FBI: 73 police officers intentionally killed in the line of duty in 2021

According to the FBI, 73 law enforcement officers were intentionally killed in the line of duty last year. That's almost 16 more than the average for the last five years, 27 more than in 2020 and the most since 2001, reported the KUSA-TV.

Despite the significant increase in the number of officers intentionally killed, COVID was, by far, the leading cause of the 520 line of duty deaths last year nationwide. More than 350 officers died of the virus in 2021.

Tim Jeffrey says he can't explain the recent increase in officers being murdered, and he does not see an end in sight.

"It's a societal problem," Jeffrey said. "There was a slogan that we had, God please let this be the last one, but we know, unfortunately, it's not."

So far in 2022, according to Dan Abrams on News Nation, 75 police officer have been shot and 10 have died.

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Mangino discussed war crimes on WFMJ-TV Weekend Today

 

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Florida adopts 'election' police law

 Two months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed a plan for a powerful elections police force that would answer to him, state lawmakers passed a watered-down version that barely resembles what the governor asked for but still worries voting rights advocates reported the Washington Post.

DeSantis (R) had asked for nearly $6 million to hire 52 people, including sworn officers, to investigate alleged violations of elections laws. The GOP-led House and Senate instead gave him about $2.5 million for the new Office of Election Crimes and Security.

The agency will be the first of its kind in the nation. Its staff of 25 will be part of the Department of State, which answers to DeSantis. Both chambers approved its creation by wide margins after debate that had Democrats invoking the name of the late civil rights leader John Lewis and a Republican representative making reference to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The governor has indicated he will sign the measure into law.

 “It’s drastically improved from what the governor wanted, but I don’t believe we should have an elections police force at all,” said Joe Scott, the elections supervisor in Broward County. “These are people who will be looking for crimes where there are none. That has the potential to intimidate a lot of voters and the organizations who try to help voters.”

The bill also includes harsh repercussions for some voting practices that were common in the state until last year, when the legislature, at the governor’s behest, passed sweeping changes to state elections laws.

One of the most controversial penalties is for “ballot harvesting.” The 2021 law made it a misdemeanor for anyone to have more than two ballots, which impacts efforts at churches and community centers to have volunteers gather ballots and deposit them at an elections office or in a drop box. The bill passed this week raises that to a felony, punishable with a fine of up to $50,000 and five years in prison.

“So now we’re criminalizing certain acts around the elections process that most folks, particularly in the Black community, have long held as a way to assist those in need,” said Genesis Robinson, political director of Equal Ground, a voting rights advocacy group. “To spend time in jail for simply trying to be a good neighbor, that’s a problem.”

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Is Vladimir Putin a war criminal?

There is a loud and growing chorus of calls for the International Criminal Court to pursue Vladimir Putin. On March 2, the court said it would immediately proceed with an active investigation of possible war crimes following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, reported CNN.

The US Embassy in Kyiv said two days later that Russia committed a war crime by attacking a nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

"It is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant," the embassy said on its official Twitter feed. "Putin's shelling of Europe's largest nuclear plant takes his reign of terror one step further."

Russia's suspected use of cluster bombs and so-called vacuum bombs in dense areas with many civilians has also been described as a war crime.

"I want to be very clear about this, that Mr. Putin is a war criminal," former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the Council on Foreign Relations recently. "He has to sit behind the bars in International Criminal Court."

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Mangino talks with Nancy Grace on Crime Stories

 Listen to my interview with Nancy Grace on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

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Actor Jussie Smollett sentenced to 5 months in jail and three years probation

 A judge in Chicago sentenced Jussie Smollett to five months in jail on Thursday, ordering that the actor be incarcerated for falsely reporting to the police that he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in 2019, reported The New York Times.

At the end of a hearing that lasted about five hours, Judge James B. Linn excoriated Mr. Smollett from the bench, saying that he had concluded that the actor had premeditated the hoax and that despite his and his family’s admirable past work in social justice, he had an arrogant, selfish side and had planned the stunt because he “craved the attention.”

In the searing speech, the judge said that Mr. Smollett’s name had become synonymous with lying, that he had sought to throw a “national pity party” for himself and that Mr. Smollett’s conduct had undermined other victims of hate crimes at a sensitive time, as America was trying to climb out of its painful history of racism.

“You took some scabs off some healing wounds and you ripped them apart,” the judge said. “And for one reason: You wanted to make yourself more famous.”

Given the chance to address the court before the sentencing, Mr. Smollett declined. But after Judge Linn read his sentence, the actor defiantly stood up and declared, “I did not do this, and I am not suicidal,” adding that “if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself.” As he was taken into custody to begin his jail sentence, Mr. Smollett raised his right fist. His lawyers immediately said they planned to appeal.

During the hearing, the defense and prosecution presented sharply different views of Mr. Smollett’s offense. Prosecutors framed it as a calculated plan to deceive law enforcement and the public at a time when hate crimes were on the rise. Mr. Smollett’s lawyers portrayed it as a minor low-level felony that had been subjected to an outsize amount of prosecutorial attention.

“Why are we jumping up and down and acting like this is a murder case?” said Nenye Uche, a lawyer for Mr. Smollett. “It’s not.”

Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor who handled the case, argued in court that Mr. Smollett had made matters worse for himself by declaring his innocence in front of the jury.

The judge ultimately sided with the prosecution.

At trial, Mr. Smollett had been found guilty of felony disorderly conduct, which carries a sentence of up to three years in prison. The judge decided on a shorter sentence, to be served in a local jail, and also gave Mr. Smollett a term of more than two years of probation and a fine of $25,000. He was also ordered to pay more than $120,000 in restitution for the cost of Chicago’s police investigation of his case.

Before the sentencing, well-known figures like the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Samuel L. Jackson and his wife, the actress LaTanya Richardson Jackson; and Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., wrote letters to the judge asking him to forgo prison time. Supporters argued that Mr. Smollett had no previous felonies on his record and that he had suffered reputational damage after the police accused him of orchestrating a hoax assault.

On Thursday, Mr. Webb recommended that Mr. Smollett be incarcerated for an unspecified amount of time, arguing that his misconduct was serious, that he lied to the jury and that he had shown no contrition.

“What Smollett did in this case is he denigrated, degraded true hate crimes and he marginalized the people who are true victims of hate crimes,” Mr. Webb told the judge. 

The sentencing caps more than three years of twists and turns in a case that inflamed political divisions and stirred up controversy among Chicago officials. For days, Mr. Smollett was viewed as a victim, someone who had been beaten and targeted with racial and homophobic slurs. Even after the authorities challenged his version of events, it seemed as though Mr. Smollett would avoid significant criminal punishment. Prosecutors dropped the charges against him in March 2019. But in 2020, Mr. Smollett was indicted again after Mr. Webb revived the investigation into what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2019.

The case was closely followed nationally, and in Chicago the issue became particularly potent, as prosecutors’ decision to drop the charges divided their office and the Police Department; the issue also became a central vein of criticism against Kim Foxx, the county’s top prosecutor, during her recent campaign for re-election. 

During the trial, the prosecution told the jury that Mr. Smollett had instructed two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, to attack him near his apartment in Chicago, where they placed a rope around his neck like a noose and yelled, “This is MAGA country.”

The Osundairos each testified at length, explaining how Mr. Smollett took them through a “dry run” of the attack and asked one of them to “fake beat him up.”

Mr. Smollett, 39, who in 2019 was best known for starring in the music-industry drama “Empire,” maintained his innocence during seven hours of testimony over two days, telling the jury that he had been the victim of a real hate crime. His lawyers argued in court that the Osundairo brothers relished their proximity to fame and that they wanted to scare Mr. Smollett enough to get him to hire them as his security detail.

The lawyers also highlighted homophobic comments by Olabinjo Osundairo, suggesting the attack could have been motivated by bias against Mr. Smollett, who is gay. (On the stand, Mr. Osundairo repeatedly denied being homophobic.)

The prosecution's evidence included video surveillance of the men meeting up for what the brothers said was the “dry run” and Instagram messages from Mr. Smollett to Abimbola Osundairo shortly before the attack in which the actor provided updates on the timing of his flight back to Chicago.

The defense disputed that Mr. Smollett had planned the attack, arguing that both the messages and the footage were evidence that he had been interacting with Abimbola Osundairo because he had been providing the actor with fitness training.

The 12-person jury in December found Mr. Smollett guilty of five out of six counts of felony disorderly conduct related to his police report.

Judge Linn announced his decision after denying the defense’s bid to have the conviction thrown out or for the actor to gain a new trial.

Much of the hearing was devoted to efforts by the defense to argue that Mr. Smollett deserved a new trial and that he certainly should not be jailed. The courtroom at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse contained several members of his family, including his older brother, Joel Smollett Jr., and other supporters, such as a former musical director for “Empire,” Rich Daniels. Mr. Daniels took the witness stand to speak to Mr. Smollett’s character, giving examples of what supporters described as a generous and humble spirit.

“Incarceration of any kind would send the wrong message,” said Joel Smollett Jr., as Jussie Smollett wiped tears from his eyes, “especially in a time in which we as a nation have expressed, in a bipartisan plurality, the desire to see real criminal justice reform.”

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Lethal injection again under the microscope in Oklahoma courtroom

The status of executions across the country has been in turmoil for more than a decade, ever since pharmaceutical companies began halting their delivery of the most widely used drugs for executions, reports The New York Times. State prison systems were left to create cocktails of the drugs they could still get their hands on, often relying on one sedative in particular, midazolam, to start the execution process.

But the lethal new formulations have led to legal challenges across the country, with death row prisoners and their lawyers arguing that the sedative now in use in about half a dozen states is ineffective at its primary purpose: keeping prisoners from feeling pain as they die.

The first full trial on the challenges to midazolam played out this past week in Oklahoma, where a prisoner vomited and shook for several minutes after he was injected with the sedative during an October execution. In the case before Judge Stephen P. Friot of the U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City, a group of prisoners on death row argued that the mix of drugs that awaits them in that state has the potential to cause so much pain as to be “constitutionally intolerable.”

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the use of midazolam in a 2015 ruling in the same Oklahoma case, but the current trial has allowed for additional expert testimony and presentations of detailed research about the real-world use of the drug in execution chambers.

The case, one of several legal challenges to execution drug protocols filed across the country, could have broad implications for the 27 states with capital punishment, several of which use midazolam.

The governors of three states have issued moratoriums on the death penalty, and only 14 states where capital punishment is currently legal have carried out an execution in the last decade, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The federal government executed 13 people under President Donald J. Trump, the first time it carried out executions in 17 years, but the Biden administration has since reintroduced a moratorium.

With a week full of excruciatingly detailed testimony over how the human body may react to the drugs used in Oklahoma, the case is an example of how the battle over the death penalty has shifted from the legality of capital punishment to increasingly nuanced debates over how it is carried out. The courts have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of many methods of execution, yet states have increasingly been unable to carry them out as pressure from regulators, medical associations and groups that oppose the death penalty have made it harder to obtain the lethal drugs.

 “This is the biggest issue in the realm of capital punishment: how we do executions,” said Maria Kolar, an assistant professor at the Oklahoma City University School of Law who studies the death penalty.

 “We wouldn’t just go drown someone or burn someone at the stake,” Ms. Kolar said. “But if midazolam is not capable of maintaining that insensate state, we may well be producing the same feeling in the person being executed.”

Oklahoma’s execution formula calls for an initial dose of midazolam, which state prison officials say renders a prisoner unconscious and impervious to pain. Once the drug takes effect, two other drugs are administered to induce paralysis and then stop the heart — a process that might be excruciating for someone who was not fully sedated.

Prison officials have argued that the sedative is a “tried-and-true” way to make executions painless, and at this week’s trial, each side called on doctors whose testimony bolstered its case.

Dr. Ervin Yen, an anesthesiologist and former Republican state senator now running as an independent for governor, testified for Oklahoma after witnessing three recent executions. He said the mixture of drugs currently in use allowed the state to execute people “in as humane a way as possible,” according to The Oklahoman.

In contrast, Dr. Gail Van Norman, an anesthesiology professor at the University of Washington who was called by the public defenders representing the prisoners, said she was “virtually certain” that the current drug combination had caused several men extreme pain, the newspaper reported.

 

In the 2015 ruling against the need for a preliminary injunction to immediately halt use of midazolam, a majority of Supreme Court justices also said that the prisoners challenging the sedative’s use had failed to identify an alternate means of execution that would reduce the likelihood of suffering.

The death row prisoners have now identified three alternatives that they argue are readily available and preferable, including two possible combinations using fentanyl, a powerful opioid, or scrapping lethal injections altogether in favor of a firing squad.

At least two states that once used midazolam for executions have stopped doing so in recent years. Florida began using a different drug after it was unable to get more midazolam from its supplier, and Arizona did so as part of a settlement after a 2014 execution using the drug lasted for nearly two hours, one of the longest in American history.

Oklahoma’s history of killing prisoners has been particularly plagued by errors.

In 2014, Clayton D. Lockett appeared to writhe in pain after the medical staff failed to make sure that the midazolam sedative flowed into his bloodstream; his execution was called off but he nonetheless died 43 minutes later of a heart attack. In the state’s next execution, of Charles F. Warner in 2015, officials mistakenly used the wrong drug to stop his heart. The combination of mistakes led to a six-year pause on executions in the state before the problematic execution of John Marion Grant in October.

Mr. Grant, who had been convicted of fatally stabbing a prison cafeteria worker, appeared to vomit or regurgitate and, in the account of reporters who witnessed his death, convulsed about two dozen times after being injected with midazolam. At the time, the state’s prisons chief, Scott Crow, said that the execution was “not pleasant to watch” but that he believed it was nonetheless humane.

A ruling in favor of the prisoners would, at least temporarily, block Oklahoma from carrying out additional executions using the current combination of drugs, but would not halt other states from doing so. About half a dozen states used midazolam as part of the lethal injection mixture in their most recent execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. If the plaintiffs are successful, Oklahoma would almost certainly appeal the ruling, sending the case to an appellate court, and potentially to the Supreme Court.

The state has executed three people with the use of midazolam over the past three months, none of whom reacted similarly to Mr. Grant. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they expected that a ruling in Oklahoma’s favor would lead the state to quickly schedule executions among the 40 people currently on death row.

The judge was not expected to issue a ruling for at least a month, after an additional brief from lawyers on each side.

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