The House Judiciary Committee scrapped plans to vote on a prison reform proposal Wednesday, Politico reports. The last-minute postponement of the measure came as President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner visited Capitol Hill to rally support for it. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Il.) advised House Judiciary members to oppose a narrower prison reform bill without the addition of a sentencing overhaul they spent months negotiating. The Trump administration and GOP leaders want to see a prison-only bill move, not the broader criminal justice bill, but that’s not stopping Grassley and Durbin from what one Republican portrayed as meddling in the House debate. “Frankly, I respect the two senators, but they have enough problems in the Senate,” said Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), lead author of the prison bill. “I wish they would actually focus on passing bills over there. That would be nice.” Durbin talked to the House Judiciary panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, about the importance of keeping the two bills together; Grassley has reached out to Republicans to pitch a comprehensive approach. “We think they’re both important ideas, and the notion of running on one and not on the other is just not acceptable,” Durbin said. The Senate’s lobbying threatens to kill momentum for the Kushner-backed House bill, which would provide training to prisoners in hopes of discouraging repeat offenses. The omission of sentencing changes is opposed by dozens of powerful progressive groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) blamed the vote delay on “time constraints” and said the postponement will give negotiators more time to work out “minor issues.” The panel is scheduled to consider the bill during the week of May 7. Six months ago, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic — which took 64,000 lives in 2016 — a public health emergency that could make more people eligible for Medicaid or dispatch more medical professionals to the areas hit hardest by the drug crisis. The declaration has been extended twice, most recently on Tuesday. Health policy experts say it’s unclear what — if any — federal rules have been waived since the declaration. Trump did not offer state and local governments more money to combat the drug crisis. Because of this, some say the declaration has been nothing more than an empty promise, reports Governing. “We’ve seen no effect here in Baltimore from the emergency [declaration],” says Leana Wen, the city’s health commissioner. “We could save so many more lives if we had more resources. We don’t need any more rhetoric.” U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have introduced the Comprehensive Addiction Resources Emergency (CARE) Act. It would require the federal government to spend $10 billion a year for 10 years on the opioid crisis. There are at least seven other bills pending to address the opioid epidemic. The one with the most bipartisan support is the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) 2.0. It offers $1 billion more than current federal funding for treatment and prevention. Frustration over federal inaction is even boiling over within the president’s own party. Before Trump traveled to New Hampshire to talk about opioids, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu confronted White House officials about the lack of funding to back up the emergency declaration. In his speech, Trump focused on cracking down on illegal immigration and drug dealers.”I’m deeply concerned with the focus on incarceration. It goes against what science says, which is that addiction is a disease. We know that treatment works. The war on drugs doesn’t,” says Wen. Supreme Court justices asked tough questions of both sides on Wednesday while weighing President Trump’s authority to impose a travel ban, which restricts entry into the U.S. from several predominantly Muslim nations, after the president promised to impose a “Muslim ban.” By the end of the argument, it was hard to identify five justices ready to vote to strike down the ban, the New York Times reports. Immigrant rights groups hoped that Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy would join the court’s four-member liberal wing to oppose the ban. Their questioning was almost uniformly hostile to the challengers. Several justices asked Solicitor General Noel Francisco about the national security justifications for the travel ban, and pressed him to explain why the restrictions should not be seen as tainted by religious animus. Justice Elena Kagan offered a hypothetical scenario in which a future president who is a “vehement anti-Semite” and makes denigrating comments about Jews comes into office and bans entry to the United States from Israel. “The question is, what are reasonable observers to think in that context?” she asked. Francisco acknowledged that “it’s a tough hypothetical” but insisted that in the case before the court, the administration’s basis for the travel ban was fully documented as a result of concerns about national security, and not on Trump’s personal beliefs. “No matter what standard you apply, this proclamation is constitutional,” he said. Kennedy pressed Neal Katyal, a lawyer for the challengers, about why courts should second-guess a president’s national security judgments. Roberts posed hypothetical questions about the president’s power to thwart terrorist attacks, and he asked whether Trump is forever unable to address immigration in light of his campaign statements. St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit and Cleveland have the nation’s highest homicide rates taking population into account, The Trace reports. The national murder rate has declined since the early 1990s, but since 2015, the rate has been ticking up. In 2016, the national rate was 5.4 killings per 100,000 people, a year-over-year increase of 8.6 percent. While the overall murder rate still remains far below those recorded in the ’90s, that’s the greatest recorded in nearly two decades. In Chicago, the murder rate nearly doubled between 2014 and 2016. Milwaukee and Louisville saw comparable spikes. There is no city more synonymous with violence in the U.S. than Chicago, but on a per-capita basis — murders per 100,000 residents — the city regularly experiences fewer killings than places whose murder rates get far less national attention. “Because Chicago has so many people, it can get a murder every day, and that gets people’s attention,” says Fordham law Prof. John Pfaff. “When you focus on numbers, not rates, Chicago ends up looking worse because you forget just how big a city it is.” Mass shootings, though comprising less than 2 percent of all gun deaths, can skew a local murder rate so drastically that some cities decline to include fatalities from gun rampages when reporting to the FBI. Las Vegas excluded victims of the 2017 Mandalay Bay massacre from its homicide counts. More than half a dozen governors — most of them Northeastern Democrats — announced plans to launch an “unprecedented” multistate consortium that will study gun violence as a public health issue, Politico reports. The governors said they were unhappy about the lack of action from Washington. “Those of us at the state and local level are taking matters into our hands to curb violence in our communities,” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. “That’s why I’m proud to join my fellow governors in creating the nation’s first regional gun violence research consortium.” The new research consortium will work across universes and government agencies across the states involved. The research will be compiled, along with existing data from institutional, federal and multistate sources, into a clearinghouse available for public review. Nearly three dozen scholars have agreed to participate. Murphy and three others governors — Dannel Malloy of Connecticut, Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island and Andrew Cuomo of New York — had already agreed to work together ongun violence. Their “States for Gun Safety“ coalition is sharing data on mental health, arrest warrants and orders of protection, with the goal of being consistent in preventing firearm purchases. The governors have also won the backing of Republican Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, along with Democratic Govs. John Carney of Delaware and Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico. The venture is aimed at filling a gap that’s existed since 1996, when federal law began limiting the CDC’s ability to study gun violence. Former President Obama directed the CDC to resume its research in 2013, but the work has remained limited. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar says the law limiting the CDC’s work on gun violence prevents it only from taking an advocacy position, not from doing research. Chicago’s aggressive vehicle impound program seizes cars and fines owners thousands of dollars for dozens of different offenses. The program impounds cars when the owner beats a criminal case or isn’t charged with a crime in the first place. It impounds cars even when the owner isn’t even driving, like when a child is borrowing a parent’s car, reports Reason. Chicago fined motorists more than $17 million between March 2017 and March of this year for 31 different types of offenses, ranging from DUI to having illegal fireworks in a car to playing music too loud. About $10 million of those fines were for driving on a suspended license, and more than $3 million were for drug offenses. The city says it is simply enforcing nuisance laws and cracking down on scofflaws. But community activists and civil liberties groups say the laws are predatory, burying guilty and innocent owners alike in debt, regardless of their ability to pay or the effect losing a vehicle will have on their lives. “There’s plenty of reason to be concerned that there’s injustice being done to people who are mostly poor, people who aren’t in a position to fight back,” says Ben Ruddell of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The city has been perpetuating an exploitative system, charging exorbitant fees in a way that it knows is likely to make it so folks never get their cars out of impoundment.” Chicago faces a huge budget deficit, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s solution has been to try and nickel-and-dime his way out, including through impoundment. The worldwide— and illegal — cyberattack-for-hire business flourishes. Plenty of online thugs will take astonishingly small sums of money and launch a cyberattack on your behalf. The hackers-for-hire flood a website with malicious traffic and knock it offline. Fed up with such malignant attacks, law enforcement officials around the world announced that authorities in 12 countries, including the U.S., seized servers and arrested four top administrators of webstresser.org, crippling what is believed to be the most successful of the cyberattack-for-hire platforms, McClatchy Newspapers reports. The high-tech crime unit of Dutch police and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency led the investigation, according to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency. More than 136,000 people had signed up for webstresser.org’s attack services, and the online platform’s hackers launched more than 4 million Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in recent years, Europol said. In a DDoS attack, hackers overwhelm a targeted website or network with traffic, causing it to crash. “The orchestrated attacks targeted critical online services offered by banks, government institutions and police forces, as well as victims in the gaming industry,” Europol said. Researchers said the takedown of webstresser.org underscores how services offered by criminal hackers have filtered from the underground dark web, where criminals and anarchists lurk, to platforms that appear legitimate. And they have tens of thousands of clients, some with petty grievances. “People are doing DDoS attacks for strange reasons, like if they lose in an online game, they attack the server. Or if they just don’t like a football team, they DDoS that football team’s website,” said Ben Herzberg of Imperva, a California company that defends clients from such attacks. Alek Minassian is facing 10 counts of first-degree murder, one for each of the people he is accused of killing in Toronto. Police say he drove a van into pedestrians in a busy shopping district in the city. When such an attack occurs, people search for an explanation in whatever information is available. Those scouring the suspect’s social-media presence believed they’ve found it, in a post that appeared there the same day as the attack. The post, now deleted by Facebook, praised “Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger” and declared that the “Incel Rebellion has already begun!,” the Washington Post reports. Rodger killed six people and wounded more than a dozen others in the California college town of Isla Vista before committing suicide. The viral spread of the Toronto suspect’s post has had the effect of introducing the concept of “incel” to a wider audience. Incel is partially explained by what it stands for: involuntarily celibate. In online culture, “incel” means more than just a support group for the lonely and shy. It refers to a specific, insular, self-radicalized community with roots in the anti-feminist, misogynist “manosphere” and 4chan culture. Incels share a central thesis: that their involuntary celibacy results from the shallowness of women, who they think want to date only traditionally attractive men. The Southern Poverty Law Center says that the more extreme posts on incel forums advocate sexual violence against women. “Frustration with relationships and lack thereof are pretty common human experiences. What makes the incel culture different is that these are primarily heterosexual white men who are directing their anger in a misogynistic way towards women,” said sociologist Ross Haenfler of Grinnell College who studies subcultures and masculinity. “There may be some real pain there, but that pain results from a misplaced anger.” Erick Davila, who killed a 5-year-old girl and her grandmother in a gang-related shooting at a child’s birthday party in Fort Worth a decade ago, was executed Wednesday evening in Texas, the Associated Press reports. Davila received lethal injection for using a laser-sighted semi-automatic rifle to spray bullets at about 20 people, more than a dozen of them children. Annette Stevenson, 48, and her granddaughter, Queshawn Stevenson, were killed and four others were wounded, including the girl celebrating her 9th birthday. Davila, 31, offered no apologies. He was the ninth prisoner executed in the U.S. this year, five of them in Texas. Authorities said the April 6, 2008, attack was in apparent retaliation for a previous run-in Davila had with the slain girl’s father, who was attending the party. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from Davila’s lawyers about 30 minutes before the punishment was carried out. Prosecutors withheld information that Davila was so high on drugs during the shooting that he was “likely intoxicated to the degree that it would have rendered him temporarily insane,” lawyer Seth Kretzer told the high court in a filing. He argued that could have influenced jurors to decide on a lesser penalty, and questioned the constitutionality of how Texas juries decide death sentences. For more than 40 years, the unsolved crimes of the “Golden State Killer” haunted California, his trail of killings and rapes bedeviling police and terrifying communities. Authorities say they have solved the case. Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer who officials say is responsible for 12 homicides and 45 rapes since the 1970s, was arrested Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reports. He was taken into custody at his home in Citrus Heights, Ca., a suburb of Sacramento, where his decade-long violent crime spree began in 1976. “The answer was always going to be in the DNA,” said Anne Marie Schubert, Sacramento County district attorney. “We found the needle in the haystack and it was right here in Sacramento.” The case has vexed police officers and cycled through generations of detectives across California for decades. It wasn’t until 2001 that DNA testing led officials to realize the rapes in Northern California were committed by the same man who killed people in Southern California. The string of attacks started in the eastern part of Sacramento with a series of burglaries and rapes. The killer then moved on the San Francisco Bay area, where he committed rapes and homicides. He would attack couples, tie up them up, rape the woman and then murder both people, the FBI said. The last killing is believed to have come in 1986, when 18-year-old Janelle Cruz was raped and murdered at her home in Irvine. The elusiveness of the killer led some to believe that he was versed in police techniques. DeAngelo is suspected of carrying out some of the attacks while serving as a police officer between 1973 and 1979, said Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones. The fugitive who remained the target of a manhunt Wednesday night in the killing of a Maine sheriff’s deputy had been freed on sharply reduced bail by a Massachusetts judge after his arrest on gun charges, the Boston Herald reports. Police say John Daniel Williams, 29, of Madison, Me., fatally shot Somerset County Sheriff’s Cpl. Eugene Cole, 61, early yesterday morning in Norridgewock, Me., then took off in his marked cruiser, robbed a convenience store, and disappeared. Williams had been due to appear in a Massachusetts court on gun charges yesterday. Williams was arested in Massachusetts March 22 by state police, who said they found him after his car went off Interstate 495. He was glassy-eyed and slurring his words, with an illegal handgun, ammo and large-capacity magazine in the trunk, as well as several bags of white and brown powder police suspected were drugs. Prosecutors asked for $10,000 bail. Williams had burglary and theft convictions on his record and faced drug charges in Tennessee dating to 2008. A judge reduced the bail to $5,000. Because prosecutors did not request a dangerousness hearing for Williams, a judge could not lawfully consider his potential threat to public safety in reaching his decision. “Given his lack of ties to the community and the fact that his prior record did not contain acts of violence, we felt that $10,000 was an appropriate amount,”said Carrie Kimball-Monahan, spokeswoman for District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opens Thursday on a six-acre site overlooking the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, the New York Times reports. It is dedicated to the victims of American white supremacy, marking the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror. At the center is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of a county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as “unknown.” The circumstances of individual lynchings are described in brief summaries along the walk. Among them are Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for “walking behind the wife of his white employer,” and Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a white mob, was hung upside down, burned and sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit organization behind the memorial, said that many of the victims “have never been named in public.” Stevenson and a small group of lawyers spent years immersing themselves in archives and county libraries to document the thousands of racial terror lynchings across the South. They have cataloged nearly 4,400. Inspired by the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Stevenson decided that a single memorial was the most powerful way to give a sense of the scale of the bloodshed. Also at the site are duplicates of each steel column, lined up in rows like coffins, intended to be sent to the counties where lynchings were carried out |
