cases

The upcoming documentary dives deep into the disappearance of a schoolgirl.

Netflix has released details of a new factual show exploring the media coverage and shifting public interest around “one of the most closely watched unsolved missing-persons cases of the century”.

The documentary attempts to find answers in the disappearance of Alissa Turney, who vanished in 2001.

The 17-year-old went missing on the last day of her junior year of high school in Phoenix, Arizona.

Alissa’s case was initially labelled as a runaway, and a missing-persons investigation was not launched straight away.

To this day, Turney’s whereabouts remain unknown. The documentary comes from the producers of American Murder: Gabby Petito. Alissa’s parents divorced when she was three years old and her mother, Barbara, remarried a man named Michael Turney.

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Michael, who had three children of his own, adopted Alissa and her older brother John. Michael and Barbara then went on to have a child together- Sarah.

Tragically, Barbara died after a cancer battle when Alissa was just nine years old, leaving Michael to raise all six children.

At the time of her disappearance, Alissa, who had a boyfriend, lived with Michael and Sarah and worked at the fast-food restaurant Jack in the Box.

On the last day of her junior year at Paradise Valley High School, Michael had picked her up from school at lunchtime and she had allegedly stormed off after an argument.

Later, he and Sarah found a note in her bedroom, saying she was running away to California, but she had left her phone and other personal items behind.

She had been planning to go to a party that night, but never attended.

A week after she disappeared, Michael said he received a phone call from a California number where Alissa swore at him before hanging up.

In 2008, Michael claimed Alissa had been killed by two “assassins” from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

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However, the spotlight then shone on Michael as at the same time, detectives were raiding Michael’s home when they found explosive devices and firearms amongst other weapons.

They also found a manifesto outlining his plans for a rampage against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers building in Phoenix.

Turney admitted to unlawful possession of unregistered destructive devices and was sentenced to 10 years in jail, being released in August 2017.

In August 2020, he was indicted and charged by a Maricopa County grand jury on second-degree murder charges relating to Alissa’s disappearance.

However, all charges were dismissed in July 2023 and Alissa’s body has not yet been found.

Oct. 24 (UPI) — Former special counsel Jack Smith wants to testify in open hearings before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees about his investigations of President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, Smith’s lawyers sent letters to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who lead the chambers’ panels. Trump was indicted in two cases: attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.

On Oct. 14, Jordan demanded that he testify behind closed doors with a transcript available, writing “your testimony is necessary to understand the full extent to which the Biden-Harris Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement.” Jordan accused him of prosecutorial overreach and evidence manipulation.

But Smith, who resigned from his position before Trump returned to office in January, wants the hearings in public.

“Given the many mischaracterizations of Mr. Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Mr. Smith respectfully requests the opportunity to testify in open hearings before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees,” his attorneys, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, wrote.

Smith will need approval from the Justice Department, where he was employed when Joe Biden was president.

Smith’s attorneys said he will need guidance so he won’t violate rules to guard jury testimony.

“He is prepared to answer questions about the Special Counsel’s investigation and prosecution, but requires assurance from the Department of Justice that he will not be punished for doing so,” the letter said.

Smith’s lawyers also asked for “access to the Special Counsel files, which he no longer has the ability to access.”

“Jack Smith certainly has a lot of answering to do, but first, Congress needs to have all the facts at its disposal,” Grassley told CNN in a statement. “Hearings should follow once the investigative foundation has been firmly set, which is why I’m actively working with the DOJ and FBI to collect all relevant records that Mr. Smith had years to become familiar with.”

Smith issued reports on both cases but the one on Trump’s handling of sensitive documents found at Mar-a-Lago hasn’t been released. Attorney General Merrick Garland, before leaving office, said he wouldn’t release the report because of a criminal case involving two of Trump’s co-defendants was ongoing. But when Trump was elected president again, both cases were dropped.

The president and Republicans in Congress have accused Smith of pursuing politically motivated cases against Trump in an effort to undermine his candidacy for a second term.

But Smith “steadfastly adhered to established legal standards and Department of Justice guidelines, consistent with his approach throughout his career as a dedicated public servant,” while leading the investigations, the letter said.

Rep. Jamie Raskkin, a Democrat serving a district in Maryland, told The Hill that Smith’s offer should be accepted.

“Mr. Smith has made clear that he is prepared to address those allegations publicly, and I can think of no reason to deny the American people the opportunity to hear his testimony, under oath and with questioning from Members of both parties, and to let all Americans judge for themselves the integrity of Mr. Smith’s investigations,” Raskin wrote Thursday.

“There is no reason his appearance should be in the shadows of a backroom and subject to the usual tiresome partisan tactics of leak-and-distort.”

This week, it was reported Trump is pressing for his Justice Department to pay roughly $230 million as a settlement for two investigations. One involved the documents case and the other was ties of his 2016 campaign to the Russian government, which was investigated by another special counsel, Robert Mueller. No charges in the latter were made because of the ability to indict a sitting president.

Smith hadn’t spoken much publicly about his office’s investigations or through case failings.

On Oct. 8, he was interviewed by Andrew Weissman at University College London. Weissman was part of Mueller’s investigations and is now an MSNBC analyst.

“The idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case, or who got chosen, is ludicrous,” Smith told Weissmann.

“The people on my team were similar to what I saw throughout the [Department of Justice] throughout my career,” he said. “Apolitical people who wanted to do the right thing and do public service.”

President Trump has often locked horns with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, with the once left-leaning court putting a persistent drag on his first-term agenda.

And now, even after remaking the bench with his own appointees, the president is still tangling with the West Coast’s federal appellate court — a situation poised to boil over as the circuit juggles multiple challenges to his use of the National Guard to police American streets.

“I appointed the judge and he goes like that — I wasn’t served well,” Trump told reporters Sunday, lashing out at U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of Portland after she temporarily blocked the deployment federalized troops.

“To have a judge like that, that judge ought to be ashamed of himself,” Trump said, referring to Immergut, who is a woman.

The president has long railed against judges who rule against him, calling them “monsters,” “deranged,” and “radical” at various points in the past.

Trump has also occasionally sniped at conservative jurists, including U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, whom he called “disgraceful” after the court rejected his bid to overturn the 2020 election.

But this weekend’s spat marked a shift in his willingness to go after his own appointees — a turn experts say could become much sharper as his picks to the appellate bench test his ambition to put boots on the ground in major cities across the U.S.

“The fact that a pretty conservative judge ruled the way she did is an indication that some conservative judges would rule similarly,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute.

The 9th Circuit handed the administration an early victory in the troop fight this spring, finding that courts must give “a great level of deference” to the president to decide whether facts on the ground warrant military intervention.

That ruling is set to be reviewed by a larger appellate panel, and could ultimately be reversed. The circuit is also now set to review a September decision barring federalized troops in California from aiding in civilian law enforcement, as well as Immergut’s temporary restraining order blocking the deployment over the weekend.

In the meantime, the 9th Circuit’s June decision has served as a guidepost for states seeking to limit what Oregon called a “nationwide campaign to assimilate the military into civilian law enforcement.”

“That decision is binding, and it does require a substantial degree of deference on the factual issues,” Somin said. “[But] when what the president does is totally divorced from reality, that limit is breached.”

Immergut appeared to agree, saying in her ruling that circumstances in Portland this fall were significantly different than those in L.A. in the spring. While some earlier protests did turn violent, she wrote, recent pickets outside Portland’s ICE headquarters have featured lawn chairs and low energy.

“Violence elsewhere cannot support troop deployments here, and concern about hypothetical future conduct does not demonstrate a present inability to execute the laws using nonmilitary federal law enforcement,” the judge wrote, addressing the 9th Circuit decision.

“The President is certainly entitled ‘a great level of deference,’” Immergut continued. “But ‘a great level of deference’ is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground. … The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”

But exactly where the appellate court may draw the line on presidential fact-finding is tricky, experts said.

“How much deference is owed to the president? That’s something we’re all talking about,” said John C. Dehn, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Whether courts can review the president’s judgment at all is a matter that splits even some of the president’s most conservative judicial picks from his current justice department attorneys.

So far, Trump has relied on an esoteric subsection of the U.S. Code for the authority to send soldiers on immigration raids and to control crowds of protesters.

Dehn and others have characterized that reading of the code as semantic and divorced from its legal context.

“They’re looking at the words in a vacuum and arguing the broadest possible meaning they could can think of,” Dehn said. “The administration is not engaged in good faith statutory interpretation — they’re engaged in linguistic manipulation of these statues.”

Immegur agreed, quoting Supreme Court precedent saying “[i]nterpretation of a word or phrase depends upon reading the whole statutory text.”

For some conservative legal scholars, Trump appointees’ willingness to push back on repeated deployments could signal a limit — or a dangerous new escalation in the administration’s attacks on jurists who defy them.

“It’s obvious the administration is trying to do this on a bigger scale,” Somin said. “Ideally we would not rely on litigation alone to deal with it.”

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court opens its new term on Monday and is scheduled to hear arguments in 33 cases this fall.

The justices will hear challenges to transgender rights, voting rights and Trump tariffs and will reconsider a 90-year-old precedent that protects officials of independent agencies from being fired by the president.

Here are the major cases set for argument:

Conversion therapy and free speech: Does a licensed mental health counselor have a 1st Amendment right to talk to patients under age 18 about changing their sexual orientation or gender identity, even if doing so is prohibited by state law?

California in 2012 was first state to ban “conversion therapy,” believing it was harmful to minors and leads to depression and suicide. Other states followed, relying on their authority to regulate the practice of medicine and to prohibit substandard care.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group, sued on behalf of a Colorado counselor and argued that the state is “censoring” her speech. (Chiles vs. Salazar, to be argued on Tuesday.)

Supreme Court Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., left, Clarence Thomas and Brett M. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. attend inauguration ceremonies for Donald Trump in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20 in Washington.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Voting rights and Black majority districts: Does a state violate the Constitution if it redraws its congressional districts to create one with a Black majority?

In the past, the court has said racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional. But citing the Voting Rights Act, it also has ruled states must sometimes create an electoral district where a Black or Latino candidate has a good chance to win.

Otherwise, these minorities may be shut out from political representation in Congress, state legislatures or county boards.

But Justice Clarence Thomas has argued for outlawing all use of race in drawing district lines, and the court may adopt his view in a pending dispute over a second Black majority district in Louisiana. (Louisiana vs. Callais, to be argued Oct. 15.)

Trump and tariffs: Does President Trump have legal authority acting on his own to impose large import taxes on products coming from otherwise friendly countries?

Trump is relying on a 1977 law that empowers the president to act when faced with an “unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad. The measure does not mention tariffs or taxes.

In a pair of cases, lower courts ruled the tariffs were illegal but kept them in place for now. Trump administration lawyers argue the justices should defer to the president because tariffs involve foreign affairs and national security. (Learning Resources vs. Trump, to be argued Nov. 5.)

The high court will look at whether transgender athletes can compete in certain sports. Above, a 100-meter hurdles event during a track meet in Riverside in April.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Transgender athletes and school sports: Can a state prevent a transgender student whose “biological sex at birth” was male from competing on a girls sports team?

West Virginia and Idaho adopted such laws but they were struck down by judges who said they violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of laws and the federal Title IX law that bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges.

Trump voiced support for “keeping men out of women’s sports” — a characterization deemed false by transgender women and their advocates, among others. If the Supreme Court agrees, this rule is likely to be enforced nationwide under Title IX. (West Virginia vs. B.P.J. is due to be heard in December.)

Trump and independent agencies: May the president fire officials of independent agencies who were appointed with fixed terms set by Congress?

Since 1887, Congress has created semi-independent boards, commissions and agencies with regulatory duties. While their officials are appointed by the president, their fixed terms keep them in office when a new president takes over.

The Supreme Court upheld their independence from direct presidential control in the 1935 case of Humphreys Executor vs. U.S., but Trump has fired several such officials.

The current court has sided with Trump in two such cases and will hear arguments on whether to overturn the 90-year-old precedent. (Trump vs. Slaughter is due to be argued in December.)

Eight months into his second term, President Trump’s long-standing pledge to take on those he perceives as his political enemies has prompted debates over free speech, media censorship and political prosecutions.

Trump has escalated moves to consolidate power in his second administration and target those who have spoken out against him, including the suspension of late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s show, Pentagon restrictions on reporters and an apparent public appeal to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to pursue legal cases against his adversaries.

In a post on social media over the weekend addressed to Bondi, Trump said that “nothing is being done” on investigations into some of his foes.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he said. Referencing his impeachment and criminal indictments, he said, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Criticizing investigations into Trump’s dealings under Democratic President Biden’s Justice Department, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Sunday that “it is not right for the Trump administration to do the same thing.”

Directive to Bondi

Trump has ratcheted up his discussion of pursuing legal cases against some of his political opponents, part of a vow for retribution that has been a theme of his return to the White House. He publicly pressed Bondi over the weekend to move forward with such investigations.

Trump posted somewhat of an open letter on social media Saturday to his top prosecutor to advance such inquiries, including a mortgage fraud investigation of New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James and a possible case against former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump accuses of threatening him.

The president posted that he had “reviewed over 30 statements and posts” that he characterized as criticizing his administration for a lack of action on investigations.

“We have to act fast — one way or the other,” Trump told reporters later that night at the White House. “They’re guilty, they’re not guilty — we have to act fast. If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty or if they should be charged, they should be charged. And we have to do it now.”

Trump later wrote in a follow-up post that Bondi was “doing a GREAT job.”

Paul, a frequent Trump foil from the right, was asked during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the propriety of a president directing his attorney general to investigate political opponents. The senator decried “lawfare in all forms.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said it was “unconstitutional and deeply immoral for the president to jail or to silence his political enemies.” He warned that it could set a worrisome precedent for both parties.

“It will come back and boomerang on conservatives and Republicans at some point if this becomes the norm,” Murphy said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump is turning the Justice Department “into an instrument that goes after his enemies, whether they’re guilty or not, and most of them are not guilty at all, and that helps his friends. This is the path to a dictatorship. That’s what dictatorships do.”

The Justice Department did not respond Sunday to a message seeking comment.

Letitia James investigation

Each new president nominates his own U.S. attorneys in jurisdictions across the country. Trump has already worked to install people close to him in some of those jobs, including former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in the District of Columbia and Alina Habba, his former attorney, in New Jersey.

Trump has largely stocked his second administration with loyalists, continuing Saturday with the nomination of a White House aide as top federal prosecutor for the office investigating James, a longtime foe of Trump.

The president announced Lindsey Halligan to be the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia on Saturday, just a day after Erik Siebert resigned from the post and Trump said he wanted him “out.”

Trump said he was bothered that Siebert had been supported by the state’s two Democratic senators.

“There are just two standards of justice now in this country. If you are a friend of the president, a loyalist of the president, you can get away with nearly anything, including beating the hell out of police officers,” Murphy said, mentioning those convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and insurrection at the U.S. Capitol pardoned by Trump as he returned to office. “But if you are an opponent of the president, you may find yourself in jail.”

New restrictions on Pentagon reporters

Trump has styled himself as an opponent of censorship, pledging in his January inaugural address to “bring free speech back to America” and signing an executive order that no federal officer, employee or agent may unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.

Under a 17-page memo distributed Friday, the Pentagon stepped up restrictions on the media, saying it will require credentialed journalists to sign a pledge to refrain from reporting information that has not been authorized for release, including unclassified information. Journalists who don’t abide by the policy risk losing credentials that provide access to the Pentagon.

Asked Sunday whether the Pentagon should play a role in determining what journalists can report, Trump said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“Nothing stops reporters. You know that,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House for slain activist Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.

Trump has sued numerous media organizations over negative coverage, with several settling with the president for millions of dollars. A federal judge in Florida tossed out Trump’s $15-billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times on Friday.

Jimmy Kimmel ouster and FCC warning

Perhaps the most headline-grabbing situation involves ABC’s indefinite suspension Wednesday of veteran comic Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. What Kimmel said about Kirk’s killing had led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show and provoked some ominous comments from a top federal regulator.

Trump celebrated on his social media site: “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.”

Earlier in the day, the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, who has launched investigations of outlets that have angered Trump, said Kimmel’s comments were “truly sick” and that his agency has a strong case for holding Kimmel, ABC and network parent Walt Disney Co. accountable for spreading misinformation.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) argued that Kimmel’s ouster wasn’t a chilling of free speech but a corporate decision.

“I really don’t believe ABC would have decided to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a threat,” he said Sunday on CNN. “ABC has been a long-standing critic of President Trump. They did it because they felt like it didn’t meet their brand anymore.”

Not all Republicans have applauded the move. On his podcast Friday, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a former Trump foe turned staunch ally, called it “unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.”

Trump called Carr “a great American patriot” and said Friday that he disagreed with Cruz.

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

The Chadian Ministry of Public Health and Prevention has announced there are over 2,100 recorded cases of cholera in the country, adding that the disease is spreading in three provinces. The announcement was made yesterday, Sept. 19.

Since announcing the discovery of the first suspected cases of the disease on July 13, followed by the confirmation of the Vibrio cholerae 01 Ogawa on July 24, Chad has been facing a persistent spread of the disease with 2,134 total cases recorded, including 74 confirmed cases after laboratory analysis.

There have been 137 deaths attributed to the outbreak, bringing the fatality rate to 6.8 per cent. Women are the most affected, with the age groups of 5–14 and 15–44 representing more than 64 per cent of the cases.

The provinces where the disease is very active are Ouaddai, Sila, and Guera, with nine health districts affected, notably Chokoyane, Hadjer Hadid, and Bitkine.

The national authorities, supported by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and other partners, have been working on the installation of choleric beds and reinforcement of treatment units, distribution of doxycycline and the purification of water, and the disinfection of houses and community sensitisation in the affected zones. The authorities are also preparing to start a vaccination campaign in the districts of Abeche, Abdi and Goz Beida, with an extension envisaged to Bitkine.

In spite of these efforts, several obstacles complicate the response measures, including insufficient equipment such as tents, adapted beds, protection kits, a lack of qualified personnel, and weak participation of certain partners, defecation in open areas, insecure funerals and gatherings that favour the transmission of the disease, as well as difficult access to affected zones.

The Ministry of Public Health emphasised that cholera is transmitted through water or contaminated food, and to protect against it, the systematic washing of hands with water and soap, drinking only pipe-borne or boiled water, and washing fruits and vegetables before consumption are recommended. The population is also advised to avoid eating roadside food and to report cases of acute diarrhoea immediately to health facilities.

WASHINGTON — A federal magistrate judge on Thursday angrily accused Justice Department prosecutors of trampling on the civil rights of people arrested during President Trump’s law enforcement surge in the nation’s capital.

Judge Zia Faruqui, a former federal prosecutor, said leaders of U.S. Atty. Jeanine Pirro’s office have tarnished its reputation with how they are handling the deluge of cases. He said Pirro’s office is routinely bringing cases that don’t belong in federal court and needlessly keeping people in jail for days while they evaluate charges.

“It’s not fair to say they’re losing credibility. We’re past that now,” Faruqui said. He later added, “There’s no credibility left.”

The judge lambasted Pirro’s office during a hearing at which he agreed to dismiss the federal case against a man accused of threatening to kill Trump while in police custody. The defendant, Edward Alexander Dana, spent more than a week in jail before a federal grand jury refused to indict him.

It is extraordinarily rare for a grand jury to balk at returning an indictment, but it has happened at least seven times in five cases since Trump’s surge started nearly a month ago. Faruqui said it is ironic that an occupying force is at the mercy of the occupants” serving on the grand juries.

Pirro has been critical of Faruqui, one of four magistrates at the district court in Washington. On Thursday, the top federal prosecutor for Washington responded to Faruqui’s latest remarks by saying the judge “has repeatedly indicated his allegiance to those who violate the law and carry illegal guns.”

“This judge took an oath to follow the law, yet he has allowed his politics to consistently cloud his judgment and his requirement to follow the law,” she said in a statement. “America voted for safe communities, law and order, and this judge is the antithesis of that.”

Faruqui said there is no precedent for what is happening at the courthouse over the last few weeks. He said Trump administration officials are frequently touting the arrest figures on social media with seemingly no regard for how the arrests are affecting people’s lives.

“Where are the stats on the people illegally detained?” he asked.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Conor Mulroe said prosecutors from Pirro’s office are working around the clock on the influx of new cases.

“You are busy because you all have created this mess,” he told Mulroe. “I’m not saying it’s your problem. It’s your office’s problem.”

Mulroe was the only representative of Pirro’s office who attended Thursday’s hearing. Faruqui questioned why Pirro or her top deputies “don’t have the dignity to come here” and defend their charging decisions.

“That’s what leaders do,” he said.

The White House says over 1,800 people have been arrested since the operation started Aug. 7. Over 40 cases have been filed in district court, which hears the most serious federal offenses, including assault, gun and drug charges.

Dana was jailed for about a week after his arrest on Aug. 17. A different judge ordered his release on Aug. 25. On Thursday, Pirro’s office opted to drop the federal case against Dana but charge him with misdemeanors, including destruction of property and attempted threats, in D.C. Superior Court.

Dana’s attorney, assistant federal public defender Elizabeth Mullin, said prosecutors should have known that this case didn’t belong in federal court.

“A 15-year-old would know,” she said. “It was obvious from the outset.”

Dana was arrested on suspicion of damaging a light fixture at a restaurant. An officer was driving Dana to a police station when he threatened to kill Trump, according to a Secret Service agent’s affidavit. Dana also told police that he was intoxicated that night. Mullin said Dana’s “hyperbolic rambling” didn’t amount to a criminal threat.

Faruqui ordered prosecutors to file a brief explaining why they didn’t immediately inform him of its charging decisions in Dana’s case. The judge apologized to Dana “on behalf of the court” and suggested that Pirro’s office also owes Dana an apology.

Pirro said in an earlier statement that a grand jury’s refusal to indict somebody for threatening to kill the president “is the essence of a politicized jury.”

“The system here is broken on many levels,” she said. “Instead of the outrage that should be engendered by a specific threat to kill the president, the grand jury in D.C. refuses to even let the judicial process begin. Justice should not depend on politics.”

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press.

United States President Donald Trump has announced his government will seek the death penalty in every murder case that unfolds in Washington, DC, as part of his crackdown on crime in the country’s capital.

Trump made the announcement in the midst of a Labor Day-themed meeting of his cabinet on Tuesday as he discussed a range of issues, from weapons sales to the rising cost of living.

“Anybody murders something in the capital: capital punishment. Capital capital punishment,” Trump said, seeming to relish the wordplay.

“If somebody kills somebody in the capital, Washington, DC, we’re going to be seeking the death penalty. And that’s a very strong preventative, and everybody that’s heard it agrees with it.”

Trump then acknowledged that the policy would likely be controversial, but he pledged to forge onwards.

“I don’t know if we’re ready for it in this country, but we have no choice,” Trump said. “States are gonna have to make their own decision.”

Federal prosecutions in DC

Washington, DC, occupies a unique position in the US. The US Constitution defined the capital as a federal district as opposed to a state or a city within a surrounding state.

Elsewhere in the country, most murder cases are prosecuted by state or local authorities unless they rise to the level of a federal crime.

But in Washington, DC, the US Attorney’s Office – a federal prosecutor’s office under the Department of Justice – prosecutes nearly all violent crimes.

The administration of former President Joe Biden had backed away from the death penalty. Under the Democrat’s leadership, the Justice Department ordered a moratorium that paused capital punishment as it reviewed its policies.

Biden himself campaigned on the promise that he would “eliminate the death penalty”, arguing that more than 160 people who were executed from 1973 to 2020 were later exonerated.

“Because we cannot ensure we get death penalty cases right every time, Biden will work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example,” Biden’s team wrote on his 2020 campaign website.

While Biden ultimately did not eliminate the federal death penalty, in one of his final acts as president, he commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row.

In a statement in December, he anticipated that a second Trump administration would pursue the death penalty for federal cases.

“In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden wrote.

A reversal of policy

But when Trump took office for a second term on January 20, one of his first executive orders was to “restore” the death penalty.

“Capital punishment is an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens,” Trump wrote in the order.

“Our Founders knew well that only capital punishment can bring justice and restore order in response to such evil.”

The Republican leader had campaigned for re-election on a platform that promised a crackdown on crime and immigration, sometimes conflating the two despite evidence that undocumented people commit fewer crimes than US-born citizens.

In the days leading up to his inauguration, Trump doubled down on that pledge, denouncing Biden for his decision to commute the majority of incarcerated people on federal death row.

“As soon as I am inaugurated, I will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters,” Trump wrote on his platform Truth Social. “We will be a Nation of Law and Order again!”

Trump has repeatedly pushed for the increased use of the death penalty in the seven months since, including during an address to a joint session of Congress in March.

In that speech, he called on Congress to pass a law to make the death penalty a mandatory sentence for the murder of a law enforcement officer in the US.

During his first term, from 2017 to 2021, Trump gained a reputation for accelerating the use of capital punishment on the federal level.

While federal executions are rare, the first Trump administration conducted 13 of the 16 executions that have taken place since 1976, the year the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.

The only other president to carry out capital punishment during that time was a fellow Republican, George W Bush. His administration oversaw three federal executions.

Critics fear a similar uptick in death penalty cases during Trump’s second term.

Public support for capital punishment has been steadily declining over the past decade, according to surveys. The research firm Gallup found that, as of 2024, a narrow majority of Americans – 53 percent – were in favour of the death penalty, down from 63 percent a decade earlier.

A DC crime crackdown?

Trump’s call to apply the death penalty to all murder cases in Washington, DC, coincides with his controversial push to crack down on crime in the capital city.

That comes despite data from the Metropolitan Police Department that show violent crime in the capital hit a 30-year low in 2024, a statistic shared by the Justice Department in a statement in January.

Homicides, it added, were down by 32 percent over the previous year.

But Trump has maintained that crime fell only when he deployed more than 2,000 armed National Guard troops to patrol the city this month.

“Crime in DC was the worst ever in history. And now over the last 13 days, we’ve worked so hard and we’ve taken so many – and there are many left – but we’ve taken so many criminals. Over a thousand,” Trump said at Tuesday’s cabinet meeting.

He also claimed – without evidence – that the local government in Washington, DC, gave “false numbers” in its crime reporting.

“What they did is they issued numbers: ‘It’s the best in 30 years.’ Not the best. It’s the worst. It’s the worst,” Trump said. “And they gave phoney numbers.”

Just a day before, Trump signed an executive order to develop a new unit within the National Guard “to ensure public safety and order in the Nation’s capital”.

But under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the federal government is largely prohibited from using military forces for domestic law enforcement except in cases of disasters or major public emergencies.

Trump has described crime in Washington, DC, as a national emergency although local leaders have disputed that assertion.

At several points during Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, he defended his strong-arm approach to law enforcement as necessary, even if it earns him criticisms for being a “dictator”.

“The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ But I’m not a dictator. I just know to stop crime,” Trump said.

A day or two after the March 3, 1991, beating of Rodney King, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.’s law firm got a call from the victim’s family, wondering if the popular, but sometimes controversial, litigator would take the case.

Cochran was in court at the time doing what some say he does best: convincing a jury to fork over taxpayer dollars–about $2 million in this instance–to a citizen who had been abused by a person with a badge.

So his secretary told the caller that Cochran wouldn’t be available for several weeks, Cochran says, dropping his head into his hands in mock despair.

Fourteen months later, as the riots triggered by the King verdicts waned, Cochran got another call. A community group wondered if he’d represent the men accused of beating trucker Reginald Denny at the corner of Florence and Normandie.

Cochran turned them down.

Then came an offer to represent the nation’s second most visible beating victim–Denny–and Cochran finally got a piece of this complex and pivotal moment in city history. In a sense, it was a moment to which Cochran’s whole career had pointed, leading like a long fuse from the 1965 Watts riot.

“What makes it ironic,” he says, “is that I’m black and he’s white.”

If that’s an irony, it’s not the only one.

Over the past decade, juries have awarded Cochran’s clients an estimated $35 million in county and city funds, mainly from lawsuits charging law officers with excessive force. Now Cochran’s anticipated civil suit for Denny and three other clients–a black, a Latino and an Asian–will charge that the LAPD failed to act with sufficient force in quelling April’s riots.

“That’s an irony,” Cochran allows, nodding. “It really is . . . “

*

Reggie Denny walks into Cochran’s office like a schoolboy visiting the principal for the first time.

“May I sit down?” he asks, as his 8-year-old daughter, Ashley, plops onto a couch wearing a T-shirt Cochran brought her from the Barcelona Olympics.

As usual, Cochran careers through topics, his mind working at the frenetic pace of Robin William’s animated genie in “Aladdin.”

The 55-year-old attorney never breaks into the cartoon genie’s refrain–”You ain’t never had a friend like me!” But Denny leaves little doubt that he views Cochran as a new best friend with almost magical powers.

As a photographer shoots, Cochran begins a semi-staged discussion of the claim he has filed with the city on Denny’s behalf, for an as-yet-unspecified–but “very substantial”–sum.

“I suspect that between now and the first of the year, we’ll get these massive rejections of the claims. Then we’ll come out and file our lawsuit. We’re ready. We’ve got a few little surprises for them. It’s going to be interesting,” Cochran says.

“Well,” Denny replies, his soft voice filled with admiration, “you know ‘em better than anyone.”

Later, when the meeting winds down, Cochran looks out the window of his Wilshire Boulevard office. In the parking lot 10 floors below, Cochran’s Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, license plate JC JR is visible, parked across from the white crew-cab truck that was a gift to Denny–license plate IBARIOT.

Cochran gestures to a landscape that six months ago was dotted with plumes of smoke from the riots, but now is clear and calm.

“It looks like Utopia, doesn’t it?” he says, chuckling. “Unfortunately, it’s not, yet.” Then, with the charm of a master litigator addressing a jury, he turns to Ashley: “It’s going to be better when you grow up, OK, Ashley? It’s going to be a better world out there.”

Johnnie Cochran sees the pivotal point in his life as the day the 6-year-old and his family boarded a train to California, leaving his Shreveport, La., birthplace.

“This may not be the land of total promise, but I tell you, it’s a lot better than having been raised in Louisiana,” he says.

For a time, Cochran and his two sisters lived with their parents in the Alameda projects, before the family moved to San Diego and finally Los Angeles.

His father, Johnnie Cochran Sr., rose through the ranks of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co., while Hattie Cochran raised the children in a small house on 28th Street. The tight-knit family became a part of an old-fashioned watch-out-for-each-other community, attending Second Baptist Church, the political powerhouse to which Cochran still belongs.

After skipping a grade in elementary school, Cochran attended Los Angeles High School, where Dustin Hoffman was a classmate, and then went to UCLA and Loyola Law School.

Cochran had just moved into private practice from the city attorney’s office when Watts exploded amid charges of police brutality in 1965. Nine months later, a police officer made a routine traffic stop of a young black named Leonard Deadwyler, who was accompanied by his pregnant wife and young daughter.

The officer shot and killed him, and the case reignited the city’s simmering racial tensions.

Representing Deadwyler’s family, Cochran played the media, turning the case into a cause. In the end, though, his firm lost the case.

Still, the case showed Cochran that his “burning passion” lay in pursuing this social-change-through-lawsuit strategy.

Today, his firm’s blue-and-gilt brochure says that he and the eight attorneys working for him “have dedicated themselves to being the best that they can be, to eradicating injustice wherever encountered, and to enhancing the quality of life whenever possible for all citizens.”

The attorneys’ quality of life hasn’t suffered either.

Built into the counter that separates the firm’s reception area from its plush offices is an electronic message sign. Lately, its red dots have flashed this message to one of the firm’s young attorneys who just won a nice judgment: “Congratulations, Carl! Welcome to the million-dollar club!”

Cochran had earned his first Rolls-Royce by the mid-1970s.

In 1978, though, he took “a five-fold pay cut” to become third in command of the 900-person Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office. He arrived just after controversy erupted over the shooting of Eula Love, a black woman killed by police after she threatened them with a kitchen knife. Cochran helped create a special “roll-out” team to investigate officer-involved shootings.

Despite his growing legal stature, he was not immune to racial stereotypes.

One evening as he drove his three children home after a show at Magic Castle, red lights appeared in the rear-view mirror of Cochran’s Rolls.

“Out of the car!” the loudspeaker boomed. “Get your hands over your head.”

Cochran knew enough to comply. With his children watching, he edged over to the sidewalk as police officers kept him fixed in the sights of their service revolvers.

When the officer rummaging through the designer bag Cochran carries spotted his D.A.’s badge, the scene changed abruptly. But it taught Cochran a lesson–the same one he gets each time he goes to New York City and watches helplessly as a stream of cabbies refuse to pick him up, he says: “It can happen to anyone who’s black.”

Cochran’s work as a prosecutor was widely lauded. In 1979, the California Trial Lawyers Assn. named him its “Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer.” He left the D.A.’s office in 1981, and nine years later the same group named him “Attorney of the Year”–in part because of his success in suing law-enforcement officers.

Cochran’s skills landed him posts teaching trial tactics and techniques at UCLA and Loyola law schools. His vita grew into a seven-page catalogue of awards, appointments and commendations that range from inclusion in the Los Angeles High School Alumni Hall of Fame in 1987 to being profiled this year by National Law Journal as one of “Ten Litigators Who Stand Apart From the Crowd.”

“He is not a person that pounds the table and screams at the jury,” says Superior Court Judge Stephen M. Lachs, who presided over a trial in which Cochran sued the state on behalf of a man killed by the California Highway Patrol. “He is just very nice and likable. There’s no doubt that he was very, very effective in reaching jurors’ emotions. But in a subtle way.”

Adds Ricardo Torres, presiding judge of Los Angeles County Superior Court: “He’ll charm everybody, but especially the jury. He just exudes ability. . . . I can’t think of anyone, especially a trial litigator, I’d rather talk to.”

Other powerful figures also seem to enjoy Cochran’s company.

On the cabinet behind his desk is a large picture of Cochran with Mayor Tom Bradley, his Kappa Alpha Psi “big brother” at UCLA, and two smaller shots of him shaking hands with President-elect Bill Clinton.

Cochran hit Little Rock, Ark., for the victory celebration, and recently ricocheted on a round-trip red-eye from Washington–where he has an office–to chat with Vernon Jordan about getting minorities into the Clinton Administration.

“Do you know that only one U.S. President in history has ever gone to Africa?” he asks. “There’s never been an undersecretary for African affairs who’s been an African-American. . . . We talked about that.”

Cochran’s encouragement of African-American inclusion doesn’t stop at the top, people say. “As a kid,” says community activist Kerman Maddox, “I remember watching the Deadwyler case on TV. We’d have family dinners and talk about this young, smart, black attorney who was taking on that case.”

Later, when he and his friends saw themselves as young, smart, African-American “nobodies,” Maddox says, Cochran took time to help them figure out “how does one make it in Los Angeles?”

Cochran’s way has not won universal approval.

Attorney Stephen Yagman objects to the way Cochran–whom Bradley appointed to the prestigious Board of Airport Commissioners in 1981–straddles Los Angeles’ legal and political fences.

“Johnnie Cochran trades on the fact that he is politically connected to the Establishment,” says Yagman, who often is listed alongside Cochran as one of the nation’s top police-abuse litigators. “He long has had intimate connections with Mayor Tom Bradley and City Atty. Jimmy Hahn, while at the same time bringing suits against the LAPD.

“In my opinion, there is a conflict of interest between a person who is a city official–who, in fact, administers one of the city’s police forces, the airport police–suing the city . . . It creates the appearance of favoritism by the city attorney’s office and the mayor’s office.”

Earlier this year, a deputy city attorney with the police litigation unit raised just that issue when Cochran’s firm filed suit on behalf of a teen-age girl who had been molested by an off-duty LAPD officer. Jim Pearson, chief assistant city attorney under Hahn, told the deputy that the office had long ago decided there was no conflict in such matters.

The deputy’s motion to disqualify Cochran was withdrawn, Cochran won a record $9.4-million judgment against the city and was awarded another $300,000 in attorney’s fees.

In 1990, The Times included Cochran in its investigation of dubious dealings by Bradley appointees.

The stories pointed out that Cochran and his wife, Sylvia Dale, hosted a Bradley fund-raising dinner at their home, which was attended by people who did business with the airport commission. The stories also noted that Betty Dixon, wife of Rep. Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles), received a concession contract at LAX two years after her husband appointed Cochran to an important House ethics commission post.

Cochran acknowledges that such matters could well lead to suspicions of conflict of interest. He maintains, however, that he has never knowingly solicited contributions from people doing business with his commission.

As for Dixon, Cochran says that the commission granted a contract to a respected concessionaire, which contracted Dixon as part of its aggressive minority hiring program. He says that he was not involved.

On Dec. 4, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, in one of his last actions before departing office, closed an investigation of Cochran and 12 other Bradley aides and appointees that had been spurred by The Times’ report. Because of insufficient evidence and the statute of limitations, Reiner concluded that no charges would be filed.

Again, eyebrows might raise, Cochran concedes, since he has raised funds for Reiner in the past, and lists him, Bradley, and James Hahn among others as personal references.

Cochran says that such entanglements are unavoidable for anyone with his political involvement. And there are plenty of political types who value those ecumenical connections. There are, in fact, fans who suggest Cochran should run for mayor.

His answer: “Absolutely not. You’re looking at a guy who is extremely happy with what he is doing.”

Plus, he says, he can do more behind the scenes: “I don’t want to sound like a conservative all of a sudden. But government’s not going to be able to solve all our problems.”

Some big settlements he’s won, Cochran says, allow him to plow money back into the community. He sponsors a UCLA scholarship fund for young African-Americans, and a 10-unit housing project named after his parents, which he contributed to in collaboration with the Community Redevelopment Agency, opened last week on Redondo Boulevard, just west of the Crenshaw district.

Even with such contributions, some contend that many judgments and settlements Cochran wins do more harm than good.

“Mr. Cochran and the attorneys who do those lawsuits . . . have created the perception that law enforcement and peace officers aren’t accountable to anyone,” says Shawn Matthers, president of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. Brutality-case attorneys, whom he calls “the ambulance chasers of the ‘90s,” have turned that misperception “into a cash cow of deep-pocket liability at an enormous cost to the taxpayers.

“Our perception is that Los Angeles County is an increasingly violent place. . . . Until the politicians respond to the fact that there’s that level of violence, nothing is going to change.”

Cochran, however, thinks that hitting government in the pocketbook is often the only way to make it change.

He cites the highly publicized Ron Settles case in 1983. By exhuming the young black man’s body, Cochran was able to convince a jury that Settles had not hung himself in a Signal Hill jail as alleged, but rather had been killed by the Signal Hill police.

As a result, that allegedly racist police department instituted sweeping reforms.

Now Cochran believes the King case may have a similar effect in Los Angeles.

* When the rioting triggered by the King verdicts broke out, Cochran was at a television station urging calm.

“I don’t care if you’re black, brown, Anglo, Asian or Native American,” he says, “all of us were fearful of what we saw that day. If you love Los Angeles, you don’t want to see it burn down. That doesn’t take away for one minute the sense of frustration people felt over that verdict. But you can vent your frustrations without burning down your entire community.”

After the riots, when he was asked to represent members of the so-called “Reginald Denny 4,” Cochran recoiled. He has little patience with those who would excuse whomever attacked Denny: “If anyone is totally honest with themselves, there is no justification to what happened there. . . .” The people who attacked Denny, whoever they are, “are not heroes and I hope they don’t become martyrs.”

Nor does he agree that the system that failed to convict King’s attackers should be overthrown. “It’s not a perfect system,” Cochran argues, “but it’s the best system that the world has devised. So what we have to do is keep fighting and talking about it.”

When he was approached to represent Denny, some dissension surfaced in his all-black firm. Cochran told his colleagues that the case was not about race, but rather “about human beings versus human beings, about the kind of conduct you can engage in.”

Cochran smiles at the irony that the man who has hammered the LAPD for excessive force now charges that it abandoned part of the city to the lawless.

But, he says, “I don’t think it’s necessarily a contradiction. . . . One of the burdens we have to prove in a violation of civil rights case is that the officers have a callous disregard for the safety of an individual. That’s pretty much the same burden I’ve got to prove in this case for Denny.

“I think that it’s a variation on a theme. But I think it’s totally consistent. We’re saying, would you have done this in Westwood? Would you ever have pulled back?

“The answer is ‘no.’ ”

Aug. 8 (UPI) — The Department of Justice asked New York judges to unseal more evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell criminal cases, but it still wants to shield “personal identifying information.”

This is an expansion of Attorney General Pam Bondi‘s earlier request to courts to unseal five days of grand jury testimony in relation to the cases.

In July, a Florida judge refused to unseal transcripts related to a criminal case brought against Epstein for sex charges in the early 2000s. That case was resolved in a controversial plea deal that saw the billionaire financier serve about a year in prison.

The latest request is about Epstein’s 2019 criminal case in New York, which was dropped after he died by suicide in his jail cell. It also asks to unseal grand jury evidence in Maxwell’s case, which ended in her conviction and sentence of 20 years in prison.

The request to shield personal identifying information could protect others from being tied to the case.

“Any effort to redact third party names smacks of a cover up,” victim Annie Farmer said through her lawyer in an Aug. 5 letter to the court. Farmer testified for the prosecution in Maxwell’s 2021 criminal trial.

“To the extent any of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s enablers and co-conspirators who have thus far evaded accountability are implicated by the grand jury transcripts, their identities should not be shielded from the public,” Farmer’s lawyer, Sigrid McCawley, added. She added that victims’ identifications should be redacted.

The new request comes after the judges handling the requests — Richard Berman for the Epstein case and Paul Engelmayer for the Maxwell case — told the department to specify their positions.

The department requested to have until Aug. 14 to notify everyone who’s name appears on the evidence and update the judges.

Usually, grand jury proceedings and evidence are kept secret.

Meanwhile, advocacy group Democracy Forward filed suit Fridy against the Justice Department and the FBI for records on their handling of the Epstein investigation. It wants records about senior administration officials’ communication about Epstein documents and any correspondence between Epstein and President Donald Trump.

The group says it submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the records related to communications about the case in late July that have not yet been fulfilled.

“The court should intervene urgently to ensure the public has access to the information they need about this extraordinary situation,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the group, said in a statement. The federal government often shields records on criminal investigations from public view.

Maxwell earlier this week opposed the Justice Department effort to unseal the grand jury testimony. She said it would compromise her privacy and her potential to appeal.

Also earlier this week, the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., subpoenaed the Department of Justice, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several others for documents and testimony about Epstein.

A decade ago, Jesus Adan Rico breathed a big sigh of relief. That was when the Chino High School student, a Dreamer, learned an immigration judge had effectively shelved his deportation proceedings. Maria Torres, who came to the U.S. at 2 years old, also had her deportation proceedings paused by an immigration judge because she recently married a U.S. citizen.

Yet just eight weeks ago, Adan Rico — now 29, married with a new child — discovered that the Trump administration had revived his deportation case, even though he has renewed his DACA status at least four times. Torres learned the government wants to bring back her case just as she was preparing for her green card interview.

“No matter what we do, no matter how far we go in school, in our jobs and with our families, it doesn’t matter. It is all hanging by a thread,” he said.

Adan Rico and Torres are among thousands of immigrants who have built lives around the assumption they are safe from being detained and deported. Now they face that threat at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security, which is giving new life to administratively closed cases in a bid to step up immigration enforcement.

Some lawyers have received dozens of motions to recalendar — the first step to reopen old cases. If lawyers don’t succeed in opposing those motions, the immigrants could wind up back in courthouses that in recent months have become a hub for arrests.

“It has been 10 years,” Adan Rico said. “And all of a sudden our lives are on hold again, at the mercy of these people that think I have no right to be here.”

DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, flanked by Madison Sheahan, left, and Todd Lyons, speaks during a news conference at ICE headquarters in May.

(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

When asked about the government’s push to restart old proceedings, Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin declined to address questions about the administration’s change in policy or respond to attorneys’ complaints about the process. She released a statement similar to others she has offered to the media on immigration inquiries.

“Biden chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including criminals, into the country and used prosecutorial discretion to indefinitely delay their cases and allow them to illegally remain in the United States,” she said. “Now, President Trump and Secretary Noem are following the law and resuming these illegal aliens’ removal proceedings and ensuring their cases are heard by a judge.”

Attorneys handling these proceedings say the government is overwhelming the courts and immigration lawyers by dredging up cases, many of which are a decade or more old. In several of these, clients or their original lawyers have died. In other cases, immigrants have received legal status and were surprised to learn the government was attempting to revive deportation proceedings against them.

Since the 1970s, immigration judges have administratively closed deportation proceedings in order to ease the massive backlog on their dockets and prioritize more urgent cases. The maneuver essentially deferred a case, but didn’t completely dismiss it, giving both the court and the immigrant wiggle room. The idea was that immigrants could pursue other forms of relief such as a hardship waiver or deferred status. The government could reopen the case if needed.

Across the country, immigration attorneys have received a flurry of requests by Homeland Security’s Office of Principal Legal Advisor to revive cases. The motions, attorneys say, appear similar in language, and lack analysis or reference to a change that prompted the decision. In their motions, Trump administration lawyers argue that the targeted immigrants have not been granted green cards and therefore do not have legal status to be here.

The motions urge immigration judges to use their discretion to revive cases and consider whether a person has been detained or the pending application’s “ultimate outcome or likelihood of success.”

What distinguishes immigration proceedings from cases in federal or state courts is that both the lawyers and the judges are part of the executive branch, not the judiciary branch. They answer to Secretary Kristi Noem and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, respectively.

Attorneys and clients are racing against the clock to submit opposition to these motions. Many have become in essence private investigators, tracking down clients they haven’t seen in years. Other attorneys, who have retired, are looking to other immigration attorneys to pick up their client’s case.

“The court is drowning in these motions because we’re trying to resist these,” said David L. Wilson, an immigration attorney at Wilson Law Group in Minneapolis. He first received a batch of 25 government motions at the end of May — and then they kept coming every few weeks. One case involved a client from El Salvador who had been granted Temporary Protected Status, and whose case was administratively closed in 2006.

Adan Rico, a new father who is studying to be an HVAC technician in the Inland Empire, was stunned that the government was seeking to revive deportation proceedings.

The attorney who originally represented him has since died. “If it wasn’t for his daughter calling, I would have never found out my case was reopened,” he said. “The Department of Homeland Security never sent me anything.”

Attorney Patricia M. Corrales speaks at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles office in April.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

His new attorney, Patricia Corrales, said Adan Rico’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status doesn’t come up for renewal until 2027 and it defers deportation proceedings. But Corrales, who has received about a dozen motions, said it appears the government isn’t even checking whether the individuals are alive, much less their immigration status.

One of her cases is that of construction worker Helario Romero Arciniega. Seven years ago, a judge administratively closed deportation proceedings for Romero Arciniega, after he was severely beaten with a metal sprinkler head and had qualified for a visa for crime victims.

This year, government officials filed a motion to bring back the deportation proceedings against the construction worker, even though he had died six months ago.

“They don’t do their homework,” Corrales said of the government lawyers. “They’re very negligent in the manner in which they’re handling these motions to re-calendar.”

Some attorneys have reported delays in their ability to file their opposition motions because the court is so overwhelmed.

When asked about the backlog, Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the federal immigration court known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review, confirmed that the court “must receive the underlying initial motion before it can accept a response to that motion.”

Some immigrants now in legal limbo were just steps away from finalizing their green card applications.

Maria Torres, an L.A. County resident and mother of two, said she was only 2 years old when she was brought to the U.S. by her family. She grew up undocumented, and when the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program became available, applied to gain work authorization.

But in 2019, at 21, she was arrested on suspicion of a misdemeanor DUI, which put her into deportation proceedings. She took the classes and paid her ticket. With deportation proceedings open against her, she was able to get her case closed in 2022 while she sought a visa through her husband, a U.S. citizen.

Her visa was approved, and with just one interview appointment left, Torres felt blindsided when she received a call from her attorney’s office, saying the government wanted to restart deportation proceedings against her.

“I just felt my heart sink and I started crying,” she said. Her attorney submitted a motion opposing the recalendaring of the case, and they are waiting to hear how a judge will rule. In the meantime, she said, she’s hopeful she’ll have her final interview for her approved visa before then.

“People aren’t getting due process,” said attorney Mariela Caravetta. “It’s very unfair to the client because these cases have been sleeping for 10 years.”

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Mariela Caravetta, an immigration attorney in Van Nuys, said that, since early June, about 30 of her clients have been targeted with government motions to reopen their cases.

By law, she has to reply in 10 days. That means she has to track down the client, who may have moved out of state.

“It’s bad faith doing it like that,” said Caravetta, who accused the federal government of flooding the immigration courts in an effort to meet its deportation quotas.

“People aren’t getting due process,” she said. “It’s very unfair to the client because these cases have been sleeping for 10 years.”

Caravetta has convinced some judges to deny the government motions because the clients are seeking ways to legally stay in the country. In a handful of cases, she hasn’t been able to reach her clients.

The government isn’t making an effort to reach out to attorneys to discuss the cases, as is required, she added. “That would save a lot of time for everybody,” she said. Her clients may have U-visas, which give relief to migrants who have been victims of crime and who help investigators or prosecutors. But the government’s motions say, “These people have not done anything to legalize their status, we need a final resolution.”

Matt O’Brien, a former federal immigration judge and deputy executive director of FAIR, which advocates for stricter immigration laws, said the Trump administration is “enforcing the Immigration and Nationality Act the way that Congress wrote it.”

He questioned why attorneys are complaining about cases being recalendared, saying “it’s akin to a motion of reopening a case in any other court.”

Yet for many immigrants whose cases are being revived, the risks are high. Judges have discretion to deny motions to reopen cases, and have done so in some situations, attorneys say. But judges have also approved the government’s request if there is no opposition from the immigrant or their attorney.

At that point, cases are put on the calendar. If it gets scheduled, and the immigrants do not show up to court, they could eventually be ruled “in absentia,” which would make them vulnerable to immediate deportation and bar them from entering the country legally for years.

It all fits with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing deportation numbers, say many immigration lawyers and former officials.

“They are getting the largest pool possible of people that they can remove, and removing them from the country,” said Jason Hauser, the former chief of staff of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “And what stands in the way from that is a working due process of an immigration system.”

In April, Sirce E. Owen, acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, issued a memo criticizing the use of administrative closure, referring to it as “a de facto amnesty program with benefits” because it offers work authorization and deportation protections. Owen, a former immigration judge, rescinded previous Biden administration guidance that offered a more proactive approach to administrative closures.

Owen stated that, as of April, about 379,000 cases were still administratively closed in immigration court and cited them as a contributing factor to the court system’s backlog of 4 million cases.

In immigration courts in Los Angeles and San Diego, attorneys are already seeing these cases come before immigration judges. Many clients have expressed shock and despair at being dragged back into court.

Sherman Oaks attorney Edgardo Quintanilla has seen about 40 cases recently, including some dating back to the 2010s. Clients, he said, are alarmed not only by the government’s legal maneuvers but by the prospect of entering a federal building these days.

“There is always the fear that they may be arrested when they go to the court,” he said. “With everything going on, it is a reasonable fear.”

Just hours after the Trump administration moved to extend U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli’s term as Los Angeles’ top federal law enforcement official, prosecutors moved to dismiss charges in a pair of controversial criminal cases, including one involving a donor to the president.

In a motion filed late Tuesday, federal prosecutors sought to dismiss an indictment accusing Andrew Wiederhorn, ex-CEO of the company that owns the Fatburger and Johnny Rockets chains, of carrying out a $47 million “sham loan” scheme.

Prosecutors also sought to dismiss charges against L.A. County sheriff’s deputy Trevor Kirk, who has already been convicted and sentenced in an excessive force case after he attacked a woman in a supermarket parking lot in 2023.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office declined comment. Both cases had already drawn significant controversy during Essayli’s turbulent run as L.A.’s top federal prosecutor.

Days before Essayli’s initial appointment in April, Adam Schleifer, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the criminal case against Wiederhorn, was fired at the behest of the White House.

Schleifer alleged in appealing the decision that his firing was motivated in part by his prosecution of Wiederhorn, a Trump donor who has maintained his innocence.

According to three sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly, Essayli had a meeting with Wiederhorn’s defense team shortly after he was appointed. The meeting included former U.S. Atty. Nicola T. Hanna, whom the sources said was in charge of the office when the investigation into Wiederhorn began and is now on Wiederhorn’s defense team.

According to those sources, Essayli suggested shortly after the meeting ended that the cases against Wiederhorn could be dismissed if Essayli was permanently appointed.

“From day one, we have maintained Andy’s innocence,” Hanna said in a statement on Tuesday. “We are extremely grateful that the U.S. Attorney’s Office listened to our arguments and determined, in the interests of justice, that all charges should be dropped.”

Hanna has not responded to requests for comment about the prior meeting with Essayli.

Earlier on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed Essayli would be named acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, a move that extends his term another 210 days.

Under normal procedures, U.S. Attorneys must receive Senate confirmation or be appointed by a federal judicial panel. But facing opposition to Trump’s picks in the Senate, the administration has used a similar tactic to skirt legal norms and keep its chosen prosecutors in power in New York, New Jersey and Nevada in recent weeks.

The indictment against Wiederhorn also alleged he was aided by the company’s former chief financial officer, Rebecca D. Hershinger, and his outside accountant, William J. Amon. The U.S. attorney’s office moved to to dismiss the indictment against all three defendants, as well as charges against their company, Fat Brands.

“From day one, we have said Rebecca Hershinger was innocent,” attorney Michael J. Proctor of the law firm of Iversen Proctor LLP said in a statement. “We are grateful that the government has acknowledged the case should be dismissed.”

Wiederhorn was also under indictment on a gun charge, which prosecutors moved to dismiss as well. Wiederhorn is banned from possessing firearms after he pleaded guilty in 2004 to charges of paying an illegal gratuity to his associate and filing a false tax return. He spent 15 months in prison and paid a $2-million fine.

Late Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney’s office also moved to dismiss an indictment against Alejandro Orellana, a 29-year-old ex-Marine who had been accused of aiding in civil disorder for passing out gas masks during large scale protests against immigration raids in Southern California.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment. Orellana’s case was one of the few indictments Essayli’s prosecutors had won related to alleged misconduct during the protests, and Essayli had fervently defended the charges when questioned by a Times reporter last month.

“He wasn’t handing masks out at the beach … they’re covering their faces. They’re wearing backpacks. These weren’t peaceful protesters,” Essayli said. “They weren’t holding up signs, with a political message. They came to do violence.”

Orellana issued a statement Tuesday that declared: “Protesting is not a crime. Defending my community is not a crime.”

“I want to thank all the supporters across the country who mobilized to get the charges dropped,” he said. “We won because we’re on the right side of history and our cause is just.”

Kirk, the sheriff’s deputy, was convicted of assault under color of authority in February and faced 10 years in prison for hurling a woman to the ground and pepper spraying her while responding to a reported robbery at a Lancaster supermarket in 2023. The victim, Jacy Houseton, was filming Kirk at the time but was not armed or actively committing a crime.

Kirk and his defense team have argued Houseton matched the description of a suspect given to Kirk as he responded.

Kirk was set to self-surrender next month, on August 28.

“We support that obviously without any objections and I think it’s within the confines of the law,” Kirk’s attorney, Tom Yu, said.

Caree Harper, who has represented Houseton, said she was notified Tuesday afternoon by Asst. U.S. Atty. Robert Keenan of the plan to dismiss the indictment against Kirk.

“We thought Trump’s new U.S. Attorneys office could not stoop any lower, but it seems like Mr. Essayli & Mr. Keenan’s insistence on being Trevor Kirk’s BEST defense attorney has no limits,” Harper said in an email.

Reached by phone, Harper called the news “disappointing and disheartening,” citing the fact that the judge in the case “already gave him an unbelievable break.”

“They don’t want him to spend one day in jail. They don’t want him in cuffs at all,” Harper said. “This is a travesty of justice yet again.”

Washington, DC – The family of Sayfollah Musallet, the United States citizen who was beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank last week, is calling for justice.

Musallet’s relatives want Washington to launch its own investigation into the incident to ensure accountability.

The Florida-born 20-year-old is the ninth US citizen to be killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers since 2022. None of the previous cases have led to criminal charges or US sanctions against the perpetrators.

That lack of response is what advocates call a “pattern of impunity”, wherein Washington demands a probe without placing any significant pressure on Israel to produce results.

In Musallet’s case, the administration of President Donald Trump urged Israel to “aggressively” investigate the killing.

“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said in a statement on Tuesday.

It is not clear if the US has taken any further actions to seek justice in the aftermath of the fatal beating.

Critics say the “pattern of impunity” stems in part from the historically close bonds between the US and Israel. Successive presidential administrations in the US have affirmed their “unwavering” support for Israel, and the US provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid annually.

Here, Al Jazeera looks at who the eight other victims were, how the US has responded to their killing and where their cases stand.

Omar Assad

Assad, a 78-year-old Palestinian American, was driving home in the occupied West Bank after visiting friends on January 12, 2022, when Israeli soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint.

According to the autopsy report and his family’s account, the troops dragged Assad out of his car and then handcuffed, gagged and blindfolded him, leaving him to die at a cold construction site.

The administration of then-President Joe Biden called on Israel to launch a criminal investigation into the incident.

But Assad’s relatives and lawmakers from his home state of Milwaukee wanted Washington to conduct its own probe – a demand that never materialised.

As is often the case, Israel’s investigation into its own soldiers’ conduct did not lead to any criminal charges.

In 2023, the Israeli army said that it found no “causal link” between the way its soldiers treated Assad and his death.

The Biden administration also declined to apply sanctions under US law to the Israeli unit that killed Assad: the Netzah Yehuda, a battalion notorious for its abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Last year, the US Department of State announced that the battalion will still be eligible for US aid under the Leahy Law, which prohibits military assistance for security units involved in human rights violations.

Shireen Abu Akleh

Abu Akleh, a veteran Al Jazeera reporter, was fatally shot by Israeli forces during a raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on May 11, 2022.

Owing to her status as one of the most celebrated journalists in the Middle East, her killing sparked international outrage from rights groups and press freedom advocates.

Despite the global attention, Israeli forces attacked her funeral in Jerusalem, beating the pallbearers carrying her coffin with batons.

Israel initially denied killing Abu Akleh, 51, falsely claiming that the reporter was shot by armed Palestinians.

Months later, after multiple visual investigations showed that Israeli soldiers targeted Abu Akleh, Israel acknowledged that its forces likely killed the reporter, dismissing the incident as an accident.

The Biden administration faced waves of pleas by legislators and rights groups to launch its own investigation into the killing, but it resisted the calls, arguing that Israel is capable of investigating itself.

In November 2022, Israeli media reports claimed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was investigating the shooting of Abu Akleh, but the US Department of Justice never confirmed the probe.

More than three years after Abu Akleh’s killing, her family and supporters say justice in her case has not been served.

Tawfiq Ajaq

Born in Louisiana, Ajaq was 17 when he visited the occupied West Bank to see his relatives last year.

On January 19, 2024, he was driving a pick-up truck with his friends when Israelis sprayed the vehicle with bullets and killed him.

Mohammed Salameh, who witnessed and survived the attack, said the shooting was unprovoked.

While it is not clear which individual shot Ajaq, Israel said the incident involved “an off-duty law enforcement officer, a soldier and a civilian” and was sparked by “rock-throwing activities” – a claim that Salameh has denied.

The US State Department called for an “urgent investigation to determine the circumstance” of the incident.

But more than 19 months after the shooting, Israel has not publicly released any findings or charged any suspect in the shooting.

“We feel abandoned by our government,” Ajaq’s uncle, Mohammad Abdeljabbar, told Al Jazeera last year.

Mohammad Khdour

Khdour was also 17 when he was killed under almost identical circumstances to Ajaq just weeks later.

According to his cousin Malek Mansour, who witnessed the attack, an unidentified assailant opened fire at their car in the occupied West Bank from a vehicle with an Israeli number plate.

Mansour said the attack was unprovoked. Khdour died on February 10, 2024.

The two had been eating cookies and taking selfies moments before the shooting.

Once again, Washington called for a probe.

“There needs to be an investigation. We need to get the facts. And if appropriate, there needs to be accountability,” then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters at that time.

But advocates say that, while normally Israel launches sham investigations into such incidents, Israeli authorities have not acknowledged Khdour’s killing at all.

The Israeli military and police told the publication Haaretz last year that they are not familiar with the case.

Jacob Flickinger

An Israeli air strike targeted a World Central Kitchen (WCK) vehicle in Gaza on April 1, 2024, killing seven aid workers, sparking anger and condemnation across the world.

Among the victims was Flickinger, a 33-year-old US-Canadian dual citizen.

Biden called for a “swift” Israeli investigation into the attack, which he said “must bring accountability”.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the blast a “tragic accident”.

The Israeli military said the commander who ordered the strike had “mistakenly assumed” that gunmen in the area were in the aid vehicle.

It added that the commander did not identify the car as associated with World Central Kitchen, a well-known hunger relief initiative founded by celebrity chef Jose Andres.

A World Central Kitchen logo was displayed prominently on the top of the vehicle before the attack.

Israel said it dismissed two commanders over the incident, but there were no criminal charges.

Since then, Israel has killed hundreds of aid workers in Gaza, including Palestinian staff members from World Central Kitchen.

Last year, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza as well as other alleged war crimes.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi

Eygi, born in Washington state, was participating in a protest against an illegal settler outpost in the West Bank on September 6, 2024, when an Israeli soldier shot her in the head.

She was 26.

While there were reports of a scuffle during a crackdown on the demonstration by Israeli forces, several witnesses have said that Eygi was shot during a calm period after the chaos had ended.

The State Department called on Israel to “quickly and robustly” investigate Eygi’s killing, but it ruled out conducting its own probe.

Biden dismissed her death as an “accident”, but Blinken condemned it as “unprovoked and unjustified”.

On the same day that Eygi was fatally shot by Israel, the US Justice Department ​filed charges against Hamas leaders after the killing of US-Israeli captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin in Gaza.

The Israeli military said its soldiers likely killed Eygi “indirectly and unintentionally” – a conclusion that her family called offensive, stressing that she was targeted by a sniper.

“The disregard shown for human life in the inquiry is appalling,” the family said in a statement.

Trump ally Randy Fine, now a Congress member, celebrated the killing of Eygi. “One less #MuslimTerrorist,” he wrote in a social media post, referring to the shooting.

Kamel Jawad

When Jawad, a celebrated leader in the Lebanese American community in Michigan, was killed by an Israeli air strike in south Lebanon on October 1 of last year, the Biden administration initially denied he was a US citizen.

Washington later acknowledged that Jawad was American, expressing “alarm” over his killing.

“As we have noted repeatedly, it is a moral and strategic imperative that Israel take all feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm. Any loss of civilian life is a tragedy,” the US State Department said at that time.

Israel has not commented publicly on the strike that killed Jawad.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) slammed the Biden administration’s handling of the case, including the US government’s initial “smug” response.

“It’s as if they’re intentionally trying to see our people killed, intentionally downplaying us and dehumanising us,” ADC executive director Abed Ayoub told Al Jazeera last year.

Amer Rabee

On April 6, Israeli forces in the West Bank fatally shot 14-year-old Rabee, a New Jersey native, and called him a “terrorist”. Two of his friends were also injured in the attack.

While the Israeli military accused Rabee and his friends of throwing rocks at Israeli vehicles, the slain teenager’s family insisted that he was picking almonds on the side of the road.

The Trump administration failed to pursue accountability in the case or even publicly press for further details about the incident.

Instead, the State Department cited the Israeli account about the 14-year-old’s killing.

“We offer our sincerest condolences to the family on their loss,” the State Department said at that time. “We acknowledge the [Israeli military’s] initial statement that expressed that this incident occurred during a counter-terrorism operation.”

A 16-month-old Palestinian baby is among a growing number of children in Gaza suffering from meningitis, as overcrowding, poor sanitation, and collapsing healthcare caused by Israel’s war on the enclave drive a surge in cases.

Dutch prosecutors have dropped charges against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans after CCTV footage showing violence towards Muslim women last November was erased. Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen is in Amsterdam, where the decision has sparked controversy over alleged double standards.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court Monday again made it harder for Death Row inmates and other criminals to challenge their convictions in a federal court by claiming their constitutional rights were violated by state courts.

The pair of 6-3 rulings, including one in a California case, could speed the pace of executions around the nation. Many inmates have kept their legal cases–and themselves–alive by contesting their convictions in prolonged battles in federal courts.

In one decision, the justices reinstated a death sentence against a Sonoma County man who in 1975 shot and killed his wife. The second ruling involved a Virginia case.

Together, the rulings send a now-familiar message: Convicted criminals should not routinely get a second chance to contest their cases in a federal court.

About 95% of criminal cases nationwide are handled in the state courts. During the 1960s and ‘70s, however, the Supreme Court encouraged federal judges to closely review state cases to make sure that a defendant’s rights under the U.S. Constitution were protected. Inmates took advantage of this protection by filing a petition of habeas corpus to transfer their cases from a state to a federal court.

But under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the high court has stressed the opposite. Federal judges should not casually meddle in state court matters, the conservative majority has said.

The California case concerned whether an inmate should get a second chance to contend that he was unfairly induced to incriminate himself.

The defendant in the case, Owen Duane Nunnemaker, was sentenced to death for the 1975 slaying of his estranged wife, Alice. Nunnemaker went to her home in Sebastopol, Calif., shot her at close range and cut a phone cord to prevent her children from calling for help. She died of her wounds.

He later claimed he loved her, but was temporarily deranged. Prosecutors, however, sent a police psychiatrist to interview Nunnemaker, who found him calm and rational. During the trial, the psychiatrist gave damaging testimony against the defendant, who was convicted and sentenced to death.

In his appeal in state courts, Nunnemaker said his Miranda rights were violated because the psychiatrist never warned him his statements could be used against him. The California appellate courts ruled that it was too late for Nunnemaker to raise this Miranda issue. His lawyer should have objected during the trial, the judges said.

Without giving a reason, the California Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.

But he fared better in the federal courts. Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit of Court Appeals ruled that Nunnemaker was entitled to a hearing before a federal judge to see whether his constitutional rights had been violated.

The Supreme Court said the 9th Circuit erred in the case, Ylst vs. Nunnemaker, 90-68. The majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, said the federal appeals court should have presumed that the California courts declined to hear Nunnemaker’s appeal for procedural reasons, and the federal courts have no power to second-guess those procedural rules.

In their dissent from the ruling, Justices Harry A. Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall and John Paul Stevens said, “The Court today continues its crusade to erect petty procedural barriers” to raising constitutional claims in the federal courts.

Monday’s other death penalty case ruling was written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, herself a former state judge. She rejected the claim of a Virginia Death Row inmate that his initial appeal of his conviction still should be considered by that state’s court system, even though his lawyer was three days late in filing it.

The case “concerns the respect the federal courts owe the states,” O’Connor said. Because the state rules forbid the consideration of a late appeal, the federal courts must do the same, she said in Coleman vs. Thompson, 89-7662.

Law enforcement spokesmen praised the rulings for upholding valid criminal convictions. The decisions mean that an old legal challenge “cannot be resuscitated by some sympathetic federal judge,” said Charles Hobson of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. But Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose), whose House subcommittee is considering the federal habeas corpus laws, lambasted the court. The decisions “force innocent prisoners to pay the ultimate price for the errors of their lawyers in a state court,” Edwards said.

The United States Supreme Court has ended its latest term with a host of blockbuster decisions, touching on everything from healthcare coverage to school reading lists.

On Friday, the court issued the final decisions of the 2024 term before it takes several months of recess. The nine justices on its bench will reconvene in October.

But before their departure, the justices made headlines. In a major victory for the administration of President Donald Trump, the six-person conservative majority decided to limit the ability of courts to issue universal injunctions that would block executive actions nationwide.

Trump has long denounced court injunctions as an attack on his executive authority.

In two other rulings, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority again banded together. One decision allowed parents to opt out of school materials that include LGBTQ themes, while the other gave the go-ahead to Texas to place barriers to prevent youth from viewing online pornography.

But a decision on healthcare access saw some conservative justices align with their three left-wing colleagues. Here is an overview of their final rulings of the 2024 term.

Court upholds preventive care requirements

In the case of Kennedy v Braidwood Management, the Supreme Court saw its usual ideological divides fracture.

Three conservative justices – Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts – joined with the court’s liberal branch, represented by Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, for a six-to-three ruling.

At stake was the ability of a government task force to determine what kinds of preventive healthcare the country’s insurance providers had to cover.

It was the latest case to challenge the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, a piece of legislation passed under former President Barack Obama to expand healthcare access.

This case focused on a section of the act that allowed a panel of health experts – under the Department of Health and Human Services – to determine what preventive services should be covered at no cost.

A group of individuals and Christian-owned businesses had challenged the legality of that task force, though.

They argued that the expert panel was a violation of the Appointments Clause, a section of the Constitution that requires certain political appointees to be chosen by the president and approved by the Senate.

The group had previously secured an injunction against the task force’s decision that HIV prevention medications be covered as preventive care.

That specific injunction was not weighed in the Supreme Court’s decision. But writing for the majority, Justice Kavanaugh affirmed that the task force was constitutional, because it was made up of “inferior officers” who did not need Senate approval.

Court gives nod to Texas’s age restrictions on porn

Several states, including Texas, require users to verify their age before accessing pornographic websites, with the aim of shielding minors from inappropriate material.

But Texas’s law came under the Supreme Court’s microscope on Friday, in a case called Free Speech Coalition v Ken Paxton.

The Free Speech Coalition is a nonprofit that represents workers in the adult entertainment industry. They sued Texas’s attorney general, Paxton, arguing that the age-verification law would dampen First Amendment rights, which protect the right to free expression, free association and privacy.

The plaintiffs noted the risks posed by sharing personally identifying information online, including the possibility that identifying information like birthdates and sensitive data could be leaked. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, warned that Texas’s law “robs people of anonymity”.

Writing for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged that “submitting to age verification is a burden on the exercise” of First Amendment rights.

But, he added, “adults have no First Amendment right to avoid age verification” altogether. The majority upheld Texas’s law.

Court affirms children can withdraw from LGBTQ school material

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority also continued its streak of religious freedom victories, with a decision in Mahmoud v Taylor.

That case centred on the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland, where books portraying LGBTQ themes had been approved for use in primary school curricula.

One text, for example, was a picture book called Love, Violet, which told the story of a young girl mustering the courage to give a Valentine to a female classmate. Another book, titled Pride Puppy, follows a child searching for her lost dog during an annual parade to celebrate LGBTQ pride.

Parents of children in the school district objected to the material on religious grounds, and some books, like Pride Puppy, were eventually withdrawn.

But the board eventually announced it would refuse to allow parents to opt out of the approved material, on the basis that it would create disruptions in the learning environment.

Some education officials also argued that allowing kids to opt out of LGBTQ material would confer a stigma on the people who identify as part of that community – and that LGBTQ people were simply a fact of life.

In the majority’s decision, Justice Samuel Alito asserted that the education board’s policy “conveys that parents’ religious views are not welcome in the ‘fully inclusive environment’ that the Board purports to foster”.

“The curriculum itself also betrays an attempt to impose ideological conformity with specific views on sexuality and gender,” Alito wrote.

Court limits the use of nationwide injunctions

Arguably, the biggest decision of the day was another ruling decided by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority.

In the case Trump v CASA, the Trump administration had appealed the use of nationwide injunctions all the way up to the highest court in the land.

At stake was an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office for his second term. That order sought to whittle down the concept of birthright citizenship, a right conferred under the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Previously, birthright citizenship had applied to nearly everyone born on US soil: Regardless of their parents’ nationality, the child would receive US citizenship.

But Trump has denounced that application of birthright citizenship as too broad. In his executive order, he put restrictions on birthright citizenship depending on whether the parents were undocumented immigrants.

Legal challenges erupted as soon as the executive order was published, citing Supreme Court precedent that upheld birthright citizenship regardless of the nationality of the parent. Federal courts in states like Maryland and Washington quickly issued nationwide injunctions to prevent the executive order from taking effect.

The Supreme Court on Friday did not weigh the merits of Trump’s order on birthright citizenship. But it did evaluate a Trump administration petition arguing that the nationwide injunctions were instances of judicial overreach.

The conservative supermajority sided with Trump, saying that injunctions should generally not be universal but instead should focus on relief for the specific plaintiffs at hand. One possible exception, however, would be for class action lawsuits.

Amy Coney Barrett, the court’s latest addition and a Trump appointee, penned the majority’s decision.

“No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law,” she wrote. “But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation – in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.”

DIY cervical cancer tests will be sent to women’s homes under NHS plans to boost uptake and help eradicate the disease.

The kits will be posted to those who have ignored or missed their smear test invitation and are therefore “underscreened”.

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They contain a swab to self-sample the cervix for human papillomavirus (HPV), a group of viruses that cause 99 per cent of cervical cancers.

The NHS wants to eliminate the cancer entirely by 2040 using screening and vaccination.

But only 69 per cent of women take part in screening, well below the 80 per cent target.

This means that more than five million women in England are not up to date with their check-ups.

The screening programme saves an estimated 5,000 lives per year in England but the number could be higher with better uptake.

Health chiefs said women may avoid their smear test for fear it will hurt or be embarrassing, or because they struggle to find the time.

The new test is a quick at-home sample that is then sent off to a lab in the post.

Health bosses hope it will help overcome barriers that prevent some women from attending cervical cancer screening appointments.

The initiative will be rolled out in January 2026.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “These self-sampling kits represent healthcare that works around people’s lives, not the other way around.

“They put women firmly in control of their own health, ensuring we catch more cancers at their earliest, most treatable stages.”

“We know the earlier cancer is diagnosed the better the chances are of survival.

“By making screening more convenient, we’re tackling the barriers that keep millions of women from potentially life-saving tests.”

Research has suggested that offering DIY testing kits could boost uptake.

A trial – led by King’s College London in partnership with NHS England – found that offering self-sampling kits to “under-screened” women when they attend their GP practice and by posting kits to women’s homes could boost uptake in England by about 400,000 each year.

The Department of Health and Social Care said that the new programme “specifically targets those groups consistently missing vital appointments” including younger women, those from minority ethnic backgrounds, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people.

The initiative comes after the UK Health Security Agency revealed that young women in certain parts of England are at higher risk of cervical cancer due to “alarmingly” low uptake of HPV jabs.

At-home cervical cancer screening is part of the government’s upcoming 10 Year Health Plan, due to be published in the coming weeks, which will focus preventing illness instead of only treating it when symptoms appear.

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Eve Appeal chief executive, Athena Lamnisos, said: “There are so many different reasons why those who are eligible aren’t responding to their cervical screening invitation letter.

“HPV self-testing will be a step change for some. Being able to do the test in their own time and following simple instructions is what many people want and need.

“Ensuring that the under-screened and never screened know about this new test is vital for Eve.”

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, added: “We welcome the UK government’s decision to roll out cervical cancer home screening kits in England – to help remove barriers and make cervical screening more accessible.

“The gold standard way to test for HPV is still a sample taken by a clinician and this will be suitable for most people.

“But beating cervical cancer means beating it for everyone, and this move helps to bring us closer to that goal.

“It’s important to remember that cervical screening is for people without symptoms so, if you notice any unusual changes for you, do not wait for a screening invitation – speak to your doctor.”

The NHS Cervical Screening Programme invites women and people with a cervix aged 25 to 64 for regular screening.

Under current guidelines, people aged 25 to 49 are called back for a check-up every three years if they test negative for HPV, whereas 50 to 64-year-olds are invited for checks every five years.

But from July, people who test negative during an in-person test with their clinician will be invited back after five years, rather than three, following a recommendation by the UK National Screening Committee.

The change comes after evidence showed that people who test negative for HPV are extremely unlikely to develop cervical cancer within the next decade.

Anyone whose sample shows traces of HPV will continue to be invited to more frequent screenings.  

Digital invitations and reminders for cervical screening were also recently rolled out as part of the NHS App’s ‘ping and book’ service to boost uptake.

Cervical cancer symptoms, such as bleeding between periods and during sex, should be investigated by a GP.

Around 13 high-risk types of HPV are known to cause 99.7 per cent of cervical cancers.

They cause cell changes which can eventually turn cancerous.

Dangerous strains of the common virus can also lead to mouth, anal, penile, vulval and vaginal cancer.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s favorite target again this year was the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which saw 15 of 16 rulings overturned on review.

For decades, the high court’s conservatives have trained a skeptical eye on the historically liberal appeals court and regularly reversed its rulings, particularly on criminal law and the death penalty.

But by some estimates, this year saw the most Supreme Court reversals of 9th Circuit decisions since 1985. And the range of issues was broad, including immigration, religion, voting rights, property rights and class-action lawsuits.

In four years, President Trump appointed 10 judges to the appeals court, a sprawling Western jurisdiction that includes nine states and two U.S. territories. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush each named seven judges to the 9th Circuit in their eight years in the White House.

Trump’s 9th Circuit picks appeared to have played a significant role this year by pressing for internal review of rulings they didn’t like and joining sharp dissents that drew the interest of the Supreme Court.

“The more people who join the dissents, the more it gets the attention of the conservatives,” said one 9th Circuit judge, speaking on the condition of not being identified by name.

“This year was different,” another judge said. “This year was really different.”

When two owners of fruit-growing operations sued over a 1975 California state regulation that allowed union organizers to enter their property to speak to workers, they lost before a federal judge and the 9th Circuit.

Judge Richard A. Paez of Los Angeles, a Clinton appointee, said in a 2-1 decision that the state rule did not authorize “physical taking” of farmers’ property, as the lawsuit claimed, but rather temporary access to it.

Judge Sandra S. Ikuta of Los Angeles, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote a dissent arguing that the ruling was wrong and should be overturned. She said the state rule takes “an easement from the property owners” and gives it to union organizers, who are free to enter when they choose. In a dissent from the full court’s refusal to reconsider the panel’s decision, seven other 9th Circuit judges, six of them Trump appointees, agreed.

When the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 for the property owners last month, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. cited Ikuta’s dissent. “The access regulation appropriates a right to invade the growers’ property,” he wrote in Cedar Point vs. Hassid. The high court was split along ideological grounds.

The same divide was on display in the justices’ 6-3 decision shielding big donors to conservative charities and nonprofits from having their names disclosed to the California attorney general.

The 9th Circuit, in a 3-0 decision, had upheld the state’s policy of checking donors as an anti-fraud measure, but Ikuta wrote a dissent, joined by four Republican appointees, two of them nominated by Trump. The dissent said the full appeals court should “correct this error.” She argued that experience had shown that conservative donors have suffered “harassment and abuse” when their names have been disclosed.

The Supreme Court agreed to review the ruling, and Roberts cited Ikuta’s dissent in his opinion reversing the 9th Circuit in Americans for Prosperity Foundation vs. Bonta.

“There is still a large cohort of liberal judges” on the 9th Circuit, said Ed Whelan, a conservative legal analyst in Washington, “but there are now many conservative appointees who are vigilant in calling them out.”

In total, 47 judges sit on the 9th Circuit — 24 appointed by Republicans going back to President Nixon, and 23 named by Democrats starting with President Carter.

Many of those judges work part time. Of the full-time jurists, 16 are Democratic and 13 are Republican appointees.

The size of the circuit — the nation’s largest — partly explains why its cases are often subject to Supreme Court review.

“The 9th Circuit is so vastly larger than any other circuit that it is inevitable they are going to take more 9th Circuit cases,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school.

Although this year’s 9th Circuit reversal rate was unusually high, the high court in fact overturned 80% of all the cases it reviewed, Chemerinsky noted.

Moreover, only a tiny percentage of appellate decisions are reviewed by the Supreme Court. Typically, the 9th Circuit hands down about 13,000 rulings a year.

Chemerinsky noted the Supreme Court overturned several 9th Circuit cases on immigration and habeas corpus, the legal vehicle for releasing someone from detention. “The 9th Circuit is historically more liberal on immigration and habeas cases,” he said.

Some reversals occurred in cases that were not ideological, however: The high court overturned a 9th Circuit decision by Republican appointees on what constitutes a robocall.

Though the Supreme Court split along ideological lines on property rights, voting rights and conservative donor cases from the 9th Circuit, the justices were unanimous in reversing the 9th Circuit in several immigration cases.

On June 1, they overturned a unique 9th Circuit rule set by the late liberal Judge Stephen Reinhardt. Over nearly 20 years, he had written that the testimony of a person seeking asylum based on a fear of persecution must be “deemed credible” unless an immigration judge made an “explicit” finding that they were not to be believed.

In one of his last opinions, Reinhardt approved of asylum for Ming Dai, a Chinese citizen who arrived in the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for refugee status for himself and his family. He said they were fleeing China’s forced abortion policy.

Only later did immigration authorities learn that his wife and daughter had returned to China because they had good jobs and schooling there, but the husband had no job to return to.

An immigration judge had set out the full story and denied the asylum application, only to be be reversed in a 2-1 ruling by a 9th Circuit panel. The panel cited Reinhardt’s rule and noted that although evidence emerged casting doubt on Dai’s claims, there had been no “explicit” finding by an immigration judge so his story had to be accepted.

“Over the years, our circuit has manufactured misguided rules regarding the credibility of political asylum seekers,” Senior Judge Stephen S. Trott wrote in dissent. Later, 11 other appellate judges joined dissents arguing for scrapping this rule.

Last fall, Trump administration lawyers cited those dissents and urged the Supreme Court to hear the case. They noted the importance of the 9th Circuit in asylum cases. Because of its liberal reputation, “the 9th Circuit actually entertains more petitions for review than all of the other circuits combined,” the lawyers said.

In overturning the appeals court in a 9-0 ruling, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch began by noting that “at least 12 members of the 9th Circuit have objected to this judge-made rule.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered another 9-0 ruling holding that an immigrant arrested for an “unlawful entry” after having been deported years ago may not contest the basis of his original deportation. The 9th Circuit had said such a defendant may argue his deportation was “fundamentally unfair,” but “the statute does not permit such an exception,” Sotomayor said in U.S. vs. Palomar-Santiago.

The high court’s furthest-reaching immigration ruling did not originate with the 9th Circuit, but it nonetheless overturned a 9th Circuit decision.

At issue was whether the more than 400,000 immigrants who had been living and working in the U.S. under temporary protected status were eligible for long-term green cards. The Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit said no, rejecting a green card for a Salvadoran couple who had entered the country illegally in the 1990s and had lived and worked in New Jersey ever since.

The 9th Circuit had taken the opposite view; Trump lawyers cited this split as a reason the high court should take up the New Jersey case. On June 7, Justice Elena Kagan spoke for the high court in ruling that the 3rd Circuit was right and the 9th Circuit wrong. To obtain lawful permanent status, the immigration law first “requires a lawful admission,” she said in Sanchez vs. Majorkas.

The 9th Circuit’s sole affirmance came in a significant case: By a 9-0 vote in NCAA vs. Alston, the justices agreed with the 9th Circuit that college sports authorities could be sued under antitrust laws for conspiring to make billions of dollars while insisting the star athletes go unpaid.