#criminal defense attorney minneapolis

[criminallawyerminnesota]

Our experienced team of Federal Criminal Defense Attorneys is dedicated to providing unwavering legal support, ensuring your rights are protected at every step of the legal process. Whether you are facing charges related to white-collar crimes, drug offenses, fraud, or other federal offenses, we have the expertise to build a strong defense tailored to your unique case.

[gwendolyn01]

In this video, Lynne Torgerson Criminal lawyer in Minneapolis, is on a mission to fight for your Second Amendment right to bear arms for self-defense. With her vast experience and knowledge in constitutional law, Lynne Torgerson is leading the charge to strike down the enhanced carry permit requirement in Minneapolis.

[myinvestmindset]

Finding the Right Minneapolis Criminal Defense Attorney Near Me

When legal troubles arise, finding the right Minneapolis criminal defense attorney near me becomes a critical task. Whether you're facing charges or need assistance with legal matters, having a skilled and experienced attorney by your side can make a world of difference. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the importance of hiring a local attorney, the qualities to look for, and tips on finding the best Minneapolis criminal defense attorney near me.

The Significance of a Local Attorney

Knowledge of Local Laws

One of the primary reasons for seeking a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney near me is their in-depth understanding of local laws and regulations. Laws can vary significantly from one jurisdiction to another, and an attorney familiar with the local legal landscape is better equipped to navigate the complexities of your case. They are aware of recent changes in legislation, local court procedures, and the specific judges and prosecutors involved, all of which can impact the outcome of your case.

Accessibility and Convenience

Having a local attorney means you can easily meet them in person, which is essential for building a strong attorney-client relationship. Frequent face-to-face meetings can foster better communication and trust between you and your attorney. Moreover, you won't have to travel long distances to attend court hearings, making the legal process more convenient and less stressful.

Community Connections

Local criminal defense attorneys often have strong ties within the community, which can work to your advantage. They may know key individuals in the legal system, including judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement personnel. These connections can be leveraged to negotiate on your behalf and potentially secure more favorable outcomes.

Qualities to Look for in a Minneapolis Criminal Defense Attorney

Expertise in Criminal Defense

When searching for a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney, prioritize candidates with specialized expertise in criminal law. Criminal defense is a highly nuanced field, and an attorney with extensive experience in this area is more likely to provide effective representation. Look for a track record of handling cases similar to yours successfully.

Strong Communication Skills

Effective communication is crucial in the attorney-client relationship. Your attorney should be an excellent communicator, capable of explaining complex legal concepts in a way that you can understand. They should also be responsive to your questions and concerns, ensuring that you are kept informed throughout the legal process.

Trial Experience

While many criminal cases are resolved through negotiations and plea bargains, there may be instances where going to trial is the best course of action. In such cases, having an attorney with trial experience is essential. They should be skilled in courtroom proceedings, including cross-examination, evidence presentation, and argumentation.

Strong Negotiation Skills

Negotiating with prosecutors for reduced charges or favorable plea deals is a common aspect of criminal defense. Look for an attorney who possesses strong negotiation skills and a history of achieving favorable outcomes for their clients. Their ability to advocate on your behalf during negotiations can significantly impact the outcome of your case.

Compassion and Empathy

Facing criminal charges can be an emotionally challenging experience. A good Minneapolis criminal defense attorney should be compassionate and empathetic, understanding the stress and anxiety you may be going through. They should offer emotional support while remaining focused on building a robust defense strategy.

Tips for Finding the Best Minneapolis Criminal Defense Attorney Near Me

Start with Research

Begin your search by conducting thorough research. Use online resources, legal directories, and referrals from friends, family, or other professionals to compile a list of potential attorneys in Minneapolis. Pay attention to reviews and testimonials to get an idea of their reputation and client satisfaction.

Seek Recommendations

Personal recommendations from trusted sources can be invaluable. If you know someone who has had a positive experience with a criminal defense attorney in Minneapolis, ask them for their recommendation. Word-of-mouth referrals often lead to finding attorneys who excel in their field.

Consultations and Interviews

Schedule initial consultations with several attorneys from your list. These consultations are typically free or offered at a nominal fee. Use this opportunity to ask questions, discuss your case, and assess the attorney's suitability. Pay attention to their communication style, how well they listen, and their willingness to address your concerns.

Assess Experience and Track Record

During the consultations, inquire about the attorney's experience in handling cases similar to yours. Ask for examples of past cases and their outcomes. An attorney with a successful track record in handling cases similar to yours is more likely to provide effective representation.

Discuss Fees and Payment Plans

Be clear about the attorney's fees and payment structure. While legal representation can be costly, many attorneys offer flexible payment plans or accept payment only if they win your case (known as contingency fees). Make sure you fully understand the financial arrangement before proceeding.

Check for Disciplinary Actions

Check the attorney's disciplinary history with the state bar association. Any history of professional misconduct or disciplinary actions can be a red flag. You can typically find this information on the state bar's website.

Trust Your Instincts

Ultimately, your choice of a Minneapolis criminal defense attorney should feel right to you. Trust your instincts and choose an attorney with whom you have a good rapport and feel comfortable. A strong attorney-client relationship is built on trust and open communication.

Conclusion

When facing criminal charges or legal issues in Minneapolis, finding the right criminal defense attorney near you is paramount. A local attorney brings essential knowledge, accessibility, and community connections to your case. To ensure the best possible representation, look for an attorney with expertise in criminal defense, strong communication and negotiation skills, trial experience, and a compassionate demeanor.

Remember that thorough research, seeking recommendations, and conducting interviews are crucial steps in finding the best Minneapolis criminal defense attorney for your specific needs. With the right attorney by your side, you can navigate the legal system with confidence and work towards achieving the best possible outcome for your case.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

WaPo's Philip Bump: State-endorsed violence is triumphing over left-aligned protests

Philip Bump at Washington Post:

I was in Florida in May 2021 when I saw a white Mini Cooper with two seemingly incongruous bumper stickers. One said, “I WILL NOT COMPLY” — a then-vogue sentiment as governments sought to mandate vaccines to fight the coronavirus pandemic. In a rear window, though, the car displayed a monochromatic American flag with one of the stripes rendered in blue. This, of course, is the graphical representation of the “Blue Lives Matter” mantra, an expression of support for the police that emerged as law enforcement began facing new criticism about the killing of Black civilians a decade ago. I will not comply … but I support our men and women in law enforcement.

It’s easy to carve out a realm where these sentiments are not at odds. The driver won’t comply with vaccine mandates but stands with the police as they do the hard work of subduing the real criminals. Or, to define the space where the sentiments are not at odds more simply: The driver adheres to a right-wing worldview in which state power is properly deployed against the left. For the driver, the law protects but doesn’t bind, as the saying has it. That was three years ago. In the period since, state power has gained a lot of ground against its long-standing adversaries’ criticism and protest. Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) took the unusual-for-him step of pardoning a man who was convicted of murder in a shooting death in Austin. The shooter, Daniel Perry, was driving in the city in July 2020 when he came across a protest criticizing the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. Garrett Foster was part of the crowd and was carrying a rifle, which is legal in the state. Perry claimed that Foster aimed the weapon at him and that he fired in self-defense.

Others in the crowd denied that Foster raised his weapon. A jury determined that the killing was not justified and sentenced Perry to prison. They did so without even seeing some of the most striking evidence: text messages from Perry in which he expressed racist views and talked about shooting people who engaged in looting in the wake of the Floyd protests. (Foster, like Perry, was White.) But Abbott decided a pardon was in order, arguing that the state’s stand-your-ground law “cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.” Foster’s killing was rebuked by Texans but sanctioned by the state. In the wake of the protests in 2020 — an underrecognized challenge to state power from the left — other states attempted to build laws specifically to increase the costs of those protests. In Florida and Oklahoma, for example, the state legislatures passed and governors signed laws absolving drivers of some penalties if they struck protesters blocking roads.

[...] One of the widest partisan divides, meanwhile, was on “disrupting public events.�� That divide was about as wide as the one on “establishing encampments.” Since the protests that unfolded in the summer of 2020, the largest widespread protest movement seen in the United States has been centered on the establishment of encampments on college campuses to protest Israel’s military incursion in Gaza. Most Americans expressed skepticism of those protests in polling released this month. In recent Fox News polling, though, a majority of Democrats expressed support for the protests while Republicans opposed them by more than a 5-1 margin. [...]

At many colleges, including New York's Columbia University, administrators agreed with the Republicans. Law enforcement was brought in to disrupt and remove encampments. That was true at Columbia, where the New York Police Department swept the campus more than once. The second and final sweep resulted in several students being hospitalized. Over the weekend, the NYPD again violently disrupted a protest. Officers were seen striking protesters participating in a pro-Palestinian event in Brooklyn, with police arguing that the response was needed because protesters were blocking the streets. The neighborhood’s City Council member told the New York Times that “from my vantage point, the response appeared preemptive, retaliatory and cumulatively aggressive.” [...]

The violent crackdown on the protests were sanctioned by the state. It is possible that the bumper sticker on that car I saw in Florida in 2021 was harrumphing not about an unwillingness to comply with the coronavirus vaccine but, instead, with the advent of a Democratic president. After all, the weeks after the 2020 election were awash in right-wing refusal to comply with the state power manifested in recognizing Joe Biden’s electoral victory. On Jan. 6, 2021, rioters supporting Donald Trump overwhelmed law enforcement and overtook the Capitol in a failed effort to redirect power back to the sitting president.

The response from Trump’s allies and the broader right has been illuminating. There was an immediate effort to rationalize the violence by comparing it to the protests that unfolded the previous summer, like the one at which Garrett Foster was killed. Or like the one after which teenager Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two men. (“Those who help, protect, and defend are the good guys,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on social media once Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder. “Kyle is one of good ones.”) Over the longer term, though, the right’s Capitol riot narrative — led by people like Greene — focused more heavily on the purported injustices those rioters had faced. Those who are incarcerated have been presented as “political prisoners,” rather than as violent criminals and, often people who’ve pleaded guilty to their offenses. In the vernacular of that Mini Cooper, these were honorable people refusing to comply, not criminals engaged in an unacceptable denial of how much blue lives matter.

Washington Post’s Philp Bump wrote a solid article on why left-leaning protests (pro-Palestine, pro-Black Lives Matter, etc.) are more likely to face state-sanctioned violent crackdown responses than right-leaning protests (anti-COVID mitigation measures, etc.)

[beardedmrbean]

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A progressive Minnesota prosecutor who was elected on a platform of police accountability has reluctantly dropped charges against a state trooper who fatally shot a Black man after a traffic stop.

After months of heavy criticism, even from the state’s Democratic governor, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Monday stood by her initial decision to charge Trooper Ryan Londregan in last summer’s killing of Ricky Cobb II. She says that new evidence makes the case would difficult to prove.

Moriarty, a former chief public defender for the county, was elected in 2022 with nearly 58% of the vote. Her announcement shows that charging officers with crimes is never simple, even in the same county where Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd's 2020 murder.

Moriarty said she still believes she made the right decision to charge Londregan based on evidence available at the time. But she said a newly raised defense claim that Londregan believed Cobb was reaching for Londregan’s gun, along with new statements from State Patrol officials backing claims that he was following his training, made the case impossible to prove. So she filed papers Sunday to dismiss it.

“I was elected by the people in Hennepin County to make ethical, courageous decisions,” Moriarty said. “This is the kind of county attorney everybody wanted, not one that made decisions based on politics.”

The dismissal comes as progressive district attorneys and candidates in several liberal strongholds across the country have faced setbacks as frustrations have risen over public safety.

In Oregon last month, centrist DA candidate Nathan Vasquez ousted incumbent progressive prosecutor Mike Schmidt in Multnomah County, after vowing to be tough on crime. Last month in San Francisco, Alameda County supervisors set a recall election for District Attorney Pamela Price, who, like Moriarty, ran on a platform of offender rehabilitation and police accountability. Price had replaced Chesa Boudin, another progressive prosecutor who voters recalled earlier in 2022.

Gov. Tim Walz said Moriarty eventually “got to the right decision,” and that it became apparent that “there were problems in this prosecution from the beginning.”

Walz denied Moriarty’s allegations that he interfered in the case, but also told reporters he would have used his power to take the case from her and hand it to the attorney general’s office if she had not dropped the charges. He said those powers provide a “safety net” to “allow an egregious situation like this to be corrected.”

Leaders with the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, which waged a high-profile campaign urging Walz to take the case from Moriarty, said her statements about her decision were “unhinged” and “riddled with vengeance.” Republican politicians were quick to repeat their claims that Londregan should never have been charged.

“Former Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner. a Democrat, said this case is an example of how the criminal justice system has become increasingly politicized.

“You have a prosecutor who was very transparent on the campaign trail about what her priorities were and what she intended to do in office. Police accountability was one of those priorities,” Gaertner said in an interview. “In this case, it seems to me like she made a good faith decision to charge this case, but then when other information came to her attention, she dismissed it. That was the ethical thing to do. And I'm sure it wasn't easy.”

On July 31, troopers pulled the 33-year-old Cobb over on Interstate 94 because the lights were out on his car. They found that the Spring Lake Park man was wanted for a violating a domestic no-contact order in neighboring Ramsey County. Londregan arrived to assist. While the troopers were telling Cobb to get out of the car, he shifted into drive and took his foot off the brake. When Cobb’s car began to slowly move forward, Londregan reached for his gun. Cobb stopped. Londregan pointed his gun at Cobb and yelled at him to get out. Cobb took his foot off the brake again while another trooper’s torso was at least partially in the car. Londregan then fired twice at Cobb, striking him both times in the chest.

Body camera video shows Cobb raising his hand just before Londregan shot him. Moriarty said the video doesn’t prove a claim, raised by the defense in April, that Cobb was attempting to reach for his service weapon — but she conceded it doesn’t disprove it either. She said prosecutors didn't know previously that this assertion would be key to Londregan's defense.

Moriarty also pointed to fresh statements by State Patrol training officials, submitted as part of the defense case, that the trooper acted in accordance with his training. She said it made the case harder to prove.

Prosecutors took all of that to a use-of-force expert whose analysis lead them to conclude that they’d lose at trial, Moriarty said. The judge might have dismissed the case without even sending it to the jury, she added.

In a fiery news conference of his own, Londregan's attorney, Chris Madel, said Moriarty knew from the start that Londregan would argue he used deadly force to protect himself, and knew since April that the defense would claim Cobb reached for Londregan's firearm.

“This county attorney was hell-bent on prosecuting a cop,” Madel said. “She could not wait for a case like this to come up.” He added: “For her to come out now and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we had no idea the defense was hiding this great evidence,’ it’s just plain absurd."

Londregan, who was free on his own recognizance, remains on paid leave while the State Patrol reviews the shooting. Madel said Londregan plans to return to law enforcement over the objections of some family members.

Moriarty called on the State Patrol to implement several changes to reduce the use of deadly force. The troopers at the scene had better options than leaning into his car to try to extricate Cobb but “bungled” their opportunities, she said. They could have told Cobb that they intended to arrest him, instead of just ordering him out of the car. They could have just let him drive off, she said, because they knew where to find him. Or they could have placed stop sticks under his car.

The State Patrol declined to respond to her recommendations. The Patrol said in a statement Sunday night that its ability to comment was limited because of the ongoing lawsuit filed by Cobb's family in April.

Attorneys for Cobb's family said they were disappointed but not surprised by this outcome.

“The simple fact is that, regardless of how many absurd excuses Trooper Londregan gives to try and absolve himself, he shot and killed Ricky Cobb II at point blank range without any justification and, instead of prosecuting him for murder, the County Attorney’s Office has bowed to political pressure to drop the charges," the family's attorneys said in a statement.

“Apparently, all you have to do to get away with murder is to bully the prosecutors enough and the charges will just go away,” the attorneys continued. "The people don’t believe the excuses and neither do we.”

[killed-by-choice]

Linda Padfield, 28 (USA 1973)

Linda Padfield probably had no idea about Benjamin Munson’s extensive criminal record.

Munson had been a back-alley butcher for years. In 1969, he was convicted of subjecting a teenage girl to an illegal abortion. He won an appeal in circuit court. When the state appealed, the South Dakota Supreme Court upheld the conviction. Munson was trying to get this decision overturned when Roe v. Wade was passed, and a court decided that the charges were moot.

After Roe v. Wade, 28-year-old Linda Padfield traveled for 5 hours to reach Munson for a newly-legal abortion. She brought her 3 other children and a friend with her on the trip, telling relatives that it was a trip to visit friends. On June 15, 61-year-old Munson performed the abortion and sent Linda back to the motel room where she was staying. He gave her no warning of the danger she was in.

The next day, Linda and her friend took the 3 children sightseeing and then started heading home. Linda got back to her hometown of Groton on June 17.

By the time the group got home, Linda was already terribly sick. She had a fever and was nauseous. She told her concerned mother (Audrey Padfield) the truth about the trip and was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital in Aberdeen for emergency surgery immediately. A doctor noticed that Linda was showing signs of kidney failure and considered the possibility that fetal body parts were left behind.

Linda was too sick to survive. She deteriorated rapidly and died on June 18, 1973, only two days after the abortion. Dr. James Hovland, one of the doctors who treated Linda at St. Luke’s, said that he had considered that Linda might have retained fetal parts but did not pursue the possibility because she would have died while doctors were trying to make the determination.

Linda’s autopsy results were horrifying. Linda had been 5 months pregnant at the time of her abortion and her uterus still contained the rotting remains of the dead baby, who was almost whole. Munson had only torn off one arm, one leg, a piece of the skull and a section of the torso. A total of 240 grams of a decomposing fetus remained. Munson sent her home with a death sentence.

Even if doctors at St. Luke’s had performed an immediate hysterectomy, the infection was so severe that Linda couldn’t survive. In two days, the infection from the rotting corpse raged through her entire body. She was not in a condition to survive a hysterectomy.

Despite Munson’s efforts to avoid legal consequences, the case went to court. The prosecution focused on the fact that infection from that amount of retained body parts is inevitable. The Attorney General commented, “You take a three-inch leg off something, you have to know that there’s more in there than just the leg.”

The defense, however, argued that, “You’ve got to establish the standards of care before you can prove whether a doctor was culpably negligent.” The only standard of care, the defense said, was a local standard of care. What abortionists did in other areas, the defese argued, was irrelevant. Since Munson was the only dedicated abortionist in the state, whatever he did was by definition the community standard of care. Unbelievably, the judge bought it and ordered the jury to acquit.

Munson was later welcomed as a member of the National Abortion Federation. Linda Padfield clearly didn’t matter to the NAF. Neither did 18-year-old Yvonne Mesteth, who Munson killed in 1985 by leaving fetal body parts inside of her.

“Aberdeen doctors testify in Munson Trial,” Associated Press

“Rapid city doctor faces manslaughter charge,” Lead (SD) Daily Call, Oct. 6, 1977

“Janklow will not file appeal” Lead (SD) Daily Call, Oct. 19, 1977

“Munson acquitted,” Mitchell (SD) Daily Republic, Oct. 21, 1977

“Abortion death disputed,” Mitchell (SD) Daily Republic, Oct. 18, 1977

“Munson greeted warmly or with disgust” Minneapolis Tribune

"Rapid City Doctor Seeks Injunction," Argus Leader, August 10, 1976

"Dismissal denied in Munson case," Argus Leader, April 22, 1977

"Doctor: fetus parts after abortion might have lead to patient's death," The Daily Republic, October 20, 1977

"Judge directs acquittal for Munson," The Argus Leader, October 21, 1977

[datzhott]

Minnesota Man Kills Sex Offender For Stalking His Daughter With Moose Antlers

GRAND MARAIS, Minn. — A Minnesota man was charged Friday with fatally beating an elderly man previously convicted of child sexual assault, who he believed had stalked his young daughter in the past. Levi Axtell, 27, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Lawrence V. Scully, 77, who was beaten to death Wednesday at his home in Grand Marais. A criminal complaint filed Friday said Axtell killed Scully with a shovel and a moose antler and then drove to the Cook County Sheriff's office and confessed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. At a video hearing on Friday, Axtell's bail was set at $1 million. Defense attorney Dennis Shaw noted during the hearing that Axtell had no serious criminal history until now and his longtime ties to Grand Marais made him a minimal flight risk. Axtell remains jailed in Cook County. His next court appearance is scheduled for April 10. In 2018, Axtell alleged that Scully was stalking his 22-month-old daughter and other children in his van, which he parked near her Grand Marais daycare. Axtell sought an order of protection, which was granted but then dismissed within several weeks, according to court records. In 1979, Scully was convicted in Kanabec County, Minnesota, of sexually assaulting a 6-year-old girl, according to Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen. He was released from prison in 1982. On Wednesday, Axtell arrived at the sheriff's office covered in blood and “put his hands on his head and said that he had murdered (Scully) with a shovel,” according to Friday’s criminal complaint. Read the full article

[sa7abnews]

Amid Veepstakes, Minnesota Cops Push Gov. Tim Walz to Back Off Police Violence Cases

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/06/amid-veepstakes-minnesota-cops-push-gov-tim-walz-to-back-off-police-violence-cases/

Amid Veepstakes, Minnesota Cops Push Gov. Tim Walz to Back Off Police Violence Cases

All eyes are on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who’s emerged as a leading contender for Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick for the 2024 Democratic ticket. As the national spotlight focuses on Walz, critics have drawn attention to his decision to call the National Guard on protesters against police brutality in 2020. And now, Minnesota police are calling on Walz to remove a reform prosecutor from police use of force cases.

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020, voters elected a reform prosecutor, Mary Moriarty, who promised to prosecute police misconduct and take a restorative justice approach to prosecution. 

The letter to Walz sent Wednesday from the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, a copy of which was obtained by The Intercept, asks the governor to remove Moriarty’s office from all past, present, and future police use of force cases. With a former prosecutor as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, this pressure on Walz brings to the fore the split within the Democratic Party over how to handle the demand for continued police and criminal justice reform, as conservatives and law enforcement push to undo the reforms that have been put in place.

The push against Moriarty isn’t unique to Minnesota. Critics of reform have moved to oust or restrict the authority of prosecutors in dozens of states as reformers started winning elections more frequently amid the growing push for criminal justice reform. Between 2017 and early 2023, more than 37 bills to remove or limit the power of reform prosecutors were introduced in 17 states. As of early 2023, that number grew to more than 53 measures in 26 states, including efforts to restrict the power of prosecutors who refused to charge people who sought abortions. 

Related Behind Keith Ellison’s Tough-on-Crime Turn

In the letter to Walz, MPPOA general counsel Imran Ali wrote that police were concerned about Moriarty’s handling of use-of-force cases and that the association had “deep concerns about the impartiality and bias” from Moriarty against law enforcement. He suggested that Attorney General Keith Ellison could handle the cases “with proper funding.” Ellison built his career on reform and was once an ally of Moriarty’s. Last year, he removed a case from Moriarty’s office in which she declined to charge two teenage brothers accused of murder as adults.

“There is no way County Attorney Moriarty can act without bias and be impartial,” Ali wrote. “A significant number of peace officers have reached out to me and are troubled and fearful of this county attorney handling any use of force matters.” 

Moriarty’s critics in Minneapolis have been pushing to remove her from certain cases and oust her from the office since shortly after her term began in January 2023.

Last week, MPPOA filed an ethics complaint against Moriarty’s office for her handling of murder charges against a state trooper who killed a 33-year-old Black man, Ricky Cobb II, during a traffic stop last year. Moriarty’s office dropped the charges in June after the trooper’s defense team claimed that he was in fear for his partner’s life during the stop. Moriarty said the trooper used lawful force, and that her office couldn’t disprove his defense, but that she was “not backing down.”

Earlier this year, two Minnesota police associations sent a letter to Walz asking him to remove Moriarty from that case. At the time, four Republican members of Congress from Minnesota called for an investigation into Moriarty over the case, and at least one called on her to resign. Walz, MPPOA, and Moriarty’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We expect nothing less from a thoroughly corrupt police union that will do anything to prevent accountability for law enforcement accused of misconduct,” said Michael Collins, senior director of government affairs at Color of Change, a racial justice group. “Governor Tim Walz opened the door to these requests when he sided with the union in the Ricky Cobb II case. His behavior was shameful, up to and including calling the trooper’s defense lawyer to ask if they wanted the case to be reassigned to another county attorney. It’s no wonder the police union thinks he’s their guy. He should denounce the request and stop trying to pander to the right on criminal justice by undermining police accountability.”

Moriarty responded to the MPPOA’s ethics complaint last week, criticizing the police association for lobbying against efforts to hold police accountable and opposing regulations that would ban law enforcement from being involved in white supremacists groups.

The police group objected to Moriarty’s critiques in their letter to Walz this week. “These divisive comments were meant to divide our communities and elucidate her bias and belief that all peace officers are tied to white supremacist organizations,” Ali wrote. “As a person of color, and the general counsel of MPPOA, I find her comments offensive, repulsive and intend to injure and harm law enforcement all over the state, including harming my personal reputation.” 

Walz is not the only vice presidential candidate with a fraught relationship with the criminal justice reform movement. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another pick on Harris’s list, has also backed efforts to strip Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner of his authority to prosecute certain crimes. When Shapiro was state attorney general in 2019, his office pushed the Philadelphia Inquirer to be more critical of Krasner, The Intercept reported. Shapiro also backed a controversial bill passed by Pennsylvania lawmakers to strip Krasner’s ability to prosecute certain gun crimes in the city and give concurrent jurisdiction to the AG’s office. Shapiro’s office later said he would not use the measure to “act unilaterally or go around DA Krasner.” Local activists later pressured Shapiro into saying he would support a repeal of the bill. 

Correction: August 1, 2024, 2:04 p.m. ETAn earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association as a union. The references have been removed. The post Amid Veepstakes, Minnesota Cops Push Gov. Tim Walz to Back Off Police Violence Cases .

[feddefense]

The Role of a Criminal Defense Lawyer: Responsibilities and Duties

When in a crisis such as being accused as criminal by someone, the first thing that you need to do is to find the best and most reliable criminal defense lawyer in Minneapolis who can help you get out of your situation, especially if you are being unfairly pointed as a criminal. Hiring a professional and skilled criminal lawyer will help you get out of the unfair situation you are in.

Roles of a Criminal Defense Lawyer Here are some of the important reasons why you need to get yourself a knowledgeable criminal lawyer when being unfairly pointed as a criminal.

To Understand the Charges and Laws One of the essential reasons why you need to hire a knowledgeable and trusted criminal lawyer when you are being unfairly pointed as the perpetrator of a crime even if you are innocent is to understand the charges and relevant laws being pointed towards you. Your lawyer will carefully analyze the crime, dissect the applicable laws and statutes, and assess how the law applies to your situation so that she will know her next step.

To Gather Information About the Case The next role that your criminal defense lawyer needs to do to help you get out of the situation you are in is to gather information about the case being accused to you. For her to defend you and make a strong case, she needs to gather all kinds of pieces of evidence that tell that you are innocent. She will also have to contact witnesses and collect testimonies.

She needs to read case files and take notes to narrow down the most relevant points that favor you. She will also have to look at your history to determine if there are any relevant facts or issues that could be used against you.

To Protect Your Constitutional Rights Another responsibility of your criminal defense lawyer is to protect your constitutional rights. She will have to make sure that the authorities respect and abide by these rights throughout the arrest until the sentencing. She must see to it that your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as well as your Sixth Amendment which is the right to legal counsel are being given to you.

To Create a Case Strategy Development The fourth role of your best criminal defense attorney is to create a case strategy development for the criminal case being thrown at you. She needs to understand the charges and applicable laws and then develop a legal strategy tailored to the criminal case that is being accused of.

The strategy involves challenging the prosecution’s evidence, presenting counter-evidence, negotiating plea deals, and aiming to prove you are innocent of the crime you are being accused of.

To Keep You Informed on the Case The next critical role of your criminal defense lawyer is to keep you informed about the status of your case. She must communicate the developments of your case and explain the process. She will also tell you her anticipations on the next move of the opposing side and she will have to be responsible for making you understand the next course of action.

She will work with you and other attorneys to streamline the process to boost your chances of winning the case.

To Defend You During Trials The sixth and last crucial role of your criminal defense lawyer in this article is to defend you during trials. She will have to do an extensive amount of research on the case, look at all available pieces of evidence to come up with a strong defense, and work with private investigators or expert witnesses who specialize in certain areas such as DNA analysis or accident reconstruction.

In the trial, she will be responsible for looking out for the best of your interests, questioning witnesses, objecting to improper evidence or testimonies, and coming up with compelling opening and closing statements that summarize your version of the events.

In Conclusion, These are only some of the crucial reasons why you have to choose and hire the best criminal defense attorney to represent you when you are being accused of a criminal case that you did not do. When looking for a professional and reliable lawyer to represent and help you choose one that is a highly rated 5-star criminal defense attorney who is ready to defend you. Get someone who has been practicing criminal defense exclusively since 2005.

[ausetkmt]

n 2018, Tiffany Roberts, a 42-year-old lawyer, joined the Southern Center for Human Rights, a venerable civil-rights organization based in Atlanta. She had been a criminal-defense attorney moonlighting as an organizer for most of the previous ten years and now had a sense, based on a host of overlapping developments and controversies, that something terrible was about to happen.

Eleven months earlier, Georgia lawmakers had expanded the legal definition of domestic terrorism to include damaging certain types of property — deterrence aimed at the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement, which had also inspired a wave of state bills that sought to give motorists immunity for hitting protesters with their cars. The backlash from lawmakers came just as the movement for Black lives was getting bolder, setting up a potential confrontation that could be far more explosive than anything Roberts had experienced. “The tactic of floating legislation that would authorize violence was emboldening folks who wanted to harm Black folks,” she says.

That confrontation erupted in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis. Opponents of police brutality in Atlanta and other cities flooded the streets, and their cries for justice, which had mostly gone ignored, suddenly had the support of a majority of Americans and the ears of lawmakers in statehouses across the country and on Capitol Hill. It is estimated that anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people participated in demonstrations that spring and summer, making it the largest protest movement in American history and an uncommonly multiracial one. While some people broke windows and set cop cars on fire and some politicians called for harsher crackdowns in response, the protesters appeared to be winning in the court of public opinion. Despite the underlying rage over Floyd’s death, it was a time of extraordinary hope and promise.

The significance of the uprising was felt acutely in Atlanta, where Black politicians and business leaders have long held sway but a Black underclass was still routinely brutalized by the police. The vaunted Atlanta Way was premised on the notion that a Black ruling class, with the help of white moderates, could make the city a site of stability, growth, and equality — an object of envy for its peers in the South and beyond. Now, Atlanta’s mandarins had to confront reality: Less than three weeks after Floyd’s death, a Black man named Rayshard Brooks who had been drinking fell asleep at a local Wendy’s drive-through and was killed by the cop who tried to arrest him. Brooks’s slaying further undermined Atlanta’s reputation for balancing civil rights with commerce and order. The mayor at the time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, recognized the problem. “The biases are still there,” she lamented at a CNN town hall.

But even amid this reckoning, Roberts saw signs that the city’s tolerance for disruption was limited. “There was already a political push to paint all of the protests as violent,” she says. “I didn’t think there was any way that Georgia was going to escape that.” Atlanta’s response to the George Floyd protests was heavy-handed from the start: nonviolent demonstrators kettled en masse, nearly 600 people arrested in just two weeks in June. The Southern Center was already embroiled in statewide fights against jail overcrowding and the death penalty. Now, it had to help huge numbers of detained protesters connect with defense attorneys. It went surprisingly well at first. The Center helped negotiate amnesty deals — 20 released here, 40 there — and charges were eventually dropped against most of the 2020 demonstrators. Still, Roberts was concerned by how officials were fixated on characterizing the protests as a foreign conspiracy. “That really wasn’t a Black protest,” Bottoms claimed dismissively.

Roberts started to suspect that officials were using these protests as a test. How many people could they criminalize at once? And would the crackdown be met with an outcry? It was not. On the contrary, the city’s response to the unrest was praised on television by soon-to-be-President Joe Biden. Roberts’s suspicions that the protesters had become targets were validated that summer when some demonstrators burned down the Wendy’s where Brooks had been killed and set up an occupation amid the rubble. After an 8-year-old was killed that July near one of the makeshift barriers, the mayor’s political opponents rushed to blame the death on Bottoms’s failure to maintain both order and police morale during the protests.

The central demands of the movement — which ranged from defunding the police entirely to merely reducing the outsize footprint of a draconian criminal-justice system — were quickly forgotten. The whole point of the Floyd uprising was not only to insist on an end to wanton police brutality but also to call attention to the way cops were being asked to address too many glaring social problems, such as poverty and mental health, that could be better handled without guns or jail. When urban crime briefly spiked during the pandemic, panicked officials who had previously expressed sympathy for the Floyd movement quickly shifted to spending even more resources on law enforcement. And no initiative symbolized that pivot more ostentatiously than Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center — what critics refer to as Cop City.

From the get-go, Bottoms’s 2021 announcement that an 85-acre plot of city-owned forest would be converted into a $90 million training facility, including a mock city for policing drills, was met with resistance. Police had already been using this area in unincorporated DeKalb County, seven miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, as a firing range — the pop-pop of live rounds could be heard by people taking walks along the forest trails — but nobody involved with the plan felt obligated to consult residents in neighboring communities. “We don’t want to spend six-to-nine months on hold while we are doing citizen engagement,” said David Wilkinson, president of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the pro-cop nonprofit that has been coordinating the project.

In September 2021, the city council heard more than 17 hours of mostly negative public comment focusing on both the project’s eye-popping reinvestment in cops and its environmental impact — the forest, one of the largest in any urban area in the U.S., acts as a protective sponge for flooding. The final vote was 10-4 in favor.

Cop City immediately became one of the first major tests of the post-Floyd political order. People had spent 2020 begging for an end to abusive policing. The city responded the next year with a massive expansion of the police state. And the project’s biggest supporters — a slate of power brokers that ranged from the mayor’s office to the corner offices at Home Depot and Delta Airlines — envisioned the facility as a national model and hub where cops from all over could travel to refine their tactics.

Protesters from around the country trickled into the city only to be faced with what had grown to be the most aggressive crackdown on activism the U.S. had seen in decades — a forerunner of the harsh police actions that have featured so prominently in the recent campus protests against the war in Gaza. Mass arrests became commonplace in Atlanta. Criminal penalties for protesting got harsher. Officials smeared dissidents as “violent agitators,” language Jim Crow politicians had used, and let them languish in deadly jails. In the four short years since Floyd’s death, local and state leaders — Black and white, Democrat and Republican — have turned the cradle of the civil-rights movement, where Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach and John Lewis coined the term good trouble, into what one protester described to me as “one of the worst cities in America for activism.”

The main expression of this crackdown has been a spate of charges that equate protesters with some of the country’s most notorious villains — people like John Gotti and Timothy McVeigh. Forty-two have been charged with domestic terrorism and 61 with racketeering and conspiracy. Prosecutors have argued that there is a direct line between the Floyd uprising and the unrest at Cop City, bringing the story of that hopeful summer of 2020 to its dispiriting conclusion and making clear what Roberts and others have suspected all along: that in the state’s eyes, those who took to the streets to demand racial equality and justice were merely criminals who hadn’t yet been punished.

Protests near Cop City on November 23, 2023. Photo: Dustin Chambers

When the Atlanta City Council approved Cop City in 2021, a handful of protesters started camping out in the South River Forest where the facility was slated to be built. They called themselves “forest defenders.” They set up a welcome table, shared food, hosted dance parties, and screened the Japanese environmental fable Princess Mononoke. They gave themselves funny nicknames — Pigweed, Bunny, Slug — and slept in makeshift tree houses. Some were from Georgia, others were not. They could be wary and eccentric yet disarmingly nice. A correspondent from The Daily Show visited one of their encampments, took one look at their bingo-night setup, and called them “Georgia Ewoks.”

Within a year, a coalition of local law-enforcement agencies was trying to evict the forest defenders to make way for construction. Some of the occupants allegedly threw rocks, while others damaged construction equipment. The group had no leader, organization was scattered and haphazard, and if you wanted to set a bulldozer on fire, no one was going to stop you. Rewards of up to $25,000 went up for the capture of certain protesters.

Just before Christmas 2022, cops raided the woods and were greeted with a volley of rocks. They arrested five people and, in the first of several escalations, charged them with domestic terrorism. “None of those people live here,” claimed Carven Tyus, assistant chief of the Atlanta Police Department. “Why is an individual from Los Angeles, California, concerned about a training facility being built in the state of Georgia? And that is why we consider that domestic terrorism.”

Whatever the rationale, the crackdown failed to deter the protesters. Soon the encampment was up and running again. Plans were made for another multiagency raid. On January 18, 2023, a day whose precise sequence of events is still being disputed, cops stormed the woods and opened fire on a protester they later claimed had shot at them first, a 26-year-old Venezuelan named Manuel Paez Terán. Fifty-seven bullets hit home in what is believed to be the first police slaying of an environmental activist in U.S. history.

Forensic evidence, an autopsy, and the testimony of Paez Terán’s fellow defenders have since cast doubt on the official narrative. Paez Terán’s hands did not show any gunpowder residue, according to the DeKalb County medical examiner.

Seven other forest defenders were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism that day, but once again the raid acted as a further incitement. The weekend after Paez Terán’s death, a group of protesters held a vigil on Peachtree Street, one of Atlanta’s high-traffic thoroughfares, where some allegedly broke windows and set police cars on fire. Six were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. “Víva, víva, Tortuguita!” has since become the movement’s rallying cry, a tribute to the nickname chosen by Paez Terán, “Little Turtle.” The inspiration was a military chief who had led Native forces to victory over the U.S. Army in 1791.

After the arrests, Bottoms’s successor as mayor, Andre Dickens, echoed Tyus’s claim. “It should be noted that these individuals were not Atlanta or Georgia residents,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation. “Most of them traveled into our city to wreak havoc.”

Roberts was surprised to get a call from the mayor’s office around this time. Dickens’s staff wanted her to attend a meeting of local civil-rights activists to discuss Cop City. It seemed like a rare olive branch, but Roberts did not trust the mayor. So she sent another staffer in her place, wanting to avoid any misleading photographs that suggested broad activist support for his agenda. Her colleague reported that the mayor was trying to get everyone on message about how the protests had been orchestrated by outside agitators. Attendees pushed back — plenty of Atlantans were against Cop City too, and some of them were in that room. “There was no press about that meeting,” Roberts says. “It didn’t go the way he thought it was going to go.”

Meanwhile, Roberts needed attorneys to keep the detainees from languishing in jail for months or even years without trial. When her team put out a call for lawyers, Josh Lingsch answered. A few years earlier, he had been a crusader at the Fulton County public defender’s office, objecting when his supervisor tried to “coerce all my clients into taking plea deals,” he says. Lingsch wanted to move forward with the cases that were ready for trial: Let the people have their day in court. He was pushed out and eventually began peddling his services to organizations like the Southern Center. “It just struck me as pretty ridiculous,” he remembers thinking of the domestic-terrorism charges. He was paired with a client, Teresa Shen, who had been arrested in the woods during the January raid in which Paez Terán was shot.

The Southern Center has a list of nearly 80 lawyers like Lingsch who can work on civil-rights-related cases. At the height of the Floyd uprising, there were 250 lawyers on hand, but the number dropped after what Roberts calls “the coolness of 2020” faded away and attorneys wanted less to do with any Black Lives Matter–adjacent rabble-rousing. “One of the implications is this tremendous strain on resources,” she says. “And there’s less money now.”

Back then, Roberts and her colleague Devin Franklin tell me, if you broke a window at a rally, you would be charged with breaking a window at a rally — “criminal damage to property” or something similar. Now, that same behavior was being treated far more seriously, which in turn required a far more sophisticated legal defense. The number of anti–Cop City activists who were charged as terrorists leaped from zero to 18 — and it was about to double.

When Paez Terán was killed, Priscilla Grim, a 50-year-old veteran of Occupy Wall Street, remembers thinking, “You’re literally assassinating activists? ” She wanted to help and booked a flight to Atlanta from New York as soon as she got word of a “week of action” at the site, which involved a rally, a concert under the trees, and press conferences. “I was just like, I’m going to cover this stuff on my Instagram and see where it goes,” she tells me.

On the night of March 5, 2023, Grim was walking to the concert, almost a mile from the construction site, when she heard men’s voices screaming at her from behind. She tripped and fell, startled. The next thing she knew, cops were all over her. Her knee started to balloon — she had torn her ACL in September — so they half-dragged, half-carried her to a nearby parking lot, where she estimates 40 other detainees were being held. “The cops were checking IDs,” she says. “And then they said, ‘You guys are in the go-to-jail crowd.’ And it was everybody who was from out of town.”

Earlier that evening, some protesters had allegedly damaged equipment and launched fireworks at the cops there. It has since been reported that the main piece of evidence against the March 5 arrestees was that many of them had mud on their shoes, which supposedly proved they had been fleeing the construction site. The reason the Georgia residents were allowed to walk free while so many out-of-towners were herded onto buses became obvious to Grim. “It was to set us up as the outside agitator,” she says, a practice that goes back to southern segregationists blaming local protests on interlopers from the North.

Before being booked at DeKalb County Jail, “I was so certain that nothing was going to happen to me,” Grim says. She had been picked up at protests in the past: a few hours in detention, then back on the streets. This was Getting Arrested 101, as many students at Columbia would learn this April when they were detained for protesting the university’s ties to Israel. Grim remembers the inmates who were already there, almost all of them Black, being confused by this sudden influx of mostly white women. “Why are you here?” they asked. When she ultimately discovered she was being charged with domestic terrorism, she was both shocked and confused. “I saw two buildings get taken down,” she says, recalling 9/11. “When you kill 3,000 people at once, that’s terrorism.”

“It’s serious,” she told her daughter’s father over the phone. They had been separated for 13 years, but his was one of the few numbers she still had memorized. The message law enforcement was sending to would-be protesters was clear. In 2019, conditions at DeKalb County Jail were so bad they had sparked protests themselves. One emblematic photo shows an inmate pressing a sign that simply reads MOLD against a window — after receiving her first meal, Grim learned why. Half the toilets weren’t working. Her glasses were confiscated. She was denied bond, and it would take two weeks of pleading by her lawyer to get some Aleve for her knee.

When she was finally granted bond a month later, Grim estimates she had seen only three hours of sunlight in her entire 31 days inside. Back in New York, she discovered that her employer, Fordham University, had rescinded an offer of a permanent position after her arrest. As she began submitting job applications, she realized a Google search of her name brought up the Atlanta Police Department’s press release from when she was arrested, including her mug shot. It describes her and her comrades as “violent agitators.”

The Unstoppable Growth of Cop City: Despite an activist encampment in February 2023 (top), a sprawling police-training facility is emerging from a forest on the outskirts of Atlanta (bottom). Photo: Cheney Orr (top); Dustin Chambers for New York Magazine (bottom)

The forest defenders were a motley crew of environmental activists, police abolitionists, community organizers, and drifters looking for a purpose. Like Grim, they were there for reasons both urgent and obscure. Luke Harper, 28, is a queer adoptee from the Philippines who grew up with white parents in the placid suburb of South Windsor, Connecticut. Before coming to the South River Forest, he wrote copy for an ad agency in Florida and spent his free time playing his ukulele for Food Not Bombs volunteers, handing out free meals, and participating in clothing drives. He is more than a little embarrassed by how little he knew about the fight he was joining on March 5. “I was in the mindset of I haven’t done anything wrong, so nothing bad is going to happen to me,” he says. “Which, Zak, is fucking naïve.”

Adele MacLean, who goes by the nickname Earthworm, is a 43-year-old grassroots organizer Roberts has long known as someone who helped secure prisoners bail money and resources for navigating the legal system. “To see Earthworm being prosecuted for being part of an organization that says, ‘Okay, well, people don’t have gas, or people don’t …’” Roberts says. “How far removed are we from that sort of accusation?”

On September 5, 2023, Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr announced a RICO indictment in Fulton County naming 61 defendants, including Earthworm, Grim, and Harper. Georgia’s RICO statute, one of the many state-level heirs to the federal “racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations” laws that were used to take down the mob in the 1970s, accomplishes the magic trick of lowering the burden of proof for prosecutors while raising the penalties for defendants. If Carr could show the accused were part of a criminal enterprise, then anything they did to advance its interests — even acts that wouldn’t otherwise be seen as criminal, like Earthworm allegedly reimbursing protesters for $52.22 worth of food — would be punishable with up to 20 years of prison time.

Carr’s 109-page indictment traces the evolution of this alleged criminal enterprise populated with scheming anarchists and violent terrorists who went from the burning streets of downtown Atlanta in 2020 to setting tractors ablaze in the South River Forest in 2023. For Zohra Ahmed, a former public defender in New York who later became a law professor at the University of Georgia, the document “is hard to decipher.” Ahmed’s family is from Pakistan, and she moved to the U.S. two years before 9/11; she knows intimately how terms like terrorist can be contorted for political ends, but she says the state’s theory of the protesters’ criminal enterprise is unclear. “If the basis for the ‘criminal agreement’ is simply that the cops suck,” Ahmed says, “and I don’t like it and I want to do something about it, all of that sounds like First Amendment activity.”

To the best of Ahmed’s knowledge, RICO has never been used against a group like this. By claiming that a diffuse but broadly aligned social movement equals organized crime, prosecutors are saying protesters could find themselves subject to a Mafia-style trial because some random guy broke a window. “If it includes everyone,” Ahmed adds, “then why is it a criminal conspiracy?”

Ahmed and her colleague Elizabeth Taxel have, with the help of their students, been researching due-process issues around conspiracy cases of this magnitude and looking for close-enough analogs to this case that may offer some precedent. Is it more like the prosecutions of anti-pipeline activists at Standing Rock in North Dakota or like when Carr filed that big gang indictment in Georgia a few years back? Without any real clarity, “everyone’s left guessing,” Ahmed says. “And so you have to play a million different combinations in your mind as a defendant, as a defense counsel, and as someone supporting defense counsel.”

This is an overwhelming task, which may be the point. The public-defense system in Atlanta is already strained to the breaking point, and most of the Southern Center’s private lawyers are defending clients in the Cop City RICO case. Add the fact that Fulton County already has two massive RICO trials on the docket — one involving the rapper Young Thug and another Donald Trump’s alleged election interference — and you have a system whose resources are largely consumed. “If the prosecution is able to make this stick,” says Ahmed, “it will rely on sloppiness.”

In November, Harper came back for his RICO arraignment. Three months in jail had wrecked his personal life: His former roommate in Florida had tried to give away his belongings while he was detained, and he was having trouble finding work (Google search results were a problem, as they had been for Grim). He had spent the summer traveling the country, struggling to make sense of where he fit in with this movement. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to him, and the weight of it hit unexpectedly. A few weeks after his release from jail, Harper was with a group of friends at Pride in San Francisco when a sudden terror overcame him — was the crowd too rowdy? Was this too much like a protest? — and he felt sure the cops were going to arrest him again. He started sobbing uncontrollably.

Grim flew out for the arraignment too. It was bittersweet, she says, to see so many of her alleged co-conspirators, women she would not have known had the cops not locked them up together where all of them had hoarded menstrual pads and toilet paper in their bras. Now, each was handed a numbered paddle — there were too many of them to treat as individuals. Grim saw her old cellmate, but were they allowed to talk? “It was like a weird, sad family reunion,” she says.

Grim’s lawyer received an offer from Carr’s office: three to four years in a Georgia state prison in exchange for a guilty plea. The lawyer laughed and dropped the offer back in the envelope it came in. “You don’t have a case,” Grim concluded, echoing a sentiment that has been spreading through the defense camp.

The protests continued despite the RICO charges. On September 7, 26-year-old Ayeola Omolara Kaplan stood in a razed section of the South River Forest, chained to a bulldozer. “My thinking,” she says, “was that if I do a demonstration on the property, trying to stop construction, this will show that there are other people out there who aren’t afraid.” Photos from that day show her in the middle of a field crisscrossed with tread marks, wearing black lipstick and a black Adidas tracksuit with a bundle of multi-colored locs gathered on top of her head. To her right stand three other activists, one holding a hand-painted sign that reads STOP WORK. A fifth protester is sitting on top of the bulldozer.

Kaplan grew up in Atlanta, where you could hardly go a block without seeing some tribute — a street name, a mural — to a Black civil-rights luminary. If civil disobedience had a spiritual home anywhere in America, it was supposed to be here. What she learned as she sat in DeKalb County Jail for three days among the fruit flies, gnats, and roaches, deprived of water, was that Atlanta’s real calling card was as a place uncommonly free from disruption.

The city’s reputation for peaceful desegregation and Black prosperity — while Birmingham and Little Rock were being torn apart in the 1960s and white flight hollowed out urban cores in the 1970s — was another way of saying Atlanta was safe for doing business. The merit of a thriving corporate sector has always been the main subject of agreement between the Black-led city government and the white-run state government. Republican governor Brian Kemp and Mayor Bottoms clashed viciously over COVID restrictions. But when Norfolk Southern established its headquarters in midtown, opening day was a party.

It is easy to imagine the shock waves that rippled through corporate boardrooms and city hall when it turned out that Atlanta was not insulated from the rage boiling over from Minneapolis. “I think what happened in 2020 really scared the Establishment into action,” says Lingsch, the former public defender representing one of the domestic-terrorism defendants. Practically overnight, the orderly reputation on which the city had long prided itself — a place where progress was won with cash and “Kumbaya” and where its first of seven Black mayors was elected back in 1973 — had literal fire licking its heels. It gave the rush to build Cop City an air of desperation; its completion became a monument to reasserting control. “To get released from jail,” Kaplan says, “one of the things I had to say is I wouldn’t go back to the site.”

That aura of control is essential for both parties. It is the Georgia Republican Party’s worst-kept secret that Carr is angling to succeed the term-limited Kemp in 2027. He is prosecuting the Cop City protesters as a law-enforcement official, but as a politician, he has not concealed his support for the Public Safety Training Center. “This is gonna be state of the art,” Carr said admiringly of the project last year.

The city council has absorbed the political lessons of 2020, which led Bottoms to decline a bid for reelection and former councilman Dickens succeed her by running from her right. When residents gathered 116,000 signatures to put the construction of Cop City to a ballot referendum last year, the council saw it not as a democratic way to resolve a dispute previously defined by skirmishes but as another threat to the social order. Councilmembers have since thwarted the process at every turn, including by subjecting it to voter-suppression tactics that their own party has sued Republicans for using. “We’re snuffing out a nonviolent political solution to this,” lamented one pro-referendum advocate during a heated council meeting in January.

But more than a crusade for local politicians, Cop City is the harbinger of a dark future. Since 2020, similar police-training complexes have been either proposed, slated for construction, or opened in cities as disparate as Chicago, Newark, and Corpus Christi, and states as scattered as California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. All reflect a similar attitude toward the protests of 2020. In the wake of that summer’s unprecedented challenge to state brutality, the American political class has declined introspection and instead chosen to rearm itself against the citizenry, very much including pro-Palestinian student protesters who one day might similarly find themselves being accused of conspiracy and worse.

For the Democratic Party, Georgia has become a vital new swing state. It helped secure Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory and is the reason the party still has control of the Senate. Young people are pouring into the region, and Black people are spreading to the suburbs. Atlanta is now one of a handful of metropolitan areas where a savvy ground game can flip a national election — where the minutiae of manning polls and tallying votes have acquired a sense of almost existential importance. It is a place where election season feels like a 365-day affair: Everyone seems to have a petition for you to sign, and everyone is trying to register you to vote. For all its warts, it is the rare place where progressive organizing can triumph and everyday people have begun to sense they can change the world — just as long as they don’t make trouble, good or otherwise. How to Criminalize a Protest

[dankusner]

CRIMINAL JUSTICE Governor pardons ex-Army sergeant

He was convicted of killing Black Lives Matter protester, but Abbott called it self-defense

AUSTIN — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a full pardon Thursday for a former U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.

Abbott announced the pardon shortly after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles announced a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored.

Perry had been in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his 2023 conviction in the killing of Garrett Foster, and he was released shortly after the pardon, a prison spokeswoman said.

Perry, who is white, was working as a ride-share driver when his car approached a demonstration in Austin.

Prosecutors said he could have driven away from the confrontation with Foster, a white Air Force veteran who witnesses said never raised his gun.

A jury convicted Perry of murder, but Abbott called it a case of self-defense.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney,” Abbott said.

‘Politics over justice’

A Republican in his third term, Abbott has typically issued pardons only for minor offenses, and he notably avoided a posthumous pardon recommendation for George Floyd for a 2004 drug arrest in Houston.

It was Floyd’s killing by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 that set off national demonstrations.

Abbott ordered the board to review Perry’s case shortly after the trial, and said he would sign a pardon if recommended.

Under Texas law, the governor cannot issue a pardon without a recommendation from the board, which the governor appoints.

Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza blasted the pardon as a “mockery of our legal system.”

“The board and the governor have put their politics over justice,” Garza said. “They should be ashamed of themselves. Their actions are contrary to the law and demonstrate that there are two classes of people in this state where some lives matter and some lives do not.”

Abbott’s demand for a review of Perry’s case followed pressure from former Fox News star Tucker Carlson, who on national television had urged the governor to intervene after the sergeant was convicted at trial in April 2023.

Perry was sentenced after prosecutors used his social media history and text messages to portray him as a racist who may commit violence again.

The sergeant’s defense attorneys argued that Foster did raise the rifle and that Perry had no choice but to shoot.

Perry did not take the witness stand and jurors deliberated for two days before finding him guilty.

Perry acted in self-defense when confronted by an angry crowd and a person with an assault rifle, Perry attorney Clint Broden said after the pardon.

“The events of this case have always been tragic and, unfortunately, Garrett Foster lost his life,” Broden said. “Mr. Perry and his family thank the Board of Pardons and Parole for its careful review of the case and are grateful that the State of Texas has strong laws to allow its citizens to protect themselves.”

Fierce debate

Foster’s girlfriend, Whitney Mitchell, was with Foster when he was killed.

She called the pardon an act of “lawlessness.”

“With this pardon the governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan and U.S. Air Force veteran and impugned that jury’s just verdict. He has declared that Texans who hold political views that are different from his and different from those in power can be killed in this state with impunity,” Mitchell said.

The shooting set off fierce debate in 2020 amid the demonstrations sparked by Floyd’s death, and Perry’s conviction three years later prompted outrage from prominent conservatives.

Before sentencing in the case, Carlson aired a broadcast calling the shooting an act of self-defense and criticizing Abbott for not coming on his show.

The next day, Abbott said he believed Perry should not be punished and told Texas’ parole board to expedite a review of the conviction.

After the verdict but before Perry was sentenced, the court unsealed dozens of pages of text messages and social media posts that showed he had hostile views toward Black Lives Matter protests.

In a comment on Facebook a month before the shooting, Perry wrote, “It is official I am a racist because I do not agree with people acting like animals at the zoo.”

Perry served in the Army for more than a decade.

At trial, a forensic psychologist testified that he believed Perry has post-traumatic stress disorder from his deployment to Afghanistan and from being bullied as a child.

At the time of the shooting, Perry was stationed at Fort Cavazos, then Fort Hood, about 70 miles north of Austin.

Daniel Perry released from prison

Abbott pardons him in deadly 2020 protest shooting

Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in downtown Austin in 2020, was freed from prison Thursday within an hour of Gov. Greg Abbott signing a pardon proclamation in a case that triggered a political and legal firestorm.

In a series of rapid-fire developments in a less than two-hour span, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry be pardoned on the murder conviction.

Abbott then granted the full pardon to Perry, leading to his release from the Mac Stringfellow Unit in Rosharon, about 20 miles south of downtown Houston.

Perry, 36 at the time of his April 2023 conviction, may also be able to apply to have his record expunged, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The board announced its recommendation to pardon Perry and restore his firearm rights in a statement posted on its website Thursday.

Its decision came after a “meticulous review of pertinent documents, from police reports to court records, witness statements, and interviews with individuals linked to the case,” the statement said.

In July 2020, Perry shot and killed Garrett Foster after Perry drove into a racial justice protest on Congress Avenue.

Perry claimed that he shot Foster, who was carrying an AK-47 rifle, in selfdefense.

During Perry’s trial last year, prosecutors argued that Perry had sought out confrontation.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney,” Abbott said in a statement Thursday. “I thank the Board for its thorough investigation, and I approve their pardon recommendation.”

In a proclamation Thursday, Abbott took aim at Travis County District Attorney José Garza, writing that Garza “demonstrated unethical and biased misuse of his office in prosecuting Daniel Scott Perry.”

Less than 24 hours after a jury in April 2023 found Perry guilty of murder, Abbott said on social media that he would approve a pardon if one were recommended by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

The announcement came after prominent conservative figures called on him to undo Perry’s conviction.

Shortly after Abbott’s announcement, a state district judge unsealed court records that contained Perry’s previously unreleased messages and social media posts, which contained racist rhetoric.

“Daniel Perry was imprisoned for 372 days and lost the military career that he loved,” Doug O’Connell, an attorney who represents Perry, said in a statement. “The action by Governor Abbott and the Pardon Board corrects the courtroom travesty which occurred over a year ago and represents justice in this case. “I spoke to Daniel Perry this afternoon. He is thrilled and elated to be free. Daniel is also optimistic for his future.”

Garza condemned the actions of the parole board and Abbott, writing in a statement that they have “put their politics over justice and made a mockery of our legal system.”

“They have sent a message to Garrett Foster’s family, to his partner, and to our community that his life does not matter. They have sent the message that the service of the Travis County community members who served on the grand jury and trial jury does not matter,” Garza said. “We will not stop fighting for justice."

In a written statement to the American- Statesman, Foster’s partner, Whitney Mitchell, decried Abbott’s decision and said that there was evidence that Foster intended to murder a protester.

“I loved Garrett Foster. I thought we were going to grow old together,” Mitchell said in the statement, provided via her attorney, Angelica Cogliano. “He was the love of my life. He still is. I am heartbroken by this lawlessness. Governor Abbott has shown that to him, only certain lives matter. He has made us all less safe.

“With this pardon, the Governor has desecrated the life of a murdered Texan, impugned that jury’s just verdict, and declared that citizens can be killed with impunity as long as they hold political views that are different from those in power.”

Gubernatorial pardons of high-profile or controversial offenders in Texas historically have been the exception, not the rule.

Abbott frequently announces his pardons or grants clemency in conjunction with the holiday season, and they often involve people convicted of nonviolent crimes committed years, and sometimes decades, earlier.

Three days before Christmas 2023, the governor granted three requests for pardons and clemency.

One was for someone who was convicted for theft in 1990 and sentenced to two years of deferred adjudication.

Another was for a 1978 theft that was punished by a $500 fine.

The third was for a conviction on a possession of marijuana charge in 2010 that resulted in a three-day jail sentence.

Two years earlier, offenders with somewhat more serious convictions – one of robbery that came with a probation sentence and one of possession of a weapon where alcohol is served that carried no jail time – were among the eight holiday-season pardons issued by Abbot

GUBERNATORIAL PARDON

Abbott demanded review of Austin case before sentencing

Texas governor’s rush to override jury raises judicial concerns

AUSTIN — Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardon this week of Daniel Perry, convicted of murder in the shooting death of Air Force veteran Garrett Foster at an Austin Black Lives Matter demonstration in 2020, satisfied prominent conservatives who had demanded Perry’s release.

It also outraged prosecutors and the victim’s family.

To critics, Abbott’s rush to wipe away the conviction also raised questions about how a governor might try to overturn a jury’s verdict in the future.

“He has declared that Texans who hold political views that are different from his and different from those in power can be killed in this state with impunity,” said Whitney Mitchell, Foster’s girlfriend who was with him at the protest when he was killed.

Texas law limits a governor’s power to issue pardons.

It can be done only with a recommendation of the governor-appointed Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Abbott, a three-term governor, has used his pardon authority sparingly over the past decade, typically granting only a handful every year for low-level offenses.

Perry’s case was far different, from the seriousness of the crime to the politics involved.

Foster was killed amid the widespread demonstrations against police killings and racial injustice that followed the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer.

Perry’s conviction in 2023 prompted immediate calls from state and national conservatives for a pardon for the off-duty soldier who claimed self-defense.

Speedy response

Abbott’s response was just as quick.

Even before Perry was sentenced, the governor criticized the jury that convicted him and demanded the parole board conduct a “swift” review of the case.

The governor also left no doubt about his expected result.

“I look forward to approving (a pardon) as soon as it hits my desk,” Abbott posted on social media.

The public release of Perry’s social media history and text messages just days later did not change Abbott’s determination.

Prosecutors used Perry’s own words — including comparing Black Lives Matter protests to animals at a zoo — to portray him as a racist who may commit violence again.

When trial Judge Clifford Brown sentenced Perry to 25 years in prison, he didn’t mention Abbott’s call for a pardon, but said from the bench that the verdict “deserves our honor and it deserves to be respected.”

Geoffrey Corn, chair of criminal law at the Texas Tech University Law School, called Abbott’s early push for a pardon, criticism of the jury and partisan attacks on the elected Democratic district attorney who oversaw the case a blow to the public’s confidence in the judicial system.

‘Catastrophic’

“It’s almost on the verge of catastrophic,” Corn said. “We’re telling people that when somebody is tried in a jurisdiction that is predominantly Democratic and you’re a Republican, the result can’t be valid? And vice versa?”

Perry, who is white, was stationed at Fort Hood, about 70 miles north of Austin, when the shooting happened.

He was working as a ride-share driver and had just dropped off a customer when he turned onto a street filled with protesters.

Foster, a 28-year-old white Air Force veteran, was legally carrying an AK-47 rifle.

Perry claimed he was trying to drive past the crowd and fired his pistol when Foster pointed a rifle at him.

Witnesses testified that they did not see Foster raise his weapon.

Prosecutors argued that Perry could have driven away without shooting.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney,” Abbott said in his pardon statement.

Yet David Kwok, director of the Criminal Justice Institute at the University of Houston Law Center, called jury nullification an important concept in justice.

“That is the power of the jury to push back against the force of government,” Kwok said.

‘Much more political’

Abbott had a long career in law before he was governor.

He was an attorney and state district judge before he was appointed to the state Supreme Court, which decides civil cases.

He then was elected state Attorney General and served three terms.

As governor, Abbott for years leaned into his legal and judicial experience when making political decisions, and was often criticized for being too deliberate and slow, said Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

“Abbott has changed a great deal over his 10 years,” as governor, Jillson said. “He has become much less judicial and much more political.”

[criminallawyerminnesota]

If you are charged with a theft related offense, the prosecution has alleged that you intentionally, without claim of right, took another person’s property without their consent and with the intent to permanently deprive them of the possession of the property. If the value of the property taken is $500.00 or less, the offense is classified as misdemeanor theft. If the value of the property is more than $500.00 but less than $1,000.00, the offense is a gross misdemeanor. If the value of the property is $1,000.00 or more, the charge is felony theft. Please remember, a criminal charge is only an allegation made by a prosecutor who may not know all the facts and who may not be able to prove the case. An experienced theft defense attorney can help. The fact that you are have been charged with a theft offense is not considered evidence against you. The law presumes that you are innocent of committing a theft offense! Before you can even be convicted, the prosecution must prove all of the elements of the theft offense beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the jurors must agree that you are guilty before you can be found guilty.

https://criminallawyerminnesota.com/criminal-offenses-html/theft-offenses-html/

[gwendolyn01]

When facing criminal charges, you may wonder if you need pre-charge representation. Pre-charge representation is a form of legal representation provided before charges are officially brought against you. There are several benefits of pre-charge representation, and it is important to understand them so you can decide if this is the right option.

[myinvestmindset]

Beyond the Gavel: Criminal Defense Attorney in Minneapolis

Welcome to the heart of justice, where the echoes of gavels are just the beginning. In the bustling city of Minneapolis, USA, the realm of criminal defense unfolds with a distinct flair. This vibrant metropolis, known for its unique blend of cultural diversity and legal intricacies, sets the stage for a riveting journey through the world of criminal defense attorneys.

The Minneapolis Legal Tapestry

Nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River, Minneapolis boasts a legal tapestry that weaves together history, precedent, and innovation. As the largest city in Minnesota, it stands as a hub of legal activity, where the pursuit of justice is a shared goal. With a crime rate that often captures headlines, the role of a criminal defense attorney takes center stage in safeguarding the rights and freedoms of the accused.

Beyond the Gavel: The Defenders of Justice

Beyond the symbolic gavel strikes and stern courtroom gazes lies a realm of legal professionals who redefine the boundaries of defense. Criminal defense attorney in Minneapolis are not just advocates; they are architects of creative strategies, weaving narratives that transcend traditional approaches. The famous words of renowned attorney Clarence Darrow resonate here: "You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom."

Case Study: The Landmark Smithson Case

A testament to this ethos is the landmark Smithson case of 2019. Amid heated debates on cybercrime legislation, Minneapolis defense attorney Sarah Thompson led an innovative defense that set a precedent for digital privacy rights. This case challenged conventional wisdom and highlighted the evolving landscape of legal battles.

Navigating the Maze: Challenges and Triumphs

Navigating Minneapolis' legal maze demands expertise that transcends textbooks. The ever-evolving landscape requires a finesse that only seasoned attorneys possess. This city's legal ecosystem, influenced by historical cases like the landmark Miranda v. Arizona, shapes the way defense strategies are crafted. To succeed here means embracing the complexities, where each case is a unique puzzle.

Client-Attorney Synergy: A Trusted Alliance

In Minneapolis, the client-attorney relationship is more than a legal partnership—it's a synergy that births trust. Noted legal scholar Alan Dershowitz once said, "The lawyer's job is to relate to the client, to communicate with the client, and to represent the client." In a city known for its tight-knit communities, the bonds forged between clients and their defense attorneys often extend beyond the courtroom.

Advocacy and Empowerment: A Local Commitment

Minneapolis is a city that thrives on active citizenship. Criminal defense attorneys here don't just defend; they advocate for change. From working with local nonprofits to leading discussions on legal reform, these defenders of justice are committed to making a lasting impact on their community.

The Role of a Criminal Defense Attorney

In the dynamic legal landscape of Minneapolis, criminal defense attorneys stand as the guardians of justice, advocating for the rights and dignity of the accused. As the city's crime rates fluctuate, these legal champions play a pivotal role in upholding the fundamental tenets of the legal system.

The Defender of Rights

At the heart of the Minneapolis courtroom drama, criminal defense attorneys don the mantle of defender of rights. They draw inspiration from the Fourth Amendment, which safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, ensuring that justice is not compromised even in the face of pressure.

Case Study: The Martinez Trial

A noteworthy case that underscored the essence of defense is the Martinez trial. Faced with daunting odds, defense attorney Mark Johnson orchestrated a compelling argument that ultimately secured a just outcome. This landmark trial serves as a testament to the role defense attorneys play in ensuring a fair trial for every citizen.

Championing Justice

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once stated, "Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time." In Minneapolis, criminal defense attorneys champion enduring change through their commitment to defending the rights of the marginalized and the accused. Their dedication aligns with the city's ethos of justice for all.

The Power of a Fair Defense

A fair defense can mean the difference between incarceration and redemption. As Minneapolis grapples with criminal justice reform, defense attorneys contribute to a more equitable legal system. Their tireless work aligns with the city's pursuit of equal justice under the law.

Conclusion: Sentinels of Justice

Criminal defense attorney in Minneapolis, are the sentinels of justice, preserving the rights enshrined in the Constitution and the spirit of the city. As they stand beside their clients in the courtroom, they uphold the principle that justice is not an abstract concept, but a tangible right for every individual.

[barryhogenlaw]

Barry Hogen Law: Your Premier Choice for a Minneapolis Criminal Lawyer

When legal troubles loom in Minneapolis, it's imperative to have a trusted and experienced Minneapolis criminal lawyer by your side. Barry Hogen Law is a distinguished name in the field, offering expert legal representation with a proven track record of success.

Why Choose Barry Hogen Law?

Barry Hogen Law is a reputable law firm in Minneapolis, known for several compelling reasons:

Legal Expertise: At the helm of this firm is Barry Hogen, a highly skilled Minneapolis criminal lawyer with a deep understanding of the local legal system. His extensive knowledge allows for the creation of tailored defense strategies to suit each unique case.

Personalized Representation: Recognizing the uniqueness of every case, Barry Hogen Law adopts a personalized approach to legal defense. They ensure that your defense strategy is customized to address your specific circumstances, optimizing your chances for a positive outcome.

Proven Success: Barry Hogen Law boasts a strong history of achieving favorable results for their clients. Their unwavering dedication to excellence and pursuit of justice have earned them a reputation as a trusted and effective legal team in Minneapolis.

Barry Hogen Law specializes in various aspects of criminal defense, including:

DUI and DWI Defense: If you're facing charges related to driving under the influence, Barry Hogen Law has the expertise to protect your rights and minimize potential consequences.

Drug Offenses: With extensive experience in drug-related charges, including possession, distribution, and trafficking, their legal team will vigorously defend your case.

Assault and Battery: Accused of assault or battery? Having a skilled attorney from Barry Hogen Law can significantly impact the outcome of your case.

Theft and Property Crimes: Barry Hogen Law has a strong record of successfully defending clients against theft, burglary, and property crime charges, helping them avoid severe penalties.

In Conclusion

When legal challenges arise in Minneapolis, trust your future to Barry Hogen Law. Led by a highly respected Minneapolis criminal lawyer, this firm offers unmatched expertise, personalized representation, and a track record of success. Contact Barry Hogen Law today to schedule a consultation and secure the legal support you need. Choose Barry Hogen Law for expert criminal defense in Minneapolis, ensuring the protection of your rights and interests in your legal journey.

[livinginhisgratefulness]

Derrick Thompsons first court appearance results in a bail of $1M for his crash that killed five

Derrick John Thompson was charged with criminal vehicular murder in a crash which killed five young girls. He made his first appearance before the court on Friday, and bail for him was set at one million dollars. Thompson, son of John Thompson, former Minnesota Rep. representing St. Paul East Side, did not address the court in his short time at the courtroom. There were no family members or victims of Derrick Thompson in the courtroom. Derrick John Thompson (Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office) Thompson, who had broken his hip last Friday in the Minneapolis accident, was wheeled into the courtroom from the Hennepin County Jail. Derrick John Thompson, Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office Judge Carolina Lamas said Thompson was qualified to be a public advocate. Lamas, with defense attorney Marecca vertin holding back on bail arguments, set Thompson’s bond at the $1,000,000 requested by the prosecution. Thompson is being held in jail because he had been on parole for a California conviction. He will also likely be placed under a federal hold, because the U. S. Attorney’s Office charged him last week. According to charges, a trooper saw Thompson speeding through a red traffic light in a sports utility vehicle at 95 mph, in a zone where the speed limit was 55 mph, before abruptly exiting Interstate 35W. The crash killed Salma Mohammed Abdikadir (20), of St. Louis Park, Sabiriin mohamoud Ali (17), of Bloomington, Sahra Gesaade (20), of Brooklyn Center, Sagal Burhaan Hissi (19), of Minneapolis and Siham Adan Odhowa (19), of Minneapolis. Thompson, 27, has also been charged with federal possession of fentanyl, and a gun, which were both found in the vehicle following the collision. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota made the announcement on Thursday. Thompson was found guilty in 2020 in California for a case from 2018, in which he had fled officers in his vehicle and hit a woman. She was in a state of coma for a few weeks. Thompson is still on probation for the case. Source