Roundup: Chris Duncan, reader response to suing Stephen Miller, our ongoing immigration nightmare

Links, reader mail, and a NBC interviews me for a report on a wrongful conviction in Louisiana

Greetings, readers. It’s been a bit since my last post. I’ve been fighting off a bug, but also trying to finish up some bigger projects, including my forthcoming book and new editions of both Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.

I’m also finishing up a long series on the outrageous conviction, death sentence, 30-year-imprisonment, exoneration, and now possible re-prosecution of Chris Duncan in Louisiana. It’s a story I’ve been covering on and off for 20 years.

Duncan was convicted in 1998 of the rape and murder of 2-year-old Haley Oliveaux, his girlfriend’s daughter. He was convicted primarily due to the testimony of Steven Hayne and Michael West, two forensic charlatans that were the subject of our Cadaver King book. In 2009, I broke the story about a video West took of his exam of Oliveaux in which he clearly uses a dental mold of Duncan’s teeth to create the bite marks on the little girl’s body that were later used to convict Duncan.

It took another 15 years, but Duncan was finally exonerated and released from prison last year. But the current district attorney in Monroe, Louisiana has, inexplicably, vowed to prosecute Duncan again.

The series should be ready soon. It’s horrific and heartbreaking story.

But in the meantime, here’s a 12-minute overview of Duncan’s case I worked on with NBC News that aired last week:

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Reader mail

In my last post, I argued that if they retake Congress, Democrats should create a cause of action to sue not just federal law enforcement officials, but also policymakers like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and other political appointees who make decisions and give orders that predictable result in clear violations of Constitutional rights. Somewhat more controversially, I also suggested that Congress make that cause of action retroactive. One reader was not happy with me.

I was very disturbed to read your latest piece advocating for retroactively punitive laws. The concept is abhorrent, and an affront to the very idea of a "nation of laws." While the actions and policies of the people you would have these laws target are equally abhorrent, that in no way excuses entertaining the possibility of what you are suggesting.

Pointing out that the SCOTUS has created precedents that may allow such retroactively punitive laws is hypocritical, at best. The SCOTUS has quite a history of embracing concepts that are not only unconstitutional, but just plain wrong as well. This is clearly one of those cases.

I have been reading your material since your early days writing The Agitator blog, and I have long admired your tenacious pursuit of justice, both in specific cases, and as a concept in general. You have been an outstanding journalistic leader in pointing out bad laws and the bad SCOTUS precedents that have allowed those laws to exist. To see you now advocating for bad laws, and citing bad SCOTUS precedent as supporting the idea, is extremely disappointing.

I completely agree with your premise that any policy-makers who clearly flout the laws and the Constitution should not be allowed to get away with their actions and not suffer serious repercussions. But enacting retroactively punitive laws is not a legitimate way to go about making that happen.

I think eliminating the possibility of future policy-makers getting off scot-free is the best we can hope for, and a great many very significant changes will have to be made for that to become a reality.

The Constitution prohibits ex post fact laws because it’s inherently unfair and unjust to impose criminal penalties on someone for something that wasn’t a crime at the time they did it. You can’t require people to abide by laws that aren’t yet laws.

What Miller, Homan, Trump, immigration officers, and countless others in this administration are doing is entirely different. They are knowingly and willingly violating the Constitutional rights of undocumented immigrants, legal residents, and U.S. citizens under existing law. They are not only violating the Constitution on a near-daily basis, they’re inflicting real harm and injury on people, up to and including death. These are crimes. They were crimes at the time they were committed, they’re crimes now, and they’ll be crimes tomorrow.

The problem is that there is no reliable way to hold the people who committed these crimes accountable. Trump has promised a blanket pardon for criminal liability, and the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to sue any member of the federal government. All three branches of government have completely abdicated their duty to uphold the Constitutional rights of the people Trump is targeting. I am not suggesting that Congress create new crimes. I’m suggesting they create a remedy for the people harmed by this administration’s previous and ongoing actions that are already illegal.

It’s true that I also think such a law should not exclude punitive damages. Just to be clear, punitive damages are monetary damages that go beyond compensation for pain and suffering, lost income, and generally making a victim whole. The entire reason we allow for punitive damages in civil law is to serve as a deterrent for especially harmful, egregious, and reckless behavior. I can’t imagine behavior more harmful, egregious, and reckless than the violence, terror, and death that this administration has rained down on Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, and immigrant communities all over the country. And I can’t imagine any two groups of people more in need of a deterrent to such behavior than (1) the armed federal law enforcement officers who are entrusted with the power to detain, arrest, injure, and kill, and (2) the most powerful people who make policy decisions for the most powerful government in the world.

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What I’m reading:

• A Trump-affiliated oil company called “Greenland Energy” — which was formed just last year — is apparently setting up to start drilling and extracting oil in Greenland, despite the fact that Greenland has explicitly denied them permission to do so. This is theft. It is arguably an invasion. And it’s the sort of thing that would bring military strikes if another country attempted it on U.S. soil. And just to underscore our current surreal reality, there’s this: “Greenland Energy has retained Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, a prominent right-wing former chatshow host who served on Trump’s religious freedom commission, to make a documentary series that will ‘capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters.’”

• ICE says it will only release body camera footage when doing so is in “the agency’s interests.” That’s pretty much the opposite of transparency.

• A Trump-appointed judge has dismissed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (persuasive) claim that the Trump administration’s charges against it are vindictive prosecution. Judge Emily Marks has also blocked the SPLC from discovery on the claim.

• Black residents of Senatobia, Mississippi, have been warning about racist, abusive cops for years. No one listened. Then, this year, a cop shot and killed a Black toddler.

• ICE is paying contractors millions to scour social media for people who criticize the agency, then attempting to intimidate them into silence.

• How the right’s narrative of a “censorship-industrial complex” took root and went viral. Relatedly: How right-wing chud Mike Benz got journalists like Matt Taibbi on board with the censorship narrative. Benz, by the way, is also a big reason why Elon Musk dissolved USAID.

• Speaking of which, the latest insane conspiracy theory on the far right is that rap music is a massive USAID-funded conspiracy to undermine U.S. culture. Or something like that.

• As they were deciding on the legality of Paramount’s takeovers of CBS and Time Warner, Trump-appointed FCC commissioners Brendan Carr and Olivia Trusty were accepting lavish gifts from Paramount executives.

• Trump has recently lost at the Supreme Court on his insane and arbitrary tariffs, his attempt to repeal birthright citizenship, and his transparently dishonest attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. He’s now trying to do all three of those things, anyway.

• The Trump administration thinks the attorney general — and at the moment that also means the president — should get to decide which federal prisoners serve time in which prisons. Here’s why that is a bad idea.

• Two media outlets are reporting that the White House is preparing an executive order that will purport to link autism to childhood vaccines. We all saw this coming. But it’s still going to be enormously destructive.

• The U.S. military appears to have just caused a medevac plane to crash in New Mexico, killing everyone on board. The military was apparently testing a new GPS-jamming weapon.

• Trump’s “federal task force” in Memphis has killed four people in a year.

• The Trump administration is about to let a contract expire that will leave 20,000 unaccompanied minors without legal representation as DHS tries to deport them. It’s already happening in New York.

• ICE seems to think that if they release people who die in their custody slightly before they die, they don’t have to report those people as “in-custody deaths.”

• A GAO report finds that even DOGE wildly exaggerated the amount of money saved by its cuts to government programs.

• Last month, the United States accepted just 2,528 people into the refugee program. Everyone one of them was a white person from South Africa. So far this fiscal year, 99.96 precent of the refugees the administration has taken have been white people from South Africa. The others — three in total — were from Afghanistan. And Trump later revoked their status.

• Meanwhile, the roundup of Haitians who came here legally, lived here legally, and have been assets to their communities . . . has begun.

• Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill is refusing to pay people who are eligible for compensation under a fund started by the legislature to pay the wrongly convicted. Most of these were not close calls. They were clear, DNA-backed exonerations of people who spent decades in prison. Murrill has fought 22 out of 23 claims. Her predecessor Jeff Landry (who is now the governor and, weirdly, also Trump’s “special envoy to Greenland”) also fought nearly every claim. Incidentally, Murrill is also supporting the Monroe DA in his fight to re-try Chris Duncan.

• The president has been coating everything he sees in gold as he extracts billions from his office for himself and his family. Meanwhile, the service members fighting his war don’t have toothpaste, hot water, or working toilets.

• The “concession” that senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn got from Trump in exchange for their cowardly votes to confirm Todd Blanche will still forgive any tax liability Trump or his family currently have (which is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars). It also immunizes him, his family, and his companies from any accountability for financial crimes they may have committed up until earlier this year. The good news is that it seems unlikely that a future administration would be required to abide by it. The bad news is that we now have Attorney General Todd Blanche.

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Video

This Chris Hayes dissection of the rampant anti-Muslim bigotry taking over the Republican Party is searing. But be sure to watch to the end, when he talks about how a far-right, Christian nationalist, anti-Muslim, Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for Congress just lost by 20 points in a Michigan primary.

“That’s great!” you’re thinking. “What’s the problem?” Well, he lost to a guy named Tom Smith, who raised less than $2,000, and who actually tried to drop out of the race.

“Still great!” you’re thinking. “Where’s the ugly bigotry?” Well, it turns out that the name of the guy who by every measure should have won this race is Amir Hassan. And the MAGA faithful wouldn’t stand for it.

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Photo

The Grand Tetons

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Dogs

Oscar and Fiona. My wife took the first two shots.

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