Millions of Americans are wanted on open arrest warrants, including hundreds of thousands of fugitives accused of murder, rape, robbery or assault, while victims wait for justice, report the Columbus Dispatch and GateHouse Media. Many of the cases stay open for years, even decades, and often are forgotten as law enforcers and judges struggle to keep up with thousands of new warrants filed in courthouses across the nation daily. There are more than 5.7 million cases in 27 states with open arrest warrants, enough to lock up every adult in West Virginia and Colorado combined. Add the rest of the nation, and that number could double. Reporters sought records from all 50 states, but 23 did not provide usable data. Among those warrants, reporters identified 240,000 cases that involved violence, a weapon or sexual misconduct. When warrants remain unserved, the violent suspects linger on the street, increasing the risk that someone else will be harmed. Law enforcement officials said it’s their biggest fear when they don’t have the resources to track everyone down. “Most jurisdictions around the nation are doing nothing with warrants like this. Nothing,” said criminologist David Kennedy of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “We are over-enforcing and under-protecting. With the limited resources (law enforcers) have, the attention should be focused on violent crimes, and that’s not being done.” Most people, especially those wanted for minor offenses, will remain free as long as they don’t cross paths with law enforcement in a jurisdiction that has access to their warrant. “I could pull 17 officers out of schools right now to go out and try and serve all these warrants, but is that making our schools safer, our city safer?” said Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs. “If it’s a dangerous felon, OK, but the rest of them we have to consider our other priorities.” Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, who pleaded guilty in August to breaking campaign finance laws, admitted in court Thursday making false statements to Congress about his efforts to pursue a Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Times reports. The real estate deal has been a focus of the special counsel investigation into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russian operatives. In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Cohen played down the extent of his contact with the Kremlin about the potential project and made other false statements about the negotiations, which never led to a deal. Cohen’s new guilty plea comes at a particularly perilous time for Trump, whose presidency has been threatened by Cohen’s statements to investigators. In recent days, the president and his lawyers have increased their attacks on the Justice Department and the special counsel’s office. It was the first time that special counsel Robert Mueller has charged Cohen. In exchange for pleading guilty and continuing to cooperate with Mueller, he may hope to receive a lighter sentence than he otherwise would. In two weeks, Cohen, 52, is scheduled to be sentenced for his earlier guilty plea. It was just three months ago that Cohen stood up in a different Manhattan courtroom and accused Trump of directing hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign to conceal potential sex scandals. Those payments formed the basis of the campaign finance charges against Cohen. A class of synthetic drugs has replaced heroin in many major drug markets, ushering in a more deadly phase of the opioid epidemic, the New York Times reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that drug overdoses killed more than 70,000 Americans in 2017, a record. Overdose deaths are higher than deaths from HIV, car crashes or gun violence at their peaks. The data show that the increased deaths correspond with the use of synthetic opioids known as fentanyls. Since 2013, the number of overdose deaths associated with fentanyls and similar drugs has grown to more than 28,000, from 3,000. Deaths involving fentanyls increased more than 45 percent in 2017 alone. “If we’re talking about counting the bodies, where they lie, and the cause of death, we’re talking about a fentanyls crisis,” said Jon Zibbell of the research group RTI International. The increases in drug overdose deaths have contributed to reductions in U.S. life expectancy over the last three years, a pattern unprecedented since World War II. Life expectancy at birth has fallen by nearly four months, and drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for adults under 55. “The idea that a developed wealthy nation like ours has declining life expectancy just doesn’t seem right,” said the CDC’s Robert Anderson “If you look at the other wealthy countries of the world, they’re not seeing the same thing.” Recent policy responses to the opioid epidemic have focused on opioid prescriptions. Public health researchers say the rise of fentanyls requires different tools. In some parts of the U.S., drugs sold as heroin are exclusively fentanyls now. Despite the sharp recent increases in drug-related deaths, some early signs suggest that 2017 could be the peak of the overdose epidemic. Lawyers representing babies born addicted to opioids want to break away from the massive national litigation underway, arguing that these particularly vulnerable victims need a legal pathway all their own, reports Politico. A federal judge in Cleveland overseeing the lawsuit against opioid makers and distributors is encouraging hundreds of local governments, Native American tribes, hospitals and patients who filed separate lawsuits to reach a single settlement worth potentially hundreds of billions of dollars from companies that sold the powerful painkillers while downplaying their risks. Attorneys for the opioid-dependent babies are arguing in court this week that their young clients’ crushing needs are being overlooked. They say the clock is ticking to help hundreds of thousands of kids potentially facing lifelong health and learning complications researchers are still scrambling to understand. “These kids end up being robbed of a chance because of opioids and because of big pharma,” said Kevin Thompson, an attorney for opioid babies. Thompson is pushing for at least 13 class-action lawsuits involving babies to be carved out from the sprawling lawsuit in Cleveland and transferred to a federal judge in West Virginia, one of the hardest-hit states where five percent of all babies are born dependent on opioids. A seven-judge federal panel hears arguments Thursday. Other plaintiffs and defendants, including major opioid manufacturers like Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceuticals, and national distributors like McKesson and Cardinal Health — are pushing to keep the opioid litigation in one courtroom, with the expectation of a global settlement that could rival the $240 billion tobacco settlements of the late 1990s. They argue the opioid babies’ claims are duplicative of other cases and separating their lawsuits would undermine the national effort. Elkhart, In., Police Chief Ed Windbigler is serving a 30-day unpaid suspension amid reports about officers using excessive force, reports the Elkhart Truth. The suspension began on Nov. 14. Assistant Chief Todd Thayer is interim chief.
Mayor Tim Neese said the decision is tied to two officers, Cory Newland and Joshua Titus, beating a handcuffed suspect to the ground at the police station on Jan. 12. The mayor’s communications director, Courtney Bearsch, said the suspension is “due to a failure to promptly notify the Mayor of the Jan. 12 incident” and “understating the severity of the incident to the Police Merit Commission.” A public information request by the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica led to the release of video footage of the beating on Nov. 2. Before then, Windbigler had described the incident as officers going “a little overboard.” The city’s Board of Public Safety Meeting put Newland and Titus on paid leave at least until their initial court hearing on charges of misdemeanor battery, which is expected to take place Monday. Neese is proposing the creation of a new Use of Force Review Board consisting of police officers. “I wondered if maybe on that board someone from the community should be on it. A member of the community or somebody outside the police department,” said Board of Public Safety Member Kevin Segnes. Interim Chief Thayer said, “To bring somebody in that isn’t familiar with police tactics, police use of force, how our level of force is used. That would be difficult to bring somebody in and have them evaluate something that they don’t have any experience in.” The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee delayed a confirmation vote on Ronald Vitiello’s nomination for director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to address objections raised by 14 locals of the ICE union, reports Politico. “We are going to continue to do some due diligence,” said Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI), noting that Vitiello lacked sufficient votes to advance in committee. “The unions have raised some serious issues which we’re looking into, and I think that’s appropriate.” Fourteen local leaders of the National ICE Council wrote Johnson and ranking member Claire McCaskill (D-MO) this month to complain that Vitiello, who has been serving as acting ICE director since June, failed to protect ICE employees during anti-ICE protests last summer in Portland, Or. The letter also complained about a 2016 tweet by the nominee that compared then-candidate Donald Trump to the cartoon character Dennis the Menace. Long before #MeToo became the catalyst for a women’s movement about sexual assault, Jeffrey Edward Epstein, a multimillionaire hedge fund manager whose friends included entertainers, politicians, business titans and royalty, lured teenage girls to his Palm Beach, Fl., mansion as part of a “cult-like sex pyramid scheme,” the Miami Herald reports. What began as a massage often led to masturbation, oral sex, intercourse and other sex acts. The abuse dates to 2001 and went on for years. In 2007, federal prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers put together a remarkable deal for Epstein, then 54. He pled guilty to two state felony prostitution charges, and he and his accomplices received immunity from federal sex-trafficking charges that could have sent him to prison for life. He served 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade. Alleged co-conspirators who helped schedule his sex sessions never were prosecuted. The deal, a federal non-prosecution agreement, was sealed so that no one — not even his victims — could know the full scope of Epstein’s crimes and who else was involved. The U.S. Attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, now U.S. Secretary of Labor, was involved in the negotiations. The Miami Herald analyzed thousands of pages of court records and lawsuits, witness depositions and newly released FBI documents, and tracked down more than 80 women around the U.S. and abroad who say they were victimized. Until now, those victims — today in their late 20s and early 30s — have never spoken publicly about how they felt shamed, silenced and betrayed by the people in the criminal justice system who were supposed to hold Epstein accountable. The FBI said Samuel Little, convicted in 2014 of three killings, confessed to 90 murders dating back to 1970 in exchange for moving to a new prison, USA Today reports. Authorities have corroborated 34 of the killings with several others awaiting confirmation. If all his confessions are confirmed, he could be among the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. The FBI is working with the Texas Rangers, and multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to corroborate Little’s confessions. Little, 78, was arrested in 2012 in a shelter in Kentucky, then extradited to California on a narcotics charge. Los Angeles police obtained a DNA match to Little on three unsolved murders in the area in 1987 and 1989. In 2014, he was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without parole. As Little was awaiting trial in Los Angeles, authorities in at least nine other states began scouring cold case files to see if Little may be connected. Little confessed to killings in 16 states. “He went through city and state and gave … the number of people he killed in each place. Jackson, Mississippi — one; Cincinnati, Ohio — one; Phoenix, Arizona — three; Las Vegas, Nevada, — one,” said Christina Palazzolo, a crime analyst with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. The Advocate newspapers in Louisiana have published a four-part series on the recent history of “racist policing” by the sheriff’s office in the city of New Iberia. One story describes Sheriff Louis Ackal’s acquittal in 2016 of federal charges that he had directed a squad of Iberia Parish drug deputies in a campaign of wanton beatings, false arrests and lies to cover it all up. Ackal credited the FBI with ridding his office of a band of “rogues,” while in the same breath accusing the Justice Department of a smear job. “I’m going to go back to New Iberia and make sure my house is very clean,” he said at the time. Accounts of lawless deputies and videotaped abuses inside the Iberia Parish Jail had cast a harsh glare on the parish seat, a city of 30,000 buckling from an oil industry downturn. Now, a style of deliberately racist policing that had grown familiar to residents in the city’s troubled West End and other poor, black pockets of town — enclaves known as “Little Brooklyn” and “Black Manila,” and a heavy-shooting zone a mile down the bayou from the West End — was out in the open. Last year, voters decided to create a new police force in New Iberia to replace law enforcement by the sheriff’s office. Just over four months into its existence, says the fourth article in the series, most of the early reviews for the new police force are positive. Some residents perceive a slowdown in violence, and the community outreach efforts have been greeted with growing optimism. Federal inmates have sued to block a $444 million plan to build a new federal prison in a sensitive region of Appalachia ravaged by coal-mining, reports Courthouse News Service. Expected to house a population of 1,216, the new U.S. penitentiary would sit in a hamlet of Letcher County, Ky., that is otherwise home to fewer than 100 people. The complaint from the Abolitionist Law Center labels the site a public health risk, because a mountain peak was literally lopped off the land years earlier so that it could be mined for coal. Mountain-top removal (MTR) was used throughout Appalachia “not because it was necessary but because it was the cheapest way to access coal in the area,” the suit says, adding that, “development of the project would permanently degrade the already vulnerable environment. Joined by 20 fellow inmates, plaintiff Robert Barroca brought the suit in Washington, D.C. Prisoners say the construction plans demand court intervention because the Bureau of Prisons shirked its responsibilities under the National Environmental Protection Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. “Despite the clear and uncontroverted public health risks” in the area, the prison bureau “without a reasonable and legal justification continues to move forward with its plan to build … and unnecessarily risk the health of its employees and inmates in its custody and control,” the complaint says. Some county residents, haunted by the economic downturn of a failing Appalachian coal industry, are eager to see the prison. Elwood Cornett of the Letcher County Planning Commission asked critics “what solutions they have to offer that will create over 300 sustainable, well-paying jobs in a region that is struggling to rebound?” The suit blames the construction plan on an effort to satisfy the “pork barrel politics” of U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY). Many Americans are surprised to learn that not all provisions of the Bill of Rights are applied against states, as they are to the federal government. It took the 14th Amendment in 1868, and work still underway, to apply or “incorporate” the Bill of Rights, one by one, to the states. In an argument Wednesday, the two newest Supreme Court justices seemed incredulous and impatient about the slowness of the process, reports the National Law Journal. “Here we are in 2018 still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Really?” said Justice Neil Gorsuch. He was addressing Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, who was arguing against a broad incorporation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines, citing the long history of government seizure of personal property. Justice Brett Kavanaugh added, “Isn’t it just too late in the day to argue that any of the Bill of Rights is not incorporated?” Some scholars including Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese in the 1980s said the incorporation doctrine was “constitutionally suspect” and based on “intellectually shaky foundation.” Only a handful of Bill of Rights provisions remain unincorporated, including the right to be indicted by a grand jury, the right to have jurors from the defendant’s state, and the right to a trial in civil cases. The Gorsuch and Kavanaugh comments made it likely that the court will incorporate the excessive fines clause, which has been a cause celebre for libertarian groups like the Institute for Justice. The institute represents Tyson Timbs, an Indiana man whose $42,000 Land Rover was seized by police after he was arrested for trafficking a small amount of illegal drugs. The vote for Timbs might be unanimous, though Chief Justice John Roberts asserted that seizing property that was an “instrumentality that was part of the crime” is a longstanding practice. |
