorm-style facilities, each housing more than 200 inmates who sleep in bunk beds and share kitchen and bathroom facilities.

Once five inmates in a facility test positive, the whole dorm is considered to have the coronavirus. But unless someone needs medical treatment, they remain in the dorm to recuperate, he said, adding that from one to five inmates are being sent to the hospital each day because their conditions have worsened.

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Mississippi has tested 44 state prisoners for COVID-19

Mississippi leaders have said that they are testing early and thoroughly for COVID-19, but the state’s Department of Corrections has so far failed to test most of its employees and people in its custody. As of last week, 44 prisoners out of more than 14,000 have been tested for the novel coronavirus at DOC prisons and detention centers—a rate of 0.4 percent, according to The Appeal.

The nearly 20,000 staff members and incarcerated people form a population greater than 43 percent of counties in Mississippi. Yet they are being left out of the state’s testing push, which Governor Tate Reeves has touted as “aggressive” in recent press briefings. 

“Testing is critical to manage this disaster,” he said on April 6, “and that’s one thing that we in Mississippi are very fortunate of, is we became very aggressive very early on testing.”

During a May 6 briefing, The Appeal asked Reeves about the low testing rate inside prisons. He responded, “We haven’t had large numbers of individuals in our prison system that have had symptoms.” The DOC has succeeded in avoiding “major, catastrophic spreading” because of early interventions, he said.

“Much like President Trump was very, very early by cutting off travel to China, in Mississippi we were very early in cutting off visitation in the Department of Corrections,” Reeves said at the same briefing. As of Monday, the DOC reported that 10 incarcerated people and seven employees had tested positive for COVID-19. 

He added that temporarily banning prisoners from doing road work across the state has helped taper the spread, too.

Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center in Mississippi, said that low rates of testing are not indicative of low disease rates. “The surest way to have zero confirmed cases in your facility is to conduct zero tests,” he said. 

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GateHouse: This country’s other growing and deadly epidemic

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

May 8, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been engrossed in a battle to control an epidemic in this country that in 2018 alone took 67,367 lives. The epidemic is not a new strain of influenza, Ebola or some other deadly infectious disease. The epidemic is drug abuse resulting in overdose deaths.

According to the CDC, drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Nearly 70% of the 67,367 deaths in 2018 involved an opioid. Opioid addiction is the driving force behind the epidemic.

Ironically, the birth of the opioid epidemic can be traced to an effort to help people fight chronic pain. OxyContin, a time-release pain reliever, was approved by the government in 1995 and launched for use in the U.S. in 1996. FDA approval was granted to Purdue Pharma, a family-owned business, because of the drug’s 12-hour time-release component. At the time those suffering from chronic pain only had temporary relief every four hours. Within a couple of years, OxyContin exploded onto the illicit drug scene. The time-release aspect of OxyContin was easily defeated by chewing or crushing the tablet - causing a powerful high. Purdue had the opportunity to stop the supply of OxyContin to offices and clinics across the country that were serving as nothing more than pill mills generating enormous profit and providing very little medical care.

Purdue Pharma is a privately held company owned by the Sackler family. Late last year, the family agreed to pay $3 billion over the next seven years to victims’ families, reported the New York Times.

Some of the states with the highest rates of death due to drug overdose are West Virginia (51.5 per 100,000), Pennsylvania (36.1 per 100,000) and Ohio (35.9 per 100,000). The magnitude of the opioid epidemic comes into focus when one compares the overdose deaths with the current COVID-19 death rate in those states, West Virginia (2.7 per 100,000), Pennsylvania (22.6 per 100,000) and Ohio (8.9 per 100,000).

The CDC acknowledges that a pandemic in the midst of an epidemic can be catastrophic. Opioid-related deaths are on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brittany Shultz, a substance abuse specialist with the York County Opioid Collaborative in central Pennsylvania explained to WHP-TV in Harrisburg how “a combination of fears and increased isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the rise in overdose deaths.”

Restrictions on movement may lead those with a substance abuse disorder to opt to purchase drugs from less trusted sources, raising the risk of overdosing on drugs that may be stronger than anticipated or tainted.

Narcan, an opioid overdose antidote, has been hailed as a miracle drug. The drug administered by medical staff, police officers and even fellow drug users have pulled people out of a deadly overdose by administering an easy-to-use antidote.

Even in spite of readily available Narcan, overdoses continue to rise. Some suggest that drug users locked down in their homes during the pandemic don’t have friends to call for help or to administer an antidote.

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated the lives of those in recovery. The loss of employment and social relationships has caused considerable mental health hardship to those already vulnerable to risky behavior.

While this country wages war and dedicates enormous attention and resources to this mysterious and deadly virus, and rightfully so, this country cannot afford to ignore a killer that has been with us for years and will continue to plague America for years to come.
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 at @MatthewTMangino.

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Rethinking probation and parole in the midst of pandemic

In the effort to release people from jails to stem coronavirus outbreaks behind bars, those jailed for probation and parole violations have been an obvious choice, reported The Marshall Project. They’re locked up not for committing new crimes but for breaking the rules of their supervision, like drinking alcohol, traveling without permission, or missing appointments. In New York alone, Governor Andrew Cuomo last week ordered the release of more than 1,000 such people from jails around the state.

These efforts spotlight the hundreds of thousands of people who are jailed each year for behavior that would be routine if they weren’t on probation or parole. Research has long called into question the public safety benefits of locking them up, and other traditional probation and parole tactics. Now social distancing orders to slow the virus are providing a way to test some changes critics have advocated. Fifty reform-minded probation and parole chiefs last week called for states and counties to “suspend or severely limit” jailing people for supervision violations that aren’t crimes, among other changes, in response to COVID-19.

One of them was Brian Lovins, president-elect of the American Probation and Parole Association. “This gives us a big opportunity to challenge the need for incarceration for non-violent folks,” he said.

With government buildings closed across the country, check-ins at parole and probation offices are all but suspended nationwide. Many departments are doing drug testing only in the most high-risk cases, according to a small New York University survey and interviews with people in the probation and parole field, known as “community corrections.” And with jails overcrowded and courthouses shuttered, some departments have stopped making arrests for breaking the rules of supervision—known as “technical violations”—unless there’s an imminent safety threat. Some places have formally ordered officers to stop bringing people to jail for technical violations. In others, fewer home visits and check-ins mean fewer opportunities for officers to discover broken rules.

To be sure, dialing back close pre- or post-release supervision is not without risk. Around the country, officers are using video and phone calls to keep in touch with people they supervise, but they lose some nuance and personal connection when they’re no longer in people’s living rooms, observing family dynamics, or visiting workplaces and having informal chats with whoever manages the person there, probation and parole professionals said in interviews.

Susan Rice, the chief probation officer in Miami County, Indiana, sees this time as a “big social experiment.”

“We all think we have to supervise these people and be drug testing them constantly and following them around. If we stop doing that, do they fall apart? Get rearrested? Overdose? Will it really happen or will we see that they’re fine?” she said.

Originally designed as an alternative to incarceration, probation and parole have instead become “a significant contributor to mass incarceration,” according to a 2017 Columbia University Justice Lab statement signed by more than 60 prosecutors and community corrections directors across the country. On any given day, supervision violations account for almost a quarter of people in prison nationwide—about 280,000 people—according to an analysis by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center.

“This is what the research has been saying: just leave them alone,” says a probation chief in the upper Midwest, who asked not to be named so his staff don’t feel he is criticizing their usual practice. Even before the coronavirus crisis, his office had been trying to implement probation “dosing”—tailoring their support to the person’s risk and needs, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach.

“We probably still over-supervise when we don’t even intend to,” he said. With the current suspension, “I think there will be some ‘ahas’ coming out of that.”

Late last month, a Georgia man who’d recently had a double lung transplant was set to serve a year in prison for a probation violation, according to Michael Nail, the state’s commissioner of community supervision. “That’s the last person you want to be going into the prison system” under the threat of COVID-19, Nail said. Nail said he got a call from a local sheriff, who was anxious to have the man out of his jail but couldn’t get the prison system to take him. With a judge’s help, they arranged to have the man released on time served.

“There’s nothing out there that shows a specific amount of time in custody is the magic number” to address violations, Nail said. Coronavirus precautions are “an opportunity to educate folks on what the research shows.”

The pandemic has also suspended some of the social supports that are both lifeline and requirement for many on probation and parole, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, appointments with counselors and therapy groups. Some of those have been temporarily replaced by telehealth or video conferences. One probation officer in Westchester County, New York, said she spends her days on the phone, scrambling to help people sign up for unemployment or log in to virtual appointments. She asked The Marshall Project to withhold her name because, like several of the officers interviewed, she was not authorized to speak with a reporter.

Meanwhile, probation and parole caseloads are likely to rise in coming weeks as prisons and jails look for ways to reduce overcrowding. This week California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the state intends to release 3,500 prisoners to parole earlier than planned.

“We’re all kind of freaked out,” said a Missouri probation officer whose caseload is exclusively people with sex-offense convictions. Her state’s pandemic protocol calls for “high and very high risk” clients to be seen face-to-face just once per month; all others check in by phone. “Anyone that’s been around knows they can drug all they want, they can not report, they can abscond, and they’re not going back to prison right now,” she said.

But others say the rules were too strict to begin with.

One man on parole in New York said that when he heard officers were not issuing technical violations, he decided to fly out of state for a night to meet his newborn granddaughter. He asked not to be named because he was discussing a parole violation. He had only been out a few weeks after serving decades in prison, but decided to take the chance because he was afraid that once the usual protocols are back it will be years before he may get a travel pass, he said.

“I'm not going to follow all of their rules and then catch the virus—anything could happen—and then I die and I never met my granddaughter,” he said.

So far, crime appears to be on the decline in some cities, even with a coronavirus-related rollback in nonessential policing, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. Some of the decline can certainly be attributed to people hunkering down at home and other social distancing steps. But the numbers, although not yet conclusive, may provide reassurance to those who fear that releasing people from jail and easing supervision will lead to more crime.

In Massachusetts, the court has scaled back the number of people placed on electronic monitoring to limit the interpersonal interaction required to have the device fitted as well as non-serious violations that result from the devices, said Edward Dolan, the state’s probation chief. Massachusetts is only putting ankle bracelets on people for whom the state “couldn’t figure out a way not to do it.” This includes those convicted of stalking or domestic violence, Dolan said.

It shows how the coronavirus pandemic is forcing the justice system to “adjust its risk threshold,” Dolan said.

“It’s really a balancing between the impact of the pandemic, and what we’re willing to collectively tolerate as risk in the community.”

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