Matt Mangino

ICE arrests surge -- 50,000 people in July alone

2026-08-26T09:05:28.605-04:00

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, the highest single monthly arrest total during the second Trump administration, according to new figures. reported The Associated Press.

The spike in immigration arrests shows that the administration has continued to advance its mass deportations agenda despite a shift in approach earlier this year from high-profile operations in large American cities that sparked a public outcry to arrests that have garnered less attention but have nonetheless been disruptive.

The July arrest tally of 49,571 marks a 15% jump from 43,021 arrests a month earlier and a 70% increase from 29,241 in February, in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Minnesota, according to government data that was provided by ICE to the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA and analyzed by The Associated Press.

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Richard Nixon set the table for the presidential excesses of today

2026-08-25T11:09:36.561-04:00

“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

-Former President Richard M. Nixon

He made that stunning statement to television personality David Frost in a May 1977 interview that reached an audience of 45 million, reported Just Security. Nixon’s quote is often cited to illustrate the epitome of his arrogance and blindness to the rule of law — his confidence that his power rose to such heights that he possessed a presidential prerogative to redefine the law. For nearly fifty years, that statement stood at the apex of presidential contempt for the law. But a new contender has emerged. Within weeks of taking office for his second term in 2025, President Donald Trump posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.” Trump apparently believes that his definition of saving the country includes whatever he believes needs to be done, with the law no obstacle. The months since he made the statement are consistent with that theory.

While Trump’s statement rivals Nixon’s in placing the president above the law, a nearly forgotten postscript to Nixon’s statement reveals that Nixon made a far more nuanced argument for presidential power. Less than a month after the Frost interview, Nixon published a full-page essay in the Washington Star to correct “widespread misinterpretations of the comments I made on the inherent powers of the presidency.” Nixon’s essay was an effort to repudiate the widespread perception that he asserted a pretense to monarchical power—akin to a claim that the “king can do no wrong.” He explained that his comment to Frost reflected his belief that in emergency circumstances, a president must sometimes violate the letter of the law to preserve its spirit. According to Nixon, this view echoed positions held by former Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

Nixon’s lost apologia deserves renewed attention—especially with Nixon’s recent return to the headlines. This summer, Vice President J.D. Vance expressed his admiration for Nixon while seeking to rewrite the saga of Watergate. In Vance’s eyes, Nixon was brought down by the “deep state,” and Watergate today would be “like a 12-hour news story.” But minimizing Nixon’s enormous abuses of power does not make them vanish. If anything, Vance’s effort to rehabilitate Nixon makes it all the more important to grapple with Nixon’s own explanation of his actions—and to demonstrate the flaws in a line of thinking — and an attempt at justification — that places the president above the law.

A president’s assertions of unchecked powers in a perceived emergency inherently invites abuse. But Nixon does not stand alone in claiming such powers. The view that a president has free rein in an emergency to override the law reflects a longstanding current in American views of presidential power. Taking Nixon seriously can help clarify what to expect from a president in an emergency—where unexpected circumstances pose challenges that Congress either did not anticipate or fails to address.

Our current norm-shattering presidency acknowledges no such boundaries. Nixon’s excesses may have foreshadowed Trump’s—the flagrant deception, the impoundments of appropriated funds, the denigration of Congress, the muscular use of the military, the political dirty tricks, the electoral interference, and myriad abuses of power all have Nixonian antecedents. But the brazenness and scale of Trump’s actions make Nixon’s transgressions pale by comparison. Trump has made extravagant claims of presidential power — in the political arena, in court, and in secret — often fueled by massive deceptions and power grabs, that Nixon’s seem tame. The emergence of such unchecked authority makes defining when a president has exceeded his constitutional powers a more pressing question than ever. So do the threats over the horizon, including the prospect of the president claiming emergency powers to meddle with U.S. elections.

What we learn from Nixon’s forgotten essay is this: presidential initiative may be essential, but democracy can tolerate only so much unilateral presidential action before government too closely resembles a monarchy or autocracy. Trump’s razing of legal barriers has underscored that the post-Watergate reforms adopted 50 years ago to rein in presidential power are fragile and, in some cases, ineffective. A president determined to impose his will on the nation, who has a weak or compliant Congress, and who treats laws as dispensable faces few constraints, at least in the short term, and in many realms, perhaps indefinitely. Just as the nation enacted a suite of reforms after Watergate to strengthen the rule of law, new reforms after Trump will be vital to prevent runaway executive power. No rebuilding project is more important to democracy than defining the limits to presidential power and installing practical means of enforcing them.

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Judges, 128 of the them, file ethics complaint against counsel for Homeland Security

2026-08-24T09:49:32.398-04:00

The general counsel for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now facing an ethics complaint over his social media posts about the “worst of the worst” judges, reported the ABA Journal.

In a complaint filed with the Florida Bar on Tuesday, 128 retired federal and state judges, the Democracy Defenders Fund and the Lawyers Defending American Democracy allege that general counsel James Percival’s posts “not only constitute serious professional misconduct, but they threaten the rule of law and increase the risk of violence against judges.”

Specifically, they allege that Percival violated Florida Rule of Professional Conduct 4-8.2(a), which bars lawyers from impugning the qualifications and integrity of judges or other officers.

“The posts were attacks on the characters of four sitting judges, based on mischaracterizations of the underlying cases and without concern for the repercussions of those statements,” according to the complaint. “Nothing exempts federal officials who are licensed by the state of Florida from the Rules of Professional Conduct. Nor do the rules provide for an excuse from investigating federal officials like Mr. Percival.”

On July 23, Percival published a list called the “Worst of the Worst, District Judge Edition” on his official X social media page, formerly known as Twitter. According to the complaint, this is the same label that the DHS uses for a series highlighting immigrants it has deported.

Judge Matthew Kennelly of the Northern District of Illinois, Judge Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts, Judge Paula Xinis of the District of Maryland and Judge Hernán Vera of the Central District of California were included in the list. Percival “continued to attack other judges” in separate posts later, the complaint also said.

A spokesperson for the DHS on Wednesday told Bloomberg Law, which has additional coverage, that Percival’s posts were “nothing more than a factual review of judicial decisions and their real-world consequences.”

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Man who served 70 years in prison dies at age 101

2026-08-23T10:09:27.986-04:00

Frank Smith, who served 70 years in prison — one of the longest known terms of incarceration in American history — for fatally shooting a Connecticut yacht club’s night watchman during a robbery in 1949, died on June 25 in Rocky Hill, Conn. He was 101, reported The New York Times.

His death, at a nursing home to which he had been paroled, was confirmed by the Connecticut Department of Correction and was previously reported by The Boston Globe and Greenwich Time.

In 1950, Mr. Smith was convicted of the first-degree murder of the watchman, 68-year-old Grover Hart, and sentenced to death. Mr. Smith, who insisted on his innocence, eventually received eight reprieves from the electric chair in Wethersfield, Conn.

His case attracted the attention of Aaron Cohen, a realtor in West Hartford and a member of the American League to Abolish the Death Penalty. Mr. Cohen visited Mr. Smith and orchestrated a telegram- and letter-writing campaign to stop the execution.

“I did not believe all Smith told me at first, and it took me time to believe him,” Mr. Cohen told The Hartford Courant in 1951, adding: “I am convinced that an innocent man is going to his death. He has already died too many times in his cell.”

In 1954, on the eve of Mr. Smith’s last scheduled execution, a Courant reporter wrote that he “spends most of his time trying to figure out how he was convicted. He discusses his case with anyone who’ll listen.”

The article described how, before a planned execution a year earlier, a chaplain had visited Mr. Smith in his cell. “All he wanted to talk about was his trial,” the chaplain recalled.

On June 7, 1954, two hours before he was to be strapped into the chair, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence.

“Thanks be to God!” Mr. Smith said in the hearing room, where his parents, three sisters and two brothers were watching.

Seven decades later, he remained haunted by the electric chair — “still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear,” Annalisa Quinn wrote in a 2023 profile in The Boston Globe Magazine. “‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’”

On June 7, 1954, two hours before Mr. Smith was to be executed, Connecticut’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence.Credit...Jared Charney for The Boston Globe

In 2012, Connecticut outlawed the death penalty.

Except for a brief escape attempt in 1967 and nearly 10 months on parole (which he violated) in 1975, Mr. Smith remained in prison until 2020. The state then paroled him to 60 West, a private facility that helps the state care for formerly incarcerated people who are difficult to place in traditional nursing homes. There, he lived in a secure unit.

A spokesman for the correction department said Mr. Smith’s six years at 60 West meant that he had served 76 years of his life sentence.

It is not known if that is officially America’s longest imprisonment. “Seventy years is a long time,” Paul Wright, the editor of Prison Legal News, wrote in an email, “but I think there are probably some more out there just because the U.S. locks up so many people and also locks them up for such long periods of time.”

Francis Clifford Smith was born on Sept. 1, 1924, in Stamford, Conn., and at some point moved to the Noroton neighborhood of nearby Darien. His mother was Doris (Curtis) Smith, and his father, also named Francis, was a roofer, according to The Globe, which reported that Frank was sent to a reform school when he was 10 or 11.

He then served time as a teenager in a reformatory for young men and, after escaping and assaulting a guard with a deadly weapon, was sent to a state prison for four years. He later worked as a messenger for a numbers racketeer.

On the night of July 23, 1949, two men broke into and burglarized the Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich. By some accounts, Mr. Hart surprised them, and one or both of the robbers shot him.

Before he died, Mr. Hart told police that one of the men wore a bandanna; Mr. Smith was known to police for wearing one. After a manhunt, he was arrested in the woods in Wilton, Conn. George Lowden, his accused accomplice, was also arrested.

Mr. Lowden struck a plea deal for second-degree murder, and he implicated Mr. Smith. During the trial, Mr. Smith denied his involvement in the crime, and his father testified that he found his son asleep in his car on the night of the shooting.

The jury’s verdict against Mr. Smith was clouded by several factors, including Mr. Lowden’s refusal to testify at the trial. Then, two years after the trial, a witness recanted testimony that had suggested Mr. Smith’s culpability.

In 1953, David Blumetti, an armed robber from Stamford who was imprisoned in Alabama, confessed to the murder and said that he and Mr. Lowden had been partners in the crime.

Mr. Blumetti said that he knew Mr. Smith from a previous prison stint. He said that the two men met earlier on the day of the robbery and murder, drove around in Mr. Smith’s gray Cadillac and discussed places they could rob. By Mr. Blumetti’s account, Mr. Smith decided against the robbery, and Mr. Blumetti said that he borrowed Mr. Smith’s car, picked up Mr. Lowden and, with Mr. Lowden, fired at Mr. Hart.

“They’ll be executing the wrong man,” Mr. Blumetti told The Connecticut Post in the days before the state pardons board met to commute Mr. Smith’s death sentence.

At that hearing, Leo F. Carroll, the state police major who had interrogated Mr. Smith after his arrest, told the panel that he believed Mr. Blumetti’s confession and that Mr. Smith was innocent.

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Homeland Security conducts secret domestic spying operations violating the First Amendment

2026-08-21T09:06:00.752-04:00

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict, reported The New Republic.

We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Times reported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.

But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.

What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”

Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”

That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.

“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”

In other cases, undercover agents infiltrated these meetings only to find that the protesters turned out to be awfully innocuous. One agent covertly attended a meeting in February and found that it “was more of a panel discussion,” where there was “no discussion, or call for, violence toward law enforcement.”

Similarly, another agent’s report described infiltrating a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of organizers who said they sympathized with the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance. (The papers show that DHS’s surveillance reached into other states beyond Minnesota.) This agent reported initiating a conversation with a married churchgoing couple, and the woman told the agent she’d traveled to Uganda to assist “in the construction of a hospital.”

In short, we’re not exactly talking about the Weather Underground bombers here.

Indeed, as Substacker Brian Kaylor notes, a number of these undercover operations were even conducted in churches where protesters had organized. Several of the pastors were kept entirely in the dark about law enforcement’s infiltration of their houses of worship.

The absurdity of all this is overwhelming. In some cases, the Keystone Kops vibe is strong: One agent attended a May meeting in Minneapolis, only to report that his “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium.” The agent left without the device and had to return later to retrieve it.

Interestingly, the investigative reports also offer a glimpse of culture clashes between protesters and the agents who spied on them. One agent attended a Minneapolis meeting in February and reported, perhaps with distaste, on a female protester “with they/them pronouns” and “bright green short hair” and a “nose ring.”

As writer John Ganz has noted, Trump’s secret police force is made up of the MAGA “demimonde” and the “Trumpenproletarian mob.” And indeed, Trump’s political project has long been all about turning loose “his” people—law enforcement, biker gangs, coal miners, Ultimate Fighting enthusiasts—against the leftist enemy that inhabits blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment targets MAGA-adjacent UFC fanbases and people who show an interest in paramilitary tactical equipment or military recruitment. ICE messaging openly glorifies military-style operations in urban areas—that is, in blue America’s diverse, cosmopolitan strongholds. Trump talks about Minneapolis as akin to an enemy country populated with undesirables who must be purged by MAGA patriots.

Now we’re learning that this war on blue America also includes extensive undercover surveillance. Many of these agents appear to have been drawn largely from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that’s supposed to be focused on serious, complex, transnational crimes. They’ve now been reduced to standing around in parking lots writing down protesters’ license plate numbers and using sleazy deception tactics to spy on fellow Americans whose only crime is sympathy with immigrants.

Violence is precisely what spawned this undercover spying operation, but the real culprit was the violence of the government, not of the protesters. As Lisa Needham writes at Public Notice, we shouldn’t lose sight of how quickly ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis devolved into lethal state violence against Americans. It was just after ICE’s arrival in the city that an agent gunned down Renee Good in her car, with Pretti’s killing by federal agents following around two weeks later.

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Florida responsible for 13 of the 23 executions nationwide in 2026

2026-08-20T09:20:01.113-04:00

The 23rd Execution of 2026

A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting his estranged wife and wounding his mother-in-law was executed August 18, 2026, continuing the state’s aggressive use of the death penalty in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ′ final term, reported The Associated Press.

William Frances Silvia, 61, was pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m. after receiving a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke.

Silvia was already strapped to a gurney with an IV in his arm when the curtain to the death chamber went up at 6 p.m. He remained relatively motionless with his eyes and mouth open throughout most of the execution, and a priest sat at his feet and prayed.

Asked if he had any final words, Silvia said, “I’m sorry all this happened. It was an accident. I never meant to hurt her.”

A warden shook him and shouted his name several minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing but got no response. A medic declared him dead a short time later.

Silvia is the 13th prisoner put to death this year in Florida, which has two more executions scheduled in September. The state has carried out more than half of the nation’s 23 executions so far in 2026.

Silvia was sentenced to death after being convicted of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder for the deadly 2006 attack on Patricia Silvia, along with her mother, Betty Woodard.

According to court records, William Frances Silvia purchased a shotgun that year and then went to Woodard’s Orlando-area home, where his wife had been living since their separation two months earlier. The family was in the middle of a cookout when Silvia arrived, and after an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile, authorities said Silvia retrieved the shotgun from his truck and shot the two women.

Pamela Wyatt, Patricia Silvia’s sister, said William Frances Silvia’s actions not only took her sister’s life but changed the lives of everyone who loved her.

“Nothing that happens today can give us those stolen years. No execution can return Patricia to her children and give her the grandchildren she dreamed of knowing,” Wyatt said after the execution. “But today can be an opportunity to remember that Patricia’s life was bigger than the terrible act that ended it.”

Silvia was first sentenced to death following his 2008 trial. He was briefly granted a new penalty phase, but the Florida Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 2018 because Silvia had previously waived his post-conviction appeals.

A Florida state agency, the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, provides legal representation to death row inmates. Silvia’s attorneys have argued that the agency couldn’t provide adequate legal assistance because it was already helping another death row inmate. The Florida Supreme Court rejected the appeal.

Florida leads the way in executions

A total of 47 people were executed in the U.S. in 2025. Florida led the way with 19, a record in the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

In July, Florida executed two prisoners in one day, the first state in nearly a decade to do so.

Two more executions are planned in Florida next month. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is scheduled to die on Sept. 1, followed by Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., 72, on Sept. 10.

Lucas was convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his romantic advances and wounding two of her friends.

Conahan was convicted of kidnapping and strangling a man that he had paid to pose for nude photos, and authorities suspect him of similar homicides committed in the 1990s in southwest Florida.

All Florida executions are carried out via lethal injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.

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Mangino joins On the Case with Chris Stewart on Law and Crime Network

2026-08-19T18:23:30.513-04:00

Watch my interview with Chris Stewart on Law and Crime Network's On the Case.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Virginia to review the convictions of 8 people executed between 1986 and 1998

2026-08-19T11:16:00.547-04:00

The possibility of executing the innocent has gone a long way to change the national conversation about the death penalty, reported Slate. We know that over the past half-century, more than 200 people have been exonerated after having been sentenced to die, and scholars estimate that 4 percent of those sentenced to death are innocent.

And a 2021 Pew poll found that 78 percent of its respondents believe “there is some risk that an innocent person will be put to death.” But death penalty supporters have long contended that abolitionists have sold the public a false bill of goods.

One of them, Judge Morris Hoffman, argues that “To a large and unfortunate extent, the debate about wrongful convictions in a capital context has become a proxy for arguments in favor and against the death penalty. Lost in the crossfire is any reliable data about the actual wrongful conviction rate.“ He contends that no one has yet come up with “a single case of a demonstrably innocent person executed in America in the modern era.”

Hoffman claimed the “label innocent” is “just a way of saying there were errors in the trial, that guilt seemed to them to be a ‘close call,’ and that some of those close calls must surely, as a statistical matter, have involved some factually innocent people.”

Even the abolitionist Death Penalty Information Center concedes that “there is no way to tell how many of the … people executed since 1976 may … have been innocent.”

All of this may soon change. Virginia, which abolished the death penalty in 2021, recently initiated a review of eight cases of people executed there between 1986 and 1998 whose convictions were obtained based on testimony and evidence presented by a now-discredited state forensic scientist, Mary Jane Burton.

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FBI: Violent crime continues downward slide

2026-08-17T09:20:17.733-04:00

The homicide rate in the United States dropped to the lowest it’s been in 75 years, according to an FBI report on 2025 crime statistics, which also showed overall violent crime dropped 9.3% last year, reported The Associated Press.

Experts note that national violent crime rates have been declining since 2022, and pinpointing an exact reason is difficult. They say multiple factors contribute to decreases in crime rates seen in the FBI report, which is based on data reported voluntarily by many but not all law enforcement agencies across the country.

“The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. But right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk,” said Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank based in Washington.

“Rates are falling in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions, and political leadership,” Gelb said. “The consistency across the map should make us cautious about handing credit to any one leader, party, policy, or program before the evidence catches up.”

President Donald Trump announced the decreases in the annual crime numbers during a visit to a New York police academy.

Trump proclaimed his role in lowering violent crime rates, taking a swing at his predecessor and at so-called sanctuary cities, while touting what he said was his overwhelming support of law enforcement and his tough-on-crime moves such as deploying the National Guard in Washington and elsewhere.

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Mangione's enters federal plea to stalking resulting in death, still faces murder charge in state court

2026-08-15T09:41:16.820-04:00

Luigi Mangione’s plea in the federal case now turns attention to his state case, where he is charged with second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life, reported The New York Times. He has pleaded not guilty.

The plea in the federal case complicates the state case, which is scheduled to go to trial next month.

While murder cases are typically prosecuted in state courts, federal prosecutors have said that Mr. Mangione crossed state lines to stalk and ultimately kill Mr. Thompson, which gave the federal government jurisdiction to prosecute him.

The impact of the federal plea on the state prosecution remains unclear, and Mr. Mangione’s sentence in federal court could also play a part.

Following the hearing, Mr. Mangione’s lawyers said they had filed a motion in state court to dismiss his case on double jeopardy grounds, which bars someone from being tried twice for the same offense, with exceptions.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, led by Alvin L. Bragg, signaled it would fight that outcome.

A spokesman with the office said that state prosecutors were “encouraged that Mr. Thompson’s family received a measure of accountability.”

“While federal sentencing is pending, we are prepared to litigate the defense motions,” the statement said. “The Manhattan D.A.’s Office remains committed to seeking justice for Mr. Thompson and his family.”

An exception to the U.S. Constitution protections against double jeopardy, according to the Supreme Court, allows federal and state governments to prosecute for the same conduct because they are considered “separate sovereigns” that are independent of each other.

New York provides stronger protections. Under state law, double jeopardy comes into play when a prior prosecution for the same conduct ends in a conviction by guilty plea or a resolution at trial.

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Three executions in a single day and none were in Florida

2026-08-14T09:10:38.953-04:00

The 21st and 22nd Executions of 2026

Yesterday I wrote about Anthony Darrell Hines who was executed on August 13, 2026 in Tennessee. Two more Executions followed on the same day for the first time since 2010.

Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez was put to death by the state of Oklahoma, in the first of three executions scheduled for Thursday in a rare triple procedure that underlines the renewed appetite in the US for state killings.

Just one hour later, Hines was put to death by the state of Tennessee, and at 6 pm in Alabama, that state executed Jeremy Williams.

Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, was pronounced dead at 10.13am at the Oklahoma state penitentiary in McAlester. He was sentenced to death for murdering his common-law wife, Olimpia Fisher, in 2003. He had unsuccessfully appealed for mercy, saying he was remorseful and had struggled all his life from mental illness.

Cuesta-Rodriguez’s family and friends issued a statement in the wake of his execution, calling his life one of “extraordinary beauty and tenderness within the darkest of conditions”.

“Through small, unglamorous, consistent acts of kindness, he expressed his humanity year after year,” the statement read.

“He was a different man from the one who committed his horrible crime – remorseful every single day, burdened by the weight of what he had done – but defined by decades of living humbly, gently, and with unwavering love and devotion to his family and to inmates far worse off than himself. His legacy will not be measured by his worst moment, but by the countless moments after – the letters that never failed to arrive, the art he created from behind those walls, and the love and light he poured out consistently and unconditionally, proving that even from a place of such darkness, one person’s kindness and redemption can still ripple into the world.”

The third execution of the day was of Williams, 42, who raped and murdered a five-year-old girl in Georgia in 2021. He pleaded guilty to killing Kamarie Holland and instructed his lawyers not to object to anything prosecutors did during trial, waived sentencing by a jury and did not present any mitigating evidence typically provided during a capital sentencing. He declined to appeal, bringing on his execution at a much faster pace than most death row occupants.

During Williams’s last 24 hours of life, his wife, mother, stepmother, brother and father all visited him, according to the Alabama department of corrections, and he spoke on the phone with his grandmother and aunt.

“I want to thank God for forgiving me for my sins so I can meet him in peace,” Williams said in his final words, according to the Associated Press. The agency reported that Williams rocked his head back-and-forth and smiled and appeared to sing or speak before slowing and becoming still on the gurney.

This is the first time in more than 15 years that there have been three judicial killings in the US on a single day. The one-day surge in death chamber activity was a scheduling coincidence, but it is also a sign of renewed energy among death penalty states.

Last year 47 executions were carried out in the US, a dramatic increase on the previous year’s 25. Much of the increase was generated by one state alone, Florida, which conducted 19 killings under its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

All three scheduled executions were due to take place by lethal injection, the procedure that has been the norm in the US since the early 1980s. Alabama had largely switched to a new experimental method, nitrogen gas, but that was halted by a federal judge in June on grounds that it was unconstitutional.

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Tennessee carries out execution of Anthony Darnell Hines

2026-08-13T13:46:05.062-04:00

The 20th Execution 2026

Despite numerous attempts at clemency and reprieve, convicted murderer Anthony Darrell Hines was executed in Nashville on the morning of August 13, 2026.

Hines’ death came through lethal injection at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution at approximately 10 a.m.

Hines was declared dead at 10:43 a.m. He had no last words to offer, initially, but before the injection said, “Tell my son I love him,” according to a witness.

Katherine Dix, Hines’ attorney, released this statement after the execution:

“I’d like to start by saying that I grieve for the family of Catherine Jean Jenkins. May God be with you,” Dix said. “I also grieve the violence the State of Tennessee inflicted on us all today. On Darrell, of course, who was poisoned to death, just moments ago. On those of us required by our jobs to stand passively and watch Darrell be murdered. On the prison guards and officials whose jobs require them to participate. On Darrell’s son, who met Darrell four days ago for the first time and watched him die this morning. What we witnessed here today is not normal, and I urge us all to not become numb or indifferent to the cruelty.”

Dennis Jenkins, the son of Katherine Jean Jenkins, the woman who Hines killed, had a few words for attorneys who defend death row inmates.

“For those of you who may be concerned as to whether or not this animal suffered, let me tell you what he did to my mother 41 years ago,” Dennis said. “...yes, I hope he did suffer. I hope he felt severe pain...to those hot-shot attorneys out there that are trying to make a name for yourselves by defending these cold-blooded murderers...I don’t understand your mentality.”

Thursday’s execution in Nashville moved forward despite numerous attempts by Hines’ legal representation to save his life - the last of which came this week in the form of a request for clemency from the Tennessee governor.

Gov. Bill Lee chose not to intervene in the execution of Darrell Hines, and released this statement on Tuesday:

“After deliberate consideration of Anthony Darrell Hines’ request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

What happened during Carruthers’ execution?

Hines’ execution marks the first in Tennessee since the botched attempt of Tony Carruthers at the end of May.

Attorneys for Hines, as well as dozens of medical professionals, expressed concern that the same doctor who botched the execution of Carruthers will be the one to perform Hines’ lethal injection.

Carruthers was scheduled to die by lethal injection on the morning of May 21 at Riverbend, but the doctor was unable to establish the required “backup line” to accompany the primary injection. The Tennessee Department of Corrections reported that once the procedure failed, “the execution was then called off,” and Carruthers was returned to his cell.

Gov. Lee then granted Carruthers a “temporary reprieve from execution for one year.”

Why was Darrell Hines sentenced to death?

Hines was convicted of first-degree felony murder for the 1985 killing of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins.

According to court documents, Jenkins was a maid at the CeBon Motel off Interstate 40 in Kingston Springs when, on March 3, 1985, her body was found wrapped in a sheet in one of the motel rooms. Her clothes had been moved so she was exposed, and her undergarments had been cut and taken off her body.

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DOJ offers millions to cities to 'abandon progressive ideologies on policing'

2026-08-11T09:31:18.501-04:00

The Trump administration is offering grants of tens of millions of dollars to cities across the US to create more Memphis-style enforcement surges – on the condition that they abandon progressive ideologies on policing, reported The Guardian.

The US Department of Justice says it will announce up to four finalist cities that will split $300m in grant funding under a federal “Model Cities” policing initiative (MCI) next month, setting the stage for some of the largest federal policing grants ever awarded to individual US cities.

In exchange for the funding, cities are required to comply with federal immigration enforcement requests, enact conservative policies on anti-homelessness rules, and potentially repay millions of dollars in the event of a surge in violent crime or “civil unrest”, according to a grant document.

The document cites Washington DC and Memphis, Tennessee – two cities with national guard troops patrolling the streets – as a model to emulate. The administration has so far defied calls to suspend its controversial taskforce in Memphis, following four officer-involved deaths since its launch last September.

“That’s not a model I’d be looking for,” said Steven Reed, the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama. Reed said he had seen the grant and passed on applying. “Everybody wants a quick fix, and no one wants to invest in the root cause of the issue,” he said.

Despite the significant funding boost on offer, Reed is one of several leaders of large municipalities with Democratic majorities who have signaled they will not even consider applying for the grant.

The justice department has offered policing grants to cities through programs of the office of community oriented policing services (Cops) since 1994, disbursing more than $20bn since then. The Cops office of the justice department offered city governments about $700m this fiscal year to supplement hiring, training and equipment.

The MCI, a product of funding from Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, offers another $300m to two to four municipalities with more than 100,000 residents. Grant funding will last three years under the program.

Unlike most previous grants, awards will seemingly be awarded after evaluation by senior political appointees in the justice department, and not through a more politically neutral recommendation process of peer review, said Amy Solomon, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, who previously served as assistant attorney general of the office of justice programs under Joe Biden.

The grant guidelines require applicants to have documented “buy-in and support” across the local government – mayors, sheriff’s offices, city councils and county commissions – as a condition of approval.

The initiative focuses on reducing violent crime, to “surge substantial, targeted federal funding into select cities”, according to a justice department presentation on the grants. City governments can use the money to hire more police and fund substance abuse recovery programs, prisoner re-entry programs, facilities, training and other initiatives.

A justice department spokesperson claimed jurisdictions have “expressed intense interest” in the initiative.

“Senior department leaders have made themselves available in a variety of formats to answer questions about how cities can submit the most competitive application possible,” a spokesperson replied to emailed questions. “[The justice department] looks forward to reviewing applications from across the country that demonstrate how creative solutions and close teamwork between local and federal partners can achieve the same dramatic gains in public safety seen in Washington DC and Memphis. This is the Make America Safe Again mission in action.”

The department did not answer questions about the repayment provision, and declined to say whether it had yet received eligible applications, or whether city governments would be required to accept the activation of the national guard under the grant program.

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Deployment of National Guard in DC through 2029 will cost taxpayers $1.4 million

2026-08-10T09:08:42.254-04:00

The extension of the National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C. until January 2029 will cost roughly $1.4 billion, according to a Defense Department estimate provided to Congress, reported The Associated Press.

The figure offers a glimpse of how much taxpayer money will be spent on a deployment that has been criticized by local officials as an infringement of their city’s autonomy and by Democrats who say it has militarized the streets of nation’s capital at the public’s expense.

The cost estimate is for fiscal years 2027-2029 and came in response to questions from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and was provided to The Associated Press.

The deployment began last summer, when President Donald Trump issued an emergency order that launched a law enforcement surge in the city which the administration says was meant to fight crime. Hundreds of armed Guard troops have been deployed to city streets, supporting arrest operations but also helping with snow removal and carrying out beautification projects. This summer, as the city marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, their numbers surged to about 5,000.

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Fines and court costs 'destabilize employment, finances and health'

2026-08-09T09:39:04.428-04:00

U.S. state and local governments impose court fines and fees and use what they collect to fund court operations, law enforcement, and other government services, reported Pew. Between 2018 and 2022, courts in 24 states assessed nearly $14 billion in fines and fees, with rural communities—home to roughly 46 million people—bearing a disproportionate burden compared with urban communities.

At the same time, a growing body of evidence shows that fines and fees are an unstable and unreliable revenue source, yielding limited and declining net returns for courts. Analyses of New Mexico and Texas found that collected fines and fees averaged 59% of assessed amounts from 2012 to 2018. And in 19 states, median state collection rates fell by 33% from fiscal year 2018 to fiscal 2022, while imposing significant burdens on communities.

For many households, court debt becomes an added bill to pay on top of necessities like rent, transportation, utilities, and groceries. Just as missed rent or utility payments can trigger eviction or shut-offs, missed court payments often trigger cascading punitive sanctions—like driver’s license suspension, repeated court involvement, and arrest—that can destabilize employment, finances, and health.

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Former U.S. Attorney sue DOJ and AG Blanche over his firing

2026-08-08T09:33:24.513-04:00

Less than three hours after a right-wing influencer revealed a blog post critical of Donald Trump, the DOJ fired U.S. Attorney Will Rosenzweig. He received an emailed letter signed by Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, dismissing him from his position as the U.S. attorney for Miami, effective immediately. No reason was provided, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Rosenzweig has now sued the Justice Department along with Todd Blanche, who now runs the department, and Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, asking for financial damages and his job back. In doing so, he joined a growing list of former prosecutors and federal agents who have gone to court in an effort to fight back against the widespread purge of law enforcement officials deemed to be disloyal to the president.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, agents and prosecutors have been fired for any number of reasons. Some were seasoned veterans who lost their jobs while trying to protect subordinates from being dismissed. Others were accused, sometimes incorrectly, of having worked on criminal cases involving the president. Many worked on cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Rosenzweig’s firing was one of several that shared a different twist: right-wing commentators claimed to be behind them. On the morning after he was terminated, Ms. Winters reposted a message from another far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, announcing the news. Ms. Winters’s message, punctuated by a smiley-face emoji, declared: “Got this guy fired.”

Many of Ms. Winters’s posts have since been deleted, but lawyers for Mr. Rosenzweig included screenshots of them in their lawsuit. In the posts, she said that Mr. Rosenzweig had “smeared” Mr. Trump in his writings by calling him “mentally unfit” and a “white supremacist.”

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Tennessee moving forward with death penalty after botched execution

2026-08-07T09:15:24.764-04:00

The Tennessee Department of Correction is scheduled to execute Anthony “Darrell” Hines on August 13, 2026, reported WPLN News.

For weeks, more and more people have been calling for a death penalty moratorium. But yet again, Gov. Bill Lee says that’s not going to happen.

“We live in a broken world where people commit horrible and heinous crimes, and victims and their families are devastated,” he said in a media availability this week. “And it’s a very difficult — those are very difficult situations… The people have chosen the death penalty for those most heinous crimes. It’s my responsibility to make sure that law is carried out.”

His statement was noteworthy for two reasons: Several unrelated groups — defense attorneys, faith leaders, doctors and Republican lawmakers — have called for an investigation into a failed execution in May, and say the state shouldn’t put anyone to death until that’s done. Lee’s statements indicate he does not want to heed that call. And Lee has maintained that during that failed attempt, the Tennessee Department of Correction had followed the lethal injection protocol. That’s a widely disputed conclusion.

This all started three months ago, when the agency tried and failed to execute Tony Carruthers. The medical staff tried to place a typical IV and failed. Per the lethal injection protocol, a doctor then tried to place a central line in a deeper vein. He also failed. After an hour, Lee called into the prison and ordered them to stop.

That cast a spotlight on whether Tennessee is finding qualified medical professionals to serve on the IV team and as the on-site physician.

Mounting concerns

First, defense attorneys for death row inmates asked for a moratorium, investigation and protocol rewrite. Then in early July, nearly a dozen Republican state senators made a similar call. Lee made his first “no moratorium” announcement then.

Last week, a group of about 40 doctors and nurses joined the call. They wrote a letter to Lee, arguing that medical ethics, including those laid out by the American Medical Association, bar participation in the death penalty.

“This means that the health care professionals who agree to take part in Tennessee’s executions are those willing to set aside their professional ethics,” the letter reads in part. “The problems that we have seen, such as in Mr. Carruthers’ case, are the predictable result of working with such unscrupulous actors.”

Then Tennessee’s Supreme Court announced it was taking up a different death row case. Next week, it will hold several days of hearings on whether the process will violate the rights of Christa Pike, who is scheduled to undergo the lethal injection on September 30. The court appointed a special master, which is a formal investigator. There’s a long list of constitutional concerns, most of them centering on Pike’s gender and extensive history of sexual trauma.

But the special master will also consider whether Pike is at risk of undergoing a cruel and unusual punishment because of her diagnosis with a blood disorder. The condition, thrombocytosis, means her high blood platelet count increases the risk of blood clotting, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. Pike’s attorneys argue this condition and her compromised veins could make delivering a lethal injection particularly difficult. Which would mean she’d likely need a central line placed, and would need a doctor on site capable of placing one.

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'Slush Fund' or not, Jan. 6 insurrectionists seeking payouts from the federal government

2026-08-05T09:25:14.353-04:00

The Treasury Department is illegally withholding information about who is receiving settlement money from its Judgment Fund, obscuring whether January 6th insurrectionists and Trump political allies are receiving massive payouts from the federal government, according to a lawsuit filed today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The suit seeks to require the government to promptly post required information about Judgment Fund payments, including all payments going back to the start of the current Trump administration, as well as correcting inaccurate descriptions of previous payments.

In May 2026, President Trump entered into an unprecedented “settlement” with his own Justice Department, which established a $1.776 billion slush fund intended to pay out victims of “weaponization,” including January 6th defendants. The slush fund garnered significant backlash, and the Trump administration declared the fund dead, before formally rescinding the order establishing the fund this weekend under duress from Congress. It remains unclear whether the DOJ can unilaterally rescind the order without agreement from the other litigants involved in the underlying suit, including litigant Trump. With the slush fund in limbo, Trump’s allies, including January 6th defendants, have apparently turned to pursuing payouts through the Federal Tort Claims Act settlement process, seeking millions of dollars in “restitution” for alleged wrongdoings related to their prosecution.

When the government settles with an individual under the FTCA, the Treasury Department pays that individual from its Judgment Fund. The Treasury Department is legally required to publicly disclose important settlement payment details, such as the names of claimants and their counsel, and a brief statement of facts giving rise to the claims being settled. Treasury, however, has for years adopted an across-the-board policy of noncompliance—omitting names and facts in every case and instead publishing opaque descriptors that are often inaccurate or misleading. The law requiring the disclosure of settlement payments was passed on a bipartisan basis, and was primarily sponsored by Republican Rep. Doug Collins.

“Taxpayers deserve to know where their money is going and why, especially if it’s going to the president’s cronies,” said CREW President and CEO Donald K. Sherman. “The Trump administration seems hellbent on secretly paying out Trump’s allies, including the violent insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on January 6th. There is a law in place to prevent this secrecy, and the Treasury Department needs to follow it.”

The Trump administration’s misuse of the FTCA claims settlement process is not mere conjecture. For months, the Justice Department has been led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who approved and defended Trump’s initial collusive settlement. Under Blanche’s leadership as Deputy Attorney General and later Acting Attorney General, the DOJ has awarded generous settlements to January 6th participants and other political allies despite obvious defenses the government could have used to challenge the claims they asserted. In one especially egregious example, the Justice Department agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle an FTCA case brought by Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, for wrongful prosecution, despite the fact that Flynn had pleaded guilty to his crimes and a district court had already dismissed Flynn’s FTCA case. The Treasury Department has withheld payment information related to these suspect settlements.

“Even if President Trump’s slush fund is nominally dead—something that still remains in doubt despite Acting Attorney General Blanche’s rescission of the DOJ’s order—his administration is apparently ok with using the Judgment Fund in its place,” said Sherman. “The law does not allow the government to spend taxpayer dollars in secret. If the president is paying his cronies, the public is entitled to know.”

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Danner: 'Trumps Constitutional Dictatorship'

2026-08-04T08:06:42.731-04:00

Mark Danner writes in The New York Review:

Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”

Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?

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Blanche grovels for votes from GOP Senate Judiciary Committee holdouts

2026-08-03T10:11:36.555-04:00

After a weekslong standoff between senators and the Trump administration, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the parties had reached a deal and that he had issued an order “officially” rescinding a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, reported NBC News.

“My team and I have met with committee members and Senators over the past several weeks and addressed any concerns or outstanding questions,” Blanche wrote on X. “We have enjoyed good faith discussions, and as a result issue the following order and update with regard to the May IRS settlement. The Department always welcomes and appreciates productive engagement with all members of Congress.”

Attached to his post was a signed order that said, “The Attorney General’s May 18, 2026 Order establishing the Anti-Weaponization Fund (‘Fund’) is rescinded and shall have nor force or effect.”

“This order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no fund,” the order read.

Blanche’s announcement comes two days before the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote on his nomination to be attorney general in a permanent capacity.

The fund was part of a settlement that stemmed from a lawsuit President Donald Trump filed against the IRS, a deal which also shielded the Trump family from tax audits. The fund has been criticized in part because the payouts could extend to participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Blanche faced pushback from key GOP Sens. John Cornyn, of Texas, and Thom Tillis, of North Carolina, who said their support for him hinged on the administration rescinding its plans for the fund.

Cornyn spokesperson Natalie Yezbick confirmed in a statement that the senator “has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice.”

The department “will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund and making clear in a binding written document that the scope of the audit settlement is limited to only the plaintiffs, including the President, and the IRS,” Yezbick said.

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Trump threatens Congress: "Todd Blanche was a voice of reason!'

2026-08-02T10:16:12.166-04:00

Here is a great idea. President Trump said that he would revive a proposal for a $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund that would compensate his supporters if the Senate does not confirm Todd Blanche his nominee for attorney general, reported The New York Times.

Someone should tell the President that the reason Blanche doesn't have support among GOP senators is because of his willingness to scratch all facets of the so-called "anti-weaponization" proposal.

The administration had backed off plans to establish such a fund in June as it was criticized as a scheme to reward political allies with taxpayers’ dollars.

But in a social media post, Mr. Trump reacted to skepticism about his nomination of Todd Blanche, his former defense lawyer, to be attorney general, saying that he would keep Mr. Blanche as the acting attorney general if the Senate failed to confirm him, and added that he would “push hard” to pass legislation creating the fund.

“Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

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Former special counsel Jack Smith is not a criminal

2026-08-01T10:16:28.596-04:00

Whatever one might think of Jack Smith’s performance as a prosecutor — I’ve got criticisms, and reasonable minds can differ — the guy is no criminal, wrote Elie Honig in New York Magazine.

Sure, congressional Republicans have worked themselves into a retributive frenzy — We’ve got him now! — while Donald Trump shakes pom-poms behind them. “Justice at last???” the president mused on Truth Social, expectantly. But last week’s criminal referral of Smith to the Justice Department by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan is pure sleight of hand. On close inspection, even Jordan doesn’t quite buy into his own carnival barkery on this one.

Jordan alleges that Smith lied when he testified behind closed doors to the Judiciary Committee in December 2025. Smith was asked whether, during his investigation of Trump for 2020 election subversion, he reviewed documents containing the content of text messages sent or received by members of Congress. The key to understanding Jordan’s gambit is that there are two separate batches of documents at issue. We’re going to get a bit technical here, but we need to be precise to see through the bullshit.

It almost goes without saying at this point because it’s become so common, but this is yet another act in Trump’s political payback tour. The list of names is now familiar and seemingly endless: Letitia James, James Comey, Jerome Powell, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, E. Jean Carroll, and pretty much anyone else who has ever glanced sideways at the president. Unsurprisingly, all of these efforts at prosecution have failed thus far.

If the Justice Department does somehow ram a charge against Smith through a grand jury, that case will fail too. Before a trial jury can even consider the fact that Smith did not actually commit perjury, he will have a powerful motion to dismiss based on vindictive prosecution. It’s plain that Trump and his DoJ targeted Smith because of lingering political animus over his prior investigations of Trump. In October 2025, Trump claimed that Smith and others “should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!” He reiterated his request in January 2026, citing Smith’s “large-scale perjury.” And Trump openly celebrated just moments after news broke of Jordan’s referral of Smith to the DoJ.

Trump’s Justice Department has made commonplace the (previously) rarely invoked doctrine of vindictive prosecution. One federal judge already dismissed the indictment of Kilmar Ábrego García on that basis. And the cases against James and Comey likely would have gone down the same way, had they not been thrown out first because of other constitutional infirmities.

But it seems neither Trump nor the leaders of his Justice Department care much about their string of losses. As long as they get the sugar high of the investigation and (sometimes) the indictment, they don’t seem at all bothered when these cases inevitably crash and burn.

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Erasing data on your phone at the border could land you in jail

2026-07-31T09:07:15.270-04:00

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents want to know what's in your phone—and they won't take no for an answer, reported Reason Magazine. Courts have long held that border cops don't have to respect the Fourth Amendment when searching for contraband, and the CBP claims that this power includes the data stored on travelers' phones. Now, the feds are trying to argue that erasing that data is a form of illegal obstruction.

Samuel Tunick, a participant in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic in January 2025 when a CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team pulled him into a windowless room and asked for his phone password. "Because you're refusing to talk, which is your right, we have the authority to go through your phone to see what we're looking for," an agent told him.

But instead of giving his real password, Tunick apparently gave the agents a code that would erase all the data on his phone, known as a "duress password." He was using a Google Pixel loaded with GrapheneOS, an operating system known for its nearly airtight security. The feds charged him 11 months later under a rarely used law against "destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure."

After months of paperwork and delays, the case had its first hearing last week, with Tunick's lawyers arguing that the government obtained the duress password "in violation of his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights," and therefore everything that happened to the phone should be thrown out of court as "fruits of his unlawful interrogation." They also argued that the Fourth Amendment exemption for border searches shouldn't apply to the data on phones.

"Officers were not permitted to disregard all constitutional protections afforded to Mr. Tunick simply because he was at the border," the lawyers wrote in a filing before the hearing.

Several months before the Tunick case, several experts advised Reason that U.S. citizens can protect their data from border searches by wiping their devices before traveling. (It's not so simple for foreigners, since the CBP can turn them away for any reason, including having an empty phone.) An expert told The New York Times that the Tunick case would not necessarily criminalize that tactic, because travelers who erase before traveling would have "a strong argument that they did not act with the specific criminal intent to thwart an imminent search."

But the prosecution is unprecedented, and seems designed to scare people out of even trying to hide their electronic data from the CBP.

The case also highlights an important legal imbalance: The feds have the right to lie to you, but you don't have the right to lie to them. According to FBI emails obtained by Tunick's lawyers, the government was investigating Tunick for terrorism over his involvement in the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement. But at the airport, CBP agents told Tunick that they were searching his phone for "child porn."

The reference never came up again in the investigation or case, leading Tunick's lawyers to call it "a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr. Tunick's connections." It may also have been an attempt to bolster the case for searching his phone. In 2019, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers West Coast states) ruled that child sex abuse images are one of the few cases where digital data itself can count as "contraband" for the purposes of border searches.

Defend the Atlanta Forest, also known as Stop Cop City, aims to stop the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a planned campus for police and firefighters in Georgia, both on environmental grounds and because it encourages "police militarization," according to a movement website. Throughout 2022, some protesters physically attacked the construction site and other property with rocks and Molotov cocktails. In January 2023, police shot dead protester Manuel Esteban Paez Terán under murky circumstances, alleging that Terán shot at officers during a raid.

The state of Georgia has thrown the book at protesters, hitting them with domestic terrorism and racketeering influenced corrupt organization (RICO) charges. While some defendants were charged with specific violent acts, some of them were charged as co-conspirators for nothing more than "occupy[ing] a tree house" or buying camping equipment. Prosecutors even charged three people with money laundering for running a protester bail fund.

Prosecutors dropped the money laundering charges in September 2024, and a judge threw out all of the RICO charges a year later.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to prioritize left-wing domestic terrorism. One of their targets has been Defend the Atlanta Forest. Last month, the Department of Justice brought up two protesters who allegedly committed arson on federal charges, and cited Trump's memorandum in their announcement of the charges. The FBI even internationalized the investigation, leaning on Swiss police to help unmask the owner of the email account for Defend the Atlanta Forest.

"While the government depicts the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement as an 'Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group' ('AGAAVE'), it has not put forth evidence that Mr. Tunick was involved in criminal activity in connection with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement," Tunick's lawyers wrote.

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Federal Judge John E. Jones: 'I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this'

2026-07-30T08:41:01.198-04:00

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms, reported ProPublica.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

“Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

“I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve ever seen anything close to this.”

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department.

“The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’”

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump’s political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

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Florida carries out two executions on the same day for the first time in 62 years

2026-07-29T08:40:55.946-04:00

The 18th and 19th Executions of 2026

Florida has put to death two inmates in what's now the state's first double execution in more than 60 years amid an aggressive death penalty push by Gov. Ron DeSantis, reported the USA Today.

James Duckett, a 68-year-old former police officer convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl in 1987, was executed by lethal injection at 1:19 p.m. ET on July 28.

About five hours later, Florida executed Dominick Occhicone at 6:13 p.m. ET for the murder of his ex-fiancée's parents in 1986. At 80 years old, Occhicone became the second-oldest inmate ever executed in the United States and the oldest inmate ever executed in Florida, which is putting more elderly prisoners to death than any other state in the nation.

Tuesday also marks the first time since 1964 that Florida has executed two inmates on the same day, according to an execution database by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. The last time any state executed two inmates in one day was in 2017 in Arkansas, according to the nonprofit.

Florida's rare double execution comes amid an aggressive push by DeSantis to put more inmates to death than the state ever has before. Of the 66 inmates executed in the United States since January 2025, Florida has carried out 31 of them – 47% – including Duckett's and Occhicone's, according to an analysis by USA TODAY. Since the start of this year, Florida has carried out 63% of the executions in the United States.

DeSantis has said he wants to give closure to families who have waited for justice sometimes longer than four decades.

But the Republican's actions are drawing increasing criticism from death penalty opponents and observers who say the governor is being motivated by political ambition ahead of the 2028 presidential election and is "increasingly treating executions as routine instruments of political power," according to a recent statement from Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

The governor's office hasn't responded to a request for comment from USA TODAY about the allegations of political motives.

Here's what you need to know about Duckett's and Occhicone's crimes and more about what is going on in Florida.

On May 11, 1987, 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee walked to a local convenience store to buy a pencil at around 10 p.m. in Mascotte, Florida, a rural city just west of Orlando that had fewer than 2,000 residents at the time.

James "Jimmy" Duckett, a 29-year-old rookie cop, was on patrol for the Mascotte Police Department. The married father of two sons was making his regular rounds when he spotted Teresa talking with a 16-year-old boy outside the store, according to court records.

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Duckett has always maintained that he talked to Teresa and the teen, telling each to go home. But the boy and his uncle later said that Duckett put Teresa in his patrol car and drove off.

Teresa's mother arrived at the Circle K around 11 p.m., looking for her daughter. The store clerk told her that Teresa may have gone with Duckett, and the mother began searching the area. When she couldn't find Teresa, she contacted the police and later filed a missing persons report with the only officer on patrol at the time: Duckett.

Killer cop or the wrong man? How DNA halted James Duckett's execution in March

The next morning, less than a mile from the convenience store, a fisherman found Teresa's body in Knight Lake. A medical examiner later found that she had been raped and strangled, and was still alive when her attacker drowned her. Bodily fluid, presumably from the killer, was found on her underwear − DNA that was saved.

Duckett became a suspect when a sheriff's investigator, Sgt. Chuck Johnson, thought the officer was acting nervous at the scene of the body recovery, "was not curious about the death," and told a "rehearsed-sounding story" about his interaction with Teresa and the events of the night before.

Duckett was charged with murder five months later. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

Duckett was supposed to be executed in March but won a rare temporary reprieve from the Florida Supreme Court pending new DNA testing. The tests were inconclusive, Duckett's reprieve expired July 11 and DeSantis rescheduled his execution in a death warrant signed July 14.

It was the last of many decades of delays for Teresa's family.

After witnessing Duckett's execution on July 28, Teresa’s mother was able to get out one sentence before she began uncontrollably sobbing.

“I’ve been waiting 40 years to have him dead,” Dorothy Tula said in a quavering voice.

Her sister, Shirly Lancaster, rubbed Tula’s shoulders and continued to speak on behalf of her family, saying that “the state let him live too damn long.”

“She was only 11,” Lancaster said. “We’ve lived all this time without that baby. ... Maybe she’d have been the next doctor. Maybe she’d have been the next president, you never know. But we never got the chance to find that out because this bastard took her away from us.”

What was Dominick Anthony Occhicone Jr. convicted of?

In the early morning hours of June 10, 1986, an angry Dominick Anthony Occhicone Jr. went to the home of his ex-fiancée, Anita Gerrity, in the coastal community of Holiday, Florida, about 30 miles northwest of Tampa, according to court records.

As Occhicone knocked on windows and doors, he was confronted by Gerrity's 66-year-old father, Raymon Artzner. According to court records, Occhicone smiled at Artzner as he shot him dead, then ran into the house and fatally shot Gerrity's 62-year-old mother, Martha Artzner. Gerrity and her 10-year-old daughter were able to escape.

At trial, Occhicone's attorneys argued that he was so drunk and filled with jealousy and rage that night that he was temporarily insane. Later, after Occhicone was found guilty of both murders, his attorneys argued that a life sentence was more appropriate, telling jurors that "prison life is so hard on people, that they don't live until they're 92," according to an archived news report in the Tampa Tribune.

The jury voted 7-5 to sentence him to death and a judge agreed.

In 1997, 11 years after the murders, the son of the victims told the Tribune that he was frustrated with the delays in the execution.

"It's frustrating," Jim Artzner told the paper. "Justice has not been completed. ... It has gone on for so long. When is it going to end?"

That was 31 years ago.

On July 28 after witnessing Occhicone's execution, the Artzners' loved ones told reporters that it was "the end of a long and painful journey."

"The years since June 10, 1986, have been filed with sleepless nights, empty chairs at family gatherings, and those one-on-one conversations that were lost," they said in a statement. "We have missed birthdays, milestones, and simple everyday joys that were stolen from us. The pain and grief is always there, it never goes away."

They went on to say that Occhicone's execution doesn't erase their pain, "but it does close a door and end a chapter in our lives that has just lingered for far too long."

What is happening in Florida?

Since January 2025, Florida has become the busiest state in the nation for executions. So far this year, the Sunshine State has executed more inmates than all other states combined. Florida has put 12 inmates to death, including Duckett. Texas, Oklahoma and Arizona have executed seven inmates combined.

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