#Illinois Business Defense Lawyer

[pontemlaw]

Illinois Business Defense Lawyer

Business Defense Lawyer Services by Pontem Law

An Illinois business defense lawyer is a legal professional who specializes in defending businesses in the state of Illinois from legal disputes and litigation.

The website of Pontem Law provides information on business defense lawyer. Contact with us to get the legal services.

[forgivemeyourhonor]

Walking through the picturesque streets of Cardinal Hill, you find Julian De Los Santos, the 46 year old criminal defense attorney originally from Chicago, Illinois. Living alongside them in such a small town, you know that they're tenacious and dogmatic, but what you might not know is that they are a witch, and that they’re hiding something… ― Raúl Esparza, bisexual, male, and he/they.

previous threads - visage - musings - wanted connections

current threads - mood board

Name: Julian De Los Santos

Alias: Juli, Jules, Jay

Gender/Pronouns: Male, He/They

Age: 46

Birthdate: 03/10/1944

Big Three: Pisces, Virgo, Taurus

Occupation: Criminal Defense Attorney

Height: 5’9”

Hometown: Havana, Cuba → Chicago, IL, USA

Family: mother (Rosa De Los Santos), father (Markos De Los Santos), eldest brother (Markos De Los Santos Acosta), older brother (Sergio De Los Santos), older brother (Basilio De Los Santos), younger sister (Valeria González), younger sister (Yara De Los Santos),

Friends: N/A

Relationship Status: single

Sexuality: pansexual icon

Other Relationships: N/A

Character Inspo: Kendall Roy - Succession, Miranda Hobbs - Sex In the City, Jack Donaghy - 30Rock, ADA Rafael Barba - Law & Order SVU,

At 46 years old, this criminal defense attorney navigates the legal system of Cardinal Hill, where he has sought solace ever since one fateful night that forced him to leave his city of Chicago behind.

Born in Havana, Cuba -- his early days saw too much turmoil. At the age of five, his family was forced to seek refuge from the conflicts of their native country. Business in Chicago was booming so this is where they settled. This journey -- the journey to Chicago meant they had to briefly say goodbye to their loved ones. Especially Julian. Two weeks before they migrated Sergio, Julian's older brother had become incarcerated as a result of a political demonstration gone awry. He was forced to stay in Cuba until his sentence was completed. This had such a lasting and powerful impact on his childhood that feelings of pain and misfortune remained with him and continue to do so far beyond his tender years.

Julian's parents, Rosa and Markos De Los Santos -- were a dedicated nurse and a powerful patent attorney. These hard workers instilled in him the values of perseverance and responsibilities. He excelled in academia and was driven to pursue law just like his father. But he didn't want to work tirelessly for companies or The Man, so he decided early in his academic career that he wanted to specialize in criminal law. He hoped to make a difference in the lives of those who, like his brother, found themselves ensnared in the gaping maw of the justice system.

Despite being quite successful, the echoes of his life in Chicago haunt his daily life. When he was just 31, nearly ten years into his practice, a tragic misstep would leave him reeling for decades. He made the difficult decision to relocate to Cardinal Hill. Julian hoped to escape the memories that haunted him and start fresh. The ghosts of his pasts are really never far behind and they influence his work as a criminal defense attorney -- shaping his understanding of true justice and redemption.

In the idyllic town of Cardinal Hill, Julian is known not only for his excellent legal expertise but also his compassionate approach with every client. He never shames, he only seeks to provide the solace to Cardinal Hill that it has given him. He fights passionately and tirelessly for the underrepresented. Driven by a deep-rooted belief in second chances - for others and for himself.

Julian De Los Santos continues to wade the challenges of his profession while he grapples with his family legacy, his identity and his own conscience. He stands at the crossroads of his present and his past, seeking to meet the man he was and the man he continually strives to be.

Headcannons

In Cardinal Hill, Julian becomes unlikely friends with an older library employee who was once a lawyer herself. Sharing her experience with Julian, who at some point started hating the law and called it lifeless. The old library provides another place of worship for him.

Julian struggles in his romantic life. He often pushes people away because he believes that anyone who gets too close will either suffer because of him or they will eventually leave. He's usually drawn to people who have their own past troubles and forms bonds over shared experiences.

When the pressure becomes too much or the guilt is too loud sometimes Julian will wander the streets of Cardinal Hill at night to clear his head.

Julian is Catholic and often struggles with his faith since the incident and he attends Mass regularly because of this. He struggles with feelings of unworthiness and he often confesses to a sympathetic priest.

Despite the slight turmoil it causes, Julian kept all of his late father's law books. He often revisits them and the footnotes in the margins to remind him of the man he wants to be.

Julian still writes letters to his older brother in hopes that one day he'll be able to read them -- wherever he is.

He carries around a rosary in his pocket as a comfort whenever he feels overwhelmed. He finds solace in counting the beads, allowing it to ground him in moments of guilt or anxious thoughts. It's a small act that helps him seek clarity.

One of his clients in Chicago taught him what Zine's are and he was inspired to make one and to his surprise it went really well. To this day he still makes them when he has free time -- divulging his thoughts on the law, redemption and morality. His Zine's resonate well with most people and it gives him a great sense of community.

He is the youngest of his brothers and sometimes that makes him feel inadequate or like the runt of the boys.

However, he is the only witch out of the brothers and that fills him with a sense of pride. His mother is a witch too and taught him everything he knows, which he happily passes down to his two younger sisters who he loves more than anything.

To find comfort and connection to his Cuban roots he takes a few cooking class and gets really into it, actually! He often cooks traditional meals and invites neighbors over for dinner parties.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Andrew Perez at Rolling Stone:

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s husband is currently representing Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, in a defamation lawsuit, according to court records reviewed by Rolling Stone. The lawsuit relates to reports by one of Fox’s local stations.

Jesse Barrett is a trial lawyer and managing partner at SouthBank Legal. He heads the firm’s Washington, D.C., office, which opened after Justice Barrett joined the high court. While the SouthBank Legal website says that Jesse Barrett “focuses on white-collar criminal defense, internal investigations, and complex commercial litigation,” it notes, in a recent addition, that he has “represented a prominent media company in a lawsuit alleging defamation.”  That prominent media company is Fox Corporation, which owns the conservative cable news channel Fox News. Fox News regularly covers matters at the Supreme Court and will surely continue to do so as the high court nears the end of its term. It is set to issue rulings soon on a slate of controversial topics, such as abortion, guns, public corruption, and whether Donald Trump is entitled to immunity for life for acts he committed as president. 

Jesse Barrett’s work for Fox Corporation highlights one of ethics experts’ biggest complaints about the Supreme Court: Justices are not required to disclose their spouses’ clients, so the public has no way to track who is paying money directly to their families. In her 2021 financial disclosure, Justice Barrett even redacted the name of her husband’s firm, despite it being common knowledge that he works there. [...]

It is no secret that Jesse Barrett represents corporate interests: His firm bio says his “clients have included multiple Fortune 500 companies and corporate executives.” The Southbank Legal website says that the firm has represented 26 Fortune 500 companies.  The public has no way to identify Barrett’s clients, for the most part. However, federal court records show that Barrett is serving as Fox Corporation’s lead counsel in an ongoing defamation case. He had the case moved from Cook County, Illinois, to federal court late last month.

[...]

The defamation case was filed by Lavell Redmond, an Illinois man who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault as a minor and served 24 years in prison. Redmond was hired as a code enforcement officer by the mayor of Dolton in 2021, the original complaint says. He is suing Fox over a series of reports that scandalized his hiring — the first of which claimed he had been hired for “a job in which he goes into Dolton homes and businesses to inspect them.” The complaint says that “as a code enforcement officer, Redmond was never responsible for entering village resident’s homes to do his job, nor did he ever enter village resident’s homes. Redmond only had the ability to observe home exteriors to write code violations.” Redmond alleges that “FOX 32’s reporting directly led to Redmond being arrested and wrongfully charged with violating the reporting requirements of the sex offender registry,” as well as his subsequent termination.

Jesse Barrett, the husband of right-wing SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is representing Fox Corporation (the parent company of right-wing propaganda outlet Fox “News”) in a defamation lawsuit regarding its Chicago O&O station WFLD (Fox 32), per a report from Rolling Stone.

[lawyersdatascraping]

Alabama Lawyers Email List

In the legal profession, access to accurate and up-to-date information is crucial for law firms to effectively reach their target audience and grow their client base. At LawyersDataLab.com, we understand the importance of having reliable data, which is why we offer the Alabama Lawyers Email List—a comprehensive database of legal professionals in the state of Alabama.

Our Alabama Lawyers Email List provides law firms and legal professionals with direct access to a diverse network of attorneys practicing in various fields of law across Alabama. Whether you're looking to connect with personal injury lawyers, criminal defense attorneys, corporate law firms, or any other legal specialization, our email list is tailored to meet your specific needs.

Here Are Some Key Ways Our Alabama Lawyers Email List Can Benefit Law Firms And Legal Professionals:

1. Targeted Marketing: With our Alabama Lawyers Email List, law firms can target their marketing efforts towards specific legal professionals based on their practice areas, geographical location, firm size, and other relevant criteria. This targeted approach increases the likelihood of reaching potential clients who are actively seeking legal services.

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3. Networking Opportunities: Networking is essential in the legal profession, and our Alabama Lawyers Email List provides law firms with the opportunity to connect with fellow attorneys and legal professionals in Alabama. Whether it's attending industry events, participating in legal forums, or simply reaching out via email, our Alabama Lawyers Email List facilitates networking opportunities that can lead to valuable professional connections.

4. Stay Informed: In addition to providing contact information, our Alabama Lawyers Email List also allows law firms to stay informed about the latest developments in the legal industry in Alabama. From legislative changes to court rulings and legal trends, staying informed is essential for law firms to provide effective legal representation to their clients.

5. Efficient Communication: Email remains one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways for law firms to communicate with potential clients and colleagues. With our Alabama Lawyers Email List, law firms can easily reach out to legal professionals in Alabama to inquire about collaboration opportunities, share legal insights, and promote their services.

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At LawyersDataLab.com, we are committed to providing high-quality data solutions that empower law firms and legal professionals to achieve their business goals. With our Alabama Lawyers Email List, law firms can access a wealth of valuable contacts and opportunities to grow their practice and establish themselves as leaders in the legal industry. Contact us today at info@lawyersdatalab.com to learn more about our email list and how it can benefit your firm.

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[palecatbarbarian]

Our Staff | Family Law Near Me Vero Beach, FL

divorce and family law attorney Treasure Coast

Kim Durrell began her career with Green & Metcalf - Attorneys At Law in 2000 and has assisted both attorneys in their Family and Criminal Law practice as a Florida Registered Paralegal.

Kim began her legal experience as a Deputy Clerk at the Indian River County Courthouse from 1990 through 2000. She worked in the Traffic/Misdemeanor department and later moved to the Felony Division where she held the position of Assistant Supervisor.

Kim gained valuable legal experience by clerking criminal court dockets as well as numerous criminal trials. She worked closely with Judges, Judicial Assistants, Defense Lawyers, State Prosecutors and local Law Enforcement. During that time she was a member of the Florida Association of Court Clerks.

Kim has been a local resident of Indian River County since 1984 coming from Illinois. Kim graduated from Vero Beach Senior High School in 1986. She was a member of the Future Business Leaders of America.

LINDSAY STUBBS A.A. Criminal Justice, A.S. Paralegal Studies Lindsay Stubbs has been with Green & Metcalf - Attorneys At Law since 2016. Her formal education provides a strong base of knowledge and expertise. Her research abilities along with her exceptional case management and organizational skills are major assets to the firm. Lindsay has Associate Degrees in both Criminal Justice and Parelegal Studies.

Lindsay is a life-long resident of Indian River County. Her passion and dedication to the clients of Green & Metcalf - Attorneys At Law are second-to-none.

ROBYN HATFIELD Legal Assistant Robyn Hatfield has been employed at Green & Metcalf - Attorneys At Law since 2009 and is currently enrolled at Indian River State College where she is working for her Associate of Science Degree in the Paralegal Studies Program. Robyn provides litigation support and case management to all three of the firms attorneys.

Robyn has been a local resident of Indian River County since 1986 coming from West Virginia. Robyn graduated from Vero Beach Senior High School and focused her education in the field of Office/Business Management.

LISA TENNANT Legal Assistant/ Office Manager Lisa has been with Green & Metcalf- Attorneys At Law since 2015. Lisa has 25 years of experience as a legal assistant. She provides litigation support and case management to all the attorneys and serves as the Office Manager for Green & Metcalf- Attorneys At Law.

ALLISON GREEN Administrative Assistant Assisting the practice administratively.

LET GREEN & METCALF - ATTORNEYS AT LAW FIGHT FOR YOU! No matter how difficult your case may seem, the experts at Green & Metcalf - Attorneys At Law are ready to fight for you!

[schleifmanlaw]

Michigan Breach Of Contract Lawyer Contract Breach Lawyer

The contract does not turn into legally binding till each party accepts its terms. A methodology of acceptance (such as oral, written, handshake, in-person, or through the success of a sure act) is commonly specified within the contract’s provide. A contract is an agreement between two events, which creates a legal obligation for both of them to perform specific acts.

Meeting with a lawyer can help you understand your options and tips on how to best shield your rights. Visit our lawyer listing to find a lawyer close to you who may help. These could additionally be actual losses that are not anticipated but had been reasonably foreseeable when the contract was shaped. For instance, if somebody ordered 1,000 square toes of carpet padding and the padding delivered was a half-inch quick but can nonetheless be used okay, which might be considered an immaterial breach.

Should a plaintiff resolve to pursue breach of contract litigation, they might be restricted to simply recovering the advantages delineated in the contract, corresponding to project completion, and compensated for loss of use or lost profits. In some cases, the plaintiff may select to pursue an action based in tort to acquire a better restoration. Our attorneys will analyze the specific components of your case to determine the most advisable plan of action for reaching a decision. Whether we choose to litigate a case or engage in mediation or arbitration, we persistently and passionately articulate our clients’ circumstances and argue their positions. Our Attorneys encourage shopper input to customise a technique to provide the authorized services you deserve. We present skilled illustration for those in Florida and now Texas.

There are still some circumstances, however, by which a contract is breached by one or more events. When this occurs, litigation is often necessary in order to resolve the issue and get well any damages that were caused by the breach. Specific performance is the court-ordered duty of the breaching celebration to perform an obligation. This is usually used when money damages are not adequate to put the non-breaching party in an equal place as if the breach had not occurred. Our Illinois contract litigation attorneys give examples of widespread defenses to breaches of contracts within the following article. During negotiation meetings, the parties or their business attorneys can discuss options for remedying the breach or reaching a settlement.

This is truly because a party has misplaced too much cash as a result of non-performance or the other celebration missed a key deadline. Whenever you buy a piece of commercial real estate, you will enter right into a gross sales contract. Sales contracts for real property are commonly referred to as “purchase and sales agreements,” although this will vary relying on the location. These contracts contain a broad range of data, including all the specifications of the real property. These contracts are often troublesome to learn, and having an legal professional assist you could be very helpful.

Like any dispute, these conditions must be dealt with as professionally as possible. If this was a business arrangement, don’t take it personally and turn this into a private marketing campaign of revenge. Our firm has extensive information of the various industry-specific terms and situations pertinent to contract legal guidelines and the way they'll affect your small business. Any contract dispute can hinder your profitability in addition to your day-to-day operations. Simply suspecting that a breach will occur, nevertheless, just isn't sufficient. For these sorts of clauses to be enforceable, though, they have to be well-written, which is why you wish to ensure that your company’s pursuits are represented by an skilled contracts lawyer.

Therefore, should you really feel as in case you have been victimized by a enterprise contract breach, we encourage you to contact certainly one of our skilled attorneys sooner quite than later. Our contract litigation lawyers routinely represent businesses and individuals all through the Evans and Martinez area. An operating agreement may contain clients breach of contract lawyer, prospects, distributors, suppliers, landlords, or real estate investors. In a perfect situation, an agreement is reached between two events, and every get together upholds their respective ends of the deal throughout the contract’s period. However, disputes do arise that finally result within the breach of contract.

[klaineccfanficlibrary]

i have a weird request and i thought i’d ask here before trying to prompt it, is there any fics that involve an ace attorney game AU ? in the game there are rival lawyers, prosecutor and defense. and the enemies to lovers scream klaine to me. if not are there any lawyer aus anyone reccomemds?

I think you are really going to enjoy the first one. In the second fic listed they both work in a law firm. - HKVoyage

Lawyers Get People Off by jenndesq

Kurt and Blaine are lawyers in Philadelphia who meet one night after a Mika concert. This fic has three chapters. The fourth "chapter" is a link to an illustrated version of the story, and the fifth is the fic translated into Spanish by the amazing mbernip!

~~~~~

Emotions in Limine by whenidance

As one of the founding partners at The Firm of Hummel, Lopez, and Smythe, Kurt is far too busy to worry about a personal life – on top of the stress of trying to make a name for himself as one of the most promising young attorneys in the Midwest, he’s got to keep a handle on his own office politics, which consist of Santana hooking up with their receptionist and Sebastian trying to get into his pants. When they hire a few new paralegals to help with their impending caseload, the last thing Kurt expects is to fall in love with one Blaine Anderson – and especially not on the eve of his thirtieth birthday. Can their secret office romance survive when their coworkers are quite possibly the nosiest group of people in the whole state of Illinois? (written for gleebigbang on LJ)

[regular-things]

Here are some of the bail funds and other organizations fighting against police injustice:

National

LGBTQ Fund: Bail fund providing relief to jailed LGBTQ people in 15 states and counting. Mission: “Each day, tens of thousands of LGBTQ people are held in jail or immigration detention because they cannot afford bail — for immigration status or charges like sleeping in public. With your help, the Freedom Fund posts bail to secure their release and safety.”

Campaign Zero: Organization that utilizes research-based policy solutions to end police brutality in the U.S. Mission: “Over 1,000 people are killed by police every year in America. We are calling on local, state, and federal lawmakers to take immediate action to adopt data-driven policy solutions to end this violence and hold police accountable.”

Unicorn Riot: Nonprofit media collective dedicated to exposing the root causes of social, economic, and environmental issues. Mission: “Our work is dedicated to exposing root causes of dynamic social and environmental issues through amplifying stories and exploring sustainable alternatives in today’s globalized world.”

Minnesota

George Floyd Memorial Fund: The official GoFundMe to support the Floyd family. Mission: “This fund is established to cover funeral and burial expenses, mental and grief counseling, lodging and travel for all court proceedings, and to assist our family in the days to come as we continue to seek justice for George. A portion of these funds will also go to the Estate of George Floyd for the benefit and care of his children and their educational fund.”

Minnesota Freedom Fund: Community-based fund set up to pay criminal bail and immigration bonds for individuals who have been arrested while protesting police brutality. This has become one of the most prominent bail funds, providing relief to protesters in Minneapolis seeking justice for George Floyd. Mission: “We stand against cash bail as unjust and identify wealth-based discrimination as a vehicle for the criminal justice system to target populations for structural violence.”

Black Visions Collective: Minnesota-based black, trans, and queer-led organization committed to dismantling systems of oppression and violence. Mission: “We aim to center our work in healing and transformative justice principles, intentionally develop our organizations core ‘DNA’ to ensure sustainability, and develop Minnesota’s emerging black leadership to lead powerful campaigns. By building movements from the ground up with an integrated model, we are creating the conditions for long-term success and transformation.”

Reclaim the Block: Coalition that advocates for and invests in community-led safety initiatives in Minneapolis neighborhoods. Mission: “We believe health, safety, and resiliency exist without police of any kind. We organize around policies that strengthen community-led safety initiatives and reduce reliance on police departments.”

California

Peoples City Council Freedom Fund: Los Angeles-based fund helping to pay for legal support, bail, fines, and court fees for arrested protesters in the city, as well as medical bills and transportation for injured protesters, supplies for field medics, and direct support to L.A.’s Black Lives Matter chapter. Mission: “As the mayor and city council have sought to increase the LAPD’s budget during a pandemic, and as police around the country continue to kill innocent people of color, we have taken to the street to protest the funding of state sanctioned murder.”

Silicon Valley Democratic Socialists of America Bail Fund: The Oakland/San Jose chapter of DSA is currently allocating donations to a temporary bail fund, as well as a COVID-19 aid fund. Mission: “Money in the fund may be used at the discretion of the committee for the following purposes: to pay bail, fines, or legal fees; to provide jail support; to pay for closely related expenses.”

Colorado

Colorado Freedom Fund: Providing bail relief to protesters and other individuals across the state of Colorado. CFF has also been providing protest updates on its webpage. Mission: “Founded in 2018, Colorado Freedom Fund (CFF) is a revolving fund that pays ransom (posts money bond, pays cash bail) for people unable to afford the cost of buying their own freedom.”

Florida

Free Them All: Fund organized by the group Fempower to post bond in Miami.

Georgia

Atlanta Solidarity Fund: Action Network fund set up to support the George Floyd protesters with both bail and necessary legal relief. Mission: “This fundraiser is for bail expenses for those arrested. Any surplus funds will go toward their legal defense, and to support arrestees at other protests.”

Buy Black Atlanta: Community group fund to support and repair black-owned businesses in Atlanta that were damaged during the protests.

Illinois

Chicago Community Bond Fund: Organization committed to posting bail for individuals in Cook County, Illinois, who are unable to post bail themselves. Mission: Through a revolving fund, CCBF supports individuals whose communities cannot afford to pay the bonds themselves and who have been impacted by structural violence.

Kentucky

Louisville Community Bail Fund: Bail, legal, and support fund for activists in Louisville. Mission: “The Louisville Community Bail Fund exists to not only bail out folks, but provide post-release support to get them from jail, fed, and to a situation of safety. LCBF also maintains a focus on preventative measures for those targeted by law enforcement and threatened with incarceration.”

Louisiana

New Orleans Safety and Freedom Fund: Community fund for bail, jail fees, fines, and drug testing fees in New Orleans. Mission: “Together, we will make New Orleans a safer, more equitable place to live, by redesigning the role money plays in the criminal justice system.”

Maryland

Baltimore Action Legal Team: Bail fund and legal relief for the city of Baltimore, with a focus on black activists. Mission: “BALT is committed to building the power of the local Movement for Black Lives. We take our direction from community-organizing groups who are on the ground, and we respect the leadership of local activists. BALT is committed to anti-racist practices and to black leadership. BALT is dedicated to politically-conscious lawyering and to using creative, collective solutions to support the Movement for Black Lives in Baltimore.”

Massachusetts

Massachusetts Bail Fund: Working to post bails up to $2,000 in Essex and Suffolk Counties in Massachusetts. Mission: “The Massachusetts Bail Fund pays up to $2,000 bail so that low-income people can stay free while they work towards resolving their case, allowing individuals, families, and communities to stay productive, together, and stable.”

Michigan

Detroit Bail Fund: Bail fund launched by a local activist to provide relief to the city’s protesters. Mission: “Funds donated will support BailProject.org and others who assist detained individuals in the release from jail. Your dollar will be contributed to supporting the protests, as well as getting people out of jail who were detained.”

Missouri

Kansas City Community Bail Fund: Committed to posting bail for those arrested to Kansas City. Mission: “Our mission is to give those who cannot afford bail a fighting chance at getting a positive outcome in their case rather than be persuaded to plead out through the use of a revolving fund. We want those detained pretrial to be given a chance to keep their jobs, their spot in school, their housing, and provide care for their children, while maintaining their presumed innocence, rather than sitting in local or county jail costing the taxpayers and themselves money. By doing so, we will be advocating for bail reform and ending mass incarceration by example.”

Nebraska

Neighbors for Common Good: Organization providing bail to protesters in Omaha, Nebraska.

New York

Brooklyn Bail Fund: Community bail fund for Brooklyn’s incarcerated individuals. The nonprofit recently pivoted its focus to bail reform, but organizers have committed to helping those arrested in this week’s protests and are providing support to other bail funds across the country – read their full statement on the George Floyd protests here. Mission: “We are committed to challenging the criminalization of race, poverty, and immigration status, the practice of putting a price on fundamental rights, and the persistent myth that bail is a necessary element of the justice system.”

May 2020 Buffalo Bail Fund: Fundraiser set up to provide bail for those protesting in Buffalo, New York. Mission: “In mourning and in solidarity, many people in Buffalo and other cities across the country have taken to the streets to demand justice for George Floyd and other black and brown people killed by police. This fund supports bail requirements for demonstrators arrested while doing this work here in Buffalo.”

Ohio

Columbus Freedom Fund: Bail fund committed to helping those arrested for protesting in Columbus.

Oregon

PDX Protest Bail Fund: GoFundMe established by the General Defense Committee Local 1 to bail protesters out in Portland. Mission: “The Portland General Defense Committee (https://pdxgdc.com/) has provided ongoing legal support to workers and protesters in Oregon since 2017, relying on over a century of national experience. The GDC works in connection with the National Lawyers Guild and other Portland-based organizations.”

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia Bail Fund: Bail fund providing relief to protesters in the city of Philadelphia, with the long-term goal of bringing an end to cash bail. Mission: “We are committed to providing direct bail assistance to Philadelphia protesters participating in actions to ensure their safe return home.”

Bukit Bail Fund of Pittsburgh: Organization founded after the preventable death of Frank “Bukit” Smart Jr., in Allegheny County Jail, working to bail out individuals currently incarcerated in ACJ. Mission: “The Bukit Bail Fund of Pittsburgh is a coalition of individuals and organizations striving to provide support for those incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail, located in Pittsburgh. We hope to not just provide bail, but also to increase our capacity for supporting people after they have been released.”

Tennessee

Nashville Bail Fund: Nonprofit committed to freeing low-income individuals from jail in the city of Nashville. Mission: “The Nashville Community Bail Fund frees low-income persons from jail, connects with their loved ones, and works to end wealth-based detention through community partnerships.”

Texas

Restoring Justice Community Bail Fund: A partnership between Restoring Justice, the Bail Project and Pure Justice to provide bail relief in Houston, initially set up as a response to COVID-19. Mission: “Restoring Justice is partnering with the Bail Project and Pure Justice to use donations to pay bail for people in need during the Covid-19 pandemic at no cost to them or their loved ones.”

Luke 4:18 Bail Fund: Bail fund overseen by Faith in Texas committed to posting bail for individuals in Dallas. Mission: “The Luke 4:18 Bail Fund is partnering with faith communities, currently and formerly incarcerated people, families impacted by the legal justice system, and funders to drastically reduce the jail population in Dallas County.”

400+1 Bail Fund: Bail fund originally created to assist a black man arrested in Austin who feared he could catch COVID-19 in jail. The fund is now being directed toward protesters in the city. Mission: “This bail fund was originally created to crowdfund resources for one black man too poor to make bail while fearing for his life due to the COVID outbreak. As demonstrations erupt around the nation, we are increasing our ask and reach. Additional funds will be used as a general bail fund to support the legal needs of comrades on the ground.”

Project Roar: Community fund dedicated to providing resources and outreach programs to Texas’ rural areas. They’ve expanded their services to include emergency jail and bail. Mission: “Some of the most marginalized and neglected communities are in your city, but also lie in the county areas outside the city limits. The need for services in rural areas is often overlooked. Engaging the community will include canvassing and blockwalking, phonebanking and word of mouth, public service announcements and community service announcements, etc.”

San Antonio Freedom Fund: Community fund set up to directly go towards arrested demonstrators in the city. Mission: “Every year countless unarmed black and brown men are humiliated, beaten, and murdered by militarized police. On May 30th, San Antonio will seek justice. The threat of arrest is real. We need your support. Please consider donating to our bail fund. All proceeds will go directly to the arrested demonstrators.”

Virginia

Richmond Community Bail Fund: Community group dedicated to freeing jailed individuals in Richmond who can’t make bail. Mission: “The Richmond Community Bail Fund exists to restore the presumption of innocence to defendants so they don’t lose their jobs, families, and critical services while also reducing the financial burden on our community of detaining citizens prior to their day in court.”

Washington

Northwest Community Bail Fund: Providing cash bail to arrested individuals in the Seattle metropolitan area. Mission: “The Northwest Community Bail Fund (NCBF) provides cash bail for marginalized people charged with crimes who are unable to afford bail and find themselves incarcerated while awaiting routine court appearances in King and Snohomish Counties in Washington State.”

Wisconsin

Milwaukee Freedom Fund: Bail fund for black and brown organizers in Milwaukee. Donations are currently on pause so as to administer the funds they’ve already received, but the webpage includes a list of similar local organizations to donate to instead. Mission: “The Milwaukee Freedom Fund was started by Black and Brown Milwaukee organizers who want to see residents supported as they assert their right to protest for justice. We are raising money and gathering resources for bail, court-related costs, rides, food, water, and other needs, as the community struggles for liberation.”

Outside the U.S.

Toronto Protestor Bail Fund: Toronto activists are holding their own Black Lives Matter protests over the death of Regis Korchinski and have set up this bail fund for those arrested. Mission: “In light of today’s protest we are looking to generate funding to release and support protesters who end up incarcerated. This bail fund includes any legal fees that may be incurred.”

[mongoose232323]

Breaking News

Kyle Rittenhouse Has Been Moved To Kenosha County To Face Homicide Charges After Judge Denies Defense's Request For Him To Be Released In Illinois

From The Article

An Illinois judge on Friday denied Kyle Rittenhouse's request for release and ordered him extradited to Wisconsin, where he faces homicide charges in Kenosha County.

He was transported to Kenosha County Jail on Friday afternoon, a sheriff's spokesman said.

During a hearing Friday morning, Rittenhouse's attorney argued that what he called a technical error in Wisconsin's extradition request means Rittenhouse should be released from custody where he'd been held since fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during unrest in Kenosha in August.

In a written order issued around 3:20 p.m., Lake County Circuit Judge Paul Novak agreed with prosecutors that the paperwork was entirely in order, and would be sufficient even if the defense's claim about how the Kenosha complaint was signed were accepted as true.

The defense had also claimed that Illinois would violate Rittenhouse's constitutional rights by sending him to Wisconsin. Novak noted the holding state plays a limited role in extradition, and that Rittenhouse's constitutional and self-defense claims need to be raised in Wisconsin.

Novak wrote that, under Illinois law, he may not decide the validity of Rittenhouse's self-defense, or Wisconsin's law that 17-year-olds are charged as adults, or consider potential political implications of Kenosha District Attorney Michael Graveley's charging decisions, or opine on Rittenhouse's future safety in Wisconsin custody.

A lawyer on Rittenhouse's defense team tweeted earlier that they would appeal any adverse decision by Novak.

Since he turned himself in to police in his hometown of Antioch, Illinois, early on Aug. 26, Rittenhouse had been held at Lake County's juvenile detention center.

Late Friday, the Journal Sentinel obtained records of that event, after suing under Illinois open records law weeks earlier. The records describe Rittenhouse going through cycles of calm, then crying and vomiting as he told Antioch police he had "ended a life."

He told police he and a friend had been hired to protect a business in Kenosha. The owner of Car Source, which had three properties along Sheridan Road in Kenosha which all suffered damage, denied to the Journal Sentinel that he hired anyone to act as armed security for his businesses.

https://amp.jsonline.com/amp/6085295002

[lawyersdatascraping]

Wyoming Attorneys Email List

Wyoming Attorneys Email List

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[blackkudos]

Joe Louis

Joseph Louis Barrow (May 13, 1914 – April 12, 1981), known professionally as Joe Louis, was an American professional boxer who competed from 1934 to 1951. He reigned as the world heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, and is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. Nicknamed the Brown Bomber, Louis' championship reign lasted 140 consecutive months, during which he participated in 26 championship fights. The 27th fight, against Ezzard Charles in 1950, was a challenge for Charles' heavyweight title and so is not included in Louis' reign. He was victorious in 25 consecutive title defenses. In 2005, Louis was ranked as the best heavyweight of all time by the International Boxing Research Organization, and was ranked number one on The Ring magazine's list of the "100 greatest punchers of all time".

Louis' cultural impact was felt well outside the ring. He is widely regarded as the first person of African-American descent to achieve the status of a nationwide hero within the United States, and was also a focal point of anti-Nazi sentiment leading up to and during World War II. He was instrumental in integrating the game of golf, breaking the sport's color barrier in America by appearing under a sponsor's exemption in a PGA event in 1952.

Detroit's Joe Louis Greenway and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County's Joe Louis "The Champ" Golf Course, situated south of Chicago in Riverdale, Illinois, are named in his honor.

Early life

Born in rural Chambers County, Alabama (in a ramshackle dwelling on Bell Chapel Road, located about 1 mile (2 kilometres) off state route 50 and roughly 6 miles (10 kilometres) from LaFayette), Louis was the seventh of eight children of Munroe Barrow and Lillie (Reese) Barrow. He weighed 11 pounds (5 kg) at birth. Both of his parents were children of former slaves, alternating between sharecropping and rental farming. Munroe was predominantly African American, with some white ancestry, while Lillie was half Cherokee.

Louis spent the first dozen years growing up in rural Alabama, where little is known of his childhood. He suffered from a speech impediment and spoke very little until about the age of six. Munroe Barrow was committed to a mental institution in 1916 and, as a result, Joe knew very little of his biological father. Around 1920, Louis's mother married Pat Brooks, a local construction contractor, having received word that Munroe Barrow had died while institutionalized (in reality, Munroe Barrow lived until 1938, unaware of his son's fame).

In 1926, shaken by a gang of white men in the Ku Klux Klan, Louis's family moved to Detroit, Michigan, forming part of the post-World War I Great Migration. Joe's brother worked for Ford Motor Company (where Joe would himself work for a time at the River Rouge Plant) and the family settled into a home at 2700 Catherine (now Madison) Street in Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood.

Louis attended Bronson Vocational School for a time to learn cabinet-making.

Amateur career

The Great Depression hit the Barrow family hard, but as an alternative to gang activity, Joe began to spend time at a local youth recreation center at 637 Brewster Street in Detroit. His mother attempted to get him interested in playing the violin. A classic story is that he tried to hide his pugilistic ambitions from his mother by carrying his boxing gloves inside his violin case.

Louis made his debut in early 1932 at the age of 17. Legend has it that before the fight, the barely literate Louis wrote his name so large that there was no room for his last name, and thus became known as "Joe Louis" for the remainder of his boxing career. More likely, Louis simply omitted his last name to keep his boxing a secret from his mother. After this debut—a loss to future Olympian Johnny Miler—Louis compiled numerous amateur victories, eventually winning the club championship of his Brewster Street recreation centre, the home of many aspiring Golden Gloves fighters.

In 1933, Louis won the Detroit-area Golden Gloves Novice Division championship against Joe Biskey for the light heavyweight classification. He later lost in the Chicago Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. The next year, competing in the Golden Gloves' Open Division, he won the light heavyweight classification, this time also winning the Chicago Tournament of Champions. However, a hand injury forced Louis to miss the New York/Chicago Champions' cross-town bout for the ultimate Golden Gloves championship. In April 1934, he followed up his Chicago performance by winning the United States Amateur Champion National AAU tournament in St. Louis, Missouri.

By the end of his amateur career, Louis's record was 50–3, with 43 knockouts.

Professional career

Joe Louis had only three losses in his 69 professional fights. He tallied 52 knockouts and held the championship from 1937 to 1949, the longest span of any heavyweight titleholder. After returning from retirement, Louis failed to regain the championship in 1950, and his career ended after he was knocked out by Rocky Marciano in 1951.

Early years

Louis's amateur performances attracted the interest of professional promoters, and he was soon represented by a black Detroit-area bookmaker named John Roxborough. As Louis explained in his autobiography, Roxborough convinced the young fighter that white managers would have no real interest in seeing a black boxer work his way up to title contention:

[Roxborough] told me about the fate of most black fighters, ones with white managers, who wound up burned-out and broke before they reached their prime. The white managers were not interested in the men they were handling but in the money they could make from them. They didn't take the proper time to see that their fighters had a proper training, that they lived comfortably, or ate well, or had some pocket change. Mr. Roxborough was talking about Black Power before it became popular.

Roxborough knew a Chicago area boxing promoter named Julian Black who already had a stable of mediocre boxers against which Louis could hone his craft, this time in the heavyweight division. After becoming part of the management team, Black hired fellow Chicago native Jack "Chappy" Blackburn as Louis's trainer. Louis' initial professional fights were all in the Chicago area, his professional debut coming on July 4, 1934, against Jack Kracken in the Bacon Casino on Chicago's south side. Louis earned $59 for knocking out Kracken in the first round. $59.00 in 1934 is equivalent to $1,148.60 in 2020 dollars. Louis won all 12 of his professional fights that year, 10 by knockout.

In September 1934, while promoting a Detroit-area "coming home" bout for Louis against Canadian Alex Borchuk, Roxborough was pressured by members of the Michigan State Boxing Commission to have Louis sign with white management. Roxborough refused and continued advancing Louis's career with bouts against heavyweight contenders Art Sykes and Stanley Poreda.

When training for a fight against Lee Ramage, Louis noticed a young female secretary for the black newspaper at the gym. After Ramage was defeated, the secretary, Marva Trotter, was invited to the celebration party at Chicago's Grand Hotel. Trotter later became Louis's first wife in 1935.

During this time, Louis also met Truman Gibson, the man who would become his personal lawyer. As a young associate at a law firm hired by Julian Black, Gibson was charged with personally entertaining Louis during the pendency of business deals.

Title contention

Although Louis' management was finding him bouts against legitimate heavyweight contenders, no path to the title was forthcoming. While professional boxing was not officially segregated, many white Americans had become wary of the prospect of another black champion in the wake of Jack Johnson's highly unpopular (among whites) "reign" atop the heavyweight division. During an era of severe anti-black repression, Jack Johnson's unrepentant masculinity and marriage to a white woman engendered an enormous backlash that greatly limited opportunities of black fighters in the heavyweight division. Black boxers were denied championship bouts, and there were few heavyweight black contenders at the time, though there were African Americans who fought for titles in other weight divisions, and a few notable black champions, such as Tiger Flowers. Louis and his handlers would counter the legacy of Johnson by emphasizing the Brown Bomber's modesty and sportsmanship. Biographer Gerald Astor stated that "Joe Louis' early boxing career was stalked by the specter of Jack Johnson".

If Louis were to rise to national prominence among such cultural attitudes, a change in management would be necessary. In 1935, boxing promoter Mike Jacobs sought out Louis' handlers. After Louis' narrow defeat of Natie Brown on March 29, 1935, Jacobs and the Louis team met at the Frog Club, a black nightclub, and negotiated a three-year exclusive boxing promotion deal. The contract, however, did not keep Roxborough and Black from attempting to cash in as Louis' managers; when Louis turned 21 on May 13, 1935, Roxborough and Black each signed Louis to an onerous long-term contract that collectively dedicated half of Louis' future income to the pair.

Black and Roxborough continued to carefully and deliberately shape Louis' media image. Mindful of the tremendous public backlash Johnson had suffered for his unapologetic attitude and flamboyant lifestyle, they drafted "Seven Commandments" for Louis' personal conduct. These included:

Never have his picture taken with a white woman

Never gloat over a fallen opponent

Never engage in fixed fights

Live and fight clean

As a result, Louis was generally portrayed in the white media as a modest, clean-living person, which facilitated his burgeoning celebrity status.

With the backing of major promotion, Louis fought thirteen times in 1935. The bout that helped put him in the media spotlight occurred on June 25, when Louis knocked out 6'6", 265-pound former world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera in six rounds. Foreshadowing the Louis–Schmeling rivalry to come, the Carnera bout featured a political dimension. Louis' victory over Carnera, who symbolized Benito Mussolini's regime in the popular eye, was seen as a victory for the international community, particularly among African Americans, who were sympathetic to Ethiopia, which was attempting to maintain its independence by fending off an invasion by fascist Italy. America's white press began promoting Louis' image in the context of the era's racism; nicknames they created included the "Mahogany Mauler", "Chocolate Chopper", "Coffee-Colored KO King", "Safari Sandman", and one that stuck: "The Brown Bomber".

Helping the white press to overcome its reluctance to feature a black contender was the fact that in the mid-1930s boxing desperately needed a marketable hero. Since the retirement of Jack Dempsey in 1929, the sport had devolved into a sordid mixture of poor athletes, gambling, fixed fights, thrown matches, and control of the sport by organized crime. New York Times Columnist Edward Van Ness wrote, "Louis ... is a boon to boxing. Just as Dempsey led the sport out of the doldrums ... so is Louis leading the boxing game out of a slump." Likewise, biographer Bill Libby asserted that "The sports world was hungry for a great champion when Louis arrived in New York in 1935."

While the mainstream press was beginning to embrace Louis, many still opposed the prospect of another black heavyweight champion. In September 1935, on the eve of Louis' fight with former titleholder Max Baer, Washington Post sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote about some Americans' hopes for the white contender, "They say Baer will surpass himself in the knowledge that he is the lone white hope for the defense of Nordic superiority in the prize ring." However, the hopes of white suprematists would soon be dashed.

Although Baer had been knocked down only once before in his professional career (by Frankie Campbell), Louis dominated the former champion, knocking him out in the fourth round. Unknowingly, Baer suffered from a unique disadvantage in the fight; earlier that evening, Louis had married Marva Trotter at a friend's apartment and was eager to end the fight in order to consummate the relationship. Later that year, Louis also knocked out Paolino Uzcudun, who had never been knocked down before.

Louis vs. Schmeling I

By this time, Louis was ranked as the No. 1 contender in the heavyweight division and had won the Associated Press' "Athlete of the Year" award for 1935. What was considered to be a final tune-up bout before an eventual title shot was scheduled for June 1936 against Max Schmeling. Although a former world heavyweight champion, Schmeling was not considered a threat to Louis, then with a professional record of 27–0. Schmeling had won his title on a technicality when Jack Sharkey was disqualified after giving Schmeling a low blow in 1930. Schmeling was also 30 years old at the time of the Louis bout and allegedly past his prime. Louis' training retreat was located at Lakewood, New Jersey, where he was first able to practice the game of golf, which would later become a lifelong passion. Noted entertainer Ed Sullivan had initially sparked Louis' interest in the sport by giving an instructional book to Joe's wife Marva. Louis spent significant time on the golf course rather than training for the match.

Conversely, Schmeling prepared intently for the bout. He had thoroughly studied Louis's style and believed he had found a weakness. By exploiting Louis's habit of dropping his left hand low after a jab, Schmeling handed Louis his first professional loss by knocking him out in round 12 at Yankee Stadium on June 19, 1936.

World championship

After defeating Louis, Schmeling expected a title shot against James J. Braddock, who had unexpectedly defeated Max Baer for the heavyweight title the previous June. Madison Square Garden (MSG) had a contract with Braddock for the title defense and also sought a Braddock–Schmeling title bout. But Jacobs and Braddock's manager Joe Gould had been planning a Braddock–Louis matchup for months.

Schmeling's victory gave Gould tremendous leverage, however. If he were to offer Schmeling the title chance instead of Louis, there was a very real possibility that Nazi authorities would never allow Louis a shot at the title. Gould's demands were therefore onerous: Jacobs would have to pay 10% of all future boxing promotion profits (including any future profits from Louis's future bouts) for ten years. Braddock and Gould would eventually receive more than $150,000 from this arrangement. Well before the actual fight, Jacobs and Gould publicly announced that their fighters would fight for the heavyweight title on June 22, 1937. Figuring that the New York State Athletic Commission would not sanction the fight in deference to MSG and Schmeling, Jacobs scheduled the fight for Chicago.

Each of the parties involved worked to facilitate the controversial Braddock–Louis matchup. Louis did his part by knocking out former champion Jack Sharkey on August 18, 1936. Meanwhile, Gould trumped up anti-Nazi sentiment against Schmeling, and Jacobs defended a lawsuit by MSG to halt the Braddock–Louis fight. A federal court in Newark, New Jersey, eventually ruled that Braddock's contractual obligation to stage his title defense at MSG was unenforceable for lack of mutual consideration.

The stage was set for Louis's title shot. On the night of the fight, June 22, 1937, Braddock was able to knock Louis down in round one, but afterward could accomplish little. After inflicting constant punishment, Louis defeated Braddock in round eight, knocking him out cold with a strong right hand that busted James' teeth through his gum shield and lip and sent him to the ground for a few minutes. It was the first and only time that Braddock was knocked out (the one other stoppage of Braddock's career was a TKO due to a cut). Louis's ascent to the world heavyweight championship was complete.

Louis's victory was a seminal moment in African American history. Thousands of African Americans stayed up all night across the country in celebration. Noted author and member of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes described Louis's effect in these terms:

Each time Joe Louis won a fight in those depression years, even before he became champion, thousands of black Americans on relief or W.P.A., and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe's one-man triumphs. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions—or on mine. I marched and cheered and yelled and cried, too.

Initial title defenses

Despite his championship, Louis was haunted by the earlier defeat to Schmeling. Shortly after winning the title, he was quoted as saying, "I don't want to be called champ until I whip Max Schmeling." Louis's manager Mike Jacobs attempted to arrange a rematch in 1937, but negotiations broke down when Schmeling demanded 30% of the gate. When Schmeling instead attempted to arrange for a fight against British Empire champion Tommy Farr, known as the "Tonypandy Terror",—ostensibly for a world championship to rival the claims of American boxing authorities—Jacobs outmaneuvered him, offering Farr a guaranteed $60,000 to fight Louis instead. The offer was too lucrative for Farr to turn down.

On August 30, 1937, after a postponement of four days due to rain, Louis and Farr finally touched gloves at New York's Yankee Stadium before a crowd of approximately 32,000. Louis fought one of the hardest battles of his life. The bout was closely contested and went the entire 15 rounds, with Louis being unable to knock Farr down. Referee Arthur Donovan was even seen shaking Farr's hand after the bout, in apparent congratulation. Nevertheless, after the score was announced, Louis had won a controversial unanimous decision. Time described the scene thus: "After collecting the judges' votes, referee Arthur Donovan announced that Louis had won the fight on points. The crowd of 50,000 ... amazed that Farr had not been knocked out or even knocked down, booed the decision."

It seems the crowd believed that referee Arthur Donovan, Sr. had raised Farr's glove in victory. Seven years later, in his published account of the fight, Donovan spoke of the "mistake" that may have led to this confusion. He wrote:

As Tommy walked back to his corner after shaking Louis' hand, I followed him and seized his glove. "Tommy, a wonderful perform—" I began ... Then I dropped his hand like a red-hot coal! He had started to raise his arm. He thought I had given him the fight and the world championship! I literally ran away, shaking my head and shouting. "No! No! No!" realising how I had raised his hopes for a few seconds only to dash them to the ground ... That's the last time my emotions will get the better of me in a prize fight! There was much booing at the announced result, but, as I say it, it was all emotional. I gave Tommy two rounds and one even—and both his winning rounds were close.

Speaking over the radio after the fight, Louis admitted that he had been hurt twice.

In preparation for the inevitable rematch with Schmeling, Louis tuned up with bouts against Nathan Mann and Harry Thomas.

Louis vs. Schmeling II

The rematch between Louis and Schmeling would become one of the most famous boxing matches of all time and is remembered as one of the major sports events of the 20th century. Following his defeat of Louis in 1936, Schmeling had become a national hero in Germany. Schmeling's victory over an African American was touted by Nazi officials as proof of their doctrine of Aryan superiority. When the rematch was scheduled, Louis retreated to his boxing camp in New Jersey and trained incessantly for the fight. A few weeks before the bout, Louis visited the White House, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt told him, "Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany." Louis later admitted: "I knew I had to get Schmeling good. I had my own personal reasons and the whole damned country was depending on me."

When Schmeling arrived in New York City in June 1938 for the rematch, he was accompanied by a Nazi party publicist who issued statements that a black man could not defeat Schmeling and that when Schmeling won, his prize money would be used to build tanks in Germany. Schmeling's hotel was picketed by anti-Nazi protesters in the days before the fight.

On the night of June 22, 1938, Louis and Schmeling met for the second time in the boxing ring. The fight was held in Yankee Stadium before a crowd of 70,043. It was broadcast by radio to millions of listeners throughout the world, with radio announcers reporting on the fight in English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Before the bout, Schmeling weighed in at 193 pounds; Louis weighed in at 198¾ pounds.

The fight lasted two minutes and four seconds. Louis battered Schmeling with a series of swift attacks, forcing him against the ropes and giving him a paralyzing body blow (Schmeling afterward claimed it was an illegal kidney punch). Schmeling was knocked down three times and only managed to throw two punches in the entire bout. On the third knockdown, Schmeling's trainer threw in the towel and referee Arthur Donovan stopped the fight.

"Bum of the Month Club"

In the 29 months from January 1939 through May 1941, Louis defended his title thirteen times, a frequency unmatched by any heavyweight champion since the end of the bare-knuckle era. The pace of his title defenses, combined with his convincing wins, earned Louis' opponents from this era the collective nickname "Bum of the Month Club". Notables of this lambasted pantheon include:

world light heavyweight champion John Henry Lewis who, attempting to move up a weight class, was knocked out in the first round by Louis on January 25, 1939.

"Two Ton" Tony Galento, who was able to knock Louis to the canvas with a left hook in the third round of their bout on June 28, 1939, before letting his guard down and being knocked out in the fourth.

Chilean Arturo Godoy, whom Louis fought twice in 1940, on February 9 and June 20. Louis won the first bout by a split-decision, and the rematch by a knockout in the eighth round.

Al McCoy, putative New England heavyweight champion, whose fight against Louis is probably best known for being the first heavyweight title bout held in Boston, Massachusetts, (at the Boston Garden on December 16, 1940). The popular local challenger dodged his way around Louis before being unable to respond to the sixth-round bell.

Clarence "Red" Burman, who pressed Louis for nearly five rounds at Madison Square Garden on January 31, 1941, before succumbing to a series of body blows.

Gus Dorazio, of whom Louis remarked, "At least he tried", after being leveled by a short right hand in the second round at Philadelphia's Convention Hall on February 17.

Abe Simon, who endured thirteen rounds of punishment before 18,908 at Olympia Stadium in Detroit on March 21 before referee Sam Hennessy declared a TKO.

Tony Musto, who, at 5'7½" and 198 pounds, was known as "Baby Tank." Despite a unique crouching style, Musto was slowly worn down over eight and a half rounds in St. Louis on April 8, and the fight was called a TKO because of a severe cut over Musto's eye.

Buddy Baer (brother of former champion Max), who was leading the May 23, 1941, bout in Washington, D.C., until an eventual barrage by Louis, capped by a hit at the sixth round bell. Referee Arthur Donovan disqualified Baer before the beginning of the seventh round as a result of stalling by Baer's manager.

Despite its derogatory nickname, most of the group were top-ten heavyweights. Of the 12 fighters Louis faced during this period, five were rated by The Ring as top-10 heavyweights in the year they fought Louis: Galento (overall #2 heavyweight in 1939), Bob Pastor (#3, 1939), Godoy (#3, 1940), Simon (#6, 1941) and Baer (#8, 1941); four others (Musto, Dorazio, Burman and Johnny Paychek) were ranked in the top 10 in a different year.

Billy Conn fight

Louis' string of lightly regarded competition ended with his bout against Billy Conn, the light heavyweight champion and a highly regarded contender. The fighters met on June 18, 1941, in front of a crowd of 54,487 fans at the Polo Grounds in New York City. The fight turned out to be one of the greatest heavyweight boxing fights of all time.

Conn would not gain weight for the challenge against Louis, saying instead that he would rely on a "hit and run" strategy. Louis' famous response: "He can run, but he can't hide."

However, Louis had clearly underestimated Conn's threat. In his autobiography, Joe Louis said:

I made a mistake going into that fight. I knew Conn was kinda small and I didn't want them to say in the papers that I beat up on some little guy so the day before the fight I did a little roadwork to break a sweat and drank as little water as possible so I could weigh in under 200 pounds. Chappie was as mad as hell. But Conn was a clever fighter, he was like a mosquito, he'd sting and move.

Conn had the better of the fight through 12 rounds, although Louis was able to stun Conn with a left hook in the fifth, cutting his eye and nose. By the eighth round, Louis began suffering from dehydration. By the twelfth round, Louis was exhausted, with Conn ahead on two of three boxing scorecards. But against the advice of his corner, Conn continued to closely engage Louis in the later stages of the fight. Louis made the most of the opportunity, knocking Conn out with two seconds left in the thirteenth round.

The contest created an instant rivalry that Louis's career had lacked since the Schmeling era, and a rematch with Conn was planned for late 1942. The rematch had to be abruptly canceled, however, after Conn broke his hand in a much-publicized fight with his father-in-law, Major League ballplayer Jimmy "Greenfield" Smith. By the time Conn was ready for the rematch, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place.

World War II

Louis fought a charity bout for the Navy Relief Society against his former opponent Buddy Baer on January 9, 1942, which raised $47,000 for the fund. The next day, he volunteered to enlist as a private in the United States Army at Camp Upton, Long Island. Newsreel cameras recorded his induction, including a staged scene in which a soldier-clerk asked, "What's your occupation?", to which Louis replied, "Fighting and let us at them Japs."

Another military charity bout on March 27, 1942, (against another former opponent, Abe Simon) netted $36,146. Before the fight, Louis had spoken at a Relief Fund dinner, saying of the war effort, "We'll win, 'cause we're on God's side." The media widely reported the comment, instigating a surge of popularity for Louis. Slowly, the press began to eliminate its stereotypical racial references when covering Louis and instead treated him as an unqualified sports hero. Despite the public relations boon, Louis's charitable fights proved financially costly. Although he saw none of the roughly $90,000 raised by these and other charitable fights, the IRS later credited these amounts as taxable income paid to Louis. After the war, the IRS pursued the issue.

For basic training, Louis was assigned to a segregated cavalry unit based in Fort Riley, Kansas. The assignment was at the suggestion of his friend and lawyer Truman Gibson, who knew of Louis's love for horsemanship. Gibson had previously become a civilian advisor to the War Department, in charge of investigating claims of harassment against black soldiers. Accordingly, Louis used this personal connection to help the cause of various black soldiers with whom he came into contact. In one noted episode, Louis contacted Gibson in order to facilitate the Officer Candidate School (OCS) applications of a group of black recruits at Fort Riley, which had been inexplicably delayed for several months. Among the OCS applications Louis facilitated was that of a young Jackie Robinson, later to break the baseball color barrier. The episode spawned a personal friendship between the two men.

Realizing Louis's potential for raising esprit de corps among the troops, the Army placed him in its Special Services Division rather than sending him into combat. Louis went on a celebrity tour with other notables, including fellow boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. He traveled more than 35,000 km (22,000 mi) and staged 96 boxing exhibitions before two million soldiers. In England during 1944, he was reported to have enlisted as a player for Liverpool Football Club as a publicity stunt.

In addition to his travels, Louis was the focus of a media recruitment campaign encouraging African-American men to enlist in the Armed Services, despite the military's racial segregation. When he was asked about his decision to enter the racially segregated U.S. Army, he said: "Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain't going to fix them." In 1943, Louis made an appearance in the wartime Hollywood musical This Is the Army, directed by Michael Curtiz. He appeared as himself in a musical number, "The Well-Dressed Man in Harlem," which emphasized the importance of African-American soldiers and promoted their enlistment.

Louis's celebrity power was not, however, merely directed toward African Americans. In a famous wartime recruitment slogan, he echoed his prior comments of 1942: "We'll win, because we're on God's side." The publicity of the campaign made Louis widely popular stateside, even outside the world of sports. Never before had white Americans embraced a black man as their representative to the world.

Although Louis never saw combat, his military service saw challenges of its own. During his travels, he often experienced blatant racism. On one occasion, a military policeman (MP) ordered Louis and Ray Robinson to move their seats to a bench in the rear of an Alabama Army camp bus depot. "We ain't moving", said Louis. The MP tried to arrest them, but Louis forcefully argued the pair out of the situation. In another incident, he allegedly had to resort to bribery to persuade a commanding officer to drop charges against Jackie Robinson for punching a captain who had called Robinson a "nigger."

Louis was eventually promoted to the rank of technical sergeant on April 9, 1945. On September 23 of the same year, he was awarded the Legion of Merit (a military decoration rarely awarded to enlisted soldiers) for "incalculable contribution to the general morale." Receipt of the honor qualified him for immediate release from military service on October 1, 1945.

Later career and retirement

Louis emerged from his wartime service significantly in debt. In addition to his looming tax bill—which had not been finally determined at the time, but was estimated at greater than $100,000—Jacobs claimed that Louis owed him $250,000.

Despite the financial pressure on Louis to resume boxing, his long-awaited rematch against Billy Conn had to be postponed to the summer of 1946, when weather conditions could accommodate a large outdoor audience. On June 19, a disappointing 40,000 saw the rematch at Yankee Stadium, in which Louis was not seriously tested. Conn, whose skills had deteriorated during the long layoff, largely avoided contact until being dispatched by knockout in the eighth round. Although the attendance did not meet expectations, the fight was still the most profitable of Louis's career to date. His share of the purse was $600,000, of which Louis' managers got $140,000, his ex-wife $66,000 and the U.S. state of New York $30,000.

After trouble finding another suitable opponent, on December 5, 1947, Louis met Jersey Joe Walcott, a 33-year-old veteran with a 44–11–2 record. Walcott entered the fight as a 10-to-1 underdog. Nevertheless, Walcott knocked down Louis twice in the first four rounds. Most observers in Madison Square Garden felt Walcott dominated the 15-round fight. When Louis was declared the winner in a split decision, the crowd booed.

Louis was under no delusion about the state of his boxing skills, yet he was too embarrassed to quit after the Walcott fight. Determined to win and retire with his title intact, Louis signed on for a rematch. On June 25, 1948, about 42,000 people came to Yankee Stadium to see the aging champion, who weighed 213½, the heaviest of his career to date. Walcott knocked Louis down in the third round, but Louis survived to knock out Walcott in the eleventh.

Louis would not defend his title again before announcing his retirement from boxing on March 1, 1949. In his bouts with Conn and Walcott, it had become apparent that Louis was no longer the fighter he had once been. As he had done earlier in his career, however, Louis would continue to appear in numerous exhibition matches worldwide. In August 1949 Cab Calloway rendered homage to the “king of the ring” with his song Ol’ Joe Louis.

Post-retirement comeback

At the time of Louis's initial retirement, the IRS was still completing its investigation of his prior tax returns, which had always been handled by Mike Jacobs's personal accountant. In May 1950, the IRS finished a full audit of Louis's past returns and announced that, with interest and penalties, he owed the government more than $500,000. Louis had no choice but to return to the ring.

After asking Gibson to take over his personal finances and switching his management from Jacobs and Roxborough to Marshall Miles, the Louis camp negotiated a deal with the IRS under which Louis would come out of retirement, with all Louis's net proceeds going to the IRS. A match with Ezzard Charles—who had acquired the vacant heavyweight title in June 1949 by outpointing Walcott—was set for September 27, 1950. By then, Louis was 36 years old and had been away from competitive boxing for two years. Weighing in at 218, Louis was still strong, but his reflexes were gone. Charles repeatedly beat him to the punch. By the end of the fight, Louis was cut above both eyes, one of which was shut tight by swelling. He knew he had lost even before Charles was declared the winner. The result was not the only disappointing aspect of the fight for Louis; only 22,357 spectators paid to witness the event at Yankee Stadium, and his share of the purse was a mere $100,458. Louis had to continue fighting.

After facing several club-level opponents and scoring an early knockout victory over EBU champion Lee Savold (also defeating top contender Jimmy Bivins by unanimous decision), the International Boxing Club guaranteed Louis $300,000 to face undefeated heavyweight contender Rocky Marciano on October 26, 1951. Despite his being a 6-to-5 favorite, few boxing insiders believed Louis had a chance. Marciano himself was reluctant to participate in the bout, but was understanding of Louis's position: "This is the last guy on earth I want to fight." It was feared, particularly among those who had witnessed Marciano's punching power first-hand, that Louis's unwillingness to quit would result in serious injury. Fighting back tears, Ferdie Pacheco said in the SportsCentury documentary about his bout with Marciano, "He [Louis] wasn't just going to lose. He was going to take a vicious, savage beating. Before the eyes of the nation, Joe Louis, an American hero if ever there was one, was going to get beaten up." Louis was dropped in the eighth round by a Marciano left and knocked through the ropes and out of the ring less than thirty seconds later.

In the dressing room after the fight, Louis's Army touring companion, Sugar Ray Robinson, wept. Marciano also attempted to console Louis, saying, "I'm sorry, Joe." "What's the use of crying?" Louis said. "The better man won. I guess everything happens for the best."

After facing Marciano, with the prospect of another significant payday all but gone, Louis retired for good from professional boxing. He would, as before, continue to tour on the exhibition circuit, with his last contest taking place on December 16, 1951, in Taipei, Taiwan, against Corporal Buford J. deCordova.

Taxes and financial troubles

Despite Louis's lucrative purses over the years, most of the proceeds went to his handlers. Of the over $4.6 million earned during his boxing career, Louis himself received only about $800,000. Louis was nevertheless extremely generous to his family, paying for homes, cars and education for his parents and siblings, often with money fronted by Jacobs. He invested in a number of businesses, all of which eventually failed, including the Joe Louis Restaurant, the Joe Louis Insurance Company, a softball team called the Brown Bombers, the Joe Louis Milk Company, Joe Louis pomade (hair product), Joe Louis Punch (a drink), the Louis-Rower P.R. firm, a horse farm and the Rhumboogie Café in Chicago. He gave liberally to the government as well, paying back the city of Detroit for any welfare money his family had received.

A combination of this largesse and government intervention eventually put Louis in severe financial straits. His entrusting of his finances to former manager Mike Jacobs haunted him. After the $500,000 IRS tax bill was assessed, with interest accumulating every year, the need for cash precipitated Louis's post-retirement comeback. Even though his comeback earned him significant purses, the incremental tax rate in place at the time (90%) meant that these boxing proceeds did not even keep pace with interest on Louis's tax debt. As a result, by the end of the 1950s, he owed over $1 million in taxes and interest. In 1953, when Louis's mother died, the IRS appropriated the $667 she had willed to Louis. To bring in money, Louis engaged in numerous activities outside the ring. He appeared on various quiz shows, and an old Army buddy, Ash Resnick, gave Louis a job greeting tourists to the Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas, where Resnick was an executive. For income, Louis even became a professional wrestler. He made his professional wrestling debut on March 16, 1956 in Washington, D.C. at the Uline Arena, defeating Cowboy Rocky Lee. After defeating Lee in a few matches, Louis discovered he had a heart ailment and retired from wrestling competition. However, he continued as a wrestling referee until 1972.

Louis remained a popular celebrity in his twilight years. His friends included former rival Max Schmeling—who provided Louis with financial assistance during his retirement—and mobster Frank Lucas, who, disgusted with the government's treatment of Louis, once paid off a $50,000 tax lien held against him. These payments, along with an eventual agreement in the early 1960s by the IRS to limit its collections to an amount based on Louis's current income, allowed Louis to live comfortably toward the end of his life.

After the Louis-Schmeling fight, Jack Dempsey expressed the opinion that he was glad he never had to face Joe Louis in the ring. When Louis fell on hard financial times, Dempsey served as honorary chairman of a fund to assist Louis.

Professional golf

One of Louis's other passions was the game of golf, in which he also played a historic role. He was a long-time devotee of the sport since being introduced to the game before the first Schmeling fight in 1936. In 1952, Louis was invited to play as an amateur in the San Diego Open on a sponsor's exemption, becoming the first African American to play a PGA Tour event. Initially, the PGA of America was reluctant to allow Louis to enter the event, having a bylaw at the time limiting PGA membership to Caucasians. However, Louis's celebrity status eventually pushed the PGA toward removing the bylaw, but the "Caucasian only" clause in the PGA of America's constitution was not amended until November 1961. It paved the way for the first generation of African-American professional golfers such as Calvin Peete. Louis himself financially supported the careers of several other early black professional golfers, such as Bill Spiller, Ted Rhodes, Howard Wheeler, James Black, Clyde Martin and Charlie Sifford. He was also instrumental in founding The First Tee, a charity helping underprivileged children become acquainted with the game of golf. His son, Joe Louis Barrow, Jr., currently oversees the organization.

In 2009, the PGA of America granted posthumous membership to Ted Rhodes, John Shippen and Bill Spiller, who were denied the opportunity to become PGA members during their professional careers. The PGA also has granted posthumous honorary membership to Louis.

Personal life and death

I did the best I could with what I had

Louis had two children by wife Marva Trotter (daughter Jacqueline in 1943 and son Joseph Louis Barrow Jr. in 1947). They divorced in March 1945 only to remarry a year later, but were again divorced in February 1949. Marva moved on to an acting and modeling career. On Christmas Day 1955, Louis married Rose Morgan, a successful Harlem businesswoman; their marriage was annulled in 1958. Louis's final marriage—to Martha Jefferson, a lawyer from Los Angeles, on St. Patrick's Day 1959—lasted until his death. They had four children: another son named Joseph Louis Barrow Jr, John Louis Barrow, Joyce Louis Barrow, and Janet Louis Barrow. The younger Joe Louis Barrow Jr. lives in New York City and is involved in boxing. Though married four times, Louis discreetly enjoyed the company of other women like Lena Horne and Edna Mae Harris.

In 1940, Louis endorsed and campaigned for Republican Wendell Willkie for president. Louis said:

This country has been good to me. It gave me everything I have. I have never come out for any candidate before but I think Wendell L. Willkie will give us a square deal. So I am for Willkie because I think he will help my people, and I figure my people should be for him, too.

Starting in the 1960s, Louis was frequently mocked by segments of the African-American community (including Muhammad Ali) for being an "Uncle Tom." Drugs took a toll on Louis in his later years. In 1969, he was hospitalized after collapsing on a New York City street. While the incident was at first credited to "physical breakdown," underlying problems would soon surface. In 1970, he spent five months at the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Denver, hospitalized by his wife, Martha, and his son, Joe Louis Barrow Jr., for paranoia. In a 1971 book, Brown Bomber, by Barney Nagler, Louis disclosed the truth about these incidents, stating that his collapse in 1969 had been caused by cocaine, and that his subsequent hospitalization had been prompted by his fear of a plot to destroy him. Strokes and heart ailments caused Louis's condition to deteriorate further later in the decade. He had surgery to correct an aortic aneurysm in 1977 and thereafter used an POV/scooter for a mobility aid.

Louis died of cardiac arrest in Desert Springs Hospital near Las Vegas on April 12, 1981, just hours after his last public appearance viewing the Larry Holmes–Trevor Berbick Heavyweight Championship. Ronald Reagan waived the eligibility rules for burial at Arlington National Cemetery and Louis was buried there with full military honors on April 21, 1981. His funeral was paid for in part by former competitor and friend, Max Schmeling, who also acted as a pallbearer.

Film and television

Louis appeared in six full-length films and two shorts, including a starring role in the 1938 race film Spirit of Youth, in which he played a boxer with many similarities to himself.

He was a guest on the television show You Bet Your Life in 1955.

In 1943, he was featured in the full-length movie This is the Army, which starred Ronald Reagan, with appearances by Kate Smith singing "God Bless America" and Irving Berlin, and which was directed by Michael Curtiz.

In 1953, Robert Gordon directed a movie about Louis's life, The Joe Louis Story. Filmed in Hollywood, it starred Golden Gloves fighter Coley Wallace in the role of Louis.

Legacy

In all, Louis made 25 defenses of his heavyweight title from 1937 to 1948, and was a world champion for 11 years and 10 months. Both are still records in the heavyweight division, the former in any division. His most remarkable record is that he knocked out 23 opponents in 27 title fights, including five world champions. In addition to his accomplishments inside the ring, Louis uttered two of boxing's most famous observations: "He can run, but he can't hide" and "Everyone has a plan until they've been hit."

Louis was named fighter of the year four times by The Ring magazine in 1936, 1938, 1939, and 1941. His fights with Max Baer, Max Schmeling, Tommy Farr, Bob Pastor and Billy Conn were named fight of the year by that same magazine. Louis won the Sugar Ray Robinson Award in 1941. In 2005, Louis was named the #1 heavyweight of all time by the International Boxing Research Organization. In 2007, he was ranked #4 on ESPN.com's 50 Greatest Boxers of all-time list. In 2002 The Ring ranked Louis #4 on their 80 best fighters of the last 80 years list. Louis was also ranked #1 on The Ring's list of 100 Greatest Punchers of All Time.

Louis is also remembered in sports outside of boxing. A former indoor sports venue was named after him in Detroit, the Joe Louis Arena, where the Detroit Red Wings played their NHL games from 1979 to 2017. In 1936, Vince Leah, then a writer for the Winnipeg Tribune used Joe Louis's nickname to refer to the Winnipeg Football Club after a game. From that point, the team became known popularly as the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

His recognition also transcends the sporting world. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Joe Louis on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. On August 26, 1982, Louis was posthumously approved for the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given to civilians by the U.S. legislative branch. Congress stated that he "did so much to bolster the spirit of the American people during one of the most crucial times in American history and which have endured throughout the years as a symbol of strength for the nation". Following Louis' death, President Ronald Reagan said, "Joe Louis was more than a sports legend—his career was an indictment of racial bigotry and a source of pride and inspiration to millions of white and black people around the world."

A memorial to Louis was dedicated in Detroit (at Jefferson Avenue and Woodward) on October 16, 1986. The sculpture, commissioned by Time, Inc. and executed by Robert Graham, is a 24-foot-long (7.3 m) arm with a fisted hand suspended by a 24-foot-high (7.3 m) pyramidal framework. It represents the power of his punch both inside and outside the ring.

In an interview with Arsenio Hall in the late 1980s, Muhammad Ali stated that his two biggest influences in boxing were Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis.

On February 27, 2010, an 8-foot (2.4 m) bronze statue of Louis was unveiled in his Alabama hometown. The statue, by sculptor Casey Downing, Jr., sits on a base of red granite outside the Chambers County Courthouse.

In 1993, he became the first boxer to be honored on a postage stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

Various other facilities have been named after Joe Louis. In 1984, the four streets surrounding Madison Square Garden were named Joe Louis Plaza in his honor. The former Pipe O' Peace Golf Course in Riverdale, Illinois (a Chicago suburb), was in 1986 renamed "Joe Louis The Champ Golf Course". American Legion Post 375 in Detroit is also named after Joe Louis. Completed in 1979 at a cost of $4 million, Joe Louis Arena, nicknamed The Joe, was a hockey arena located in downtown Detroit. It was the home of the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League from 1979 until 2017. The planned demolition of the Arena prompted the City of Detroit in 2017 to rename the Inner Circle Greenway as the Joe Louis Greenway. When completed, this 39-mile (63 km) biking and walking trail will pass through the cities of Detroit, Hamtramck, Highland Park, and Dearborn.

In one of the most widely quoted tributes to Louis, New York Post sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, when responding to another person's characterization of Louis as "a credit to his race", stated, "Yes, Joe Louis is a credit to his race—the human race."

Cultural references

In his heyday, Louis was the subject of many musical tributes, including a number of blues songs.

Louis is played by actor Bari K. Willerford in the film American Gangster.

In 2009, the Brooklyn band Yeasayer debuted the single "Ambling Alp" from their forthcoming album Odd Blood, which imagines what advice Joe Louis's father might have given him prior to becoming a prizefighter. The song makes reference to Louis' boxing career and his famous rivalry with Schmeling in the first person, with the lyrics such as "Oh, Max Schmeling was a formidable foe / The Ambling Alp was too, at least that's what I'm told / But if you learn one thing, you've learned it well / In June, you must give fascists hell."

An opera based on his life, Shadowboxer, premiered on April 17, 2010.

The aforementioned sculpture of Louis's fist (see Legacy above) was one of several Detroit landmarks depicted in "Imported from Detroit", a two-minute commercial for the Chrysler 200 featuring Eminem that aired during Super Bowl XLV in 2011.

Louis is the inspiration behind Jesse Jagz's eponymous song from the album Jagz Nation Vol. 2: Royal Niger Company (2014).

The first track from John Squire's 2002 debut LP Time Changes Everything is titled "Joe Louis", and the lyrics include references to his boxing and army career.

[torturedwarrior]

John Wayne Gacy:

“I should never have been convicted of anything more serious than running a cemetery without a license.” -- John Wayne Gacy, “A clown can get away with murder.” -- John Wayne Gacy. Who is John Wayne Gacy?  What makes him a serial killer? How was he caught? American serial killer whose killings of 33 boys and young men in the 1970s attracted international media coverage and stunned his affluent Chicago neighborhood, where he was renowned for his sociability and success as a clown at charitable events and children's parties.

Gacy was raised into a blue-collar family and seems to have had a pretty ordinary upbringing. Yet he displayed an increasing inclination towards sadism, which resulted in a number of experiences with the law in the 1960s. In 1968, after his accusation that he had sexually assaulted a teenage boy, he was sentenced to the Iowa State Men's Reformatory (Anamosa State Penitentiary) and forced to undergo psychological evaluation. Following his release in 1970 and while still on parole, he was again arrested for sexual assault, but the charges were dropped later. In December 1978, the police found the first of 29 bodies buried in the affluent billionaire John Wayne Gacy's estate—26 in the crawl space beneath his residence in Norwood Park Township, and three more outside the building. He admitted to four further victims ' killings discovered in the waters south of Chicago. Forty years later, here's a roadmap to Gacy's trial, prosecution and execution, and ongoing attempts to identify the other six missing survivors. Gacy then became a fairly successful independent contractor and bought a house in Chicago's suburbs.

In 1975 teens in the uptown community inform the Chicago police that a man named "John" is circling the city in his car to pick up young people. It's John Wayne Gacy, a suburban man who runs a remodeling company. Officers are watching dozens of young men in and out of Gacy's house in Norwood Park Township. They're stopping many of them for questioning, but they don't say anything against Gacy. He is popular in his family to hold get-togethers and sometimes dress up as Pogo the Clown. In January of 1976 the police stake out John Wayne Gacy’s Home. Suspecting that Gacy might be responsible for the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy, the Chicago Police Youth Division is monitoring his house just east of O'Hare International Airport, although it is outside their jurisdiction. They're not in a position to make a case against Gacy.

“No, I don't think that's possible. I think it...after 14 years under truth serum had I committed the crime I would have known it. There's got to be something that would... would click in my mind. I've had photos of 21 of the victims and I've looked at them all over the years here and I've never recognized anyone of them.” -- John Wayne Gacy. Then in March of 1977 Gacy was suspected by police of a sexual assault. Twenty-seven-year-old North Sider Jeff Rignall says that Gacy lured him into his car by offering him marijuana before using chloroform to make him unconscious. Rignall claims Gacy then brought him to his home, arrested him, then sexually assaulted him before he let him leave. A $3,000 civil suit was dismissed in the incident. On December 31st, 1977 police had seized Gacy but then released him. He was charged by Chicago police when a 19-year-old North Side youth claims he was kidnapped by a gunpoint guy and compelled to participate in sexual acts. The police document reveals that when he was brought into custody, Gacy acknowledged that he was participating in activities with the youth—and their brutality—but declined to encourage the child to participate. The Deputy State Attorney chooses not to charge Gacy.

In December 11, 1978 a young boy by the name Robert Piest who was a 15-year-old sophomore at Maine West High School goes missing. Piest says to his mother to wait for a couple of minutes, because he has to see a man who pays 5 $/hour for a construction job, almost twice as much as he does in the drug store. But he has not been seen again. Then on December 12th, 1978 Lt. Kozenczak, whose son is attending the same high school as Piest, is insisting on a thorough investigation. He learns that Gacy, whose PDM Contractors had recently remodeled Nisson Pharmacy, was the man Piest went to talk about a job. Gacy was then asked to come to the station for investigation.

The next day on December 13th, 1978 Gacy leads police to a search warrant because he denied everything he was being charged with. Later investigators discover that Gacy's car was towed at 2 a.m. from a snowbank. On the Tri-State Tollway north of Ogden Avenue— about 38 miles north of where Gacy later claimed to have dumped the body of Piest. The tow truck company's reports help investigators assess the moment Gacy disposed of the youth's body within an hour. Around 3:20 a.m., Gacy marches with mud on his pants and shoes to the Des Plaines police station. He asks for a conversation with Kozenczak but is told to return later. He returns and gives a brief statement to the officers. Kozenczak asks Gacy to give him a search warrant for the keys to his house. Gacy is protesting but giving up his keys. Then December 21st, 1978 Gacy was arrested. Gacy is seen as passing a package containing cannabis to a gas station clerk while under police surveillance. According to Gacy, then arrested. Investigators were informed that Gacy has already confirmed that he has conducted "maybe 30" killings to his attorney. With Gacy in custody, police from Des Plaines and investigators from the office of Cook County sheriff get a warrant and enter Gacy's one-story. Police accuse Gacy against his will to hold Piest there and threaten to tear the floor to find the body of the teen. Gacy denies that Piest is there but says he was forced to kill a self-defense man and buried him under his garage's concrete floor. He directs police to the driveway and labels the place on the ground where the corpse is found with a can of spray paint., ranch-style house again.

On December 22nd, 1978 Gacy Finally confesses. "(Gacy's) giving all kinds of statements, saying there's a body here, a body there, a body in a lake or a lagoon, a body buried.” -- Cook County Sheriff Richard Elrod. In a rambling, repetitive speech that continues for several hours, Gacy tells police that after having sex with them, he murdered 32 young men. He speaks about himself in the third person, claiming "Jack" or "John" performed the murders and sex acts. He claims he hid the corpses of 27 people on his estate (29 would be found), most of them in the crawl space. Five other corpses (four would be found by police), including Piest's, have been dumped into waterways south of Chicago, claims Gacy. He sketches a diagram showing where the bodies are buried, offering six of his victims ' addresses. Gacy was convicted of the assassination of Piest, although the corpse of the teenager was not identified.  December 26, 1978 the police find eight bodies in the crawlspace in Gacy’s home; but nine bodies were recovered. " ... one of the most horrendous (cases) I have ever had anything to do with."-- Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey. eight so far from the crawl space in the northeast quarter of the house, in an area under the office where Gacy conducted his remodeling business.

The Police have found thirty-two bodies but only five were not identified. The victims of John Wayne Gacy are: John Butkovich (18 years old), James Mazzara (20 years old), Frank Landingin (19 years old), Gregory Godzik ( 17 years old), John Szye (19 years old), Rick Johnston (17 years old), Timothy Jack McCoy (16 years old), Michael Bonnin (17 years old), Robert Gilroy (18 years old), Jon Prestidge (20 years old), Russell Nelson (21-22 years old), Victim No. 28 (14-18 years old), Victim No. 5 (22-32 years old), Darrel Samson (19 years old), Samuel Stapleton (14 years old), Randall Reffett (15 years old), William Carroll (16 years old), Victim No. 26 (22-30 years old), Jimmy Haakenson (16 years old), Victim No. 21 (21-27 years old), William George Bundy (19 years old). Michael Marino (14 years old), Kenneth Parker (16 years old), Victim No. 10 (17-21 years old), Matthew Bowman (18 years old), John Mowery (19 years old), Robert Winch (18 years old), Tommy Boling (20 years old), David Talsma (20 years old), William Kindred (19 years old), Timothy O’Rourke (20 years old), and Robert Piest (15 years old).

"I don't know what this trial cost. Whatever the cost, it was a small price. My voice is cracking because I really feel it's a small price we pay for our freedom. What we do for the John Gacy’s of this world, we will do for everyone." -- Judge Louis Garippo. March 13th, 1980 John Wayne Gacy has been sentenced to death. Judge Garippo imposes an execution date for John Wayne Gacy for June 2, 1980, but the penalty is indefinitely postponed while the case is brought before the Supreme Court of Illinois. On May 15th,1980 Gacy’s Lawyers; Sam Amirante and Robert Motta who have been paid each of the amount of $44,424 for defending Gacy have withdrawn from the case and then they billed the county $57,603 for expenses. Then his judge-Judge Garippo resigns from the bench after twelve years as a Cook County Judge to go into private practice. "If his lawyers believed that deluging the court with paper at the last instant would lead us to delay the execution in order to have more time to read the documents, they were mistaken."-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, U.S. Court of Appeals. Gacy finally died after a lethal injection of drugs at 12:58 a.m., with all his civil challenges rejected. At the Corrections Facility in Stateville near Joliet and Fried chicken and butterfly shrimp was his last meal.

      Work Cited:

 Jenkins, John Philip. “John Wayne Gacy.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 31 Oct. 2019. Web. 14 Dec. 2019.

Rumore, Kori and Kyle Bentle. "Here are John Wayne Gacy's victims - Chicago Tribune." Chicago Tribune: Chicago news, sports, weather, entertainment. 17 Dec 2018. Web. 13 Dec 2019. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/history/ct-john-wayne-gacy-victims-20181215-htmlstory.html>.

"Timeline: Suburban serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the efforts to recover, name his 33 victims - Chicago Tribune." Chicago Tribune: Chicago news, sports, weather, entertainment. Web. 13 Dec 2019. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/history/ct-john-wayne-gacy-timeline-htmlstory.html>.

"Top 20 quotes of JOHN WAYNE GACY famous quotes and sayings | inspringquotes.us." Inspiring Quotes | inspiringquotes.us. Web. 13 Dec 2019. <http://www.inspiringquotes.us/author/1001-john-wayne-gacy>.

[bountyofbeads]

DONALD TRUMP’S STRANGE AND DANGEROUS ‘ABSOLUTE RIGHTS’ IDEA

This is a profound misunderstanding of the American constitutional system.

FEBRUARY 29, 2020

By Jane Chong, Former law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit | Published February 29, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted March 01, 2020 |

President Donald Trump’s theory of executive power starts and ends with his “absolute rights.”

Trump invoked that catchphrase earlier this month, when, in apparent response to his angry tweets, the Justice Department undercut its own prosecutors and reduced their recommended prison sentence for Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime friend and former campaign adviser. Trump denied having asked the Justice Department to step in—but not without insisting that he had the “absolute right to do it” if he so chose.

That claim is a favorite Trump refrain, and like a brake warning light, it tends to signal that the car is no longer safely in contact with the legal road. In May 2017, after The New York Times  reported that Trump had spilled highly classified information to Russian government officials, he tweeted that he had “the absolute right to do so.” In December of that year, when asked whether the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails should be reopened, Trump invoked his “absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.” Six months later, in June 2018, Trump tweeted that Robert Mueller’s investigation was “totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” and that if push came to shove, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.”

[ Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: 23 dangerous propositions the Senate just ratified]

Things snowballed in 2019. In February of that year, Trump announced that he had the “absolute right to declare a national emergency” in order to obtain border-wall funding that Congress had not authorized. In April, Trump denied reports that he had offered to pardon the Customs and Border Protection commissioner if he were arrested for enforcing Trump’s policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, but tweeted that he had “the absolute right” to close the border. In October, in the midst of the House impeachment inquiry into his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump claimed that he had an “absolute right, perhaps even a duty,” to ask foreign countries for help in investigating corruption. In November, he derided Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, by tweet in the middle of her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee and claimed his “absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

The temptation may be to dismiss Trump’s theory of absolute rights as a showy rhetorical tic. But one of his very first acts as president was to operationalize that theory, not long after debuting it on the campaign trail. “The president has the right to ban any group or anybody … that he feels is going to do harm to our country,” Trump explained in a June 2016 appearance on Howie Carr’s radio show, while inveighing against Muslim immigration to the United States after the mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. “They have an absolute right, Howie.” Seven days after his inauguration, Trump signed a legally and operationally unworkable executive order imposing a 120-day ban on entry for all refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries and an indefinite ban on all refugees from Syria, which reportedly underwent none of the usual interagency review processes.

Most recently, less than a week after claiming his “absolute right” to intervene in Stone’s case, Trump issued a round of pardons that conspicuously included his friends and associates, most colorfully Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor and a contestant on Trump’s show Celebrity Apprentice, who was caught on FBI wiretaps in 2008 trying to sell President Barack Obama’s Senate seat. The move suggests more coming interference on behalf of Stone, the “tough, loyal guy” whose case, Trump alleges, was “totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought,” and whose trial, Trump claims, suffered “significant bias.” Last week, when asked again about his plans regarding Stone, Trump mused aloud, “I’m allowed to be totally involved. I’m actually, I guess, the chief law-enforcement officer of the country.”

[ Read: Will Trump destroy the presidency?]

The point is, Trump’s theory of executive power does real work and has had real consequences. The opening memorandum prepared by Trump’s defense team for his Senate impeachment trial, for example, served as an homage to the general concept of absolute rights and built from its vision of an unconstrained executive the startling argument that the president cannot be impeached for abuses of power. Trump’s coinage actually made a revealing, and legally mystifying, appearance in the brief: “It is well settled that the President has a virtually absolute right to maintain the confidentiality of his diplomatic communications with foreign leaders.” As support for this sweeping claim, Trump’s team cited the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in United States v. Nixon. But that decision notes nothing more than the courts’ traditional deference to the president’s claims of executive privilege over communications bearing on sensitive foreign-policy and national-security matters—and ultimately determined that President Richard Nixon had to hand over tapes subpoenaed by the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

Where Trump derived the idea that as president he enjoys absolute rights is unclear. But his chosen phraseology is sticky and evocative. It carries a quasi-juridical ring that belies its conceptual incoherence. Closely examined, his incessant invocation of the phrase evokes the image not of the leader of the free world, but of a freeholder enjoying untrammeled and indefinite possession of his estate. Constitutionally baseless but rhetorically compelling, the whole concept of “absolute rights” is best described as a legal innovation by a real-estate mogul who understands power through the prism of private property rather than public obligation.

As the owner and developer of a sprawling global real-estate empire, Trump, of course, knows a thing or two about property. And in the world of property, the best kind of ownership is “absolute”—or “perfect”—title. Absolute title grants the title holder unequivocal, unchallengeable ownership rights. The property is free and clear, to be enjoyed and used by the owner as he sees fit. It is encumbered by nothing. The owner is beholden to no one.

What does it mean for Trump to claim ownership of not a golf resort but the executive branch of the U.S. government?

Commentators have repeatedly observed that Trump “has often seemed to conflate himself with the government, and his own interests with the nation’s.” Thus, to criticize Trump is to attack America. This makes some sense if the unitary executive is reimagined as a sole proprietorship, an arrangement in which the business enterprise enjoys no legal existence separate from its owner.

“I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Trump crowed to a group of teenage conservatives at a Washington, D.C., summit in July, awkwardly waving his constitutional authority like a golden ticket entitling him to full possession of a chocolate factory. Conceived this way, as absolute title, Article II vests the president not with power sanctioned by and concomitant with his obligations to the people, but with rights enforceable against them.

This is a profound misunderstanding of the American constitutional system. Within that system, rights protect individuals against incursions by the state. The assertion of “absolute rights” by the country’s chief executive stands this concept on its head by purporting to insulate state conduct, however arbitrary and transgressive, from review or even critique. The idea is incompatible with the design of Article II, which vests the president with conditional, circumscribed authority to ensure that the laws are “faithfully executed.” Some of that authority is his alone to exercise—for example, only the president can grant pardons, command the armed forces, and recognize foreign states. But to the extent he misunderstands or abuses that authority, the Constitution facilitates challenge by the other branches. In extreme cases, that challenge is supposed to take the form of impeachment and removal.

In short, absolute presidential rights have no place within a constitutional democracy, wherein all power is derived from the will of the governed. And they have no purchase in a three-branch federalist republic, wherein the national executive is subject to check by Congress and the courts, and forbidden from seizing powers held by the states.

Since the start of his presidency, Trump has been criticized for asserting what amounts to a kingship—prompting one of his personal lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, to announce during the House impeachment inquiry that as president, Trump “has the power that kings have never had.” Dershowitz’s unabashed embrace of the comparison calls to mind the closing words of Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist No. 69,” which underscore the differences between the president of the United States and the king of Great Britain. The president is an officer elected by the people; the king is “perpetual and hereditary.” The president is “amenable to personal punishment and disgrace”; the king is “sacred and inviolable.” Hamilton concluded his exercise with a call to resist those who claim “things so unlike resemble each other.”

But closely examined, the executive-power claims pioneered by Trump, the consummate wheeler and dealer, may not require leaping to a wholly different governmental paradigm. Something messier is happening here, something less lucid and self-aware than a power grab by a would-be monarch. For Trump, who inherited and then spent a lifetime expanding an empire that embodies ownership on a scale unimaginable to the ordinary American, power has always been property, property has always been power. James Madison wrote, “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort.” In Trump’s view, that protected property happens to include all the authorities and privileges encompassed in the “absolute rights” of the American presidency, the greatest deal he has ever closed.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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JANE CHONG is the former deputy managing editor of Lawfare and served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

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TRUMP’S QUIET POWER GRAB

The president’s administration is attempting to bring thousands of federal employees under his control, and the public is largely unaware.

By Peter M. Shane | Published February 26, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted March 01, 2020 |

Throughout the federal government are thousands of officials who do not direct courtrooms, but who are, in a sense, judges. They are federal employees who preside over trial-like disputes, hear evidence and testimony, and make decisions that can deeply shape people’s lives, such as the granting of asylum and veterans benefits. These executive-branch employees are administrative adjudicators.

The Trump administration has launched an obscure but dangerous effort to undermine this system, and to dictate both the appropriate circumstances for commencing adjudication and the rules that govern how disputes with agencies are resolved. If the Trump administration’s strategy works, it will have steered the federal bureaucracy further toward an authoritarian future in which all executive-branch policy making must bend to the whims of a single individual, the president.

[ Shadi Hamid: The fundamental legitimacy of Donald Trump.]

Although precise data are hard to find, recent work by two leading administrative-law scholars suggests there are roughly 12,000 of these agency adjudicators of various types across the federal bureaucracy, as compared with about 870 permanently authorized federal-court judges. Though the number of matters these adjudicators handle is very hard to come by, a 2016 estimate suggests that they decide more than 750,000 cases annually, which would be about double the number of civil and criminal felony case filings in federal district court.

A plurality of administrative adjudications involve Social Security disability claims. But there is extensive variety among the several hundred agencies and programs involved in administrative adjudication. Some agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, engage in licensing. Others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Trade Commission, impose penalties for legal noncompliance. Numerous adjudication schemes across multiple agencies involve disputes about government payments, the awarding and administration of government contracts and benefits, and the imposition of employee discipline. A database created by Stanford Law School and the Administrative Conference of the United States numbers these programs and the agencies involved in the hundreds.

The public is, for the most part, quite oblivious to much of this activity’s scope and importance, much less the Trump administration’s attacks on its integrity. What is at stake is not the specific resolution of individual disputes—at least not thus far—but rather the authority to dictate the general rules by which agencies decide individual cases, cases in which accuracy and impartiality are key values.

Administrative adjudication is essential to the effective implementation of federal law. For some agencies, adjudication is a necessary component of policy making, because the statutes they enforce are extremely general and sweeping; specificity gets fleshed out on a case-by-case basis. Indeed, prior to the 1960s, administrative adjudication was more prevalent than issuing general regulations as a policy-making vehicle. For example, the National Labor Relations Board  is charged with combatting “unfair labor practices.” It gives that standard meaning by bringing cases against individual employers who engage in activity the NLRB suspects is unlawful. These matters are tried before officials called administrative-law judges, or ALJs, whose decisions are reviewable first by the five members of the NLRB and then, if appealed, by a federal court. Lawyers working on subsequent labor disputes can consult the administrative orders that emanate from these adjudicative proceedings, just as they would read court decisions, to find out how the NLRB interprets the law. This is, likewise, how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) pursues “unfair or deceptive trade practices,” and how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prosecutes a variety of offenses under the federal Securities Act.

Congress also empowers a wide variety of administrative judges to be the first-line decision makers regarding individual applicants for all sorts of government benefits. The largest group comprises the ALJs who work for the Social Security Administration. Other agencies use different categories of administrative judges to approve applications under programs as diverse as veterans benefits, patents, and refugee asylum. ALJs enjoy a number of statutory protections intended to depoliticize their service and to protect, within bounds, the independence of their judgment. Other agency adjudicators with different titles almost always enjoy less protection for their decision-making independence, based on their agencies’ governing statutes.

[ Kim Wehle: Congress has lost its power over Trump.]

The Trump administration is now waging a two-pronged attack on the independence of all administrative adjudicators, including ALJs, and the agencies that employ them. The first prong involves telling agencies, via executive orders, how to exercise the discretion that Congress has given them to conduct adjudication. One such order, from October 2019, boasts the lofty title “Promoting the Rule of Law Through Transparency and Fairness in Civil Administrative Enforcement and Adjudication.” Among its provisions is a limit on when agencies may judge a private party’s past conduct to be unlawful based on a general legal standard. The executive order says that no such agency determination may be issued unless the agency has first warned the public—through a specific rule—that the general legal standard prohibits the conduct the agency would now challenge.

This may not sound like much, but in practice it would make the work of a number of federal agencies far more difficult. Consider this scenario: The FTC finds that a company has been using artificial intelligence in a novel way to ascertain which of its online customers can most effectively be tempted by a misleading, if not outright duplicitous, sales pitch. The FTC has never encountered the practice before. The FTC’s statute currently gives the agency discretion to launch an administrative proceeding against the company to determine whether the technique should be deemed a forbidden “unfair or deceptive trade practice.” If, based on the agency’s policy deliberations and a carefully assembled factual record, the FTC determines that the practice is “unfair” or “deceptive,” it could prohibit the company’s future use of that practice. What the FTC could not do would be to penalize the company for its pre-adjudication conduct—for example, by levying a fine—if no prior FTC proceeding had warned the company that it was violating federal law. The relief—as lawyers call a remedy to a legal problem—would have to be entirely forward-looking. The Supreme Court has approved this manner of administrative adjudication since 1947.

Under the Trump order, the FTC would not be allowed to proceed as I have described. It would first have to conduct a rule-making on the fairness of AI-guided online sales practices before it could go after any firm. This might be grossly inefficient and would disable the FTC from developing a nuanced factual understanding of regulated practices through individual cases. The Trump order does insist: “Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof.” The problem with this promise not to “impair” is that the order’s so-called fair-warning requirement, if applied to delay or prevent adjudication, would do just that. On this issue, Trump’s order either alters the discretion of administrative agencies or it is meaningless.

[ Peter M. Shane: The obscure—but crucial—rules the Trump administration has sought to corrupt ]

The second and even more aggressive prong is the Trump administration’s campaign to undermine independent agencies, which conduct a lot of the highest-profile administrative adjudications. The aim is to put an end altogether to the idea of independent officers in the executive branch. An agency is considered an “independent agency” if its head or heads may be dismissed by the president only with good cause—typically, “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect of office.” Conventional understanding is that presidents may fire at will any administrator who lacks such statutory protection. The Department of Justice under Trump, however, has been working hard to nudge the Supreme Court into determining either that any statutory limits on presidential at-will removal authority are categorically unconstitutional or that “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect of office” must be interpreted broadly enough that failure to follow any presidential directive would become “good cause” for dismissal. This would effectively end, for example, the independence of the Federal Reserve System.

The Justice Department’s first attempt at curtailing independence came in a 2018 case called Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission. The issue in Lucia was whether ALJs used by the SEC were “officers”—as opposed to “employees” of the United States—and thus had to be directly appointed by the SEC itself. (Under Article II of the Constitution, Congress may allow heads of agencies to appoint “inferior” officers. The president must appoint “principal officers” with Senate advice and consent. Congress has free rein for determining how “employees” may be hired.) The Court determined that the ALJs were indeed “officers” under the Constitution. It thus concluded that the SEC had acted unconstitutionally by allowing its chief administrative-law judge, working with SEC staff, to choose the commission’s ALJs. By not personally signing off on the appointments, the SEC commissioners had hoped to create the appearance of greater impartiality when their ALJs decided cases in which the SEC itself was a party. But given the Court’s holding, the SEC commissioners—the agency’s principal political appointees—would henceforth have to formally appoint the bureaucratic judges deciding the agency’s cases.

The Justice Department wanted the Court to go further, however. It argued that if the ALJs are “officers,” then the statute protecting them from at-will discharge would have to be narrowly interpreted so that they could be fired simply for failing to follow directions. The Court explicitly refused to discuss the issue. But the Solicitor General proceeded to issue a memorandum to all agency general counsels, advertising the Department’s eagerness to mount this argument in a future case.

A more direct vehicle for pushing the Court to invalidate agency independence from presidential control is a case to be argued on March 3, Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (I helped write an amicus brief in this case defending the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure.) The Justice Department’s  position is that the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1935 decision upholding agency independence, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, should be overruled. Should the Court agree, it would not only render independent judges unconstitutional within any agency, but Congress would no longer be able, through tenure protections, to limit direct presidential policy control over the principal officers who deliver each agency’s final judgments—members of the Federal Communications Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and all the similar bodies I have already mentioned. All would become removable by the president at will.

The Trump administration, in short, is challenging agencies’ ability to go after wrongdoing through administrative adjudication, and is seeking to undermine the independence of both first-line agency adjudicators and the heads of the agencies they work for. The administration appears intent on expanding this campaign. On January 30, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a request for information that could be used to inform further agency-adjudication orders. Public comments are due on March 16. The questions posed by the OMB suggest the Trump administration is interested in significantly rewriting the rules by which agencies conduct their trial-type proceedings.

Yoni Appelbaum: Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore

By making the investigation and prosecution of regulated parties more difficult, the president threatens to create a system that, through centralized control, would allow cronyism and “agency capture” to protect corporate interests ahead of the public interest. New rules shaping adjudication could also enable political officials to make it harder for individuals to get the government benefits to which they are entitled.

A group of administrative-law scholars at George Washington University wrote a friend-of-the-court  brief in  Lucia  warning of the disaster that would follow tightening political controls over agency adjudicators. They pointed out that “Congress devoted a substantial amount of time during the 1930s and 1940s to the question of how to structure agencies that engage in adjudication of regulatory disputes.” By statute, Congress imposed procedures for ALJs that were “specifically designed to ensure that they had an appropriate degree of decisional independence from the agencies whose cases they were to hear.” Making ALJs removable at will, or simply for failing to follow directions by political superiors, would undermine the impartiality that Congress sought to guarantee.

Impartiality is anathema to Trumpism. That the Trump administration wants to upend a long-standing system for assuring both the reality and appearance of fairness in agency adjudication may be shocking. But it is not surprising. If you consider yourself on block watch for threats to democracy, take your eyes for a moment off the president’s Twitter feed and turn your attention to administrative law. Danger is lurking amid the complexity.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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PETER M. SHANE is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II chair in law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.

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The World Is Experiencing a New Form of Autocracy

Today’s authoritarians use legal measures to subvert constitutional constraints on their power.

By Tim Horley, Anne Meng, Mila Versteeg | Published March 01, 2020 7:30 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted March 01, 2020 |

In March 2018, Donald Trump, addressing a crowd of donors at his Florida estate, told what sounded like a joke. He was talking about the recent amendment of China’s constitution to remove presidential term limits, allowing Xi Jinping to serve in that office indefinitely. About Xi, Trump said: “He’s now president for life, president for life. And he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give it a shot someday.” The crowd cheered and applauded in response. In fact, Trump has told one version or another of this joke many times since becoming president.

And though Trump’s remarks are generally perceived as facetious, many of his counterparts on the world stage are quite serious. In January, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian nation in an annual State of the Union–esque speech. Alongside pledges to improve living standards by, among other things, offering free hot meals to schoolchildren, he proposed major constitutional reforms that could see the presidential office weakened and the prime ministry and State Council strengthened—measures very likely aimed at ensuring that Putin can remain in power after 2024, when constitutional term limits will force him out of the presidency.

[ Barbara McQuade: What would happen if Trump refused to leave Office? SEE TIMELINE]

This is how authoritarianism looks today. Our original study documents all term limit evasion strategies worldwide since the year 2000. We found that presidential-term-limit evasion is exceedingly common: About one-third of all presidents who reached the end of their term made a serious attempt to overstay. Two-thirds of those who made the attempt succeeded.

What’s particularly interesting is not only that so many presidents try to evade term limits, but that they are more and more sophisticated and legalistic in how they do so. Whereas leaders once used unmistakably authoritarian actions to stay in power, such as banning opposition parties or dismissing the legislature, today’s heads of state instead use democratic institutions and legal measures to subvert constitutional constraints on their power. More specifically, we found that there are four basic strategies for evading term limits, none of which violates a constitution outright: adding constitutional amendments, rewriting the constitution, using the courts to reinterpret the constitution, and appointing a placeholder president.

The first and most common strategy—used in some 66 percent of the attempts in our data—is simply to amend the constitution to extend or remove term limits. This is the path Xi took when, with hardly a whisper of dissent, he removed any limit on the number of five-year terms he could serve. Often, such changes are breathtaking in their sophistication. In Rwanda, for instance, Paul Kagame presided over a constitutional amendment process that will allow him to serve for a total of 35 years (or longer, if further amendments are in the offing). The effort began in 2015, when Kagame’s party encouraged voters to sign petitions urging Parliament to give the president an additional term. The party—the Rwandan Patriotic Front—withheld its formal endorsement for these efforts until a critical mass of signatures was reached. Once this happened, Parliament passed an amendment unanimously, and then a reported 98.9 percent of voters in a popular referendum ensured that the amendment would take effect. Throughout, Kagame himself never made public whether he intended to remain in office or otherwise commented on the amendment process, and he announced his intention to seek another term only after the measure had passed. The amendment allows Kagame—and only Kagame—an additional seven-year term, after which a new limit of two five-year terms (passed as part of the amendment package) will apply to him on a prospective basis. Thus, he may remain in office until 2034 while preserving an aura of democratic legitimacy and guaranteeing, at least on paper, that his successor will be limited to a maximum of 10 years.

A second strategy, which constitutes about 8 percent of evasion attempts, is what we call the “blank slate” strategy: when a leader creates an entirely new constitution, essentially nullifying the old term limits. When a new constitution is created, the leader’s term is effectively restarted, without any apparent constitutional violation. This was one of the methods employed by former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir until his ouster last year: After taking power in 1989, he oversaw not one but two entirely new constitutions, and thus remained in power for decades without formally violating term limits; each time there was a new constitution, his term started all over again.

A third strategy, which has had remarkable success in Latin America in particular, is to challenge the very legality of term limits in court. This strategy constitutes about 15 percent of evasion attempts since the turn of the millennium. In Nicaragua, for example, President Daniel Ortega was able to successfully remove term limits from his nation’s constitution by arguing that they were a violation of his human rights. The court, reasoning from a body of constitutional and human-rights law, agreed. A similar story unfolded in Bolivia and Honduras. In fact, though one might be tempted to put faith in judges to prevent executive overstay, our study found that courts are remarkably pliant. With the important exception of Colombia, where the Constitutional Court blocked Álvaro Uribe’s attempt to extend his term a second time, courts tend to sign off on term-limit evasion in all its guises.

A fourth strategy, also constituting about 15 percent of evasion attempts, is what we call the “faithful-agent strategy,” which involves presidents seeking a successor they can control, so that they can continue to govern even while formally out of office. Putin was previously able to extend his own rule using this strategy. He took office in 2000, when Russian presidents were limited to two consecutive terms of four years. In 2008, rather than simply moving aside or seeking to overstay his legal term as president, he stepped down, endorsing a handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, as president. Medvedev promised to nominate Putin as prime minister if elected. With Putin’s endorsement, Medvedev easily won the presidency, and very shortly after taking office he oversaw a parliamentary vote confirming Putin as prime minister. For the next four years, Putin served as a potent prime minister to the relatively inert President Medvedev. After constitutional reforms passed in that era, Putin could return to two more consecutive presidential terms, now extended to six years each. Thus, without violating the law, Putin has maintained an iron grip on power for 20 years; he is the longest-serving Russian head of state since Joseph Stalin.

Finally, a small handful of presidents were able to stay past their term by illegally delaying or canceling elections. However, this is the least frequently used strategy (only 5 percent of evasion attempts), most likely because it is more evidently illegal and authoritarian.

Still, one-third of overstay attempts did fail—and typically in spectacular fashion. In recent years, popular movements in Malawi, Burkina Faso, and Paraguay, among many others, have forced presidents to back down. (Burning down parliament, where the president’s allies may be at work on legislation to extend the president’s term, seems to be a particularly effective palliative.)

In Paraguay, for example, a recent push to amend the constitution to remove its strict single five-year term limits initially looked poised to succeed: Then-President Horacio Cartes secured enough support to get the Paraguayan Senate to pass an amendment that would have removed term limits. Unexpectedly, however, the opposition called for nationwide protests, and thousands of Paraguayans heeded the call—a variety of political and religious groups joined in, including, most prominently, the Catholic Church. Protesters clashed with the police, leading to one protester's death, but they managed to burn down the part of the legislature where the Senate met. The strong public backlash was enough to pressure Cartes to back down, formally withdrawing his support for the amendment via a letter to the archbishop of Asunción. Congress then voted down the proposal, and in the 2018 elections, Cartes did not participate, allowing for the election of current President Mario Abdo Benítez.

Paraguay is just one recent example of the power of public resistance; our study found that popular resistance through the coordinated efforts of various civil-society groups, including students, clergy, labor unions, and—in some cases most crucially—defectors from the president’s own party, is by far the most effective means of preventing overstay. Another source of optimism is that in well-established democracies with a long history of rotation from power, executive overstay is relatively rare. Out of these democracies in our data set, only 18 percent of leaders attempted to evade term limits, mostly through constitutional amendments.

Nonetheless, the legal and constitutional strategies that leaders use to keep themselves in power are particularly dangerous precisely because they are perceived as being procedurally democratic. A new generation of autocrats has perfected the art of looking democratic while pursuing authoritarian goals. Whether they succeed usually comes down to whether ordinary citizens take the threat seriously enough to do something about it.

This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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TIM HORLEY is a lawyer and a 2018 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law.

ANNE MENG is an assistant professor of politics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Constraining Dictatorship.

MILA VERSTEEG is the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and a senior fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. She is the author of the forthcoming book, How Constitutional Rights Matter.

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[rockford-illinois-daily-blog]

Rockford Illinois Daily

Rockford, Illinois

Known for its architectural significance, Rockford is the home of various historic architecture including the 1873 Lake-Peterson House and the Victorian era Erlander Home Museum. The city is notable for having modern architectural movements such as the Prairie School and the Deco Art. One of the city’s most renowned cultural facility is the Coronado Theatre which was recognized as one of the Great Places in Illinois due to its unique blend of Spanish Baroque Revival and Art Deco. Rockford also boosts its cultural significance with its 1929 Faust Hotel which serves as the home of the elderly and disabled.

Law Office of Paul M. Marriett

The Law Office of Paul M. Marriett is owned and founded by lawyer Paul M. Marriett. Marriett is experienced in representing clients in family and domestic law cases and in seeking for the financial recovery of businesses and employees. He is an expert in handling cases related to general traffic, federal immigration law, criminal defense and personal injury. Paul Marriett implements a service oriented practice in his office to ensure that clients are satisfied with the service provided. The law firm is responsive and works closely with clients to guide them from the start up until the case is resolved.

State’s worst schools challenge large Illinois districts to change

ROCKFORD — More than half of Illinois’ worst-performing schools are nowhere near the concrete jungles of Chicago that most people associate with low test scores and high dropout rates. Lewis Lemon Elementary School is surrounded by modest, wood-frame homes, many of which are more than 100 years old and in varying states of disrepair. Several houses within walking distance of the school have boarded-up doors and windows. The school itself, named after a slave who bought his freedom shortly after moving to Rockford with one of the city’s founders in 1834, is one of the Rockford Public Schools’ newest, built in 1993. About a block away, a multimillion-dollar road improvement project wrapped up in 2014 and a new grocery store opened in 2015. Read more here

Worst performing schools in Illinois challenged school districts to change how they implement public education in 2019. Aside from population loss and high crime rates, the economic status of an area affects the improvement of student achievement which is a major problem of schools in the state. Chicago Public Schools have the most number of worst schools with a total of 95 lowest performing schools while Rockford ranks next with 16 schools included in the lowest performing category. The performance of schools are measured based on academic growth, chronic absenteeism, reading and math proficiency and progress of English language learners.

Nicholas Conservatory & Gardens in Rockford, Illinois

Nicholas Conservatory & Gardens is located along the banks of Rock River in Rockford, Illinois. The facility houses an 11,000 square foot area for plant exhibition which is equipped with water features, sculptures and seating areas. An Eclipse Lagoon can be seen inside the facility along with a waterfall, two fountains and a pedestrian bridge. The conservatory is connected to the Sinnissippi Rose Garden through a walkway. Program staff in the conservatory is offering yoga for kids and adults, and a 45-minute program that explores culture and art. The Conservatory is open from 9 am to 5 pm from Tuesday to Friday.

Link to map

Driving Direction

5 min (1.7 miles)

via IL-251 S and E State St

Best route, lighter traffic than usual

Nicholas Conservatory & Gardens

1354 N 2nd St, Rockford, IL 61107, USA

Head southwest toward Ethel Ave

10 ft

Turn left onto Ethel Ave

144 ft

Turn right at the 1st cross street onto N 2nd St

0.6 mi

Continue straight onto IL-251 S

0.6 mi

Turn right onto E State St

Destination will be on the left

0.4 mi

Law Office of Paul M. Marriett

"308 W. State Street, Suite 327;

Rockford, Illinois"

[jswdmb1]

Put the Message in the Box

“Put the message in the box

Put the box into the car

Drive the car around the world

Until you get heard”

- World Party

Yes, I have enjoyed my break, thanks for asking, but it’s time to get back to work.  While I was off, I had plenty of time to read through all of the wonderful questions you sent.  Well, actually, it was only one.  But, given my difficulties sometimes grasping with reality, I couldn’t be sure if it was the only one I got, or if there were more just coming from my head.  Turns out, I was mixing up the voices in my head with the radio.  So, to avoid any confusion, I’ve included all of them here in my version of (bow to David Letterman) viewer mail.  Here we go:

“Astrology. Do you believe there is something to it? I mean like real astrology - like Ptolemy, Cassini, and Nostradamus practiced - not the one-size-fits-all horoscope you find in the newspaper.” - anonymous

Great question.  I definitely agree that these silly newspaper horoscopes are a waste of time, but the notion that the stars and planets somehow dictate what happens to us here on Earth is not something that I dismiss.  The problem I have is how could anyone possibly figure that out.  I am a very analytical person, and I just can’t believe someone like Nostradamus could have had the tools and data available to him at that point in time to make any sort of informed conclusions.  Frankly, I think he was just throwing a lot of shit up against the wall and just seeing what sticks.  That being said, the vastness and grandeur of our universe certainly suggest that there are forces out there that could have a significant impact on our lives. Unfortunately, I’m a bit too cynical and/or agnostic to believe that anyone will ever be able to prove that, in my lifetime anyway.  I guess that relegates me back to the astrology section in the newspaper, but I pass right by it to the crossword puzzle anyway, so I guess I’ll just have to keep finding things out one day at a time for now.  But, I’m open to any foresight that can be given to me, with proof of course.

“What’s going on?” - Marvin G., Detroit, Michigan

Gee, Marvin, where do I begin?  It seems if you even take a couple of days off there is “shocking” news that has already been replaced with something even more unbelievable.  I think, however, that this most recent story of a certain lawyer who worked for a certain boss who made him pay certain porn stars and committed a bunch of laws in the process is going to stick.  I think what everyone has to remember, including our president, is that impeachment is a political process and not a legal one.  Whether he can be indicted for a crime, or even if one exists that can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt is irrelevant.  If the legislative branch feels from a political standpoint that the president needs to be removed due to his actions (or inaction) then they must proceed with impeachment proceedings.  If you look at impeachment processes in history, notably Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and even Richard Nixon, what got them in trouble pales in comparison to what this guy looks to have done.  I happen to think that means this is going to be going on for a long time and well into the 2020 election cycle.  No matter which side you are on, this is going to be political theater at its highest level, so enjoy it if you are into that thing.

“Can you get to that?” - Mavis S., Chicago, Illinois

Personally speaking, Mavis, I can definitely get to impeachment proceedings commencing at some point in the next six-to-twelve months.  The question is where do they go once they start and do they ever leave the committee level?  Even if they do, it seems unlikely to me that things could move fast enough to the House voting for impeachment by the 2020 primaries.  Furthermore, a Senate trial with a conviction appears even further far-fetched given eighteen Republican senators would have to flip on their sitting president (remember that a 2/3 majority is needed to convict).  I’m actually okay with that scenario playing out as it allows a lot of probing and debate that hasn’t happened in the past two years and gives the voters in the next election much better information than they had last time.  I also think that it gives other Republicans cover to challenge a sitting president in the primaries, which hasn’t happened seriously since Ted Kennedy took on Jimmy Carter in 1980.  My prediction is that impeachment never really gets off the ground, but it damages Trump so badly that he never makes it out of his party’s primaries.  Of course, this could all change tomorrow with the next bombshell that drops, but for now that’s what I see happening.

“What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” - Michael S., Athens, Georgia

Thanks for the note, Michael.  The name’s Jim, actually.  Anyway, if you happen to be driving through the Chicago area, I’ll recommend two frequencies for you to try on your FM dial.  The first, of course, is 93.1 or WXRT.  It is the last true FM rock station left in Chicago that plays everything from blues to classic rock to 80′s new wave to 90′s grunge up to new music from today and everything in between.  The DJ’s are knowledgeable and stay out of the way of the music.  My favorite is Terri Hemmert on weekday mornings from 10:00 to 1:00.  Saturday mornings are also a can’t miss with the three-hour flashback show to a particular year in rock.  The other frequency to try is 88.7.  This one is fun because in the city it will be Loyola University’s WLUW, but as you drive out west (around Harlem on the Ike) it turns into Elmhurst College’s WRSE.  WLUW is the quirkier of the two as you may find an obscure Icelandic electronica song played right after Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights”.  Nothing wrong with either song, but it helps to be in college and on drugs to enjoy those so close together and I am not in or on either.  As such, I’m more partial to WRSE as they focus on rock variety with the occasional surprise thrown in.  They actually remind me a lot of an amateur version of XRT in many ways.  Whichever you listen to, it’s fun to hear college kids learning their way and it makes me feel just a little hip that they let me tune in.

“How bad do you want it?” - Don H., Linden, Texas

You have no idea how bad I want it Mr. H.  We’ve been waiting over thirty years in this town for a football team with a real shot at winning the Super Bowl, and I think we have one here.  This defense is that good.  Plus, as well as the D played against the Rams, I thought seeing the running game going well was a really good sign.  We’ll still need Mitch to get it back after hurting his shoulder, but I don’t think the Bears have to ride his arm to the Super Bowl.  Now, to get there, they are going to have to win two road games, probably in New Orleans and L.A., but I really think they would have an outside chance at a run if the momentum carries from last week.  If they do get to the Super Bowl, I predict they dominate any team that represents the AFC as I think they are better than them all (including the Chiefs and the Pats who they should have beat a few weeks ago).  The best thing about this team is that they have a ton of young talent that still has a lot of upside, so even if a Super Bowl isn’t in the cards this year, the Bears are a team to be reckoned with for a while in the NFC.   But, first let’s take care of business and win the NFC North title at home over the Packers.  After so many years of misery, I can’t think of a better way for this team to make a statement that it is back and the rest of the league will be messing with them at their own peril for years to come.

“Who are you?” - Pete T., London, England

I get it, Pete, I know that I have no authority to really speak on any of these subjects, but I can’t help myself.  I just love to answer questions and was very grateful for the one question that came to me from a blog reader.  I also think I have done a service by answering some of these additional questions that you all have been singing about for years.  I mean, as far as I know, there never have been any real responses to questions like yours.  I know there are a lot more out there too, so I’m happy to do it again.  I will, so long as I can get some blog reader questions to go along with them.  You know, just so people don’t think I’m completely insane. So, Take a Chance and Read Some Crap readers, hit that question button and keep this going as I’m sure Bob M. (Could You Be Loved?), George H. (What is Life?), and Whitney H. (How Will I Know?) would love answers to their questions too.  Until then, I hope at least some of these answers have satisfied your nagging questions, but the job is never complete.  I think the tide has finally turned for the question and 2019 is going to be full of them.  It may get uncomfortable at times, and maybe even downright nasty, but that is part of life and we are never going to evolve without continuing to challenge those with power and always asking why.

It’s good to be back everyone.  Until next time.

- Jim