Fourth Circuit: Police need warrant to use tracking device that mimics cellphone tower

Police wanting to use a device mimicking a cellphone tower to locate people must first get a warrant, a Fourth Circuit panel ruled, reported Courthouse News Service.

Kerron Andrews was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department in May 2014, after the police secured a court order allowing them to use a cell-site simulator to obtain his real-time location information. Andrews’ cellphone provider had allowed the police to determine his location within a few blocks, before the police used a simulator to determine he was in a specific townhouse.

Andrews told the Fourth Circuit panel this past January that the court order did not satisfy the Fourth Circuit’s warrant requirement. The panel disagreed Thursday, while recognizing that cellphones pose a unique threat to individual privacy.

The precision of the technology used by the police is invasive, U.S. Circuit Judge Nicole Berner wrote for the majority, and people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a private home. The Joe Biden appointee was joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Toby Heytens, also a Biden appointee.

“This technology is akin to sense-enhancing technology that allows the government to peer into a private home, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly held requires a warrant,” she wrote. The cell-site simulator effectively “cracked open the front door” of the property to reveal Andrews, she said.

“Despite the ubiquity of cell-site simulators, no federal court of appeals has squarely addressed whether law enforcement’s use of this technology for realtime tracking of a cellphone constitutes a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment,” she wrote. “Today, we hold that it does.”

Andrews had a reasonable expectation that his phone wouldn’t be used as a real-time tracking device by law enforcement, the panel found, and the use of the cell-site simulator constitutes a search as defined in the Fourth Amendment. The judges did not decide if the pen register order secured by the cops satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Despite this, Andrews’ civil suit against the police department and detectives can’t proceed, because the officers are protected by qualified immunity, the panel found, upholding a lower court’s judgment in favor of the police department and its detectives.

Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. concurred with the judgment, adding in a short opinion that he feels the panel should have first determined if Andrews’ constitutional rights had been violated and evaluated whether the pen register order was a valid warrant.

The police sought to arrest Andrews — who had previously worked with them as an informant — on charges of triple attempted murder after a shooting during a drug deal. The prosecution dropped the case against him after a Maryland court found officers should have first secured a warrant to use the simulator. He had spent nearly two years in pretrial detention, and later sued the department and two detectives claiming that they violated the Fourth and 14th Amendments by using the simulator.

“We are pleased that today’s ruling agreed that using privacy-invading technology—here, a device that enables law enforcement to see through walls—requires a valid search warrant,” Mike Pichini, attorney for Andrews, told Courthouse News. “Although disappointed with the overall result, we celebrate that our Constitution constrains law enforcement’s warrantless privacy invasions, especially when such invasions breach residential walls. We, the people, must be vigilant against government warrantless use of ever-evolving technology to erode our fundamental right to privacy.”

The Baltimore Police Department and detectives had argued his constitutional rights were not violated, and that their actions were reasonable as they had a warrant for his arrest and a court order allowing them to use a cellular tracking device that was functionally equivalent to a warrant. The court order did not satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, Andrews argued.

The case had appeared before the Fourth Circuit before, when the panel expressed concerns the order did not specifically authorize a cell-site simulator and that the device may have searched devices other than Andrews’. The court remanded the case, directing the lower court to conduct more fact-finding.

In May 2025, the police defendants secured summary judgment, with U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher concluding the search required a warrant but that the order the police secured was sufficient and effectively acted as a warrant. Andrews’ Fourth Amendment rights were not violated, she ruled.

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Erasing data on your phone at the border could land you in jail

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents want to know what's in your phone—and they won't take no for an answer, reported Reason Magazine. Courts have long held that border cops don't have to respect the Fourth Amendment when searching for contraband, and the CBP claims that this power includes the data stored on travelers' phones. Now, the feds are trying to argue that erasing that data is a form of illegal obstruction.

Samuel Tunick, a participant in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic in January 2025 when a CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team pulled him into a windowless room and asked for his phone password. "Because you're refusing to talk, which is your right, we have the authority to go through your phone to see what we're looking for," an agent told him.

But instead of giving his real password, Tunick apparently gave the agents a code that would erase all the data on his phone, known as a "duress password." He was using a Google Pixel loaded with GrapheneOS, an operating system known for its nearly airtight security. The feds charged him 11 months later under a rarely used law against "destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure." 

After months of paperwork and delays, the case had its first hearing last week, with Tunick's lawyers arguing that the government obtained the duress password "in violation of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights," and therefore everything that happened to the phone should be thrown out of court as "fruits of his unlawful interrogation." They also argued that the Fourth Amendment exemption for border searches shouldn't apply to the data on phones.

"Officers were not permitted to disregard all constitutional protections afforded to Mr. Tunick simply because he was at the border," the lawyers wrote in a filing before the hearing.

Several months before the Tunick case, several experts advised Reason that U.S. citizens can protect their data from border searches by wiping their devices before traveling. (It's not so simple for foreigners, since the CBP can turn them away for any reason, including having an empty phone.) An expert told The New York Times that the Tunick case would not necessarily criminalize that tactic, because travelers who erase before traveling would have "a strong argument that they did not act with the specific criminal intent to thwart an imminent search."

But the prosecution is unprecedented, and seems designed to scare people out of even trying to hide their electronic data from the CBP.

The case also highlights an important legal imbalance: The feds have the right to lie to you, but you don't have the right to lie to them. According to FBI emails obtained by Tunick's lawyers, the government was investigating Tunick for terrorism over his involvement in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. But at the airport, CBP agents told Tunick that they were searching his phone for "child porn."

The reference never came up again in the investigation or case, leading Tunick's lawyers to call it "a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr. Tunick's connections." It may also have been an attempt to bolster the case for searching his phone. In 2019, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers West Coast states) ruled that child sex abuse images are one of the few cases where digital data itself can count as "contraband" for the purposes of border searches.

Defend the Atlanta Forest, also known as Stop Cop City, aims to stop the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a planned campus for police and firefighters in Georgia, both on environmental grounds and because it encourages "police militarization," according to a movement website. Throughout 2022, some protesters physically attacked the construction site and other property with rocks and Molotov cocktails. In January 2023, police shot dead protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán under murky circumstances, alleging that Terán shot at officers during a raid.

The state of Georgia has thrown the book at protesters, hitting them with domestic terrorism and racketeering influenced corrupt organization (RICO) charges. While some defendants were charged with specific violent acts, some of them were charged as co-conspirators for nothing more than "occupy[ing] a tree house" or buying camping equipment. Prosecutors even charged three people with money laundering for running a protester bail fund.

Prosecutors dropped the money laundering charges in September 2024, and a judge threw out all of the RICO charges a year later.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to prioritize left-wing domestic terrorism. One of their targets has been Defend the Atlanta Forest. Last month, the Department of Justice brought up two protesters who allegedly committed arson on federal charges, and cited Trump's memorandum in their announcement of the charges. The FBI even internationalized the investigation, leaning on Swiss police to help unmask the owner of the email account for Defend the Atlanta Forest.

"While the government depicts the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement as an 'Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group' ('AGAAVE'), it has not put forth evidence that Mr. Tunick was involved in criminal activity in connection with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement," Tunick's lawyers wrote.

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DOJ drops subpoenas for NYT reporters after challenge by judge

The Justice Department is dropping the subpoenas it filed demanding grand jury testimony and phone records from New York Times journalists after sharp questioning Thursday from a federal judge who challenged almost every facet of the government's approach, reported NPR.

The government had insisted that it was acting solely in the interest of national security. It filed subpoenas on July 10, just two days after the Times published the first of two stories about concerns that led to the U.S. Secret Service interceding to prevent President Trump from flying home from Turkey on the new Air Force One jet.

But at the hearing, the presiding judge, U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian, made clear he believed the Trump administration had violated protections given to journalists in black and white to uphold First Amendment principles. He also pointed to several instances of what he considered slipshod legal work and threatened to levy sanctions against federal attorneys for failing to follow the law and misleading the court in signed filings.

The case highlighted the Trump administration's ongoing assault on press rights and the free flow of information to the public. It also provided another glimpse of the White House's eagerness to assert an expansive definition of executive authority, as prosecutors argued the U.S. attorney general has the power to set aside legal protections for journalists when he deems necessary.

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Judge appointed by Trump seething at administration conduct

 A federal judge in Florida appointed by President Donald Trump just nine months ago seethed at the administration in a new ruling, accusing them of cooking up a flimsy excuse to bypass his own judgment in favor of a career official within the administration itself, wrote Matthew Chapman.

Judge Kyle Dudek's ruling concerned the immigration detention case of Dmitrii Iastrebov, a noncitizen who has been sitting in lockup without a proper hearing — only for the Trump administration to argue that the administration's own appointed immigration judge, rather than the U.S. district judge, should be the final word on the matter.

This case, wrote Dudek, "borders on the surreal ... an immigration judge refused to hold the ordered hearing, claiming Iastrebov is not covered by § 1226(a) and thus ineligible for bond. Instead of defending this Court’s mandate, the Government’s counsel acquiesced in that refusal and waived any administrative appeal. Now, faced with a renewed habeas petition, the Government casually announces that its previous concession 'was in error' and asks this Court to reverse itself and hold that Iastrebov is instead subject to mandatory detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225."

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NYPD no longer reviewing all stop and frisk encounters as required by court order

More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.

But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers, reported ProPublica.

The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.

In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.

The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.

The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.

The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.

Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.

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Forum examines rising attacks on judges

Federal judges read profane death threats and praised U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ recent comments condemning personal criticism of judges during an unusual forum to highlight rising attacks on the judiciary, reported The Associated Press.

None of the four judges singled out President Donald Trump or members of his administration, who have railed against judges that have ruled against them. One of the judges on the panel, U.S. District Judge Mark Norris in Tennessee, was appointed by the president.

He recalled receiving pizza deliveries at his rural home one night for Daniel Anderl, the slain son of a federal judge in New Jersey. Dozens of judges have had unsolicited pizzas delivered to their homes, often in Anderl’s name.

Norris said such threats have become routine against judges.

The event was sponsored by Speak up for Justice, a nonpartisan group supporting an independent judiciary. The group held a similar event last year — both of them unusual because judges mostly limit their comments to the courtroom and written decisions. But more judges have recently begun talking about personal threats and attacks.

The U.S. Marshals Service, responsible for protecting judges, reported 564 threats in the government fiscal year that ended in September, up from the year before. On Tuesday, Roberts warned that personal criticism of federal judges is dangerous and “it’s got to stop.”

Norris and the other panelists pushed back on criticism that their rulings reflect the political affiliations of the presidents who appointed them.

“I sit with four other judges who were appointed by President Trump, and they are phenomenal judges,” said U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, who sits in Washington.

She would trust them to handle any case, she added, though they wouldn’t always reach the same decision.

Last month, Reyes used part of a court hearing to read email and social media death threats she received following her ruling blocking the Trump administration from ending temporary immigration protections for Haitians living in the United States. She read the threats again during the forum.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee read messages that threatened to kill her at home. One of the messages led to an indictment, she said.

“I think everybody needs to speak up,” she said. “It’s not just the judges who need to speak up.”

Roberts’ comments came two days after Trump called a federal judge who ruled against the administration “wacky, nasty, crooked and totally out of control.” The chief justice, too, did not single out the president.

U.S. District Judge Michelle Williams Court said Roberts had helped open up a discussion about the threats. Court recalled a threat against her children years ago that led her and her husband to inform their school.

She also said she has seen a rise in “veiled threats” in court filings by attorneys.

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Brooklyn woman with mental health problems remains in jail uncharged for not revealing whereabouts of missing child

The Family Court in this case is doing precisely what the constitutional guarantee against compelled self-incrimination forbids: It is exerting the court’s coercive power to force Ms. Pritchett to give testimony that could expose her to criminal prosecution

On Thursday, the Brooklyn Family Court judge asked the woman the question for the seventh time:

Where was Jacob?

Jacob Pritchett, an 11-year-old so small that his neighbors in Brooklyn thought he was no older than 7, had not been seen for months. The police and a child welfare case worker, prompted by a call to 911, had gone to his Brownsville apartment on Oct. 1 to find him. But the woman who answered the door, Jacqueline Pritchett, told them she had never had a child, reported The New York Times.

The apartment was spotless and had the pungent scent of cleaning products, and the police could see toys in the bathroom and in the closet, according to court transcripts. But Ms. Pritchett, 50, continued repeating her claim even after Judge Dawn Marie Orsatti issued a civil warrant on Oct. 10, charging her with contempt for not revealing where her boy was, and sent her to Rikers Island.

Ms. Pritchett has been brought back to court repeatedly, and on Thursday, Judge Orsatti tried again.

“If you tell the court the whereabouts of Jacob, I will release you from incarceration,” Judge Orsatti said.

Ms. Pritchett, dressed in brown sweatpants and sweatshirt, sat next to her lawyer and looked back silently. Her lawyer, Daniela Mancini, leaned over and said her client was invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Judge Orsatti sent Ms. Pritchett back to Rikers.

The case has flummoxed detectives who scoured three months of surveillance footage taken from the building, looking for any sign of the boy. They traveled 330 miles to upstate New York to search a landfill where the garbage from the Brooklyn building was taken. They have interviewed neighbors and relatives, but no one has been able to help them figure out where Jacob, whom the police and neighbors have described as nonverbal, could be.

The answer appears to lie with Ms. Pritchett, but she has resisted giving one despite the efforts of the court, the police and the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.

Brooklyn Defender Services, the public defenders representing Ms. Pritchett, declined to comment about the boy’s disappearance or whether his mother knew anything about it. It has filed court papers arguing that she should be released immediately from Rikers Island, calling her detention a “constitutional violation.”

”The Family Court in this case is doing precisely what the constitutional guarantee against compelled self-incrimination forbids: It is exerting the court’s coercive power to force Ms. Pritchett to give testimony that could expose her to criminal prosecution,” wrote Brian A. Holbrook, a lawyer for Brooklyn Defenders, in a Dec. 2 petition.

It is unclear whether Jacob went to school. Before this fall, Ms. Pritchett did not appear to have a history of involvement with child welfare agencies in New York State, according to someone who viewed some of her social service records and spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

The police once made a check on Jacob in 2017 after a 911 call, according to court transcripts. The Police Department said it is continuing to investigate the case.

The 911 call that sent the police and A.C.S. to the Brownsville address this fall came from a worried neighbor, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case who was not authorized to discuss it.

Police officers went to the apartment in a three-story red brick building on Howard Avenue on Oct. 1 for a wellness check.

Ms. Pritchett told officers that she lived alone and “became loud and boisterous during the interview,” according to an internal police document.

During a hearing on Oct. 10, an A.C.S. caseworker, Gabriel Martindale, said that when he and the police arrived, he went inside and saw two mattresses. The apartment was dark and the electricity had been shut off.

The smell of cleaning products, he said, was “very strong.”

When Mr. Martindale asked whether the toys belonged to Jacob, Ms. Pritchett said they were hers. He then presented her with Jacob’s birth certificate and asked whether that was her son.

“She said she’s never had a child, that she has never had a period, that she’s never been with a man,” Mr. Martindale said. She then said “that she is Jesus Christ.”

Ms. Pritchett was taken to Brookdale University Hospital nearby for psychiatric evaluation. Neighbors said they had seen the police checking the building’s dumpsters. A police dog that later searched the apartment “got a hit” from the refrigerator inside the kitchen, the internal document stated.

On Oct. 9, the police were in Perinton, N.Y., near Rochester. Wearing white coveralls, they fanned out across the High Acres Landfill. The official said investigators went there after they learned the garbage collected at the Brooklyn apartment was sent there.

Neighbors said in interviews in October that they had not seen the boy in months, but had noticed that Ms. Pritchett, who had grown thinner, had lesions on her skin and sometimes talked to herself.

Shamik Burchet, who lives in the building and often saw Ms. Pritchett and Jacob, said the child “seemed really neglected.”

When the boy was younger, Mr. Burchet said, his mother sometimes left him sitting in a stroller alone in the building’s lobby.

“Sometimes I’d have to sit with him,” he said. “Eventually she’d come back around.”

Evelyn Rolon, who lives nearby and works as a bartender, said the mother and son moved into the building about seven years ago.

“I would hate to think that a mom would hurt her own child,” said Ms. Rolon, 49, who often saw Ms. Pritchett and her son. “I’m hoping she gave him to somebody because she got overwhelmed.”

Sometimes, Ms. Pritchett would meet neighbors at block parties. The boy was usually not with her, but at a cookout in early September, Ms. Rolon said she gave the woman two burgers — one for her and one for Jacob.

“He would be making sounds. He wasn’t formulating words,” Ms. Rolon said.

Ms. Pritchett was often seen out alone. Other times, they could hear her screaming at Jacob in the apartment.

“We’d tell her, ‘Stop yelling at the baby like that.’ You know how someone yells at a grown person? That’s how she used to yell at the baby,” Ms. Rolon said. “You could tell she was overwhelmed.”

In October, when officers from the crime scene unit were searching the apartment, they sealed the door with a neon green warning sign that forbade anyone from coming inside without police authorization. Affixed just below that sign were several pink and yellow stickers with happy faces.

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Troops deployed to Portland in defiance of Court Order

The Trump administration briefly deployed Oregon National Guard soldiers to Portland earlier this month, hours after a Federal District Court judge had ordered any such deployment blocked, the government revealed, according to The new York Times.

The District Court judge, Karin Immergut, raised the possibility that the deployment, however brief, had put the administration in contempt of court as she began a trial to determine whether to lift a temporary restraining order, or T.R.O., on troop deployments or make it permanent.

“We’ll discuss later whether that’s contempt and a direct violation of my T.R.O.,” Judge Immergut told a Justice Department lawyer after learning of the deployment.

President Trump wants to send National Guard troops to protect the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, which has been the site of daily protests for more than four months. Oregon and the city of Portland have sued to stop that deployment, and a trial in the case began Wednesday.

But Judge Immergut imposed temporary restraining orders first on the use of Oregon National Guard soldiers beginning at 3:40 p.m. on Oct. 4, then on all guard troops the next day.

Before the trial began Wednesday morning, a Justice Department lawyer, Jean Lin, told Judge Immergut that Oregon soldiers under federal control were sent to Portland between 11 p.m. on Oct. 4 and 2 a.m. on Oct. 5. Ms. Lin did not say how many soldiers were sent or what they did at the ICE building.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the federalized National Guard soldiers, said military officials were looking into news of the brief deployment. Emails submitted as evidence in the case show a nine-person advance team from the Oregon National Guard, part of 200 Guard troops federalized by the Department of Defense, reported working at the ICE facility after the temporary restraining order was filed.

The issue marked the second time this week that the Justice Department had to come clean before judges considering Mr. Trump’s planned deployment in Portland. Federal lawyers have said the National Guard was needed in Portland because the federal government had exhausted existing resources, even after moving Federal Protective Service officers and other law enforcement agents with other federal agencies to Portland from other parts of the country.

But in a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday, U.S. attorneys acknowledged that they overstated the number of federal agents reassigned to Oregon.

In a brief filed before an Oct. 20 appeals court hearing, the government said that 115 Federal Protective Service officers from other parts of the country had been surged as a group to the ICE building and stated that “it is undisputed that nearly a quarter of the agency’s entire F.P.S. capacity had to be redirected over a relatively short period to a single location in one medium-sized American city due to the unrest there.”

But in a letter to the appeals court on Monday, a federal lawyer said 86 F.P.S. officers were actually sent to Portland over the summer, including some who were deployed multiple times. The lawyer also noted that the reference to “nearly a quarter” of the federal agency’s capacity being sent to Oregon was simply incorrect.

What the federal government meant to report, the lawyer wrote, was that 13 percent of the agency’s inspectors — who are responsible for crisis response, investigations and security assessments at federal buildings — had been deployed to Portland over the course of the summer.

On Wednesday, in the first day of what’s expected to be a three-day trial, lawyers for the city of Portland and the state of Oregon argued that the federal response to protests at the Portland ICE facility has been disorganized and needlessly violent.

“The court will hear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have staffing challenges,” Scott Kennedy, a senior assistant attorney general for Oregon, told the judge. “But that has nothing to do with Portland.”

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States consider surgical castration as a punishment for sex crimes against children

 The Marshall Project expands on castration as punishment:

Last year, Louisiana sparked a slew of sensational headlines when state legislators passed a law allowing surgical castration as punishment for people convicted of sex crimes against children. That was the first successful legislation in a new wave of bills proposing both chemical and surgical castration in states such as New Mexico, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

This March, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would make chemical castration a precondition of parole in sex offenses involving a child under the age of 13. As the bill headed over to the state senate, Republican Rep. Scott Fetgatter made its intent clear, saying, “I will fight for stricter laws against such offenders to better protect our kids.”

But while supporters of these bills echo that cause, many experts say the approach is needlessly cruel and lacks a sound scientific basis.

Castration — both reversible chemical and permanent surgical castration — does lead to the reduction of testosterone and a diminished libido. But “there is literally no evidence that testosterone is the driving factor of individuals committing crimes of a sexual nature,” said Kristen M. Budd, a senior analyst with the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization working to reduce the number of people behind bars in the U.S.

Castration is not a new idea. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, doctors in the U.S. have been using hormone therapy — via off-label use of medications for conditions like prostate cancer — since the 1940s to lower the testosterone in men with “pathological sexual behavior.” Sandy Rozek, the communications director for the National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws, told The Marshall Project that she’s occasionally heard from people who want to avoid reoffending that the treatment plans they’ve created with their doctors have included surgical castration. Rozek draws a line between these self-appointed procedures and the criminal justice bills mandating castration as a condition of parole or as a court-ordered punishment.

“If your choice is between 10 more years in prison and castration, that’s not really a choice,” she said. “That’s coercion.”

The coercive nature of the state permanently or temporarily altering a man’s body in exchange for release is what led the courts in Michigan to deem the practice unlawful and experts like Budd to point out its similarity to 20th century eugenics, which resulted in the systematic sterilization of thousands of incarcerated women who were deemed “subnormal.”

Proponents like Democratic Louisiana Rep. Delisha Boyd, who co-authored the castration bill that became law in her state, believe that the harshness of the procedure is a self-evident deterrent against sex crime. Boyd, who comes from a family with a history of child sexual abuse, emphatically told NPR, “Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”

According to Gary Taylor, a researcher and professor who wrote an authoritative book on the history of castration, this strategy has long been practiced with the goal of inciting fear. Some ancient societies would kill enemies and cut off their testicles to intimidate future foes. The practice also permeated the antebellum and Jim Crow South, in which the extra-judicial lynchings of Black people were punctuated with castration as a form of White supremacist psychological terror, with the severed testicles often kept as souvenirs.

The bill Boyd co-authored made Louisiana the first state to allow judges to order surgical castration as a punishment, but there are at least 10 states that passed laws before 2008 to allow chemical or surgical castration as a condition of parole. California led the way in 1996. But despite these laws having been on the books for years, there is little information on how often states perform these procedures. A former sex crime prosecutor told the LAist in 2019 he never saw it done in Los Angeles.

Given the scant information available, the experts we spoke with are not aware of any concrete way to demonstrate that castration deters crime. But Rozek believes the claim is analogous to arguments made in favor of the death penalty, which numerous studies show offers no unique deterrent to violent crime. “People don’t stop and think about things like that when they are committing an offense,” she said. And like the death penalty, Budd is worried that when this punishment is performed, it will be done disproportionately to Black people who have White victims.

In terms of recidivism — whether a formerly incarcerated person reoffends — both Budd and Rozek note that people convicted of sex offenses are less likely than people convicted of other crimes to be rearrested after release. A study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that followed the post-prison lives of people across 30 states released in 2005 found that about 67% of people convicted of sex offenses were rearrested in the nine years following their release, compared with about 84% of people convicted of other crimes.

For those at risk of reoffending, they point to treatment programs, like cognitive behavioral therapy — which studies have consistently found to reduce sexual recidivism — over the unknowns of castration. Budd also notes that castration can further ostracize those who have committed crimes of a sexual nature. Instead of states investing millions into post-release punishments, such as sex offender registries, she believes society would be safer if lawmakers “actually created spaces for people who may have attraction to children to go seek help without fear.”

While a castration bill in South Carolina is still working its way through the legislature, and one in Oklahoma was withdrawn from an appropriation committee, the bills proposed earlier this year in New Mexico, Iowa and Mississippi have died. Rozek takes no solace in this. “The first year out, most of the bills won't pass,” she said. “But this is just the first phase. They will come back.”

Similarly, Budd believes that with the bipartisan passing of the surgical castration law in Louisiana, we could see this punishment be adopted for other crimes. “It happened with sex offense registries,” she said. “Now you have violent offender registries in states like Ohio and Oklahoma that list people’s home address and their vehicle information once they're released from prison.”

While these punitive bills can boost legislators on both sides of the aisle hoping to look tough on crime, Budd warns that they can doom the formerly incarcerated looking for a clean start. “These laws take away hope, chance for change, and human dignity.”

To visit The Marshall Project CLICK HERE

Law & Crime:‘Beginning to assert their constitutional authority’: Federal judiciary may be gearing up for a face-off with Trump administration

Matthew T. Mangino
LAW & CRIME NEWS
April 10, 2025

President Donald Trump’s administration apparently believes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 can be used to address unlawful migration and drug trafficking — but so far, federal courts have pushed back on that notion.

A March 15 executive order issued by President Donald Trump suggested a Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua was behind “an invasion of and predatory incursion into” the United States.

The Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, when it was used to justify the mass internment of people of Japanese heritage while the U.S. was at war with Japan.

The United States is not at war with Venezuela. However, based on the government’s interpretation of the Alien Enemies Act, the Trump administration forcibly deported 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Included with those summarily deported was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man with a work permit, married to an American citizen, and raising an American-born child. Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador in spite of a 2019 protection order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador.

In late March, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked any deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, writing that the law refers to hostile acts perpetrated by another nation. On appeal, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Boasberg.

In the neighboring jurisdiction of the District of Maryland, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis found that the government had no lawful authority to detain and deport Abrego Garcia. She ordered his return. The Justice Department in a Supreme Court filing stated that Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador through an “administrative error,” but the government had no authority to effectuate his return.

Just this week, the Supreme Court lifted Boasberg’s order that had barred the government from removing noncitizens who are designated as members of a Tren de Aragua. By a vote of 5-4, the justices declined to address the challengers’ contention that they are not covered by the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 on which Trump relied in issuing the order. Instead, the high court found, the challengers’ lawsuit must be brought in Texas, where they are being held, rather than in Boasberg’s Washington, D.C., court.

However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurring opinion that “the Court’s disagreement is not over whether the detainees receive judicial review of their transfers — all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question,” he concluded “is where that judicial review should occur.”

As the Trump administration celebrated its “victory,” judges in Texas and New York said “not so fast.” Judges in both states temporarily barred the government from deporting Venezuelans jailed in parts of those two states while lawyers challenge the Trump administration’s use of Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The orders were the first to occur following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the administration can resume deportations under the act.

The broader decision was handed down by U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., appointed by Trump and sitting in the Southern District of Texas. He said that the administration cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to remove any Venezuelans being held at the El Valle Detention Center, in Raymondville, Texas, near the southern border, until at least April 23, giving lawyers for the detainees an opportunity to argue that the Alien Enemies Act is only applicable to enemy nations in times of war.

The Trump administration received further bad news from the U.S. Supreme Court. In what appeared to be a unanimous decision, the high court affirmed on Thursday Xinis’ order requiring “the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador” and to be prepared to share what steps it has taken to bring Abrego Garcia home. She set a hearing for Friday, and — when DOJ lawyers asked for more time to evaluate the Supreme Court’s ruling — excoriated the government attorneys.

“[T]he Defendants’ act of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was wholly illegal from the moment it happened, and Defendants have been on notice of the same,” Xinis wrote Friday in response to the government’s request. “Indeed, as the Supreme Court credits, ‘the United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.’ Second, the Defendants’ suggestion that they need time to meaningfully review a four-page Order that reaffirms this basic principle blinks at reality.”

As the hearing went forward on Friday, Xinis lashed out at the Trump administration after DOJ lawyers said that the government was “not yet prepared to share” information as to what efforts have been made to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release.

“That means they’ve done nothing,” Xinis said in retort.

The decisions in the deportations cases are coming fast and furious, and with each ruling, courts are beginning to assert their constitutional authority to hold in check an overreaching executive branch.

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

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Louisiana seeks constitutional amendment to draw more juveniles into adult court

When Louisiana reversed its “Raise the Age” law in early 2024, moving all 17-year-olds back into the adult criminal system, it became the first and only state in the nation to enact such a reform, intended to shield youth from adult prisons, only to then repeal it. Since then, sheriffs of some of the biggest parishes in the state have struggled to accommodate the influx of minors into their jails. Now, Louisiana lawmakers are seeking to go a step further: They’ve proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would give themselves more leeway to decide what crimes can send children even younger than 17 into adult court—and potentially adult prison, reported Bolt. 

On March 29, Louisianans will vote on Amendment 3, a constitutional amendment that would hand legislators the power to add, with a two-thirds majority vote, any felony to the list of charges that would qualify a child to be treated like an adult in the eyes of the law. In Louisiana, this includes crimes like making a fake ID or stealing a phone. The state constitution currently restricts the crimes for which minors aged 14 and up can be charged as adults to a list of 16 serious felonies including murder, rape, and armed robbery. 

The amendment’s sponsor, Republican state senator Heather Cloud, says the limits on charging children as adults have “hamstringed” Louisiana from being able to address juvenile crime. Some of the bill’s supporters have expressed a deeply pessimistic view of Louisiana’s youth population; in a House committee hearing last fall, Republican lawmaker Tony Bacala told his colleagues, “Some of these kids are already lost when they’re two years old.” 

The move has alarmed advocates across the state, who are urging a no vote. “This is just casting the net wider to get young people inside the system,” Antonio Travis, the youth organizer for the group Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, told Bolts.

“These are grasps for more power,” said Sarah Omojola, the executive director of Vera Institute New Orleans. “We’re really trying to cage up and defund Louisiana’s future.”

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry sat in chambers during the House’s debate and vote on the amendment in November, a signal of his support. Its content is consistent with a broader effort by Landry and his allies in the legislature to establish more serious and lasting consequences for young people accused of crimes. In 2023, as attorney general, Landry campaigned for a bill that would have made young people’s criminal records public—but only for residents of the state’s three most populous parishes, which are all majority-Black. The bill was sponsored by state representative Debbie Villio, a former prosecutor and ally of Landry’s who brought the constitutional amendment alongside Cloud. 

Both Landry and Villio insisted at the time that this targeting was about crime rates, not race, but organizers were appalled. “How could a person not look at the evidence and see that this is an intentional attack on certain communities?” Travis asked. The bill died in the senate amidst widespread accusations of racism. But in 2024, during a special session on crime that Landry called as his first official act as governor, Bacala brought back a new version that applied equally to every parish, which passed. Landry promptly signed it into law. 

Before 2017, the year Louisiana’s “Raise the Age” law took effect, “the education system was definitely, definitely feeding our youth justice system,” Travis told Bolts. “Kids were getting incarcerated from truancy. Kids were getting incarcerated from being suspended too much.” 

The reform moved 17-year-olds into the juvenile justice system as a default, though those accused of serious crimes could still be transferred to adult court. “This narrative of these hard criminals … that narrative was slowly being done away with,” Travis said. “The general public was recognizing that these are kids and they deserve resources.”

But this new day in Louisiana wouldn’t last long. There were a few abortive efforts to overturn “Raise the Age”: one bill that Landry, then attorney general, supported died in 2022; another was vetoed by then-Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, in 2023. But this year, with Landry as governor, the legislation passed and became law last April. Landry feted the change on X, writing: “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court. These are criminals and today, they will finally be treated as such.”

The fallout was immediate: Any 17-year-olds already in custody were transferred to adult facilities, and all 17-year-olds arrested from then on were processed and treated as adults, meaning that their criminal history also becomes public record. The vast majority of these young people were not accused of home invasions, carjacking, or robbery, it turns out. Of the 203 17-year-olds arrested in the state’s three largest parishes during the first five months under the new law, ProPublica found that nearly 70 percent were charged with nonviolent crimes, like trespassing or marijuana possession. Only 13 percent were charged with serious felonies—and prosecutors already had the discretion to send young people accused of these crimes into adult court. 

Erika Jupiter, statewide organizing manager for Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children’s, told Bolts that the change has had the effect of separating young people from their families and communities. ”Parents are very worried about the experience their children are having, and also it’s harder for them to communicate with their children,” she told Bolts. “If your child is in that adult facility, you may go weeks without knowing a status on what’s happening with them.” 

Recognizing that minors are at increased risk of physical and sexual assault in prison, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act requires them to be “sight and sound” separated from adult prisoners. This has resulted in adult prisons placing young people in solitary confinement or in “pods,” which Jupiter described as “windowless shipping containers.” “It’s still inhumane,” she said. Officials have also shipped kids to prisons over 150 miles away from their original facility since the law took effect. “You have children going so far away from home, and their parents can’t visit,” Jupiter said.

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Kansas public defenders: Huge caseloads, lower pay and now less funding

Public defenders in Kansas face borderline unethical caseloads, lower pay rates than peers and now the possibility of even less funding to address attorney shortages, reported News from the States.

Heather Cessna, executive director of the Kansas Board of Indigents’ Defense Services, or BIDS, painted a picture for the Senate Judiciary Committee at its first meeting Tuesday of a state struggling to keep up with high case volumes, an aging workforce and economic pressures. 

BIDS requested an additional $10 million from the Legislature this year to adequately compensate public defenders to avoid turnover and hire more lawyers to allow for ethical caseloads. 

Instead, the special legislative budget committee wants to cut $7 million from the BIDS budget, according to House Bill 2007, which was introduced Monday and sponsored by committee chairman Rep. Troy Waymaster, R-Bunker Hill. 

Ultimately, Kansas does not have enough “experienced, qualified and available” attorneys willing to take on BIDS cases, Cessna told lawmakers. About 84% of adult criminal cases in Kansas are BIDS cases.

Clients and lawyers alike are frustrated, Cessna said, “and I field those phone calls daily.”

In Sedgwick County, home to Wichita, attorneys from outside the county are called to travel in to represent indigent defendants. In Shawnee County, where BIDS has two offices, attorneys spent 2024 refusing to take on more cases to maintain professional and ethical caseload levels. In Johnson County, public defenders are inundated with cases, even with a fully staffed public defender’s office and a back-up cache of private attorneys, Cessna said.

“In counties with fewer attorneys, that only gets worse,” she said.

A judge appoints a public defender to a criminal case when a defendant cannot afford representation. It’s a right embedded in the U.S. Constitution, and when that right is in jeopardy due to attorney shortages, like those in Kansas and jurisdictions across the country, the consequences are serious, Cessna said.

Without an attorney, cases are delayed. Evidence can be lost.

“If you have a constitutional requirement to have an attorney representing these people, and you don’t have an attorney standing in that courtroom next to that person, then that case has to get dismissed,” Cessna said.

More than half of Kansas counties have 10 or fewer lawyers and even fewer who specialize in criminal defense. One-third of lawyers in Kansas are over the older than 60, signaling a swath of soon-to-be retirees. 

Freshman Republican Sen. TJ Rose, an insurance agent from Olathe, wondered if compensating private attorneys who take on public defense cases at a rate of $250 an hour instead of $120 an hour would alleviate the shortage. 

Steve Leben, a retired Kansas Court of Appeals judge and a University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law professor, wrote Monday on social media platform X that higher compensation rates for private attorneys could “lessen or eliminate” the shortage.

“But the most effective solution economically and for professional representation is properly funding public defenders,” he said.

Cessna said private attorneys are also subject to the same ethical caseload standards as public defenders, and there isn’t the same oversight and quality control capabilities as with direct employees.

Kansas remains in a better position than some other states, which have seen courts forced to dismiss criminal cases due to a lack of attorneys and, therefore, an inability to fulfill constitutional obligations. 

Still, challenges persist.

“There is no question” cutting BIDS’ funding will escalate a situation that has already reached a crisis point, Cessna told Kansas Reflector.

“I think we’re going to have difficulty paying bills,” she said.

Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Luckert told reporters Wednesday that the proposed $7 million budget cut would be “amazingly significant.”

“The result of that is that it slows processing cases,” Luckert said. “Basically, what we have to do is wait. There are caps on the number of cases that an attorney can take to be able to be effective in those cases. If they’ve reached those caps, the court just has to wait until the attorneys are able to help with that.

“And that means, oftentimes, people sitting in jail for undue amounts of time.”

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New Jersey Governor wants to reduce locking up technical parole violators

New Jersey officials would return potentially hundreds fewer parole violators to prison and cap how long they could be held under changes Gov. Phil Murphy will announce in his annual state of the state address next week, reported the New Jersey Monitor.

Murphy will urge lawmakers to pass legislation that would reduce how many people get hauled back to prison for technical parole violations, which is when someone violates the conditions of their parole rather than commits a new crime. Between 1,100 and 1,200 parolees are in state custody on any given day for technical parole violations.

“Right now, roughly 10% of our state’s entire prison population consists of people who are being held behind bars for committing a technical parole violation, like missing a scheduled meeting or forgetting to report a move to a new town,” Murphy is expected to say in his speech Tuesday afternoon at the Statehouse in Trenton. “Nobody should lose their freedom because of a technicality.”

The state Parole Board decides who is granted parole, under what conditions, and when, as well as whether to charge someone with a parole violation that will land them back in prison. Murphy included $1 million in the current state budget — which runs through June — for a consultant to examine how those decisions get made, although that work hasn’t yet started.

New Jersey law gives the parole board little discretion.

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Fire science under scrutiny in review of 40 year old conviction

The  man who has been serving consecutive life sentences for the 1984 rooming house fire in Beverly has the opportunity for a new trial, according to WBGH in Boston.

Last week, Essex County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Karp overturned James Carver’s convictions for second-degree murder and arson. In the decision, Karp wrote a new trial was necessary because advances in fire science and eyewitness testimony “cast real doubt on the justice of his convictions.”

The fire killed 15 people. During the trial in 1989, prosecutors claimed Carver acted out of jealousy when he discovered a tenant of the rooming house was dating his ex-girlfriend. An investigator said the fire started from a stack of gasoline-soaked newspapers aflame in the only exit of the building. Witnesses said they saw Carver by the newspapers before the blaze.

Carver, 60, has maintained innocence and appealed, claiming new evidence would prove that other people set the fire. He has multiple chronic conditions and has used a wheelchair since 2006. He sought medical parole in 2021 but was denied.

This year, the court heard testimony from fire science and memory experts.

Karp’s decision mentions the fire marshal failed to “adequately rule out an electrical source.” On eyewitness memory, he noted experts revealed “the risk of misidentification significantly increases each time a witness is exposed to a suspect or the suspect’s photograph.” His decision mentions one witness was shown Carver’s photo three times before identifying him in a lineup.

Attorney Charlotte Whitmore of the Boston College Innocence Program said over 25 students have worked on Carver’s case in the past nine years.

“A lot of the evidence that the prosecution used in the 1980s to attempt to prove that this fire was an arson are now outdated, you know, sort of myths that fire scientists no longer rely on,” said Whitmore.

She and attorneys Lisa Kavanaugh, director of the Innocence Program at Committee for Public Counsel Services drove to Old Colony — where Carver is currently housed at — on Christmas Eve to let him know of Karp’s decision.

“Charlotte and I each took one of his hands and told him, 'we’re here with really good news,'” said Kavanaugh. “His face sort of lit up and he was like, 'Really?’ Then we told him 'the judge allowed your motion for new trial.’ It was a very emotional moment. He started crying. He was really just completely overwhelmed.”.

Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker has 30 days to decide whether to retry the case. In a statement, he said his office has received the court’s decision allowing Carver’s motion for a new trial.

“This was the defendant’s fifth such motion,” Tucker wrote. “His four prior motions were denied. We are carefully reviewing the ruling and exploring options. We are also attempting to locate and notify the families of the fifteen victims who were killed in the fire.”

A CVS and memorial stand at the rooming house site. Amanda Mazzaglia of the Elliott Chambers Fire Memorial Foundation said the foundation has “always been about the victims and never served as an interest in the legalities of the crime,” but declined further comment.

Within the next few weeks the court will also likely hear “the issue of his release conditions,” said Kavanaugh, who said they’re working on a release plan for Carver, in hopes that can occur during the time the commonwealth decides whether the case can be tried.

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Fourth Amendment victory at the border

A federal court has held that the government must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before searching travelers’ electronic devices at the border, according to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The ruling came in a case in which a criminal defendant, Kurbonali Sultanov, moved to suppress evidence obtained from a search of his cellphone when he entered the U.S. at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. In October 2023, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed an amicus brief in the case, arguing that warrantless searches of travelers' phones violate the First Amendment’s protection of the freedoms of the press, speech, and association, as well as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The judge relied heavily on the amicus brief in issuing her ruling.

“As the court recognizes, warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border are an unjustified intrusion into travelers’ private expressions, personal associations, and journalistic endeavors—activities the First and Fourth Amendments were designed to protect,” said Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “The ruling makes clear that border agents need a warrant before they can access what the Supreme Court has called ‘a window onto a person’s life.”

Sultanov was stopped for questioning at John F. Kennedy Airport in March 2022. He initially refused to provide the password to his cellphone but complied when officers told him he had no choice. The officers searched the cellphone manually at JFK, and subsequently searched the phone forensically after obtaining a warrant. In a subsequent criminal case in the Eastern District of New York, Sultanov filed a motion to suppress the evidence obtained from his phone, arguing that the warrantless search of the device at JFK, and the later forensic search, violated his Fourth Amendment rights. 

The court held that the warrantless search of Sultanov’s cell phone at JFK violated the Fourth Amendment, but ultimately denied his motion to suppress because the court concluded that the government acted in good faith.

The court also held that border searches of electronic devices burden core First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of the press. In reaching this conclusion, the court relied on records obtained by the Knight Institute through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, which describe travelers’ experiences with electronic device searches at the border. Read more about that lawsuit here.

The court also explained that these searches chill communications between reporters and their sources, again pointing to the amicus brief filed by the Knight Institute and Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which detailed the experiences of numerous journalists who when entering the U.S. were flagged for secondary inspection and were required to surrender their electronic devices for warrantless searches.

“As the court recognized, letting border agents freely rifle through journalists' work product and communications whenever they cross the border would pose an intolerable risk to press freedom,” said Grayson Clary, staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This thorough opinion provides powerful guidance for other courts grappling with this issue, and makes clear that the Constitution would require a warrant before searching a reporter's electronic devices.”

Read the ruling here.

California takes on homelessness and mental illness

A new initiative, called CARE Court — for Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment — is a cornerstone of California’s latest campaign to address the intertwined crises of mental illness and homelessness on the streets of communities up and down the state, reported The New York Times.

Another piece of the effort is Proposition 1, a ballot measure championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and narrowly approved by California voters this month. It authorizes $6.4 billion in bonds to pay for thousands of treatment beds and for more housing for the homeless — resources that could help pay for treatment plans put in place by CARE Court judges. 

And Mr. Newsom, a Democrat in his second term, has not only promised more resources for treatment but has pledged to make it easier to compel treatment, arguing that civil liberties concerns have left far too many people without the care they need.

So when Ms. Collette went to court, she was surprised, and disappointed, to learn that the judge would not be able to mandate treatment for Tamra.

Instead, it is the treatment providers who would be under court order — to ensure that medication, therapy and housing are available in a system that has long struggled to reliably provide such services.

“I was hoping it would have a little more punch to it,” Ms. Collette said. “I thought it would have a little more power to order them into some kind of care.” 

Yet it seemed like her only option, so she made the petition and hoped.

CARE Court is Mr. Newsom’s bid to balance the very public and very political problem of homelessness with profound questions about individual rights in a country that for generations forced people with severe mental illness into dangerous, dysfunctional institutions.

Under Gov. Ronald Reagan, California led the country in a national movement to end widespread practice of committing the mentally ill to state institutions. But like the rest of the country, the state didn’t ensure that adequate resources were shifted to community services.

Mr. Newsom, in signing the legislation that set up the new courts, nodded to this history, calling it California’s “original sin.”

That failure helped seed the crisis that plays out in city after city.

The state’s growing homeless population — just over 180,000 people, according to federal statistics, more than a quarter of the nation’s homeless — has city parks and spaces underneath freeway overpasses bulging with encampments, and those clearly in mental distress are a common sight in communities up and down the state.

“Continue to do what you’ve done, and you’ll get what you’ve got,” Mr. Newsom said when he signed the CARE Court legislation. “And look what we’ve got. It’s unacceptable.”

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