The coast-to-coast opioid epidemic is swamping hospitals, with new government data showing 1.27 million emergency room visits or inpatient stays for opioid-related issues in a single year, the Washington Post reports. The 2014 numbers, the latest available for every state and the District of Columbia, reflect a 64 percent increase for inpatient care and a 99 percent jump for emergency room treatment compared with figures from 2005. Their trajectory likely will keep climbing if the epidemic continues unabated. The report, released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), puts Maryland at the top of the national list for inpatient care. The state, already struggling with overdoses from heroin and prescription opioids, has seen the spread of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which can be mixed with heroin or cocaine and is extraordinarily powerful. Gov. Larry Hogan this year declared a state of emergency in response to the crisis. A state report this month showed that opioid-related deaths in Maryland had nearly quadrupled since 2010, and deaths from fentanyl had increased 38-fold in the past decade. “We see overdoses in all ethnic groups, in all Zip codes,” said Leana Wen, Baltimore’s health commissioner. Wen made naloxone, the overdose-reversal medication, available over-the-counter at pharmacies, and she urged residents to obtain it. She said the new numbers showing the surge in hospital visits was not surprising and noted that many people who show up seeking treatment for addiction cannot receive it immediately. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said witnessing the shooting attack on House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and four others last week motivated his call for members of Congress to circumvent D.C. gun laws and arm themselves, the Washington Post reports. Brooks, who was on the playing field when the shooting began last week at the Republican congressional baseball practice, plans to introduce legislation this week to allow members of Congress to carry concealed weapons anywhere in the U.S., except the Capitol or events where the president and vice president are present. Brooks said he has a concealed-carry permit in Alabama but declined to say whether he carries a weapon because he doesn’t “want the bad guys to know about our defense capabilities.” Brooks, who took cover in the first-base dugout during the shooting, said that if he had had his pistol he would have fired at the gunman “with a surprise short-range attack … As a consequence of none of us in that dugout having the ability to defend ourselves, that shooter was able to wound three more people.” Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat, accused Brooks of politicizing the shooting and trying to interfere with local laws passed by elected officials. “Representative Brooks apparently did not want to be left out as members use last week’s horrific shooting to go after D.C.’s local gun safety laws,” Norton said. Brooks said Norton might react differently if she were pinned in a dugout during a shooting. “Maybe Eleanor Holmes Norton is willing to go down without a fight. I’m not,” he said. “It’s one thing to talk hypothetical, it’s another thing to talk real life.” After juries acquitted police officers in prominent Minnesota and Oklahoma shootings, many experts are concluding that the courts may be ill-equipped to lead the debate over police reform, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Police officers are rarely convicted criminally. Only one officer involved in a controversial post-Ferguson police shooting has been convicted: Michael Slager, who fatally shot Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., in 2015. Families have had much more success with civil rights lawsuits, with many having settled with municipalities for millions of dollars. While such settlements may bring a measure of acknowledgment for grieving families, they may not directly change the underlying police behavior. Convicting police officers is challenging, because the law gives them broad latitude in justifying their use of lethal force. Even large civil settlements have little deterring effect because the costs are typically shouldered by municipalities and covered by insurers. “In some ways we want it to be that way because we don’t want to chill officers in their duties,” says Prof. Kami Chavis-Simmons, a former prosecutor who directs the Criminal Justice Program at the Wake Forest University School of Law. “We have to think of different ways of holding officers accountable.” Activists and reformers could focus on pressing for changes to police department policies, particularly through using their ballot box power to elect mayors, district attorneys, and other officials willing to implement new policies. Settlements could be provoking a form of private sector oversight on police, through the pressures liability insurers could impose on departments they’re covering. Insurers have been pressuring smaller police departments, The Atlantic reported, threatening to withdraw coverage if reforms aren’t made. Such a development could be significant under a Trump administration that has expressed a desire to minimize federal oversight of police. Charleena Lyles of Seattle was short and slight, weighing less than 100 pounds. That might be what confuses Domico Jones most about his sister’s death at the hands of police, the Seattle Times reports. “She was nobody that you would ever think would be intimidating to a police officer,” he said after two officers fatally shot Lyles, 30, in her apartment, on Sunday. They were responding to her report of an attempted burglary, and police say she displayed a knife. Three of her children were in the home, and she was pregnant, relatives said. Family members believe race was a factor. Lyles was African American, while the two officers are white. Lyles had a hard childhood. She grew up around drugs, Jones said. Her mother died when she was a teenager, so she and her siblings relied on each other. Lyles worked as a cashier, cook and barista at a coffee shop. Court records and interviews with relatives paint a picture of someone trying hard to overcome tremendous challenges. Prosecutors, judges, her attorney, state and private social services, her family and Lyles herself all were working to address her increasingly erratic behavior. But it ended in her death. In a rare move, prosecutors in the retrial of former University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing criticized a lead investigator, saying she asked Tensing “easy question after easy question” and never intended for him to face charges, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. “When she said, ‘It’s just a formality,’” prosecutor Seth Tieger told jurors, referring to Cincinnati police Sgt. Shannon Heine’s interview of Tensing, “what she meant was, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to get what you want.’” During closing arguments yesterday, Tieger said Heine “was given this major case with little or no experience.” He said Heine, now a sergeant, spent only four months in the homicide unit. Police were judging one of their own, he added. Tieger had little choice but to attack Heine, who appeared to catch prosecutors off-guard when she testified early in the trial that Tensing’s actions “may be determined to be justified.” Heine also said there wasn’t anything in Tensing’s statement that was inconsistent with what she knew about the case. Attorney Mark Krumbein, who handled about 80 murder cases over three decades, said he has never seen the prosecution attack its lead investigator. Tieger said Tensing created the “dangerous situation” that led him to fatally shoot Sam DuBose in the head as DuBose tried to drive away from a traffic stop. Jurors deliberated for about three hours Monday afternoon without reaching a verdict. The family of Michael Brown, the city of Ferguson, former Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson and former police Officer Darren Wilson are nearing settlement of a lawsuit over Brown’s 2014 fatal shooting by Wilson, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. A person familiar with the negotiations said that the settlement would be under $3 million, which is the limit of the city’s insurance. Any settlement, once finalized, would have to be made public under Missouri’s open records law. Brown’s parents, Lezley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., filed the lawsuit in May 2015, about nine months after their son’s death on Aug. 9, 2014. The suit claims that a culture of pervasive hostility toward African Americans led to the death of the 18-year-old. It said Wilson used excessive and unreasonable force, and Wilson and other officers were poorly trained. The suit sought unspecified damages. Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said a special week-long deployment of more police officers showed that “when we have police officers in uniform on the streets of Baltimore, it does have an impact on the violence,” reports the Baltimore Sun. The deployments — ordered in response to six killings in less than 24 hours early last week — required all patrol officers to work 12-hour shifts, instead of their standard 10-hour shifts, and sent officers who don’t regularly work patrol out onto the street. Shortly after Davis announced the initiative, four people were shot in a quadruple shooting. After that, the pace of shootings stalled. Since Wednesday morning, police have reported eight people shot in Baltimore. One was fatal. Violence in Baltimore often occurs in spurts, which limits the value of week-to-week comparisons. Still, the number of shootings and killings in the past week was well below the average so far this year, which is on pace to be the deadliest in the city’s history. Davis said the deployment was not sustainable over the long term, but it served its purpose of immediately bringing down shootings. “The only number I’m going to be satisfied with is zero,” he said. “But in terms of slowing the pace of violence, it seemed to accomplish that.” Police officers who exhibit low self-control in their personal lives are more likely to use deadly force on the job, says a study from the University of Texas at Dallas. The study, published in the journal Police Quarterly, analyzed the responses of 1,935 Philadelphia Police Department officers to determine each officer’s level of self-control. “We know that self-control plays a role in many aspects of a person’s life. We wanted to explore the relationship between self-control and police use of deadly force,” said criminologist Jon Maskaly of the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. Researchers measured self-control based on eight indicators, including whether the officer had financial problems or had been in a car accident. Each indicator increased the likelihood of an officer’s involvement in a shooting by 21 percent, the research found. Only 5 percent of officers studied had been involved in shootings, which is the national average. Researchers said the findings suggest that police departments should consider paying more attention to behavioral markers that may reflect lower self-control and increase the use of psychological exams and interviews to better screen candidates. The Supreme Court blocked a lawsuit against former George W. Bush administration U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and former FBI director Robert Mueller over claims they crafted and executed unlawful detention policies after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, the National Law Journal reports. Eight undocumented men, part of a group of 700 immigrants who were arrested and detained under a “hold-until-cleared” policy, alleged they were rounded up and imprisoned—based only on their race or religion—for months. One of the men, Ahmer Abbasi, said he spent nearly 11 months in jail before being deported to Pakistan. The Supreme Court’s 4-2 decision yesterday overturned a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (The late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat was vacant, and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan sat out the case.) In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that Congress had not provided a damages remedy for the circumstances the lawsuit raised. “The silence of Congress is relevant; and here that silence is telling,” Kennedy wrote. Justice Stephen Breyer read a lengthy summary of his and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent—an indication of how strongly the two felt about the majority decision. He said they “most strongly disagreed” with the majority’s view “that the post 9/11 circumstance—the national security emergency—does, or might well constitute, a ‘special factor’ precluding a damages remedy.” Testimony begins today in the federal corruption trial of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, who was elected as a reformer, and now is charged with accepting bribes and gifts and defrauding the government and his mother’s nursing home in what prosecutors say was his way of maintaining a lifestyle that exceeded his paycheck, Philly.com reports. U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond spent all day yesterday selecting a jury of 10 women and two men from nine Southeastern Pennsylvania counties for a trial predicted to last from three to four weeks. Just two jurors are African American. Williams has proudly described himself on his office’s website as the city’s first African-American district attorney. Prosecutors allege that Williams, 50, nearing the end of his second four-year term, was so indebted that he ignored his oath of office and professional ethics and accepted bribes and gifts, and defrauded the government and his own mother to maintain his lifestyle. The defense maintains that Williams’ wide circle of friends willingly lent him money and paid for vacations and other personal expenses. Williams’ use of government vehicles and money earmarked for his mother’s nursing home bills were well within the law, the defense says. In their trial memorandum, prosecutors broke down Williams’ alleged crimes into five schemes. Sing Sing Correctional Facility, 30 miles north of New York City, is known for its cameos in classic films and infamous inmates. Local officials believe the maximum-security men’s prison, which holds 1,600 inmates, also could attract a different sort of clientele: tourists, the Wall Street Journal reports. For decades, local officials have sought to build a museum at Sing Sing. They view the prison as a historic landmark that could draw visitors, who would then eat, shop and explore other attractions in Westchester County. Capitalizing on broad interest in incarceration and so-called dark tourism, Sing Sing Prison Museum would tell the story of Sing Sing’s past and its present, and host criminal-justice events. Local officials believe it would be one of the few prison museums in the U.S. on the grounds of an active prison. “It’s an untold story in a facility with amazing name recognition,” said Jerry Faiella of Historic Hudson River Towns, a regional-tourism nonprofit leading the project. Brent Glass, director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, said Sing Sing’s history illustrates that of criminal justice in the U.S. “Every chapter in the history of criminal justice in America has a few pages written at Sing Sing prison,” said Glass, an adviser to the project. Late last year, the $50 million project won a $500,000 state economic-development grant. Last month, it selected board officers and the state approved the museum’s charter, a step toward becoming a nonprofit. Consulting firms estimate the museum would draw just over 100,000 visitors each year and increase tourism spending by $12 million statewide. |
