Anchorage, Alaska does not have enough lawyers to take criminal cases to trial

Defendants in at least 930 Anchorage misdemeanor cases have walked free for this reason since May 1, the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found. These include people accused of crimes ranging from violating a restraining order to driving drunk with children in the backseat.

A grand total of three defendants have gone to trial since May, according to the city.

The cascade of failed prosecutions is especially disturbing in a state with the nation’s highest rate of women killed by men. More than 250 of the cases dismissed since May included charges of domestic violence assault, such as men allegedly punching, kicking or threatening to kill their wives or girlfriends. They include charges dropped against a state official accused of elbowing his then-girlfriend in the nose.

Two factors are at work in the mass dismissals. First, Alaska’s overloaded court system has limped along for years by allowing extensive trial delays, defying a state requirement for speedy trials. Second, the Anchorage prosecutor’s office, as in many American cities and states, is struggling to hold onto lawyers.

When a judge this year tried to clear out a backlog of Anchorage misdemeanors by having them brought forward as a group to regularly check which ones were ready for trial, defense attorneys pounced. They began demanding speedy-trial rights for their clients. The city couldn’t keep up. Cases started dying.

City officials say they’re aware of the problem. They have raised prosecutor pay and are hiring attorneys to take more cases to trial, in hopes the prosecutor’s office will be “fully back in action” in three to four months, according to Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner.

Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, who took office July 1, said her transition team knew the lack of prosecutors was a problem, but she was surprised by the number of dropped cases.

“Right now, the prosecutors are frustrated, the police are frustrated. The public is frustrated. Victims are frustrated,” she said in an interview. “We see that. I see that, and this is something that we are working to fix.”

To read more CLICK HERE

Be careful what you wish for, SCOTUS creates volatile campaign issues

 Professor Eric J. Segall of Georgia Sate University, writing at Jurist:

The conservative justices on the Roberts Court consistently lecture the American people about the importance of text, history, and tradition to constitutional litigation. They use the term originalism as a catch-all phrase for their alleged focus on prior law. They want the American people to believe that their preferred outcomes are based on legal sources external to their own ideological preferences.

As the Court starts the new term, however, we can see from last year’s important cases that the justices’ alleged commitments to originalism are illusory. Election concerns and pragmatic factors drove the Court’s important decisions not any open-minded journey through our Constitution’s text, history, and traditions. That pattern is always true no matter which political party controls the Court. But the liberal justices do not pretend they can fill the open spaces of constitutional law with answers derived exclusively from text, history, and tradition.

As a matter of governmental transparency and rule of law values, the justices should justify their country-defining decisions with reference to their values, politics, and experiences and not pretend that text, history, and tradition are the drivers of the results they reach. Last term’s cases starkly and dangerously illustrate the disconnect between how the Roberts Courts describes the methods they use to solve hard issues and the actual factors generating those decisions. A summary of those cases and their context demonstrates that politics not law were at the forefront of the justices’ considerations.

Abortion

Donald Trump’s and J.D. Vance’s meandering and changing statements about abortion reflect GOP awareness that they are on the wrong side of this issue in a post-Dobbs world. According to Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and consultant, “when you’re talking about abortion, you’re playing on the Democrats’ turf just like when you’re talking about immigration and inflation, you’re playing on Republicans’ turf.”

The conservative justices understood the politics of the moment so were also “loath” to talk about abortion last term, just like the leaders of the Republican Party. That concern resulted in the Court’s dismissal on procedural and standing grounds of two huge cases because the justices were wary about issuing anti-choice opinions five months before a monumental election. The cases were dismissed prior to the justices’ reaching the merits, so it is likely both, one involving a suit by anti-choice doctors to make abortion drugs much harder if not impossible for women to obtain, and one dealing with emergency room procedures during difficult pregnancies, will return to the Court, but not in an election year.

Trump Cases

The dismissal of the abortion decisions, admittedly, is one step removed from cases directly impacting elections, although the effects of those two cases, had they been decided differently, would have hurt the GOP in November. The two Trump cases the Court heard this term demonstrated how much the six conservative justices were focused on the upcoming presidential election not text, history, or tradition.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment forbids any person “who having taken an oath . . . to support the Constitution . . . shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State.” Two conservative scholars—Professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen—wrote an important article arguing that President Donald Trump is disqualified from seeking the Presidency because of his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Subsequently, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed and ruled that Trump could not be on the Colorado ballot.

In a unanimous and fast-tracked ruling, the Court held that states have no jurisdiction to disqualify a President under Section 3, at least absent a federal law authorizing them to do so. The justices knew that Congress would not pass such an authorization, and the disqualification issue vanished from the scene, certainly helping Trump.

Why did the liberal justices go along, even if they disagreed about the breadth of the opinion? They knew that red states were not going to disqualify Trump, that they were out-voted anyway, and they were likely scared of future disqualifications of Democratic candidates by red states.

But the most important aspects of this case were the Court’s speedy resolution of the controversy and the complete absence of any serious discussion of text, history, and tradition. Instead, the justices focused on pragmatic and prudential concerns. When originalism does not align with the conservative justices’ values and politics, the Roberts Court consistently minimizes or ignores text, history, and tradition.

The second Trump case, involving the President’s immunity from criminal prosecution after he leaves office, was characterized by one noted commentator as the legal nadir of the Roberts Court, putting the President “above the law.” There can be little doubt that the result and the timing of the decision was designed to help the former President. They made Trump’s prosecutions as difficult and as delayed as possible.

The Court created three buckets of Presidential conduct. For core constitutional functions, such as the President’s pardon power, he possesses immunity. For acts taken pursuant to congressional authority, he has presumptive immunity. For unofficial conduct, he has no immunity.

This approach is reasonable and had the Court stopped there, the lower courts would have had to figure out in which bucket Trump’s efforts to steal the election belonged. But the Roberts opinion (with the liberals dissenting) went much further and held that, when judges try to figure out the relevant buckets, evidence of motive, other official acts, and discussions with top advisors cannot be considered by the courts. Pursuant to those gratuitous add-ons without any basis in text, history, or tradition, Presidents are now effectively immune for acts taken while they were President, no matter how criminal.

The Court’s fast-tracking of the disqualification case way back in February combined with their delay of the immunity case and its eventual holding (on the last day of the term) insured that Donald Trump would be on the ballot in November and that the pending criminal case against him brought by Jack Smith would not be concluded by the election, and that the disqualification question would not affect the election.

No constitutional text provides immunity for the President, the Court barely glanced at history, and the entire decision reads like living constitutionalism on steroids. In both the immunity and the disqualification cases, the justices barely glanced at the law and decided based on other concerns, mostly about the upcoming election. They acted exactly as one would expect Republican politicians to act.

Second Amendment

And then there were guns. Two years ago, the Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol, Inc. v. Bruen, in which the Court overturned a 1911 New York law requiring a special license to openly carry a firearm and issued a new and bizarre analysis that has caused chaos and confusion in the lower courts. Part of the chaos included an unhinged Fifth Circuit decision invalidating a federal law disarming people who are under domestic relations protective orders. The defendant had a history of violent threats, including against the girlfriend who was the subject of the order.

The Court could not affirm that madness shortly before the election. Such a holding would have been a complete disaster at the polls, especially among women who are much too often the victims of domestic violence. Thus, in Rahimi v. United States, the Court reversed the Fifth Circuit and said the defendant in the case could be constitutionally prohibited from owning a gun. Only Justice Thomas dissented.

The Roberts Court used the issues of abortion, guns, Presidential immunity, and Trump’s potential disqualification to protect Republican politicians running for office. Text, history, and tradition simply did not matter to the originalists in these cases. Although the justices often hide behind legalese instead of the real drivers of their judgments, last term was one of the worst measured by pure hypocrisy. The conservative justices should stop pretending their important constitutional law decisions flow from legal sources or their originalism. They do not. The justices hiding that reality is a gross affront to transparency and the rule of law.

To read more CLICK HERE

Mangino joins Nancy Grace to discuss the drunken socialite case

Join me and Nancy Grace as we discuss the California drunken socialite convicted of second-degree murder in the deaths of 8- and 11-year-old boys who were struck and killed by her speeding car.

To watch the interview CLICK HERE

Four million people in 48 states are banned from voting because of a felony conviction

According to a recent report by The Sentencing Project "Locked Out 2024," laws in 48 U.S. states ban people with felony convictions from voting. In 2024, an estimated 4 million Americans, representing 1.7% of the voting-age population, will be ineligible to vote due to these laws, many of which date back to the post-Reconstruction era. 

In this historic election year, questions persist about the stability of democratic institutions, election fairness, and voter suppression in marginalized communities. The systematic exclusion of millions with felony convictions should be front and center in these debates.

To read the Report CLICK HERE

Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip gets second chance before SCOTUS

The US Supreme Court considered whether the murder conviction of Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma, should be set aside due to a witness having given false testimony in court and state prosecutors having failed to disclose key information about the witness, according to Jurist.

This Glossip's second chance before the high court. In 2015, he and other Oklahoma inmates challenged the state’s lethal injection protocol, claiming the use of the drug midazolam violated their Constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” The US Supreme Court rejected that challenge.

In 1997, a hotel maintenance worker named Justin Sneed beat his employer, Barry Van Treese, to death. Sneed then claimed that Glossip, the hotel’s manager at the time, orchestrated the murder. According to various court documents, Sneed was told he could avoid the death penalty by testifying against Glossip at trial. Sneed ultimately testified that Glossip had paid him $10,000 to commit the murder. Glossip maintained his innocence, but was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder.

At issue in the present Supreme Court case is Sneed’s testimony. In particular, Sneed suffered from severe mental health struggles, for which he had been treated in the past. At trial, he denied ever having received psychiatric care — a claim that has since been disproved. In 2023, it was discovered that the prosecutors had not revealed Sneed had bipolar disorder and was prescribed lithium after he was arrested. Sneed had also reportedly told his attorney his testimony was a “mistake,” but this information was not revealed to the defense.

As asserted in an amicus brief submitted by the Innocence Project, a criminal justice reform advocacy group:

The State violated Richard Glossip’s right to due process… The State withheld material evidence that would have undercut the credibility of its key witness, Justin Sneed, by showing that he suffered from a serious psychiatric condition. And the State failed to correct Sneed’s false testimony … when he denied that he was under the care of a psychiatrist. Indeed, the State now agrees that Mr. Glossip is entitled to relief for this violation of his due process rights.

Previously, in June of 2022, 30 Reed Smith LLP lawyers published a report after investigating the legitimacy of Glossip’s conviction, raising concerns about the conviction, and in the following year, Glossip appealed for Oklahoma’s court to set aside his conviction. In April, Glossip sought to halt his execution planned for May 18, 2023 and his conviction returned to the district court. Attorney Gentner Drummond was investigating Glossip’s conviction in 2023 and backed Glossip’s appeal.

Drummond has stated that Glossip’s conviction depended on Sneed’s credibility. However, Justice Clarence Thomas implied faults in the investigation and said that the original prosecutors, Connie Smotherman and Gary Ackley, should have the opportunity to share their side.

Last month, the US Supreme Court upheld the execution of a Missouri man whose death sentence had been similarly controversial. Marcellus Williams was executed on Sep. 25 despite widespread concern surrounding the witness testimonies, prosecutorial practice, and evidence that led to his conviction.

To read more CLICK HERE

Florida Governor DeSantis tries to strong arm political opponents

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) administration is reportedly trying to intimidate television stations into taking down advertisements put out by supporters of Amendment 4 — a proposal on the ballot in Florida this fall that seeks to codify abortion access into the Sunshine State constitution, where abortion is banned after six weeks, reported Talking Points Memo.

On Oct. 3, DeSantis’ Department of Health sent a letter to at least one local NBC affiliate, WFLA-TV, suggesting they could face criminal charges for airing ads that encourage voters to support Amendment 4.

The letter, first reported by Florida investigative journalist Jason Garcia, claims that such ads violate Florida’s “sanitary nuisance” law and suggests that stations may be committing a misdemeanor offense by airing them.

Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group sponsoring Amendment 4, responded to the Health Department’s letter with one of their own, addressed to the local news station.

“The Department cannot criminalize media outlets running political advertisements with which it disagrees,” they wrote in the letter they shared with TPM. “Such advertisements are not a ‘sanitary nuisance.’ They do not expose the stations running the advertisements to criminal sanction. Speech criticizing the government in the context of a political campaign is the lifeblood of democracy and lies at the very heart of the First Amendment’s protections. The Department’s letter is a flagrant abuse of power and must be rejected.”

To read more CLICK HERE

If you read one thing today read this excerpt from a recent post by author and historian Heather Cox Richardson

 THE BIG LIE

Scholars of authoritarianism call a lie of such magnitude a “Big Lie,” a key propaganda tool associated with Nazi Germany. It is a lie so huge that no one can believe it is false. If leaders repeat it enough times, refusing to admit that it is a lie, people come to think it is the truth because surely no one would make up anything so outrageous.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” He went on: “Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile. It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”