Roundup: Innocence and executions, the Trump threat, new scrutiny for deaths in police custody

Your roundup of criminal justice and civil liberties news

A young Wally (Photo credit: Liliana Segura)

Greetings, readers. Happy weekend.

Before we get to the roundup, a few housekeeping items:

— First, I’m thrilled to announce that I’m working on my third book. I’ve signed a contract with PublicAffairs — the publisher of my first two books — to write The Defenders, which will be a deeply-reported look at criminal defense from the people on the front lines of the justice system. I began reporting for this book prior to the pandemic, shadowing criminal defense attorneys around the country, including in Brooklyn, New Orleans, Detroit, Lake Charles, Louisiana; and Glasgow, Kentucky. I was actually at a Detroit public defender office when the pandemic hit. I’ll be visiting more criminal defense attorneys in the coming months. If all goes to plan, the book will be published in the spring of 2026.

— This month marks the second anniversary of this newsletter. The transition from a traditional journalism job to a self-employed journalist has been an adventure. One lesson I’ve definitely learned — and really already knew after hearing from friends — is that it’s all but impossible to make a living as a freelance journalist. Editors commission stories, sit on them for months, and sometimes then decide not to publish. Which means it just isn’t a reliable source of income. It’s frustrating as a writer, but it’s also really frustrating for sources, who are often vulnerable people who have trusted me with their stories. The Watch gives me an outlet to tell these stories, even if an agreement with a publication falls through. It also provides me with a steady income to both live on and to fund my reporting.

So if you’re a paid subscriber, thank you again. I definitely couldn’t do this work without you.

— We recently lost our handsome, loyal, wonderful dog Wally, whose sweet mug serves as The Watch’s mascot. It’s the second dog we’ve had to put down in a year. The first, Daisy, was the dog I brought to our marriage. Wally is the dog my wife Liliana brought. She adopted him 15 years ago. Expect another sappy dog memoriam in the coming weeks. (More photos of Wally below.)

On a related note, instead of “Today in dog history,” which has become a bit labor-intensive, I’ve decided to feature a dog in each roundup. If you’d like your pup to be featured, feel free to send me a photo and brief description.

— Here are some recent events and podcast interviews I’ve done:

• This week, I joined some very smart folks on a Cato Institute panel about policing and surveillance since George Floyd. You can watch that here.

• I discussed the indigent defense systems in Georgia and Florida on the terrific Public Defenseless podcast here.

• You can listen to me discuss my series on the retconning of George Floyd’s murder on the Serious Inquiries Only podcast here.

• I discussed Trump’s plan for mass deportations on the Daily Beast’s New Abnormal podcast with Andy Levy.

• I talked about police and prosecutor immunity on the Cato Daily Podcast.

• Finally, I detailed Trump’s authoritarian vision for a second term for the podcast Current Affairs.

— When I launched this newsletter two years ago, my first investigative piece looked into the wrongful conviction of Charlie Vaughn. That story was then re-published by a Little Rock outlet. It won a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association, which resulted in the organization helping with Vaughn’s legal defense. Despite all of that, and despite a clemency petition last year to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Charlie Vaughn remains in prison. He has now spent 35 of his 54 years behind bars. It’s good motivation to keep working.

On to the roundup . . .

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Policing

— Here’s a big story with national implications broken by Nashville’s superb local TV reporter Phil Williams: A nutty, conspiratorial assistant police chief in Tennessee helped a far-right election-denying group get access to a federal database of financial records.

— Even when you win a case against police officers for Constitutional violations, the process can be punishing and drag on for years. Here’s an example: A federal appeals court recently ruled against qualified immunity for an officer who shot a man in the back, paralyzing him from the waist down. The officer had turned off her body cam before the incident, but footage from a security camera showed she lied about what happened. The ruling is good news, but as defense attorney Joshua Erlich pointed out on BlueSky, it’s taken six years to get this far. And all the ruling does is finally allow the case to go to trial.

— A damning DOJ report finds that the town of Lexington, Mississippi imposed an oppressive fines and fees regime that resulted in the equivalent of $1,400 in debt for every resident of the town. Money extracted by fines went directly to the public department budget, which created a culture of corruption and abuse. Incredibly, while black people make up 72 percent of the town, they were hit with 98 percent of fines, sometimes for offenses like “taking too long to get out of their car at the grocery store.” The current police chief is under investigation for fining and jailing women who declined his solicitations for sex. Black residents went from being 2.5 times more likely to be arrested than white citizens in 2018 to 17.6 times more likely in 2023.

— A Chicago study finds that while city police are far more likely to pull over Black drivers for alleged traffic infractions, automated cameras issue tickets roughly proportionate to how often Black drivers use the roadways. In other words, the study contradicts the argument that cops stop Black people more because Black people are more likely to commit infractions.

— The Memphis officers who killed Tyre Nichols were convicted on lesser charges, but acquitted on the charges related to killing him. The George Floyd verdidts notwithstanding, juries are really, really reluctant to convict cops, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

— The NYPD dismissed hundreds of police misconduct cases without bothering to investigate them.

— Interesting study on the role of deception in policing.

— A Virginia court has ruled that the state’s police agencies can keep names and salaries of police officers hidden from the public.

— The vast majority of NYPD jaywalking tickets are issued in predominantly black neighborhoods.

— California passed a law to create a state database of police misconduct to prevent problem officers from finding work with another agencies. Unfortunately, law enforcement agencies have found a way around the law — they agree to wipe the records of bad cops if those cops agree to resign voluntarily.

— A white man in Phoenix falsely reported being assaulted by a black man. Police responded and attacked a black man nearby, who happens to be deaf and have cerebral palsy. The officers claimed the man “took a fighting stance” and appeared ready to run, both of which are contradicted by video — not to mention his condition. Instead, it appears his main offense was a failure to comply with their orders . . . because he can’t hear. The officers “punched him in the head at least 10 times, Tasered him four times, and wrapped their arms around his neck.” And then they arrested him for assaulting them. The incident comes just months after DOJ released a report accusing the Phoenix PD of racism, excessive force, and abuse of people with disabilities.

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Innocence

— In my post earlier this year about Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, I wrote about the cases of Terrence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne. Both were sentenced to life in prison for killing a police officer, even though a jury acquitted both of the crime (it’s complicated). Here’s an update on their cases — and on Miyares’s ongoing effort to keep them behind bars.

— Here’s an uplifting story about Calvin Buari, a wrongly convicted man who has started a ride-share company for family members to visit relatives in prison.

— Over the summer, we saw the 200th exoneration of a Death Row prisoner.

— There seems to be no wrongful conviction that Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey won’t fight to preserve.

— Actor J.J. Valezquez has been officially exonerated for the murder of a retired New York police officer. He was convicted in 1998 “despite the fact that he did not match the suspect description and had an alibi corroborated by phone records.” He served 24 years. A Dateline investigation helped clear his hame.

The Trump threat

— It’s hard to over-emphasize the fact that Trump and his supporters abandoned all pretense and are now just spewing straight up fascism, laced with eliminationist rhetoric. We are in very scary territory.

— No, really

— More . . .

— But don’t take my word for it. Talk to Trump’s former joint chiefs chairman, who says Trump is “fascist to the core.” Add this to what others who served in Trump’s administration have said, like former chief of staff John Kelly, also a retired general, who said Trump is “the most flawed human being” he has ever met. I’ll just add here that career military people aren’t exactly known for batting terms like “fascist” around willy-nilly.

— You could also look to far-right publications like the Federalist, before Trump officially became the GOP nominee in 2016 — or, before they realized that it was in their financial interest to support him.

— Or you can just look at the sort of genocidal garbage Trump himself is churning out right now.

— By the way, the entire reason Trump was in Aurora yesterday stems from a right-wing lie that an apartment building in the city had been “taken over” by Venezuelan migrants.

— Add meteorologists to the growing list — librarians, doctors, nurses, academics, election workers, journalists, government workers, law enforcement, jurors, judges, prosecutors, business owners, emergency aid workers, and just regular people who changed their mind about Trump — of people who have received death threats because of MAGA fanaticism and conspiracism.

— Trump’s claim that FEMA is withholding money from Trump-supporting areas hit by hurricane Helene and giving that money to migrants is, of course, complete and utter horseshit. But it comes from a real place — it’s exactly the sort of thing Trump would do. In fact it’s the sort of thing he did do — over and over and over and over and over and over.

— JD Vance is now targeting immigrant children in the Detroit public schools. Vance himself points out that these are the children of immigrants, which means most are likely U.S. citizens. As usual, he’s also exaggerating and outright lying to sow fear about these kids.

— The Trump plan to “leave abortion to the states” apparently includes tacit approval of law enforcement monitoring of menstrual cycles.

— Trump calls for “one really violent day,” which he says will end property crime in America.

— Trump threatens to withhold federal funding for school lunches to any public school that mandates vaccines. You can be relieved of hunger pains or protected from polio — but not both!

— When Tim Walz asked JD Vance point-blank if Donald Trump lost the 2020 election at the vice presidential debate, Vance made a hilariously cowardly pivot to a dumb talking point about Kamala Harris “censoring” COVID skeptics, and how people who end friendships with Trump supporters are violating Trump supporters’ free expression. It’s an especially ridiculous point because, the day before, Donald Trump said he’d support making it illegal to criticize the Supreme Court.

— I’m not sure how close Trump will be able to get to his goal of making U.S. policing more violent and less accountable, but I’d rather not give him the chance.

— Donald Trump, Jr. posted the name and photo of the JD Vance acquaintance who leaked the personal 2020 text messages in which Vance criticized Trump. This of course has led to harassment, threats, and demands from MAGA politicians that the federal government terminate contracts with the man’s employer, Deloitte.

— Trump continues to dangle the idea that RFK, Jr. will have a prominent position in his administration to tout his “medical freedom” agenda. Here’s a little taste of what the lesser Kennedy thinks “medical freedom” looks like:

“Speaking during a live recording of the Latino Capitalist podcast, Kennedy described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free ‘wellness farms,’ where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.”

— NBC postpones a documentary about Trump’s child separation policy until after the election to avoid offending the former president.

The drug war

— The marijuana front of the war on drugs is far from over, including in states that have legalized it for recreational use. In October 2023, LAPD raided a business they suspected of being an unlicensed marijuana operation due to unusual electricity consumption and the “distinct odor” of marijuana. The business was a medical imaging center. When one officer disregarded a sign warning against entering the room while wearing anything metal, an MRI machine sucked his gun from his hand. (In an admirable show of restraint, the other officers did not open fire on the machine for “dispossessing” the officer of his service weapon.) The police found nothing illegal.

— The Houston cop who routinely lied on drug warrants, including a warrant in which police shot and killed an innocent couple, was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

— JD Vance recycles the tired “drug-laced-Halloween-candy” trope, but with a bigoted anti-immigrant twist.

— The Irvine police department bought a tricked-out Cybertruck to

̶p̶u̶r̶s̶u̶e̶ ̶c̶r̶i̶m̶i̶n̶a̶l̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶t̶e̶r̶r̶a̶i̶n̶

̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶ ̶h̶i̶g̶h̶-̶r̶i̶s̶k̶ ̶w̶a̶r̶r̶a̶n̶t̶s̶

. . . use in its DARE anti-drug program. This actually makes some sense. If you’re going to continue a gimmicky, overpriced anti-drug program that doesn’t work and probably does more harm than good, a gimmicky, overpriced truck that doesn’t work is a pretty good mascot.

The death penalty

— The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Richard Glossip case this week. The state of Oklahoma — as represented by Attorney General Gentner Drummond — does not believe Glossip should be executed. With no one from the state to argue for execution, the court hired a former John Roberts clerk from California to argue for Glossip’s death. Meanwhile, just months after expressing his deep concern that unscrupulous prosecutors could, in theory, target the most powerful person on the planet with politically-motivated charges, in Glossip’s case Justice Clarence Thomas seemed most concerned about the reputations of the poor prosecutors who withheld exculpatory evidence in order to put a man on death row.

— Meanwhile, barring any action from the governor or courts, Texas will execute Robert Roberson next week, a man convicted with the now-discredited theory of Shaken Baby Syndrome, and whom many believe to be innocent — including the lead detective who investigated the case. Illustrating how arbitrary this can all be, this week the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — which has rejected Roberson SBS claims — recently granted another prisoner a new trial on an SBS claim. The same expert testified in both trials.

— A new report finds that the team of guards who carry out executions in Alabama — arguably the most solemn, profound power we grant to government — have a history of violence, abuse, and misconduct.

— In Japan, the person who has spent more time on death row than anyone on the planet has been exonerated. He spent 46 years awaiting execution.

Free speech and the First Amendment

— The rate at which X/Twitter has complied with foreign government requests to remove content is more than twice what it was before Elon Musk took over. Look forward to comment on this from the free speech championing journalists who broke the “Twitter Files” story!

— Georgia has dropped the ridiculous “money laundering” charges against the chief officers of a charitable bail fund. But they still face equally ridiculous charges of “racketeering.”

— The young reporter working for a tiny publication who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on Mississippi welfare corruption involving former NFL quarterback Brett Favre is now facing jail time for refusing to reveal her sources to a judge and to the Mississippi governor her reporting exposed.

— Far-right federal judge Reed O’Connor has ordered Media Matters to turn over records and donor lists in Elon Musk’s risible lawsuit against the organization for engaging in journalism that Musk finds unflattering.

— The DeSantis administration threatens to prosecute TV stations if they air campaign ads featuring a woman with brain cancer who says she needed a life-saving abortion.

— Trump wants to revoke CBS’s broadcasting license over its interview with Kamala Harris. We’re increasingly MAGA mouthpieces argue that “media bias” — negative coverage of Trump or not-negative-enough coverage — amounts to an in-kind political contribution to Trump’s opponents. Expect to see more of it. And if Trump wins, expect to see them start to suggest that these contributions are “illegal,” and therefore reason to prosecute and imprison journalists. Think I’m exaggerating? They’re already doing it.

— After threats from cosnervative lawmakers, Texas A&M drops LGBTQ+ studies.

— Republican AGs are threatening a professional medical organization unless it reverses its positions on trans care.

Immigration

— An in-depth look at how the Manhattan Institute — led by Reihan Salam, the son of Bangladeshi immigrants — has supported Chris Rufo’s racist libel against immigrants from Haiti, Congo, and other developing countries.

— The Democrats have called out Trump’s lies about Biden’s immigration record, but when it comes to defending immigration and immigrants more generally, they have failed, largely adopting the Republican narrative about a “border crisis” and ending policies that established the U.S. as a sanctuary and beacon of hope for people fleeing violence and persecution. Even the Libertarian Party nominee (who, to be fair, was nominated in spite of resistance from the party’s retrograde leadership) has done more than Kamala Harris to defend the Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

— You may have seen the claim on social media, but no, the Biden administration did not release “13,000 immigrant murderers” into the country.

— Once gain, the main problem with the argument that immigrants should “just come here legally” is that despite high demand for immigrant labor, it’s next to impossible for most immigrants to do that.

— The red-state challenge to DACA heads to the Fifth Circuit — probably the federal appeals court least sympathetic to immigrants.

— Here’s a heartbreaking report on how the Trump-Vance lies about Springfield have devastated a Haitian family in the town.

Deaths in police custody

— In my series on the retconning of George Floyd’s murder, I wrote about how the state of Maryland commissioned an audit of autopsies related to in-custody deaths in that state. It does not appear to be going well.

— Speaking of which, the National Academies of Science is conducting a big study on deaths in police custody, including how they’re investigated and classified. This could be a huge deal. The NAS study on forensics was groundbreaking, and pushed a lot of much-needed (though ultimately insufficient) reform across the country.

— Federal judge rules that federal prison officials can refuse to comply with an open records request about inmate deaths due to medical neglect because complying with the request could embarrass those officials. No, really.

— An AP investigation looks at five deaths in police custody in Evansville, Indiana were investigated and classified by a coroner with long ties to law enforcement. Not surprisingly, the coroner excused police in all five cases. In two he relied on the dubious “sickle cell trait” diagnosis often used to exonerate police for the deaths of Black people. In Indiana, coroner is an elected position, and requires no medical training. Current Vanderburgh County coroner Steve Lockyear has no such training. Instead, he served 24 years as a deputy for the very sheriff’s department he now investigates when suspects or prisoners die in its care.

— Idaho jails aren’t required to — and thus don’t — inform the public about deaths in custody.

— Florida judge blocks newspaper from publishing video of a jail inmate’s death. The paper says the video directly contradicts the police narrative.

Etc.

— The publication Bolts continues to provides the best and most comprehensive criminal justice-related coverage of the elections. Here’s their guide to 2024.

— Adam Serwer on how the MAGA right wants to create a nation of snitches, where neighbors report neighbors for illegal abortions, immigration violations, drug offenses, and violations of oppressive state laws regarding trans people. If you want to get paranoid, this also starts to look like a pretty good infrastructure for reporting insufficient loyalty to the government. More on the growing threat of vigilantism here.

— Indiana Republican Senator Mike Braun says interracial marriage is an issue that should be “left to the states.” That seemed to work out well last time.

— Florida officials told residents who refused to evacuate ahead of hurricane Milton that they should expect to die. But some of those same officials didn’t bother to evacuate jails and prisons.

— Video of the day:

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Dog of the month: The late, great Wally Segura. RIP, friend.

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Photo: Arches National Park

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