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You are here: Home / Archives for Civil Rights / Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

Righteous Rant!

by WaterGirl|  April 24, 202512:45 pm| 116 Comments

This post is in: Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Racial Justice

Update:

Remember folks, you don’t have to go to every argument you’re invited to, especially when the other guy has already made up his mind. (Thin Black Duke)


If I were teaching a class, this would be required reading.

What’s happening to undocumented immigrants is not new to Black Americans.

by Shalise Manza Young  (posting at The Contrarian)

None of what’s happening with undocumented immigrants is new for Donald Trump.

None of what’s happening with undocumented immigrants is new to Black Americans.

A clip of Attorney General Pam Bondi talking about Kilmar Abrego García came up in my Instagram feed last week. Bondi’s white pinstriped suit was accessorized with a sparkling cross, a familiar sight among women in the increasingly fascistic MAGA set.

Apparently the bigger the cross, the bigger the fiction, because not one word that came from Bondi’s mouth was grounded in reality. Kind of like every appearance White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, also a fan of oversized crosses, makes in front of cameras.

Bondi said, “hard stop, [Abrego García] should not be in our country.” That is patently untrue: He was granted legal status to remain here. Bondi: “MS13 is characterized, as it should be, as a foreign terrorist organization.” No evidence has been presented in court that shows Abrego García has ever been a member of MS-13, and, even if he were, merely being in a gang isn’t a crime.

And on and on she went. With every passing day, the story this administration spins about Abrego García gets more fictional as the administration works to convince the American people that it’s OK to snatch a man with no criminal record and the legal right to be in this country and send him to a foreign gulag with no due process.

He’s brown, so they don’t care. And they’re working hard to convince you not to care, too.

For centuries, similarly fantastical tales have been conjured about Black people to justify their subjugation, which is why this is all achingly familiar for the community and those with knowledge of American history.

The message, often buoyed by the media, has long been: They’re Black, so we don’t care, and neither should you.

If you can read the next paragraph without crying or flying into a rage, you are doing better than I am.

It’s nothing we don’t already know, but seeing those sentences lined up one after another, boom, boom, boom.  Truth bombs raining down.

show full post on front page

Black men are dullards so they can’t be leaders; they’re violent, so they must be kept under lock and key. Black women are hypersexual, so raping them is allowed. Black people don’t feel pain, so doing medical experiments on them without anesthesia is permitted. They are never to be believed but frequently to be accused, evidence be damned.

Watching that clip of Bondi, my mind drifted to the horrifying story of Marcellus Williams. Last September, Williams, a Black man, was killed by the state of Missouri, with then-Gov. Mike Parson pushing the execution through despite evidence that Williams was innocent of the murder for which he was found guilty in.

Williams isn’t the only one. Stories abound of Black men who were put to death or given life sentences, losing decades with their families for crimes they never committed; the National Registry of Exonerations has tracked acquittals since 1989, and of the 3,663 individuals in its database, 1,952 are or were Black. That’s 53%. Black people are roughly 12.5% of the population in this country.

The way media covers stories also goes a long way in shaping public opinion and upholding the negative stereotypes about Blacks. Just a few days ago, a 20-year-old white man named Phoenix Ikner allegedly opened fire at Florida State University, killing two and wounding six others. His online footprint shows a fascination with Hitler and Nazis, and yet searching his name results in smiling selfies alongside stories of his difficult childhood.

But when teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by self-styled deputy George Zimmerman for the crime of minding his own business in a neighborhood Zimmerman thought Martin didn’t belong in, NBC News posted a story headlined, “Trayvon Martin was suspended three times from school.” After George Floyd was murdered in front of onlookers by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for being suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill, some outlets worked overtime to highlight Floyd’s time in jail and other issues. In both cases, portrayals of Martin and Floyd gave the impression that their deaths were deserved.

The kidnappings of Abrego García and all the men who have been disappeared to El Salvador have something else in common with Black people: no due process.

Floyd was killed after merely being accused. New York police killed Eric Garner for the misdemeanor of selling untaxed cigarettes in 2014. A year ago, four teenagers suspected of stealing a car died after the car they were in was intentionally rammed by police, causing it to wrap around a pole. No matter what any of those Black individuals were accused of or had done previously, they deserved their day in court, just as the Constitution promises.

See why all of this is so familiar? Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, presidential adviser Stephen Miller—they all keep screaming that the men they’ve trafficked to prison in El Salvador are violent “aliens,” even though reporting shows very few of them have a criminal history and were swept up on often ludicrous allegations, like the interpretation of an “Autism speaks” tattoo as one representing a violent gang.

They’re all following the lead of Trump. There’s 50 years of evidence of Trump’s racial animus, beginning with the first time his name appeared in The New York Times: All the way back in 1973, the Justice Department brought suit against Trump and his father for refusing to rent apartments to Black applicants.

He began his political career by widening his scope of non-white targets, calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, though he so generously added, “some, I assume, are good people.” Campaigning a year ago, he called undocumented immigrants “animals” and “not human.”

To be sure, Trump and his cronies haven’t backed off their racism toward Black folk. Moves made by defense secretary and enthusiastic Signal user Pete Hegseth—such as questioning in one of his books whether since-fired chairman of the joint chiefs, four-star Gen. C.Q. Brown, was promoted to his role because of his race; saying “the dumbest phrase on planet Earth is ‘diversity is our strength'”; and banning the celebration of Black History Month in schools on military bases—clearly demonstrate his beliefs about Black Americans.

Latino migrants are their target now, but when Trump floated the idea of sending American citizens to the concentration camp in El Salvador, alarm bells immediately went off for Black people. History—both American and Trumpian—tells them who would be at the top of the list if or when that time comes.

This writer is someone to watch.

Here’s her short bio at the end of the article on The Contrarian:

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal.

Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung

Open thread.

Righteous Rant!Post + Comments (116)

Chris Van Hollen Press Conference (LIVE)

by WaterGirl|  April 18, 20254:49 pm| 71 Comments

This post is in: Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Trump-Musk

Van Hollen starts around the 38-minute mark.

Chris Van Hollen Press Conference (LIVE)Post + Comments (71)

So It Continues, Uncharted Waters Part 2

by WaterGirl|  April 18, 20251:35 pm| 132 Comments

This post is in: Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Trump-Musk

In yesterday’s post, linked below, I shared thoughts from Ben Wittes and Marc Elias about Judge Boasberg’s ruling on the illegal kidnapping (my words!) of a legal resident in America.

So It Begins, Uncharted Waters

Today I want to share thoughts from Jay Kuo about the followup ruling from Judge Wilkinson.  (You’ll see his full name below.)

An Opinion for the Ages

There are moments when stories and messages break through the noise, even in a time when chaos agents in the Trump administration have come at us with everything, hoping to flood the zone and overwhelm the public.

Sometimes things just cut through.

The plight of Kilmar Abrego García is one such moment. It has captured the attention of the public in large part because the government admitted it made a mistake but now stubbornly refuses to fix it. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled against the White House in a 9-0 decision, even if it was mealy mouthed as usual.

Enter Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III (yes, that’s his full, quite Republican name). Judge Wilkinson sits on the Fourth Circuit and is a Reagan appointee. He’s a consistently conservative voice. Like conservative icon Ret. Judge J. Michael Luttig (also of the Fourth Circuit, and also with three names but no Roman numerals), Judge Wilkinson was once on everyone’s short list to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

He’s not exactly a bleeding heart liberal. And yet, he just shredded Trump.

His opinion yesterday unsurprisingly declined to second guess Judge Paula Xinis’s implementation of SCOTUS’s recent ruling in the Abrego García case. That unanimous opinion had upheld a ruling by Xinis, whom Wilkinson praised as a “fine district judge,” that had directed the government to facilitate the return of Abrego García to the U.S. from a notorious prison in El Salvador.

But it was Wilkinson’s critique of the executive that made lawyers and jurists everywhere stand and cheer.

Kuo is kind enough to quote the ruling section by section, with his reaction, stated in plain English.  I’ve quoted the first 7 chunks in the first 7 comments below, but you really should read the whole thing.

Mostly open thread.

So It Continues, Uncharted Waters Part 2Post + Comments (132)

So It Begins, Uncharted Waters

by WaterGirl|  April 17, 202510:55 am| 141 Comments

This post is in: Civil Rights, Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Trump-Musk

So it begins.

I bring you two views of *Judge Boasberg’s opinion find the probably cause exists to find the government is in criminal contempt:  Ben Wittes at Lawfare and Marc Elias at Democracy Docket.

*Chief judge of the District of Columbia district court, and former head of the FISA court.

First, a short summary from Ben Wittes at Lawfare.

So today, Judge Boasberg dropped a 46-page opinion finding “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt” and that “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it” and that “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself’” and finding, as well, that it does not matter that the Supreme Court later vacated the order that the government previously violated because “it is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’—no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’—until a court reverses it,” and finding that this means that Judge Boasberg’s order to turn those planes around, wrong as it may have been in terms of the venue of the district court that should have been entering it, was law unto those government officials who ignored it and failed to give those deportees any semblance of due process.

I desperately hope that this isn’t all kabuki, but even if it is, I would rather see it play out as though the Rule of Law still exists in the United States of America.

And now, a 15-minute explanation of what happens next from Marc Elias at Democracy Docket.

Now, the full article from Benjamin Wittes.

Lawfare: The Situation: Vindicating the Semblance of Due Process

Ben Wittes writes:

The Situation on Monday ruminated on the tools in the hands of the two judges seeking to hold the Trump administration accountable for deporting people to Salvadoran prisons.

Today, one of those judges took his shot.

In case you’ve forgotten the J.G.G. case in a week of market turmoil, tariffs, and intense media interest in one man sent to a Salvadoran gulag on March 15, this is the case about those other guys sent to the same Salvadoran gulag on that same day—the ones sent under the president’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation and put on a pair of planes that were mysteriously not turned around when federal judge James Boasberg ordered that they be turned around so that the people on them could get some semblance of due process.

Remember that case? It has been a while—all of nine days since the Supreme Court vacated Judge Boasberg’s order because the case should have been brought in a different court and under a different statute even though the court also said that if the administration is going to deport people under the Alien Enemies Act, they are entitled to some semblance of due process.

But it turns out that federal district judges have long memories, particularly when you go behind their backs and pack two planeloads full of deportees before you issue your proclamation, conceal from them that you are planning to deport these people, stall for time, ignore their orders, transfer the detainees to foreign custody hours after they order you not to do so, and then stonewall them for a month about basic information about the flights, the preparation for the flights, the diplomatic arrangements, and your own legal arguments—even as you release pictures of the planes, mock the courts on social media, and show videos of the detainees, all of whom still have had no semblance of due process.

So today, Judge Boasberg dropped a 46-page opinion finding “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt” and that “The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it” and that “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself’” and finding, as well, that it does not matter that the Supreme Court later vacated the order that the government previously violated because “it is a foundational legal precept that every judicial order ‘must be obeyed’—no matter how ‘erroneous’ it ‘may be’—until a court reverses it,” and finding that this means that Judge Boasberg’s order to turn those planes around, wrong as it may have been in terms of the venue of the district court that should have been entering it, was law unto those government officials who ignored it and failed to give those deportees any semblance of due process.

show full post on front page

Actually, this all feels critical, I am going to include the whole article here.  Even if you read it here, PLEASE click on the article so I don’t have to feel bad about including the whole thing.

And thus did Judge Boasberg offer the government a simple choice: He gave the defendants until April 23 to propose a plan to purge their contempt or to identify the contemnor—the person who gave the order to not turn the planes around, and Judge Boasberg did not lay out what exactly purging the contempt would look like precisely, but he did say that “The most obvious way for Defendants to do so here is by asserting custody of the individuals who were removed in violation of the Court’s classwide [order] so that they might avail themselves of their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding” but he also says that, “The Court will also give Defendants an opportunity to propose other methods of coming into compliance, which the Court will evaluate,” and he did not say exactly what he would do to get to the truth, but he did say that “the Court will proceed to identify the individual(s) responsible for the contumacious conduct by determining whose ‘specific act or omission’ caused the noncompliance,” because either those deportees are going to get what they’re entitled to or he’s going to out and punish the miscreants who are keeping them from their semblance of due process.

And Judge Boasberg, I think, knows that the government has a third option, which is to appeal again and go up to the Supreme Court to complain that a single district judge is holding hostage the entire foreign policy of the United States and to complain in public that a single liberal district judge is trying to take over the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security and the foreign policy prerogatives of the president of the United States and wants to hold executive branch officials in contempt for failing to follow a lawless order that the Supreme Court already overturned and to have members of Congress introduce impeachment resolutions against this judge and to have other members of Congress talking about stripping the courts of jurisdiction over things and to do all of this knowing that while throwing up a lot of smoke won’t change the fact that the administration knowingly and intentionally and flagrantly violated a court order and Judge Boasberg’s opinion shows that conclusively, it will cause all kinds of people who should know better—not to mention even more people who probably can’t be expected to know better—to believe that the problem is the district judges who object to presidential lawlessness rather than to the lawlessness itself and the fact that his lawlessness has caused a couple of hundred people to rot in a Salvadoran prison with no semblance of due process.

And Judge Boasberg, I think, knows as well that the government has a fourth option too—and that that option is to stonewall this order, just as it stonewalled the one on which this order follows up—and that is to decline to “purge” its contempt because that would mean letting this unelected district judge run U.S. foreign policy and force the president of the United States to recover people he designated as gang members and terrorists from the sovereign government of El Salvador which doesn’t want to give them back because the president doesn’t want them back, and to decline to assist the judge in inquiring into the identity of the miscreant who caused this misadventure because, well, that person was—let’s just be honest about this—doing exactly what the president wanted, just as the president of El Salvador is now doing exactly what the president wants, and Judge Boasberg knows that this option is not incompatible with the third option—which is to say that the government could appeal the contempt order and go all the way up the appellate ladder once again and then, if and when it loses, stonewall anyway and drag things out for weeks or months more, during which time the deportees will continue to rot in the Salvadoran gulag with no semblance of due process.

And Judge Boasberg, I suspect, also knows that he has only a faint chance of getting the government to bring these people back, and he knows, I suspect, that he has only a slightly-better-than-faint chance of creating a clear record of who precisely the miscreant was who engineered this disaster, and he knows also—I’m fairly confident—that there’s a good chance that the government’s stonewalling will work, that he can’t force the American president to force the Salvadoran president to reload those planes and fly them back, and he might not even be able to force the government to reveal how this all came to pass and who is to blame for the violation of the court order and the deprivation to hundreds of men before deportation of any semblance of due process.

But damn it, he’s doing it anyway, because he’s a federal district judge, and the government defied his order, and Stephen Miller thinks that the administration’s gamesmanship with the most basic principles of the rule of law is just oh-so-clever, and the judge—with impeccable calmness and civility—is going to do everything in his power to remedy that, full well knowing that there are limits to his power, but knowing that his job is to make sure that someone asks every proper question, issues every reasonable order, and pulls on every available lever to vindicate that semblance of due process.

Succeed or fail, this is how it’s done.

The Situation continues tomorrow.

Since the article was written yesterday, “tomorrow” is today.

So It Begins, Uncharted WatersPost + Comments (141)

We Got Here Faster Than I Thought We Would

by WaterGirl|  March 25, 20252:00 pm| 80 Comments

This post is in: Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Trump-Musk

Trump DOJ tells the courts: “You Can’t Make Me”

We are just starting the 10th week of this presidency, and the DOJ has told the courts to fuck off.  You can’t make me.  You’re not the boss of me.  We aren’t gong to follow your directive because we say we don’t have to.

The article below from TPM kind of stops abruptly, and doesn’t say anything about what the response of court might be, or even what options the court has.

I would love to hear from our attorneys and from anyone else who has links to what next steps might be.  In the meantime, here’s what we know now.

show full post on front page

From Talking Points Memo

The Trump administration took the extraordinary step of invoking the state secrets privilege rather than answer a federal judge’s questions about whether it violated his order blocking deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

“The Executive Branch hereby notifies the Court that no further information will be provided in response to the Court’s March 18, 2025 Minute Order based on the state secrets privilege,” the administration asserted in a bumptious filing over the names of top DOJ officials.

Although it is a weak and probably not viable privilege claim, the state secrets invocation escalates President Trump’s series of attacks on the judicial branch and its independent sources of power under the Constitution. It did so with unusually sharp language that showcased a sneering contempt for the judiciary in refusing to even provide the allegedly privileged information to a judge for his review.

“The Court has all of the facts it needs” the administration argued as it objected to “[f]urther intrusions on the Executive Branch.” It asserted that it would no longer entertain “further demands for details that have no place in this matter.” It contended that the court “owes President Trump ‘high respect’ … but to this point has not” given it to him. The administration repeatedly stated that “there is no need for the requested disclosures” without engaging in actual argument.

Judge Boasberg, a former FISA court judge with deep experience in national security law, had already expressed skepticism in open court about the applicability of the state secrets privilege in this case. But the Trump DOJ forged ahead with a distinctly derisive tone:

“The information sought by the Court is irrelevant to plaintiffs’ claims and to the Executive Branch’s compliance with the Court’s operative order. The Court has already devoted more time to these inquiries than it did to evidence and argument on the issue of whether a class should be certified.”

At issue is whether the Trump administration complied with Boasberg’s order to stop deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, including flights of Venezuelan nationals alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang from Texas to a prison in El Salvador. For more than a week, the Justice Department has dodged Boasberg’s demands for more information on the timing of the flights as he seeks to determine whether his order was violated.

“The need for additional information here is not merely ‘dubious,’ or ‘trivial,’ it is non-existent. The Executive Branch violated no valid order through its actions, and the Court has all it needs to evaluate compliance. Accordingly, the Court’s factual inquiry should end,” the Justice Department concluded.

The invocation of the state secrets privilege came at the end of a long day in the case that began with Boasberg issuing an opinion detailing the legal basis for his temporary restraining order barring the Alien Enemies Act deportations and included feisty oral arguments on the TRO before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

I am not a lawyer, but it sure feels to me that if this response from the DOJ flies with this court, it’s game over for the courts.  Am I wrong about that?

Open thread.

We Got Here Faster Than I Thought We WouldPost + Comments (80)

Only 4 Lawless Supreme Court Justices Today, I’ll Call That a Victory!

by WaterGirl|  January 9, 20257:28 pm| 87 Comments

This post is in: Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Politics, Supreme Court, Supreme Court Corruption, Trump Indictments

Supreme Court denies Trump’s request to block his hush money sentencing Friday

The U.S. Supreme Court has narrowly denied Donald Trump’s request to delay his criminal hush money sentencing, Friday in New York.

Trump’s last hope to halt Friday’s sentencing in his New York criminal hush money case had rested with U.S. Supreme Court, after the New York Court of Appeals, the highest court in the state, on Thursday denied his request to block the sentencing.

Trump on Wednesday launched an eleventh-hour request to New York’s highest court to pause the hush money case, on the same day that he also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block his sentencing.

In a brief filed to the Supreme Court late Thursday, Trump’s lawyers reiterated their position that Trump is entitled to immunity as president-elect.

You get three guesses as to who the 4 justices are, and the first two don’t count.

I predict a tantrum from the soon to be president, and I don’t care.  I would not mind seeing someone punch any of Trump’s attorneys in their smug little faces.

Only 4 Lawless Supreme Court Justices Today, I’ll Call That a Victory!Post + Comments (87)

Friday Afternoon Open Thread: In Legal News

by WaterGirl|  March 15, 202412:30 pm| 130 Comments

This post is in: Criminal Justice, Politics, Trump Indictments

Small roundup of legal news because I’m still wound up about, well, all of it!

Andrew Weissmann gets smacked down.

I think this would be a de facto disqualification under Georgia law that would require her entire office to be removed the same as if Judge McAfee had found an actual conflict of interest. Won’t happen. And would open the door to more litigation about re: constitutional officers. https://t.co/xX5SpSDVM4

— Anthony Michael Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) March 15, 2024

Andrew Weissmann’s buddy Norm Eisen doesn’t agree with Andrew, either!

BREAKING: Judge McAfee has followed our recommendation and called for Wade to go👇

If he does—& he will—Willis stays

Now let’s get that trial scheduled for the summer!

A thread (1/x)https://t.co/Ipueyui43h

— Norm Eisen (norm.eisen on Threads) (@NormEisen) March 15, 2024

Speaking of Norm Eisen. This is a short clip where he explains that he thinks there is room for 2 Trump cases to go to trial before the election, which ones, and why.

The Manhattan case is still likely to conclude in the next few months

The ? then is: will any of the other 3 racehorses (trials) cross the finish line before the election?

Given today’s GA developments, I think at least 1 of them will

I discussed @CNN @thelauracoates pic.twitter.com/HpNUrVR2ZA

— Norm Eisen (norm.eisen on Threads) (@NormEisen) March 15, 2024

For rikyrah:

SDNY WTF?!

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) March 15, 2024

Loved this from Sheldon Whitehouse. “If you wanna be a celebrity, be a chef.”

That’s it.

This new habit of prosecutors offering commentary leads no place good. Explanations and editorializations made to make yourself look good are particularly dangerous.

Vanity has no place here; if you wanna be a celebrity, be a chef.

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) March 15, 2024

Open thread.

Update: I’ll put up another Worker Power fundraising thread tomorrow, but if you donate in the meantime, just let me know in the comments here.   frosty’s match is still active, and we have another BJ Angel waiting in the wings, so all donations up to $25 per person will be matched as long as you let us know in the comments.

Friday Afternoon Open Thread: In Legal NewsPost + Comments (130)

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