Max Boot: From America's Mayor to Trump Chump the legacy of Rudy Giuliani

Max Boot writes for the Washington Post, "To be a prelapsarian conservative in America today — as that creed was understood before 2016 — means getting used to heartbreak. One after another, conservatives that I have admired and respected — Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Bill Bennett, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Scott Walker and many others — have failed the Trump test. They have sacrificed their purported principles to curry favor with a populist demagogue who is turning the Republican Party into the American version of France’s National Front.

The most conspicuous Republican to fall from grace — and he had a long way to fall because he once reached such a lofty pinnacle — is Rudy Giuliani. He has gone, in Joe Scarborough’s biting but accurate phrase, from “America’s mayor” to Trump’s chump. But not even the gaudy, post-9/11 phrase “America’s mayor” can convey the true depth of Giuliani’s achievement, especially to a non-New Yorker."

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Georgia executes man who was 18 years old when he committed murder

The 10th Execution of 2018

Robert Earl Butts Jr. was put to death by lethal injection on May 4, 2018 at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. He was pronounced dead at 9:58 p.m., reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution. 

When asked for a final statement, Butts replied, “I’ve been drinking caffeine all day.” Then he declined an offer for a prayer. 

He never looked at the father and brother of his victim, sitting on just the other side of the window that separates the witness area from the execution chamber. Nor did he look at Baldwin County Sheriff Bill Massee or Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, who was chief deputy in Baldwin County at the time of the murder. 

Two minutes after the pentobarbital began to flow into the vein in his arm, Butts mumbled, “It burns, man.” After that, he yawned and took a series of deep breaths until there was no movement about a minute before he was pronounced dead.

Butts, 40, was sentenced to death for the March 1996 murder of 25-year-old Donovan Corey Parks in Milledgeville. Butts and his co-defendant, Marion Wilson Jr., asked Parks — an off-duty correctional officer — for a ride from a local Walmart store, then minutes later ordered him from the car and shot him in the head. Butts was 18 at the time. 

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Butts’ request for a stay of execution about 45 minutes prior to him getting the needle.

That followed the Georgia Supreme Court’s unanimous decision Friday afternoon to deny a stay of execution. 

Although the lethal injection was scheduled for 7 p.m., Georgia does not proceed until all courts have weighed in on last-minute appeals for mercy.

In addition to denying Butts’ motion for a stay of execution, the Georgia Supreme Court denied his request to appeal rulings by the Butts County Superior Court and the Baldwin County Superior Court, which both issued an order denying a stay and rejecting Butts’ challenge to his death sentence.

Butts spent his final hours with two relatives as the courts weighed his lawyers’ last-minute appeals, and he ate his last meal — a hamburger with bacon and two kinds of cheese, a rib-eye steak, chicken tenders, seasoned french fries, cheesecake and strawberry lemonade.

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GateHouse: 50 years after RFK’s assassination, his killer remains in prison

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

May 4, 2018

Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He was mortally wounded just after midnight on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Moments before entering the kitchen, Kennedy had given a victory speech after winning the California Democratic primary for President of the United States.

Kennedy was being ushered through the hotel kitchen by a group of campaign volunteers. Suddenly, he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a young man angered over Kennedy’s pro-Israeli position.

Less than five years earlier, Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, was struck down by an assassin’s bullet and only two months earlier civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis, Tennessee, by an assassin.

Sirhan was convicted 10 months later — within a week of his conviction, he was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the California Supreme Court vacated all pending death sentences.

Sirhan remains in a California prison and has been denied parole 15 times, most recently in 2016. Parole commissioners concluded, after more than three hours of testimony, that Sirhan did not show adequate remorse or understand the enormity of his crime.

Why the lack of remorse? A half century after the assassination, Sirhan and his lawyers are still dreaming up ways to get him out of prison.

In 2011, his lawyers came up with a new plan for his release that read like the plot of a Hollywood movie.

Although Sirhan’s conviction occurred more than four decades prior, he asked the court to review his conviction through a Writ of Habeas Corpus. His direct appeal rights have long been exhausted but habeas corpus provided the opportunity to challenge a conviction as the result of newly discovered evidence.

Sirhan’s lawyers hired memory expert Daniel Brown, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. Brown suggested hypno-programming caused Sirhan to repeatedly write that “RFK must die” in his notebooks and triggered the assassination.

Brown interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours over a three-year period. Sirhan believed that when he fired his shots in the hotel kitchen he was at a gun range, shooting at circular targets, reported CNN.

Sirhan’s lawyers believed he was programmed to cause a distraction in the kitchen, allowing a second gunman to secretly shoot Kennedy from behind. Lawyers argued that Professor Brown believed a mysterious young woman in a polka-dot dress lured Sirhan into the kitchen as part of a mind-control plot.

Sirhan’s claims of hypno-programming and assassination might make for an action-packed Hollywood thriller — if it hadn’t already been written, produced and premiered more than six years before Kennedy’s murder. “The Manchurian Candidate” released by MGM in 1962, starred Frank Sinatra and portrayed a supposed war hero who was brainwashed into becoming an unwitting assassin.

In January 2015, the Central District Court of California denied Sirhan’s claims, refusing to even grant him an evidentiary hearing to assess the merits of this new testimony.

Robert F. Kennedy was laid to rest on June 8, 1968. Senator Ted Kennedy eulogized Robert Kennedy in one of America’s most memorable tributes. “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; but to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. For those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.”

That prayer continues today.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Out of prison--Meek Mill is pushing criminal justice reform in Pennsylvania

Newly freed rapper Meek Mill is putting his celebrity status behind criminal justice reforms in Pennsylvania, reported WHYY. He joined Gov. Tom Wolf and other top state officials Thursday at the National Constitution Center to push for changes in everything from probation and parole policies to a cash bail system that Wolf said is equivalent to “debtor’s prison.”

Wolf said he hopes the national attention Mill’s case has attracted will translate into real policy change. The governor called on the state House to pass a trio of bills recently approved the state Senate that would release nonviolent offenders more quickly and help move more prisoners into substance abuse programs, while also pumping more dollars into probation and parole programs across the state.

The raft of legislation, Wolf said, is not just about offender rehabilitation, but also victim protection.

“But we can do that while also ending the cycle of incarceration that has left so many people, so many families feeling trapped, helpless, without an opportunity to return to society after they’ve been released,” he said, adding that the state needs to “stop using jails as mental health facilities.”

Mill, who was raised in North Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, described the community where he grew up as “ruthless” and “drug-plagued.”

Still on probation after a 2007 arrest on drug and gun charges that will likely be dismissed, Mill said said his probation officer helped steer him into a treatment program after he told her he was addicted to opioids.

“It changed my life,” he said Thursday.

It is the type of problem, Mill said, that those on court supervision should not be afraid to admit to officers tasked with keeping probationers on the straight and narrow.

“I don’t think any human being should be locked, shackled from top to bottom, ankle to hand, because they use marijuana or was addicted to opioids,” he said.

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Giuliani opens a can of worms for President Trump, Michael Cohen and...oh yes, Robert Mueller

It didn’t take former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani long to make his mark after joining President Trump’s legal team. Unfortunately, the mark Giuliani left was on his client, reported the Washington Post.

During an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Giuliani volunteered a startling bit of information. That $130,000 that Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen admitted having paid to porn star Stormy Daniels? Trump had repaid it.

“That money was not campaign money, sorry. I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know,” Giuliani said to Hannity, raising the subject on his own. “It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation.”

Giuliani’s central thesis — that the repayment meant that no campaign finance laws were broken —is wrong. If Cohen loaned Trump $130,000 by making the payment to Stormy Daniels so that her story wouldn’t come out before the election, that loan would have had to have been reported.

And it would have been reported before Election Day.

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$60 million spent to cover Border Patrol wrongful conduct

The U.S. government has paid out more than $60 million in legal settlements where border agents were involved in deaths, driving injuries, alleged assaults and wrongful detention, an analysis of more than a decade of official data reveals, posted The Crime Report.

The Guardian reported that President Trump has been pushing to expand the patrol force at the southern border, insisting recently on Twitter, “Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws.” While Trump has ordered National Guard troops to be deployed to provide agents with extra support, the review of settlement data and details found in related court records raises concerns about the agency’s history of interactions with civilians, both native-born and immigrant.

The federal government has settled at least 20 wrongful death claims, paying more than $9 million to the families of people killed since 2003, in incidents including shooting, beating, use of Tasers and collisions with vehicles. Nearly $47 million has been paid out for damages resulting from alleged reckless driving by border agents. Of more than 1,300 such payments, a review of 40 cases with available court records found six crashes which were deadly and 18 that cited grave injuries including amputations and disability. Four people, including two U.S. citizens and a legal permanent resident, received settlements for being wrongly deported. Nine people, including three citizens, two immigrants with legal status and two tourists, received settlements for illegal detentions of between four days and two months. More than $650,000 was paid out in settlements in four cases where four people were shot by border agents and survived.

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SCOTUS to hear case of Missouri man too sick to be executed

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up the death penalty case of Russell Bucklew, a Missouri inmate who claims his execution would likely cause him "needless suffering" because he suffers from a rare disease, reported CNN.

Last March, a divided court granted a request to stay his execution. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the order.

In court papers, lawyers for Bucklew says his disease, called cavernous hemangioma, is progressive and has caused "unstable, blood-filled tumors to grow in his head, neck and throat" and they argue that an expert concluded that if he were to undergo lethal injection he is "highly likely to experience ... the excruciating pain of prolonged suffocation resulting from the complete obstruction of his airway."

Lawyers for the state dispute the findings of the medical expert and emphasize that Bucklew engaged in lengthy delays in fighting his death sentence.

Bucklew was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, burglary and forcible rape in 1998.

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