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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Permitless carry appears to have failed — most states enduring more fatal shootings

On February 14, gunfire erupted during a parade for the Kansas City Chiefs, who had won the Super Bowl three days earlier. What was intended to be a celebration of their victory — amid a crowd that law enforcement estimated at around a million —  ended with a shooting that left one woman dead and wounded nearly two dozen others, half of them children, reported The Trace.

More than 800 police officers were at the parade, but there was little they could legally do to intervene until the moment guns were raised and bullets began to fly. Carrying a loaded gun at a crowded parade isn’t illegal in Missouri. Like 28 other states, Missouri doesn’t require a permit to carry guns in public. It’s a permitless carry state, where people can legally tote loaded firearms without a license, training, or a background check.

Removing permit requirements was supposed to make people safer. That’s what gun rights proponents said as the laws spread across the country over the past decade. By removing roadblocks for citizens to carry guns, more people would do so, and it would deter or stop shootings. But by that metric, permitless carry appears to have failed — in Missouri and elsewhere — with most states enduring more fatal shootings after the laws took effect. 

The Trace analyzed gun violence data and found that 16 of the 20 states that enacted permitless carry between 2015 and 2022 saw more shooting deaths — excluding suicides — after the laws took effect than during an equivalent time period before. In Missouri, average monthly shooting fatalities, adjusted for population, were 28.7 percent higher in the three years after the introduction of permitless carry, compared to the three years before. In neighboring Kansas, which enacted permitless carry in July 2015, fatalities were 24.9 percent higher.

West Virginia endured the largest increase in shooting deaths among the states analyzed by The Trace, with a surge of 40.2 percent. That is in line with a 2023 study in the American Journal of Public Health, which reported a 48 percent increase in West Virginia’s gun homicides in the four years following the adoption of permitless carry, relative to the years from 1999 to 2015. 

Two states saw essentially no difference in shooting fatalities following permitless carry, The Trace found. Two other states — Indiana and Ohio — saw fewer.

The Trace’s analysis was based on data from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that logs incidents of gun violence in near-real time. The GVA first began tracking shootings through media and police reports in 2014. 

A decade of data became available for the first time in 2023, overlapping with the period when most states introduced permitless carry. While GVA’s data is expansive, the analysis excludes nine states because they enacted permitless carry before the inception of GVA, or because the laws were enacted too recently to make a viable before-and-after comparison.

To be clear, just because shooting deaths increased in the months following permitless carry’s enactment doesn’t mean it is the sole or primary cause. Gun production, sales, and deaths have also increased nationwide in the past decade, and many states loosened other gun laws around the same time that they adopted permitless carry. 

Most of the states that have enacted permitless carry already had lax concealed carry permit requirements before removing them entirely. Also, many permitless carry states enacted the laws shortly before or amid the pandemic, a period that saw a spike in gun violence nationwide, followed by a historic decrease in most states.

In recent studies, researchers have attempted to account for such confounding factors, and they, too, have found a relationship between looser concealed carry laws and elevated gun violence rates.

The Kansas City parade shooting was a staredown between two groups of people that spiraled into a mass shooting, prosecutors have said. At least a dozen people brandished weapons, and six people opened fire.

“The parade shooting – it was directly related to permitless carry,” Jean Peters Baker, the Jackson County prosecutor whose office is overseeing several cases related to the parade shooting, told The Trace.

Lack of research

In 2023, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that when states shifted from requiring permits and training to permitless carry, nonfatal shootings and other gun assaults increased 32 percent.

“What we have seen in our work and other high-quality, rigorous studies is that when you make it easier for people to carry guns in public, you see increases in firearm violence,” said Cassandra Crifasi, an injury epidemiologist who co-directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions and was the study’s lead author.

While growing, the number of rigorous studies on permitless carry specifically is somewhat limited. That’s in part due to the recency of the laws and a dearth of detailed, reliable violent crime and firearm injury data to evaluate them. Research takes time to complete and evaluating a specific policy like permitless carry — particularly the prospect of identifying and supporting causality — is difficult.

There is far more research on loosening public carry restrictions more broadly. 

Years before permitless carry became a national phenomenon, dozens of states transitioned from “may issue” laws, which gave officials discretion in granting permits, to “shall issue” laws, which guarantee permits to applicants who meet basic qualifications, like age limits, a clean criminal record, and sometimes live-fire training requirements. 

A meta-analysis conducted by the RAND Corporation of more than 40 rigorous academic studies found supportive evidence — the think tank’s strongest designation — that “shall issue” concealed carry laws may increase firearm homicides, overall homicides, and violent crime. One of the studies, which controlled for confounding factors, found that more permissive concealed carry laws were associated with 13 to 15 percent higher aggregate violent crime rates 10 years after adoption.

“The research at this stage is pretty robust and consistent,” said Rosanna Smart, a researcher who coleads RAND’s Gun Policy in America initiative. “Almost all of those estimates are showing that this movement to a more permissive regime is on the side of harming public safety versus protecting it, which is a stated objective of the laws.”

In 2022, the Supreme Court declared the stricter “may issue” concealed carry laws unconstitutional. The ruling generally upheld permit requirements, but forced the more permissive “shall issue” regimes on the remainder of the states that still require permits.

Just a few decades ago, carrying concealed firearms in public was illegal in much of the country. As recently as 1980, at least 21 states prohibited any form of concealed carry, and until 2010, only two states — Vermont and Alaska — allowed adults to carry without a permit. But in the past decade, with the help of gun rights advocates and the National Rifle Association, permitless carry has become the norm.

Politicians have pushed permitless carry through legislatures by billing the laws as a benefit to public safety.

In March 2021, Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, appeared at an NRA virtual town hall to trumpet the permitless carry bill making its way through the state Legislature.

At the time, Tennessee, like the rest of the country, was grappling with a surge in gun violence. Lee, however, dismissed concerns from Democrats and law enforcement officials who argued that the permitless carry bill would exacerbate the violence. Instead, he positioned the bill as a crucial part of a broader “public safety agenda.”

“This particular piece of legislation not only protects the Second Amendment, but it actually creates a safer environment and stiffens penalties for those that break the law,” Lee said at the time. “While it is about a safety initiative for me, fundamentally, this is about protecting what, at the birth of our nation, our founding fathers established in the Constitution.”

The latest state to pass permitless carry was Louisiana, where the law took effect July 4. Because Louisiana’s law has been in effect for less than a month, it’s not included in The Trace’s analysis, but in Tennessee, there was an 8 percent increase in average monthly shooting fatalities over the two-and-a-half years following permitless carry’s enactment on July 1, 2021. Overall, there were 11 percent more deaths from shootings in Tennessee over the latter 30-month period, compared to the 30 months before permitless carry.

We limited our analysis of state gun violence trends to those that removed permit requirements between July 2015 and July 2022. That was to leave at least 18 months of data on either end of implementation in a total of 20 states. 

For each state, we compared an equal period of time before and after implementation while using the most data as possible. For some, like South Dakota and Kentucky, that meant as many 54 months of data on either end of implementation.

In Kansas City, LaTasha Jacobs, a Second Amendment advocate and former firearms instructor, said she started carrying a gun to protect herself from a stalker. 

“I was in a back-against-the-wall situation,” Jacobs said. “The process of having to wait or sign up for a class, the process of having to go to said class, then go through the process of getting fingerprints and getting my permit — who knows what could have happened to me, my family, whomever, in that timeframe if I had to wait for that entire process.”

Jacobs said people intent on harming others are unlikely to abide by licensing requirements. “Restricting my access to protect myself and my family doesn’t affect criminals, but it leaves me unarmed and unable to protect my children,” she said. 

But Jacobs also said she recognizes the potential dangers and implications of removing permitting and training requirements. For her, education for responsible gun ownership is necessary, even when it isn’t legally required. 

“Yes, you don’t have to have a permit to carry your firearm,” she said. “But it’s important to know when, where, and how you can carry as you move about throughout the city or the state.”

While these data trends provide a broad picture of gun violence following the implementation of permitless carry laws, they don’t capture the day-to-day challenges faced by law enforcement and prosecutors in these states. In Missouri, one of the earliest adopters of permitless carry, officials have been grappling with these challenges for years.

Baker, the Jackson County prosecutor, said law enforcement faces “an untenable situation,” brought into sharp relief by the Super Bowl parade shooting.

“I have a young man with a SpongeBob backpack that’s got a 9mm in it,” Baker said. “It was legal for him to pull it out of his backpack and carry it outside of his backpack. It’s not until he’s in the aim position that it’s no longer legal. I don’t know how to articulate to people how dangerous that is — for all of us, for law enforcement, for the young people themselves.”

Since the introduction of permitless carry, law enforcement, prosecutors, and elected officials have repeatedly said the law has made it more difficult for them to get illegal weapons off the streets. 

Baker said the law has contributed at least in part to what was a record for homicides in the city in 2023 — while most of the rest of the country saw historic declines. 

Three years before the parade shooting, the man who is alleged to have fired the first shots pulled out a gun during another argument over a basketball game at a Kansas City suburb’s community center. It led to a small stampede as people ran from him and his gun. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct, but because of permitless carry, prosecutors couldn’t charge him with carrying a gun without a license, which could have barred him from gun ownership. 

“It’s not like police or prosecutors missed something. We didn’t miss,” Baker said. “We’re following the rule of law.”

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State funds are finally committed to indigent criminal defense in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania will soon convene a committee to decide how to spend the state's first-ever funding for public defense, though experts cautioned the investment won't be enough to level the playing field, reported Spotlight PA.

In December, the Pennsylvania state legislature approved $7.5 million for criminal defense for those who cannot afford a lawyer, a constitutional right that counties paid for without state assistance.

“Thanks to historic legislation signed by Gov. [Josh] Shapiro, Pennsylvania will no longer be one of only two states in the country that does not allocate state funding for public defenders,” said Manuel Bonder, spokesperson for the Democratic governor.

Every person accused of a crime must have access to an attorney to aid in their defense, a right that has been enshrined in the 6th and 14th Amendments of the United States Constitution for 60 years. Until now, Pennsylvania state coffers did not contribute any funds to that purpose.

Shapiro had initially proposed $10 million in his budget, but negotiations with the legislature knocked the figure down a few million. The new state money addresses Pennsylvania’s reputation as one of the only states in the country that did not fund public defense. Now, questions remain on how the money will be distributed and used.

Alongside the money, the legislature passed language establishing an Indigent Defense Advisory Committee that will figure out how to use it. The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency will oversee the committee and has until Feb. 12 to establish the membership, which must include public defenders from across the state as well as judges, academics, and legislative appointees.

Once in place, the committee will decide how the $7.5 million will be spent to best benefit Pennsylvania’s 67 counties. It will also determine universal standards for public defense, which up until now has been hampered in some counties by a lack of resources.

“The public defenders I know are incredibly talented attorneys,” said state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Philadelphia), whose legislation formed the basis for the language passed as part of the budget deal in December.

But talented attorneys can only do so much without adequate resources, Hughes said. “If that public defender is carrying several hundred cases, the amount of time they have available is limited,” he said.

Under the new law, counties must supplement the state money with their own funding, which varies drastically across the state. Philadelphia, for example, provides extensive public defense services through the city’s Defender Association, a nonprofit firm that receives most of its funding from the city.

Chief Defender Keisha Hudson told Spotlight PA in April that the Defender Association budget alone is more than $50 million, six times larger than the money the legislature approved to aid counties. The organization’s budget helps employ 500 attorneys, investigators, and social workers.

A county-by-county review by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee of the General Assembly in 2021 found Philadelphia spends the most money on criminal defense per person, around $30.20 in fiscal year 2019.

The same year, Mifflin County in rural central Pennsylvania spent $3.20 per person.

The December legislation also directs the new committee to develop educational curricula for public defenders, particularly for capital offense cases, and to collect data that will help the state oversee the quality of counsel being provided on a county level.

The goal is to have the funds distributed thoughtfully, said Hughes, and provide support as data comes in.

It won’t be enough to level the playing field, said Sara Jacobson, director of the Public Defenders Association of Pennsylvania, who will serve on the committee. Prosecutors have received millions of state dollars for decades, she said.

But the $7.5 million might be able to address technological deficiencies that prevent local offices from measuring their caseloads and ensuring no single attorney has too many cases or all of the most difficult cases, she said.

“There are new national public defender workload standards that are out this year that would help offices say for X number of cases we need Y number of lawyers,” Jacobson said, “but offices in Pennsylvania can't even do that calculation if they don't have basic case management.”

And though the new funding marks a historic step forward, it does little to move Pennsylvania’s ranking among other states, said David Carroll, executive director of the Sixth Amendment Center, which tracks how states live up to the constitutional promise of free public defense.

“[Pennsylvania’s] indigent defense cost-per-capita figure rises only slightly (from $9.67 to $10.25),” Carroll wrote in an email to Spotlight PA. “For comparison, the national average in 2022 was $19.67.”

Pennsylvania ranks 45th in total indigent defense funding, Carroll said. The states that spend less per capita are Mississippi, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas.

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Conservative Wisconsin legislators back-off impeaching newly elected supreme court justice

Wisconsin Republicans signaled on that they were retreating from their threats to impeach a recently seated liberal State Supreme Court justice, Janet Protasiewicz, before the newly left-leaning court could throw out the gerrymandered legislative maps that have cemented the G.O.P.’s hold on power in the state, reported The New York Times.

Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the State Assembly, said at a news conference in Madison that he would not seek to remove Justice Protasiewicz based on the argument he and fellow Republicans had been making for two months — that statements she made calling the maps “rigged” during her campaign for office this year compelled impeachment if she refused to recuse herself from a case challenging them.

Now, Mr. Vos said, the focus would be on what Justice Protasiewicz does “in office.” He said that if the court ruled against the Republican-drawn maps and other conservative causes, he would appeal its decisions to the U.S. Supreme Court. Impeachment, he said, remained “on the table” but was not something Republicans would pursue now.

“If they decide to inject their own political bias inside the process and not follow the law, we have the ability to go to the Supreme Court and we also have the ability to hold her accountable to the voters of Wisconsin,” Mr. Vos said.

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High profile escapes get Pennsylvania legislature moving on jail security

Rep. Kathy Rapp, who represents Warren and Forest counties, said the Warren escape is just one recent example of why jail safety and infrastructure need to be addressed, reported WESA-FM in Pittsburgh. Two inmates also escaped from the Philadelphia correctional facility in May. Danelo Cavalcante, who escaped from Chester County jail almost two weeks ago, was taken into custody early Wednesday.

“The bills are really to tighten up and look at what's going on in our jails that we need to take a good look at and make them safer so that our communities are safer," Rapp said, "especially when we see escapees breaking out of our county jails and striking fear into the hearts of our constituents.”

Rapp plans to introduce a bill that would remove the chance of parole for inmates that try to escape.

“Since they're escapees, we know they want to get out of jail, right? So if they know that they're not going to have a chance then with parole, hopefully that will disincentivize an escape,” Rapp said.

Other bills in this package would provide jail infrastructure funding, allow county jails to hire off-duty corrections officers from other counties and state corrections officers, create an alert system for prison escapes, and require a security audit of county jails that experienced an escape.

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Texas AG campaigns against his impeachment

 

With television ads and text messages, direct mail and billboards, supporters of the embattled Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, have embarked on an escalating campaign of political pressure, backed by hard-right billionaires, aimed at trying to sway the outcome of Mr. Paxton’s upcoming impeachment trial, reported The New York Times.

The targets of their efforts are narrow: the 19 Republican members of the State Senate who will act as jurors in the trial, set to begin on Tuesday, and decide whether allegations of corruption and abuse of power are serious enough to warrant permanently removing and barring Mr. Paxton from office.

But the effort to save Mr. Paxton, who is seen by many hard-core conservatives as their legal standard-bearer, is also the latest proxy in the broader fight over the future direction of the party, both in Texas and nationally.

It has drawn in a range of conservative figures on both sides, with Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, and Karl Rove, the political consultant to former President George W. Bush, arguing in support of the impeachment process, and Steve Bannon, the former Trump political adviser, lampooning it as a Democrat-inspired witch hunt.

“We want the entire MAGA movement to understand that what’s going on in Texas is not just about Texas,” Mr. Bannon told his podcast audience this month.

The wrangling over Mr. Paxton’s fate has reflected the same deep Republican divisions that emerged in Georgia over the indictment of Donald J. Trump, raising again the question of whether Republicans are willing to hold fellow conservatives to account — and whether, if they do so, they can survive a primary.

Mr. Paxton has so far managed to survive politically under both a criminal indictment and the looming impeachment, in part because he has become a key player on the right flank of the conservative legal movement. He has mounted aggressive challenges to the Biden administration, particularly over its immigration policies, and led coalitions of Republican states against Obama-era programs such as the Affordable Care Act and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which protects many migrants from deportation if they came to the United States as children.

He secured Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a hard-fought primary last year, after demonstrating his willingness to contest the results of the 2020 election in court. An outspoken partisan fighter, he addressed the crowd at a rally for Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded an insurrection at the Capitol.

Yet those conservative credentials may not be enough to help Mr. Paxton survive what promises to be the most significant test he has faced. Though Republicans have a clear majority in the Texas Legislature, the most stridently partisan members do not always hold sway.

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Guns are everywhere in Tennessee, almost anyone can carry without a permit

When you talk about crime in Tennessee, guns are the elephant in the room. According to the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, gun-related violent incidents topped 1,600 in 2022, up 28% from just over 1,250 such incidents in 2016, the year Strickland took office, reported MLK50. Guns are everywhere in Tennessee, and that’s how the Republican super-majority in the state legislature likes it. In 2021, the legislature made it legal for almost anyone to carry a firearm without a permit. 

After the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in March, where a former student killed three children and three teachers with a legally purchased AR-15 assault rifle, a student-led protest movement urged the legislature to pass red flag laws, which would allow authorities to confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous to themselves or others.

When Democratic Representatives Justin J. Pearson, Justin Jones, and Gloria Johnson brought the protests into the House chamber, Republicans responded by expelling Pearson and Jones, both of whom are Black. (Johnson, who is white, was spared expulsion by one vote.) President Joe Biden called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic, and without precedent.” Both Pearson and Jones were easily re-elected to their seats earlier this month, in time to participate in the Aug. 21 special session called by Gov. Bill Lee, ostensibly to address the state’s exploding epidemic of gun violence.

 “Gun violence is the number one killer of children because of the decisions of the Tennessee state legislature that invoked permitless carry and that have put the values of the Tennessee Firearms Association, American Firearms Association, and the National Rifle Association over the lives of people in our community,” Pearson said.

Black communities in Tennessee are disproportionately affected by gun violence, Pearson noted. While 12% of Tennesseans are Black, they represent 38% of crime victims in 2022, according to the TBI. “I buried a friend this year,” he said. “Last year, I buried a mentor who died from gun violence. This is not normal.”

He wants to see laws that protect children, protection orders that shield domestic abuse victims, stronger background checks and tracing the routes by which guns come into our community.

“Memphis doesn’t have any gun manufacturers, yet we have this extreme amount of gun violence. We need to figure out why that is and who is proliferating and profiting off of the pain and the suffering that we are experiencing,” he said.

Recent proposals before the city council would repeal permitless carry in Memphis and ban the sale of assault rifles. But even if the local proposals passed, many assume that the state legislature would simply preempt them. “The reality is, we are always going to be facing the issue of preemption,” Pearson said. “Our state legislators who represent Memphis and Shelby County, they’re going to have to start standing tall and speaking up and using their voices.” 

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Tennessee legislature looks to expel three members for protesting gun laws

The Tennessee House is voting Thursday on whether to expel three Democrats from the legislature after they halted proceedings last week to join protesters demanding gun control, reported the Washington Post.

The House’s session has 29 items on its agenda, and the expulsion vote is expected to come near the end of the session. At the start of Thursday’s proceedings, Rep. Justin Pearson (D), one of the three facing expulsion, welcomed his supporters to the Capitol on the House floor.

“Thank you for getting on the bus at 3 a.m. or 2:30 a.m. this morning to be a part of this process,” Pearson said, “and to make sure your voices are heard and your presence is power so that we can continue to elevate the issues in our community and those who we continue to lose.”

As bills related to school safety and mental health were debated on the House floor on Thursday morning, Rep. Justin Jones (D), another of the three facing expulsion, argued that Republicans were trying to pass bills just to pass bills in a “PR move.”

“[These are] false solutions right before an expulsion vote,” Jones said, as supporters could be heard protesting outside the chamber.

At the doors to the entrance of the main gallery, several hundred protesters stood with ponchos and umbrellas on a rainy Nashville day, blowing whistles and chanting, “What do we want? Gun control. When do we want it? now” and “Do your job! Do your job!”

A young woman in a red bandanna with a pink whistle held a sign that says “I turn 18 today. Hallie, William and Evelyn never will,” in reference to the three 9-year-olds killed in the Covenant School shooting in Nashville.

Young children, teenagers, and parents stood in a light drizzle and 53-degree temperatures. They held an extended, bloodcurdling scream for more than three minutes, then chanted, “14 minutes. 14 minutes. Six Lives. Six Lives.”

Pediatric emergency physician Steve Riley, of Gallatin, Tenn., said he felt the need to make his presence known at the capitol despite the cold and rain.

“I’ve seen the video of what happened on the House floor, and I understand [the three Democrats] being reprimanded for not following the rules of decorum for the House, but a vote to expel them is wrong,” he said.

The Tennessee House has only expelled members twice in the modern era, according to a report from the office of the state’s attorney general.

On March 30, hundreds of students, parents, teachers and people from across Tennessee flooded the Capitol to urge lawmakers to pass gun-control legislation in the wake of the Covenant School shooting that killed six people, including three 9-year-olds.

During the protests, Reps. Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson and Pearson walked to the front of the chamber to join in the chants that reverberated from the gallery.

There were protesters of all ages — including children “from strollers to high school,” according to Johnson — padding the gallery, filling the rotunda and overflowing outside the building.

Jones, who held a sign that read “Protect kids, not guns,” led the crowd on the chamber balcony, shouting “No action, no peace!” into a megaphone. Afterward, Pearson spoke through the megaphone about gun violence and chanted, “Enough is enough.”

“There comes a time when you have to do something out of the ordinary,” Jones tweeted later that day. He added that the lawmakers “could not go about business as usual as thousands were protesting outside demanding action.”

The same day, Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton (R) referred to the Democrats’ actions as an “insurrection.” He said they had committed “multiple violations” of the General Assembly’s rules.

Republicans in the House filed the resolutions Monday to oust Jones, Johnson and Pearson, saying the three lawmakers “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor” to the House.

The resolutions to expel the three lawmakers cited the rules Sexton referred to, which include “preserving order, adhering to decorum, speaking only with recognition, not crowding around the Clerk’s desk, avoiding personalities, and not using props or displaying political messages.”

Pearson sent a letter the same day to all Tennessee representatives acknowledging that he had broken decorum during the March 30 protests but adding that “it was untenable to hear the chants, pleas, and cries of thousands of peaceful children outside our chambers and do nothing — say nothing.”

“We must never become desensitized to the voices of people crying out for change,” Pearson wrote at the end of the letter, which he posted online Tuesday. “We must never accept senseless deaths to continue on our watch and do nothing.”

Phillis Sheppard stood in line for an hour in the rain Thursday morning, hoping to get into the capitol rotunda to witness the expulsion vote. Across the street from the line, live musicians performed and volunteers passed out snacks and bottles of water to protesters.

“They’ve stopped letting people in,” Sheppard said. “It’s clear it’s an attempt to stop legislators from seeing what kind of support exists here outside. What’s happening with legislators, trying to expel these members, runs counter to everything we stand for. We want legislators to stand and speak for their constituents. It’s disheartening and enraging.”

Minutes later, the doors opened and the crowd cheered, as a family pushing a stroller emerged from inside — Eric Zabriskie, a doctor and psychiatrist at Vanderbilt medical center, with his wife and two boys, ages 4 and 2. The older boy is holding a yellow construction paper that reads “No Guns.”

“We were in the gallery,” he said. “They were voting in a bill for making sure there’s an armed security in schools — public and charter schools. As a physician and psychiatrist and father, I am here because we want common-sense gun reform.”

The Tennessee General Assembly — where Republicans hold the supermajority in both chambers — has faced pressure to enact gun legislation since the March 27 shooting but has resisted calls to do so.

Should the lawmakers be expelled, county and city-level officials would select delegates to serve in the three vacant House seats until the next regularly scheduled election in August 2024, said Carrie Russell, a political science senior lecturer at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Jones, Johnson and Pearson would be able to run for reelection at that time, she said.

As the resolutions were filed, protesters shouted and began chanting in the gallery, which Sexton ordered to be cleared and for state troopers to remove hecklers.

While the three lawmakers — who’ve been dubbed the Tennessee Three — awaited the votes this week, their supporters organized rallies and protests against their expulsion. Some were part of a caravan to Nashville, leaving their homes across the state in the early morning to reach the Capitol for Thursday’s proceedings.

Republican Reps. Gino Bulso, Andrew Farmer and Bud Hulsey, who filed the resolutions, did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post on Wednesday.

The White House opposed the resolutions to expel the representatives. Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday that, across the country, Republican lawmakers were “doubling down on dangerous bills that make our schools, places of worship and communities less safe.”

“By doing what they’re doing with these three Democratic legislators, they’re shrugging in the face of yet another tragic school shooting while our kids continue to pay the price,” Jean-Pierre said. “That’s what we’re seeing every time that we hear one of these tragic events.”

Before Thursday’s votes, Russell told The Washington Post that she feared a “chilling effect” on lawmakers no matter the outcome.

She said taking an “extraordinary measure” like attempting to expel representatives “doesn’t bode well” for a government based on a representative democracy and an open marketplace of ideas.

“Cutting the mics off and expelling members is seemingly pretty closed off to deliberative democracy,” Russell said.

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State legislatures go after reform prosecutors

In January, the Local Solutions Support Center and the Public Rights Project, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and economic and environmental justice, released a report tallying bills introduced in legislative sessions between 2017 and 2022, reported The Intercept. The authors found that nearly 30 bills had been introduced in 16 states during that period.

“Although only five preemption laws have passed,” the report says, “this new trend is part of a larger movement by reactionary states to use preemption to thwart criminal justice reform and undermine the will of local constituents calling for this change.”

With at least nine additional bills have introduced this year, including one in a new state, Mississippi, totals rose to 37 bills in 17 states.

The federal system provides no legal protection for cities against state lawmakers who want to step in to stop a certain policy, leaving cities with progressive leanings at the mercy of conservative state officials.

In some cases, the power to recall an elected official serves a purpose — for instance, in North Carolina, which does not have a statute for recalling an elected official, an elected sheriff was indicted for attempted murder and refused to step down — but recalls can also be easily exploited for political purposes. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis removed an elected attorney, Andrew Warren, because he pledged not to prosecute women who sought abortions. This week, DeSantis moved to suspend another prosecutor over his handling of a criminal case.

Likewise, critics say that state legislatures are abusing their statutory authority by trying to rip power away from prosecutors.

Reformist prosecutors have come to office and undertaken policy changes like reducing or ending cash bail, declining to charge people in nonviolent drug possession cases, holding police accountable for misconduct, and addressing wrongful convictions. Conservative politicians, however, have painted these reformers as harbingers of lawlessness, blaming them for a spike in homicides — although that spike has also impacted areas with traditionally “tough-on-crime” prosecutors.

“This is clearly not a response to a failure of policy on the ground. This is a direct rebuke to voters saying what they want.”

The new rash of legislative efforts to strip prosecutors of their power has sometimes come before reforms are even enacted. The district attorney in Polk County, Iowa, has been on the job for eight weeks, and state lawmakers are already trying to give her powers to the attorney general.

“All of these changes seem to be in direct response to policy preferences before anything has even happened,” said John Pfaff, a scholar of criminal justice at Fordham University School of Law. “This is clearly not a response to a failure of policy on the ground. This is a direct rebuke to voters saying what they want.”

GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced four bills that would prohibit prosecutors from declining to charge certain offenses or refusing to seek the death penalty in capital cases and would allow the attorney general to fine and seek removal of prosecutors who decline to pursue certain charges. One of the bills would prohibit elected prosecutors from adopting policies to limit criminal enforcement of laws related to voting and elections — laws that have become politicized following former President Donald Trump’s false claims of mass election fraud.

Another Texas bill would establish a council to monitor prosecutors and grant it the power to petition for prosecutors’ removal for “incompetency or misconduct.” The bills would apply to elected prosecutors across the state.

Georgia lawmakers have introduced two bills to take away power from prosecutors. One would make it easier to recall an elected prosecutor and another would prohibit prosecutors from using blanket policy guidelines, like declining to charge for drug possession or ending cash bail for nonviolent offenses. Another proposes an oversight commission for elected prosecutors appointed by the governor and grants the power to discipline, remove, and force elected prosecutors and solicitor generals to retire.

A bill in Iowa would give the attorney general power to prosecute any criminal charge without first receiving a request from the county attorney.

Mississippi is one place where conservative state-level officials are looking to rein in prosecutors from Democratic local officials, particularly in Hinds County, where majority-Black Jackson is located and Jody Owens holds the district attorney’s seat. One proposed bill would create a separate court system and police force for a district in Jackson, with prosecutors and public defenders appointed by the attorney general.

Jackson would become the only county in the state to not elect its own prosecutors and judges. The proposal has come under fire for giving white state officials the power to appoint officers and administer a separate judicial system for a heavily Black city. The bill passed the Mississippi State House last month largely along party lines.

Another bill in Missouri would allow the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to handle cases in any jurisdiction if the governor determines that “a threat to public safety and health” exists. The original version of the bill targeted the circuit attorney in St. Louis County, Kim Gardner, a reform-minded prosecutor who was elected in 2020 on promises to end cash bail and hold police accountable.

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Krasner: Impeachment an 'authoritarian attack to overturn elections'

Days after the Pennsylvania Senate set the stage for the first impeachment trial in nearly three decades, Philadelphia’s top prosecutor asked a state court to halt the proceedings, arguing that the process is politically motivated, unlawful, and outside the Legislature’s purview, reports the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Democrat who easily won re-election last year, asked Commonwealth Court on Friday to stop the Republican-backed process that could remove him from office after GOP lawmakers launched an investigation into him earlier this year.

During a virtual press conference on Monday, Krasner said efforts to impeach him play into the “national context of attacks on reform prosecutors” and “a more generalized authoritarian attack” to overturn elections.

“The authoritarian movement in this country, at the moment, is losing, and the authoritarian movement in this country against reform prosecution is losing,” Krasner said. “I repeat — you don’t have to do this stuff when you’re winning elections.”

The legal challenge came days after lawmakers in the upper chamber voted to formally accept the articles of impeachment from the Republican-controlled state House, which accuse Krasner of misbehavior in office and obstructing a legislative investigation, and took an oath to uphold the state Constitution during a trial that could begin in January.

The lawsuit names interim Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, R-Westmoreland, the House impeachment managers, and the senators who will serve on the committee overseeing the case  arguing that the impeachment efforts against Krasner “stands the Constitution and this commonwealth’s history on its head.”

The filing claims that the impeachment process should have expired on Nov. 30, when the two-year legislative session ended. The filing also argues that the Legislature does not have the constitutional authority to remove local officials from office, and alleges the charges against Krasner do not meet the standards for impeachment.

Krasner requested an expedited briefing in Commonwealth Court, citing a writ of summons formally notifying him of the charges approved by the Senate last week. Michael Satin, a lawyer for Krasner, said he does not know what the court will decide.

The writ of summons gave Krasner until Dec. 21 to file an answer to the upper chamber ahead of the trial.

Erica Clayton Wright, a spokesperson for Senate Republicans, told reporters in a statement that the caucus was reviewing the filing and would respond “once we have had time to evaluate the petition.”

The House Select Committee on Restoring Law and Order, which was formed in June to investigate and review rising crime rates in the state’s largest city, has focused on Krasner’s approach to prosecuting crime in Philadelphia. In September, the GOP-controlled panel conducted a series of public hearings with live testimony on gun violence.

Earlier this year, the House voted 162-38 to hold Krasner in contempt for refusing to respond to a subpoena issued by the GOP-controlled committee.

Krasner agreed to testify before the select committee. But there were conditions from the panel, including that the meeting would take place behind closed doors without a public live stream or audio recordings. While the committee would have a copy of the testimony, Krasner said he could not make a copy.

Krasner — who has urged lawmakers to focus on a statewide review of gun violence and increased crime through a public process — told reporters in October that Republicans were using impeachment as a “political stunt.” He added that lawmakers have not proven that his policies have contributed to increased crime in Philadelphia.

On Monday, Krasner said he “fully [intends] not to be silent” as the proceedings play out.

“We are proud of our policies. We are proud of our ideas. We are proud of our successes,” Krasner said. “We know some things about what is going on in the rest of the state that is, frankly, not flattering to their motivation to pursue all of this. We fully intend to respond.”

Removal from office requires a two-thirds majority vote, at least 34 lawmakers, in the Senate, meaning that some Democrats in the 50-member chamber would have to support the measure for it to succeed after what could be a lengthy and costly trial. Voters elected a Republican 28-22 majority during the November election, and a special election will take place next month to replace one GOP lawmaker who resigned.

Sen. Jimmy Dillon, D-Philadelphia, was the only member of his party to support the impeachment-related resolutions last week.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, argued similar claims on the chamber floor, saying it would be “unconstitutional” to carry over impeachment proceedings from one session to the next two-year period. He also noted that voters elected a Democratic majority in the House during the Nov. 8 general election and said moving ahead with a trial would “undermine the voice of the people of this commonwealth.”

Only two officials in Pennsylvania have faced removal from office through the impeachment process. The most recent occurred in 1994.

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New Mexico looks at limiting qualified immunity

Laurie Roberts writes in the USA Today: 

As America nears the grim milestone of its 3,000th exoneration, the causes of wrongful convictions are well understood. Sometimes a survivor misidentifies their attacker, or an incarcerated person provides false testimony in exchange for leniency. But too often, egregious police misconduct sends innocent people to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. 

From witness tampering and malfeasance in interrogations to fabricating evidence and committing perjury at trial, police misconduct contributed to 35% of known exonerations nationwide. This misconduct stole thousands of years of freedom and a lifetime of priceless memories from its victims. Yet the perpetrators of these injustices rarely face accountability because of the court-created defense of "qualified immunity."

This doctrine lets public officials escape civil liability after engaging in misconduct, unless a previous court decision has ruled that nearly identical conduct violates the Constitution – even when their actions put innocent people behind bars. In practice, this means officers can violate people’s rights with impunity, as long as they do so in sufficiently unique ways. 

That’s why the Innocence Project has redoubled its efforts in state legislatures. Last year, we worked with dozens of organizations and grassroots activists from across the political spectrum to pass the New Mexico Civil Rights Act (NMCRA), which eliminates qualified immunity as a legal defense and allows New Mexicans whose constitutional rights have been violated to sue in state court.

The NMCRA’s impact is bigger than the individual lawsuits it will facilitate. To avoid large civil settlements, the law incentivizes cities and counties to enact training and policies that will prevent misconduct before it happens. And ending qualified immunity won’t impact municipalities where officers are conducting themselves professionally. Litigation will instead reveal civil rights violations going unaddressed. The fiscal impact of the legislation is a feature, not a bug, and it finally puts a price tag on injustice. 

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Utah has bipartisan support for abolishing the death penalty

 A push to repeal the death penalty in Utah, once a bedrock of conservative support for capital punishment, has garnered unlikely bipartisan support, writes David Dudley for The Crime Report.

Utah Rep. Lowry Snow, a Republican, voted twice against bids to repeal the death penalty in Utah in the past. Now, he’s the chief sponsor of HB 147, which seeks to prohibit the state from seeking the death penalty for aggravated murder committed after May 4, 2022.

Instead, the current draft of the bill includes a possible sentence of 45 years-to-life for aggravated murder.

He’s partnered with Sharon Wright Weeks, who started as a forceful advocate of the death penalty after her sister was killed—but has since shifted position.

Their combined efforts could result in a repeal during this year’s Utah legislative session, which runs Jan. 18 to March 4, 2022.

With support from two groups who are often in opposition to one another, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Libertas Institute, as well as a growing number of state and municipal officials, Weeks and Snow said they feel like they’ve got a fighting chance.

And they’re not alone.

Losing Faith in the Justice System

Weeks’ 24-year-old sister, Brenda Lafferty, and her 15-month-old niece, Erica, were brutally murdered in American Fork, Utah in 1984.

The men who killed them, Ron and Dan Lafferty, were the brothers of Brenda’s husband, Allen. The Laffertys were members of a fundamentalist sect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Ron Lafferty said he received a message from God, ordering him to kill the woman and her daughter, along with three others.

Weeks told The Crime Report that she relived the pain of those horrific events throughout the trial that followed.

“But I felt a sense of relief when Dan Lafferty received two consecutive life sentences, and Ron Lafferty was sentenced to death,” she said.

In 1991, Ron Lafferty’s verdict was overturned by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. That was the beginning of a 30-year battle to see justice served, as Lafferty appealed numerous times, claiming that he wasn’t competent to stand trial.

Weeks said that she’s felt shackled to “them” ― the term she uses to refer to the Lafferty brothers ― while waiting for Ron Lafferty to be executed by the State of Utah.

“Every time he appealed, the media dragged out the details of my sister’s murder,” Weeks said. “And every time that happens, I have to live through the murders, and my family’s pain, again.”

Weeks said that she felt no sense of justice after Lafferty died in prison of natural causes in 2019.

“I don’t think the state does it on purpose,” she said. “Utah’s system is broken. And it needs to be replaced with something that works.”

‘That’s God’s Work’

Rep. Snow told The Crime Report that he met with Weeks in 2017. He didn’t know who she was.

“But as she told me her story, I was moved,” Snow said. “I’d never thought about that side of the story.”

As Snow looked into how many people were on death row in Utah, and the number of years that they’d spent there waiting to be executed, he said he realized that something had gone awry.

“I became even more suspicious when I learned that there were an increasing number of inmates on death row who were being exonerated,” he said.

“That’s when my thinking on the subject began to change. The promise of justice is made in good faith, but it was clearly failing in some cases.”

Snow said that, at the time, 18 people had been exonerated in Utah, including one for murder.

The idea that someone could sit on death row for an indefinite amount of time, and that some were executed despite being innocent, were deeply troubling to Snow.

“In some cases, we ask juries to impose the death sentence upon people,” he said.

“But sometimes there’s insufficient evidence. Sometimes there’s misconduct on the behalf of prosecutors or police.”

That a citizen can be deprived of the highest right society bestows upon its citizenry, the right of life, in such uncertain circumstances, Snow said, is unacceptable.

“Whether in the womb or in the world, I’m pro-life,” he said. “I don’t think we have the right to decide another person’s life in such imperfect circumstances. That’s God’s work. Only God gets to do that.”

Utah Fits the Profile

Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, said that Utah fits the profile of a traditionally conservative state that may be ripe for a change.

Dunham cited a Gallup Poll released in November, which showed a decline in nationwide support for the death penalty.

“It also showed that the number of conservatives who no longer support capital punishment is increasing,” Dunham told The Crime Report.

“The poll shows that 27 percent of conservatives are now against capital punishment, a significant shift in support.”

One of the reasons for the shift, Dunham said, is that Americans are relatively uninformed about the death penalty.

“The more they learn,” he said, “the more they are against it. And this can inform policy decisions in various ways.”

The death penalty may not make sense fiscally, Dunham said, because “statistically speaking, inmates like Ron Lafferty are more likely to die while on death row than to be executed.”

According to a 2017 study done by Torin McFarland, each death penalty inmate costs approximately “$1.12 million (2015 USD) more than a general population inmate.”

There are seven men on death row in Utah right now. Collectively, they’ve served more than 200 years, costing tax-payers millions. That number increases exponentially “as appeals processes drag on, and the state pays costs associated with trial, prosecution and incarceration,” Dunham said.

The death penalty may not be a deterrent to violent crime. “Murder rates hold steady in states that have the death penalty,” Dunham said.

“Those states that have abolished the death penalty did not see increases in the murder rate. If the death penalty was a deterrent, we would see those rates trend upward, and above the national average.”

The homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48 percent to 101 percent higher than in states without the death penalty, according to this study, which compares data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.

Weeks’ experience is common amongst victims’ families, Dunham said.

“Weeks has been shackled to Ron Lafferty for 35 years,” Dunham said, “as he went through two trials and a number of appeals.”

By the time it reached the appellate, the trial was no longer about the murder, it was about Lafferty’s mental state.

“That can feel very demeaning to victims’ families,” Dunham said. “They’re reliving these crimes. They’re hanging on to anger, which fuels a need for vengeance. So, it’s bad for our emotional health as these cases drag on for years and decades.”

“I can’t say it will happen,” Dunham concluded, “but Utah definitely fits the profile of conservative states that have turned the corner on the death penalty.”

Who’s on Board?

Republican Sen. Dan McCay will sponsor the bill in the Utah Senate, where in 2016 a bid to repeal the death penalty (SB 189) was approved by a vote of 15-13. It ultimately failed in the House that year.

Abolishing the death penalty is gaining momentum in communities around Utah. At least four other county attorneys have publicly endorsed Snow’s bill.

Utah County Attorney David Leavitt announced in September that he will no longer seek the death penalty, according to a report by The Salt Lake Tribune, because the “costs far outweigh its benefits to the community as a whole.”

Likewise, Utah County Commissioners voted 2-1 in October to pass a resolution urging state lawmakers to do away with the death penalty.

Another Utah Senator, Republican Don Ipson, said that, while he believes the death penalty as it stands is broken, he doesn’t want to “take tools out of the prosecutor’s toolbox.”

So, he will vote against the bill when it reaches the senate floor.

“We can’t continue to keep people on death row for 30-plus years, while they go through endless rounds of appeals,” said Ipson, who was Chair of the Utah House Committee of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice in 2016, when the last bid to repeal the death penalty stalled in the House.

Though he opposes the bill in favor of revising the death penalty, Ipson expects Snow to be well prepared.

“And it would be wise for everyone to listen to him before casting their vote,” Ipson said.

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