Author: Sterling

Counsel for a Delaware man and the U.S. Justice Department presented oral arguments at the Third Circuit on Wednesday for the third time in as many years, as the court seeks to determine whether a nonviolent felon can own a gun.

In 1995, Bryan Range pleaded guilty to welfare fraud after making a false statement to obtain $2,458 worth of food stamps. While Range was sentenced only to probation, because the crime was punishable by over a year in prison federal law dictates he cannot possess a firearm.

Range filed an as-applied challenge in federal court against the U.S. Attorney General and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives director in 2020. The court dismissed his complaint and Range appealed.

In 2022, the Third Circuit affirmed, finding the government had shown that the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation justified barring Range from Second Amendment right entitlements.

However, Range successfully petitioned for an en banc rehearing and in 2023, the Third Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision. The en banc panel found the government failed to establish any historical tradition of firearm regulation that would bar Range from owning a firearm.

However, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that judgment following United States v. Rahimi, in which justices ruled 8-1 to allow for the temporary restriction of gun possession for individuals deemed to be a physical threat. Because Rahimi’s decision emphasized that courts need only find “relevantly similar” past legal principles to prove historical tradition, Range would have to again present his argument for rearmament.

During Range’s oral argument, U.S. Circuit Judge Marjorie O. Rendell, a Bill Clinton appointee, noted that Rahimi suggested a more serious historical punishment could, in theory, justify a lesser modern one, adding that counterfeiting theft was once punishable by death in the early United States.

In response, Range’s attorney Peter Patterson sought to draw a line between Range’s case and Rahimi, emphasizing that his client’s crimes were strictly nonviolent, while Rahimi had been disarmed due to a civil domestic violence restraining order.

“What the court said is that if someone could be put in prison on account for their threat of violence to another person, we can take the relatively lesser step of disarming them,” Patterson said. “What they didn’t say is that if someone was put in any prison for any reason, we can disarm them.”

Patterson said there would be “startling consequences” for citizens’ individual rights if that notion were extended to nonviolent offenders.

“There would be nothing limiting that to the Second Amendment,” he said. “(If) they commit an offense analogous to a capital offense at the (nation’s) founding, then presumably, you could strip them of their First Amendment rights, their Fourth Amendment rights, and everything — for life. And, surely, that cannot be correct.”

Patterson also took aim at the government’s position that individuals who have committed a “serious offense” can be disarmed, instead drawing the line at offenders who have committed violent acts or threats.

“If it’s someone who’s committed an offense, whether it’s serious or not…but it’s wholly disconnected from any danger of violence to anyone, it makes no sense to say, somehow, that person has forfeited their basic right to self-defense,” Patterson said.

Representing the government, attorney Kevin Soter contested Patterson’s claim, suggesting any and all felonies constitute “serious crimes” that could justify disarmament.

However, Soter’s position appeared to find little acceptance from the bench. One judge after another hammered Soter with growing irritation as they sought his definition of a “credible threat” to others’ physical safety — the threshold under Rahimi to justify disarmament.

“Let’s say that Pennsylvania decided that jaywalking or failing to return library books is a felony,” U.S. Circuit Judge David J. Porter, a Donald Trump appointee, said. “Would those offenders be permanently disarmed under Rahimi?”

Soter said that while that offender would be disarmed upon conviction, they could seek mechanisms such as expungement or a pardon to regain their Second Amendment rights later.

“That’s a very steep hill to climb,” one judge muttered.

Later, U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas M. Hardiman asked Soter to point out any evidence in the record suggesting Range poses a credible threat of physical violence.

As Soter began to explain that Congress has treated Range’s crimes as worthy of disarmament, Hardiman interrupted to again ask plainly where the record indicates a credible threat of physical violence.

Soter continued, briefly mentioning Range’s criminal history before being again interrupted by an exasperated Hardiman.

“I’m not asking you to describe the record,” Hardiman, a George W. Bush appointee, snapped. “I’m asking you to cite in the record. Where in the record does he show himself to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another?”

“By being convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year,” Soter replied before Hardiman interrupted him for the third consecutive time.

“So everybody who is convicted of a crime that’s punishable by a year and a day or more, ipso facto follows that that person poses a credible threat to the physical safety of others?” Hardiman asked. “That’s your argument?”

Soter’s reply again focused on congressional categorization of felons as “dangerous enough to be disarmed,” prompting U.S. Circuit Judge Kent A. Jordan to prod the attorney as well.

“I would really like a straight answer to the question, too,” the George W. Bush appointee said. “Is it the government’s position that…by virtue of being convicted of that crime where the punishment is possibly a year and a day in prison, you are ipso facto a danger — a physical danger — to the community? Is that the government’s position?”

Once again, Soter was almost immediately interrupted by the bench.

“That’s just a yes or a no,” Jordan said. “That’s actually a yes or a no. You can say, ‘That’s not our position,’ and clarify it, or you can say, ‘That is our position,’ and clarify it. But you ought to start with a yes or a no.”

“I think the answer to that is that person is a member of a group that Congress can disarm,” Soter said shortly before his argument time had concluded.

A Tennessee law giving the appointed state attorney general authority to argue certain death penalty cases and removing that power from the hands of locally elected district attorneys is constitutional, an appeals court has ruled.

Tennessee’s Court of Criminal Appeals issued a decision Friday striking down a Shelby County judge’s ruling that the law passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature was unconstitutional.

Passed in April 2023, the law allows the attorney general to step in and take over post-conviction capital cases. Judge Paula Skahan ruled later that year that the law did not follow the Tennessee Constitution because it removes the power of the locally elected district attorney to argue them. 

The attorney general is an appointee picked by Tennessee’s Supreme Court.

Opponents of the law have called it an example of attempts by Republican governors and legislatures in several states to take on locally elected officials who have deprioritized enforcement of laws those officials deem unfair. Some attorneys and Democratic lawmakers have said the new law targets progressive district attorneys who have expressed reluctance to pursue the death penalty. 

Meanwhile, attorneys for inmates fear the state could use the law to argue against considering DNA evidence and intellectual disabilities.

Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, appealed Skahan’s decision, which affects death row inmate Larry McKay’s motion for another trial based on new evidence. Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, who stepped into the case on behalf of McKay and other district attorneys across the state, said the matter “will ultimately be decided by the Tennessee Supreme Court.”

The law involves proceedings that are outside the traditional appeals process in death penalty cases. Those include going before a trial court to present new evidence, request DNA testing, or argue that a defendant has an intellectual disability. The attorney general oversees traditional appeals. 

Skahan said that in trial court matters, the state constitution designates the district attorney as a state representative.

However, under the 2023 law, Skrmetti can replace Mulroy in McKay’s case. Mulroy supported McKay’s motion, which argued that the new law hinders the elected district attorney’s ability to fulfill his responsibilities. 

McKay’s lawyer, Robert Hutton, filed the motion to disqualify Skrmetti from intervening. Hutton has said the law was an “overreach” by the Legislature.

The law’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor, has said that district attorneys might be unfamiliar with the sometimes decades-old death penalty cases under appeal. That means the post-conviction challenges “lose their adversarial characteristic that ensures justice,” he said.

Taylor also said victims’ families would be better off communicating with just the attorney general’s office.

The appeals court ruling affects other cases in Tennessee in which death row inmates are challenging their convictions outside the appeals process. Although the Legislature cannot interfere with the district attorney’s “virtually unbridled prosecutorial discretion to initiate criminal prosecutions,” the state has long been represented by the attorney general in “proceedings collaterally attacking criminal convictions,” the appeals court said. 

Skahan made a mistake in ruling that the law transferring representation from the locally elected district attorney to the attorney general was unconstitutional, the appeals court said.

In recent years, other district attorneys around the country have refused to prosecute cases related to some Republican-passed state laws, from voting restrictions to limits on protesting. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers passed a bill in 2023 establishing a commission to discipline and remove prosecutors who they believe aren’t sufficiently fighting crime.

Mulroy, in Memphis, and Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk, in Nashville, have said that they oppose the death penalty. State Sen. Raumesh Akbari, the Democratic minority leader, has said the law shouldn’t have been changed because of possible dislike for the “policies of our more liberal district attorneys.”

McKay was convicted of two murders during a robbery in Memphis and sentenced to death more than 40 years ago. His motion claims new scientific methods have revealed that the firearms evidence presented at his trial was unreliable.

His co-defendant, Michael Sample, was released from death row after he was found to be intellectually disabled.

The Supreme Court is taking the bench again on Monday, ready to hear cases on ghost guns, a death sentence and transgender rights. 

The docket doesn’t have quite as many blockbuster cases on its docket as it did last term, when its rulings included an opinion granting broad immunity to former president Donald Trump. 

Still, it’s possible that the conservative-majority court could yet be asked to intervene in election disputes after the ballots are cast in November. 

The justices also stayed relatively busy during their summer break. The orders they issued on emergency appeals included a refusal to restore President Joe Biden’s student loan plan and a partial approval of an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to vote. 

The new term also opens against the backdrop of low public trust in the Supreme Court, and continued debate about whether their newly adopted code of ethics should have an enforcement mechanism. 

Here’s a look at some of the cases coming up: 

Ghost gun regulations 

The justices will hear a case Tuesday on regulations for ghost guns, privately made weapons that are hard for police to track because they don’t have a serial number. 

The number of the firearms found at crime scenes has soared in recent years, from fewer than 4,000 in 2018 to nearly 20,000 recovered by law enforcement in 2021, according to Justice Department data.

The numbers have been declining in multiple cities since the Biden administration began requiring background checks and age verification for ghost gun kits that can be bought online. 

But manufacturers and gun rights groups argue that the administration overstepped and the rule should be overturned. 

Doubts about a death sentence 

In the decades since Richard Glossip was sentenced to die over a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme, the case has become a rare one where prosecutors are conceding mistakes. 

Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general has joined with Glossip in seeking to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence.

Despite those doubts, an Oklahoma appeals court has upheld Glossip’s conviction, and the state’s pardon and parole board deadlocked in a vote to grant him clemency. 

The court will hear arguments in his case on Wednesday. 

Transgender rights 

Perhaps the court’s most closely watched case so far this year is a fight over transgender rights. 

The case over state bans on gender-affirming care comes as Republican-led states enact a variety of restrictions, including school sports participation, bathroom usage and drag shows.

The administration and Democratic-led states have extended protections for transgender people, though Supreme Court has separately prohibited the administration from enforcing a new federal regulation that seeks to protect transgender students. 

The justices will weigh a Tennessee law that restrict puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors. The case does not yet have a hearing date, but will likely be argued in December.

This week advocates opened the doors of a first of its kind transitional housing program in Seattle for LGBTQ+ veterans.

Minority Veterans of American, the nonprofit tasked with running the home, has signed a 50-year contract with the county to provide housing and support for LGBTQ+ veterans.

One-point-eight million dollars came from a King County levy to purchase and renovate what Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Vets, hopes will be home for many vets who pass through the Seattle area. The county estimates that there are 780 homeless veterans in the region.

Q’mmunity House, is a renovated five bedroom two-story home in West Seattle, where residents will have a place to stay for six to 18 months until they find more permanent housing.

The transitional housing is nestled into a cul-de-sac, walled off the main road by a canopy of trees, with close access to the veterans center and hospital.

Until this week, that kind of home didn’t exist anywhere in the nation for LGBTQ+ veterans who need help with housing after leaving the military, Church said.

“You leave parts of yourself in the military, you leave your parts to yourself along the road somewhere, and the ability to come home, and bring all of your pieces to a space is so important,” Church said.

When people who are LGBTQ+ leave the military, there’s not often a family or community to go home to. In addition to that, Church said people often find it easier to live in the streets or in a car than to deal with homelessness programs.

LGBTQ+ service members often have had to hide parts of themselves, as their lives are politicized, in the military, and outside of it.

“Remember, it’s the government who punished them for outing themselves when they were service members,” said Michael Kauth, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Health Program for Veterans Affairs.

“If you served during a time of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ or during the transgender ban, if you outed yourself, you were punished by losing your career and possibly losing your benefits as a veteran,” Kauth said. “So that’s a lesson that they’ve learned and carry with them after service.”

Those veterans can also encounter that Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric when they enter civilian life. That is part of the reason why Q’munnity House was established, Church said.

“Many people are looking to states like Washington and counties like King County as an opportunity for them to flee, for lack of a better word, political violence,” they said.

Now that Q’munnity House is open, the challenge is to connect people who are LGBTQ+ veterans and in need of housing to this new resource.

That’s something Ebo Barton has been wrestling with as well. Barton directs housing services at the Lavender Right’s Project in Seattle, which serves Black, gender-diverse, and intersex communities. 

Barton is also a veteran and in the middle of planning the launch of their own housing program — but finding people to connect to these housing resources can be a challenge.

“There’s a lot of reasons why. One, it’s not safe for folks to identify themselves in the current world we live in. So folks are not likely to be honest about their gender identities, and going with what the documents say,” he said.

The other reason could be that people who can “pass” for the gender they’re transitioning to are able to use that privilege to navigate the world unnoticed. And finally there is also a level of mistrust towards community-based and government organizations, Barton said.

But Barton said members of the LGBTQ+ community tend to balance this external mistrust with a lot of internal support.

“I also think that there is a level of our communities that are really good at taking care of each other,” he said.

Q’munnity House is one of several new LGBTQ+ oriented housing programs that have opened in the Seattle area in recent years, including from groups like Queer the Land, and Lavender Rights Project. The practice of community housing is part of a long standing LGBTQ+ tradition that is evolving, Barton said.

“I think that now, with the resources and the knowledge and the expertise that we have — and then learning from our histories in community — we’re getting a lot further with being able to have sustainable housing,” he said.

The Maryland State Police agreed to change the way it tests recruits and said it will pay $2.75 million to 48 women and Black applicants who were turned down for trooper jobs after they failed recruiting tests later deemed discriminatory.

The actions, approved Wednesday by the Board of Public Works, are part of a consent decree that settles a two-year civil rights investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into hiring and promotion practices by the police agency.

The probe found that the police “engaged in a pattern or practice of unintentional discrimination against African-American and female applicants” for entry-level trooper jobs, through the use of written and physical tests that disproportionately disqualified those applicants. The rejected recruits were applying to police recruiting classes from 2017 to today.

Col. Roland Butler, the Maryland State Police superintendent, stressed Wednesday that the Justice Department determined the discrimination was unintentional. But he also said the police force agreed with the findings, and that the agency is “committed to making meaningful and lasting change.”

“The fact remains that 48 men and women were deprived of the opportunity to serve and protect the communities, and they were done so unjustly and denied this opportunity unintentionally,” Butler said during testimony to the board. “However, discrimination in any form has no place in the Maryland State Police and it will not be tolerated.”

The investigation focused on two tests that are part of the process – including background checks, drug tests and interviews – to hire a new trooper.

The Police Officer Selection Test (POST) is a written test of an applicant’s abilities in math, reading, writing and grammar. A passing grade is 70%, and would-be officers can retake the test up to four times in a year in an effort to pass. Applicants who fail are eliminated from the program.

The Functional Fitness Assessment Test requires applicants to do 18 pushups in a minute and 27 situps in a minute, run 1.5 miles in 15 minutes, 20 seconds, and be able to reach 1.5 inches past their toes while seated to test their flexibility. All four parts of the test have to be successfully completed to pass, but applicants can try three times in a year before being eliminated.

According to the Justice Department investigation, however, the skills assessed in those two tests were not actually essential to a trooper’s job performance. And while 91% of white applicants were ultimately able to pass the POST test, just 71% of Black applicants were able to so. On the physical test, 51% of women passed compared to 81% of men.

“The Justice Department found that MdSP (Maryland State Police) used discriminatory hiring practices that wrongfully disqualified Black and female state trooper candidates,” said Sarah Marquardt, an assistant U.S. attorney involved in the case.

In addition to a cash payment, the police department will offer jobs, with seniority dating back to the year they applied, to at least 25 of the 48 Black and woman applicants who have been rejected since 2017, under the settlement. The agency will also develop new tests, under the supervision of the Justice Department, that are nondiscriminatory.

Because the new tests will take time to develop, the Justice Department has agreed to let the police keep using the two flawed tests, but with relaxed standards – no time limit to complete the run or the pushups, for example. But that concerned Treasurer Dereck Davis and Comptroller Brooke Lierman who, with the governor, make up the Board of Public Works.

“Why are we still doing it? … Why aren’t they completely eliminated?” Davis asked of the tests. “If it’s not related to the job, then it doesn’t need to be a part of the process.”

Davis worried that by removing objective standards like the time limits for the physical test, the outcomes would be more subjective, which “lends itself to be more discriminatory.”

But Butler said it’s important to keep the tests, with relaxed standards, so that police have a baseline for applicants and might be able to help them focus on areas where they can improve.

Davis was also concerned with a request Wednesday from the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for $70,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by an inmate who claimed corrections officers used excessive force during a strip search. Davis said he fears that the state is too quick to settle and is paying out millions as a result.

“Why are we settling?” Davis asked. “We seem to look at how much more we could be paying (by going to trial), and I’m looking at it as how much more we could be saving.”

He estimated that the board spent $10 million on settlements last year, and wanted to know why the department was not taking more cases to trial.

“It just seems there’s this reluctance to take a case to trial. I’m just going to say it: Are we afraid of Black jurors and Black juries, especially when the [inmates] are Black?”asked Davis, who is Black.Joseph Sedtal, the deputy secretary of administration for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said the department is not happy about the payouts, either. But he said the decision to settle a case is driven not by the racial makeup of a potential jury, but by the facts of each case and a recent trend overall of increasing verdicts in all jury trials.

“With any of these, it’s a cost-benefit analysis,” Sedtal said. “Do we think a jury’s going to come back with a verdict in the six- seven-figure range, or does a $50,000 settlement make sense?”

He said the board was only seeing the cases that are settled, and not the ones that the department fights.

“Around 90-91% of these cases are ultimately getting kicked out,” Sedtal said.

The case settled Wednesday was frustrating to Davis because corrections officials said they believe the officer involved largely followed a 15-step protocol for a strip search. Because of privacy concerns, however, there is no video of the actual strip search and Sedtal said what actually happened in that short window becomes “our word against theirs.”

“And their word is more credible than yours,” Davis said. “That’s essentially what we’re saying.”

“I would like to think of settlements as more of a rarity, as opposed to a regularity,” said Davis, who worried that “the word is out” among inmates that the state will settle.

Lierman asked Sedtal for data on the number of cases pursued and won by the department compared to the number settled.

“Are you actually litigating these, if so, what’s your success rate?” she asked.

“If somebody has been wronged, we should be paying that person and the employee should be retrained or released,” Lierman said. “But we can’t have strip searches that were done properly cost the state $50,000 each.”

The legal provision struck down Saturday by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez is contained in S.B. 1, a controversial and sprawling Texas Senate omnibus bill first enacted in 2021.

Among a variety of the bill’s features, it imposed restrictions and criminal penalties for canvassing methods used commonly by outreach groups and volunteers alike trying to assist voters with the completion or submission of their ballots, including absentee or mail-in ballots. 

When Texas enacted S.B. 1, the state deemed that “vote harvesting” methods would be considered a third-degree felony going forward and that convicted violators could face up to 10 years in prison and be forced to pay a fine of up to $10,000. 

The notion of “vote harvesting,” however, was ill-defined in the legislation. 

Paxton and Republicans in Texas championed the canvassing restrictions as a tool to fight voter fraud. In recent weeks, Texas law enforcement has raided the homes of a Democratic candidate for the Texas state house, a local mayor and Latino voting rights activists. 

But Rodriguez said the canvassing language was confusing and overly vague, and that enforcement of the provision could infringe on the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights of people and entities who — long before S.B. 1 was ever enacted — engaged in common practices like hosting in-person candidate forums, giving voting machine demonstrations or providing language assistance to voters on how to complete ballots. 

The judge noted, for example, that it was commonplace for bilingual volunteers to knock on doors in Texas and find that the person at home may need help translating something. 

Canvassers for groups such as plaintiff OCA-Houston, for example, a network representing Asian American and Pacific Islanders in Texas, may also provide prospective voters with things like Gatorade or water if they are out in the elements. 

This, according to Paxton, is an illicit “benefit.” 

S.B. 1 as a whole was challenged in court for the first time in September 2021 when voting rights group La Union del Pueblo Entero brought a lawsuit on behalf of numerous voting and civil rights groups, Texas election officials and individual voters. 

The group’s lawsuit was consolidated with a series of other similarly situated claims, including those from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. A bench trial was held over several weeks and ended in October 2023. The court weighed allegations that S.B. 1 chilled the plaintiff’s rights and imposed hurdles on groups that have already experienced disproportionate discrimination in Texas. 

Notably, S.B. 1 banned 24-hour drive-thru voting in Texas, something made popular after the COVID-19 pandemic. S.B. 1 also made it a crime for poll workers to “take any action” that may make a poll watcher’s observation “not reasonably effective,” one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, Leah Tulin, said during closing arguments, according to the Brennan Center for Justice . 

During the state’s last election, this factor alone, Tulin said, led several county election officials in Texas to report that they “witnessed poll watchers behave in ways that made both election workers and voters feel uncomfortable, harassed, and intimidated.” 

Even poll watchers who acted in good faith now feel intimidated by the threat of criminal liability for merely doing their jobs, Tulin argued. 

Rodriguez’s order only addresses the canvassing restrictions. The decision means that Paxton is now stopped from conducting probes into alleged “vote harvesting.” 

“The County DAs are permanently enjoined from deputizing the Attorney General, appointing him pro tem, or seeking his appointment pro tem from or by a district judge to prosecute alleged violations of TEC § 276.015 that occur within their jurisdictions,” the 78-page order states. 

As HuffPost previously reported, an 87-year-old volunteer for the League of United Latin American Citizens said she was questioned for hours by armed police officers gripping riot shields. She wasn’t the only one. Dozens of volunteers were confronted by authorities, and some said they had guns pointed in their faces and their phones seized. Two of the volunteers allegedly targeted by Paxton’s investigators for so-called “vote harvesting” were a 73-year-old and 80-year-old LULAC member. A Texas state director for LULAC said the raids were an “intimidation tactic” used on Texas’s Latino community. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas celebrated Rodriguez’s ruling, saying on X, formerly Twitter, that it was a “win for voting rights in the state and the organizations that help keep elections accessible.”

A municipal garbage disposal policy in Chickasaw, Alabama, is regarded by its citizens as punitive, experts say it’s illegal.

Chickasaw, Alabama’s garbage policy allows residents to be arrested or issued a criminal summons if they get behind on their sewer or garbage bills. If convicted under the city’s ordinance, residents of this small suburb just outside of Mobile face a fine between $25 and $500 and a jail sentence not exceeding 10 days. 

According to Inside Climate News, in 2021, the city passed an ordinance on outstanding bills. The ordinance charges a $25 fee for each month the original bill goes unpaid and does not allow debtors to make partial payments. 

Investigators for the outlet determined that the ordinance, passed by an all-white city council, disproportionately harms the city’s Black population. Although the racial makeup of the city is relatively evenly distributed among white and Black citizens, the policy has had a disastrous effect on women, Black residents, and people with disabilities. 

Chickasaw’s history tells a more troubling story. According to Inside Climate News, the city was founded as a whites-only company town in the early 20th century. This exclusionary practice continued until 1980 when a federal court case revealed that Chickasaw had long been perceived as a “Caucasian town” and that no Black residents had lived there since World War II.

Following that lawsuit, Chickasaw’s Black population began to climb; however, the city’s leadership remained white.

According to Shaquala Jackson, a former resident who also faced problems after the city charged her with “theft of service,” the city’s past is bleeding into its present. 

“I was always told that Chickasaw was a ‘No Black Zone’ for many years,” Jackson told Inside Climate News. “So maybe they just want to get the Black people out of ‘their’ area.”

According to Southern Poverty Law Center legal experts, Chickasaw’s policy of prosecuting its residents over unpaid garbage bills violates Alabama and federal law. 

On Sept. 11, SPLC lawyers sent a letter to Chickasaw’s city attorney indicating that the city was violating constitutional provisions at both the state and federal levels.

“Our review of the City’s billing practices, its theft of service ordinance, nearly 200 criminal case files, and conversations with dozens of Chickasaw residents indicate that the City’s practices violate multiple constitutional provisions and state and federal laws,” the SPLC’s lawyers wrote. 

A similar case unfolded in Alabama in 2022 when Valley, a city in Alabama located along the Chattahoochee River, made national headlines after police arrested Martha Menefield, an 82-year-old woman, over her unpaid garbage bills. 

Now, it appears that prosecuting citizens for falling behind on garbage bills is a more widespread practice than Micah West, an SPLC lawyer, previously believed.

The Oregon Board of Parole granted a release date of Jan. 9 to prominent incarcerated legal expert Mark Wilson, whose litigation efforts inside prison have helped thousands of other prisoners.

Wilson’s upcoming release date is only possible because of his recent lawsuit against the corrections department, which ended in a settlement earlier this year. That lawsuit was the second time the department agreed to settle with Wilson over retaliation claims. 

In 1987, when Wilson was 18 and addicted to methamphetamine, he participated in a double homicide during a home burglary. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two life sentences with the possibility of parole in exchange for testifying in his codefendants’ trials. The family members of the victims, Rod and Lois Houser, opposed Wilson’s release. 

Wilson started working as an incarcerated legal assistant shortly after he entered prison as a teenager, because he saw it as a way he could make a positive contribution even if he spent the rest of his life behind bars. The Supreme Court held in 1977 that people in prison have a constitutional right of access to the courts, requiring prisons to provide law libraries or assistance from people with legal training. 

Wilson quickly developed a reputation among prisoners and lawyers on the outside as a talented and fearless legal assistant, taking on complex cases that came with significant risk of retaliation. In 2001, Wilson spearheaded a class-action lawsuit against the DOC on behalf of a group of prisoners who were being denied treatment for hepatitis C, an infection that affected about 30% of Oregon’s prison population at the time. The lawsuit ended in a settlement, which led to improvements in the department’s evaluation and treatment policies — and forced the department to spend millions on hepatitis C medication. 

“That lawsuit and the resulting settlement of it has saved thousands of lives and I attribute that to Mark’s dedication,” civil rights attorney Michelle Burrows, who helped Wilson file the hepatitis C lawsuit, said in Wilson’s first parole hearing in 2009. “Mark taught me everything I know, I truly believe, about prisoner litigation,” Burrows said. 

Soon after the settlement, DOC transferred Wilson to a remote, more dangerous prison, and blocked him from working as a legal assistant. He sued the corrections department for retaliation in 2006 and eventually reached a settlement that transferred him back to Salem in the Oregon State Correctional Institution, where he resumed work as a legal assistant. 

Oregon has a complicated three-part parole process. Generally, after an individual has served their minimum sentence, they have a hearing where the parole board assesses their rehabilitation. If the board determines the individual is “likely to be rehabilitated within a reasonable period of time,” there is a second hearing to set a tentative release date. Ahead of that tentative release date, there is an “exit interview” hearing to assess the individual’s release plan, their mental and emotional health, and their disciplinary record in prison. If the board rules in favor of the individual, it sets an actual release date. 

In practice, at each step, the hearings typically focus extensively on the crime committed. The process is so convoluted that Wilson wrote an 88-page guide to help others prepare for their rehabilitation hearing. 

Wilson’s first parole hearing was in 2009. By then, he had completed years of drug treatment, volunteered in the prison’s hospice, earned his GED and associates degree, facilitated victim empathy groups, and raised thousands of dollars for the children of a woman who was murdered, in addition to his legal work. His only disciplinary violation was from 1991 when he and 20 other people protested prison wages by declining to return to work for an afternoon. 

Asked by board members what led to his crimes, Wilson described how he coped with childhood sexual abuse through drugs and alcohol, and became addicted to meth by his senior year of high school. The board ruled against Wilson, citing his descriptions of his childhood as “attempts to deflect blame” and “minimize his actual accountability.” The board accused him of “being able to recite the ‘right words’ about guilt, empathy and responsibility” without experiencing “genuine humility and contrition.” 

Wilson did not request another hearing until years later. In his 2017 hearing, he said that he did not want to cause his victims’ family members additional pain, but he also recognized his own family’s need to see him try to come home. Again, the board ruled against him, this time accusing him of “shifting the burden and harm to the victims from these hearings off of himself and on to his family.” 

Wilson finally received a finding of rehabilitation in 2019. By then, he had earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon, served as a teaching assistant, completed a 200-hour yoga instructor training program, and became the first incarcerated person to be part of an Oregon state legislature working group. The board set a projected release date of Jan. 9, 2027, with the possibility of release as soon as August 2022 if he received time reductions for good behavior. 

But in 2021, Wilson feared his chances of ever leaving prison had been dashed by a baseless disciplinary finding. 

Several years prior, top Oregon Department of Corrections officials traveled to Norway to tour their comparatively humane prisons. When they returned, they unveiled the so-called “Oregon Way,” a “philosophical approach to corrections” rooted in “humanizing and normalizing the prison environment.” 

DOC library coordinator Pam McKinney, Wilson’s boss in the law library, believed in the Oregon Way, hanging pictures and motivational quotes on the walls of the library. It was in this spirit that McKinney placed a plastic children’s toy phone on Wilson’s desk in early 2020, a joking reference to the number of phone calls he received at work.

Library coordinator Pam McKinney gave incarcerated legal assistant Mark Wilson a toy phone that looked like this one — a joking reference to the number of calls he received at work. Oregon’s Department of Corrections later cited the toy as evidence that Wilson had “compromised” McKinney. 

When Wilson saw the toy phone on his desk, he laughed politely and moved it to a nearby shelf, where it remained for nearly a year. But in January 2021, prison officials confiscated the toy phone, removed Wilson from his job as a legal assistant, and told him he was under investigation. At the time, Wilson was working on several high-stakes cases that had significant financial implications for DOC, including a class-action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners whose medical records were breached. 

Later that year, prison officials formally accused Wilson of violating several prison rules, most significantly, “compromising” McKinney, a prison employee. They cited the toy phone as “evidence” of an “unauthorized personal relationship,” despite providing no evidence of such a relationship. 

The corrections department held a disciplinary hearing during which Wilson was handcuffed and locked in a cage without a lawyer or access to documents he planned to use in his defense. 

Wilson was found guilty of the misconduct allegations and punished with four months in solitary confinement, one of the harshest punishments available within Oregon’s prison system. Barred from doing legal work, many of his cases languished. Most critically, the misconduct finding shattered Wilson’s chance of release. 

During the exit interview, the third stage of the parole process, the board reviews the individual’s disciplinary record and can cite misconduct as a reason to defer release for up to 10 years at a time, indefinitely. 

In late 2021, Wilson sued prison officials, again alleging retaliation. His 2022 potential early release date came and went as the litigation moved forward. In April 2024, Wilson agreed to settle the case in exchange for DOC vacating the disciplinary findings, processing his request for good-time credit, and paying him $50,000. 

As a result, Wilson headed into his exit interview last week with no disciplinary record since his 1991 wage protest action. 

Wilson has three job offers to continue his legal work, including one from the Oregon Justice Resource Center, the nonprofit that represented him in the recent retaliation lawsuit and employs formerly incarcerated people Wilson used to work with in the law library. 

At Wilson’s final parole hearing earlier this month , family members of the victims restated their opposition to his release, saying they did not believe he was remorseful about the crime. Deschutes County District Attorney Steve Gunnels said in a letter to the board that Wilson’s efforts to seek release demonstrated an “ongoing pattern of self-entitlement and callousness” toward his victims. 

Wilson’s parole packet included support letters from former Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel and state Sen. Michael Dembrow (D), who attended Wilson’s college graduation ceremony and invited him to participate in a legislative workgroup on prison education. Shirley Fishbaugh, Wilson’s 93-year-old grandmother, wrote it was her “greatest wish to see him sitting once again next to me in my home.” 

Several people who were incarcerated with Wilson wrote of the transformative impact he had on their time in prison. “I honestly received more help from Mark in my first couple months than I have ever received from DOC in general,” wrote Cayce French, who described how Wilson looked out for him when he was transferred out of juvenile custody into adult prison. 

Wilson’s dedication as a legal assistant “was unparalleled,” wrote Matthew Sexton. “He was always approachable whether he was on the clock or not, to answer questions, concerns or simply just provide an ear for someone in emotional distress. Countless [adults in custody], myself included, greatly benefited from his generosity of his time, wisdom, and support.”

Democratic US Senator Ron Wyden on Thursday introduced the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act, a bill aimed at reforming the United States Supreme Court. The proposed legislation seeks to expand the court from nine to fifteen justices among other reforms. 

Beyond adding six new justices to the Court, Senator Wyden’s proposal seeks to implement new requirements on judicial transparency. It would require judges to consider recusal and write public opinions about their decisions.

Further, the law would require the Internal Revenue Service to audit each justice’s tax returns promptly after they are filed. The provisions on judicial transparency appear to respond to recent investigative reports by ProPublica.

Among other allegations, the organization accused Justice Clarence Thomas of failing to report sizeable gifts, raising concerns about judicial independence. Relatedly, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced articles of impeachment against Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito following Propublica’s findings.

Finally, Senator Wyden’s proposal would change the requirements of judicial review of legislation. Currently, a simple majority of the Supreme Court or circuit courts of appeals can strike down legislation; whereas, Wyden’s proposal would require a two-thirds majority to overturn legislation.

Despite the bold proposals, the bill faces significant hurdles. Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate, and Republicans narrowly control the House of Representatives, making passage unlikely. However, Senator Wyden remains committed, stating on social media platform X (formerly Twitter): “I think we can all agree it’s time to reform the Supreme Court. As of today, I have the bill to do it.” 

Public support for expanding the Supreme Court appears limited. A September 13th survey revealed that only 3 of every 10 Americans supported expanding the Supreme Court. In comparison, nearly two-thirds support introducing term limits to the court. 

Following former president Trump’s appointment of three justices during his terms, Democrats have increasingly discussed the possibility of expanding the court. Earlier this year, President Joe Biden penned an editorial in the New York Times arguing for reforms, including expansion of the nations highest court. Though the plan drew some criticism, Democrats argue that adding seats to the court could minimize the long-term influence of any single president.

Meanwhile, organizations like the Brennan Centre have alternatively advocated for imposing term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Two days after the State of Missouri executed Imam Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels ‘Abdul-Qudduus, 55, also known as Marcellus Williams, Black America is still, once again, grappling with the reality that laws created and enacted upon this stolen land were neither designed to protect us, nor—at barest minimum—treat us fairly. 

We allegedly live in a nation where we are innocent until proven guilty; that’s what it says on paper. Yet, Khaliifah—who chose his name upon taking the Shahada, the formal declaration of Islamic faith—was killed with no credible evidence supporting his guilt. In fact, the opposite is true: the stunning lack of credible evidence supported his innocence. Still, in a system that is not broken—a system functioning exactly as it was created to function—the life of this father, grandfather, spiritual leader, and poet did not matter. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” did not apply to him, as it disproportionately does not apply to far too many Black and Brown people in this fraudulently named Land of the Free.

I interviewed Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In that compelling conversation, we discussed the capital punishment and Stevenson said, in part: 

“We, in the African American community, have always known that the criminal justice system is a threat, that it will take people who are innocent or wrongly convicted and it will treat people unfairly…but we keep fighting. I became a lawyer because I really did want to have the skills and abilities to get behind the limitations of democracy…I always want to use that power to help people who are disfavored and disadvantaged, to help people like the people I grew up with.”

Sept. 21 marked 13 years since the State of Georgia killed Troy Davis. He was 42 years old. Just as in Khaliifah’s case, the U.S. Supreme Court had the power and opportunity to stay his execution again. But despite his alleged guilt not proven beyond a reasonable doubt—in fact, there was evidence supporting his innocence, as well—the nine justices declined to intervene. 

Every year, I think of him, still, even more so this year in the hours before the State of Missouri executed Khaliifah. I remember the massive outcry as every lever of our government—judicial, legislative, and executive—failed this man. There was a complete abandonment of any pretense that his Black life held any value beyond the cost to convict, incarcerate, and ultimately execute him. 

It was judicial homicide. 

And here we are again. Knowing that at any moment—whether by a police officer’s bullet, a judge’s gavel, or a governor’s pen — our Black lives, our children’s Black lives, our mothers’ or our fathers’ Black lives, our sisters’ or our brothers’ Black lives, could be snatched away without repercussion. We know this beyond a reasonable doubt, unlike the alleged guilt of Khaliifah and Davis. 

Here we are again. Left pondering the incontrovertible fact that if everyone guilty of murder were convicted, sentenced and executed, there would be police departments across this country a lot smaller tonight. 

This week, I sat down with civil rights leader and attorney Lee Merritt. Lee is known for being front-and-center, and behind the scenes, fighting for justice for Jacqueline Craig, Jordan Edwards, Atatiana Jefferson, Botham Jean, Ahmaud Arbery, and many more Black people who have been harmed—and, in too many instances, killed by police officers emboldened by the machinations of a white supremacist system that desecrates Black lives with impunity. 

The toll this work takes on him is heavy, but the responsibility and honor he feels working in service to Black people is greater. We discussed his journey as a Black attorney navigating the judicial system and how Bryan Stevenson’s work informs his own practice. We also discussed the synchronicity between the Black Freedom Struggle and fighting to free Palestine from Israel’s 76 yearslong illegal occupation and genocide—something Khaliifah so beautifully and bravely addressed in his poem, “ The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine.” And, as someone committed to justice outside of the courtroom every day, he shared his lived-in experience as a Black man in this nation who, yet again, bore witness to a legal lynching. 

Watch and listen to Lee’s powerful, poignant responses here. Be moved by them, yes; but more importantly, be called to action. To the family of Imam Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels ‘Abdul-Qudduus, to his friends, loved ones, and all the men incarcerated with him who found strength in his leadership, friendship, creativity, and spiritual wisdom, to Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty (MADP), the organizers who fought so tirelessly, too often without support, to save his life: We rage with you. We grieve with you.