CREATORS: What Is Due Process and Why Is It Important?

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
April 15, 2025

As we slide into the second quarter of 2025, if I were to predict the word or phrase of the year, it would be "due process." News stories lament the absence of due process, and talking heads, lawyers, White House aides, judges and journalists relentlessly examine its history and relevance. What does due process mean?

Due process, established by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, guarantee that the government cannot take a person's basic rights to "life, liberty, or property" without giving advance notice and the opportunity to challenge the action in front of an impartial arbiter.

The concept of due process developed centuries before the U.S. Constitution was drafted. Due process is a historical product of the Magna Carta, through which King John of England promised "that [n]o free man would be deprived of his life, liberty, or property except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." The phrase "due process of law" first appeared in a 1354 version of the Magna Carta, "No man ... shall be put out of his lands or tenements nor taken, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without he be brought to answer by due process of law."

The Founders incorporated due process into the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." At the time, due process only applied to federal matters.

In the wake of the Civil War, the U.S. House of Representatives proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified by the states and became part of the U.S. Constitution.

In essence, due process can be encapsulated in a single word — fairness. Due process impacts all of us, even if we are not facing arbitrary imprisonment or deportation.

Due process ensures fair treatment when a homeowner contests property taxes, or a driver fights a traffic ticket, a business seeks a zoning change, an individual seeks unemployment compensation or a student faces discipline.

According to Brandon L. Garrett, Kate Evans and Elana Fogel writing for The Hill, due process is always placed under special stress when people demand quick results without fairness. For instance, a new President wanting to show the nation he is cracking down on criminal gangs and illegal immigrants.

The U.S. government did not provide notice or review before hurrying hundreds of Venezuelan nationals onto planes bound for a notorious prison in El Salvador last month. According to The New York Times, White House aide Stephen Miller has repeatedly asserted that the people deported were not entitled to due process, even though the U.S. Supreme Court recently said the opposite.

David French of The New York Times asked, "How do they know if someone is an 'illegal alien' absent due process?"

French shared, in a recent column, his experience as a soldier deployed to Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. After six of his comrades were killed in a booby-trapped house, a captured man was brought to French and his commanding officer. They determined, after questioning and examination of the relevant evidence, that he was not an enemy combatant.

He was released. French continued, "As he rolled out, though, a soldier turned to me and voiced our shared fear. 'It sure would suck if he actually turned out to be bad and we let him go.'"

"We're not God," French responded. "I can't look into his heart and know the truth, so we have to go by evidence. The evidence makes the decision for us. Was there enough evidence to hold him?"

That is due process. French continued, "(Due process) doesn't just protect a person's liberty and dignity. It's a humble acknowledgment of our own limitations."

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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Is there a serial killer in New England?

 Bodies of potential victims found in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island

Speculation about a serial killer in New England is gaining significant traction online – specifically stemming from discussions in a private Facebook group called "New England Serial Killer," reported Fox News.

Members of the Facebook group and social media users on other platforms like TikTok and X are pointing to several recent discoveries of human remains in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island between March and April.

Authorities across all three states have identified remains in New Haven, Groton, Killingly and Norwalk, Connecticut, as well as Framingham and Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Foster, Rhode Island.

Three sets of human remains have been identified. New Haven police identified remains discovered on March 21 as Denise Leary, a formerly missing 59-year-old mother of two. Norwalk police also identified the remains of 35-year-old Paige Fannon of West Islip, New York, on March 6. Her remains were found in a swiftly moving Norwalk River after heavy rainfall the night before.

Rhode Island State Police identified remains found in a wooded area of Foster as 56-year-old Michele Romano, who had been missing since August 2024.Their causes of death have not been released as of Tuesday.

"There is no information at this time suggesting any connection to similar remains discoveries, and there is also no known threat to the public at this time," Connecticut State Police said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

CTSP further told police that troopers responded to Woodward Street in Killingly on April 9 regarding the discovery of possible human remains. Police later confirmed the remains, which have yet to be identified, and said there is no known threat to the public.

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Letter: Incredibly, acting US Attorney served as prosecutor and defense attorney in the same case

Five former prosecutors who worked on criminal cases stemming from the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol are urging the disciplinary office governing lawyers in Washington, DC, to open an investigation into Ed Martin the President’s controversial pick to be US attorney for Washington, DC, reported CNN.

Martin, who has been serving in the post on an interim basis since Trump returned to the White House, is a divisive pick for the job. 

The letter details Martin’s representation of defendants who were prosecuted by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department for their involvement in the Capitol attack. In one case, the letter says, Martin was still repping the individual even after being tapped to serve as interim US attorney. He didn’t withdraw his representation of the man until after the case was dismissed by a federal judge in DC.

“By acting simultaneously as a prosecutor and defense attorney in the same case, Mr. Martin violated Rule 1.7(a), which directs that ‘A lawyer shall not advance two or more adverse positions in the same matter,’” the letter reads.

“Collectively, Mr. Martin’s actions threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia,” the group told the disciplinary board. “The reputation of our community depends on a prompt and thorough investigation into Mr. Martin’s violations of his professional obligations.”

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Pennsylvania governor and family attacked by man with Molotov cocktails and hammer

A Harrisburg man walked an hour from his home with gasoline-filled beer bottles and a hammer before setting fire to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official state residence early Sunday, then fled the scene and later turned himself in, reported The Associated Press.

The suspect, 38-year-old Cody Balmer, allegedly confessed during a police interview and said if he had confronted Shapiro inside the historic Susquehanna riverfront residence, he would have beaten the governor with the hammer, court records released Monday state.

Balmer was charged with attempted criminal homicide, arson, burglary, terrorism, and other offenses, according to the criminal complaint obtained by Spotlight PA. Court records state Balmer was fueled by “hatred” towards Shapiro, though it does not elaborate on the reason for those feelings.

The attack came during the Jewish holiday of Passover, just after Shapiro had held a Seder in his residence with family and guests.

Of the possibility that Balmer’s arson could have been a hate crime, Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo told Spotlight PA, “It's something we’d look at — we’re not there yet. We haven’t made a determination, but we’re looking at that because of the timing.”

Balmer was initially scheduled to be arraigned Monday, but a spokesperson for Pennsylvania State Police said in a statement that “due to a medical event not connected to this incident or his arrest, Balmer was transported to an area hospital where he is currently receiving treatment.”

According to the State Police, he remains under their supervision and will be arraigned when he is released from the hospital.

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South Carolina used firing squad for the second time in five weeks

The 12th Execution in 2025

A firing squad on April 10, 2025 executed Mikal Mahdi a South Carolina man who killed an off-duty police officer, the second time the rare execution method has been used by the state in the past five weeks, reported The Associated Press.

Mikal Mahdi gave no final statement and did not look to his right toward the nine witnesses in the room behind bulletproof glass and bars once the curtain opened.

He took a few deep breaths during the 45 seconds between when the hood was put over his head and when the shots rang out, fired by three volunteers who are prison employees at a distance of about 15 feet (4.6 meters).

Mahdi, 42, cried out as the bullets hit him, and his arms flexed. A white target with the red bull’s-eye over his heart was pushed into the wound in his chest.

Mahdi groaned two more times about 45 seconds after that. His breaths continued for about 80 seconds before he appeared to take one final gasp.

A doctor checked him for a little over a minute, and he was declared dead at 6:05 p.m., less than four minutes after the shots were fired.

Firing squad executions resume

Mahdi’s execution came a little over a month after Brad Sigmon was put to death March 7, in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and the fourth since 1976. The others all occurred in Utah.

The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world. It has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

But South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane method, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.

In a statement Mahdi’s attorney, assistant federal public defender David Weiss, called the execution a “horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society.”

Mahdi had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair.

“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils,” Weiss said. “Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.”

Mahdi is the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight months as the state makes its way through prisoners who ran out of appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on executions in the state.

Mahdi’s is the 12th execution in the U.S. this year. Twenty-five prisoners in nine states were killed in all of 2024. Alabama and Louisiana have killed inmates by nitrogen gas. Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona and Texas have executed men by lethal injection, while South Carolina has used both the firing squad and lethal injection.

Mahdi’s last meal was ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake and sweet tea, prison officials said.

The crime

Mahdi admitted killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times before burning his body. Myers’ wife found him in the couple’s Calhoun County shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier.

Myers’ shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested in Florida while driving Myers’ unmarked police pickup truck.

Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Boggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing.

Final appeal

Mahdi’s final appeal was rejected this week by both the U.S. and South Carolina Supreme Courts. His lawyers said Mahdi’s original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that did not call on relatives, teachers or others who knew him and ignored the impact of months spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen.

The defense’s case to spare Mahdi’s life before a judge lasted only about 30 minutes. It “didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,” Mahdi’s lawyers wrote.

Mahdi’s earliest memory was his father slamming his mother through a glass table and later lying to his son and saying his mother was dead. Mahdi’s father pulled him out of school in fifth grade when officials suggested he needed behavioral help, defense lawyers said.

Prosecutors said Mahdi constantly used brutality to solve his problems. As a death row prisoner, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block. Mahdi was caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records.

“The nature of the man is violence,” prosecutors wrote.

Weiss, Mahdi’s attorney, said his client died in full view of a system “that failed him at every turn — from childhood to his final breath.”

Busy death chamber

Mahdi’s death is the end of a busy time in South Carolina’s death chamber. He is the fifth inmate killed since September after the state had not had any executions since 2011. No other inmates are out of appeals but several are close.

The state was able to restart executions after lawmakers allowed the firing squad and passed a bill allowing suppliers of the pentobarbital to remain secret, along with the exact procedures used to kill inmates and the names of prison employees on execution teams, including the firing squad shooters.

Along with Sigmon’s firing squad death last month, three other South Carolina prisoners have been executed via lethal injection since September.

The state now has 26 inmates on its death row. Just one man has been sentenced to death in the past decade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mangino a guest on "Who Killed . . . ?" podcast with Bill Huffman

Great to join Bill Huffman of "Who Killed . . . ?" podcast talking about the Idaho murders and fingerprint analysis.

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