Thursday, May 29, 2025

2025 may be on course for the lowest homicide rate ever recorded

One of the most predictable clichés in journalism is "if it bleeds, it leads"—the idea that media have a bias for salacious, grisly stories. Like many stereotypes, it's very much based in truth, which might explain why plummeting murder rates nationwide have not managed to capture national attention.

Despite a news cycle that prioritizes doom, the U.S. has seen that decline take hold over the last couple of years, with the murder rate in 2024 not just falling from the 2020 spike but returning to pre-COVID levels. That brings us to the present, and to a question: Reason magazine askes, Could 2025 see the lowest murder rate ever recorded?

It's possible.

The primary caveat, of course, is that the year is not over. But the initial numbers show a record low is within the realm of possibility—an amazing turn of events, particularly when considering the murder increase five years ago, which at times felt apocalyptic.

So what are the numbers? In surveying some of the most homicide-prone cities nationwide, crime data analyst Jeff Asher recently found more than a 20 percent decrease in murders from 2024. That's encouraging in isolation, but even more so when remembering that last year, too, saw a sharp decline, and 2023 before that. A sampling: As of early May, murders were down 31.6 percent in Baltimore, 34.5 percent in St. Louis, 36.8 percent in Cleveland, 63 percent in Denver, 30.6 percent in New Orleans, 26.8 percent in New York, and 23.7 percent in Chicago.

For an even more up-to-date example, Philadelphia had recorded 88 homicides as of May 22, according to the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) crime dashboard. On May 22, 2021, that number was 201. Indeed, 88 is the lowest year-to-date homicide number that the PPD has listed on its dashboard for this same period—January 1 to May 22—tying with years 2014 and 2015. (2014 currently holds the record for the lowest national murder rate ever recorded.)

"Running the numbers suggests that a 10 percent or more decline in murder nationally in 2025 would roughly tie 2014," writes Asher, co-founder of AH Analytics. (The numbers, thus far, are much better than that, although that could of course change.) "But it's fairly clear that a decline in the direction we're currently seeing would safely give 2025 the title of lowest US murder rate ever recorded."

A common point of pushback in the debate around crime rates is the notion that many offenses simply aren't reported to police. "That concern is a very legitimate one—for certain crimes," I wrote last year in discussing the 2024 murder rate decline. "Tracking burglaries, for example, is notoriously difficult; the bulk of people simply don't report them. Murders, however, are usually reported to police." That doesn't mean law enforcement will actually solve the crime: About 58 percent of murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases were cleared in 2023, according to data on Statista, which means for crime reporting purposes, the case was solved. While there's obviously work to be done there—and while data collection is by no means perfect—it is typically pretty hard to hide a body.

But what about the idea that we're merely coming off a murder uptick, so this is nothing to celebrate? "Fewer people are being killed than they were during a major homicide increase" is not compelling messaging, to be sure. But that's not what's happening here. We're not talking about a record decline after a precipitous surge; we're talking about a record low, period. While it's still possible that won't pan out, the fact that it's even on the table after a bloody few years is such good news that journalists might even consider leading with it.

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Wednesday, May 28, 2025

CREATORS: The Expanding Presidency, 200 Years in the Making

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 27, 2025

The dominance of the executive in American government today was set in motion nearly two centuries ago.

Former President Andrew Jackson was the first president to suggest that being the only official elected by all the people bestowed on the office a mandate from the American people.

Sound familiar? President Donald Trump claimed a mandate from the American people. He said during a speech to the FBI, "The American people have given us a mandate, a mandate like few people thought possible."

Jackson won 56% of the popular vote in 1828. With his "mandate," he expanded the power of the presidency. In doing so, he incurred the wrath of his political opponents. Jackson beat Adams, who four years earlier had bested Jackson in a controversial election that was thrown to the House of Representatives to resolve.

Passions in the early 19th century were high, not unlike today. Then Secretary of State, and later U.S. Senator, Henry Clay told Senator, and future Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, the election of Jackson was "mortifying and sickening to the heart of the real lovers of this government."

A close examination of Jackson's presidency reveals many similarities to the controversial issues we read and hear about today. Jon Meacham's book "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House" provides such an examination.

Jackson had his battles with the U.S. Supreme Court. When Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in favor of the Cherokees in a dispute with the federal government, Jackson was reported to have said, "Well, John Marshall made his decision now let him enforce it."

Although Meacham thought the quote was "historically questionable," he believed it was philosophically accurate. Jackson believed that a president should not just defer to the wishes of the courts or Congress but should make his own independent interpretation of important issues and rulings.

Today, the president is also at odds with the courts. He has called for the impeachment of judges who rule against the interests of his administration and his administration has defied orders of the court.

There was even discussion of Jackson's impeachment. He was considered a radical president, and an impeachment was a radical solution. Although Jackson was never impeached, he was censored by the U.S. Senate and fought for years to have the stain on his record expunged from the annals of the Senate.

When Jackson's subordinates refused to carry out his directions, he was not above replacing them. He orchestrated a mass resignation from his cabinet during his first term — and fired his Secretary of the Treasury when he refused to defund the National Bank during his second term.

According to data from the Brookings Institution, Trump had 14 cabinet secretaries resign during his first term. More than any modern president.

Just as the Trump administration has deployed federal troops to the southern border, Jackson pushed for a "Force Bill" when South Carolina teetered on the brink of succession in 1833. The Force Bill would have permitted Jackson to use federal troops against American citizens to enforce federal law, which some describe as a "Jacksonian dictatorship."

Jackson's use of the bully pulpit, as Theodore Roosevelt — an admirer of Jackson — called it, seems more benevolent than the current president. Jackson's priority was to keep the union together. Thirty years before the Civil War, the threat of "nullification" was hanging over the country. The South, led by South Carolina, was threatening to leave the Union.

In a message following an adverse ruling by the Supreme Court, Jackson wrote, "The authority of the Supreme Court must, therefore, not be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities."

He was called a despot and emperor, but Meecham pointed out that his message concluded with, "I have now done my duty to my country ... If sustained by my fellow-citizens, I shall be grateful and happy; if not, I shall find in the motives which impel me ample grounds for contentment and peace."

Would we be naive to expect to hear such magnanimity from today's White House?

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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Tuesday, May 27, 2025

The 'big beautiful bill's" assault on the judiciary and elections

Here are two things you might not know about Trump's "big beautiful bill" according to Katie Couric Media:

An assault on the judiciary

A policy in Section 70302 would hugely limit federal courts’ power to hold government officials in contempt if they violate judicial orders. This is a major live issue — as the Guardian notes, at least one judge appears poised to issue a contempt citation in a high-profile immigration case related to the administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

Not only does this provision threaten the judicial branch and the separation of powers, but as the CLC points out, it represents a stark escalation in a campaign the Trump administration is already waging against the judiciary. The courts have ruled against it at least 170 times already, and in many cases, Trump’s response has been to ignore due process and attempt to intimidate judges.

Deregulating election misinformation

Section 43201(c) of the House reconciliation bill would ban the enforcement of all state and local laws that regulate AI — including regulation around the use of AI in political campaigns and elections — for 10 years.

For want of decisive action from Congress to regulate AI’s impact on the democratic process, states have filled the vacuum by enacting their own safeguards. If the big beautiful bill dismantles them, false information could run rampant for the next decade, seriously impacting voters’ ability to make informed decisions.

To read more CLICK HERE

Monday, May 26, 2025

On this Memorial Day 'words matter'

 Today we remember those who died in defense of our country.  During World War II, 400,000 Americans died defending this nation from the scourge of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi's and the Axis Powers.  Hitler was infamous for his dangerous rhetoric. Listen closely, words matter:

1935

Jewish people referred to as “parasites”; “people who can sneak their way, like parasites, into the human body politic, dehumanizing terms like "vermin," and "bacillus" to describe Jews.

Hitler’s rhetorical strategy: the rhetorical use of repetition, stating that the “repetition of fear-arousing messages, supported by a variety of information sources in addition to the speaker, strengthens the impact of his message”

2025

“MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”

 “Lock Her Up!”

 “corrupt”, “nasty”, “failing”, as well as “bimbo”, “stupid” and “unattractive” when referring to women, “loser”, “corrupt”, “crooked” to refer to people he deemed opponents or enemies.

Immigration: "No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans. They’re animals.”

Political opponents are "vermin" and immigration is "poisoning the blood" of the U.S.

 Words as Weapons: A Discourse Analysis on the Weaponization and Mobilization of Language by Richard R. Cavazos and Bridget Drinka, Ph.D

Sunday, May 25, 2025

SCOTUS side steps Trump administration firings

Since taking his second oath of office, President Trump has been on a firing spree. In violation of numerous laws or longstanding presidential practice (or both), he has ordered the removal of many high-level officials who normally retain their positions regardless of who is in the Oval Office, reported The New York Times.

Some of these high-level officials have successfully challenged their removal in the lower courts. But on Thursday, in a case involving members of the National Labor Relations and Merit Systems Protection Boards, the Supreme Court quietly blessed some or all of these firings. In doing so, the court effectively allowed the president to neutralize some of the last remaining sites of independent expertise and authority inside the executive branch.

The court sought to cast its intervention as temporary, procedural and grounded in considerations of stability, with the unsigned order noting concerns about the “disruptive effect of the repeated removal and reinstatement of officers during the pendency of this litigation.”

In truth, the decision was radical. Whatever one thinks about the underlying question of presidential authority, the court should not have disposed of the case this way. It effectively overruled an important and nearly century-old precedent central to the structure of the federal government without full briefing or argument. And it did so in a thinly reasoned, unsigned, two-page order handing the president underspecified but considerable new authority.

Over the last four months, the legal world — and the country — has been plunged into chaos, and the Supreme Court bears a heavy dose of responsibility. Many of it decisions involving the presidency — including last year’s on presidential immunity — have enabled the president to declare himself above the law. The court’s latest order both enables the consolidation of additional power in the presidency and risks assimilating a “move fast and break things” ethos into constitutional law.

No modern president has ever come close to the large-scale personnel purges that we have seen under Mr. Trump, and for good reason: Many of the officials in question are protected by law from being fired at will by the president. Mr. Trump maintains that laws limiting the president’s ability to fire high-level officials are unconstitutional. In making that argument, he is drawing on a series of recent Supreme Court opinions emphasizing the importance of presidential control over subordinate officials and invalidating removal limitations at agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But those recent decisions exist alongside another, older precedent, which until now has stood as a bulwark against any president’s ability to lay waste to independent agencies: the Supreme Court’s 1935 opinion in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. In that case, the court concluded that Congress could create expert agencies designed to enjoy a degree of independence from the president and could limit the president’s ability to fire at will the leaders of such agencies.

The court’s recent unitary executive cases, with their expansive vision of presidential control, haven’t formally overruled Humphrey’s Executor. In fact, they stated explicitly that they were not “revisit[ing] that case,” which involved an agency, the Federal Trade Commission, whose multi-member structure differed from the single-member leadership structure at issue in the court’s recent cases. To be sure, the logic of the recent cases cast considerable doubt on Humphrey’s Executor. But lower courts reviewing challenges to President Trump’s firings have concluded that those firings are unlawful under existing precedent, applying Humphrey’s Executor and leaving to the Supreme Court “the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.”

That’s what happened in the challenges brought by Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, two agencies that look a lot like the F.T.C. Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox prevailed in their cases before U.S. District Courts and then the full D.C. Circuit. But last week the Supreme Court “stayed” those lower court rulings protecting Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, and permitted their firings to stand while the litigation proceeded.

The court provided scant reasoning for its decision, though it hastened to add that nothing it said should be taken to cast doubt on “the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee” — a nakedly policy-driven effort to head off the prospect of President Trump making good on threats to fire Jerome Powell, the Fed chair.

To be clear, I am not a fan of unitary executive theory, or of its proponents’ singular fixation on the president’s power to fire — a power the Constitution doesn’t expressly give the president and one that I don’t think history supports.

Even if you disagree — even if you think that Article II’s grant of “the executive power” to the president includes the power to fire at will any high-level official in the executive branch — the court’s disposition of the case sends a profoundly dangerous message to the White House. In firing officials like Ms. Harris and Ms. Wilcox, the administration acted in flagrant violation of statutes and in direct defiance of the Supreme Court. Handing the president a win here suggests that the administration did not need to abide by Congress’s statutes or the Supreme Court’s rulings as it sought to change legal understandings.

Given the range of high-stakes legal questions pending before the courts — on questions ranging from the due process rights of migrants to the termination of federal funds to the firing of civil servants — this decision risks emboldening the administration further to act outside of our traditional constitutional order.

And it did so during a week when the administration has accelerated its assault on both norms and law — criminally charging a member of Congress, accepting a luxury Qatari jet and defending the president’s lavish investor dinner that would have been unthinkable under the ethics guidelines of previous presidential administrations.

In the past four months, the lower courts have done more than other government entities to respond to the chaos emanating from the Trump administration. They have enforced constitutional guarantees, required compliance with statutes and insisted on the force of the decisions of the Supreme Court.

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Saturday, May 24, 2025

'Lawless': Will SCOTUS chief draw a constitutional red line?

As President Donald Trump sweeps the law aside, indiscriminately firing government employees, closing agencies and departments, pressuring law firms and universities, and seizing people residing lawfully in the country without due process, the nation’s eyes have turned to John Roberts. Surely, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, guardian of institutional legitimacy, will draw a constitutional red line, writes George Thomas in a book review for the Washington Monthly. 

Yet Trump has thus far governed on the opposite assumption—that the Roberts Court won’t stop him—and he has good reason to believe as much. Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump v. United States, the presidential immunity case decided last year. Roberts overlooked what was in front of his nose, the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and instead penned an opinion that on its face immunized presidents against legal responsibility if they were engaged in “official acts.” Roberts insisted that this was necessary, lest presidents be afraid to make the tough decisions that often fall to them. For a Court that so frequently turns to history, one had to wonder just what history the Court was looking at. Presidents in the second half of the 20th century, even after Watergate, have not exactly been shy about claiming sweeping official power. 

Trump seems to have taken the ruling’s central lessons to heart: By way of executive order, clothing his action with the veneer of an “official act,” he has asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Christopher Krebs, his former director of cybersecurity, for telling the truth to the American people. As Trump was lying about the 2020 election results, and falsely claiming election fraud and interference, Krebs, doing his job, insisted that, according to the evidence, the 2020 election was free and fair. For this, Trump is attempting to use the power of his presidency to punish Krebs. 

Should the chief justice be surprised? Is he surprised that Trump might ignore the Supreme Court and disregard the niceties of the Constitution? What will the Court decide with regard to the president’s blunderbuss tariffs, his shipping of people out of the country without due process, and his firing the heads of independent regulatory agencies without cause? 

Leah Litman gives us good reason to doubt that the Roberts Court will hem Trump in. Indeed, her new book, Lawless, seeks to demonstrate that this Court was constructed to advance a Republican agenda. When Justice Antonin Scalia passed away at the beginning of an election year, then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a confirmation vote for Barack Obama’s Supreme Court appointee. Yet when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died with early voting already underway in the 2020 election, McConnell muscled Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation through the Senate. Politics over rules. If Litman is right, there is little hope that the Court will tame a lawless administration; because it is driven by “conservative grievance,” not law. 

A professor of law at the University of Michigan, former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, and cohost of the hit podcast Strict Scrutiny, Litman is writing for fans, not to persuade perplexed Court observers. Each chapter is contrived around pop culture references, like “The Ken-Surrection of the Courts” and “The American Psychos on the Supreme Court”—the former referring to the Barbie movie and the Court’s rollback of women’s reproductive rights, and the latter referring to Christian Bale’s character in American Psycho and the Court’s “murder” of the administrative state. Lawless is filled with casual snark: “Okay, but that’s just like your opinion, bro(s)”; “Come on!”; “Maybe that is true … On Mars”; “Duh!”; and “O RLY?” Litman fans—and there are many—will love it. As an occasional listener to Strict Scrutiny, which is both insightful and entertaining, I found the snark somewhat distracting and juvenile. 

It’s too bad. Litman has a serious argument here: We should understand the Supreme Court as part of the Republican coalition, undoing wide swaths of law to advance the party’s political agenda. She is at her most compelling when illuminating how the Court’s opinions are part of this larger political and constitutional project, not isolated instances of constitutional interpretation. Consider the Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. There are long-standing jurisprudential criticisms of Roe, some of which can even trace their lineage back to Justice Ginsburg. Yet what Litman illustrates is that overturning Roe was part of a conservative vision that goes beyond reproductive rights. Abortion rights, as Litman argues, symbolized “feminism and feminists,” and Republicans sought to roll back advances in gender equality, which many saw as an attack on the family. William Rehnquist, as a young lawyer in the Nixon administration, insisted that outlawing sex discrimination would lead to the “dissolution of the family.” Samuel Alito similarly opposed changes that would bring women to Princeton, criticized the availability of birth control, and, as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, argued for overturning Roe. Alito got his wish three decades later when he authored Dobbs. 

Dobbs is not disembodied jurisprudence that exists outside of politics. For Litman, it is part of a larger political effort to reject gender equality. This attitude—grievance, as Litman has it—is manifest in J. D. Vance’s quip about “childless cat women” or that women who do not have children are “sociopathic” and “shouldn’t get nearly the same voice” in politics as people with children. Dobbs is the opening salvo: Birth control, giving women the ability to make fundamental choices about family and careers, has come under attack in Republican-controlled states. Litman observes similar moves regarding LGBTQ rights, and highlights the Republican Party’s 2016 platform, which called for justices who would overrule not just Roe but Obergefell—the 2015 decision finding state laws that prohibited same-sex marriage unconstitutional—as well. 

Even the Supreme Court’s jurisprudential approach, relying on history and tradition, neglects gender. As Litman writes, 

Originalism supports a political project of taking away rights from groups that were not always included in American politics and society. It effectively maintains that a group possesses rights today only if the group possessed those rights in laws that were enacted in the 1700s or 1800s.

When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, women had few legal rights even within marriage, did not have the vote, and were prohibited from professions like law simply because they were women. As the Court put it in 1873, 

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood.

Conservatives, some of whom have called for a “manly originalism,” as Litman helpfully reminds us, would undo gender equality as we know it. We are already witnessing tragic instances of women dying because abortion restrictions prohibit them from getting the medical care they need. 

Litman has a similarly powerful argument when it comes to the Court’s voting rights decisions. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, Roberts “produced memo after memo outlining objections to expanding the VRA,” drawing on opinions written by Rehnquist, for whom he had clerked, to narrow the reach of the act. When Roberts was situated in the center chair himself, his Shelby County opinion began a rollback of federal voting rights enforcement. Under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Amendment, states that had engaged in racially discriminatory practices in the past had to get federal approval before changing their voting rights laws. Roberts found this unconstitutional because it rested on outdated information. But the result was telling: States that were once part of the confederacy began altering their election laws in ways that disproportionately made it more difficult for racial minorities, particularly Black people, to vote. We do not have to think that this is Jim Crow II to find the pattern deeply disturbing. 

Yet past Supreme Courts—the New Deal and Warren Courts—also have roots as part of political coalitions. And these courts also instituted profound changes to constitutional law, setting aside precedents and offering novel constitutional understandings. Is the Roberts Court different on this front? 

At times, yes. Most notably, given Litman’s argument, the New Deal Court was in line with a large governing majority, and even the Warren Court, which is viewed too often as an anomaly, was embedded within the coalition of Kennedy-Johnson liberalism as it brought the white South into line with the rest of the country. Partly in contrast, the Roberts Court is supported at best by a slim plurality in a deeply divided country, and its decisions—overturning Roe, for instance—are often out of line with democratic sentiment. Plus, the current Court relies heavily on text and history but does so in a highly selective manner. On gun control and abortion rights, for instance, the Court has embraced a view of history that confines our understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment to the middle years of the 19th century. Yet confronted with whether Donald Trump had disqualified himself for office under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment by instigating January 6 and the events around it that tried to keep him in power, the Court had little interest in history or original meaning. It would have been momentous to remove a presidential candidate from the ballot, and there was at least some reason to doubt that Trump had engaged in an insurrection under Section 3’s terms, but the Court simply neglected these foundational questions.

The Roberts Court is sweeping away well-established law based on a theory of the separation of powers that finds little grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.

Supreme Court opinions always raise contingencies and qualifications, but Litman demonstrates how the current Court too often leans into Republican causes. And they do so even if it requires dismantling the jurisprudential legacy of their judicial icon—Justice Scalia—on issues like the free exercise of religion. Here the Court has begun to insist not only that the establishment clause allows the states to directly fund religious institutions, but also that the free exercise clause commands it. Such an understanding finds little grounding in history or original meaning, and would have baffled James Madison, but it has become part of a conservative insistence that Christianity is prone to persecution in contemporary politics. 

Litman also chronicles how the Court has acted on long-standing Republican goals to limit the power of administrative agencies: overturning precedent which held that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of a statute when it was ambiguous; demanding that agencies show clear intent on the part of Congress if their regulations engage “major questions”; and questioning whether Congress is even allowed to delegate its power to agencies in the first place. These developments have limited the reach and power of executive branch agencies, placing that power instead in the hands of courts. Litman goes so far as to say the Supreme Court has “murdered” the administrative state. More compellingly, she insists that the Court is sweeping away well-established law based on a theory of the separation of powers that finds little grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent. This is particularly true of the idea of non-delegation—that Congress cannot delegate its power to administrative agencies housed in the executive branch. The Court seems determined to revisit this issue, which could dismantle the administrative state and, notably, lead to widespread deregulation, which accords with the desires of leading Republican donors. 

If the Court has hemmed in administrative power, it is set to unleash the power of the president by way of “unitary” executive theory. The idea of the unitary executive is that the president gets complete control over the executive branch, including the power to remove government officers for any reason he sees fit. Does this mean that the president has control over all administrative agencies, including independent regulatory agencies like the Federal Reserve? Founding-era history does not even begin to support such claims. The first great discussion about removal, the Removal Debate of 1789, found arguments on all sides. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton, deemed the father of the unitary executive, insisted in Federalist 77 that the president needed Senate approval to remove officers as well as to appoint them. If we have settled on the precedent that presidents can remove political officers, we have also settled on the fact that Congress can insulate some officers that head independent agencies from presidential control. 

Trump wants to overturn this settlement. The White House has fired an extraordinary number of government employees, including lawyers who resisted Trump’s edicts in the name of the law. In Trump v. Wilcox, the president has asked the Court to endorse his constitutional authority to remove the heads of independent agencies at will. If the Roberts Court agrees, it would sweep away nearly a century of constitutional law and vest the president with kingly power to go along with the kingly immunity it has already bequeathed him. It remains to be seen whether the putative institutionalist John Roberts can assemble his Court to preserve institutions against this constitutional assault. Litman gives us reasons to be skeptical, and she is right to remind us that preserving constitutional institutions depends on political movements that work over the course of years. That is the struggle we find ourselves in today.

To read more CLICK HERE

Friday, May 23, 2025

Tennessee executes man for murder of his wife and her two teenage sons

 The 19th Execution of 2025

Tennessee inmate Oscar Smith was executed by lethal injection on May 22, 2025 for the 1989 murders of his estranged wife, Judith Smith, and her teenage sons, Jason and Chad Burnett, reported The Associated Press.

Smith was pronounced dead at 10:47 a.m. after a lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital. The 75-year-old had maintained his innocence. In a lengthy final statement, he railed against the justice system, saying it “doesn’t work,” echoing sentiments expressed in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Speaking of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Smith said, “He has the last word and is the last person who can give justice where justice is needed.” There are more men waiting to die at the prison, he said. “I’m not the first, and I’m not going to be the last.”

Smith was strapped to a gurney and had an IV in his right arm. It was attached to a long tube that ran into a different room where the lethal injection was administered. Witnesses saw no obvious sign that the injection had begun after his final statement, but Smith’s speech became labored as he spoke with his spiritual adviser. Witnesses heard him say, “I didn’t kill her.” He appeared calm and did not appear to struggle as visible signs of respiration stopped.

Thursday marked the first time Tennessee officials allowed a spiritual adviser into the execution chamber with the inmate. She prayed over Smith and comforted him, at one point singing, “I’ll Fly Away.”

The crime

Smith was convicted of fatally stabbing and shooting Judith Smith, 13-year-old Jason Burnett and 16-year-old Chad Burnett at their Nashville, Tennessee, home on Oct. 1, 1989. He was sentenced to death by a Davidson County jury in July 1990 for the murders.

In 2022, a Davidson County Criminal Court judge denied requests to reopen his case despite some new evidence that the DNA of an unknown person was on one of the murder weapons. The judge wrote that the evidence of Smith’s guilt was overwhelming and the DNA evidence did not tip the scales in his favor.

Two of Smith’s co-workers testified at trial that he had solicited them to kill Judith Smith, and he had a history of threats and violence against her and the boys. Smith had also taken out insurance policies on all three victims. And one of the child victims could be heard yelling what prosecutors said was, “Frank, no!” in the background of a 911 call on the night of the murder. Frank is Smith’s middle name and the one that he used regularly.

Judith Smith’s siblings speak

Judith Smith’s sister, Terri Osborne, and brother, Mike Robirds, witnessed the execution and spoke to reporters afterwards, standing in front of large portraits of their sister and nephews.

“The pain of losing Judy, Chad, and Jason is something we will continue to carry,” Osborne said. “Not a moment goes by that we don’t miss them. We miss the sound of Judy’s voice on the other end of the phone. We miss the excitement of planning Chad’s driving lessons. And we miss the pure joy of hearing Jason’s laughter.”

The tragic deaths are a reminder of the devastating consequences of domestic violence, Osborne said.

“We know it is an incredibly hard thing to do to leave a spouse who is abusing, but pray that this case becomes a call to action, encouraging those in danger to seek help before it’s too late,” Osborne said.

The murders were brutal, Robirds said.

“No one should have to live in fear like our sister did,” he said. “And no family should have to endure a loss like ours.”

Protesters gather

Christina Isbell was among the death penalty opponents who protested outside the prison. Her downtown Nashville church, Christ Church Cathedral, includes a death row ministry.

“For me, it’s just all about what God teaches,” Isbell said. “And that is, even though somebody else may commit a horrible crime, you don’t go do that to them as well.”

William Burgess was the lone person standing in a fenced off area for death penalty supporters outside the prison. He said he owned a car lot across the street from the home where Smith murdered his family members. Burgess said he was one of the first one to see the bodies.

“He lived too long,” Burgess said of Smith. “Waste of taxpayers’ money.”

A surprise reprieve and a lawsuit

Smith’s attorney, assistant federal public defender Amy Harwell, told reporters afterward he will be remembered for his “cantankerous, curmudgeonly brand of kindness” and leatherwork skill. She said Smith will not have an autopsy due to his religious beliefs. But she said other autopsies have shown this execution method causes “excruciating pain and suffering.”

Tennessee executions have been on hold for five years, first because of COVID-19 and then because of missteps by the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Smith came within minutes of execution in 2022 before a surprise reprieve from Republican Gov. Bill Lee. It later turned out the lethal drugs for that planned execution had not been properly tested. A yearlong investigation revealed numerous other problems with Tennessee executions.

The correction department issued new guidelines for executions in December that are the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.

Nineteen men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and nine other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025.

To read more CLICK HERE