Yale Professor Marci Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism, is leaving the U.S. because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy, reported The New York Times. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
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The COVID-19 pandemic and its corresponding increase in shootings sparked a national conversation around firearm injury, emergency room visits, and the treatment of gun violence victims in hospitals. Five years later, the conversation has faded, but new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that gun violence remains a stubborn presence across the country, with 93,022 shooting injuries treated in hospitals from 2018 to 2023.
According to the research, an American emergency room treats at least
one firearm injury every 30 minutes, reported The Trace.
“Most cities use police data to inform prevention planning,
but data from hospital and public health sources is an essential, and often
missing, piece to guide action, as many incidents of violence and crime are not
reported to police,” said Dr. Adam Rowh, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC
and lead author of the study, via e-mail to The Trace.
The study, published in Annals of Internal
Medicine last month, analyzed the CDC’s data on emergency department
firearm injuries, which is limited to the District of Columbia and nine states:
Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Utah, Virginia,
Washington, and West Virginia. The study showed that the monthly rates for
shooting injuries were highest in July and lowest in February; daily rates were
disproportionately high on holidays, and nighttime peaks were the highest on
Friday and Saturday, consistent with prior research. The researchers also found that rates were
highest between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., and were the lowest between 10:00 and 10:30
a.m.
The authors of the study concluded that knowing the periods
when gunshot injuries are highest could be essential both in deploying care and
in effectively allocating resources, such as trauma preparedness, ambulance
services, hospital staffing, and strategies for intervention.
One of those strategies is hospital-based violence
intervention programs (HVIPs), an effort aimed at mitigating reinjury by
providing holistic and rehabilitative care to shooting victims. The model,
first developed 30 years ago, has spread nationwide, and various
programs fund
their services through myriad resources, most notably through grants
now facing the threat of cuts and closures.
“It’s happening on every front,” January Serda, the grant
coordinator of one such program in Newport News, Virginia, said of federal cuts
to community violence intervention funding, education, and healthcare.
Dr. Randi Smith, a trauma surgeon who launched an HVIP at
Grady Memorial Hospital, in Atlanta, Georgia, said she has attended to a
gunshot victim on every one of her on-call days in the trauma center. Financial
and social investment in such programs is as paramount to treatment as
life-saving medical care, she emphasized.
“I was very motivated to start a violence intervention
program, taking best practices from some of the programs that I have been a
part of and shortcomings that I had learned from the past,” Smith said. The
program she started in 2023, Interrupting Violence Among Youth and Young
Adults, is one of the few based in the
Southeast.
The program has served more than a thousand people,
including survivors and their family members. According to Smith, its reinjury
rates are less than 3 percent, compared with national benchmarks that are up to
30 percent and institutional benchmarks that are between 12 and 15
percent.
Her work has a long legacy. Nearly four decades ago, physicians and nurses —
especially those with public health experience — were among the first cohort of
medical practitioners to recognize gun violence as a public health issue. That
recognition was largely based on what they witnessed in hospitals and emergency
rooms, as the rate of shootings reached historic highs in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Those firsthand accounts were pivotal in the development of the nation’s first
hospital-based violence intervention programs.
Serda, the grant coordinator for an HVIP in Virginia, said
in today’s multilayered crisis, it’s more paramount than ever to prioritize
care for the people on the frontlines. She came to violence intervention from
nonprofit management and fundraising for survivors of sexual assault in 2022,
after her 17-year-old son, Justice Dunham, was fatally shot in a high school
parking lot after a basketball game.
“I was blown away by the lack of training around
trauma-informed care, or safe spaces and outlets, for nurses and practitioners,
and people who are seeing this firsthand and helping the community,” said
Serda, who began to advocate for trauma-informed initiatives designed to help
patients, her HVIP team and others address the emotional impact of caring for
victims of violence and firearm injuries. “There was no discussion about
compassion fatigue, or burnout, or vicarious trauma.”
As hospital personnel adjust to the ever-evolving firearm
violence crisis, Smith said listening to their experiences, and supporting their
well-being, has never been more crucial.
“I think a lot of people are looking at the recent news,
post-pandemic, that shootings have decreased, and have not realized that we as
hospital staff are still treating patients day after day,” said Smith, “dealing
with a medical environment that shifted significantly since the pandemic, and
navigating extreme burnout.”
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In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that held
racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the
facilities for each race were equal in quality. Justice Henry Billings Brown
wrote the majority opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Six justices joined with Brown, who opined that although the
Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed the legal equality of all races in the United
States, "it was not intended to prevent social or other types of
discrimination."
The much-maligned decision in Plessy remained in effect
about education for 58 years. Finally, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court
decided Brown v. Board of Education — which held that the "separate but
equal" doctrine was unconstitutional in the context of public schools and
educational facilities.
The Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in favor
of Brown. The Court ruled that "separate educational facilities are
inherently unequal," and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Brown paved the way for minority students to have a fair and
equal education. In 1974, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act was
established, prohibiting discrimination against faculty, staff and students.
This included racial segregation of students and required school districts to
take action to overcome barriers to students' equal participation.
However, 69 years after Brown, the Supreme Court rejected
affirmative action at schools of higher education, declaring that the
race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of
North Carolina were unlawful, eliminating a pillar of higher education.
In Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of
Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, the Brown decision
was often quoted in the 230 pages of opinions.
The Supreme Court held that state laws cannot favor one race
over another, that the equal protection clause requires equal treatment under
the law for everyone "without regard to race or color." The decisions
turned the Brown decision on its head. Affirmative action — which had been used
to level the playing field for minority students was now considered to be
imposing discriminatory practices on white prospective students.
The landmark decision in Brown, which overturned a legacy of
racism in this country, was used to rationalize an argument eliminating
affirmative action. The decisions in Harvard and North Carolina will, as Adam
Liptak wrote in The New York Times, "(A)ll but ensured that the student population
at the campuses of elite institutions would become whiter and more Asian and
less Black and Latino."
Then came President Donald Trump's second term. Almost
immediately upon taking office, a letter went out to state education leaders
across the country, suggesting Title I funding — targeted to schools with a
high proportion of low-income students — would be cut if the use of Diversity,
Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) programs continued.
School and state officials were asked to sign a
certification or "loyalty oath" and return it to the U.S Department
of Education acknowledging they are complying with the directive. The oath has
been challenged in court.
In light of an unsympathetic Supreme Court and an
administration bent on rewriting the history of discrimination in this country,
advocates for racial equality are fighting back. They have turned to state
constitutions and state courts to fight "resegregation."
State judges in New Jersey and Minnesota have interpreted
their respective state constitutions as imposing responsibility on the state to
remedy racial discrimination. Expect more states to look to their state
constitution for relief, while other states relish the federal government's
undoing of years of progress toward racial equity.
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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Louisiana allowed split jury criminal convictions. If one or two jurors disagreed on a guilty verdict, the defendant could still be convicted. Oregon was the only other state to allow split verdicts.
Louisiana
adopted the practice in 1898, fueled by efforts to maintain white supremacy
after the Civil War. Diluting the voice of Black jurors allowed the often-white
majority to determine the outcome.
In 2018,
Louisiana voters did away with the use of nonunanimous jury convictions. Two
years later in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that juries in state criminal
trials must be unanimous to convict a defendant, settling a quirk of
constitutional law that had allowed divided votes to result in convictions in
Louisiana and Oregon.
Justice
Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court that the practice is inconsistent with the
Constitution’s right to a jury trial and that it should be discarded as a
vestige of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana and racial, ethnic and religious bigotry
that led to its adoption in Oregon in the 1930s.
Of the
1,500 people in Louisiana prisons from split jury convictions at that time,
about 80% were Black and most were serving life sentences, according to a
Project of Justice Initiative analysis.
Following
the high court decision, Oregon’s Supreme Court granted
new trials to hundreds of people. But Louisiana’s Supreme Court rejected
arguments to apply the ruling retroactively, leaving people locked up
with scarce legal options or waiting on a miracle.
Nearly
1,000 people convicted by split juries remain in prison
in Louisiana.
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The secrecy of the confessional in the Roman Catholic Church is so sacrosanct that any priest who violates it is automatically excommunicated.
In Washington State, a new law requiring clergy to break the
seal when child abuse has been revealed has kindled a heated battle involving
the state, the Roman Catholic Church and the Justice Department, reported The New York Times.
The legislation, signed into law last week by Gov. Bob
Ferguson, a Democrat, requires members of the clergy to report child abuse or
neglect to authorities, even if that knowledge arises during the sacrament of
confession. It has outraged many Catholics in the state, and across the
country.
“This law is a clear intrusion into the practice of our
Catholic faith,” said Archbishop Paul D. Etienne of Seattle. “The state is now
intruding into the practice of religion, and if they’re allowed to get away
with that, where do we draw the line?”
The Justice Department apparently agrees. On Monday, the
department announced it was opening a civil rights investigation into the law,
which it called “anti-Catholic.” The investigation will focus on the law’s
“apparent conflict” with religious freedom under the First Amendment.
Clergy are considered mandated reporters in a majority of
states, meaning they are legally obligated to report to authorities if they
suspect a child is being abused. In most states, however, the state reserves
protections for the clergy-penitent relationship. In seven states, including
New Hampshire and West Virginia, there is no such exception. (In Tennessee, the
privilege is denied only in cases of child sexual abuse.) It’s not clear that
any priests have been prosecuted or penalized in those states over failing to
report abuse that they learned about during a confession.
A similar bill in California was withdrawn by its sponsor in
2019 after a backlash, including from critics who pointed out that it would be
difficult to enforce. The Vatican also appeared to weigh in, releasing a
document in the run-up to the California vote emphasizing that the secrecy of
confession is an “intrinsic requirement” of the sacrament.
President Trump has made “eradicating anti-Christian bias” a
priority for the Justice Department. In April, Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the
department’s civil rights division, rewrote
a mission statement for the division to prioritize investigations into
issues including anti-Christian bias and transgender women’s participation in
sports, a sharp shift for an agency known for decades for its work on racial
equality.
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23-1239 BARNES V. FELIX
DECISION BELOW: 91 F.4th 393 CERT.
GRANTED 10/4/2024
ARGUED: January 22, 2025
FACTS: On April 28, 2016, Officer Roberto Felix Jr. fatally shot Ashtian Barnes during a traffic stop on the Harris County Tollway. After spotting Barnes’s Toyota Corolla, which had been flagged for toll violations, Felix initiated a stop and Barnes pulled over to the median. When Felix requested documentation, Barnes, who was driving a car rented in his girlfriend’s name, could not produce it and began “digging around” in the car. Claiming he smelled marijuana, Felix questioned Barnes, who then turned off the vehicle and suggested checking the trunk for documentation. Dash cam footage shows that after Barnes opened the trunk and exited the vehicle at Felix’s request, the car’s blinker came back on and the vehicle began to move. Felix, with his weapon drawn, stepped onto the moving car and pressed his gun against Barnes’s head. While holding onto the car frame with his head above the roof—leaving him unable to see inside the vehicle—Felix fired two shots. Barnes’s vehicle stopped, and he was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:57 p.m. Though both the Houston Police Department and Harris County Precinct 5 Constable's Office investigated the incident, a grand jury found no probable cause for an indictment.
The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, focusing exclusively on the two seconds before the shooting when Barnes’s car began moving with Felix holding onto it. The court ruled that because Felix reasonably feared for his life in that moment, his use of deadly force was justified regardless of his previous actions, such as jumping onto the moving vehicle. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed.
QUESTION PRESENTED: The Fourth Amendment prohibits a police officer from using "unreasonable" force. U.S. Const. amend. IV. In Graham v. Connor, this Court held that reasonableness depends on "the totality of the circumstances." 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989) (quotation marks omitted). But four circuits-the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth-cabin Graham.
Those circuits evaluate whether a Fourth Amendment violation occurred under the "moment of the threat doctrine," which evaluates the reasonableness of an officer's actions only in the narrow window when the officer's safety was threatened, and not based on events that precede the moment of the threat. In contrast, eight circuits-the First, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and D.C. Circuits-reject the moment of the threat doctrine and follow the totality of the circumstances approach, including evaluating the officer's actions leading up to the use of force.
In the decision below, Judge Higginbotham concurred in his own majority opinion, explaining that the minority approach "lessens the Fourth Amendment's protection of the American public" and calling on this Court "to resolve the circuit divide over the application of a doctrine deployed daily across this country." Pet. App. 10a-16a (Higginbotham, J., concurring).
The question presented-which has divided twelve circuits-is: Whether courts should apply the moment of the threat doctrine when evaluating an excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment.
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Cary Aspinwall of The Marshall Project writes:
In late March, police in southern Georgia arrested
a 24-year-old woman who had a miscarriage after a witness reported
seeing her place the fetal remains in a dumpster.
The coroner in Tift County determined it
was a 19-week fetus from a naturally occurring miscarriage, but some
legal experts consider the arrest a bellwether for the criminal suspicion that
surrounds pregnancy loss in many states in post-Roe America.
The Marshall Project previously examined how
the way a person handles a pregnancy loss — and where it occurs — can
mean the difference between a private medical issue and a criminal charge.
Nationally, federal data shows that about 20% of pregnancies
end in a loss, but only a small number are investigated as crimes. In several
states, a positive drug test after a pregnancy loss can result in criminal
charges for the mother, and even prison time.
Prosecutions related to pregnancy appear to have increased
since the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, according
to Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for the legal rights of
pregnant people. In the first year after the Dobbs decision — from June 2022 to
June 2023 — there were at least 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions, researchers
for the group found.
Here are some states where miscarriages and stillbirths have
been investigated by the criminal legal system in recent years:
Alabama
Alabama has a broad “chemical endangerment of a child” law
allowing prosecutors to charge someone for drug use during any part of a
pregnancy, whether the mother delivers a stillborn
fetus or a healthy
newborn.
Our 2022
investigation with AL.com found that more than 20 women had been
prosecuted after a miscarriage or stillbirth in Alabama. Some of the harshest
sentences resulted in cases where a fetus was stillborn and the woman went to
trial.
The Pregnancy
Justice report examining nationwide prosecutions related to conduct
associated with pregnancy, pregnancy loss or birth in the first year after the
Dobbs ruling found that nearly half of the cases came
from Alabama.
Arkansas
Arkansas is among several states that still make it a crime
to “conceal”
a birth or stillbirth. Such laws date back to the 17th century, and were
intended to shame and accuse women of crimes if they were pregnant and
unmarried.
In 2015, Annie
Bynum walked into a hospital with a plastic bag containing the remains
of her stillborn fetus and ended up going to jail — and eventually prison. She
was accused under the concealment law.
A jury originally convicted and sentenced Bynum to six years
in prison. Later, an appeals
court ruled that the jury shouldn’t have been allowed to hear evidence
that Bynum ingested medications to induce labor before the stillbirth or had
previously had abortions — because the charge was that she had concealed the
pregnancy, not tried to end it. While pregnant, Bynum had planned to quietly
let a friend adopt the baby, and she eventually pleaded guilty to a legal
violation for the attempted adoption.
California
In 2022, the state passed a law banning investigations and
prosecutions of pregnancy loss.
But prior to that law, at least two California women
had already
served time in jail and prison for stillbirths that prosecutors had
alleged were related to drug use.
Adora
Perez had served nearly four years of an 11-year sentence before a
judge ruled her plea agreement — to a charge of voluntary manslaughter of a
fetus — was unlawful,
and overturned her conviction in 2022.
That only happened after the case of then-26-year-old
Chelsea Becker garnered international outrage. Becker was charged with
“murder of a human fetus” in 2019, but the case was dismissed
in 2021 and led to Perez’s case getting a second look. Anger about the
prosecutions of both women led
to the change in state law, to avoid punishing “people who suffer the
loss of their pregnancy.”
Georgia
At least one woman who had a miscarriage has been arrested
under a state law that makes it a crime to conceal a dead body, punishable
by up to 10 years in prison.
On March 20, police in Tifton, Georgia, issued a press
release announcing that a dead fetus had been found in a dumpster at
an apartment complex, after an ambulance was called for a woman who was found
bleeding and unconscious. The next day, the Tifton Police Department announced
it had arrested the woman who miscarried that fetus, accusing her of one count
of concealing the death of another person and one count of abandonment of a
dead body.
On April 4, Tift County District Attorney Patrick Warren
announced that his office was
dropping charges against the woman. His office determined that neither
charge was applicable to her case under Georgia law, because a medical examiner
determined the woman had a naturally occurring miscarriage.
Ohio
Ohio’s abuse
of a corpse law allows a fairly broad interpretation, if applied to
fetal remains: “No person, except as authorized by law, shall treat a human
corpse in a way that would outrage reasonable community sensibilities.”
In 2023 in Warren, Ohio, Brittany Watts was
arrested and charged with abuse of a corpse after experiencing a
miscarriage at home in her toilet. She had been to a hospital prior to her
miscarriage but left when she felt she was getting inadequate treatment,
according to news reports. When she went back to the hospital after her miscarriage,
a nurse called police and reported that Watts had given birth at home and did
not want the baby — an assertion Watts’ lawyer denied. A grand jury declined
to move forward with the criminal case in 2024.
Earlier this year, Watts filed
a lawsuit in federal court alleging medical professionals conspired
with a police officer to fabricate criminal charges against her.
Oklahoma
Criminal charges related to drug use while pregnant — in
cases of pregnancy
loss or infants born
healthy — have become increasingly common in recent years in
Oklahoma.
Kathryn Green gave birth to a stillborn baby in Enid,
Oklahoma, in 2017. She was struggling with meth addiction at the time and
scared. She cleaned her
stillborn son’s body, wrapped him in a blanket and put him in a box.
Police later found the remains in the trash and arrested her. Prosecutors
initially charged her with second-degree murder, alleging that the stillbirth
happened because of “meth toxicity.” But medical tests later showed otherwise:
Green’s stillborn son had an infection that had caused his death, records show.
In 2022, Green decided to enter an Alford plea — a guilty
plea in which the defendant maintains innocence. At her sentencing hearing, a
judge said he wasn’t convinced that prosecutors had proven Green willfully and
knowingly harmed her baby by using methamphetamine while pregnant, but he was
bothered by her “lack of maternal instinct.”
South Carolina
South Carolina was the first
state to prosecute a woman for a stillbirth allegedly due to drug use.
In 2001, Regina McKnight was sentenced to 12 years in prison for giving birth
to a stillborn baby who tested positive for cocaine. McKnight served eight
years before the state Supreme Court overturned
her conviction, in part because her trial lawyer didn’t present witnesses
to challenge prosecutors’ claim that her drug use definitively caused the
stillbirth.
The state charged at
least 200 women between 2006 and 2021 with unlawful neglect of a child
or homicide by child abuse for alleged perinatal drug use.
In March 2023, a college student in Orangeburg, South
Carolina, named Amari Marsh went from miscarrying a fetus in her bathroom to
being investigated for a homicide. She told investigators she didn’t realize
she was pregnant until she went to an ER with severe pain. She left the
hospital and miscarried later in a toilet at home (which medical experts say is
common). Her boyfriend at the time called 911. Police became suspicious that
she may have sought to end the pregnancy or not called 911 fast enough, records
show. She was jailed and accused of homicide by child abuse — before the fetus
was autopsied.
An autopsy showed later that the fetus died of natural
causes due to an infection that Marsh was unaware of, her
lawyer said. In South Carolina, police can arrest someone on a criminal
complaint without approval from local prosecutors (called solicitors). After a
grand jury reviewed all of the evidence in the case, the charges against Marsh
were dismissed.
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