Organizations file suit to stop dismantling of Department of Education

The Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle the Education Department drew a pair of court challenges on Monday, as opponents called the plan an attempt to evade congressional authority, reported The New York Times.

The first lawsuit was filed in federal court in Massachusetts by the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers union; the American Association of University Professors; and two public school districts in Massachusetts. Within hours the N.A.A.C.P., the National Education Association union and other critics had brought a case of their own in federal court in Maryland.

The challenges came four days after President Trump signed an executive order that directed the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the department.”

The day after the order, Mr. Trump announced that the Small Business Administration would assume control of the government’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio, and that the Health and Human Services Department would oversee nutrition programs and special education services.

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Trump comes after the lawyers

Legal advocacy groups have sounded the alarms after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened new actions against lawyers and law firms that bring immigration lawsuits and other cases against the government that he deems unethical, reported Reuters.

In a memorandum to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi late on Friday, Trump said lawyers were helping to fuel "rampant fraud and meritless claims" in the immigration system, and directed the Justice Department to seek sanctions against attorneys for professional misconduct.

The order also took aim at law firms that sue the administration in what Trump, a Republican, called "baseless partisan" lawsuits. He asked Bondi to refer such firms to the White House to be stripped of security clearances, and for federal contracts they worked on to be terminated.

Ben Wizner, a senior lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new directive sought to "chill and intimidate" lawyers who challenge the president's agenda. Trump has separately mounted attacks on law firms over their internal diversity policies and their ties to his political adversaries.

"Courts have been the only institution so far that have stood up to Trump’s onslaught,” Wizner said. “Courts can’t play that role without lawyers bringing cases in front of them."

The ACLU is involved in litigation against the administration over immigrant deportations, including the expulsion of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

The Trump administration has been hit with more than 100 lawsuits challenging White House actions on immigration, transgender rights and other issues since the start of the president's second term. Legal advocacy groups, along with at least 12 major law firms, have brought many of the cases.

A White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said “President Trump is delivering on his promise to ensure the judicial system is no longer weaponized against the American people."

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the memorandum, which directed Bondi to assess lawyers and firms that brought cases against the government over the past eight years.

Law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters, which is working with the ACLU in an immigrant rights case against the administration, said in a statement that it was "inexcusable and despicable" for Trump to attack lawyers based on their clients or legal work opposing the federal government.

Representatives from other prominent law firms that are representing clients in cases against Trump's administration, including Hogan Lovells, Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump issued executive orders this month against law firms Perkins Coie and Paul Weiss, suspending their lawyers' security clearances and restricting their access to government buildings, officials and federal contracting work.

The president also last month suspended security clearances of lawyers at Covington & Burling, in each case citing the firms' past work for his political or legal opponents.

The Keker firm on Saturday called on law firms to sign a joint court brief supporting a lawsuit by Perkins Coie challenging the executive order against it.

Paul Weiss on Thursday struck a deal with Trump to rescind the executive order against it, pledging to donate the equivalent of $40 million in free legal work to support some of the administration's causes such as support for veterans and combating antisemitism.

Lawyers are bound by professional ethics rules that require them to investigate allegations before filing lawsuits and not deceive the courts. Imposing disciplinary sanctions on lawyers who violate such rules falls on the court system, not federal prosecutors, though prosecutors can charge lawyers with criminal misconduct.

Some lawyers aligned with Trump faced professional discipline over claims that they violated legal ethics rules in challenging Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win over Trump.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who later was an attorney for Trump, was disbarred in New York and in the District of Columbia over baseless claims he made alleging the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Lawyers for Civil Rights, a legal advocacy group suing the administration over deportations, called Trump's sanctions threat hypocritical in a statement to Reuters, saying Trump and his allies "have repeatedly thumbed their noses at the rule of law."

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Fingerprint evidence not infallible

Fingerprints have been police tools for a long time, more than a century. They were considered infallible for much of that history, according to Science News.

Limitations to fingerprint analysis came to light in spectacular fashion in 2004, with the bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid. Spanish police found a blue plastic bag full of detonators and traces of explosives. Forensic experts used a standard technique to raise prints off the bag: fumigating it with vaporized superglue, which stuck to the finger marks, and staining the bag with fluorescent dye to reveal a blurry fingerprint.

Running that print against the FBI’s fingerprint database highlighted a possible match to Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer. One FBI expert, then another, then another confirmed Mayfield’s print matched the one from the bag.

Mayfield was arrested. But he hadn’t been anywhere near Madrid during the bombing. He didn’t even possess a current passport. Spanish authorities later arrested someone else, and the FBI apologized to Mayfield and let him go.

The case highlights an unfortunate “paradox” resulting from fingerprint databases, in that “the larger the databases get … the larger the probability that you find a spurious match,” says Alicia Carriquiry. She directs the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence, or CSAFE, at Iowa State University.

In fingerprint analyses, the question at hand is whether two prints, one from a crime scene and one from a suspect or a fingerprint database, came from the same digit (SN: 8/26/15). The problem is that prints lifted from a crime scene are often partial, distorted, overlapping or otherwise hard to make out. The expert’s challenge is to identify features called minutiae, such as the place a ridge ends or splits in two, and then decide if they correspond between two prints.

Studies since the Madrid bombing illustrate the potential for mistakes. In a 2011 report, FBI researchers tested 169 experienced print examiners on 744 fingerprint pairs, of which 520 pairs contained true matches. Eighty-five percent of the examiners missed at least one of the true matches in a subset of 100 or so pairs each examined. Examiners can also be inconsistent: In a subsequent study, the researchers brought back 72 of those examiners seven months later and gave them 25 of the same fingerprint pairs they saw before. The examiners changed their conclusions on about 10 percent of the pairings.

Forensic examiners can also be biased when they think they see a very rare feature in a fingerprint and mentally assign that feature a higher significance than others, Quigley-McBride says. No one has checked exactly how rare individual features are, but she is part of a CSAFE team quantifying these features in a database of more than 2,000 fingerprints.

Computer software can assist fingerprint experts with a “sanity check,” says forensic scientist Glenn Langenburg, owner of the consulting firm Elite Forensic Services in St. Paul, Minn. One option is a program known rather informally as Xena (yes, for the television warrior princess) developed by Langenburg’s former colleagues at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Xena’s goal is to calculate a likelihood ratio, a number that compares the probability of a fingerprint looking like it does if it came from the suspect (the numerator) versus the probability of the fingerprint looking as it does if it’s from some random, unidentified individual (the denominator). The same type of statistic is used to support DNA evidence.

To compute the numerator probability, the program starts with the suspect’s pristine print and simulates various ways it might be distorted, creating 700 possible “pseudomarks.” Then Xena asks, if the suspect is the person behind the print from the crime scene, what’s the probability any of those 700 could be a good match?

To calculate the denominator probability, the program compares the crime scene print to 1 million fingerprints from random people and asks, what are the chances that this crime scene print would be a good match for any of these?

If the likelihood ratio is high, that suggests the similarities between the two prints are more likely if the suspect is indeed the source of the crime scene print than if not. If it’s low, then the statistics suggest it’s quite possible the print didn’t come from the suspect. Xena wasn’t available at the time of the Mayfield case, but when researchers ran those prints later, it returned a very low score for Mayfield, Langenburg says.

Another option, called FRStat, was developed by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory. It crunches the numbers a bit differently to calculate the degree of similarity between fingerprints after an expert has marked five to 15 minutiae.

While U.S. Army courts have admitted FRStat numbers, and some Swiss agencies have adopted Xena, few fingerprint examiners in the United States have taken up either. But Carriquiry thinks U.S. civilian courts will begin to use FRStat soon.

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Florida and Oklahoma carry out executions on the same day

 The 9th and 10th Executions of 2025

Oklahoma carried out its first execution of 2025 on March 20, 2025, giving a lethal injection to a Wendell Arden Grissom a confessed killer who had said in his first interview with police that he wanted the death penalty, reported The Daily Oklahoman.

Also on March 20, 2025, Florida officials executed Edward James for the killing of an 8-year-old girl and her grandmother on a night in which he drank heavily and used drugs, according to The Associated Press.

Grissom, 56, was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.

"I consider this a mercy. It's going to be all right," he said in his last words after apologizing and asking for forgiveness from "all of you that I hurt."

He did not seek any emergency stays in court and did not speak at his clemency hearing in February. He told Newsweek on Monday, "I don't want to spend the rest of my life in here."

Grissom was executed for fatally shooting a woman during a 2005 home invasion in rural Blaine County. The victim, Amber Dawn Matthews, 23, was at the isolated home near Watonga helping a friend, Dreu Kopf, pack for a move the next day.

Matthews was shot the first time in the back of the head while holding her friend's newborn baby, Gracie. She was shot again in the forehead after collapsing to the floor. Kopf also was shot but survived.

"You guys really need to remember her because she was unbelievable," Kopf said Thursday of her best friend. "She saved my kids."

Florida Prison officials said James, 63, was pronounced dead at 8:15 p.m. after receiving a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. He drew the death penalty after pleading guilty to the Sept. 19, 1993, killings of Toni Neuner, 8, and her grandmother, Betty Dick, 58.

As he awaited the injection, James said he did not wish to give a final statement. Then, as the drugs were administered, James breathed heavily, his arms flinching, and then he was still.

Jared Pearson, Neuner’s brother, said afterward that the family was able to find some kind of peace with the process.

“But we lost generations because of him,” Pearson said. “It’s all pure evil. That night was horrific.”

Three other executions were carried out this week in the U.S., including the lethal injection earlier Thursday of an Oklahoma man for the fatal shooting of a woman during a home invasion. Arizona executed a man by an injection Wednesday and Louisiana used nitrogen gas for the first time Tuesday, putting a man to death as that state ended a 15-year pause on executions.

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Arizona executes condemned prison who volunteered to be executed

 The 8th Execution of 2025

Aaron Gunches, who has advocated for his death, was executed shortly after 10 a.m. March 19, 2025 at a prison facility in Florence, reported The Arizona Republic.

On Dec. 30, 2024, Gunches filed a hand-written motion for his own death warrant, asking the Arizona Supreme Court and the state to stop “foot dragging.” He asked to be executed on Valentine’s Day, though it’s uncertain who that romantic irony was supposed to gore, or if it was merely because the day was the anniversary of his first death sentence.

He was the first person killed by the state of Arizona since 2022 and the fourth since 2014. In 2022, three men were executed, and the state struggled to administer all three lethal injections. In 2014, it took two hours for the lethal injection drugs to kill Joseph Wood, leading to an eight-year pause in executions.

Upon taking office in 2023, Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes, both Democrats, suspended executions pending a review of the state's capital punishment system by an independent commissioner.

At the time, Hobbs said the review was needed because "Arizona has a history of mismanaged executions that have resulted in serious questions and concerns" about the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry's execution protocols and lack of transparency.

But Hobbs ended the review before it was finished, saying she had lost confidence in the effort.

Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican, had been putting pressure on Mayes to pursue Gunches' execution and eventually attempted to get his death warrant from the Arizona Supreme Court on her own, challenging the attorney general's exclusive authority to make such a request. Mitchell's efforts, however, were rendered moot after Mayes filed a death warrant request, which was granted by the court in February.

Hobbs cited an "execution preparedness" review the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry sent her on Nov. 22 as proof the state was ready to proceed with putting prisoners to death.

Gunches was sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, a former longtime boyfriend of Gunches' girlfriend. Gunches kidnapped and shot Price multiple times in a desert area off the Beeline Highway.

Dale Baich watched the execution of Aaron Gunches as his invited legal witness. He said appearances could be misleading, because of how the lethal drugs affect a human body.

“The witnesses did not see is what happened under the jumpsuit and sheet. We know from scientific studies that rapid administration of a high dose of pentobarbital is excruciatingly painful. Pulmonary edema develops in seconds as the lungs fill with water and one is not able to breathe," Baich told reporters afterward.

"There is a sensation of drowning from within and not being able to do anything about it. It is like being waterboarded to death," he added.

Baich said the breaths, the heaving chest and gurgling sounds were all signs we was struggling to breathe, and noted, "Even though it may have looked peaceful, it was not.” 

Ted Price's sister, Karen Price, told the media after watching the execution of her brother's killer: “The pain of losing Ted remains profound and cannot be conveyed in mere words."

She fondly remembered him as an avid fan of the Suns and Diamondbacks, and a compassionate man who loved cats. He'd be 63 years old if he'd lived, she said, recalling an idyllic childhood in Utah. She is 15 months younger than her brother, with whom she was very close.

The last time Karen Price saw her brother alive was when she dropped him off at the Salt Lake City airport in February 2002, when she snapped a photo of him. His body was found in the desert 23 days after he went to Arizona, she said.

She struggled for words to convey what the execution of Aaron Gunches means to her and said that she was relieved the process was finally over.

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Louisiana carries out first execution in 15 years using nitrogen gas

 The 7th Execution of 2025

Jessie Hoffman was put to death on March 19, 2025 at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, becoming the first person in the state executed using nitrogen gas, reported the Louisiana Illuminator.

It also marked the first time Louisiana has carried out the death penalty in 15 years, citing its inability to obtain the drugs necessary for lethal injection. With no foreseeable sources to resuming using that method, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and the GOP-dominated state legislature approved nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative. 

Alabama is the only other state to have used the technique, having put four condemned men to death since adopting the method in February 2024.

“It went flawless. There was nothing that happened incorrectly,” Gary Westcott, secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety and Corrections, told reporters after Hoffman’s execution, according to WAFB-TV.

Hoffman, 46, was executed for the 1996 kidnapping, rape and murder of 28-year-old Mary “Molly” Elliot.

Investigators said Hoffman abducted Elliot at a downtown New Orleans parking lot where he was a valet and where she parked daily for her job at an advertising agency. She was taken to rural St. Tammany Parish, where she was assaulted and fatally shot the day before Thanksgiving. A hunter found her nude body the next day at a remote boat launch near the Pearl River.

Landry’s office issued a statement from him after Hoffman’s execution. It stressed how Elliot’s “family and friends have been forced to relive the tragedy through countless legal proceedings.”

“In Louisiana, we will always prioritize victims over criminals, law and order over lawlessness, and justice over the status quo,” Landry said. ”If you commit heinous acts of violence in this State, it will cost you your life. Plain and simple.” 

Read the governor’s full statement below.

Lawyers for Hoffman, seeking a last-minute reprieve from his death sentence being carried out, argued nitrogen hypoxia amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, prohibited under the 8th Amendment. Hoffman instead sought death by firing squad or lethal injection, acknowledging his responsibility for Elliot’s violent death.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick of Louisiana’s Middle District Court, temporarily blocked Hoffman’s execution date to allow that argument to proceed. Attorney General Liz Murrill challenged that order. Last week, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals removed the injunction from Dick, a federal court appointee of former President Barack Obama. In a 5-4 decision late Tuesday afternoon, the Supreme Court refused to stop Hoffman’s execution.

Cecelia Koppel, one of Hoffman’s attorneys and director of the Center for Social Justice at Loyola University College of Law, issued a statement shortly after Hoffman’s death. 

“Tonight, the State of Louisiana carried out the senseless execution of Jessie Hoffman,” Koppell said. “He was a father, a husband, and a man who showed extraordinary capacity for redemption. Jessie no longer bore any resemblance to the 18-year old who killed Molly Elliot.”

Koppel had unsuccessfully challenged Louisiana’s move to nitrogen hypoxia, arguing the method was an illegal affront to Hoffman’s Buddhist faith. Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Donald Trump, joined the court’s three liberal jurists and wrote the dissenting opinion, calling out the 5th Circuit’s failure to address Hoffman’s religious concerns. 

The expedited nature of Louisiana’s nitrogen hypoxia protocols was also a point of contention for Koppel. Although Landry and lawmakers approved the method last year, the governor didn’t provide the legally required execution protocol until Feb. 10. Those details remained under seal until March 5, giving Hoffman’s team less than two weeks to challenge the pending execution.   

“The State was able to execute him by pushing out a new protocol and setting execution dates to prevent careful judicial review and shrouding the process in secrecy,” Koppel said. 

State corrections officials allowed only two journalists to witness the execution. According to The Advocate, Hoffman was fastened to a gurney and inhaled nitrogen gas for 19 minutes. State officials said he displayed “convulsive activity” as he died, and he was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m.

Hoffman declined to make a final statement before his death and refused a last meal, according to the report.

Ilona Hoffman, the executed man’s wife, issued a statement that said he “was not defined by his worst moment” and that the “system” had failed him as a child.

“This execution was not justice. It was revenge,” Ilona Hoffman said. “True justice recognizes growth, humanity, and redemption. Louisiana chose to ignore that.”

The Promise of Justice Initiative, which opposes the death penalty, was among the groups in Hoffman’s corner. Its senior staff attorney, Samantha Pourciau, took critical aim at the Landry administration in a statement after his death.

“Governor Landry’s yearslong pursuit of this execution concluded with more pain and more trauma. Tonight, while many in our state cannot afford groceries, the state used countless resources to kill one man,” Pourciau said in part. “The governor cannot cloak this in fighting for victims, because today we learned that this is not, in fact, what this family wants. This is what the governor wants. This has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”

There are 55 more people on death row in Louisiana, and Murrill has said the state intends to execute four people this year.

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CREATORS: A New Twist on the "Reviled" Advocate

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
March 18, 2025

American criminal jurisprudence has been turned on its head. For centuries lawyers have been attacked for advocacy on behalf of despicable criminals. Last week, the tables turned. President Donald Trump attacked prosecutors and government lawyers for advocacy on behalf of the people.

The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients was established more than 250 years ago with John Adams' representation of the British soldiers charged with murder during the Boston Massacre. Adams' trial summation set the standard for law and order.

Adams, who would later serve two terms as president of the United States, said of justice, "On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace."

Today, more than ever, the clamor of the populace — through news media and social media — can almost instantly accuse, try and convict a person in the court of public opinion. Lawyers are often intentionally, or unintentionally, drug into the glare of the media and no longer perceived as only representing the accused, but of siding with the reprehensible conduct. A lawyer faced with the decision to take on a controversial client must legitimately ask herself, "Will I ever get any more law business in my community if I take this case?"

Attorneys are advocates for others. Many understand that representing the person or issue does not equate to accepting or endorsing what a particular client does. In practice, however, many people have difficulty accepting that a pedophile, terrorist, mass killer or racist hate group is entitled to legal representation.

At times, attorneys are demonized for representing defendants charged with heinous crimes — as if there was something immoral about providing a defense to someone charged with a crime. Such conduct undermines the fundamental protections of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, "to have the assistance of counsel."

There have also been times when lawyers have failed to meet the lofty standards of protecting the United States Constitution. Denise Lieberman, writing for "Liberties," the newsletter of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, pointed out that during the McCarthy era the American Bar Association "declared that any attorney representing a person associated with the Communist Party was unworthy of membership in the bar, and even demanded that lawyers take loyalty oaths."

However, few were prepared for what we saw last week. President Trump focused his wrath, not on defense attorneys who represent unpopular clients, or legal organizations that capitulate to the rhetoric of demagogues — no, Trump vilified prosecutors.

President Trump made a speech at the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, where, according to The New York Times, he lashed out at lawyers and former prosecutors by name. He also accused the department's previous leadership of trying to destroy him. He labeled those who opposed him as "scum," "corrupt" and "deranged."

"Unfortunately, in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations," Trump said, in speaking — of the Justice Department — to an audience at the Justice Department. "They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people."

Trump called himself the chief law enforcement officer in the country — of course, he is not. However, it was less than reassuring when the country's actual chief law enforcement officer — Attorney General Pam Bondi, said, according to Politico, "We will never stop fighting for (Trump) and for our country."

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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