Trump wins another 14th Amendment ballot challenge

After several days of trial involving multiple witnesses and other evidence, a Colorado state court became the fifth to reject an effort to keep Donald Trump off a state presidential ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a post-Civil War addition to the Constitution ratified in 1868, reported The Bulwork. It provides: “No person shall . . . hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath . . . as an officer of the United States . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Because the Colorado case involved lengthy testimony and detailed findings of fact and rulings on the meaning of Section 3, the 102-page decision is worth summarizing at some length. Clearly, Colorado District Judge Sarah B. Wallace wrote with an expectation that judges at higher state courts and likely even the U.S. Supreme Court would wind up studying her analysis on an appeal petition.

Here’s what other courts have ruled thus far about Trump and Section 3:

• Earlier this month, the Minnesota Supreme Court rejected a bid to keep Trump off the state’s primary ballot, but for a different reason than Wallace’s: that “there is no state statute that prohibits a major political party from placing on the presidential nomination primary ballot . . . a candidate who is ineligible to hold office.” Translated, the Republican party is fully in charge of who gets on the primary ballot. Yet Minnesota Chief Justice Natalie Hudson noted that the plaintiffs could file another suit later to keep Trump off the general election ballot should he win the Republican primary in Minnesota.
• In Michigan, Court of Claims Judge James Redford took a different route altogether, ruling that courts have no business deciding what Section 3 means because it’s a “political question” that exclusively belongs to Congress. (The political question doctrine is a made-up rule the Supreme Court uses if it just doesn’t want to wade into sticky political issues like crafting the technical rules governing an impeachment trial, for example.) However, if Trump wins the general election, Redford added, his eligibility under Section 3 could be revisited, and if he’s then determined ineligible, the Twentieth Amendment—which provides for the vice president-elect to become president if a president-elect dies before taking the oath of office—could somehow kick in.
• In New Hampshire, a federal judge ruled in October that John Anthony Castro, an unknown presidential candidate from Texas who has initiated over two dozen Section 3 lawsuits across the country, did not have standing to sue under Article III of the U.S. Constitution—meaning he lacked a sufficient injury to bring the matter within Article III’s “case” or “controversy” requirement that gives federal courts jurisdiction in the first place. The judge wrote: “Castro has not established that he has or will suffer a political competitive injury arising from Trump’s participation in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.” In addition, he agreed with the Michigan state court judge that the matter is probably a “political question” that’s for elected politicians—not judges—to decide.
• Finally, in Florida, another federal judge dismissed a case for lack of standing in September. The plaintiff in that case was an individual citizen who, the judge ruled, had no legal basis to complain about another person’s running for office. A “generalized interest” in the election outcome is not enough of an injury to invoke the power of the courts.

All these cases will undoubtedly be appealed.

To read more CLICK HERE

Are we numb to the threats to democracy?

Dahlia Lithwick writing for Slate:

It’s been just a clutch of days since former President Donald Trump and his allies made clear that if he wins reelection, he plans to gut the existing U.S. government and “install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists” to take over senior legal, judicial, defense, regulatory, and domestic policy jobs in the civil service. It’s been under a week since he announced in an interview on Univision that he’d cheerfully “weaponize” the power of the Justice Department to indict his rivals for no other reason than that they were “beating me very badly.” Also less than a week ago, he delivered his chilling Veterans Day promise to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American dream.” The news of his plans to carry out mass deportations while rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and interning them in sprawling detention camps, as well as his hope to cancel U.S. visas—for lawful green-card and student visa holders—who harbor “anti-American” views is also very recent. All of this is to be achieved by installing armies of lawyers, judges, and functionaries who will not erect roadblocks to such projects, as they did when he was president the first time, because they don’t believe in the rule of law as we understand it. As Trump openly described his rationale for his plans last week in the most spine-chilling language yet, undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And yes, the week is only half done.

We further learned, just a week ago, that Ohio Republicans plan to try to block a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive freedom by stripping state judges of the power to decide such cases. And we have learned in recent days of plans by allies of the new Republican House speaker to reinstate the brutally repressive Comstock Act so as to further limit sexual autonomy. And today we can’t seem to take our eyes off the now-violent physical altercations happening in the very same Capitol building that was stormed by violent extremists trying to overturn the 2020 election. The cogs and the wheels of democratic governance sound janky as hell right now.

The piece suggesting that all of the above represents an objective, verifiable, and historically predictive set of preconditions for authoritarianism, or fascism, or the end of free and fair elections has been said or written, succinctly and brilliantly, in recent days by Jamelle Bouie, Joyce Vance, Ruth Ben Ghiat, Rachel Maddow, John Cassidy, Seth Meyers, Jason Stanley, Zack Beauchamp, Chris Lehmann, Michael Tomasky, Scott Lehigh, and who knows how many others. And, perhaps paradoxically, the piece suggesting that the press has failed utterly to meet this perilous moment has been done, also brilliantly, by Margaret Sullivan, Brian Stelter, and Dan Froomkin, all of them echoing the call of New York University professor Jay Rosen, who continues to demand that the media cover the 2024 campaign by emphasizing “not the odds but the stakes.”

The stakes, we can probably agree, are in no way in doubt. As Bouie and others suggest, the Stephen Millers and Jeffrey Clarks and Steve Bannons are counting the minutes before “Flood the Zone With Shit” becomes the new “E Pluribus Unum.” Indeed, it almost seems as if “not the odds but the stakes” no longer captures a media failure alone; it actually also encapsulates the scope of a bitter political failure. We may actually have moved into the realm of journalism adequately covering the stakes, with the sad reality emerging that nobody seems to care much about the stakes at the present moment.

The horse race we are describing? The odds we are clocking? The contest we are all betting on? It’s now just fascism vs. democracy. These “stakes” we are, all of us, fretting about, this question of whether democracy survives the next 12 months, is the very thing everyone is watching like it’s the NCAA playoffs. I’m no longer completely convinced that voters don’t fully understand the stakes; not when you’re hearing Trump talking of executing his former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, not when you’re hearing of mass deportations without due process, and not when family separations at the border is a future promise, as opposed to a recent lawless tragedy.

What if the media is actually covering the spectacle precisely because the stakes—casual brutality, violence, callousness, lawlessness, and the descent into anarchy—are perfectly visible, legible, and clear? It’s hard to read any other way the current threats by sitting senators who promise to beat up committee witnesses, or former speakers of the House who elbow their political opponents, or congresspeople who say they will impeach everyone who makes them mad while dabbling in the recreational threat to shut down the government. What if the problem isn’t that consumers of media fail to understand the actual stakes of losing democracy? What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good, clean fun? As Bouie puts it in his New York Times piece on the subject this week, “The mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen. And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”

There is going to come a moment—and for many of the writers cited above, that moment has already arrived—in which the media appropriately reports on the enormity of the stakes and nobody flinches.

When you’ve been contending with such enormous stakes for as long as this country has—since at least that golden escalator ride eight years ago—it can be hard to keep flinching at the risks, even as they become ever more undeniable. Here’s hoping that our reflexes start to kick in over the next 12 months, lest we’re once again reminded of what happens when the stakes have been staring us in the face all along and we choose instead to roll the dice on democracy itself.

To read more CLICK HERE

Mangino discusses Kohberger prosecution on the one year anniversary of the murders

Watch my extensive interview on the Law and Crime Network discussing the murder of four Idaho Colleges students on the one year anniversary of their deaths.

To watch CLICK HERE

Police suicide a growing concern nationwide

Andy O'Hara writing for The Marshall Project: 

There is a code of secrecy around mental illness in police agencies across the nation, a code that is difficult to break through.

No federal agency keeps an official count of how many law enforcement officers commit suicide each year. That’s in part why I founded Badge of Life, a nonprofit that seeks to prevent police suicides. We’ve collected data in recent years and found that there are an average of 130 law enforcement suicides every year, or eleven per month.

More officers die of suicide than die of shootings and traffic accidents combined. It’s a problem that cries out for answers and remedies, but too many departments are reluctant to admit it exists, much less implement programs to address it.

While a few of the known deaths are publicly attributed to depression or PTSD, the overwhelming majority are listed as having “unknown causes.” Stigma — the fear that it will reflect negatively on a department or result in liability claims by the family — appears to be a motivating factor behind such vague information.

Based on 24 years experience on the job, I believe that work-related stress and depression are far more prevalent in police work than reports suggest. Law enforcement is one of the most toxic, caustic career fields in the world. But, while injuries like PTSD are increasingly acknowledged within the military, its prevalence in civilian police work goes virtually unnoticed.

Instead of continuing to ignore the problem, the law enforcement community needs to address mental health and suicide head-on, devising what they call a “cradle to the grave” approach for officers. Cadets in police academies must be informed of the emotional toll of police work and taught coping techniques.

Additionally, rather than advising officers to get help when they “need it,” it should be strongly encouraged that officers attend regular therapy sessions with a licensed counselor, whether it is through an employee counseling service or on the “outside” to assure confidentiality.

Finally, officers should be encouraged to go at least once a year to a therapist who is adept at dealing with stress and trauma in the same way they get an annual physical or dental check-up. That would give an officer the opportunity to see what has been working well emotionally for the past year, but also affords him or her a chance to see what has not.

To read more CLICK HERE

Disgraced Congressman George Santos faces expulsion from House of Representatives

The Republican chairman of the bipartisan House Ethics Committee introduced a resolution to expel Representative George Santos of New York from Congress, citing the committee’s damning new report documenting violations of House rules and evidence of pervasive campaign fraud, reported The New York Times.

The move by Representative Michael Guest of Mississippi, the committee’s chairman, laid the groundwork for a pivotal vote after Thanksgiving that could make Mr. Santos only the sixth representative to be ejected in the chamber’s history.

“The evidence uncovered in the Ethics Committee’s investigative subcommittee investigation is more than sufficient to warrant punishment,” Mr. Guest said in a statement accompanying his five-page resolution. “And the most appropriate punishment is expulsion.”

Mr. Santos, a Republican, has survived two expulsion efforts after a crush of reports in The New York Times and other publications exposed his fabricated life story and federal prosecutors charged him with 23 felonies.

But support for Mr. Santos appeared to be eroding on Friday, as dozens of lawmakers in both parties indicated that the ethics report — showing how he spent tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions on Botox, Ferragamo goods and vacations — was the final straw for a lawmaker who has caused a year’s worth of political headaches.

To read more CLICK HERE

Alabama executes a man for 1993 robbery and murder

The 22st Execution of 2023

An Alabama inmate, Casey McWhorter was executed by lethal injection on November 16, 2023. He was convicted of killing a man during a 1993 robbery when he was a teenager, reported The Associated Press.

Casey McWhorter, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:56 p.m. at a southwest Alabama prison, authorities said. McWhorter was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for his role in the robbery and shooting death of Edward Lee Williams, 34, on Feb. 18, 1993.

Prosecutors said McWhorter, who was three months past his 18th birthday at the time of the killing, conspired with two younger teenagers, including Williams’ 15-year-old son, to steal money and other items from Williams’ home and then kill him. The jury that convicted McWhorter recommended a death sentence by a vote of 10-2, which a judge, who had the final decision, imposed, according to court records. The younger teens — Edward Lee Williams Jr. and Daniel Miner, who was 16 — were sentenced to life in prison, according to court records.

 “It’s kind of unfortunate that we had to wait so long for justice to be served, but it’s been served,” the victim’s brother, Bert Williams, told reporters after the execution. He added that the lethal injection provided McWhorter a peaceful death unlike the violent end his brother endured.

Prison officials opened the curtain to the execution chamber at 6:30 p.m. McWhorter, who was strapped to the gurney with the intravenous lines already attached, moved slightly at the beginning of the procedure, rubbing his fingers together, but his breathing slowed until it was no longer visible.

“I would like to say I love my mother and family,” McWhorter said in his final words. “I would like to say to the victim’s family I’m sorry. I hope you find peace.”

McWhorter also used his final words to take an apparent verbal jab at his executioner, the prison warden who faced domestic violence accusations decades ago, saying that, “it’s not lost on me that a habitual abuser of women is carrying out this procedure.”

Prosecutors said McWhorter and Miner went to the Williamses’ home with rifles and fashioned homemade silencers from a pillow and a milk jug. When the older Williams arrived home and discovered the teens, he grabbed the rifle held by Miner. They began to struggle over it, and McWhorter fired the first shot at Williams, according to a summary of the crime in court filings. Williams was shot a total of 11 times.

April Williams, the victim’s daughter, said her father today should be spending time with his grandchildren and enjoying retirement.

“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him and how I miss him,” April Williams said in a statement read by Corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm. “Casey McWhorter had several hours in that house to change his mind from taking the life of my Dad.”

Defense attorneys had unsuccessfully sought a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, citing McWhorter’s age at the time of the crime. They argued the death sentence was unconstitutional because Alabama law does not consider a person to be a legal adult until age 19.

McWhorter, who called himself a “confused kid” at the time of the slaying, said he would encourage young people going through difficult times to take a moment before making a life-altering mistake like he did.

“Anything that comes across them that just doesn’t sit well at first, take a few seconds to think that through,” he told The Associated Press in an interview last week. “Because one bad choice, one stupid mistake, one dumb decision can alter your life — and those that you care about — forever.” McWhorter maintained that he did not intend to kill Williams. Attorney General Steve Marshall said as Williams was on the ground wounded that McWhorter shot him in the head.

McWhorter spent nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row, making him among the longest-serving inmates of the state’s 165 death row inmates.

“Edward Lee Williams’ life was taken away from him at the hands of Casey A. McWhorter, and tonight, Mr. McWhorter answered for his actions,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement.

The Rev. Jeff Hood, a death row minister who works with an anti-death penalty group, accompanied McWhorter into the execution chamber as his spiritual adviser. “It is not lost on me that he was a murderer and so are all Alabamians tonight. I pray that we will all learn to stop killing each other,” Hood said in a statement.

The Alabama execution occurred the same night that Texas executed a man convicted of strangling a 5-year-old girl who was taken from a Walmart store nearly 22 years ago.

McWhorter was the second inmate put to death this year in Alabama after the state paused executions for several months to review procedures following a series of failed or problematic executions. James Barber, 64, was executed by lethal injection in July for the 2001 beating death of a woman.

Alabama plans in January to make the nation’s first attempt to put an inmate to death using nitrogen gas. Nitrogen hypoxia has been authorized as an execution method in Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi, but no state has used it.

To read more CLICK HERE

Some Chicago and Philadelphia neighbors literally worse than war zones

For some young black men, it can be safer to be in the U.S. military at war than living at home in the most violent neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Chicago

Alex Knorre is a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston College writing in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Mass shootings tend to dominate the debate over gun violence, but they accounted for just 3% of all firearm homicides in the United States in 2021.

The vast majority of gun homicides are murders that happen in an extremely concentrated number of neighborhoods, places where the rate of gun deaths rivals war zones.

As a scholar of gun violence and victimization in the U.S., I study and publish research on the geographic and demographic concentration of shootings. I’m always searching for new perspectives to help people understand this crisis.

Shootings happen over and over in the same locations. About half take place in just 1% to 5% of the land area in U.S. cities — in other words, in a tiny percentage of the nation’s homes, stores, parks and street corners.

These same neighborhoods tend to suffer from what criminologists call concentrated disadvantage — an unsavory mix of high crime rates, illegal drug markets, poverty, limited educational and economic opportunities and residential instability. Cumulatively, these factors decrease residents’ ability to maintain public order and safety in the ways that safer neighborhoods do informally by confronting violent behavior or supervising teenagers.

Kids who grow up in these neighborhoods suffer the long-lasting repercussions of exposure to violence, such as high levels of stress and trauma that dampen educational attainment and result in decreased cognitive ability.

The demographics of these neighborhoods means that both victims and perpetrators of shootings are disproportionately young Black men, who are 93.9% of firearm-related homicide victims in Chicago and 79.3% of gun homicides in Philadelphia (where young Hispanic men make up another 12.9%). Homicides disproportionately affect the young largely because boys and men ages 15 to 25 are more likely to engage in delinquent and criminal behavior, a phenomenon known as the age-crime curve.

For some young men, it can be safer to be in the U.S. military at war than living at home in the most violent neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Chicago.

How we did our study

This finding comes from a study my co-authors, Brandon Del Pozo and Aaron Chalfin, and I did to compare shooting rates in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles with casualty rates of U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Our paper is published in JAMA Network Open, an open-source medical journal, and is free to read.

We collected all publicly available city-level data on shooting deaths, including the time, exact place and information about the victim. Our study focused on Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago because they were the largest American cities with public data available. However, gun homicides happen everywhere, with notable rates of gun homicides in St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit and Cleveland.

For military casualties, we relied on the estimates from studies of the mortality of U.S. soldiers at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Afghan War was deadlier, with 395 deaths of U.S. combatants per 100,000 people per year, compared with 330 in Iraq. We used the higher rate from the Afghan War as our reference, expressing the homicide rate in other places in relationship to this benchmark.

Deadliest ZIP codes in North Philly, Garfield Park

The most violent ZIP code in Philadelphia is 19132 in North Philadelphia. That ZIP code includes parts of Strawberry Mansion and the blocks further north and east. The violence of these city streets was captured by sociologist Elijah Anderson in his ethnographic study “Code of the Street,” published in 2000.

A young man living in this ZIP code had 1.91 times more annual risk of getting killed with a firearm than a U.S. soldier deployed to Afghanistan for a comparable amount of time.

During 2020 and 2021, this ZIP code was home to about 2,500 young men. Thirty-seven were killed in gun homicides.

A similar calculation for the most violent neighborhood of Chicago, an area around Garfield Park with the ZIP code 60624, yields statistics that are even grimmer. Young men living there were 3.23 times more likely to die from a bullet than U.S. service members deployed to Afghanistan. Sixty-six young men were shot dead during 2020 and 2021.

Moreover, survivors of this violence bear the burden of it for the whole time they live in these neighborhoods. In contrast, the average deployment is less than 12 months.

Research papers like ours can raise many “Yeah but” questions. Answering them can better help us understand the limitations of our study.

For example, many service members do not engage in active combat. This fact made our research team wonder if the inclusion of data from personnel in safer support roles was skewing our data, so we specifically looked at the casualties of one U.S. brigade combat team that was heavily engaged during the Iraq War.

The brigade had a casualty rate 1.71 times higher than our benchmark. That means that members of the brigade were still safer than male youth in the most violent area of Philadelphia (with a casualty rate of 1.91 times higher) and Chicago (3.23 times higher).

It is also worth noting that we studied two particularly violent years in U.S. cities. 2020 saw a record increase in homicide rates. That number stayed high in 2021, before decreasing slightly in 2022.

Lastly, on a more positive note, gun mortality in New York and Los Angeles was significantly lower than in Philadelphia and Chicago, and much lower than the risks faced in war.

Our research also showed that soldiers who are injured on the battlefield are less likely to die from their wounds than people shot in the American cities we studied.

Surviving a wound is more likely if medical help is immediate. This suggests two ideas to decrease shooting deaths: Train more police officers to provide urgent basic medical treatment to the victims of gun violence and add capacity to trauma centers near violent neighborhoods.

To read more CLICK HERE