New Jersey Governor wants to reduce locking up technical parole violators

New Jersey officials would return potentially hundreds fewer parole violators to prison and cap how long they could be held under changes Gov. Phil Murphy will announce in his annual state of the state address next week, reported the New Jersey Monitor.

Murphy will urge lawmakers to pass legislation that would reduce how many people get hauled back to prison for technical parole violations, which is when someone violates the conditions of their parole rather than commits a new crime. Between 1,100 and 1,200 parolees are in state custody on any given day for technical parole violations.

“Right now, roughly 10% of our state’s entire prison population consists of people who are being held behind bars for committing a technical parole violation, like missing a scheduled meeting or forgetting to report a move to a new town,” Murphy is expected to say in his speech Tuesday afternoon at the Statehouse in Trenton. “Nobody should lose their freedom because of a technicality.”

The state Parole Board decides who is granted parole, under what conditions, and when, as well as whether to charge someone with a parole violation that will land them back in prison. Murphy included $1 million in the current state budget — which runs through June — for a consultant to examine how those decisions get made, although that work hasn’t yet started.

New Jersey law gives the parole board little discretion.

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AG nominee: 'The investigators will be investigated'

Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, faced questions on Capitol Hill Wednesday over her loyalty to the Republican president-elect, who has vowed to use the agency to pursue revenge on his perceived political enemies, reported The Associated Press.

The former Florida attorney general and corporate lobbyist told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee that politics would play no part in her decision-making as the country’s chief federal law enforcement officer, but also refused to rule out the potential for investigations into Trump’s adversaries.

If confirmed to lead the department that charged the once and future president in two separate criminal cases, Bondi would become one of the most closely scrutinized members of Trump’s cabinet.

She’s a close Trump ally and long-time defender

Bondi has been a fixture in Trump’s orbit for years, and a regular defender of the president-elect on news programs amid his legal woes.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones,” Bondi said in a 2023 Fox News appearance. “The investigators will be investigated.”

As Democrats repeatedly questioned Wednesday whether she would maintain a Justice Department that’s independent from the White House, Bondi insisted that “no one should be prosecuted for political purposes.” But she also refused to say what she would do if the president directed her to drop a case or answer whether she would investigate Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who charged Trump.

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Tulsa Race Massacre not a mob but 'coordinated, military-style attack'

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report, according to The New York Times.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

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In Texas 'tough on crime' impacts the guilty as well as the innocent

Politicians like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton project an image of being tough on crime, but they’re also tough on those who are innocent, per a year-end report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, as reported by The Austin Chronicle.

The annual report tells the stories of several individuals who faced execution in 2024 despite evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. Three of the eight people the state planned to execute this year tried to present evidence of innocence. The state killed Ivan Cantu on Feb. 28, despite evidence not heard by his trial jury – or any court – which demonstrated that the main witness against him lied on the stand about important details of the case. In July, Ruben Gutierrez received a last-minute stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether he should be allowed to sue the state of Texas to compel them to conduct DNA testing on items involved in his conviction. Gutierrez has said for years that such testing will show he is innocent. The state of Texas has fought the testing every step of the way.

The most glaring example of that kind of intransigence was the case of Robert Roberson. Roberson was convicted in 2003 of killing his chronically ill 2-year-old daughter Nikki on the basis of the dubious medical hypothesis known as “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” now regarded in many circles as junk science. Roberson’s advocates have tried for years to get Texas’ criminal justice system to consider evidence showing that Nikki died of undiagnosed pneumonia, not being shaken. The courts have refused to grant him a new trial. Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles have supported his execution.

The Texas Supreme Court stayed the execution on Oct. 17 at 9:45pm, four hours after it was to have begun, to allow the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence to bring Roberson to the Capitol to testify on his innocence. Paxton stopped the testimony last month, allowing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to ignore a subpoena from the committee. Roberson’s supporters expect another execution to be set for him in the coming year.

In two other death penalty cases, courts decided that Melissa Lucio and Kerry Max Cook were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is considering whether to accept the recommendation of Lucio’s trial court and overturn her death sentence. She remains locked up as she awaits the decision. Cook was officially exonerated by the TCCA nearly 50 years after his conviction and is now free.

The TCADP’s report shows that Texas juries are continuing to sentence fewer and fewer people to death. Only six new people were sent to death row this year. However, as death sentences decline, they continue to be applied disproportionately to people of color. Five of the six men sentenced to death this year are people of color: three are Black, one is Hispanic, one is Native American. According to the report, nearly 70% of death sentences over the last five years have been imposed on people of color. More than 40% were imposed on Black defendants. This disparity hasn’t changed over the years. Although Black people constitute about 13% of Texas’ population, they represent 47% of death row.

But the total number of people awaiting execution is down. As of Dec. 16, TDCJ lists 174 people on the row, the lowest number since 1985.

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ABA Journal's Top Words in Law for 2024

The ABA Journal's Top Words in Law for 2024 include catchy ways to describe minimal workplace attendance and expert-witness conferences, according to the list recently unveiled by Burton’s Legal Thesaurus.

Law360 has the story on the top new words, chosen by a select committee led by Margaret Wu, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, who teaches legal writing.

According to Law360, the words include:

  • “Coffee badging,” in which a worker shows up at the office for a minimal amount of time to comply with in-person work mandates.

  • “Hot-tubbing,” in which expert witnesses for both parties in a bench trial discuss the case with a judge in an attempt to reach agreement. The procedure is also known as “concurrent expert evidence.”

  • “Word salad,” meaning nonsensical verbiage.

  • “Cybersmear,” which is online defamation, usually contained in an anonymous post.

  • “AI washing,” which is misleading advertising regarding the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence product.

Other AI-related terms include “slop” and “sea of junk,” which refers to poor-quality AI content.

Wu told Law360 that her colleagues and William C. Burton, the creator of Burton’s Legal Thesaurus, look for terms that were brand-new in the past year, that changed in meaning, or that took on different importance.

“We go through and try to find words that we think are interesting and seem to be growing in popularity and words that we think would be helpful for both practicing lawyers as well as legal scholars to be aware of,” Wu said.

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Professor files legal brief challenging lethal injection for condemned man who wants executed

Death by lethal injection looks like the condemned person just went to sleep. But looks can be deceiving, reported the AZMirror.

Anesthesiologists know that an overdose of pentobarbital, the barbiturate used for executions by lethal injection in Arizona and other states, renders the prisoner unresponsive — but not necessarily fully anesthetized — before it kills by “flash pulmonary edema.”  

The drug causes part of the heart to fail, makes the brain obstruct breathing and floods the lungs with fluid. Autopsies show that the lungs of prisoners executed with pentobarbital are two to three times heavier than normal. 

In short, the prisoner drowns in his or her own body fluids, which one expert told the federal courts in a 2019 deposition is “one of the most powerful, excruciating feelings known to man.”

Lethal injection was once thought to be the least painful, most humane form of execution. Now, experts liken it to waterboarding, a form of torture considered too cruel to use in wartime.

To be specific, eight of the 27 autopsies cited in that 2019 deposition were of men executed in Arizona. Aside from problems inserting IV catheters in some of the executions, there were no apparent signs reported of what the anesthesiologist called “outward calm, inner terror.”

Virginia law professor Corinna Barrett Lain filed an amicus curiae, or “friend of the court” brief, advocating for condemned Arizona prisoner Aaron Gunches, who doesn’t want anyone advocating for him.

Gunches is on Death Row for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, his girlfriend’s ex-husband, and he has repeatedly petitioned the courts to go forward with his execution, saying he would rather be dead than rot in prison.  

the Arizona Supreme Court is supposed to set a briefing schedule that will likely lead to a death warrant so that Gunches’ execution can go forward.  

On Dec. 30, Gunches, who is representing himself in the case, filed a handwritten motion asking the court to forgo the formality of briefing and just set an execution date to “have his Long Overdue Sentence carried out.”

“Gunches asks this court why is AG (Kris) Mayes’ motion necessary?” he wrote. “It is pointless and just more ‘foot dragging’ by the state.”  

In a response filed Monday, Mayes’ office held firm on the formality of briefing.

But Lain argues in her brief that Gunches may not know what he is in for.

“Arizona is asking for a death warrant, and Mr. Gunches apparently agrees,” she said in an interview with the Arizona Mirror. “But the interests at stake when a state kills its citizens — in your name, and mine — are larger than those of the parties. One might very well support the death penalty and oppose executions in the name of expediency that inflict a torturous death.”

Lain is a former prosecutor and a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.  She spent seven years researching lethal injection for her book, “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection,” which will be published in April.

Her amicus brief covers the pain likely inflicted by pentobarbital overdose (a subject that has not yet been litigated in Arizona), the history of troublesome and botched executions in the state and Gov. Katie Hobbs’ sudden dismissal of an independent investigation into the state’s execution processes in favor of a report the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry conducted on itself.

Whether Lain’s argument will sway the justices — or Gunches— remains to be seen.

Gunches is adamant that he would rather die, and he almost succeeded once. In 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who had already overseen the executions of three prisoners in the last year of his tenure while running for U.S. Senate, obtained a death warrant for Gunches. But he didn’t have enough time in his term for the execution to take place.

When Hobbs became governor and Mayes became attorney general in January 2023, they let the warrant run out and appointed David Duncan, a retired federal magistrate judge, to evaluate the state’s troubled lethal injection protocol.

Lain starts her brief with Mayes’ remarks at the time.

“I don’t think it’s a secret that we inherited one of the worst, most incompetent and most ill-funded Department of Corrections in the country,” as Mayes told the media. “I don’t think it takes a leap to suggest that we should understand whether they are capable of carrying out the death penalty before we do it.”

Indeed, there had been botched executions, repeated difficulties in setting IV lines, instances in which the Corrections department tried or succeeded in importing drugs illegally from other countries and failures to be transparent.

In that brave new administration, executions were put on hold, indefinitely. Or so it seemed.

But Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell intervened, asking the Arizona Supreme Court to let her carry out the death warrant, so that justice could go forward, even though the state constitution reserves that job for the AG.  Nonetheless, after two years of back and forth, the high court was willing to entertain arguments on the matter.

In December, Duncan, the independent investigator, sent a summary of his preliminary findings to Hobbs — and was summarily fired.

In a preamble of sorts to his unfinished draft report, he listed all the reasons the death penalty is impractical  — expense, long waits, exonerations — but then gets to the matter at hand: the disaster that is lethal injection. 

Among the findings, as Lain points out, were “‘Corrections officials seeking to learn on the eve of an execution what doses of lethal drugs to administer from Wikipedia.’ That’s outrageous.”

Pharmaceutical companies will not supply drugs for executions, so corrections departments have to have them custom-made or “compounded.”

Lain adds, “In 2023, (Corrections Director Ryan) Thornell went on record saying he had ‘serious concerns about the qualification and competency of the compounding pharmacist and the process used to compound the current supply of lethal injection drugs.’ Today, the State tells Arizona’s highest court not that it changed compounders, but that it changed its mind. The very same compounder that it had ‘serious concerns’ about two years ago is now just fine.”

A completed report promised to be scathing, and Duncan even suggested that death by firing squad, as barbaric as it is, was less likely to be botched than lethal injection.

“The ending of a life and overcoming that person’s will and biological command to live is by nature a violent act in every case — even lethal injection,” he wrote in a parenthetical aside.

Duncan suggested to reporters that he was fired after he asked about witnessing execution rehearsals conducted by Corrections staff, and after discovering that the executioners were paid tens of thousands of dollars in cash that the state was not reporting with proper tax documentation.

“Arizona has a long history of execution failures,” Lain said. “Against that backdrop, in 2023, the state promised to bring transparency and accountability to the execution process by conducting an independent review of its entire lethal injection process, but that review was terminated before the judge could complete it.”

But there had also been a political shift since the beginning of the Hobbs administration.  Mayes settled with Mitchell and said executions would go forward under the aegis of her office.  And Donald Trump, who had 13 federal prisoners executed during the last year of his first term, was coming back into office, already enraged about outgoing President Joe Biden commuting the death sentences of most of the prisoners on federal Death Row. Executions, after all, are one way that politicians prove to voters that they are tough on crime. It might have been awkward for Arizona to go forward with them after a particularly damning report commissioned during an earlier, more enlightened political moment.

Instead, Hobbs offered up an assessment by Thornell, who assured her that the department he leads had improved its team and its control over the drugs it procures to carry out executions.

“This is a new team, a team that wasn’t here in the past where we had botched executions,” Hobbs told the media. “And the whole point of doing the thorough review that has been done is to avoid that.”

Lain is not convinced.

“The initial draft summary prepared by the judge identified seriously problematic processes,” Lain said.

“Instead, the state relies on a review it conducted of itself, and says “trust us,” everything is fine.”

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U.S. gun violence continued to decline significantly in 2024

Gun violence in the United States continued to decline significantly in 2024, providing yet another signal that the pandemic-era surge has come to an end, reported The Trace. Firearm deaths and injuries dropped for a third straight year. Homicides in major cities, mass shootings, and child and teen gun deaths also fell.

Yet the toll of gun violence remains. Even as shootings decline, tens of thousands of lives continue to be lost or permanently changed by guns.

Data helps provide a clearer picture of gun violence trends, informing prevention efforts and highlighting both the progress made and the challenges that remain. 

Here are two of 13 statistics offered by The Trace that help shed light on America’s gun violence epidemic.

16,576

The number of firearm deaths, excluding suicides, in 2024

Gun deaths decreased for a third consecutive year, dropping 12 percent from 2023’s total of nearly 19,000. While still slightly above pre-pandemic levels, gun deaths this year were 21 percent lower than the pandemic-era peak of more than 21,000 in 2021. These figures, compiled by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, include murders, accidental shootings, and homicides deemed legally justified. GVA does not track suicides, which account for more than half of all gun deaths. [Gun Violence Archive]

-14 percent

The decrease in firearm injuries in 2024

Firearm injuries fell to 31,409 in 2024 — down nearly 14 percent from 2023, when there were 36,338. Tracking gun injuries is challenging. The Gun Violence Archive attempts it by monitoring media reports, which may not capture all incidents. Still, the data suggests a significant overall decline in firearm injuries. [Gun Violence Archive]

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