Justice
“Little Home Market”: The Connecticut Company Accused of Fueling an Execution Spree
The Intercept has uncovered new details about the small family business in Connecticut identified as having sold a lethal drug to the Federal Bureau of Prisons for use in the Trump administration’s unprecedented execution spree. Beginning in July 2020, the administration killed 13 people in the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, over the course of six months.
Absolute Standards Inc., located on the outskirts of New Haven, produces and sells materials used to calibrate laboratory and research instruments. The company is registered with Connecticut as a “manufacturer of drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices” and employed just 21 people in the lead-up to the executions, records show.
John Criscio, the company’s owner, has denied that Absolute Standards played a role in supplying pentobarbital, a barbiturate used for lethal injection.
But according to a source The Intercept interviewed last year, Criscio and the company’s director, Stephen Arpie, acknowledged in a meeting that Absolute Standards produced the active ingredient for pentobarbital for use in the federal executions. The person, who met with Criscio and Arpie about the possibility of obtaining lethal injection drugs, asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the interaction. A separate unnamed pharmacy then used the active ingredient, or API, to make an injectable drug that would stop prisoners’ hearts.
“They went about explaining to us how they produce the chemical,” the person said of Criscio and Arpie. “They’d been reading about it in the papers. And they saw that people couldn’t get it. They were like, ‘Well, we make the standard, so we know how to make it. So we can just make it.’ They basically bragged about how they built this little home market.”
A second person interviewed by The Intercept said they were also told by Arpie and Criscio that Absolute Standards made drugs for executions.
Like many of the 27 states capable of carrying out death sentences, the federal government has fought to keep the identity of its supplier hidden from the public. Earlier this month, the comedy news program “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” named Absolute Standards as the Bureau of Prisons’ drug supplier, citing an anonymous source. The segment echoed reporting by Reuters, which noted in 2020 that the House Oversight Committee had sent a letter to Absolute Standards suspecting the business was the source of the drugs. At the time, Arpie told Reuters that he did not always keep track of the final use of his products and couldn’t rule out involvement.
Interviews conducted by The Intercept and documents obtained under public records laws bolster evidence that Absolute Standards, located in a state that abolished the death penalty in 2012, helped the Trump administration resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. A Connecticut congressional staffer raised concerns about the company’s role in the executions as early as April 2021, suggesting that states might be looking to follow the federal government’s lead. “As Absolute Standards has been identified as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for executions,” the staffer warned, “the risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”
When asked about pentobarbital, Criscio told The Intercept, “We don’t make that material.” Arpie did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the BOP declined to comment.
The federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., on Aug. 28, 2020.
Photo: Michael Conroy/AP
In August 2018, Absolute Standards applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital, according to a notice in the Federal Register. The designation allows for the production of chemicals “by means of chemical synthesis or by extraction from other substances.” A few months later, in October, the BOP received its first batch of the API for pentobarbital, according to a declaration by Raul Campos, then-associate warden of the BOP’s Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The declaration was submitted as part of litigation over the Trump administration’s lethal injection protocol.
(The Intercept requested Absolute Standards’ applications to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital in August 2023. On Monday, the DEA declined to hand over those records, stating that they were exempt from disclosure, in part because they included “information that is classified to protect national security.”)
For years, pharmaceutical companies refused to sell pentobarbital for use in capital punishment, creating shortages that halted executions in some states that relied on the drug. Acquiring the API marked the end of a yearslong search for the BOP.
“We were looking for the drugs domestically and internationally,” a former BOP official with knowledge of the situation told The Intercept last year. The official asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the procurement of execution drugs. “There were a number of leads that looked promising and then ended up being dry.”
Out for Blood
Eager to restart executions, the Trump administration had prioritized locating lethal drugs. But U.S. manufacturers did not want their products to be associated with killing people because they feared it would hurt their bottom line. “There’s such a lobby against the death penalty that any company who becomes identified as providing the drugs gets boycotted,” the BOP official said. “Those companies make more money from legitimate uses of the drug than they do from executions.” It was equally difficult to find drugs internationally, the official added, because of “shady characters” and issues confirming the legitimacy of suppliers.
A team within the BOP general counsel’s office, led by then-general counsel Kenneth Hyle, was in charge of vetting potential suppliers. “More often than not, the companies they identified turned out to be nonviable,” the official said. Hyle did not respond to requests for comment.
The former official did not remember how the BOP identified Absolute Standards but said there was a team of people calling suppliers off a list. “I know that we had people that were just calling every company that they could to find out if they were able and willing to produce it.”
Only a small group of people knew the name of the API supplier, according to the official, who was only aware that it was a small company based in Connecticut. “I had no reason to ask for the name,” the official said.
The API failed its first quality assurance test in October 2018, according to the declaration submitted by Campos. Another batch of the pentobarbital ingredient passed testing in February 2019 and was sent to a compounding pharmacy to be made into an injectable solution. The BOP has not revealed the identity of the compounding pharmacy. The former BOP official told The Intercept that they did not remember the name of the pharmacy, only that it was located somewhere in the South.
“The fear was that publicity would result in this company no longer wanting … to do business.”
Typically, the government logs payments to vendors in an online database, but there is no public record of any BOP payments to Absolute Standards. “I don’t recall how it was done. It was probably not done through their normal payments process,” the former BOP official said. “Everything was done discreetly, because again, the fear was that publicity would result in this company no longer wanting to be willing to do business.”
After learning that the BOP had secured execution drugs, officials from other states started inquiring about whether they could buy from the same company. An official from Nebraska, which was prevented in 2015 from importing drugs from India, asked the BOP about its source. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services did not respond to questions about the communication.
In April 2019, an attorney adviser from the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs emailed colleagues to notify them that a staffer from South Carolina Rep. William Timmons’s office had asked about the federal government’s execution drugs. “Specifically, they ask 1. Does the Federal Government have the ‘cocktail’? 2. Could they transfer it to states under existing law?” the email read.
Timmons’s deputy chief of staff, Heather Smith, told The Intercept that the employee who inquired with the BOP no longer worked for the representative. Smith did not know whether the employee ever talked to Absolute Standards.
South Carolina has not conducted an execution since May 2011 due to drug shortages. But last September, officials announced that the state had secured pentobarbital. After The Intercept requested records detailing communications between the South Carolina Department of Corrections and Absolute Standards, the corrections team replied that such information was exempt from disclosure, citing in part a state secrecy law that shields records disclosing the identity of people and companies involved in executions. The corrections department did not comment when asked whether its response meant that Absolute Standards was providing the state with execution drugs.
In the summer of 2020, as the federal executions got underway, Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., started to raise questions about Absolute Standards’ involvement. They sent a letter to the company on July 14, the same day the government killed Daniel Lewis Lee, the first person to die in the execution spree, stating that they’d seen redacted testing reports “indicating that your company has assisted DOJ in securing and/or testing pentobarbital for death penalty executions.” The lawmakers posed a list of 11 questions to Absolute Standards about its work in the executions. The company did not reply, emails obtained by The Intercept show.
There is no public record of further investigation by the lawmakers into Absolute Standards.
Pressley’s office did not return multiple requests for comment, and Raskin’s press secretary told The Intercept to contact the House Oversight Committee. Nelly Decker, the communications director for Oversight Committee Democrats, wrote in an email that she had “nothing more to add” on the inquiry.
“The risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”
In April 2021, Jennifer Lamb, the district director for Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., brought Absolute Standards to the attention of state Attorney General William Tong. “It appears the company may have supplied the US Department of Justice with ingredients used to make pentobarbital for use in federal executions,” Lamb wrote.
“There are several states that are now actively looking to follow the federal government’s lead in acquiring this drug and resuming executions,” she continued. Describing Absolute Standards as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for capital punishment, Lamb warned that Connecticut could be complicit in clearing the way for executions across the country.
The following month, Tong sent a letter to Absolute Standards informing its owners that “Connecticut has a strong public policy against executions.” Providing drugs to carry them out, he wrote, “is contrary to the values and policies of this state.” Tong requested details about the company’s activities, expressing concern that the business might “also be providing pentobarbital, or contemplating providing the drug, for use by individual states in their attempts to execute human beings.” Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Joshua Perry, named in the letter as the point of contact for future correspondence, declined to comment.
After John Oliver named Absolute Standards as the BOP’s source, a spokesperson for Tong told CT Insider that the attorney general was reviewing the company but had not launched an investigation. The outlet also reported that state lawmakers are now exploring legislation to ban Connecticut companies from selling lethal injection drugs.
Abe Bonowitz of Death Penalty Action protests near the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., on July 15, 2020.
Photo: Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Absolute Standards is known for its flexibility in the scientific industry. “They can pivot pretty easily as far as what the needs are of whatever industries,” said Meredith Millay, director of product management at Emerald Scientific, a company focused on cannabis science that has worked with Absolute Standards for a decade and sells products made by the Connecticut business. “If you need something and you can’t find what you need … they are small enough to where you can put in a special request and get custom standards made.”
Absolute Standards has boasted about the “world class manufacturing” and “internationally recognized quality” of its analytical reference materials and performance evaluation samples, compounds used to calibrate lab equipment and increase the precision of scientific analysis conducted by a wide range of entities. Criscio started the business in 1990, later employing his son and daughter. The company is registered with the DEA to manufacture Schedule II through V drugs, according to documents filed with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection. When asked about Absolute Standards and the API for pentobarbital, the DEA said it “does not comment on specific registrants.”
In recent years, the company netted contracts with the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, contracts and invoices obtained through records requests show. In 2017, for example, the company sold the Interior Department $88,500 worth of analytes in substances such as ethanol and soil. State agencies such as the California State Water Resources Control Board and the New York Office of Cannabis Management list Absolute Standards as one of a handful of vendors approved to conduct testing to ensure the quality of lab results.
Criscio has vehemently denied his company’s role in executions. Last October, The Intercept visited the Absolute Standards office, a small one-story building covered in weathered aluminum siding. When The Intercept inquired about Criscio at the reception desk, a woman said that he was out for the rest of the week. But later in the afternoon, Criscio arrived at the office, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the NASA logo.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing to talk about,” Criscio told The Intercept in the parking lot after being asked whether his company supplied execution drugs. “You’re on private property. If I have to, I’ll call the police. Is that what you want me to do?” He then went inside.
After The Intercept approached another man outside to ask about pentobarbital, Criscio reemerged and called the police, telling the operator, “I have two people on my property refusing to leave, harassing my employees.”
“I’m ready to have a fucking heart attack right now. Get off my fucking property,” he said, growing increasingly agitated. “I do not know what you’re talking about. That’s all I have to say. I’m not gonna say no more.”
The Intercept left a note at an address listed for Arpie, the company’s director. He did not reply and has not answered subsequent phone calls, text messages, or emails.
In early April, after the John Oliver segment, Criscio maintained that his company did not supply drugs for the federal executions.
“Yeah, no, we don’t make that material,” he told The Intercept. “I’m the owner of the company. I’m telling you there’s no comment. Thank you, goodbye.”
This story was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.
The post “Little Home Market”: The Connecticut Company Accused of Fueling an Execution Spree appeared first on The Intercept.
A Prosecutor Asked Texas to Kill Melissa Lucio. Now He Says She Should Be Freed.
On the night that 2-year-old Mariah Alvarez died, a Child Protective Services investigator made her way to the Harlingen, Texas, police station to interview the toddler’s siblings.
Mariah’s lifeless body had arrived at a local hospital covered in bruises, which authorities immediately assumed were evidence of abuse. Her mother, 38-year-old Melissa Lucio, who had a history of being investigated by the child welfare agency, tried to explain that Mariah had fallen down a flight of stairs. But the police subjected Lucio to a punishing late-night interrogation lasting more than five hours. After repeatedly denying that she killed her daughter, Lucio finally conceded that she was responsible. In 2008, Lucio was convicted of murder and sentenced to die.
The possibility that Mariah’s death was not murder but the result of a tragic accident was never investigated. Police ignored evidence that included a report compiled by the child welfare investigator, Florence Arreola, who interviewed several of Mariah’s siblings while Lucio was being interrogated in another room. The children corroborated their mother’s account, reiterating that Mariah had fallen down the stairs two days earlier. Lucio had never abused Mariah, they said, and the only injuries they saw on the toddler were bruises “from when she fell.”
Jurors at Lucio’s trial never heard these statements. Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos withheld Arreola’s report from the defense, casting Mariah’s death as the violent culmination of “a cruel and brutal life” at the hands of her mother. Despite Lucio’s insistence that she was innocent, the DA’s office spent years defending her conviction, seeking an execution date in 2022. Lucio came within two days of execution before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals intervened, sending the case back to the trial court to consider whether withholding the evidence had violated Lucio’s constitutional rights.
In a dramatic reversal, the DA’s office now admits that Villalobos failed to disclose the exculpatory statements. Today, Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz agrees with Lucio’s attorneys that, had the records been disclosed, Lucio likely would not have been convicted. In a joint filing with the attorneys, Saenz told the trial court that Lucio’s conviction should be overturned.
On April 12, two years after Lucio narrowly avoided execution, Cameron County Judge Arturo Nelson signed off on the agreement. The case is now back before the Court of Criminal Appeals, which will decide whether to grant the joint request to vacate Lucio’s conviction. If it does, Lucio will have spent 16 years on death row for a crime that never happened. There is no timeline for the court to rule.
In a statement, Lucio’s family thanked her legal team and the district attorney’s office alike. “We hope and pray the Court of Criminal Appeals will agree with the District Attorney, the defense, and Judge Nelson and our mother can come home to her family. It’s been 17 years that we have been without her. We love her and miss her and can’t wait to hug her.”
Melissa Lucio with five of her children.
Photo: Courtesy of the Lucio family
The case against Melissa Lucio was full of red flags, from a coerced interrogation and reliance on junk forensics to lackluster defense lawyering and prosecutorial misconduct. “I’ve been doing capital defense work in Texas for 30 years,” Sandra Babcock, a Cornell Law School professor who is now part of Lucio’s defense team, told The Intercept in 2022. “And this is by far the weakest capital case I’ve ever seen.”
Lucio was prosecuted by embattled District Attorney Villalobos, who used the case to boost his tough-on-crime reputation as part of his reelection campaign. At the time of Lucio’s 2008 trial, Villalobos was facing corruption charges and a challenger who had taken him to task for failing to prosecute child abuse cases. In the wake of the conviction, Villalobos became known as the man who sent the first Latina woman to Texas’s death row. The district attorney was subsequently sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for racketeering and extortion.
Lucio was represented by defense lawyer Peter Gilman, who had never handled a death penalty case and went on to work at the DA’s office immediately after the trial. A mitigation specialist who worked for Gilman later said that the lawyer had refused to pursue exculpatory evidence that could have saved his client’s life.
Related
Is Texas Sending Melissa Lucio to Die for a Crime That Never Happened?
The state’s evidence against Lucio went mostly unchallenged until 2010, when veteran forensic pathologist Thomas Young reviewed the medical evidence. Young concluded that there had been a rush to judgment by medical examiner Norma Farley, who told the court that simply upon seeing Mariah’s body, she knew that the child had died from abuse. “This child was severely abused,” Farley told the jury at Lucio’s trial. “I mean, it would have been evident to a first-year nursing student.”
But Farley’s examination didn’t occur until after Lucio had been interrogated for hours and admitted to hurting her daughter, and it was conducted while one of the interrogating officers was present — meaning Farley was already aware of the cops’ theory of the crime before she conducted her review. These factors undoubtedly skewed her conclusions, according to Young, who said such dynamics are all too familiar in forensic pathology. “You develop a belief, and come hell or high water, you’re going to defend your belief,” he told The Intercept. Young found that the fall had likely caused Mariah’s brain to swell, which, left untreated, had cascading physical effects that developed over several days, including a coagulation disorder that caused widespread bruising. In his view, the medical evidence was absolutely consistent with an accidental fall — as Lucio and her family had always insisted.
Nonetheless, the case flew under the radar until documentarian Sabrina Van Tassel took it up in her 2020 film “The State of Texas v. Melissa.” The film revealed additional evidence that Lucio was telling the truth about the fall that ultimately killed Mariah, including footage of interviews that child welfare counselors conducted with two of Lucio’s sons, both of whom said Mariah had fallen down the stairs. Interviewed for the film, Gilman was dismissive of the notion that the kids could have been crucial witnesses. “I didn’t feel like any of the children would be helpful,” he said.
In the years Van Tassel spent working on the documentary, she became convinced that the evidence the state had provided to Lucio’s defense attorneys was incomplete. A number of Lucio’s children told Van Tassel that they had been interviewed at the police station, yet there was no record of those conversations in the case file. “I knew there were things that were missing,” Van Tassel said.
Nevertheless, the film contained significant revelations that catapulted the case into public view. After Lucio’s 2022 execution date was set, the documentary became a critical organizing tool, fueling a campaign to save Lucio’s life. The group Death Penalty Action held screenings in the Rio Grande Valley and across the state, accompanied by members of Lucio’s family. Outside the DA’s office in Brownsville, activists put up signs in English and Spanish that read “Watch the Film.” At one point, Lucio’s son John approached Saenz, who succeeded Villalobos as district attorney, on his lunch break, urging him to reconsider Lucio’s case. “I know for a simple fact that my mother is an innocent woman,” he said.
Meanwhile, Lucio’s cause attracted a powerful and unlikely ally: North Texas Republican state Rep. Jeff Leach, co-chair of the House Criminal Justice Reform Caucus. Leach, a self-professed supporter of capital punishment, and his caucus co-chair, Democratic Rep. Joe Moody, rallied an unprecedented level of support for Lucio among an ideologically diverse group of more than 80 state representatives — more than half the members of the Texas House, a body that rarely comes to a decisive consensus about anything.
Leach vowed to do “everything I can … in every way possible” to stop Lucio’s execution. In April 2022, he and Moody convened a committee hearing to question Saenz, who had requested Lucio’s execution date. They implored the district attorney to step up and withdraw it. But Saenz brushed off their concerns, saying he had no reason to ask for the death warrant to be withdrawn.
With Lucio’s execution date looming, her lawyers, including Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation for the Innocence Project, filed a new challenge to Lucio’s conviction before the Court of Criminal Appeals, pointing to the defects in the case and arguing that Lucio was innocent of killing her daughter. It was a long-shot appeal to a court known for its hostility to death row defendants claiming innocence. So it was welcome but startling news when the court issued a last-minute stay of execution, sending Lucio’s claims back to the district court for further vetting. Among the claims was that the state had withheld records from the defense, including the reports from Arreola, the child welfare investigator.
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Melissa Lucio’s Life Was Spared at the Last Minute. What Happens Now?
In a statement following the stay, Saenz said he welcomed the opportunity to prosecute Lucio again. But nine months later, he quietly signed a joint filing with Potkin acknowledging that his office had withheld exculpatory evidence from Lucio’s defense. “There are uncontroverted facts and the parties agree,” the lawyers wrote, that there was a “reasonable probability” that the outcome of the trial “would have been different had the evidence been disclosed.”
The agreement, which was signed in January 2023, remained out of the public eye until earlier this month, when a local reporter broke the news, including a statement from Potkin and Saenz saying the case was now in the hands of the courts. The Court of Criminal Appeals “is the only court that can vacate a conviction,” the statement read. “We are hopeful that Melissa’s case will be resolved.” A week later, a district court judge signed off on the agreement, sending the case up to the CCA.
Van Tassel got the news in a message from Lucio. “I’m coming home soon, sis!” Lucio said.
“We were just overwhelmed, you know. Overwhelmed with joy,” Van Tassel said. Yet she is cautious not to celebrate prematurely. “Part of me doesn’t want to rejoice too much because we’ve been through so much.” After the exhilaration of the stay of execution, the surge of publicity faded. Lucio sometimes felt forgotten while she waited on a court system that showed no sense of urgency. Lucio’s mother, Esperanza, died last fall, shortly after Lucio herself was hospitalized with abdominal pain. Lucio was unable to attend the funeral. “She died without seeing her daughter again,” Van Tassel said of Esperanza, who had hoped to see Lucio walk free. “How horrible is that?”
Weeks before news broke about the agreement between Lucio’s lawyers and the state, Van Tassel started a GoFundMe in anticipation of Lucio’s release. Her family will need considerable help getting Lucio on her feet as she reacquaints herself with the outside world. Lucio hopes to get a fresh start, perhaps in a different town, where she can rebuild her life from scratch. “I have no clothes,” she told Van Tassel in one recent message. “I don’t even know what size I am.”
The post A Prosecutor Asked Texas to Kill Melissa Lucio. Now He Says She Should Be Freed. appeared first on The Intercept.
US refuses to say it won’t kill Assange
Wikileaks journalist remains imprisoned as US continues to pursue discredited extradition case – and refusal to give binding guarantee would result in his immediate release if UK justice system was fit for purpose
The US has refused to give a specific, binding guarantee to a UK court that it will not execute journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been held for years in solitary confinement in Belmarsh prison while he fights the US government’s attempt to extradite him so it can imprison him for years beyond his lifespan, after Assange exposed war crimes in Iraq by the US military.
The case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century.
His recent appeal was adjourned to give the US time to affirm properly that it would not kill him if he was extradited, a sick joke when there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.
Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.
Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024
The judges even refused to admit fresh evidence of the US’s plans to assassinate Assange, instead offering the US another opportunity to have him in their hands if they would promise not to put him to death. The US.
But Assange’s wife Stella has revealed that the US has refused to say that it will not kill him and has offered only a boilerplate statement about the death penalty, while denying Assange the free speech protections it would offer to any US citizen:
The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty.
It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S citizen. Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if extradited.
The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.
The Biden Administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.
The US statement says the death penalty will be ‘neither sought nor imposed’, but this is non-binding and meaningless given its previous attempts to kill him. The refusal to guarantee there will be no death penalty in Assange’s specific case should mean under UK and European human rights laws that the extradition is immediately refused by the UK court and Assange should already be free. Even if the assurances had been given, the likelihood that the US’s treatment of Assange would lead to his death should be enough to quash the bid.
The fact that he is not yet free of the threat of extradition, let alone walking around in the freedom he should have, is a damning indictment of the state of UK justice and democracy.
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Lawsuit Links Wild UAE-Financed Smear Campaign to George Washington University
Once a well-respected public commentator and academic in his native Austria, Farid Hafez’s life slowly began to unravel after rumors spread that he was an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood — allegedly a sleeper agent promoting extremism in the country.
“I used to be published every month in newspapers from both the left and right. I had a high profile in Austria, and people took me seriously,” Hafez said. “But some years ago, people started calling me to tell me that there were rumors about me spreading behind closed doors. I felt there was a difference, and that something was changing.”
“Eventually,” he said, “I was sidelined to such an extent that newspapers would not even publish me anymore.”
“I was sidelined to such an extent that newspapers would not even publish me anymore.”
Hafez’s growing ostracism in Austria culminated in a controversial police operation in 2020 called Operation Luxor. Hafez and others were targeted with raids and asset seizures. Hafez ultimately left Austria for the United States, where he took up a visiting professorship at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Operation Luxor was later deemed unlawful by Austrian courts, and the police’s terrorism charges against Hafez were eventually dropped. Today, the case is widely viewed as a witch hunt that targeted Austrian Muslims. Despite his exoneration, the damage to Hafez’s life from the yearslong ordeal have been immense.
“A lot of this has basically been about destroying my reputation,” he said. “Everybody knew that I was affected by this, even far from Austria.”
Little did Hafez know at the time, but the rumors about him and others in Austria originated from a research center at George Washington University and a prominent U.S.-based terrorism analyst there named Lorenzo Vidino, according to a lawsuit filed late last month. Hafez’s suit alleges fraud and racketeering, asking for $10 million in damages from Vidino, along with George Washington University and its Program on Extremism, the research center that Vidino heads.
The lawsuit, according to a press release, alleges that Hafez and others were targets of an organized smear campaign, accusing Vidino of “participating in a criminal enterprise that deployed fake journalists, social media bots and pay-to-play reporters to destroy the careers of dozens of individuals by constructing and disseminating false narratives linking them to the Muslim Brotherhood.” (Vidino and George Washington University haven’t filed a response to the lawsuit, and neither replied to requests for comment.)
The campaign against Hafez exploited an environment of suspicion that can result in Muslim or Arab scholars being targeted, said an academic who works on anti-Islam bias, noting that such campaigns often fixate on people whose work touches on politically sensitive subjects.
Farid Hafez, now a professor at Williams University, at a panel on Islamophobia in Istanbul on Oct. 19, 2017.
Photo: Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
“Farid Hafez is not the first Muslim professor to be targeted by ideologues who seek to silence and censor scholarship on Islamophobia, or Palestine, or anti-Arab racism,” said Sahar Aziz, a national security expert and director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University. “In the U.S., individuals who are critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East are often slandered as un-American or disloyal. In direct contradiction of American principles of academic freedom and free speech, Islamophobic organizations and government officials seek to censor Arab and Muslim professors when they disagree with the substance of their scholarship.”
“Meanwhile,” Aziz added, “in Europe there is vilification of almost any Muslim individual or group that is politically active, such that their activities are conflated with support for terrorism.”
GWU’s Lorenzo Vidino
Vidino worked with a private investigation firm in Switzerland that covertly spread spurious allegations against various Muslims in Europe, accusing them of involvement in terrorism and extremism, according to a report last year in the New Yorker.
Many of the details in the New Yorker, which are repeated in part in Hafez’s lawsuit, became public when hackers leaked internal communications from the firm behind the campaign, known as Alp Services. The hackers sent the files from Alp, another defendant in Hafez’s suit, to one of its intended targets: an American citizen living in Italy named Hazem Nada, who alleged in a separate lawsuit that his company and personal reputation were tarnished by unfounded accusations of terrorist financing.
The leak suggested that the operation was being financed to the tune of millions of dollars by the United Arab Emirates government as part of a broader campaign to destroy perceived ideological enemies in Western countries, and particularly those it accused of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE campaign reportedly targeted more than 1,000 people in 18 European countries.
Among those mentioned in the files as working with Alp was Vidino, who took a 3,000-euro consulting fee from the firm for “a series of gossipy reports about the Brotherhood’s reach,” according to a passage from the New Yorker quoted in Hafez’s lawsuit. The “gossipy reports,” which helped form the basis of the campaign on behalf of the UAE, appeared to consist of lists of suspected Islamists that Alp could then show it had discredited on behalf of its Emirati client. (Alp has neither responded to Hafez’s lawsuit nor a request for comment.)
In addition to his work with the Austrian government and George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, Vidino maintains public connections with think tanks based in the UAE, including the Abu Dhabi-based Hedayah, which is chaired by members of the royal family. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior analyst at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a think tank run by anti-Muslim activist Steve Emerson.
Lorenzo Vidino, of the George Washington University Program on Extremism, at a press conference following a meeting on radicalization with Italian officials in Rome on Jan. 5, 2017.
Photo: Riccardo De Luca/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Nada filed his separate lawsuit against the government of the UAE, Vidino, Alp Services, and several others alleged to have been involved in the smear campaign against him. The UAE-sponsored campaign, the suit says, triggered a series of events that ultimately led Nada’s oil trading company, Lord Energy, to declare bankruptcy.
Nada is seeking $2.7 billion in damages and compensation. In addition to ideological reasons for the campaign against him, Nada’s lawsuit alleges that the UAE, a major oil and gas producer, had commercial motivations when it hired Alp Services to help shut his firm out of competing in the global energy market.
“The enterprise’s sham accusations that Hazim and Lord Energy were involved in terrorist financing were meant to — and did — eliminate a commercial competitor by causing banks and financial institutions to stop lending to Hazim and Lord Energy and causing other industry participants to stop doing business with Hazim and Lord Energy,” Nada’s lawsuit says.
The defendants in Nada’s case have not responded directly to the allegations against them, either in court or in the press.
Luxor’s Toll
Hafez would seem like an unlikely target for a smear campaign. A well-respected academic researcher in Austria, his work focused on documenting and combating anti-Muslim racism in Europe. He was a co-author of the European Islamophobia Report, a scholarly annual analysis of anti-Muslim discrimination on the continent, and was affiliated with a Islamophobia research center based out of Georgetown University.
Starting in 2015, Vidino began appearing as a public commentator and later working as a consultant with the Austrian government, focusing on issues of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez said his reputation began to suffer around the same time.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a political movement mostly based in the Arab states, which has often clashed with the conservative monarchies in the region. The movement has been suppressed in countries like Egypt but remains a bogeyman for local leaders as well as right-wing groups in Western countries who have frequently accused Muslim political opponents of association with the group.
Hafez felt himself gradually becoming the target of these attacks. The accusations were often put forward vaguely in public where individuals or organizations were accused of “affiliations” with the Muslim Brotherhood rather than holding any concrete roles or membership. The allegations were amorphous enough that they were impossible to refute, or even challenge, mostly disseminated as they were through whisper campaigns spread through the Austrian government and security establishment.
After the smears took hold, Operation Luxor came down on the night of November 9, 2020. Hundreds of armed police officers raided the homes of Hafez and dozens of others, along with institutions they were affiliated with.
The search warrant used to justify the raid was based on a report authored by Vidino about the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria. Vidino also served twice as a witness for the Austrian government against targets in the case.
The Austrian government at the time — led by right-wing Chancellor Sebastian Kurz — celebrated the raids as a blow to “political Islam.” Despite these claims, however, the operation ultimately failed to uncover evidence of terrorism or even generate any arrests and convictions.
Despite being eventually exonerated by Austrian courts, Hafez’s career and reputation suffered in Austria and his financial assets were frozen. He has suffered ongoing stress — along with his family, including his young children who remain traumatized by the armed raid on their house in 2020.
“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe.”
The lingering impact of the smear campaign and raid on his life have now led Hafez to seek relief from American courts against Vidino, George Washington University, and Alp Services. A press release about Hafez’s lawsuit said, “Vidino presented himself as a disinterested academic with an expertise on terrorist figures and groups, feeding the narrative to both legitimate reporters and pay-to-play journalists, fellow academics and think-tanks that Hafez was deeply connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Hafez knew that Vidino was antagonistic to his work on behalf of Muslim communities in Austria. The New Yorker article and Nada’s lawsuit, however, had raised more troubling questions. Vidino had, according to Hafez’s lawsuit, acknowledged that he strongly suspected the payment from Alp was coming from the Emirates. Hafez’s lawsuit said, “Alp and Dr. Lorenzo Vidino (‘Dr. Vidino’), with the assistance of the other co-defendants, targeted Dr. Hafez and others similarly situated because they saw him as a means of keeping their UAE gravy train rolling and veracity was simply beside the point.”
Hafez’s lawsuit, in other words, raises the possibility that Vidino’s advocacy may not have been merely ideological but driven by financial incentives from the UAE.
“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe,” Hafez said. “But when I first started looking into him, I was focused on his ideological ties to the far-right in the United States. I assumed that he was an ideologically inspired person. I had no clue whatsoever that the UAE was behind his work, and maybe even the main driver.”
The post Lawsuit Links Wild UAE-Financed Smear Campaign to George Washington University appeared first on The Intercept.
Idaho Goes to the Supreme Court to Argue That Pregnant People Are Second-Class Citizens
In the early 1980s, doctors at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital faced an alarming trend: Thousands of patients from across the city were being transferred to the county facility, including patients whose conditions were unstable, making the transfers medically risky. Many patients ended up in the intensive care unit; others died.
Several years later, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study confirming that transfers had skyrocketed from roughly 1,300 in 1980 to nearly 7,000 in 1983. The study supported what doctors had observed, according to the Chicago Tribune: “that private hospitals in the area are shirking their duty to provide care to the needy.” Reviewing some 500 transfers from private medical facilities to the Cook County hospital over a one-month period, the study found that the vast majority of patients were unemployed, and many had been transferred because they lacked the means to pay for health care. Eighty-nine percent were Black or Hispanic, 24 percent were medically unstable, and just 6 percent had consented to transport.
The Chicago doctors weren’t alone. Across the country, the transfer practice, known as “patient dumping,” had become a serious problem, especially for those in labor. “This was a full-term baby who would have been alive right now if the system hadn’t shuffled the mother around,” one doctor told the San Francisco Examiner in 1985 about a patient in labor who arrived at an Oakland hospital after being turned away from two other facilities. The baby was stillborn. “When she walked in here, I knew immediately something was really wrong,” the obstetrician said. “She was doubled over, holding her belly.”
The problem became so grave that Congress stepped in, passing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, known as EMTALA. Still in effect today, the law is straightforward: It requires all hospitals that receive certain federal funds to conduct a medical assessment of every patient who shows up at the ER and, in a medical emergency, provide necessary stabilizing treatment. The law defers to medical professionals to determine when a medical emergency exists and what stabilizing treatments are needed.
EMTALA operates as a “point of rescue,” said Nicole Huberfeld, a professor at Boston University’s schools of law and public health. “It is the one law that we have that makes it so that anyone can get access to care when they’re having a medical emergency.”
The End of Roe
For nearly 40 years, necessary stabilizing treatment under EMTALA has included abortion care. In July 2022, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Department of Health and Human Services posted a memo reiterating hospitals’ obligations under EMTALA. When a state had banned abortion but abortion was the stabilizing treatment a patient needed, the memo stated, EMTALA preempted the state law.
In a letter accompanying the guidance, Health Secretary Xavier Becerra assured providers that EMTALA “protects your clinical judgment and the action that you take to provide stabilizing medical treatment to your pregnant patients, regardless of the restrictions in the state where you practice.”
“That’s the exact evil that Congress was trying to stop.”
But in a case pending before the Supreme Court, scheduled for oral arguments on April 24, Idaho claims that abortion is not protected under EMTALA, and that the federal government is interfering with state’s ability to ban the procedure. “The whole point of Dobbs was to restore to the states their authority to regulate abortion,” lawyers with the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom, who are representing Idaho, wrote in their brief. “Yet the administration seeks to thwart Idaho’s exercise of self-government on this important topic.” The claim that EMTALA covers abortion, they wrote, “is imaginary.”
If the court were to accept Idaho’s recasting of EMTALA, the safety-net law meant to eliminate discrimination in emergency medical care would be nullified, experts say, singling out pregnant people as a separate and unequal class of patients. Such a ruling would hobble the ability of medical professionals to respond appropriately to emergencies and encourage a new generation of patient dumping.
“Idaho’s arguments would make pregnant people second-class citizens in emergency rooms,” said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the reproductive freedom project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That’s the exact evil that Congress was trying to stop.”
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta looks on as Attorney General Merrick Garland announces the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to block Idaho’s abortion ban on Aug. 2, 2022.
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, near-total abortion bans quickly took effect in several states, including Idaho, where the so-called Defense of Life Act bans all abortions save for those necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant person. During a legislative hearing on the measure in 2020, the law’s sponsor, state Sen. Todd Lakey, said the law included no exception for the broader health of the pregnant person because that was not as important as the life of the fetus. “I would say it weighs less, yes, then the life of the child,” he said.
“If we’re talking health of the mother, that’s a nuanced decision that could be something much less than life,” Lakey said. “If the decision was based solely on a question of some type of health, then you’re talking about taking the life of the unborn child, so that weighs more heavily than simply ‘health.’”
Idaho’s ban has placed health care providers in a precarious position. Violations of EMTALA’s mandate can result in hefty fines for doctors and hospitals and the loss of federal funding that facilities use to treat elderly patients and people with disabilities. Doctors who violate Idaho’s abortion ban, meanwhile, face criminal prosecution, two to five years in prison for each offense, and loss of their medical license.
The narrowness of the exception to Idaho’s ban prompted the federal government to sue the state in August 2022, arguing that the law impermissibly conflicts with EMTALA’s requirement that providers treat “emergency medical conditions,” not only those that pose “risks to life,” but also conditions that place a person’s health in “serious jeopardy.” The text of EMTALA clearly states that where conflicts with state law exist, the federal law takes precedence.
The government asked a federal district court to immediately block Idaho’s law from taking effect while the lawsuit was ongoing. The court agreed, enjoining the Idaho ban “to the extent that statute conflicts with EMTALA-mandated care.”
Idaho appealed the ruling and lost, prompting the state to ask the Supreme Court to intervene, which it did in January, lifting the district court injunction and scheduling the case for oral arguments.
In legal filings, Idaho points out that the word “abortion” is not included in the EMTALA statute, claiming there was no understanding that Congress meant to include abortion care among potential stabilizing treatments required under the law. In contrast, the statute does include the phrase “unborn child,” which according to the state, means that the well-being of the fetus must be weighed in addressing medical emergencies.
Idaho law doesn’t conflict with EMTALA at all, the lawyers argue, because Idaho regulates the practice of medicine in the state. EMTALA only requires doctors to provide stabilizing treatments that are “available” at a given hospital, and since abortion is illegal, it is thus unavailable. And because abortion is unavailable in Idaho, a hospital could legally transfer a patient somewhere else for care, presumably without being accused of dumping. Practically speaking, that would mean coordinating a transfer to a facility out of state and hours away.
Idaho claims the Department of Health and Human Services’ 2022 guidance was merely an attempt to legalize all abortion in the state. “A patient who wanted, but was denied, an abortion cannot wield EMTALA to force an emergency room to perform one,” reads the lawyers’ Supreme Court brief.
Huberfeld, the health law expert, who along with several other legal scholars filed an amicus brief supporting the federal government’s position, says Idaho is misinterpreting the law. EMTALA doesn’t contain the word “abortion” because, at the urging of medical professionals, Congress left the menu of stabilizing treatments to their discretion. At the time of EMTALA’s passage, abortion was protected care, and even states that had banned the procedure later in pregnancy included exceptions for the life and health of the pregnant person. Physicians have long “acknowledged their statutory obligation to provide abortion care in those rare emergencies in which terminating a pregnancy is the necessary ‘stabilizing’ treatment,” Huberfeld and her colleagues wrote.
The reference to an “unborn child,” meanwhile, is defined in the EMTALA statute — just not in the way that Idaho claims. “Three of the four mentions are specifically about taking into account the risks to the unborn child during labor when transferring a patient to another hospital,” said Kolbi-Molinas of the ACLU, which also filed an amicus brief in support of the federal government. The fourth mention is meant to ensure that a pregnant person in the ER will receive care for a pregnancy-related problem that is not currently placing their own life at risk. “So the hospital couldn’t say, ‘Well, you’re fine, so we’re just going to let your baby die,’” Kolbi-Molinas explained.
Those references are important, according to Huberfeld, because before EMTALA, hospitals were abandoning pregnant people in alarming numbers. “There were so many instances of people in labor being turned away from emergency departments and they and/or their newborns dying,” she said. “It was specifically addressed because the circumstances of patient dumping for people in labor were so egregious.”
For Idaho to suggest that Congress actually meant to shield hospitals from having to address the medical needs of pregnant people in favor of protecting the fetus “is like gaslighting,” Kolbi-Molinas said.
And the argument that state hospitals don’t have to provide emergency abortion care because Idaho regulates the practice of medicine turns EMTALA on its head. Huberfeld thinks the argument is bait meant to attract justices inclined to embrace the notion of state sovereignty. But EMTALA is tied to Medicare funding, she said, which hospitals do not have to accept. If they do, the funds come with strings — including EMTALA’s nondiscrimination guarantee. The law was designed to create “a national standard” because states were routinely discriminating against patients, leaving a patchwork of unequal care, Huberfeld said. “It’s the state variability that predictably leads to worse health outcomes for certain populations.”
From left to right: Anna Zargarian, Lauren Miller, Lauren Hall, and Amanda Zurawski at the Texas Capitol on March 7, 2023, after filing a lawsuit on behalf of Texans harmed by the state’s abortion ban.
Photo: Rick Kern/Getty Images
Since the fall of Roe, stories of women being denied abortions during medical emergencies have become distressingly common, making clear that the scant exceptions in state bans are not enough to keep pregnant patients safe.
Such cruelty has been on regular display in Texas, including in the case of Amanda Zurawski, who nearly died twice and whose future fertility has been imperiled because of the state’s abortion ban. Zurawski’s water broke early, and the demise of her fetus was inevitable, but because Texas’s ban contained only vague language regarding medical emergencies, doctors said they had to wait until she was on death’s door to provide the abortion she needed.
Zurawski is one of several women who have sued Texas seeking to clarify the ban’s exceptions. The state has resisted, claiming the language is clear and that it’s doctors who are confused. Zurawski and 16 other women also signed on to an amicus brief in the EMTALA case as “living proof of the inadequacy of state law, which endangered rather than protected their lives.”
ERs are “discharging pregnant patients in medical emergencies, telling them to wait elsewhere until their health deteriorates.”
Meanwhile, Texas has also been fighting the federal government to limit EMTALA’s protections. But instead of being sued by the government, as Idaho was, Texas sued first.
Just three days after HHS posted its 2022 guidance, the state filed suit in the Texas Panhandle, where the case was certain to wind up before a Trump-appointed judge thanks to the quirks of the federal court system. Texas argued that the guidance was a blatant effort to create new law out of whole cloth that would “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
The EMTALA guidance was hardly new, the government responded, and did nothing more than reinforce provider obligations under the law as written. Arguing that the case should be thrown out, the government noted that the state’s post-Roe abortion ban had yet to take effect — meaning Texas had no grounds to sue. The state’s wild claims that the government was somehow trying to mandate elective abortions was “a patent misreading of the guidance that bears no resemblance to reality.”
Nonetheless, the federal district court sided with Texas, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, effectively blocking the full protection of EMTALA in the state. How the Supreme Court rules in the Idaho case could also determine the outcome in Texas.
Related
Anti-Abortion Doctors Struggle to Explain Mifepristone Harms Before Supreme Court
Texas was joined in the lawsuit by two groups of anti-abortion doctors who previously filed a federal suit in the Panhandle challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. As in that case, the doctors in the EMTALA lawsuit alleged that the federal government’s guidance might at some point conscript them into participating in an abortion in violation of their conscience. The Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the mifepristone case last month, seemed to doubt that the doctors’ dubious claims offered them legal standing to sue.
In the meantime, as Zurawski and others argue in their Idaho case brief, by denying pregnant people EMTALA protections, states with abortion bans are creating the very kind of discriminatory care that the law was meant to eradicate: “Emergency rooms are discharging pregnant patients in medical emergencies, telling them to wait elsewhere until their health deteriorates.”
While the Idaho Supreme Court has blessed the state’s abortion ban, claiming that it provides wide latitude for doctors to exercise their judgment, the broader political climate in the state is sending a more menacing message, according to the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare.
Lawmakers have tried to insert fetal personhood language into state law and threatened to withhold funding from Boise after city officials said they would not prioritize enforcement of the abortion ban. The state’s attorney general said medical professionals who “assist” in abortion — even by referring someone to out-of-state care — could be prosecuted under the ban. As the number of preventable maternal deaths rose, the state disbanded its Maternal Mortality Review Committee. A group of so-called Freedom Caucus lawmakers penned a threatening letter to hospitals demanding to see abortion records.
A “culture of fear” has settled over the state’s medical professionals, said Dr. Caitlin Gustafson, a family medicine doctor trained in obstetrics and a member of the Idaho coalition. “We have targets on our backs for providing care in the moment that somebody is going to second guess,” she said. “It’s just untenable.”
“We have targets on our backs for providing care.”
Idaho is losing doctors at an alarming rate. Nearly 60 obstetricians stopped providing care in the 15 months following the ban’s imposition, and five of the state’s nine maternal fetal medicine doctors have left the state. Two hospital obstetrics programs have closed, and another is on the brink of closure, because hospitals could not recruit enough doctors to staff them.
Practicing in a rural community, Gustafson feels the weight of the state’s abortion ban, not only as a conflict with her duty to care for pregnant patients, but also for its impact on patients in need of other services. She said she’d just gotten word that another OB-GYN who provided consultation for rural patients was leaving the state, meaning that patients in need of routine services — hysterectomies, for example, or consultation for a “cancer scare” — will be forced to travel hundreds of miles for care. “We’re losing everything,” she said.
Gustafson has always recommended that her pregnant patients in rural areas carry “life flight” insurance in case they need emergency transportation to Boise. Now, she said, doctors across the state are recommending that all pregnant patients carry such insurance in case an emergency arises and they need to be transported out of state. “‘You mean if X, Y, or Z happens, I would have to go to Utah?’” she said patients have asked her. “‘I have two children at home. I have no family there, and I’m going to fly to a city I don’t know, and to doctors I don’t know, and that’s what you’re telling me is my only option?’”
“The level of financial, personal strain and distress this is creating and the inequality by default is tremendous,” Gustafson said. “It feels very unfair.”
Health care providers are trained to intervene in emergencies “to head off the risk of injury, illness, and death,” Huberfeld said, not to “wait until some is on death’s door to help them.” Idaho’s interpretation of EMTALA “is the exact opposite of what the law is supposed to do.”
The post Idaho Goes to the Supreme Court to Argue That Pregnant People Are Second-Class Citizens appeared first on The Intercept.
Israeli media: Israel ‘totally defeated’ – and terrified of Iran
Source close to discussions about Iran says millions would be fleeing Israel if they knew what was being said
Israeli media are often far more honest about what their country is doing – and what is going on in it – than western ‘mainstream’ media are about the same issues. While UK ‘msm’ still maintain the lie that Hamas ‘beheaded babies’ and raped women on 7 October, Israeli media sometimes freely discuss the truth – and frequently and openly write about the ‘immense’ numbers of Israelis killed that day by the Israeli military.
And now, Israeli media are discussing two further truths that will not be aired by UK broadcasters or printed by UK papers.
First, Haaretz – one of Israel’s major dailies – has splashed a headline concluding that Israel has lost – totally lost – the ‘war’, the genocide, it has been raining down on the innocent civilians of Gaza. Lost so badly that Israel cannot be secure – and will not either regain by force the captives taken by Hamas, or end its pariah status:
And second, journalists with sources close to the Israeli regime’s discussions about Iran – which yesterday achieved a measured but compelling attack on Israel in retaliation for Israel’s bombing of Iran’s consulate in Damascus – are saying openly that those discussions are so terrifying that if the Israeli populace knew what was being said, millions of them would be flooding Israel’s main international airport to try to get out of the country:
The UK government, opposition and media are incorrigibly dishonest about Israel’s genocide and its terrible consequences for the millions of innocents in Gaza and the West Bank – and the ruination of both Israel’s and the West’s always-thin pretence as democratic, humane and law-abiding. But the truth is out there – and will percolate through.
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Pro-Lifers Are Up Against a Real-Life Crisis
Patients, infertility doctors, and advocates of IVF attend a rally outside the Alabama State House on Feb. 28, 2024, in Montgomery, Ala.
Photo: Stew Milne/AP
When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S.
The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos in an accident at a fertility clinic, heightened the conflict between ideology and electability, already about as high as it could get after June 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization freed the states to snub overwhelming public opinion, enact radical abortion bans — and then lose badly in the midterms.
But now the ideologues have more than a political problem. They have a moral one too.
When most of Alabama’s fertility clinics suspended operations in fear that dropping a vial might be prosecuted as manslaughter and patients were left anguished in the middle of time-sensitive treatments, the GOP faced the present, palpable harms inflicted on real people by its abstract religious pieties. And these harmed parties were not baby killers. They were among the 1 in 7 women afflicted by infertility, and they were desperate to have babies.
Related
Alabama Court Rules Frozen Embryos Made by IVF Are “Children”
The predicament landed hard. As the national press closed in on the Alabama Legislature, its panicked Republican supermajority hurried through a bill giving full legal and criminal immunity to IVF providers for the death or destruction of embryos. The bill passed the House by a vote of 94 to 6, including most of the chamber’s 27 Democrats, and unanimously in the Senate. Some Democrats objected that the blanket immunity exposed patients to malpractice without recourse, while Republican opponents still wanted protection for the embryos. The GOP’s state PAC defended supporters as casting “a pro-life vote.”
The more radical elements of Alabama’s “pro-life” community did not agree. The American Action Fund posted a petition on Facebook attacking Republican lawmakers who “voted to give immunity to any IVF provider who ‘intentionally causes the death of an unborn child,’” putting quotation marks around a phrase that is not in the statute and pressing for repeal. D.J. Parten, founder of a group that crafted legislation to prosecute self-managed abortion as murder, called the IVF legislation the “immunity for murder” bill. Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition and author of the state’s abortion ban, told AL.com that he’d contacted the Senate pro tempore to work out the next steps, which sounded like a reversal. “If [embryos] are destroyed,” Johnston said, “there needs to be some repercussions for that.” Then what for IVF? He didn’t say.
And while the Republicans were busy biting each other’s backs, Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands walked away with a special election for a vacant state House seat. Having focused her campaign on abortion rights, she added the threat to IVF. On March 26, she beat her opponent 2 to 1.
The End of Roe
The battle moved north to Capitol Hill. Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth introduced a bill to protect “access to assisted reproductive technology, and all medical care surrounding such technology.” A Republican senator blocked the bill because it imperiled embryos, and it died on the floor.
House Republicans released a 2025 budget containing the Life at Conception Act, which would grant full legal rights “from the moment of fertilization.” It had 120 sponsors. The Senate version made an exception for IVF, but the senators couldn’t sway the lower chamber. The Republican National Committee urged candidates to come out strongly for fertility care.
Conflict churned, not just between religious morality and political reality, but also between Republicans crusading to deregulate everything public — from greenhouse gas emissions to payday lenders — and Republicans pouring their hearts and political capital into regulating everything personal, particularly what people do with their bodies.
At least one prominent player tried to split the difference. The fiercely anti-regulation Heritage Foundation released a position paper titled “Why the IVF Industry Must Be Regulated.”
“You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood. … You are not fooling anyone.”
Unsurprisingly, it is a weird document. “The well-being of children, not profit margins, should be the top priority when it comes to IVF and embryonic cryopreservation,” proclaims the writer, senior research associate Emma Waters, sounding like a perfect socialist-feminist. She goes on to decry preimplantation testing for heritable conditions, which disability justice advocates also oppose, and preselection for sex or eye or skin color, which many feminists of color and critics of human genetic engineering condemn. Waters refers to these practices, provided by the majority of U.S. fertility clinics, as “eugenics,” which they are.
The paper proposes regulations including “true informed consent,” based on full explication of the risks and success rates of the treatment, and the prohibition of embryonic genetic testing and sex selection “in pursuit of the ‘perfect’ child” — regulations common throughout the EU and the U.K.
But if Europe promulgates rules to protect patients and children born through reproductive technologies, the children whose well-being most concerns the Heritage Foundation are the unborn ones. The paper’s first recommendation not-so-obliquely endorses embryonic personhood: “Impose a standard of care in IVF clinics sufficient to prevent the wanton or careless destruction of embryonic human beings.” Waters praises the Alabama judge, whose ruling “reassures parents who rely on IVF that their children will receive the same legal protections as everyone else’s.”
Alas, even a pro-regulation encyclical from the mother church of deregulation did not resolve the GOP’s dilemma. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., put it succinctly: “You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood laws. They are fundamentally incompatible!” she said. “You are not fooling anyone.”
Aside from the Heritage Foundation, there is another group of pro-lifers who believe they can have it both ways. That is, the practitioners of embryo adoption, a small but growing niche occupying the space where the fertility and adoption industries meet, inside a community populated almost entirely by evangelical Christians. The embryo adoption communities both condone IVF out of compassion for the infertile and are working to liberate, one by one, the treatments’ leftover embryos, which Catholic bioethicist Kent Lasnoski describes as the “frozen generation” and Baptist preacher John Piper calls the “orphaned unborn.”
These agencies match donors who’ve been through IVF and have unused fertilized embryos with would-be parents, most of whom have already tried and failed in multiple rounds of IVF, fostering, and/or traditional child adoption. The agents interview and screen both sides, suggest propitious pairings, and facilitate the delivery and implantation — called transfer — of the thawed frozen embryos. Some programs are all-inclusive, with their own clinics and home study experts; others offer services a la carte and recommend outside providers. Donors are not paid, yet the exchange promises them the satisfaction and security, and perhaps the relief from guilt, of giving their “children” a good home. Recipients get a bespoke baby, selected for genetic health, sex, race, and other characteristics, plus the experience of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and “early bonding.”
But the agents do not view themselves only as individual adoption brokers. They are missionaries: rescue teams searching out “snowflake babies” shivering in cryostorage and bringing them into the warmth and shelter of womb, family, and church. “Just as each snowflake is frozen, unique and a gift from heaven, so are each of our Snowflakes Babies,” explains the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, founded in 1997 by the Christian adoption nonprofit Nightline. “We hope to help each donated embryo grow, develop, and live a full life. In the intricate design of each flake of snow, we find the Creator reflecting the individual human heart.”
And if it doesn’t work, if an embryo dies while thawing or a pregnancy ends in miscarriage — even if a couple never ends up with a child — all is understood as God’s plan. “If God puts it on our heart to adopt a child, we know that one doesn’t always come home,” one would-be mother told the anthropologist Risa Cromer.
In “Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics,” Cromer calls this “embryo saviorism,” whose ultimate aim is to build the material and spiritual infrastructure “to leverage a niche family-making process for realizing the potential for a conservative Christian country.” And not just Christian. The website photo galleries feature healthy, unambiguously gendered children surrounding coupled, unambiguously heterosexual parents (at the National Embryo Donation Center, adopters must be “a genetic male and a genetic female married for at least three years”). And although women of color suffer far higher rates of infertility than their white counterparts, these families are almost all as white as Easter lilies.
Christian embryo adoption appears to be the embodiment of the anti-abortion slogan “Love them both,” mother and child. But the interests of parents and children, or parents and fetuses or embryos, are not always identical — they are sometimes in mortal battle. Nor can the born and the “unborn” have equal rights. “There is no way to add fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses to the Constitution without subtracting women,” says reproductive justice attorney and advocate Lynn Paltrow in the film “Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America.”
The IVF-embryonic personhood debate has taught Republicans that you sometimes have to choose a side.
Embryo adoption grew out of the anti-abortion movement. It found a fortuitous place where the adult’s needs and desires and the embryo’s survival are not at odds. But that does not mean it is neutral when it comes to adult needs and desires that clash with the embryo’s. In the 1990s, embryo adopters joined the National Right to Life Committee in lobbying against stem-cell research because it could result in the destruction of fertilized embryos. They continued to push throughout the 2000 elections and beyond, even as public opinion shifted toward valuing potential cures over potential life. In 2006, a group of “snowflake families” stood beside President George W. Bush when he vetoed a bipartisan bill to restore federal funding to the research. Prominent among the families were John and Marlene Strege and their child Hannah, the first “snowflake baby,” born on New Year’s Eve, 1998.
The Streges are still taking sides. In 2021, the family — identified as Hannah S., “a former IVF frozen embryo,” and John and Marlene S., “adoptive parents of the first ‘adopted’ frozen embryo in America” — filed an amicus brief in Dobbs supporting Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Faster than anyone expected, the Supreme Court’s ruling set the U.S. moving toward a time when cells in petri dishes have more rights than the people whose bodies give them life. And when we get there, not even the hand of God will be able to unlock access to the medical procedures and products that allow millions to exercise their human right to have a baby — or not.
The post Pro-Lifers Are Up Against a Real-Life Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.
NYC Jails Flagrantly Deny Young People’s Legal Right to Education
Last June, New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke to graduates at Rikers Island who received their high-school-equivalence diplomas while serving in jail.
“When you get your diplomas today,” Adams told the graduates, “I want you to stand up, lean back, be firm and strong and say, ‘I got this. When does the hard part start? I’m finished with the hard part. Now I’m moving forward to my destiny on what I want to accomplish.’”
The group represented the successful fruits of a law that guarantees access to education to people incarcerated in city jails. The success stories, however, are only part of the picture.
Other young people incarcerated in New York jails said in court filings that they’ve been repeatedly denied their legal right to education and that the city has failed to comply with a 2016 court order requiring education access for people between 18 and 21 held in in Department of Correction custody. In filings Wednesday, the plaintiffs in a decadeslong class-action suit against the city called for the appointment of a new court monitor to oversee implementation of the order.
“Not only is this a legal failing, but it’s a moral failing.”
“Not only is this a legal failing, but it’s a moral failing,” said Lauren Stephens-Davidowitz, a staff attorney with the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization, which made the Wednesday filings. “You have these young people who are begging to get their high school education while they’re incarcerated, and are just trying so hard, and are being denied it.”
The original 1996 suit claimed that the city Department of Correction and the Department of Education failed to provide education to young people entitled to public schooling. Plaintiffs are now alleging that the city has failed to comply with a 2016 federal court order requiring that incarcerated young people be given access to a minimum of three hours of educational services each day. The order also required provision of special education services to people who needed them.
Class members include 29 people in New York City custody between the ages of 18 and 21 who don’t currently have a high school diploma. Declarations from class members provided to The Intercept document alleged violations of the 2016 court order, including claims that they’ve been told they can only receive education if they’re housed in certain programmatic facilities. (The Department of Education referred questions to the Department of Correction. The mayor’s office did not provide a comment.)
By keeping people from accessing legally required educational services, the Department of Correction is working against its professed goal of rehabilitation, said Stefen Short, a supervising attorney with the Prisoner’s Rights Project.
“It’s proven that when an individual attains their high school diploma or the equivalent in custody, their prospects for success improve on the outside,” Short said. “DOC is essentially letting folks sit idle rather than provide them with access to educational services to which they have a right. That renders everyone in the jail setting less safe. It’s a strange state of affairs. It doesn’t serve anyone’s interests.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Correction referred questions about the legal filing to the city’s Law Department, which represents the mayor and city agencies, and has not responded.
“The department has just received additional funding for programming for people in custody,” said the Correction spokesperson, Annais Morales, said, adding that the funds would allow for programs including general education diploma preparation and “tutoring for all people in custody.”
Last Chance for a Diploma
The court appointed a monitor in 2016 to oversee the city’s implementation of the order. In his third report in 2018, as his two-year term was winding down, the monitor found that the order was working for younger detainees, who were being phased out of the adult criminal system under a 2018 city law and were no longer part of the class, but not for people over the age of 18.
“While the education program at Rikers has shown marked improvements during the past two years, access to education for inmates age 18 to 21 is a persistent problem,” the report said.
Only people incarcerated in special Department of Correction program housing have access to education services. Detainees don’t have a choice in where they’re housed, and people in non-program housing have said they’ve requested access to education and been denied.
At a November meeting of the city’s Board of Correction, a nine-member oversight body, Correction Department Deputy Commissioner Francis Torres said the department provided educational services at only two facilities: the Robert N. Davoren Complex and the Rose M. Singer Center. “For this year, we have targeted our educational efforts, meaning granting access to educational services at RNDC and Rose M. Singer,” Torres said.
One incarcerated person, who needs special education services and submitted a declaration as part of the new filing Wednesday, said he had lost nearly a year of progress toward his diploma during the Covid-19 pandemic and was still being denied access to education.
“I need my special education services in order to make educational progress,” the incarcerated man said. “I am not getting the three hours of education per day that I am entitled to.”
The man, who said he was interested in vocational training in carpentry, computers, or cybersecurity, added, “I want to seize every opportunity I can to prepare for a better future.”
An incarcerated 19-year-old who received special education services prior to being in jail custody said Department of Correction staff told him he had to wait to receive education services until he was transferred to a different complex. When he got there, he said staff told him he couldn’t enroll in education services because he wasn’t in a school dorm.
“I was worried that I would not be safe in another housing area,” he said. “I did not think it was fair that I had to choose between school and safety.”
When an incarcerated person turns 22, they age out of the right to get education while in jail. “This is the last chance they have to get a high school education,” said Stephens-Davidowitz, the Legal Aid attorney. “This is a critical juncture in their lives. They have a right to do it, and they’re trying.”
Update: April 4, 2024, 2:30 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from the New York City Department of Correction received after publication.
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“Crime Has Been a Euphemism for Race”: Alameda County’s Reform DA Rejects Recall Narrative
What is now a multimillion-dollar campaign to recall the elected prosecutor in Alameda County, California, began just six months after she took office.
When Pamela Price won office in 2022, she became the first district attorney in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, in decades who hadn’t risen through the ranks of the DA’s office. Instead, Price was a former defense and civil rights attorney focused on reforming the criminal justice system and holding police accountable for misconduct.
Now, with the recall effort against her gaining steam, Price is calling out the double standard against her office, denouncing the focus on crime as the perpetuation of a racist trope.
“There is obviously no place where racism has been so accepted than in the criminal justice system,” she said. “When we talk about crime in America — for decades, if not centuries — crime has been a euphemism for race. And to be afraid of crime is synonymous often for many people with being afraid of Black people or being afraid of brown people.”
Police unions spent heavily against Price in 2018, when she first took on her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley, who had held office for a decade without facing a challenger. In June, a grand jury found that O’Malley violated county policies during the 2018 election by soliciting campaign funds from police unions.
Price lost to O’Malley in 2018 but beat one of her deputies in 2022 to become the first Black woman to serve as Alameda County’s district attorney.
It was under O’Malley’s tenure that homicides in Oakland first spiked, but Price’s opponents say they want to recall her because her reform policies have driven crime in the city, one of the 14 cities in the county. Price told The Intercept that those behind the recall campaign did not take the same tack against O’Malley when crime rose during her time in office — and that some of the cases she is being blamed for were handled by O’Malley.
Price acknowledged that violence remains an issue that she wants to tackle in office and said her policies are designed to allocate more resources toward the most serious crimes. She said, however, she has a problem with the way O’Malley never received the same scrutiny, criticism, or vitriol about crime during her tenure.
“If you did not hold Nancy O’Malley accountable, it is not fair for you to now be in the public eye suggesting to the public that I’m doing something wrong,” Price said. (O’Malley did not respond to a request for comment.)
O’Malley had been repeatedly accused of misconduct by defense lawyers. In one case, a judge knocked down the objections, but in another, charges were dismissed because of misconduct by O’Malley’s office. In 2021, a report from the ACLU of Northern California and Urban Peace Movement took the DA’s office to task for policies that resulted in “over-incarceration and criminalization” — particularly of Black and brown communities. O’Malley was also criticized for going easy on police and not investigating deaths of people in police custody.
Police and real estate investors bankrolling the recall push against Price have been among the reform DA’s most vocal and powerful opponents. That opposition has been long in the making, since Price’s 2018 campaign against O’Malley.
Things kicked into high gear after Price took office last year. The Oakland Police Officers’ Association has blamed her for crime and attacked her for charging police with misconduct. In April, Price charged an Oakland Police officer with perjury and threatening a witness in a wrongful conviction case. The union said the case was an attempt to undermine the credibility of police “and facilitate the release of convicted murderers.”
“My predecessor was the district attorney for 13 years. I haven’t seen anyone make a correlation between her policies and the rise and fall of crime.”
Under O’Malley, homicides in Oakland first climbed in 2012. Homicides fell and rose throughout O’Malley’s tenure and began to rise again in 2019, followed by another spike in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic that affected cities and rural areas around the country. O’Malley announced her retirement in 2021 and left office in 2022, just before Price took office. Oakland homicides stayed level during Price’s first year on the job.
“My predecessor was the district attorney for 13 years,” Price said. “I haven’t seen anyone make a correlation between her policies and the rise and fall of crime.”
Oakland Real Estate Interests
O’Malley had also faced a recall effort, but not because of rising homicides in Oakland. The push, which received little attention and did not go to a vote, started after O’Malley declined to prosecute one public transit officer who knelt on 22-year-old Oscar Grant’s neck before another officer shot and killed him in 2009. For her part, O’Malley is supporting the current recall effort against Price and gave $5,000 to the effort.
Supporters of the recall effort against Price, including several wearing Make America Great Again hats, rallied at the county courthouse earlier this month on the deadline to submit petition signatures to get the recall on the ballot. County election officials are still manually counting the signatures and expect a result by April 15. Price and her supporters have accused recall leaders of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to gather signatures and recruiting people who don’t live in the county to canvass for signatures.
Two committees are leading the recall push. The first, Save Alameda for Everyone, was launched in July by Oakland residents Brenda Grisham, whose son was killed in a shooting in 2010, and Carl Chan, who is the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. The recall committee has also paid thousands of dollars to Grisham’s own security company. (Grisham told the press the payment was a reimbursement for security costs.)
Grisham told The Intercept that she has never blamed Price for her son’s case. Her reasons for wanting to recall the DA stem from Price ignoring victims and releasing murderers. Grisham denied allegations that signatures had been improperly collected and said there was no rule that canvassers had to be from the county. She said she was confident the committee had enough valid signatures to get the recall on the ballot.
Grisham said she started planning the recall effort in June or July and that it shouldn’t matter who is funding the effort because they’re citizens of the county.
Among those backers was hedge fund partner and Oakland resident Philip Dreyfuss, who worked with Grisham and Chan before launching a second separate committee in September, Supporters of Recall of Pamela Price. He is one of the biggest individual donors to the committee and has given $390,000 so far, more than half of the money it raised last year. Dreyfuss also gave $10,000 to support the recall of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin in 2022. (Dreyfuss did not respond to a request for comment.)
National media outlets have framed the push to recall Price as part of a dispute over approaches to criminal justice reform. Price acknowledged that was true, but also said the fight in Alameda County is being driven by other motives, including wealthy investors who want to protect real estate interests in downtown Oakland.
Mass incarceration in California has been a failed strategy, Price said. Prosecutors in the reform movement are opposed to racism and racist policies in the criminal justice system, including mass incarceration and injustices imposed on both survivors of crime and defendants.
“Unfortunately,” Price said, “there are many in this arena who are not opposed to the racial inequities that have infected this system.”
Price pointed to her duty to the whole county, not just Oakland. “I’m the district attorney of Alameda County,” she said. “And any policies or practices that we implement are implemented and practiced across the county.”
“Unfortunately, there are many in this arena who are not opposed to the racial inequities that have infected this system.”
Price has lived in Oakland since 1978, during which time she said the city has always been portrayed in a negative light compared to others in the Bay Area. At the same time, she said, Oakland has been traumatized by gun violence that mass incarceration has not solved.
“People have always denigrated Oakland,” she said. “Now I think there’s the racism associated with putting my face as the Black face of Oakland, when in fact I’m not the mayor of Oakland, I’m not the police chief of Oakland. But it serves a purpose.”
Price added that if the people leading the recall truly cared about victims, they’d use their money to support victims in Alameda County.
“The primary backers and funders of the recall are, in fact, real estate developers and investors that have no real interest in the manner in which justice is administered to the majority of people who live, work, and play in Alameda County,” Price said. “They are a handful of wealthy folks that have as their agenda to control the way that the district attorney’s office operates. They could care less about the victims that we deal with every day.”
“The amount of money that they are prepared to spend to recall me could easily replenish the trauma recovery fund that the state is having to shut down because we don’t have any more funding.”
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin speaks to supporters during an election night event on June 7, 2022, just ahead of results that showed him being recalled as the as city’s top prosecutor.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The San Fran Playbook
Opponents of the recall push have also pointed to overlaps in donors and messaging between the campaign against Price and the campaign to recall Boudin in San Francisco in 2022. Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, has also come under fire for not disclosing payments she received from groups linked to the SF recall campaign prior to her appointment. Violent crime has increased under Jenkins, but the reaction from Boudin’s critics has been muted.
Jenkins’s current term ends in 2025. She already has a challenger, Ryan Khojasteh, an alum of Boudin’s office who Jenkins fired shortly after she was appointed. After being let go, Khojasteh went to work for Price as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. He’s currently working for Price part-time and launched his campaign against Jenkins in January.
Khojasteh is hammering Jenkins for overseeing a rise in crime after promising that getting rid of Boudin would solve San Francisco’s problems. Jenkins has now turned her fire on judges, a strategy that has largely backfired so far. Efforts to oust two San Francisco judges failed in elections earlier this month.
“Now the mayor, the DA, the police chief, who are all aligned, don’t have anyone else to blame.”
“Now the mayor, the DA, the police chief, who are all aligned, don’t have anyone else to blame,” Khojasteh told The Intercept. “So they decided to shift that to judges, and that failed.”
Even the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which was critical of Boudin, has raised alarms about crime in San Francisco under Jenkins. The chamber’s annual City Beat poll, released in February, showed that 72 percent of residents feel San Francisco is on the “wrong track” and 69 percent feel that crime worsened in 2023, during Jenkins’s tenure.
Although Jenkins has now fallen victim to the panic she stoked, her rhetoric has eroded faith in the entire system and made it harder for prosecutors and judges to do their jobs, Khojasteh said. Some victims have refused to cooperate because they’ve heard that DAs won’t prosecute or that judges will release people.
“That’s rhetoric coming from Brooke Jenkins making my job harder,” he said. “I’m the one begging the victim to come to court just to do the basics of my job.”
While Price pointed to similarities between her predicament and the San Francisco recall, she noted that what’s happening in Alameda County is very different.
“It’s the same false narrative used: the ‘soft-on-crime’ trope that comes from the 1980s, from Ronald Reagan.”
“We know that some of the major donors for the Alameda County effort were involved in funding the recall of Chesa Boudin,” Price said. “So it’s the same false narrative used: the ‘soft-on-crime’ trope that comes from the 1980s, from Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Alameda County is not one city.”
Alameda is a diverse county made up of many residents who rent, including those who may not be as accepting of the status quo as voters in San Francisco.
The linking of race and crime has been deeply embedded in how the criminal justice system functions, how it’s perceived, and the conversation that has proceeded, Price said.
“It’s a conversation about race and criminality that led to mass incarceration,” she said. “And so it’s that same conversation that we have to be willing to engage in, if we’re going to unravel mass incarceration.”
The post “Crime Has Been a Euphemism for Race”: Alameda County’s Reform DA Rejects Recall Narrative appeared first on The Intercept.
How the Right Is Taking Over State Courts With Judicial Gerrymandering
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a news conference on March 20, 2024, where he signed a state law addressing homelessness.
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court sent abortion rights back to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, state courts have become a hotbed of battles to criminalize, legalize, or expand access to abortion care.
States like Michigan prevented decades-old draconian bans from taking effect, while Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and others have challenges pending in state court to their criminal bans. Judges in Florida, Missouri, and Ohio have also become referees for when voters get to weigh in on abortion rights through ballot measures.
Beyond abortion, the Supreme Court’s supermajority conservative bloc has made the entire federal judiciary generally hostile to civil rights. State courts have therefore increasingly assumed center stage on a wide variety of issues: LGBTQ+ rights and gender-affirming care, criminal justice reform and police accountability, voting rights, and more. As state courts and the cases they handle continue to grow in importance, so have various efforts to rig who sits on those courts and who has power in the legal system.
If in the past legislative gerrymandering — or redrawing legislative districts in artificial ways — was used to entrench corporate and partisan power, we now see another branch of government being manipulated to rig the system toward the same aims: judicial gerrymandering.
Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.
Judicial gerrymandering is the process of manipulating the rules for selecting, retaining, or replacing judges, prosecutors, and other judicial actors to evade voter accountability. It can look like state legislatures redrawing judicial districts to favor certain voters; judges evading the prescribed retirement process to prevent elections for open seats; or state officials creating new “tools” to remove elected judges and prosecutors as an end run around voters’ choices.
Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.
In states where gerrymandering has already created severely partisan legislatures, the rigging of judicial positions — which are typically voted on at the local level — threatens to cut entire swaths of the population out of the political process.
Take Georgia, where conservatives have devised a scheme to prevent voters in more progressive parts of the state from exercising their power to elect their judges. As judges approach reelection, several have strategically retired before they would have to face voters, and the state has canceled elections for their seats, sending power to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to appoint their replacements and depriving voters of the opportunity to select new jurists according to state law.
The Georgia state legislature has also created a partisan oversight commission with the power to suspend and remove locally elected prosecutors, part of a national campaign of attacking the independence of district attorneys. The commission has been given broad authority to disqualify prosecutors for 10 years based on their charging decisions — often decisions aimed at reducing mass incarceration by not prosecuting low-level offenses like drug charges, or standing up for reproductive rights by taking public stances against criminal bans.
In Mississippi, state officials have executed a judicial takeover of majority-Black Jackson, depriving its mayor, also Black, and its residents of local control over police, prosecutors, and the courts. One attempt to dilute voting power over elected county judges failed, but the state has created a two-tiered system in which a Capitol district controlled by white conservatives has power to govern Jackson instead of the city’s own residents.
And in Florida, state officials considered judicial redistricting to attempt to kick out reform prosecutors, who are elected based on the district “circuit” lines for state courts. The Florida Supreme Court demurred last year, but that doesn’t stop the legislature from taking it up in 2024. These redistricting efforts come in tandem with moves by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to suspend prosecutors in both Orlando and Tampa, due to his disagreement with their approaches to prosecution.
These efforts come in various shapes and sizes, but they all add up to an end run around the democratic process, depriving voters of an opportunity to elect officials based on their priorities, and depriving officials of the ability to do the jobs they were elected to do.
The trend will continue to intensify in the coming years. The Supreme Court has made it clear it won’t get involved in issues of state and local power consolidation, no matter how egregious.
Across states, legislators and governors often follow one another, proposing “new ideas” to consolidate power along partisan lines. These attempts start not as bald-faced power grabs, but something more insidious. Early, small pushes set the precedent for actions that are bolder and more problematic — and often harder to reverse. It is up to all of us to stay vigilant and pay close attention to this new brand of subtle attempts to dilute community power.
There is also, however, a growing resistance. There’s a new playbook taking shape: a movement by elected officials, community organizations, nonprofit lawyers, and civil rights groups who are executing a range of legal and electoral strategies to fight back against judicial gerrymandering. In Georgia, for instance, we have worked with a bipartisan coalition of prosecutors to file litigation challenging their oversight commission.
The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights.
This pushback also includes efforts to let voters weigh in on changes regarding judicial authority and redistricting. When people understand what’s at stake and are given a voice, they can make it harder for state officials to interfere with and take over local power.
Supporting government officials who push back is critical to resist those trying to rig the rules of democracy. The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights. The effort for reform has won victories too, in even purple and red states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Mississippi. The future of our democracy may depend on more of these wins.
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