#us legal system

[moontyger]

It was a tip that brought a dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes.

Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip strode around and, when he got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics. That claim became evidence to get a warrant to open the envelope.

This, though, was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit.” They were made in India, and their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.

...

What will happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further.

Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet.

The documents I received after my FOIA request were highly redacted but still reveal many details about a federal investigation that began less than two years ago in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion pills were seized. The bust followed on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and came after a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion pills should be banned from the mail.

The Jackson investigation apparently also employed what’s called a mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them. The return address for the hot pink envelope in Jackson included an unused post office box number, the sort of information postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to each other.

Reproductive justice activist Laurie Bertram Roberts worries about an anti-abortion regime taking power. They direct the Jackson-based Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which assists fellow Mississippians with any reproductive decision they make, from having a baby, to leaving the state to go to an abortion clinic, to using pills at home.

In a state where abortion is strictly banned post-Roe, Bertram Roberts is also a doula. Along with other doulas, they have organized help for people at the end of their pregnancies, including those which do not come to term. Whether that end is due miscarriage or to abortion is immaterial. “We don’t ask,” they said.

The pink-envelope investigation came out of a sort of collaboration between the feds’ regional offices and a local official: U.S postal workers and a city K-9 cop. Though no one in Mississippi has yet been arrested for helping carry out an abortion, Bertram Roberts fears that synergy. They leaned forward and tensed their lips as I opened my computer and pulled up images I’d obtained from the FOIA request: photos the USPIS had taken, in a post office parking lot, of vehicles suspected of belonging to the person who mailed the pills. 

Bertram Roberts peered anxiously at the screen. “I don’t recognize them!” they said. Their face relaxed, but they shook their head. “The thing I worry about most is people getting criminalized.

...

Using local dogs creates risk for abortion-seekers. With the post office inviting local law enforcement to assist with federal investigations, local police could theoretically do their own investigations, by copying names and addresses from the mail. And they could pass that information to anti-abortion district attorneys. 

Police dogs, however, are trained to smell only the illegal drugs heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, fentanyl, and cocaine, not the ingredients in abortion pills, which currently remain legal. And the K-9s’ forensic reliability is suspect.

Why would a police dog alert on abortion pills in the first place, when they’re not narcotics?

Martel, the USPIS national spokesperson, speculated that the pills found in Jackson were contaminated in the manufacturing process by trace amounts of a drug such as marijuana, or perhaps someone was handling narcotics when they did the packing and left molecules behind that only canines’ super-sensitive noses can detect.

Theories along these lines are widespread among police, and they’re inherently impossible to disprove. Elisa Wells, a co-founder and co-director of Plan C, is skeptical. She said her group has conducted laboratory analyses of various brands of foreign-made abortion pills. They’ve all been pure, she said, and no one has ever complained about their containing narcotics.

There is another reason why a K-9 can zero in on a package that’s devoid of illicit drugs. Animal researchers call it “cueing.” Canines are exquisitely sensitive to the minutiae of a human’s posture, eye movements, and other subtle behaviors. Handlers wishing to develop probable cause to do intrusive searches for narcotics can coax their dogs into drug-alerting behavior. To get a reward, the dog will alert, even if nothing illegal is present. (Steed, the K-9 handler, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Cueing can be deliberate, but it’s more often unconscious. In 2011, Lisa Lit, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, published a now-famous study in which she told the handlers of several police dogs that their K-9s would be searching for “target scents” hidden randomly in several containers. She put red tape on some containers and said it marked the targets. In reality, none of the containers had scents. Even so, most of the dogs alerted on containers, especially those with red tape.

[bluebyrd-screaming]

It's so hard to want to be a lawyer in today's fucked up legal system

Like, what's the point of wanting to be a civil rights attorney with a focus on protecting people and having a deep understanding of the constitution if judges just don't give a fuck about the any of it and precedent no longer matters

[baronfulmen]

Holy shit it just keeps getting worse with every paragraph. I was expecting it to be bad but YIKES.

[justletmeon12]

My mom used to be a public defender. She worked appellate, so everyone she defended had already been convicted, and she took violent felonies because she found them interesting.

I don't think in 20 years she ever defended an innocent person, but she sure as hell defended some people who'd been royally fucked by a system invested in dehumanizing, torturing, and abusing them.

The point of getting rid of the death penalty isn’t that there are some innocent people on it. The point of prison abolition isn’t that there are some innocent people in prison.

The point is that the state shouldn’t have the power to kill people. The point is that the prison system commits systemic abuses of human rights, doesn’t reduce crime, is deeply racist, and doesn’t take the desires of the victims into account. To argue about whether one individual on death row or with a life sentence is innocent or guilty is just a distraction from the central issues, which is that these institutions are unjust and should not exist

[moontyger]

Image description: A twitter post by Moira Donegan that reads: "At the Supreme Court, lawyers debate how many organs a woman has to lose before she can be allowed an abortion to save her life. At the New York court of appeals, lawyers declare that if a man raped too many women some of them have to shut up about it, out of fairness to him.

[captain-kit-adventuress]

This article is a great look at why equality laws often fall short of their stated aims, through the specific lens of feminism. I adore the idea of using an unjust enrichment framework to remedy these issues legally, rather than passing anti-discrimination laws, because they essentially achieve the same thing but don't rely on changing hearts and minds, they just...make it the law. Also enrichment as a whole is a really interesting and complex framework through which to view human rights, and I encourage anyone who wants to explore other ideas of how to legislate social change to give it a read. I will note it's pretty long, but I think it's worth the time, especially if you're frustrated with the current pace of social change in America.

[mel-155-a]

Disallowing felons the right to vote was the greatest fucking trick the devil ever pulled man. Do you even know what a felony is? Here in my state of Washington it's this: "A crime is a felony if it is so designated in this title or by any other statute of this state or if persons convicted thereof may be sentenced to imprisonment for a term in excess of one year." Source: https://leg.wa.gov/CodeReviser/RCWSelectedTitles/Documents/2020/9A.pdf You are a felon if you get sentenced to imprisonment for more then a year OR if the state decides that a particular thing you are convicted of is a felony. That's it. As far as I know, most if not all of the other states use the same definition. "Well, I just won't commit any crimes!" You say, being very smart. Except that the state can also just fucking make-up crimes, and then declare them a felony! You can be made a felon for shoplifting in Washington state, provided that the store you are stealing from has previously "trespassed you" (said you aren't welcome on the property anymore) and they can then catch you stealing something. People have been made felons for repeatedly getting caught sleeping outside or peeing because there isn't any public bathrooms any more. And then you start getting into highly surveilled populations (so, basically any minority), and shit gets fucking insane. Seattle Police Department is notoriously violent and racist, we literally had a bicycle cop just going up and down a particular road where a lot of black people tend to gather and hand out citations and tickets to random people because he suspected they might be doing, selling, or even just holding drugs. Good luck proving to a court that he was in the wrong, and if you get enough of these, guess what! You're a felon now! The whole system of "felony" vs "misdemeanor" is an arbitrary bullshit game that our extremely fucked justice system has invented so that it can do whatever the fuck it wants. Are you a middle class or better cis het white guy with a DUI? Misdemeanor. Poor black queer who got arrested at a protest for "assaulting" a police officer because some of your blood got on his uniform while he was hitting you? Felony. Hate this fucking stupid shitty country so much.

[inexable]

Trump Golf Club Shooting Incident Sparks Legal Questions

With federal charges filed against Ryan Routh for illegal firearm possession near Trump's golf game in Florida, the criminal complaint stops short of labeling it an assassination attempt. Should the Justice Department have pursued more severe charges based on the FBI's initial investigation? What does this say about the legal system’s handling of high-profile incidents? Share your thoughts!

[moontyger]

How many more ways can they make it clear that they want us dead? And I mean that literally. As I wrote in 2022, it’s not just that Republican lawmakers and the anti-abortion movement see women dying as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of making abortion illegal. To them, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live.

There’s a reason that anti-choice groups have spent the last year and a half valorizing pregnant women who decline cancer treatment or other medical care. In part, they’re spreading these stories because they know maternal death rates are rising in the wake of Roe’s demise—they want to turn horror stories into martyrdom success stories. They need to make our deaths more palatable.

But this goes beyond political strategy: To them, women dying in pregnancy isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job. If we were good mothers, we’d give up anything for our fetus, including our lives. Those who don’t fulfill that role deserve disdain and punishment. Think back to that 5th Circuit ruling, which said a law meant to protect a person’s life in an emergency situation “does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child.”

An unqualified right. In other words: How dare we expect to live.

[unpredictablestuff]

The US has this fascinating legal system where all laws are applied to you whether or not you know about them, but many rights are only granted to you if you know about them and demand them.

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"Maryland Gov. Wes Moore issued a mass pardon of more than 175,000 marijuana convictions Monday morning [June 17, 2024], one of the nation’s most sweeping acts of clemency involving a drug now in widespread recreational use.

The pardons forgive low-level marijuana possession charges for an estimated 100,000 people in what the Democratic governor said is a step to heal decades of social and economic injustice that disproportionately harms Black and Brown people. Moore noted criminal records have been used to deny housing, employment and education, holding people and their families back long after their sentences have been served.

[Note: If you're wondering how 175,000 convictions were pardoned but only 100,000 people are benefiting, it's because there are often multiple convictions per person.]

A Sweeping Act

“We aren’t nibbling around the edges. We are taking actions that are intentional, that are sweeping and unapologetic,” Moore said at an Annapolis event interrupted three times by standing ovations. “Policymaking is powerful. And if you look at the past, you see how policies have been intentionally deployed to hold back entire communities.”

Moore called the scope of his pardons “the most far-reaching and aggressive” executive action among officials nationwide who have sought to unwind criminal justice inequities with the growing legalization of marijuana. Nine other states and multiple cities have pardoned hundreds of thousands of old marijuana convictions in recent years, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Legalized marijuana markets reap billions in revenue for state governments each year, and polls show public sentiment on the drug has also turned — with more people both embracing cannabis use and repudiating racial disparities exacerbated by the War on Drugs.

The pardons, timed to coincide with Wednesday’s Juneteenth holiday, a day that has come to symbolize the end of slavery in the United States, come from a rising star in the Democratic Party and the lone Black governor of a U.S. state whose ascent is built on the promise to “leave no one behind.”

The Pardons and Demographics

Derek Liggins, 57, will be among those pardoned Monday, more than 16 years after his last day in prison for possessing and dealing marijuana in the late 1990s. Despite working hard to build a new life after serving time, Liggins said he still loses out on job opportunities and potential income.

“You can’t hold people accountable for possession of marijuana when you’ve got a dispensary on almost every corner,” he said.

Nationwide, according to the ACLU, Black people were more than three times more likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana possession. President Biden in 2022 issued a mass pardon of federal marijuana convictions — a reprieve for roughly 6,500 people — and urged governors to follow suit in states, where the vast majority of marijuana prosecutions take place.

Maryland’s pardon action rivals only Massachusetts, where the governor and an executive council together issued a blanket pardon in March expected to affect hundreds of thousands of people.

But Moore’s pardons appear to stand alone in the impact to communities of color in a state known for having one of the nation’s worst records for disproportionately incarcerating Black people for any crimes. More than 70 percent of the state’s male incarcerated population is Black, according to state data, more than double their proportion in society.

In announcing the pardons, he directly addressed how policies in Maryland and nationwide have systematically held back people of color — through incarceration and restricted access to jobs and housing...

Maryland, the most diverse state on the East Coast, has a dramatically higher concentration of Black people compared with other states that have issued broad pardons for marijuana: 33 percent of Maryland’s population is Black, while the next highest is Illinois, with 15 percent...

Reducing the state’s mass incarceration disparity has been a chief goal of Moore, Brown and Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue, who are all the first Black people to hold their offices in the state. Brown and Dartigue have launched a prosecutor-defender partnership to study the “the entire continuum of the criminal system,” from stops with law enforcement to reentry, trying to detect all junctures where discretion or bias could influence how justice is applied, and ultimately reform it.

How It Will Work

Maryland officials said the pardons, which would also apply to people who are dead, will not result in releasing anyone from incarceration because none are imprisoned. Misdemeanor cannabis charges yield short sentences and prosecutions for misdemeanor criminal possession have stopped, as possessing small amounts of the drug is legal statewide.

Moore’s pardon action will automatically forgive every misdemeanor marijuana possession charge the Maryland judiciary could locate in the state’s electronic court records system, along with every misdemeanor paraphernalia charge tied to use or possession of marijuana. Maryland is the only state to pardon such paraphernalia charges, state officials said...

People who benefit from the mass pardon will see the charges marked in state court records within two weeks, and they will be eliminated from criminal background check databases within 10 months."

-via The Washington Post, June 17, 2024. Headings added by me.

[kinsey3furry300]

Recent or current US bills being debated to be signed into law by mostly republican state governments in 2023.

South Carolina: wants to make a woman seeking an abortion a capital offence. Not the only state considering this.

Minnesota and Iowa: wants to deal with workers demanding higher wages by lowering the definition of an “adult” worker to 14, allowing 14 year olds to work as delivery drivers, in construction, mining, ranching, or in meat-packing plants to get around labour shortages.

Idaho: wants to have a ban of drag performances that is so vague, that anyone or any gender wearing any makeup or “Glamorous clothing” while publicly performing in any way could be arrested and added to the sex offenders register. Montana, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia are also seeking drag show bans.

Florida is considering giving courts “Emergency powers” to forcibly take children into care if any adult in their household (including older siblings) comes out as trans or genderfluid. It’s also considering legalizing parental abduction allowing Floridians to cross state lines to kidnap their children if they are receiving gender affirming care in other states, even if they no longer have legal custody over said children.

Texas is trying to block any and all gender affirming healthcare or cosmetic procedure, including reconstructive surgery for after mastectomy on trans Texans, for residents of the state, even if they go out of state for said treatment.

And getting in on this republican madness, Democrat Massachusetts considered letting prisoners sell organs or bone marrow in exchange for sorter sentences. Just... like.... fucking hell.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/21/anti-drag-show-laws-bans-republican-states

https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/2023-02-26/child-labor-violations-are-on-the-rise-as-some-states-look-to-loosen-their-rules

https://www.businessinsider.com/south-carolina-gop-state-bill-make-death-penalty-punishment-abortion-2023-3?r=US&IR=T

https://xtramagazine.com/power/politics/florida-bill-trans-custody-247101

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-bill-ban-gender-affirming-care-transgender-adults/

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-02-09/massachusetts-bill-would-let-prisoners-donate-organs-in-exchange-for-shorter-sentence

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/03/635203037/allegations-of-sexual-abuse-surface-at-arizona-shelters-for-migrant-children

[biglisbonnews]

Study: U.S. judges give harsher sentences when their football team loses From "Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles," a study published in the American Economic Journal: Employing the universe of juvenile court decisions in a U.S. state between 1996 and 2012, we analyze the effects of emotional shocks associated with unexpected outcomes of football games played by a prominent college team in the state. — Read the rest https://boingboing.net/2023/02/06/study-u-s-judges-give-harsher-sentences-when-their-football-team-loses.html