CREATORS: Florida's Convoluted Death Penalty Process

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
July 29, 2025

Last week, a Florida jury deliberated for one hour and 42 minutes before recommending the death penalty for Shelby Nealy. If a state is going to have a death penalty, it would be for people like Shelby Nealy. He was already serving a 30-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter for killing his wife, Jamie Ivancic, in January of 2018.

He then pretended to be Jamie in the months that followed, corresponding with her family through texts and social media messages before they became suspicious.

In December 2018, he went to Jamie's parents' home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and killed her parents, Richard and Laura Ivancic, along with Jamie's brother, Nick.

What is interesting about Nealy's fate is that the jury voted 11-1 in favor of death for all three victims. The jury was not unanimous, and that is only possible in two states — Alabama and Florida.

Alabama has not required a unanimous jury decision for a death sentence since 2017. Prior to that, Alabama was the only state that allowed judges to override a jury's recommendation for a life sentence and impose a death sentence.

Between 1976 and 2017, Alabama judges overrode jury verdicts 112 times, with 91 percent of the overrides changing a verdict of life to a death sentence. Currently, Alabama allows a death sentence if at least 10 out of 12 jurors recommend death.

In Florida, the path to non-unanimous jury verdicts in death penalty cases is even more convoluted.

Across the country, 27states allow death sentences. Although the United States is considered a death penalty country, executions are rare, or non-existent, in most of the nation. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, two-thirds of U.S. states — 33 out of 50 — have either no death penalty or have not carried out an execution in at least 10 years.

Prior to 2016, Florida did not require a unanimous jury verdict to impose death. Rather, according to Taylor Evans writing in the University of Miami Law Review, a simple 7-5 majority was sufficient under state law to sentence a criminal defendant to death. Additionally, judges could override a jury's sentencing recommendation.

That changed after a Florida case made its way to the United States Supreme Court in 2017. The high Court, by an 8-1 majority, held that "(t)he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death. A jury's mere recommendation is not enough."

The United States Supreme Court required a unanimous jury verdict in capital sentencing. However, in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court issued a new interpretation of the law. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the Florida Supreme Court found, "while a unanimous jury must find the existence of an aggravating factor in a capital case (which are the factors that make a first degree murder charge eligible for the death penalty), there was no requirement that the jury's recommendation for death must be unanimous."

The Florida Supreme Court decision opened the door to an even more bizarre standard. In January of 2023, only a month after three jurors declined to impose the death penalty on Nikolas Cruz, the mass shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, legislation was proposed to change Florida's unanimity requirement in death penalty sentencing to a mere supermajority.

Today, a person convicted of first-degree murder in Florida, followed by a jury finding that the alleged aggravating factors have been unanimously proven, can be sentenced to death by a mere 8 votes out of 12 jurors. That is not progress and certainly not justice.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Media challenges constitutionality of Tennessee 'police buffer zone' law

A media coalition, represented by attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is challenging the constitutionality of a new Tennessee law that makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a law enforcement officer after being told to stay back in certain situations.

In a federal lawsuit filed this week, seven news organizations — Gannett, Gray Local Media, Nashville Banner, Nexstar Media Group, Scripps Media, Tennessee Lookout, and TEGNA — argue that the law grants law enforcement officers limitless discretion to bar journalists and the public from reporting — for any reason or no reason — on protests and other newsworthy events, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

This is the third lawsuit Reporters Committee attorneys have filed on behalf of news media coalitions challenging so-called police “buffer zone” laws. In Indiana and Louisiana, news outlets won preliminary injunctions prohibiting the states from enforcing nearly identical laws that federal district courts found to be unconstitutionally vague.

“These buffer laws jeopardize reporters’ ability to bring their communities some of the news that matters most — about crime, disaster response, police misconduct, and more,” said Reporters Committee Staff Attorney Grayson Clary, who is representing the media coalition alongside Paul McAdoo, RCFP’s Local Legal Initiative attorney for Tennessee. “When law enforcement pushes the press out of eye and earshot, it’s the public that ultimately loses out.”

Tennessee’s law, which went into effect on July 1, makes it a misdemeanor for journalists and others to approach within 25 feet of an officer while the officer is engaged in official duties at a traffic stop, the scene of an alleged crime, or “an ongoing and immediate threat to public safety” — scenarios broad enough to sweep in most of what officers do in public, from enforcing the law at a public assembly to conducting disaster response. It authorizes officers to order individuals to back up even if they don’t pose a safety risk and are not obstructing law enforcement. And it also does not require officers to accommodate the First Amendment right to report on government activity.

In its lawsuit, the media coalition notes that journalists in Tennessee routinely come into close contact with police officers during the course of their reporting, including at crime scenes and football games. But under the new law, they could be forced to move far enough away from a newsworthy event that they are unable to record audio or video, speak to sources, or simply observe an officer’s actions. 

“With the Act now in effect,” the lawsuit argues, “whenever one of Plaintiffs’ journalists is told to retreat while standing within 25 feet of law enforcement, that reporter is put to a choice between committing a crime or forgoing newsgathering.”

In addition to its First Amendment arguments, the lawsuit alleges that the buffer zone law violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it fails to specify what kinds of behavior by a journalist or other member of the public might prompt an officer to issue an order to stay back.

“This law just gives officers too much discretion to pick and choose who is and isn’t violating the law, to the point where officers are essentially writing the law themselves,” Clary said. 

In Indiana and Louisiana, the district courts focused their decisions on the Fourteenth Amendment arguments, concluding that the laws in those respective states were unconstitutionally vague. 

Both states have appealed the rulings. In Indiana, the appeal is fully briefed, and the parties are awaiting a decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In Louisiana, attorneys for both sides are in the process of briefing the case in advance of oral argument, which hasn’t yet been scheduled.

Even as we await the appeals court rulings, the media coalitions’ victories at the district court level appear to be pushing lawmakers toward narrowing the scope of police buffer zone laws. In response to the district court’s opinion in Indiana, for example, state lawmakers passed a new buffer zone statute that only applies if officers in fact have reasonable grounds to believe that an individual threatens to interfere with the performance of their duties. Florida recently adopted a similarly narrower law. 

“The message is getting through,” said Clary, who has helped litigate all three media coalition lawsuits. “I still don’t think those laws are perfect. I think there’s still a risk that they’ll sweep in more legitimate speech and newsgathering than necessary in practice on the ground. But I do think it’s encouraging that outside the courtroom, there’s clearly been a shift towards a narrower and less speech suppressive version of these statutes, even if I wish states weren’t going down this road at all.”

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American Concentration Camps: Rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes

 Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

When it comes to the topic of concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer wrote the book — literally. The Washington, D.C.-area writer’s own personal curiosity about the origins and history of this inhumane practice — and her sense that many people view the subject too narrowly through the lens of Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin’s USSR — sparked her 2017 book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Although her book traces the long arc of cruel and often disease-ridden detention camps beginning in 1890s’ Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War, one question loomed largest, especially when it was published in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term and a crackdown on immigrants at the southern border.

Could it happen here?

Eight years later, Pitzer has no doubt: The push for a network of American concentration camps — rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes, holding them indefinitely without due process, in crowded, squalid conditions — isn’t just underway. It’s happening faster than the veteran author could have imagined, especially when compared with the growth of Germany’s camps between when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933 and the start of World War II six years later.

“I’m particularly concerned about where we are now, because we’re well into that five-year period in terms of we’re already doing sweeps, right?” Pitzer said. “We’ve already got masked guys. We’re already disappearing hundreds of people to … foreign countries, or to the Everglades, or now to Fort Bliss” — the El Paso, Texas, military base, which the Trump regime just awarded a $1.2 billion contract for a large new camp.

When I connected with Pitzer this week, she was trying to finish an unrelated project, but kept getting interrupted by pesky journalists like me wanting to talk about One Long Night and the rapid push to erect a U.S. gulag archipelago of camps like the large one hastily thrown up by Florida officials in the fetid swamps of the Everglades.

Anyone clinging to their belief that a democracy like the United States could never go down the trail of large-scale inhumanity blazed by 1930s’ Germany or Russia should have had that faith shattered by the $600 million-a-year, constructed-in-days immigrant detention camp that opened on July 1 in the swampland west of Miami.

Just the quasi-official name bestowed on the new camp by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others — “Alligator Alcatraz,” reinforced by government tweets of fierce reptiles wearing “ICE” caps and Trump’s jokes about immigrants running from the Everglades’ man-eaters — is the cruelty-is-the-point exclamation mark. Pitzer and other critics of the regime’s mass deportation agenda refuse to call it by the sadistic name, but the alligator branding is hardly the only clue to intentional inhumanity.

“It’s like a dog cage,” a detained Cuban immigrant, Rafael Collado, said by phone to reporters in Miami, describing a wetlands facility that floods frequently, where detainees lack showers, the food is rancid, the overhead light is continuous, and the mosquitoes are voracious.

For Pitzer, the mosquito plague at the Everglades camp is a revelation of its common bond with the worst camps of the last 130 years. “Mosquitoes have likewise long had a starring role in concentration camps around the world, starting with the first reconcentrados in Cuba in the 1890s,” she posted recently on Bluesky. Malaria was endemic at early camps there and with America’s early 20th-century detainees in the Philippines, but later the USSR and China would intentionally torture their prisoners with exposure to the biting and disease-bearing insects.

One of Pitzer’s goals in writing One Long Night and her follow-up works has been to define what exactly a concentration camp is.

She called it “the mass detention of civilians without any real trial. So if there’s a trial, it’s a show trial.” Detainees are held “on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or some aspect of identity instead of as a consequence of a specific crime that they’ve done and been convicted of. And it was almost always done for political gain. And what I saw all over, but also in the U.S., was the way, particularly after 9/11 in ‘the war on terror,’ that it was used to sort of consolidate political power.”

The most famous case study, in Nazi Germany, is also the source of many current misconceptions, since the “final solution” death camps, such as Auschwitz in Poland, where some of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in gas chambers, have often been what people think of. But the first well-known German concentration camp, Dachau, opened less than two months after Hitler took power in early 1933, and was used to detain — not slaughter — the Nazis’ political opponents.

“It was used in a kind of social engineering way,” Pitzer said of Hitler’s early camps. “There were a lot of homeless people, there were a lot of career criminals that they put in the camps to kind of dilute the percentage of political prisoners. So it would be more of a PR thing. People would support it more. You saw detention, particularly, of gay men.”

For Pitzer, the controversial but ultimately unpunished methods America used on Muslim detainees after the 2001 terror attack, including torture tactics such as waterboarding detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba or CIA “black sites” around the world, established a baseline of depravity the Trump regime is now building on.

It’s clear the unsanitary Florida detention camp isn’t a one-off, but rather a model for what the 47th president and his immigration guru, Stephen Miller, hope to accomplish over the next three-and-a-half years.

Right now, the surge in raids on unauthorized immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already created an all-time high number of detainees at more than 56,000, which is far more than the federal government can handle. That’s led to horrendous makeshift situations like an ICE office in Manhattan, where leaked videos show detainees held in what’s supposed to be an office, as a man shouts that “they’re treating us like dogs in here.”

The Florida concentration camp model will expand, now that Congress has approved a massive $45 billion appropriation for new immigration detention sites, with another $29 billion to hire more masked agents to arrest people and fill them.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a plan for a new network of sites in military bases across the country, including one at New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst that a critic has already dubbed “the Garden State Gulag.” A 5,000-bed camp planned for Fort Bliss, near the border with Mexico, has already raised red flags after the contract went to an inexperienced firm, but Pitzer noted this isn’t the only problem with using military sites.

“It’s not like it’s a secret prison, but it is a closed space,” she said. “And it’s going to be harder to know what’s happening and to keep track of it.” The author shares my concern that as the concentration camps gain momentum, the purpose of them will shift — maybe to incarcerate protesters or political prisoners, or Americans stripped of their citizenship.

Pitzer said her research has shown these camps “almost always transcend whatever were the original goals of even the very bad actors that imposed the camps in the first place. And so what we are looking at potentially happening here is not just sort of Stephen Miller’s visions being fulfilled. We could be looking at something much worse over time that we aren’t even imagining yet.”

With Pitzer, I share a fascination with the history of concentration camps and a sense of horror watching this story unfold on U.S. soil, in my own lifetime. We do need to be honest about American history: This has happened before, not just overseas, but here during World War II, when approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved into camps. Still, the growing prevalence of Holocaust education with its rallying cry of “Never Again,” and a U.S. apology over that Japanese internment made me hope — even believe — that I’d never have to write a column like this.

I was wrong.

Pitzer told me that while she is worried about the speed with which concentration camps are being implemented, and about the weakness of institutions like Congress or the media that could play a role in stopping this, she also feels some hope in sinking public support for Trump’s immigration agenda and the protests that have occurred.

“What they don’t have in place yet is that there’s actually still a tremendous amount of personal liberty and ability to dissent among most of the American population,” she said. Yet, if we don’t raise our voices immediately, that ability could disappear quickly. The moment to scream “Never Again” is right now, not during your grandchild’s history class.

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Harsh and callous tactics used and condoned by masked ICE agents

On the morning of 2 May, teenager Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio was driving to his landscaping job in North Palm Beach with his mother and two male friends when they were pulled over by the Florida highway patrol, according to The Guardian.

In one swift moment, a traffic stop turned into a violent arrest.

A highway patrol officer asked everyone in the van to identify themselves, then called for backup. Officers with US border patrol arrived on the scene.

Video footage of the incident captured by Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen, appears to show a group of officers in tactical gear working together to violently detain the three men*, two of whom are undocumented. They appear to use a stun gun on one man, put another in a chokehold and can be heard telling Laynez-Ambrosio: “You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother.” Afterward, agents can be heard bragging and making light of the arrests, calling the stun gun use “funny” and quipping: “You can smell that … $30,000 bonus.”

The footage has put fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used by US law enforcement officials as the Trump administration sets ambitious enforcement targets to detain thousands of immigrants every day.

“The federal government has imposed quotas for the arrest of immigrants,” said Jack Scarola, an attorney who is advocating on behalf of Laynez-Ambrosio and working with the non-profit Guatemalan-Maya Center, which provided the footage to the Guardian. “Any time law enforcement is compelled to work towards a quota, it poses a significant risk to other rights.”

Chokeholds, stun guns and laughter

The incident unfolded at roughly 9am, when a highway patrol officer pulled over the company work van, driven by Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother, and discovered that she had a suspended license. Laynez-Ambrosio said he is unsure why the van was pulled over, as his mother was driving below the speed limit.

Laynez-Ambrosio hadn’t intended to film the interaction – he already had his phone out to show his mom “a silly TikTok”, he said – but immediately clicked record when it became clear what was happening.

The video begins after the van has been pulled over and the border patrol had arrived. A female officer can be heard asking, in Spanish, whether anyone is in the country illegally. One of Laynez-Ambrosio’s friends answers that he is undocumented. “That’s when they said, ‘OK, let’s go,’” Laynez-Ambrosio recalled.

Laynez-Ambrosio said things turned aggressive before the group even had a chance to exit the van. One of the officers “put his hand inside the window”, he said, “popped the door open, grabbed my friend by the neck and had him in a chokehold”.

Footage appears to show officers then reaching for Laynez-Ambrosio and his other friend as Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard protesting: “You can’t grab me like that.” Multiple officers can be seen pulling the other man from the van and telling him to “put your fucking head down”. The footage captures the sound of a stun gun as Laynez-Ambrosio’s friend cries out in pain and drops to the ground.

Laynez-Ambrosio said that his friend was not resisting, and that he didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the officer’s commands. “My friend didn’t do anything before they grabbed him,” he said.

 

In the video, Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard repeatedly telling his friend, in Spanish, to not resist. “I wasn’t really worried about myself because I knew I was going to get out of the situation,” he said. “But I was worried about him. I could speak up for him but not fight back, because I would’ve made the situation worse.”

Laynez-Ambrosio can also be heard telling officers: “I was born and raised right here.” Still, he was pushed to the ground and says that an officer aimed a stun gun at him. He was subsequently arrested and held in a cell at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station for six hours.

Audio in the video catches the unidentified officers debriefing and appearing to make light of the stun gun use. “You’re funny, bro,” one officer can be overheard saying to another, followed by laughter.

Another officer says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”

Later in the footage, the officers move on to general celebration – “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” – and talk of the potential bonus they’ll be getting: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.” It is unclear what bonus they are referring to. Donald Trump’s recent spending bill includes billions of additional dollars for Ice that could be spent on recruitment and retention tactics such as bonuses.

Laynez-Ambrosio said his two friends were eventually transferred to the Krome detention center in Miami. He believes they were released on bail and are awaiting a court hearing, but said it has been difficult to stay in touch with them.

Laynez-Ambrosio’s notice to appear in court confirms that the border patrol arrived on the scene, having been called in by the highway patrol. His other legal representative, Victoria Mesa-Estrada, also confirmed that border patrol officers transported the three men to the border patrol facility.

The Florida highway patrol, CBP, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

Laynez-Ambrosio was charged with obstruction without violence and sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course. While in detention, he said, police threatened him with charges if he did not delete the video footage from his phone, but he refused.

Scarola, his lawyer, said the charges were retaliation for filming the incident. “Kenny was charged with filming [and was] alleged to have interfered with the activities of law enforcement,” he explained. “But there was no intended interference – merely the exercise of a right to record what was happening.”

In February, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed an agreement between the state and the Department of Homeland Security allowing Florida highway patrol troopers to be trained and approved by Ice to arrest and detain immigrants. While such agreements have been inked across the US, Florida has the largest concentration of these deals.

Father Frank O’Loughlin, founder and executive director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, the advocates for Laynez-Ambrosio, says the incident has further eroded trust between Florida’s immigrant community and the police. “This is a story about the corruption of law enforcement by Maga and the brutality of state and federal troopers – formerly public servants – towards nonviolent people,” he said.

Meanwhile, Laynez-Ambrosio is trying to recover from the ordeal, and hopes the footage raises awareness of how immigrants are being treated in the US. “It didn’t need to go down like that. If they knew that my people were undocumented, they could’ve just kindly taken them out of the car and arrested them,” he said. “It hurt me bad to see my friends like that. Because they’re just good people, trying to earn an honest living.”

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Massachusetts judge dismisses more than 120 cases due to lack of public defenders

More than 120 cases, including some for assault on family members and police, were dismissed recently in Boston, the latest fallout from a monthslong dispute over pay that has led public defenders to stop taking new clients, reported The Associated Press.

At a mostly empty courtroom, Boston Municipal Court Chief Justice Tracy-Lee Lyons invoked the Lavallee protocol in dismissing case after case. It requires cases be dropped if a defendant hasn’t had an attorney for 45 days and released from custody if they haven’t had one for seven days. Tuesday was the first time it was invoked to drop cases, while suspects in custody have been released in recent weeks.

Most were for minor crimes like shoplifting, drug possession and motor vehicle violations.

But several involved cases of assault on police officers and domestic violence. One suspect allegedly punched his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach and slapped her in the face. Another case involved a woman who was allegedly assaulted by the father of her child, who threatened to kill her and tried to strangle her. A third case involved a suspect who allegedly hit a police officer and threated to shoot him.

The judge, repeatedly invoking the Lavallee protocol, dismissed almost all of the cases after being convinced public defenders had made a good-faith effort to find the defendants an attorney. No defendants were in court to hear their cases being dismissed.

“This case will be dismissed without prejudice,” Lyons said repeatedly, noting that all fines and fees would be waived.

Frustration from prosecutors over dropped cases

Prosecutors unsuccessfully objected to the dismissal of many of the cases, especially the most serious being dismissed.

“The case dismissals today, with many more expected in coming days and weeks, present a clear and continuing threat to public safety,” James Borghesani, a spokesperson for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, said in a statement. They vowed to re-prosecute all the cases.

“Our prosecutors and victim witness advocates are working extremely hard to keep victims and other impacted persons updated on what’s happening with their cases,” he continued. “These are difficult conversations. We remain hopeful that a structural solution will be found to address the causal issues here and prevent any repeat.”

Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, speaking to reporters in Fall River, said the situation needed to be resolved.

“This is a public safety issue and also a due process issue as people need representation,” she said. “I know the parties are talking. They have got to find a way to work this out. We need lawyers in court ... and certainly they need to be paid fairly.”

Dispute revolves around pay

Public defenders, who argue they are the lowest paid in New England, launched a work stoppage at the end of May in hopes of pressuring the legislature to increase their hourly pay. The state agency representing public defenders had proposed a pay increase from $65 an hour to $73 an hour over the next two fiscal years for lawyers in district court, an increase from $85 an hour to $105 an hour for lawyers in Superior Court and $120 an hour to $150 an hour for lawyers handling murder cases.

But the 2026 fiscal year budget of $60.9 billion signed early this month by Healey didn’t include any increase.

“The dismissal of cases today under the Lavallee protocols is what needs to be done for those individuals charged with crimes but with no lawyer to vindicate their constitution rights,” said Shira Diner, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law and the immediate past president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It is, however, not a solution to the deep crisis of inadequate pay for bar advocates. Until there are enough qualified lawyers in courts to fulfill the constitutional obligation of the right to counsel this crisis will only intensify.”

The pay of public defenders is a national issue

Massachusetts is the latest state struggling to adequately fund its public defender system.

In New York City, legal aid attorneys are demanding better pay and working conditions. Earlier this month, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a two-year state budget into law that increases the pay of public defenders and district attorneys in each of the next two years. That comes after the Legislature in 2023 also increased the pay to address rising caseloads, high turnover and low salaries.

Public defenders in Minnesota averted a walkout in 2022 that threatened to bring the court system to a standstill. A year later, the legislature came up with more funding for the state Board of Public Defense so it could meet what the American Bar Association recommends for manageable caseload standards.

Oregon, meanwhile, has struggled for years with a critical shortage of court-provided attorneys for low-income defendants. As of Tuesday, nearly 3,500 defendants did not have a public defender, a dashboard from the Oregon Judicial Department showed. Of those, about 143 people were in custody, some for longer than seven days.

Amid the state’s public defense crisis, lawmakers last month approved over $2 million for defense attorneys to take more caseloads in the counties most affected by the shortage and over $3 million for Oregon law schools to train and supervise law students to take on misdemeanor cases.

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Law&Crime: Donald Trump's latest legal effort may escalate fight over Jeffrey Epstein files

Matthew T. Mangino
Law&Crime News
July 23, 2025

President Donald Trump has all sorts of problems with the criminal justice system.

He pardoned hundreds of men and woman who were convicted of storming the capitol on Jan. 6, and his Department of Justice has purged career prosecutors who effectively conducted the prosecutions.

The Trump DOJ, headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, has launched an investigation into the former director of the FBI James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan who looked into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump has fared much better with civil lawsuits — not those litigated, but those settled. His record with civil verdicts — those verdicts rendered by a jury — is not so good. New York Attorney General Letitia James got a verdict for the people of New York for $355 million against Trump for business fraud.  E. Jean Carroll was awarded $88.3 million as a result of two successful defamation jury verdicts against Trump.

On the other hand, Trump received a $15 million settlement – not in the form of a jury award, but money forked over by ABC Disney Entertainment. Paramount CBS did the same, handing Trump $16 million, and then announced the end of the popular "Late Show," hosted by Stephen Colbert, after Colbert called the payment a bribe to secure an upcoming merger.

No wonder, then, that Donald Trump has filed another lawsuit against a big-time media company. The president has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.

President Donald Trump, from left, speaks while signing an executive order as Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, Rupert Murdoch and Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer of Oracle Corporation, listen in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The lawsuit was filed in a Florida federal court seeking $10 billion in damages. According to The Guardian, the suit came only a day after the WSJ "reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared."

The card reportedly concluded with "Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret."

Trump has denied the report and claimed the letter is a fake.

This lawsuit may be more about trying to extract Trump from the center of the Epstein scandal than to cash in another cowering media outlet.

A little more than a week ago, a two-page memo from the Department of Justice and the FBI said they found no evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful people or kept a "client list," and they reiterated that he died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019.

According to NPR, Epstein's death and imprisonment have been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, including a "prominent belief amplified by numerous right-wing figures who now serve in the Trump administration that the sex trafficker's death is proof, in part, that the government is run by shadowy figures out to undermine Trump."

As the outrage on the right grows, Trump posted a lengthy message on his Truth Social website telling his supporters to "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about," and spread baseless conspiracies that the so-called files were created by Democrats to go after him. That post didn't go over well with Democrats or Republicans.

While pressure from Democrats is the norm, dissent from within the Trump administration is not. The President's inner circle — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino — have been at odds with each other over the handling of the Epstein files. Prominent GOP leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have suggested the files be released.

Then, on Friday, the president capitulated, ordering Bondi to seek the unsealing of grand jury testimony from the prosecution against Epstein."

Will the grand jury testimony calm the storm — or just fuel the growing tumult facing Trump and his administration?

(Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. He is a regular contributor to Law&Crime. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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Mangino discusses Kohberger sentencing on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Derek Steyer of WFMJ-TV21 discussing the Idaho sentencing of Bryan Kohberger.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE