In the decade he worked at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, Dr. Patrick Gariety carried a notebook almost everywhere he went. “I was a compulsive scribbler,” he said, a psychiatrist and then-aspiring writer working in an environment that, in many ways, had to be seen to be believed.

Gariety had always felt drawn to public sector psychology, treating people who were marginalized and seriously mentally ill. His notebook became a way to process what he saw. “It was emotionally so fraught in different ways, that really the writing became therapeutic, a way of coping,” he told me in a phone call. So when there was a murder at the mental health wing of the prison on January 26, 2010, Gariety spent the next several weeks putting it all on paper. 

It was a Wednesday morning when he got the news. Gariety was entering the reception area, joining the crowded line of day shift workers at security as they took off their shoes, belts, and winter coats, when he heard a guard at the scanner say, “If you haven’t already heard, folks, an inmate was killed last night.” Gariety felt a surge of anxiety. He hoped and prayed that none of his patients were involved. Then his heart sank.

The victim was 51-year-old Victor Castro-Rodriguez, a skinny Cuban immigrant with bipolar disorder. He’d been found in his own cell, bound, gagged, and apparently beaten to death. Although he was not one of Gariety’s patients, Gariety knew Castro-Rodriguez. Just about everyone did. He was a talented graphic artist, Gariety wrote in his journal; some of his drawings hung in the psychiatrist’s office. “He merrily handed out his artwork to everyone.”

There were two killers, one of whom was Gariety’s patient: 38-year-old Charles Hall, who everyone called Chuck. Despite a tough-guy exterior — shaved head, tattoos — Gariety had never thought of Hall as dangerous. His violence was mainly directed at himself.

For practically his whole adult life, Hall had been afflicted by a severe case of Crohn’s disease that had ravaged his intestinal system — and which made life in prison a living hell. Hall expelled waste through an ostomy bag attached to his abdomen, which often failed to work properly, and he was often in pain or discomfort. In the weeks before the murder, he’d had his seventh corrective surgery. The sights and smells of Hall’s disability had made him a target among his neighbors; after arriving in Springfield, Hall had repeatedly asked to be placed in isolation. More than once, Hall had tried to take his own life, usually when he was having a flare-up of his symptoms. It was a suicide attempt that had landed him in Gariety’s unit in the first place.

“Certain things jump off the page.”

In the weeks following the murder, Gariety’s own feelings of rage and revulsion gave way to a desire to make sense of it all. He reread his first psychiatric evaluation of Hall. “Certain things jump off the page,” he wrote. Hall had problems controlling his temper and acted out in ways that seemed irrational and self-defeating. The crimes that sent him to federal prison were a good example. While incarcerated in Maine, Hall had made a series of audacious threats to federal authorities by phone and by mail. He made no effort to hide what he was doing. “He even signed his name to one of the mailed threats,” Gariety wrote.

Hall showed similar behavior after Castro-Rodriguez’s murder. He insisted that he would kill again if he wasn’t put in isolation. “I want you to take me seriously,” Gariety recorded him saying.

There was something else in Hall’s file that captured Gariety’s attention. Hall had told him that his father had molested his sister when they were children — and that Hall once retaliated by trying to poison his dad with Drano capsules. Gariety wondered whether Hall himself had been abused. “It’s easy for me to imagine this only being the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in his journal.

Gariety sensed an undercurrent of deep fear beneath Hall’s behavior. Perhaps his violent actions were partly a response to feeling threatened — and “a way to imagine himself now strong enough to stand up to” his abuser. Whatever his unprocessed trauma, it was compounded by his physical suffering, he wrote. This did not justify his actions. But it was a way to understand them.

Gariety left his job at the medical prison not long afterward and moved out of state. Earlier this year, a lawyer named Angela Elleman got in touch with Gariety out of the blue. It was then that he learned that Hall had been sentenced to death.

Gariety also learned that his previous speculation about Hall had proved prescient. Though it had been revealed at Hall’s trial that the story about his sister and their father was untrue, Hall’s post-conviction team had uncovered broader allegations of sexual abuse at a school he attended as a child. According to Hall and additional witnesses who gave sworn declarations as part of a legal filing in his case, Hall was one of numerous students molested by the school’s founder. “It would be unsurprising for a male inmate to have deep shame about any history of sexual abuse and to substitute his own story with a fictional one for someone like a sister,” Gariety wrote in a declaration for Hall’s attorneys.

“I’m opposed to the death penalty,” Gariety told me. “I didn’t experience Mr. Hall as a particularly sympathetic character, but I did not want to see him executed.” He remains circumspect about his observations back in 2010. He’d had no way of knowing the truth of Hall’s life and had clawed for an explanation. “Him committing murder was just so unexpected and so extreme,” Gariety said. “Where the hell did that come from? Why didn’t anyone see that?”

State of Emergency

Today, Hall is 53 years old and lives in the Special Confinement Unit at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. He spends most of his waking hours in solitary confinement, living in a cell the size of a bathroom. In his decade on death row, Hall has had no disciplinary infractions; according to a former case worker at the prison, who wrote a letter to the White House earlier this year saying that it would be best for Hall and for the staff in Terre Haute if his sentence would be reduced to life without parole. Hall “was not a management problem” during the seven years that he knew him, the case worker wrote. “He did, though, have intense medical issues that our prison was not set up to handle.”

“If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty.”

As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, Hall is among the dozens of people on federal death row who have asked him to commute their death sentence. His clemency petition makes a powerful case for mercy. It is supported by the family of his victim, Castro-Rodriguez, who say that executing Hall would only add to their pain. It also contains declarations from jurors who served at Hall’s 2014 trial, who say that the new claim of sexual abuse — along with abnormalities in Hall’s brain recently revealed by neurological testing — now cast him in a different light. “If I had known this information at the time of Mr. Hall’s trial, I would not have voted for the death penalty,” one juror said.

The new information is also at the heart of a lengthy legal challenge to Hall’s death sentence filed in federal court earlier this year. The record contains hundreds of pages of declarations and expert reports shedding light on critical aspects of Hall’s early life that his defense attorneys never investigated. “As a result,” it reads, “the jurors never heard a wealth of evidence, readily available at the time of Chuck’s trial, that would have led at least one juror to vote for a sentence less than death.” (The Department of Justice has not yet filed a response to Hall’s motion.)

His attorneys’ failure to present such evidence is emblematic of the kind of lawyering that has too often paved the way for executions at both the state and federal levels. Hall was represented at trial by veteran death penalty attorney Frederick Duchardt, who has become known for his refusal to do mitigation investigations, the painstaking process of digging into a client’s history for any evidence that might be used to spare their life.

Of the 13 people executed during the killing spree carried out during Donald Trump’s first term, two were represented by Duchardt. Wesley Purkey, the second person killed in 2020, was sent to death row despite a history of sexual abuse by his own mother. Lisa Montgomery, the only woman executed by Trump, endured a lifetime of harrowing sexual abuse from the time she was a child. In both cases, Duchardt refused to hire a mitigation specialist, arguably one of the most important parts of a death penalty trial. Then, rather than concede any errors in support of his former clients’ post-conviction litigation (as trial lawyers often do), Duchardt filed lengthy affidavits defending his work.

Duchardt has been more cooperative in Hall’s case. Earlier this year, he sat down with Elleman to give a sworn statement explaining his decision-making in Hall’s case. The transcript was filed as part of Hall’s legal challenge. “There was a deep and rich story about what happened to Chuck Hall that Fred Duchardt didn’t understand, didn’t uncover, and didn’t tell the jury,” Ellemen told me. Duchardt declined to speak to me about the case.

While Hall still has a ways to go before exhausting his available legal challenges, there is no guarantee that his litigation will outlast a second Trump term. The looming return of federal executions has created a state of emergency for death penalty lawyers and their clients.

Many who watched in horror as Trump carried out an unprecedented execution spree during his final months in office have called upon Biden to intervene. Throughout November, Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of advocacy organizations called on the president to grant mass commutations to people on federal death row. On Sunday, Pope Francis urged Biden, a Catholic, to do the same. On Monday a new round of calls came from a wide range of groups, from retired prison officials to business leaders, current and former prosecutors, and judges. On Tuesday on Capitol Hill, the mother of Christopher Vialva, who was executed in 2020, spoke alongside other advocates at a congressional briefing organized by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.

Thus far, there is no indication as to whether Biden will heed these calls. Until this week, he had been stingy in exercising his commutation power. After angering people across the political spectrum by pardoning his son, on Thursday Biden pardoned 39 more people — and granted nearly 1,500 commutations to individuals released to home confinement due to the Covid pandemic. While activists lauded his actions, they also urged Biden to go bigger by granting clemency to all 40 people on federal death row.

If there’s at least one reason for hope among the men in Terre Haute, it’s that Biden recognized the problems with the federal death penalty enough to campaign on ending it in 2020. The promise did not hurt him with voters then — and now he has nothing to lose.

What Happened to This Person?

The Indiana Federal Community Defenders office is on the 32nd floor of an office tower in downtown Indianapolis. On a Tuesday morning in late November, a makeshift display of Hall’s artwork sat alongside office supplies in a quiet corner of the office. There were pencil portraits drawn of Hall’s legal team, a blue crocheted blanket, and dangly earrings made of pink and gold beads.

Angela Elleman, Hall’s lead attorney, had come to the office that day for a scheduled hearing in his case, which had since been canceled. She usually works in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where, after years doing post-conviction litigation, she turned to trial work for 10 years. She came back to post-conviction work shortly after the end of Trump’s execution spree. In March 2021, she was appointed to represent Hall.

Reading the case files, Elleman saw things that Hall’s jury should have heard. In the run-up to the murder, Hall had reported thoughts of hurting others; despite his requests to be placed in isolation, he remained in an open unit at the prison. Due to his recent surgery, Hall had been taking prednisone on the day of the murder, a steroid that can cause mania and rage.

“I just felt like I knew in my bones that this was a possibility.”

But there were also unanswered questions. As Elleman recalls, she began to suspect early on that Hall may have been sexually abused as a child, although she struggled to explain why. “I just felt like I knew in my bones that this was a possibility,” she said. Elleman’s hunch was so strong she spent time researching the Catholic priests in the parishes where Hall was raised, to see if any of them had been accused of abuse. But she came up empty.

Elleman’s intuition was at least partly informed by her 20 years representing people facing execution. Like all death penalty lawyers, her clients’ histories have been frequently marked by some form of trauma, abuse, or neglect, which is why investigating their early life is so critical. “People who have healthy and well-adjusted childhoods don’t just wake up one day and decide to kill someone,” she said. “The question for me becomes … what happened to this person?” As she read through the records and trial transcript in Hall’s case, Elleman realized that this fundamental question had gone unanswered.

It was not hard to see why Hall had been swiftly convicted. There was no question of his guilt; surveillance tape from the prison showed Hall and his co-defendant, Wesley Coonce, entering and exiting Castro-Rodriguez’s cell on the day of the murder. After Castro-Rodriguez’s body was found, Coonce and Hall quickly took responsibility for the crime. Hall went on to talk about it to seemingly anyone who would listen, from the FBI to his family to men he later met at another federal medical facility in North Carolina.

These statements formed much of the government’s evidence against Hall at trial. Especially damaging were letters Hall sent to his own federal prosecutors, in which he insisted that he should be given the death penalty. “The only thing that will stop me from killing again is putting me to death,” he wrote. He even laid out the reasons he met the statutory requirements for capital punishment, pointing out that the murder could be considered a hate crime because Castro-Rodriguez was Cuban.

If Hall’s acts of self-sabotage were a reflection of his suicidal impulses and instability, they were also aided by the attorney who represented him in the two years after the crime. The first lawyer assigned to Hall, Darryl Johnson Jr., had almost no experience with death penalty cases. When Johnson’s co-counsel was forced to withdraw due to a conflict of interest, Johnson replaced him with his own wife, who had never done criminal defense of any kind. Neither Johnson nor his then-wife responded to requests for interviews.

The couple represented Hall at a critical stage. In the federal system, attorneys for people accused of death-eligible crimes have the chance to meet with members of the Department of Justice’s Capital Review Committee, which advises the Attorney General’s Office on whether to seek the death penalty in a given case. In the summer of 2011, Johnson traveled to Washington, D.C., where rather than seek a plea deal or explain why his client should be spared, he told the committee that Hall wanted the death penalty. That July, the Obama administration gave formal notice that it would seek death against both Hall and his co-defendant.

Johnson and his wife eventually withdrew from the case amid allegations of professional misconduct by Johnson, as well as criminal sexual assault charges brought against him by a former client. He was later suspended from practicing law, although he has since been reinstated, and he was acquitted in the criminal case. In 2012, Johnson was replaced by Kansas City-based death penalty lawyer Frederick Duchardt.

Nature vs. Nurture

If mitigation investigations are a hallmark of modern death penalty defense, Duchardt has long had a reputation among many death penalty lawyers as being proudly behind the times. “I do not follow orthodoxy,” he told a Guardian reporter who profiled him in 2016, dismissing mitigation as “social work issues” that do not sway juries.

The more jurors are able to see a defendant as a human being rather than a monster, the harder it is to vote for them to die.

In fact, the evolution of mitigation work has been a game-changer for capital defense, and almost certainly a contributing factor to the dwindling number of new death sentences in the United States year after year. It was mitigation that led a Florida jury to spare the life of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz when he faced the death penalty in 2022. The more jurors are able to see a defendant as a human being rather than a monster, the harder it is to vote for them to die.

Hall was raised in Maine by a couple who adopted him and an older sister when they were babies. Although Hall and his sister have said that they received love and care, records in his case file also show that both children struggled with feelings of abandonment and identity, which manifested in behavioral problems their parents were ill-equipped to handle. The family participated in counseling programs that raised concerns about the couple’s drinking, which spurred conflicts at home. As Hall got older, he began stealing, including from his parents. By his early 20s, he had cycled in and out of jail and prison.

Duchardt had a lot to work with upon taking over the case. Although Johnson had done little to investigate Hall’s early life, he obtained voluminous records from Hall’s parents, which contained some glaring red flags. One was an undated handwritten note from Hall to his parents in which he threatened to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. “This is one problem you can’t solve with cops,” he wrote.

Records show that while Duchardt took some steps to investigate Hall’s background, he stopped short at critical points. Although he secured funds for an investigator, the investigator did not start his work until two months before Hall’s trial — and spent the bulk of that time tracking down Hall’s birth mother. This was an important piece of the puzzle: She had given Hall up after she was gang raped and impregnated as a teenager. But Duchardt did not send the investigator to speak to teachers and others who knew Hall as a child.

Duchardt also consulted with a neuroscientist immediately after taking the case. Despite being told that it was likely neuroimaging would “show some abnormalities in Mr. Hall’s brain structure,” Duchardt did not seek funding for such testing until the trial was less than a month away. By that point, it was too late. In a phone conference in April 2014, the presiding judge told Duchardt that “we’re three weeks from trial; and if we were to go forward with this, there’s an awful lot to be done.” He denied the motion.

Hall was tried in 2014 alongside his co-defendant, Coonce. Prosecutors argued that the men had targeted Casto-Rodriguez because he had intervened “in a fight or an argument” between one of his neighbors and a prison employee and was branded a “snitch.” Jurors found them guilty in about an hour.

The penalty phase of the trial would have been the place to draw a sharp contrast between Hall’s record and that of his co-defendant. Hall had gone to federal prison for a series of threats that, while perhaps terrifying, did not physically harm his targets. Coonce, meanwhile, was serving a life sentence for kidnapping and rape. One juror later told Hall’s attorneys that being tried alongside Coonce was “the thing that hurt Chuck Hall the most.” While the juror felt it was only fair to sentence them both to die, Coonce’s previous crimes “were in a completely different league.”

Although Duchardt called 15 people to the stand at the penalty phase, 10 of them testified via video — and two of them could not identify Hall when asked to do so. Some witnesses would later tell Hall’s attorneys that they had felt unprepared — and that rather than digging into any hardship Hall might have endured in his youth, Duchardt had elicited testimony to portray his upbringing as happy and filled with love and support. One man who had spent time with Hall at a punishing juvenile boot camp was cut off by Duchardt when he started to say that the camp had been shut down after revelations of abuse. “There’s so much more I could have said,” he said in a declaration.

Duchardt seemed especially adamant about showing the jury that Hall’s adoptive parents had done their best with a difficult child. “They weren’t perfect but they were sure darn good and they showed him every bit of love and care,” he said in his opening statement. He insinuated that Hall might have simply contained some intrinsic evil given how he was conceived. It came down to the “classic” question, he said: “Is it nature or is it nurture? And we don’t know for Chuck because, [his birth mother’s] rapist, we don’t know what his background was. We don’t know what his makeup was. We can’t tell you about any of that.”

Several witnesses addressed Hall’s tendency to exaggerate or invent elaborate lies about himself. An ex-girlfriend said, “he didn’t like the person he was … so he tried to make himself out to be somebody different.” The jury heard about Hall’s false claims of having tried to poison his father as retribution for molesting Hall’s sister — which his family testified was untrue — along with another convoluted lie. A psychologist who had once provided therapy to Hall said he’d falsely claimed to have had plans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, but that those plans had been derailed when he was arrested for assaulting two men who molested his friend’s 4-year-old daughter.

With no testimony to provide possible context for such invented revenge scenarios, the lies seemed to come out of nowhere. A different psychologist testified that Hall had “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” stating on cross-examination that he could be considered a “psychopath.”

Nonetheless, jurors remained split on whether to send Hall to death row. On the second day of deliberations, jurors sent a note to the judge saying that they had decided on Coonce’s sentence but “we are unable to reach a unanimous decision” about Hall. After the judge ordered them to keep deliberating, the jury decided on death.

A Shocking Discovery

Not long after Elleman was appointed to Hall’s case, she and her team started taking a closer look at the schools where Hall had spent time as a child. One of them was an alternative school in Burlington, Vermont, where Hall spent the 1984–1985 school year, when he was 13 years old. Although Duchardt went to Vermont at one point seeking records, he concluded that it would be impossible to learn much more about the school, which had shut down in 1986. As he told the jury at trial, “Frankly, we don’t know what happened there.”

In fact, there was a lot to learn about Shaker Mountain School. Newspaper articles throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s portrayed it as an innovative model for nontraditional education. Founded in 1968 by a man named Jerry Mintz, a “likeable, burly individual,” as the Burlington Free Press described him in 1970, the school once operated in an old grocery store and eventually expanded to multiple properties across Burlington. Teachers cobbled together classwork, vocational training, and arts instruction for students who did not thrive at public schools.

Like Hall, many of the students had problems at home and had spent time in juvenile facilities. There was no set cost of admission to attend. As the school entered its 10th year, Mintz wrote to the Free Press that the goal was “to provide an educational alternative for any student who wants one.”  

Mintz went on to become an author, consultant, and leader in alternative education. Meanwhile, Hall’s time at Shaker Mountain School seemed to derail him further. Although Hall had struggled at home and in school from the time he was in elementary school, records show that he was depressed and withdrawn upon his return. Sessions with a school psychologist in 1987 described Hall as “increasingly in crisis,” with “temper outbursts” and attempts to run away.

As Elleman and her team researched the school, it did not take long for a disturbing picture to emerge. Her mitigation specialist, Rebecca Cohen, found a Facebook page for alumni of Shaker Mountain School. When she contacted the administrator, he told her that he’d always hoped someone would look into what happened there. As Hall’s legal team later described in their motion, “the school had a freewheeling and sexually permissive atmosphere,” which gave rise to wildly inappropriate relationships and behavior by staff. “A teacher once played the piano with his penis in front of everyone,” they wrote.

Most shocking, the Facebook administrator revealed a dark, open secret that Cohen would hear about again and again as she tracked down more people connected to the school: allegations of systemic sexual abuse by Mintz of boys in his care.

Mintz directed questions to his attorney, Cory Morris, who noted that Mintz has never been arrested, let alone faced “felonious allegations,” in his life. “My client denies any and all wrongdoing,” Morris wrote in an email to The Intercept.

The accounts from the former Shaker Mountain students, which Hall’s lawyers memorialized in their motion to vacate his conviction, were strikingly consistent. Mintz would take boys from the school to go bowling or to the movies, often followed by sleepovers at the loft where he stayed. According to the declarations, the boys slept on mattresses placed on the floor. Mintz slept in his underwear and encouraged them to do the same. “At first, Jerry would offer us backrubs,” one former student recounted in a 2023 declaration. “I never wanted one, but he kind of pushed himself on you. And then, after awhile, when I’d be trying to sleep, I’d feel his hands on me.”

Cohen also collected declarations from former staff, who admitted sensing that something was not quite right about the sleepovers but mostly looked the other way. Although some students tried to report the abuse, their complaints went nowhere. According to Hall’s legal filings, Vermont’s Department of Rehabilitative and Social Services, which today is the Department for Children and Families, opened at least one inquiry based on a child’s complaint but “was told by child welfare personnel that his account alone was insufficient to substantiate charges.” The department did not respond to a message left by The Intercept.

Several former teachers and students remembered Hall, whom they knew as Chuckie. One woman remembered seeing him hanging out in the school’s “smoking area,” where Hall often seemed vigilant about where Mintz might be, according to her declaration. “His eyes were red-rimmed. ‘Where’s Jerry?’ he’d ask us.” Another man, whose declaration described Hall as his “best friend at SMS,” said that he remembered Hall going to the loft without him. “I remember telling him to stay away, but we never talked specifically about what Jerry had done to either one of us. It just wasn’t something you said out loud, even if everyone knew what was going on.”

Eventually Cohen met with Hall. Sitting across from him at a steel table at the Terre Haute prison, she told him that they had not talked much about his time at Shaker Mountain School. Without disclosing what she had learned, she asked him if he would tell her more about Mintz. As Elleman described it, Hall hung his head and began shaking. “Do I have to?” he asked.

During their visit that day, and in subsequent conversations with mental health experts, Hall spoke for the first time about what had happened at Shaker Mountain School. His accounts were incorporated into expert reports filed by Hall’s attorneys, including in one by Dr. Howard Fradkin, a leading expert on male survivors of sexual abuse. Fradkin concluded that it was a “clinical mistake to diagnose Chuck with Anti-Social Personality Disorder,” and that his primary diagnosis was post-traumatic stress disorder and Complex PTSD. In his opinion, “the impact of the untreated trauma is the best explanation for the many dysfunctional behaviors he engaged in throughout his life, culminating in the murder of a fellow inmate.”

The psychologist who testified at trial that Hall had Antisocial Personality Disorder also gave a declaration to Hall’s attorneys. “I based my ASPD diagnosis on the available information given to me by Fred,” he said, referring to Duchardt. Although the psychologist had suggested to the lawyer that brain imaging should be done prior to trial, this did not happen. Subsequent testing by Hall’s post-conviction attorneys “are remarkable,” he wrote, “in that they support that Mr. Hall has abnormalities to his brain.” Given this information and the alleged sexual abuse, he said, “I believe Mr. Hall’s brain dysfunction and history of trauma may better explain his history of lying/confabulation and failure to conform with the law.”

Duchardt learned for the first time about the accounts of sexual abuse at Shaker Mountain School during his interview with Elleman. Although he conceded that it would have been valuable information, he said he would not have necessarily presented it to a jury. “That would have been up to Chuck,” Duchardt said, according to the transcript. Regardless, his client never shared it. “And that’s where you have got an advantage on me, because I think that is something, believe it or not, that a man would share with a woman before he would share with another man.”

“I Felt a Lot of Peace”

A couple weeks before he went on trial for his life in 2014, Hall sent a letter to Olga Castro, the older sister of Victor Castro-Rodriguez. “I wanted to write to you earlier, but was advised to wait,” he began. “My lawyers and I agree that the time is appropriate. So I hope this letter doesn’t offend or upset you.”

“I know that Victor was someone you all loved and now miss dearly,” Hall went on. “Please know that I am deeply sorry for everything you’ve gone through in your loss of a loved one.”

The letter was read aloud by Duchardt’s co-counsel at trial. Taking the stand for the defense, Olga testified through an interpreter that the letter had been a source of comfort: “I felt a lot of peace.”

“I don’t believe in giving them the death penalty.”

In fact, the family had made clear to the U.S. government years earlier that they did not support a death sentence for either Hall or Coonce. During a meeting between the family and a Department of Justice prosecutor in September 2010, Olga and her brother Eulogio had “advised that they opposed the death penalty,” according to a report by the FBI special agent who investigated the crime. Carrying out an execution “would not solve anything,” he wrote. “They noted that their decision was based on religious grounds and their belief that the prison was at fault in the death of their brother.”

Last year, Hall wrote another letter to Castro-Rodriguez’s family. “I wanted you to know that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t live with regrets for my actions,” he wrote. “I do wish there were a way to change the past and bring Victor back to your family.”

In a video accompanying his clemency application, Olga and Eulogio reiterated what they told federal prosecutors more than 14 years ago: They do not want to see Hall executed. He and Coonce, like Victor, “were young men who were also sick,” Olga said. “I don’t believe in giving them the death penalty.” She said that she will pray for them: “Because only God delivers justice. Thank you very much.”

The post Charles Hall Insisted He Wanted the Death Penalty. Now He’s Asking Biden for Mercy. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of carrying out the mass detention and deportation of immigrants. 

President Joe Biden spent most of his term widening the government’s ability to incarcerate and deport people; inflating the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget by millions; increasing the number of beds in prisons; and expanding the use of private prisons, some of which have been plagued with poor living conditions and allegations of sexual assault and abuse. In this past fiscal year, Biden has deported more than 700,000 people — the most within a single year since 2010, which were largely in response to a major increase in people crossing the border during his term.

Trump is inheriting these boosts to the deportation infrastructure as he looks to fulfill his promises of deporting 1 million people each year with 10,000 new Border Patrol agents and help from the military and local law enforcement. He has announced former ICE director and architect of family separation policy Tom Homan as his “border czar”; Stephen Miller, who previously oversaw both family separation and the Muslim travel ban, will return to be deputy chief of staff for policy as well as Trump’s homeland security adviser.

With less than 50 days until his inauguration, immigrant community groups and rights activists are taking his word for it and bracing for the worst. They face drastically different conditions for organizing, depending on their state and local governments, but share some common struggles: lack of funding and public support compared to Trump’s first term in office, and potential burnout from previous fights against deportation.

Less Funding, More Fatigue

In the initial days after Trump’s first election in 2016, people poured into the streets to protest against Trump’s anti-immigrant threats and his promise to build a border wall. 

“And that was connected to a lot of attention, both from philanthropy, as well as from elected officials,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of immigrant and racial justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “There’s still definitely interest in defending immigrant communities. But I don’t feel like there’s the same sort of renewed resistance that we saw at the end of 2016 — I hope that changes.” 

Cheer said that leading up to this year’s election, organizers across California expressed concern that there wouldn’t be enough money to go around to fund organizations that assist immigrants through the turmoil of a second Trump presidency. Most grants from foundations last just one or two years, she said, which doesn’t give immigrant rights groups enough runway to build and plan for the future. 

“I generally sense more fatigue this time, and maybe people are just tired or depressed,” Cheer said. Many people who anchored the fight against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies the first time around have since left the movement, taking with them valuable knowledge and experience built during Trump’s first term.

Among those who have remained in the fight is Lorena Quiroz, a Jackson, Mississippi-based organizer who was among the first to offer aid in August 2019 when ICE tore through six different poultry plants across central Mississippi in a massive raid operation, detaining 680 immigrant workers. After the raid, immigrant rights groups in the region received an injection of much-needed philanthropic funding. From that moment, Quiroz founded the nonprofit Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity. She noted that this time around, fundraising has been more difficult. She said several funders have reached out to Quiroz since the election, saying that they are thinking about her, but have yet to offer donations.

In recent months, her organization has been preparing the community for similar operations, drawing on practices from the past five years. But she said she’s worried about whether her group, which has a small team of six staff, and others in the region will have the capacity to handle another surge in ICE detainments. And she’s aware she’s not the only organization in need of more resources.

“Every state needs help, some more than others. In Texas, they’ve already attacked nonprofits and worker centers — the whole nation is on fire right now,” Quiroz said. “So knowing that, I feel guilty, like, who do I ask for help?”

Anti-Immigrant Movement

Over the past four years, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lonestar has detained more than 500,000 immigrants over the past four years. Abbott has also exploited immigrants as political pawns, bussing more than 100,000 people to Democratic-led cities such as New York, D.C., and Chicago to draw attention to an increase of people crossing the U.S.–Mexico border (crossings at the southern border have since fallen, following stricter policies from the Mexican government and Biden administration).

Abbott has also cracked down on nonprofit organizations supporting immigrant communities in Texas. Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating immigrant aid organizations for allegedly assisting people cross the border illegally in an attempt to close down the aid groups. In August, Paxton sued a longtime Houston-based immigrant rights group, FIEL Houston, for making statements on social media that referred to Trump as “El Hijo Del Diablo,” (son of the Devil) and called Abbott “a violent racist fascist man,” according to the Houston Chronicle. The state’s lawsuit seeks to dissolve the nonprofit.

“We have to be careful in what we do, and how we do it, and how we say it.”

“We have to be careful in what we do, and how we do it, and how we say it, because the governor is using every tool in their power to destroy nonprofit organizations that are supporting the community,” said José Palma, who lives near Houston and is the coordinator of the National Temporary Protected Status Alliance. His group seeks to preserve the TPS program, which currently allows nearly 1.2 million people who have fled armed conflicts or natural disasters to remain in the U.S., and pushes for legislation that would grant TPS holders a path to citizenship. 

Both Trump and Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance have committed to ending the TPS program, which applies to people from 16 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, El Salvador, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Honduras. When Trump tried to end TPS during his first term, Palma, who himself is a TPS holder from El Salvador, was a part of organizing around a lawsuit that delayed the administration’s efforts.

Palma says activists are ready to again defend against Trump’s attacks. He has spent the last year preparing organizers and other TPS holders in the event of mass deportations. But this time, Palma has also noticed less funding coming in compared to 2016. In addition, he said he has noticed more members of the immigrant community in Texas expressing fear of the increasingly restrictive policies, which has made people more hesitant to step out and organize. 

“The community is a little more afraid to go to the streets and take direct action as I have seen in some other places,” Palma said. He contrasted it with Massachusetts, where he had lived for 25 years before moving to Texas several years ago. Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said she would refuse Trump’s attempts to deputize state police for detaining immigrants and committed to pursuing litigation and executive orders to protect its immigrant communities. Meanwhile, days after the election, officials in Texas offered the oncoming Trump administration a 1,400-acre ranch to build a detention facility where authorities can incarcerate thousands of immigrants as a final stop before deportation. 

“The anxiety for sure is bigger — I’ve heard from some of my friends that are afraid even just to come for vacation during the holiday season to Texas because Texas is seen as one of the pioneers of the anti-immigrant movement right now,” Palma added. 

Crackdowns Already Happening

In states like Mississippi, which have little to no legal protections for its undocumented immigrant community, such detentions people fear are already happening.

Days before Trump’s reelection, as both presidential candidates were drumming up crackdowns on immigration, Quiroz noticed an increase in local law enforcement arresting undocumented people and handing them over to ICE. Although no agencies in the state have official agreements with ICE under its 287(g) program, police in Mississippi frequently collaborate with the immigration authority.

In one case in late November, a young man who was undocumented was detained by police in Meridian for driving without a license, Quiroz said. Mississippi does not allow undocumented immigrants to apply for a driver’s license. The man was released with a citation to pay a fine. But when he went to a police station to pay the fine, officers arrested the man and kept him in custody under a two-day “ICE hold” before federal authorities would later pick him up. 

Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, a private prison run by CoreCivic and the state’s largest immigration detention center, held around 1,400 people throughout most of 2024. But at the end of October, a week from the election, the private prison’s average daily population shot up by more than 500, bringing to the total to 2,067 incarcerated individuals — the largest population across all immigration detention facilities in the nation, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University database of government enforcement agencies.

 

While it’s unclear what accounted for the specific jump in the number of people detained at Adams in October, the increase echoed the ICE raids of 2019. On the first day of school that year, ICE tore through six different poultry plants across the state, detaining 680 immigrant workers, many of them young parents. Children returned home from school empty homes. Some toddlers and babies were in daycare, left without anyone to pick them up.

Sending out a press release, Quiroz rallied organizations from across the region into Mississippi. She helped coordinate care for the children as assistance began to pour in from local churches. Then came the challenge of tracking down those arrested by ICE who were scattered at jails and prisons throughout the state. “We had no idea where people were, or where they were taken,” Quiroz recalled. 

A network of organizers, community members, and legal workers spent the next several weeks going door to door, figuring out who was taken, where they were incarcerated, and how many family members at home were affected by the arrests. At the end of each day, the groups would report their findings, building a database and support network. Volunteer attorneys hustled to try and secure their release. Many of those detained were eventually deported or faced criminal charges in the U.S., including the use of false identity documents and unlawfully entering the country. Families scrambled to figure out child custody arrangements. For some couples that weren’t married, getting access to financial records proved difficult. 

Families, whether separated or remaining together under ICE supervision and the threat of future detainments, are still processing the trauma from the mass raids, Quiroz said. 

Who’s Willing to Get Arrested?

State and local governments can still do more to prepare. Los Angeles passed a sanctuary city ordinance earlier this month, which prohibits local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE, but a number of Democratic-led cities and states across the country have yet to put such measures in place.

Biden spent much of his term expanding the immigration and detention apparatus, boosting ICE funding and deporting record numbers of immigrants during the past four years. But he could still protect some immigrants before he leaves office. The TPS Alliance is demanding that Biden renew the TPS program for an additional 18 months before he leaves office. Additionally, the American Civil Liberties Union has called on Biden to use the lame-duck session to halt the expansions of ICE facilities and to close private prisons with known histories of abuse and neglect. 

Regardless of what may come, immigrant rights groups are preparing their communities for Trump’s new policies. 

Palma, like Quiroz, helped start his community organization to defend against the attacks on immigrants of Trump’s first term in office. 

Trump initially attempted to end TPS in 2017: Palma worried that he and his wife, who is also a TPS holder like Palma, would have to leave the U.S. with their young children, or that he would lose his driver’s license and be unable to drive his kids to soccer practice, school, or church. But the fear also drew him closer to fellow TPS holders. He began calling his friends and neighbors to form a committee of TPS holders who would advocate for the program, train other community members of their rights, but also help each other should the program be eliminated and they face potential deportation. 

“The idea is to be in a community, to be in a group and to not be alone — sometimes we see people, they are afraid and they just hide themselves. We have to be organized, in case something happens to one of your neighbors or family members, they will know at least where to look for help,” Palma said. 

His group is now carrying out multiple trainings each week, and has trained thousands of immigrants and TPS holders since its founding. Since 2017, TPS committees have formed in places like Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, D.C., and cities in North Carolina and Virginia.

In Mississippi, Quiroz also has also led training sessions in recent months that have drawn dozens, educating individuals and families on their legal rights, such as refusing to open their door for an ICE officer unless they have a signed order from a judge. 

After the 2019 raids, as ICE continued to remain a presence within the community, Quiroz and her organization turned to radical means of resistance. They sought volunteers to serve as block captains, which notify neighbors when ICE is conducting stops or raids at a given street corner, highway, or trailer park. The group also set up a hotline where people can call in the event of an encounter with an ICE agent. A network of allies, usually people with legal status, will show up and remind individuals of their rights. 

In one instance, ICE followed a woman, a single mom with a teenage daughter, while driving home. Still inside her car, the woman called the hotline and an ally was able to show up, Quiroz recalled. The ally spoke to the ICE agent and learned the agent didn’t have a warrant to arrest her. The ally then urged the woman to stay inside her car. They waited until the agent eventually left. 

However, ICE was able to detain and deport the woman. “Once they get you, they tend to target you, ’cause these towns are so small,” she said. 

Quiroz’s group also offered legal observers to accompany community members who are under ICE supervision and must check in regularly with the agency. While an observer went with one man to his appointment, an ICE agent told the observer he wasn’t allowed inside the office and went on to detain the man. Quiroz and a group of about 10 people showed up with signs and protested outside the office, demanding the man’s release. When agents tried to leave, one of the protesters laid on the road, blocking the main exit. Agents were able to leave through a backdoor with the man who was eventually deported. 

“We can only educate and plan, and then we ask people, what are they willing to do — whenever we have a public action, we ask who’s willing to get arrested,” Quiroz said. “And there’s always at least one or two people. Once we ask that, ‘Well, are you willing to stand in front of the floor? Are you willing to create a chain around the person?’” The idea is that even if ICE eventually detains and deports them, any delay would allow family members to prepare for their absence, getting documents prepared and living arrangements ready. 

Quiroz is in the process of building out a similar rapid response network ahead of January. “I have to put this plan together — I’m talking to you from things I’ve discussed with community and learning best practices from last time,” Quiroz said, “Or not even best practices, just like whatever the hell worked, because it was a mess.”

The post “Who’s Willing to Get Arrested?” Immigrant Activists Ready for Trump Deportation Plans appeared first on The Intercept.

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On paper, Emil Bove is one of the better qualified people that President-elect Donald Trump wants for his next administration. Unlike Matt Gaetz, who was briefly floated to be U.S. attorney general, Bove has actual prosecutorial experience, which will come in handy if he’s confirmed as the Justice Department’s third-most-senior official. 

But during his last stint as a supervising prosecutor, Bove oversaw a case that was so mired by prosecutorial misconduct that a judge diagnosed it an “institutional failure.”

For just over two years, Bove was one of two chiefs of the terrorism and international narcotics unit in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, as Trump highlighted in a statement last month. It was there that Bove supervised a case involving alleged evasion of sanctions, which a federal judge slammed as “marred by repeated failures to disclose exculpatory evidence.”

The government so thoroughly botched its constitutional obligation to turn over evidence that prosecutors asked the court to vacate a jury verdict. The defendant, Ali Sadr, had been convicted on multiple counts of evading sanctions against Iran.

“The supervising Unit Chiefs appear to have offered little in the way of supervision,” wrote then-District Court Judge Alison Nathan, who has since been elevated to the federal appellate bench, in 2021. A few months earlier, the judge noted “insufficient supervision” as a significant factor in the “disclosure-related issues that plagued the prosecution in this case.”

Nathan ultimately found there were “grave derelictions of prosecutorial responsibility” and “systemic” prosecutorial misconduct in the case, although it did not rise to the level of intentional misconduct.

Less than a year after the blistering ruling, Bove left the Justice Department for private practice, and he joined Trump’s legal team soon after. Bove helped lead Trump’s defense in multiple cases, including the New York hush-money case — in which the former president was convicted on all counts earlier this year — and the two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith, which the Department of Justice dismissed after Trump won the election. Along with Bove, Trump announced he wants to appoint another of his attorneys on the cases, Todd Blanche, to a top DOJ post. 

Reached by email, Bove declined to answer The Intercept’s questions.

“I understand you’re going to take a shot at me, and I’m not going to waste time arguing with you about the mischaracterizations in your email,” he wrote. Bove did not reply to subsequent requests to identify the purported mischaracterizations.

Some experts were concerned about what Bove’s shortcomings as a supervisor in the Sadr case might suggest about his future at the top of the DOJ supervisory chain.

“If Bove can’t manage to properly supervise a handful of prosecutors in a single case,” said Ben Gershman, a law professor and expert on prosecutorial ethics, “what does this portend for the proper functioning of the Justice Department if Bove is called upon to supervise the many, many thousands of prosecutors in a huge, sprawling government agency?”

The fact that a federal judge called out Bove and his unit co-chief at all is notable.

Courts often go to great lengths to avoid chastising prosecutors when they violate the Brady doctrine — named for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires the government to turn over certain evidence to defendants. As a recent study of hundreds of Brady doctrine decisions found, it’s even rarer for a judge to single out an offending prosecutor by name.

“It is rare for a prosecutor — no less a supervising prosecutor — to be called on the carpet for Brady problems,” said law professor Adam M. Gershowitz, one of the study’s authors.

But Nathan was extremely disturbed by how Bove’s team behaved, which she framed as a stark outlier in her near decade on the bench.

“This serious dereliction requires a serious response,” she wrote in a September 2020 ruling, after all charges against Sadr were dismissed.

“This serious dereliction requires a serious response.”

Nathan demanded detailed sworn affidavits from Bove and every other prosecutor involved. Given the “exceptional public interest” of airing out what happened, she later unsealed these materials, including text messages in which Bove wrote that one of his supervisees had told defense attorneys a “flat lie” about when the team discovered their error. (Bove later wrote in his affidavit, “In hindsight, I believe that is an unfair characterization.”)

The records show that the unit overlooked a document that undercut the case against Sadr until the middle of trial. Once the document came to light, rather than admit the error to the defense and the court, prosecutors working under Bove discussed how to “bury” it in a bundle of documents without flagging it as a new disclosure. (Bove himself was not part of these discussions, the court found, and only became aware of the undisclosed document after his team produced it.)

After Sadr’s defense attorneys caught on, the team would not cop to the violation, even as Bove texted privately about its “gravity.”

Instead, one of the prosecutors filed a letter to the court that misrepresented their actions. In court, Bove apologized but largely defended the team’s conduct, including the misleading letter, in statements that the judge deemed contradictory fingerpointing. 

“The prosecutors — including the Unit Chiefs — dug themselves in deeper rather than squarely take responsibility for their past missteps,” Nathan wrote. She found that although Bove and his co-chief did not direct their team to mislead her, that did not absolve them entirely. “What the Unit Chiefs plainly did not do, however, was provide sufficient supervision to ensure the accuracy of the response to the Court,” she wrote.

“Judge Nathan’s observations may offer insight into how Mr. Bove tends to manage a prosecutorial team and that might be cause for concern,” said law professor Daniel Medwed.

Nathan found that the prosecutors’ pervasive errors in the case required “systemic solutions” from Justice Department leadership. She also urged the DOJ to refer the case to its Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates misconduct claims against federal prosecutors.

OPR is notoriously opaque. Even when it determines prosecutors committed misconduct, the office typically publishes only an anonymized summary of its findings.

One such summary, published in 2023, does not name Bove or any other prosecutor but closely matches the details in the Sadr case, including the court’s findings and the circumstances behind a misleading court filing. It suggests OPR found no misconduct but that “the conduct of members of the trial team was flawed.”

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