Another day, another mass shooting--this time Pittsburgh

Two young men were killed and at least nine others injured in a mass shooting early Sunday in Pittsburgh, reported NBC News.

The shooting happened just after 12:30 a.m. during a party at a short-term rental property in the city’s North Side, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police said in a news release.

The party was attended by as many as 200 people, many of whom were underage, police added. No further details about the deceased were provided.

“As many as 50 rounds were fired inside, prompting some party-goers to jump out the windows, sustaining injuries such as broken bones and lacerations,” police said. “Several more shots were fired outside the home.”

As officers arrived at the scene, shots were heard “and several young people were observed fleeing the area on foot and by vehicle,” police said.

Evidence was being processed at as many as eight separate crime scenes and detectives from the bureau’s major crimes unit were speaking to witnesses and reviewing video footage, police added.

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Prosecutors struggle to fill staff with attorneys

 District attorneys’ offices across the U.S. are struggling to recruit and retain lawyers, with some experiencing vacancies of up to 16% and a dearth of applicants for open jobs, according to interviews with more than a dozen top prosecutors and five state and national prosecutors’ associations, according to Reuters.

The district attorneys said the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing concern about racial inequities in the criminal justice system — compounded by long-standing issues with relatively low pay and burnout — have made a career as a state prosecutor a tougher sell in the past several years.

 “We're seeing a prosecutor shortage throughout the country; it's not limited to large jurisdictions versus small jurisdictions,” said Nelson Bunn, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, a trade group with 5,000 members.

The number of applicants to prosecutor positions in San Diego County — which has the second-largest district attorney’s office in California at 330 lawyers — fell 28% between 2019 and 2021, according to chief deputy district attorney Dwain Woodley.

In Utah, open positions in the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office are hovering between 21 and 25 in an office that should have 133 lawyers, and attorneys in its special victims’ unit are handling double the number of cases recommended by the American Bar Association, District Attorney Sim Gill said.

“Crime has not dissipated in any significant way to offset the backlog,” Gill said.

Staffing shortages are affecting prosecutors’ decisions about whether to bring certain criminal cases to trial, according to Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York.

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Texas prosecutor opposed to the death penalty rescinds execution date

A Texas prosecutor has called for the execution date to be revoked for a death row prisoner who successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to allow his religious adviser to put hands on him during his lethal injection, reported UPI.

John Ramirez, 37, was scheduled earlier this week to be executed Oct. 5 for the 2004 murder of Pablo Castro in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzalez asked for the execution date to be withdrawn in a court filing. He said his assistant district attorney requested the execution date without his knowledge.

In the motion, Gonzalez said he "has the firm belief that the death penalty is unethical and should not be imposed on Mr. Ramirez or any other person while" he is in office. He said the assistant district attorney was unaware of his opinion on the issue.

Seth Kretzer, Ramirez's attorney, said Gonzalez made the "correct legal judgment" not to proceed with his client's execution.

"This is welcome news on the eve of Good Friday, Easter and Passover informs my belief that the litigation of Mr. Ramirez's case this last year has touched some small part of America's soul," Kretzer said in a statement to UPI.

"I look forward to Judge [Bobby] Galvan's order withdrawing the death warrant, which was signed only two days ago. Otherwise, will immediately file a mandamus with the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin."

Gonzalez's request comes less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ramirez's favor on a religious liberty issue. It said the state likely violated Ramirez's rights when it denied his request to have his pastor in the execution chamber, touching him and praying over him during his execution.

In 2019, the TDCJ banned chaplains from entering the state's execution chambers when the Supreme Court stayed an execution after Texas declined to allow an inmate to have a Buddhist spiritual adviser with him during the lethal injection.

The state lifted the ban in April 2021, revising its policy to allow death row prisoners to designate a corrections chaplain or other spiritual adviser of their choosing to be present inside the death chamber, but no touching or praying.

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Limitless guns fueling deadly road rage

The proliferation of guns are fueling an explosion of road rage killings, reported The New York Times.

These eruptions of sudden violence — a man in Tulsa, Okla., firing repeatedly after an argument at a red light; a Georgia driver shot while on a family road trip — are not unique to any part of America, among a population that is increasingly on edge and carrying guns. But they have been perhaps most pronounced on the roads of Texas.

 “In the past, people curse one another, throw up the finger and keep moving,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston said in an interview. “Now instead of throwing up the finger, they’re pulling out the gun and shooting.”

As more motorists seemed to be firing guns last year, the Dallas Police Department began tracking road rage shootings for the first time. The results were alarming: 45 people wounded, 11 killed.

In Austin last year, the police recorded 160 episodes of drivers pointing or firing a gun; this year, there have been 15 road rage shootings, with three people struck. (Two others were stabbed in altercations stemming from road rage.) 

The prevalence of such violence, not just in Texas but around the country, suggests a cultural commonality, an extreme example of deteriorating behavior that has also flared on airplanes and in stores. It is as if the pandemic and the nation’s sour mood have left people forgetting how to act in public at the same time as they were buying millions more weapons.

 “It’s the same sort of ball of wax: People getting frustrated, feeling strained and acting out toward others,” said Charis E. Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine. “One thing that we do know is that there has been a huge rise in gun sales,” she added.

Last month, a woman driving with her dog shot and wounded another motorist in Oklahoma City. In Miami, a man fired 11 shots from his car on Interstate 95 in what he has said was self-defense. A Los Angeles couple is set to stand trial for firing into a car during morning rush hour last year, killing a 6-year-old boy on his way to kindergarten.

Criminologists cautioned that any theory of motivation behind road rage shootings is hampered by a lack of data. Most police departments do not keep statistics on road rage episodes, in part because it is not itself a crime category. There is no federal database.

Arizona has tried to get a rough approximation of the number of road rage incidents, adding a box for “possible road rage” to the form filled out by police officers for car crashes in 2018. The data showed an increase in such incidents in 2021 compared with the previous two years, according to Alberto Gutier, the director of the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.

“It’s going crazy,” he said of road rage. “People are so stupid.”

But, he added, the state does not track the number of episodes that end up in gunfire.

For its report on an increase in road rage shootings, the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety relied on the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that compiles data from government sources and media reports. The group found that more than 500 people had been injured or killed in reported road rage shootings last year, up from fewer than 300 in 2019.

“The story that it’s telling is a definite and really worrying increase in incidents of road rage involving a gun,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior director of research at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Only in this country is someone shot and injured or killed every 17 hours in a road rage incident.”

Texas accounted for a quarter of the fatal shootings last year that were documented in the study, with 33 people killed in road rage shootings in the state, up from 18 in 2019.

Among them was David Castro, the 17-year-old who died in Houston in July. David played percussion in his high school marching band, wanted to study engineering in college and hoped to get his driver’s license by the end of the summer.

“I was going over lessons with him as we drove,” his father said in an interview, recalling a conversation with David before the shooting as they hit heavy traffic after the Astros game downtown. David’s 14-year-old brother was also in the car.

After letting several cars merge into his lane, Mr. Castro began to pull forward in his pickup. That is when a white Buick attempted to edge into the lane, he said. Neither yielded ground; eventually the two cars were touching. There was a “verbal altercation,” according to a court record.

A police officer directing traffic told Mr. Castro to let the Buick in. “So I let him in,” he said. “David was nervous. But I was like, whatever that was, it’s over.”

But it wasn’t.

On the highway, the Buick started flashing its lights and honking, Mr. Castro said. “I tried to get away and he stayed right behind me,” Mr. Castro said. As he took a turnaround lane under a highway, he heard two shots. The rear window shattered. David, seated in the passenger seat, was struck in the back of the head.

 “I just started screaming. And he kept chasing us,” Mr. Castro said. “This was not a road rage incident — this was a grown man who took the life of a child because his feelings got hurt.”

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South Dakota House votes to impeach attorney general matter heads to Senate for trial

The South Dakota House of Representatives voted to impeach state Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg over a 2020 accident in which Ravnsborg struck and killed a pedestrian on a rural stretch of highway, reported Courthouse News Service.

The 36-31 vote did not comport with a recommendation from the House Select Committee on Investigations against impeachment, which occurred in March in a 6-2 in a party line vote.

The matter moves to the state Senate for trial, where a two-thirds majority will be required for Ravnsborg’s removal. There is a minimum 20-day waiting period until the Senate trial can begin under the state constitution. He is suspended from his duties pending the outcome of the trial.

Ravnsborg has remained in office since the collision despite calls for his resignation, including from Governor Kristi Noem, a fellow Republican. The attorney general pleaded no contest last year to using a mobile electronic device while driving and failing to stay in his lane.

Ravnsborg was driving home from a political fundraiser on the night he struck Joe Boever, who was walking along the shoulder of a U.S. Highway 14 near Highmore, South Dakota. The attorney general has maintained he did not realize he struck a man until he returned to the scene the next day and found his body, according to The Associated Press.

During the Select Committee meetings, law enforcement officials testified Ravnsborg had been distracted and driving on the shoulder of the highway at the time of the collision.

On Monday, Ravnsborg sent a letter to House members claiming Noem had “weaponized” the collision by asking him to resign, South Dakota broadcaster KELO reported. He elected not to so to preserve checks and balances in state government, he said.

“No state has ever impeached an elected official for a traffic accident,” Ravnsborg wrote. “I could not resign then and cannot resign now because the incident did not impede my ability to perform the functions of attorney general including ongoing investigations of the executive office. Knowing Governor Noem could hand-select my replacement, I felt it appropriate to stay in office to maintain checks and balances within the state.”

He added: “It has been 576 days since the accident. I mark it on my calendar each day and reflect. I want to say, ‘I am sorry.’ Every day I think about Joe Boever, a man I had never met, who changed my life forever. I am sorry the family has had to endure this tragedy in so many ways and has been put in the middle of this highly political situation.”

Speaking in favor of impeachment, Rep. Linda K. Duba, a Democrat, blasted Ravnborg’s letter. She noted Ravnsborg had the opportunity to testify in front of the Special Committee under oath but did not, instead sending the letter at “the eleventh hour.”

Duba emphasizing the part of the letter where Ravnsborg wanted to say he was sorry and that Boever had changed his life forever.

“Let’s turn that around. You took Joe Boever’s life. Did you intend to hit him? No. But you did. And that’s what we’re about today and that’s what we need to think about when we push the button.”

Republican members of the House spoke in favor of impeaching Ravnsborg as well.

“The attorney general has broken the law, and as a result of that, one of our citizens has died,” said Rep. Will Mortenson. “Never before in our state’s history has it been that a state official criminally ended the life of one of our citizens and refused to resign from that post. This is a grave and exceptional situation.”

There was no testimony in opposition to the measure.

The difference in the result of the committee and full House votes may be due to concerns voiced by the public to their representatives. Michael Card, an associate professor of political science at the University of South Dakota, said legislators have told him the Ravnsborg investigation is an issue frequently raised to them by their constituents.

“I wasn’t surprised that they would vote to impeach,” Card said in an interview. “I think there is enough concern.”

Also, a pattern of behavior made public last week by South Dakota broadcaster Dakota News Now may have added to the vote to impeach. Video and information obtained via a public records request showed law enforcement had pulled Ravnsborg over at least 25 times before the fatal Sept. 12, 2020, collision.

In more than one incident, Ravnsborg made it known to the officers he was the attorney general. In once such stop, in West Point, Nebraska, he was in a state-owned vehicle bound for Army Reserve duty, in uniform.

“It just fails the smell test,” Card said. “And I suspect that a number of legislators who voted to impeach are thinking he didn’t do a crime that was worthy of going to jail, but he shouldn’t be our attorney general.”

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Challenges to candidates involved in insurrection move forward

A federal appeals court has revived a constitutional challenge to Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s (R-N.C.) right to run for reelection because of his support for insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, reported The Huffington Post.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ordered earlier this week that a hearing against an injunction halting the challenge obtained by Cawthorn be held May 3. The Republican primary in Cawthorn’s district is May 17.

Voters and the organization Free Speech for People have argued in court that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment bars lawmakers like Cawthorn from running again for office.

The clause bans those who, after previously taking an oath to “support the Constitution,” then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies.” The section was passed after the Civil War to prohibit lawmakers from representing a government they had worked to topple.

Cawthorn has declared that he did not participate in an insurrection — though he has repeatedly praised those who did — on Twitter and in speeches. He spoke at a rally preceding the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year.

Cawthorn won an injunction from a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge last month against the challenge. The judge ruled that a federal Amnesty Act for those who participated in the Civil War against the government overrode the clause — though several attorneys have argued that a law cannot countermand the Constitution.

The Fourth Circuit court this week denied a stay in the case, but it granted an expedited appeal hearing.

Ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit calls for expedited hearing concerning an injunction against the challenge to Rep. Madison Cawthorn's reelection.

Cawthorn is one of five candidates — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Mark Finchem, a Republican running for Arizona secretary of state — whose reelections are being challenged in court on constitutional grounds linked to support for the insurrection.

Greene repeatedly refers to the insurrectionists as “patriots,” and has called those arrested for violence at the Capitol “political prisoners.”