radiofree.asia

Category: texas

  • New Filing: Melissa Lucio, Who Suffered a Lifetime of Abuse, is Innocent and Her Execution Date Should be Withdrawn

    (Brownsville, Texas) Attorneys for Melissa Lucio today filed a motion to withdraw or modify her April 27, 2022 execution date. The filing in the 138th Judicial District Court of Cameron County asserts that Melissa was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for the accidental death of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah. Melissa, a Mexican-American from the Rio Grande Valley, is on death row despite forensic and eyewitness evidence that her daughter died from a head injury she suffered in a fall. Mariah’s death was a tragic accident, not a murder.

    “Police immediately jumped to the conclusion that Mariah had been murdered and never considered medical and scientific evidence that could have established Mariah died after an accidental fall,” said Vanessa Potkin, Director of Special Litigation at the Innocence Project, and one of Melissa’s attorneys. “While pregnant with twins, Melissa was subjected to a five-hour, late-night and aggressive interrogation until, physically and emotionally exhausted, she agreed to say, ‘I guess I did it.’ Melissa suffered a lifetime of sexual abuse — starting when she was only six years old — and domestic violence, which made her especially vulnerable to the police’s coercive interrogation tactics.”

    “Texas tore this family apart through the cruelty and injustice of Melissa’s wrongful conviction. Her children, mother, and siblings have been traumatized by Melissa’s arrest, prosecution, and death sentence. The State’s rush to set an execution date where there exists a strong innocence claim is alarming,” said Tivon Schardl, Chief of the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Defender for the Western District of Texas, and one of Melissa’s attorneys. “The State is also ignoring Melissa’s right to exercise her Roman Catholic faith and pending litigation in the United States Supreme Court that directly implicates this right.”

    “There is too much doubt to execute Melissa Lucio. Too many questions remain about the results of the autopsy, the conduct of interrogators, prosecutors, and courts, and Melissa’s mental impairments,” said Potkin. “Withdrawing the execution date so that the District Attorney, the courts, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and the Governor can undertake a meaningful review of Melissa’s innocence case, the coercive tactics used in her interrogation, and her lifetime of sexual abuse and domestic violence is the common-sense position and imperative as a matter of basic fairness.”

    Melissa Lucio’s Motion to Reconsider State’s Motion to Set Execution Date and to Withdraw or Modify the Execution Date can be viewed here and Exhibits can be viewed: here.

     

    Melissa’s lifetime of abuse made her especially vulnerable to coercive interrogation tactics that resulted in a false “confession.”

    On February 15, 2007, as Melissa was moving her family to a new apartment, her two-year-old daughter Mariah fell down a steep flight of outdoor stairs which led to their apartment. Mariah had a mild physical disability that made her unstable when walking. She had fallen before. Mariah appeared uninjured after the fall, but two days later, she went down for a nap and did not wake up. (Motion at pp. 6-7.)

    Within hours of losing her daughter, grieving, numb with shock, and pregnant with twins, Melissa was hauled into an interrogation room where armed, male police officers stood over her, yelled and berated her, and accused her of causing her daughter’s death.

    Melissa repeatedly told the police that she did not kill her daughter. But the officers continued to threaten her and used coercive interrogation techniques that are notorious for their tendency to produce false confessions, particularly when applied to vulnerable people like Melissa who suffer from trauma. (Motion at pp. 8-11.)

    After over five hours of interrogation, Melissa was emotionally and physically exhausted. In response to a Texas Ranger’s repeated demands, Melissa finally acquiesced and said, “I guess I did it.” (Motion at p. 8.)

    At the time of her arrest, Melissa had no record of violence. Thousands of pages of protective service records and recorded interviews with her children—including visits with the children shortly before and immediately after Mariah’s death—show that Melissa was not abusive. (Motion at p. 30.)

    Melissa’s conviction is based on two of the leading causes of wrongful convictions of women: false admissions made during police interrogation and faulty forensic evidence.  Approximately 40% of exonerated women were wrongly convicted of harming children or other loved ones in their care and nearly 70% were wrongfully convicted of crimes that never took place at all — events that were accidents, deaths by suicide, and fabricated — according to data from the National Registry of Exonerations.

     

    Melissa was especially vulnerable to the aggressive, intimidating, and psychological interrogation tactics of the police and male authority figures.

    When Melissa was just six, two adult male relatives began sexually abusing her, preying on her when her mother was not home. (Motion at p. 4.) As a young teenager, she was raped again.

    At age 16, Melissa got married as a child bride. Although this marriage would otherwise be against the law in Texas, it was permitted because Melissa’s mother gave consent. Melissa’s first husband was a violent alcoholic and drug dealer. He abandoned Melissa after she gave birth to their five children. (Motion at p. 5.)

    Melissa’s next partner continued the cycle of violence and abuse. She had seven children by her second husband. He beat Melissa, choked her, repeatedly raped her, and threatened to kill her. The family sunk deeper into poverty and was intermittently homeless. (Motion at pp. 5-6.) By the time Melissa was 35, she was struggling with physical abuse, PTSD, addiction, and poverty. She had given birth to 12 children and suffered multiple miscarriages.

    These experiences, and years of supervision by protective services—for her inability to provide for the children, never abuse—left Melissa weak and obliging in the face of authority figures and aggressive men. A Texas Ranger recklessly exploited Melissa’s vulnerabilities, first being soothing, then angry, taking down her hair, then pushing her to copy his demonstration of physical abuse. (Motion at p. 10.)

     

    “The State presented no physical evidence or witness testimony establishing that [Melissa] abused Mariah or any of her children, let alone killed Mariah,” seven Fifth Circuit judges wrote. (Motion at pp. 18-19)

    But in 2008, Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos was seeking reelection and decided to prosecute Melissa for capital murder. Lacking any physical evidence or eyewitness linking Melissa to Mariah’s death, DA Villalobos’ team characterized Melissa’s acquiescence during the coercive interrogation as a “confession.” DA Villalobos was corrupt: he is now serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion.

    At Melissa’s capital trial, Melissa’s attorneys tried to present expert witnesses who could have explained that Melissa’s response to the Ranger showed the results of her traumatic experiences, not guilt. The DA objected, and the trial court ruled that this evidence was “irrelevant.” That ruling deprived Melissa of the only means she had of explaining why she took responsibility although Mariah’s death was an accident. (Motion at pp. 12-16.)

    The trial court prohibited this testimony but allowed the Texas Ranger who coerced Melissa’s incriminating statement to testify for the prosecution that Melissa’s slumped posture, passivity, and failure to make eye contact told him that she was guilty. (Motion at pp. 11-12.)

     

    The jury did not hear Melissa’s defense or mitigating factors. Melissa’s trial attorneys were not prepared for the penalty phase of the trial. Lead counsel hamstrung his mitigation specialist and expert until weeks before the trial began. As a result, Melissa’s mitigation specialist never completed her investigation and the jury never learned about the extent of Melissa’s history of child sexual abuse and domestic violence.

    The jury never heard how Melissa’s history of trauma and abuse shaped her reactions immediately following her daughter’s death. Without that context, the jury convicted Melissa of capital murder. By contrast, Melissa’s partner, Mariah’s father, was sentenced to four years for endangering a child.

    The omission of this mitigating evidence was particularly damaging because the prosecution had a weak case for death. Melissa had no prior record of violence and the State’s sole evidence of future dangerousness was the death of Mariah and a prior conviction for driving under the influence.

     

    So far, the courts’ hands have been tied.

    A majority of judges have agreed that the exclusion of the psychologist’s expert testimony, which would have provided an explanation for Melissa’s acquiescence during the coercive interrogation, was wrong, but decided that current federal law limits the courts’ ability to intervene. (Motion at pp. 18-19.)

    A panel of federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Melissa was denied her constitutional right to present a meaningful defense. In a unanimous three-judge opinion, the court ruled that providing an explanation for her incriminating statements during the interrogation, which she was not permitted to do, was the most significant evidence in the case since there was no physical evidence or witness testimony establishing that Melissa abused Mariah or any of her children, let alone killed Mariah.

    Texas appealed to the full 17-member Fifth Circuit. Ten of 17 judges agreed that the exclusion of the psychologist’s testimony skewed the evidence against Melissa, but three of the 10 joined seven other judges in holding that the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) — a law that has been widely criticized for unfairly curtailing review, including of innocent people — barred relief for Melissa. Seven judges dissented from the opinion denying relief for Melissa with four writing separate dissenting opinions to express their outrage. (Motion at pp. 18-19.)

    The motion provides further grounds for withdrawing or modifying Melissa’s execution date, including the need for additional state court proceedings on her actual innocence, intellectual disability, newly-discovered false testimony, and testimony based on “junk science;” the COVID pandemic has created obstacles to preparing claims and present a threat to the health of people who may attend the execution; the execution date does not allow Melissa a fair opportunity to present her case for clemency; ongoing litigation before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; and ongoing litigation challenging Texas Department of Criminal Justice rules that do not allow a prisoner to have their spiritual advisor pray audibly or lay hands on them in the execution chamber, thus violating their religious liberty. (Motion at pp. 2-3.)

     

    A meaningful review of Melissa’s innocence case is needed before an irreversible injustice occurs.

    A broad, diverse, and growing coalition, including the Innocence Network, Cornell Law School Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, domestic violence and battered women’s organizations, former prosecutors, experts in gender-based violence, and law professors have expressed support for Melissa and have stated that, as a survivor of sexual abuse and domestic violence, she was especially susceptible to making a false confession or incriminating remarks during a coercive interrogation.

    According to the Death Penalty Information Center, since 1973, 186 people have been exonerated from death row, including 16 in Texas, and the number of people whose lives were taken before they were able to prove their innocence is unknown.

     

    The post New Filing: Melissa Lucio, Who Suffered a Lifetime of Abuse, is Innocent and Her Execution Date Should be Withdrawn appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Social Media Toolkit: Stop The Execution of Melissa Lucio in Texas

    Melisssa Lucio, a Mexican-American, is facing execution on April 27, 2022, in Texas for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah — a crime that never occurred. Mariah died two days after accidentally falling down a steep flight of stairs and Melissa has maintained her innocence on death row for more than 14 years. Take action now by reposting the social media materials below.

    Save Melissa Lucio

     

    • Hashtag: #SaveMelissaLucio
    • URL: SaveMelissa.Org
    • Petition link is here.
    • Twitter copy or retweet here: Melissa Lucio is facing execution on April 27 for a crime that never occurred. I am joining @innocence in preventing an irreversible injustice before it’s too late. Add your name to #SaveMelissaLucio https://bit.ly/3IIP03V
    • Facebook copy or repost here: Melissa Lucio faces execution on April 27 Texas for a crime that never occurred. Add your name now to prevent an irreversible injustice. https://bit.ly/35FDmbG
    • Instagram
      • Repost here: Melissa Lucio has maintained her innocence on death row in Texas for more than 14 years, yet she is set to be executed on April 27, 2022, for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah.⁠
      • Download images formatted for Instagram post & Instagram Stories here.
      • Download text graphics formatted for Instagram Post & Instagram Stories here.

    Suggested language for Instagram: 

    Melissa Lucio, a Mexican-American, is facing execution on April 27, 2022, in Texas for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah — a crime that never occurred. Mariah died two days after accidentally falling down a steep flight of stairs and Melissa has maintained her innocence on death row for more than 14 years.

    But Mariah wasn’t murdered. She tragically died after an accidental fall down steep stairs, and Melissa, like nearly 70% of exonerated women, has been convicted of a crime that never took place (events that were actually accidents, deaths by suicide, or fabricated).⁠

    ⁠Melissa is a survivor of sexual abuse and violence that she has endured her whole life beginning at age 6. Her history of abuse makes her especially vulnerable to coercive tactics and falsely confessing. On the night her youngest child died, she was interrogated and intimidated for five hours, until she finally said, “I guess I did it,” to get detectives to end the interrogation. ⁠

    ⁠Melissa was a mother of 12 when she was arrested. She was also pregnant with twins she gave birth to in jail and had to give up for adoption. The State of Texas presented no physical evidence establishing that Melissa ever abused Mariah or any of her children. In fact, thousands of pages of Child Protective Services records show her kids never said she was violent with them.⁠⁠

    We have less than 80 days to #SaveMelissaLucio.⁠

    Please, add your name to the petition at the link in bio, then tag three friends to do the same.⁠
    ⁠
    Image: Courtesy of the Lucio team

     

    Salvemos a Melissa

    Melissa Lucio, de ascendencia Mexicana, enfrentara su ejecución en Texas el 27 de abril de 2022 por el asesinato de su hija de dos años, Mariah— un crimen que nunca ocurrió. Mariah murió dos días después de caerse accidentalmente de unas escaleras empinadas. Melissa ha mantenido su inocencia condenada a pena de muerte durante más de 14 años.

    • Hashtag: #SalvemosAMelissa
    • URL: SalvemosMelissa.org
    • Enlace de petición aqui.
    • Twitter — volver a publicar aqui: Texas tiene programado ejecutar a Melissa Lucio el 27 de abril por un crimen que nunca ocurrió. Me uno a @innocence para prevenir una injusticia irreversible antes de que sea demasiado tarde #SalvemosAMelissa: https://bit.ly/3Gn2UqA
    • Facebook — volver a publicar aqui: Texas tiene programado ejecutar a Melissa Lucio el 27 de abril por un crimen que nunca ocurrió. Me uno a @innocence para prevenir una injusticia irreversible antes de que sea demasiado tarde: https://bit.ly/3Gn2Uq
    • Instagram
      • Volver a publicar aqui.
      • Descarga imagenes para Instagram y Instagram Stories aqui.
      • Descarga gráficas para Instagram y Instagram Stories aqui.

    Copia de Instagram:

    Pero Mariah no fue asesinada, murió trágicamente después de una caída accidental de unas escaleras empinadas. Melissa, como casi el 70% de mujeres exoneradas, ha sido condenada por un delito que nunca ocurrió (eventos que en realidad fueron accidentes, muertes por suicidio, o delitos fabricados). ⁠
    ⁠
    Melissa es una sobreviviente de abuso y violencia sexual que soporto toda su vida desde los 6 años. Su historial de abuso la hace especialmente vulnerable a tácticas coercitivas y confesiones falsas. La noche en que murió su hija menor, Melissa fue interrogada e intimidada durante cinco horas, hasta que finalmente dijo: “Supongo que lo hice,” para que los detectives pusieran fin al interrogatorio.⁠
    ⁠
    Melissa era la madre de 12 hijos cuando fue arrestada. También estaba embarazada de mellizos, a los cuales dio a luz en prisión y tuvo que dar en adopción. El estado de Texas no presentó evidencia física que estableciera que Melissa alguna vez abusó de Mariah o de alguno de sus hijos. De hecho, miles de páginas de registros de los Servicios de Protección Infantil demuestran que ella nunca fue violenta con ellos.⁠
    ⁠
    En menos de 80 días #SalvemosAMelissa.⁠
    ⁠
    Por favor, agrega tu nombre a la petición en el enlace de nuestra bio, luego etiqueta a tres amigos para que hagan lo mismo. Mande el mensaje SAVEMELISSA a 97016⁠.

    Imagen: Cortesía del equipo Lucio⁠.

    The post Social Media Toolkit: Stop The Execution of Melissa Lucio in Texas appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Who Is Melissa Lucio, Facing Execution in Texas

    In 2007, Melissa Lucio’s 2-year-old daughter, Mariah, died after a tragic, accidental fall down a flight of stairs. But Ms. Lucio and her family never got to mourn the loss of her youngest daughter because, within hours of her passing, they were swept up into a nightmare that has lasted more than 14 years and torn their family apart.

    Melissa Lucio and her family before she was wrongly sentenced to death. (Image: Courtesy of the Lucio family).

    Any chance Ms. Lucio and her family had to grieve and heal was stolen by the corrupt prosecutor whose office tried her case and the State of Texas when she was wrongfully convicted of murdering her daughter and sentenced to death in 2008. Ms. Lucio is scheduled to be executed on April 27, 2022, even though several judges have concluded her trial was unfair.

    Ms. Lucio’s conviction reflects a series of injustices, failures of the criminal legal system, and the devastating impact of generational trauma. Her conviction and death sentence for a crime that never happened compounded that trauma. And, if Texas rushes ahead with the execution of an innocent mother, the irreversible injustice will fracture her family even further and ensure the pain and trauma experienced thus far will be passed on to another generation.

    Here’s what you need to know about Melissa Lucio’s case.

    Who is Melissa Lucio?

    Ms. Lucio is a survivor of lifelong, repeated rape and domestic violence, who grew up in a Catholic, Mexican-American family living below the poverty line in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. When Ms. Lucio was just 6, two adult male relatives began sexually abusing her, preying on her when her mother was not home. It was the start of a pattern of sexual abuse and rape that continued for several years.

    Ms. Lucio endured abuse throughout her childhood and into her teenage years, until, desperate to escape her situation, she became a child bride at 16. Although she was below the legal age of marriage in Texas, Ms. Lucio’s mother consented to her child’s marriage.

    Instead of helping her to escape the trauma of her childhood, Ms. Lucio’s husband perpetuated the cycle of abuse. He was violent toward her and also abused alcohol and sold drugs. Still a minor and unable to leave the abusive marriage, Ms. Lucio was trapped and developed a substance use problem. She had five children with her husband before he left the family, abandoning the young mother to fend for herself.

    She ultimately had nine children, including Mariah, with her next partner. He, too, was abusive, repeatedly raping her, choking her, and threatening to kill her. Ms. Lucio gave birth to their youngest children together — twin boys — while in jail and had to give them up for adoption due to her wrongful incarceration. The rest of her children were split up and sent to live with relatives or placed in the custody of the state.

    Melissa Lucio pictured with some of her children. (Image: Courtesy of the Lucio family)

    Though her family lived in poverty and experienced homelessness at times, Ms. Lucio was a loving and caring mother, despite struggling to provide financially for her family.

    She is currently one of six women on Texas’ death row, and the only Latina woman sentenced to death in the state’s history.

    What happened on the day of Mariah’s death

    • On Feb. 15, 2007, Mariah fell down a flight of stairs while the family was in the process of moving homes. The toddler had a mild physical disability — her feet were turned to the side — making her unstable while walking and prone to tripping. Mariah did not appear injured after the fall, but two days later, Ms. Lucio put her daughter down for a nap, and the child did not wake up.The child was taken to the hospital where she was declared dead. Rushing to judgement, detectives took Ms. Lucio in for interrogation that same night.
    • In the interrogation room, officers berated and intimidated Ms. Lucio, who was pregnant and still reeling from the loss of her child, for five hours. Research has shown that survivors of sexual abuse and violence, like Ms. Lucio, are more vulnerable to falsely confessing under such coercive conditions.
    • During her interrogation, detectives used coercive techniques known to lead to false confessions, including “maximization and minimization” — exaggerating the strength of or bluffing about evidence and potential charges and while also downplaying the seriousness of the situation and even implying a more lenient charge.
    • Ms. Lucio repeatedly maintained her innocence during the interrogation. When shown a photo of her daughter, sobbing, she said, “I wish it was me.” But the interview continued until 3 a.m. and only stopped after Ms. Lucio — physically and emotionally exhausted — acquiesced to the detectives’ demands, saying “I guess I did it” in the hopes that they would end the interrogation.

    A miscarriage of justice and systemic failure

    • Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos sought the death penalty in Ms. Lucio’s case, likely because he was seeking re-election at the time and thought that such a “win” would earn him votes. Mr. Villalobos was convicted of bribery and extortion in 2014, and is currently serving a 13-year federal prison sentence.
    • Mr. Villalobos argued that Ms. Lucio abused her daughter leading to her death, but thousands of pages of interviews and records from Child Protective Services show that Ms. Lucio’s children never said she was violent with any of them.
    • Approximately 70% of women exonerated since 1989 were wrongfully convicted of crimes that never happened — meaning events ultimately determined to be accidents, deaths by suicide, and fabricated crimes — according to data from the National Registry of Exonerations.
    • Women, especially mothers, accused of harming a child also tend to be perceived more negatively than men and even demonized in the media. Nearly one in three female exonerees were wrongly convicted of harming a child, according to the data from the National Registry of Exonerations. In Ms. Lucio’s case, the district attorney’s office sought a murder conviction and the death penalty, and the child’s father was convicted of the lesser charge of endangering a child and sentenced to four years in prison.
    • Ms. Lucio’s defense attorneys were not prepared for the penalty phase of her trial and mounted a woefully inadequate defense. And shortly after her trial, her defense attorney joined the district attorney’s office.
    • The prosecution distorted Ms. Lucio’s conciliatory statement, telling the jury it was a confession. Because her defense attorney failed to fully investigate her background, the jury never learned about her extensive history as a survivor of sexual violence and domestic abuse. When the defense sought to present expert testimony about how her experiences would have shaped her response to an aggressive interrogation, the district attorney objected, and the court excluded the testimony. These experts had interviewed Ms. Lucio and her family and concluded that Ms. Lucio’s response to her interrogation was consistent with the behavior of a victim of abuse. While Ms. Lucio was not allowed to present this evidence, which was central to her defense and explained her behavior, a Texas Ranger who interrogated Ms. Lucio was allowed to testify that her posture and lack of eye contact were evidence of her guilt.
    • A panel of federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a unanimous three-judge opinion that Ms. Lucio was denied the right to present “a meaningful defense.” And in a subsequent decision following an appeal from the state, 10 out of the Fifth Circuit’s 17 judges agreed that the exclusion of the psychologist’s testimony skewed the evidence against Ms. Lucio.
    • The seven judges who dissented agreed that the State Court’s rejection of the psychology and mental health experts’ testimony and Ms. Lucio’s defense was “irrational” and expressed outrage, but concluded the court could not grant relief because of the strict limits of federal court review. On behalf of the seven dissenting judges, Judge Catharina Haynes, wrote “The State presented no physical evidence or witness testimony establishing that Lucio abused Mariah or any of her children, let alone killed Mariah … The jury was deprived of key evidence to weigh: that is the point.”
    • A neurosurgeon and a pathologist specializing in child abuse deaths have already disputed Mariah’s autopsty and cause of death. There is simply too much doubt in this case, and Ms. Lucio and her family deserve the truth and to heal.

    The system has failed Ms. Lucio throughout her life. At 53, having survived a lifetime of suffering and trauma, Ms. Lucio is now poised to be executed by the State of Texas, an irreversible injustice which will ensure that the cycle of harm and damage that Ms. Lucio and her children have already experienced will be perpetuated and passed on to the next generation. Ms. Lucio’s death for a crime that did not take place can only deepen the pain and suffering of her family.

    The district attorney, the courts, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and the Governor must undertake a meaningful review of Melissa’s innocence case — including the coercive tactics used in her interrogation and her lifetime of sexual abuse and domestic violence — before carrying out an irreversible injustice.

    If you have experienced sexual abuse and want to speak to someone, call the free and confidential National Sexual Assault hotline (1-800-656-HOPE or 1-800-656-4673). You can also receive help via online.rainn.org, which is available 24/7.

    The post Who Is Melissa Lucio, Facing Execution in Texas appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Ted Cruz Tweets About Cancún Travel Costs as Another Winter Storm Hits Texas

    Sen. Ted Cruz speaks during a campaign event at Lehigh Valley Sporting Clays in Coplay, Pennsylvania, on January 25, 2022.

    On Wednesday, as Texans braced themselves for another harsh winter storm, Sen. Ted Cruz (R- Texas) joked about his decision to vacation in Cancún last year during the deadly winter freeze that left millions of people in his home state without power.

    In February 2021, as Texas’s energy grid faltered and left millions of residents without power during a brutal winter storm, Cruz left Texas to vacation in Cancún, Mexico, a move that was widely condemned for being callous and out-of-touch. The storm resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people.

    Cruz later admitted that his decision to go on the family trip was “obviously a mistake” — but he also maintained that he was the victim, claiming that the media was simply looking for someone to villainize following Donald Trump’s departure from the White House a month prior.

    “The media is suffering from acute Trump withdrawal, where for four years every day, they could foam at the mouth and be obsessed with [former President] Donald Trump, and now that he has receded from their day-to-day storyline, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” Cruz said on a conservative radio show last year.

    This week, Cruz made light of his ill-advised trip to Mexico in a tweet about inflation. While noting higher gas, food, and lumber prices, Cruz wrote in a tweet on Wednesday, “And tickets to Cancun are up 32%!”

    Cruz’s comments come as the state braces for another serious winter storm — and while tens of thousands of residents are, once again, without power.

    On Thursday, a winter storm that hit much of the U.S. left 70,000 Texans without power. Notably, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott promised residents late last year that the power grid would be reliable “even during the harshest of winter storms.”

    In response to Cruz’s tweet on Wednesday, State Rep. Gene Wu (D) said the lawmaker must have sensed that “this storm is going to be serious,” if he was tweeting about flight costs to Cancún. Wu added that it was callous of Cruz to “reminisce about that time [he] abandoned the state when we were going through a catastrophic natural disaster that took the lives of 700 Texans.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Judge at Rodney Reed’s Innocence Hearing Abandoned his Duty as a Neutral, Thoughtful Fact Finder

    (Austin, Texas) The trial court judge overseeing Rodney Reed’s July 2021 evidentiary hearing abdicated his role as an unbiased, deliberative, independent fact finder and rubberstamped the State’s proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law, according to the Memorandum and Objections to Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law that Mr. Reed’s attorneys filed today at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). Because the judge abandoned his duty to be a neutral, independent fact finder, the CCA should reject the trial court’s copy-and-pasted order, Mr. Reed argues.

    Rodney Reed’s Memorandum and Objections to Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law can be viewed, here.

    Mr. Reed was scheduled for execution in November 2019, but the CCA issued a stay to allow the courts to consider new evidence of his innocence and remanded the case to the 21st Judicial District Court in Bastrop County for an evidentiary hearing. Despite the new, overwhelming evidence of innocence presented at the evidentiary hearing, Judge J.D. Langley adopted, nearly verbatim, the State’s proposed order, including several obvious factual misrepresentations.

    “The abdication of the judge’s duty cannot be tolerated, especially when an innocent man’s life is at stake.”

    “The abdication of the judge’s duty cannot be tolerated, especially when an innocent man’s life is at stake. The CCA entrusted Judge Langley with making impartial findings and independent assessments of witnesses’ credibility, supported by the evidence. That did not happen,” said Jane Pucher, Senior Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project, and one of Mr. Reed’s attorneys.

    At closing arguments, the judge demonstrated that he completely misunderstood his role as an independent fact finder and intended to adopt, in its entirely, one side’s proposed order: “What I’m here today to find out is why you think I ought to sign your version.” (Objections at pp. 1-2.)

    Convicted by an all-white jury in 1998, Mr. Reed, a Black man, has spent 23 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. In 1996, Stacey Stites, a white woman with whom Mr. Reed was having an affair, was found murdered in Bastrop County. For nearly a year, the prime suspect in the case was Ms. Stites’s fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a police officer who was abusive and violent toward Ms. Stites, according to numerous witnesses. But the police turned their attention to Mr. Reed when DNA recovered from Ms. Stites matched him.

    The judge’s cut-and-pasted order shows that he failed in his duty to carefully and independently assess the credibility of 47 witnesses. Having adopted the State’s proposed order wholesale, the court found all 20+ witnesses on Mr. Reed’s behalf to be not credible and found all 20+ witnesses on the State’s behalf to be credible.

    “It is not plausible that ALL of Mr. Reed’s witnesses were not credible, including former law enforcement officers. That is especially true, given that the witnesses Mr. Reed called had no motive to help him: these were friends and co-workers of Ms. Stites and of Mr. Fennell,” said Pucher.

    At least eight witnesses, including Ms. Stites’s co-workers, friends, and family, and a former member of law enforcement, testified at the evidentiary hearing that Ms. Stites and Mr. Reed knew each other and were romantically involved at the time of her death. This testimony disproved the State’s theory at trial that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites were strangers, she never would have associated with him, and therefore he must have kidnapped and sexually assaulted her. (Objections at p. 17.)

    In particular, Suzan Hugen, Ms. Stites’s friend and co-worker, testified at the evidentiary hearing that she saw Ms. Stites standing close to a Black man at the HEB, the two were laughing and flirting, and Ms. Stites introduced him to Ms. Hugen as “Rodney” and a good friend. Ms. Hugen, a disabled mother of four, traveled from out of state to testify “for Stacey,” her friend and former co-worker. (Objections at pp. 17, 22, 25, 39.) Despite the fact that eight witnesses corroborated each other, the court did not credit any of the testimony showing Ms. Stites and Mr. Reed knew each other.

    At least nine witnesses, including Ms. Stites’s friends and co-workers, and a member of law enforcement, testified at the evidentiary hearing that Ms. Stites and Mr. Fennell did not have a happy relationship. Their testimony described Ms. Stites’s and Mr. Fennell’s relationship as hostile, controlling, and even abusive. This evidence directly contradicted Mr. Fennell’s testimony at Mr. Reed’s trial that the couple had a loving and trouble-free relationship and were looking forward to their wedding. (Objections at p. 22.). Their testimony also explained Mr. Fennell’s motive to harm his fiancée: he suspected she was cheating on him with a Black man.

    Charles Wayne Fletcher, a former member of the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Office, stated that Mr. Fennell told him a month before Ms. Stites was murdered that she was “fucking a ni****.” (Objections at pp. 22, 27.) The son of Ms. Stites’s downstairs neighbor testified that he was with his father when he told former Lee County District Attorney Ted Weems about the violent fights he overheard in Ms. Stites’s and Mr. Fennell’s apartment, information that the State illegally suppressed at the time of trial. (Objections at pp. 22-23.) Equally shocking, an insurance agent who sold life insurance to Ms. Stites with Mr. Fennell present testified that Ms. Stites said she was not sure why she needed life insurance. Mr. Fennell responded: “If I ever caught you messing around on me, I will kill you and nobody’ll know that I was the one that did it.” (Objections at p. 23.)

    Despite the corroborating testimony of these nine witnesses, the court discredited it all. (Objections at p. 24.) In contrast, the only witnesses who testified that the couple’s relationship was peaceful, and that the court credited as credible, were Mr. Fennell himself, his mother, and his sister. Mr. Fennell, of course, has every reason to bend the truth.

    At least three witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing that Mr. Fennell knew Ms. Stites was having an affair with a Black man and therefore had a motive to murder her. Two more witnesses testified that Mr. Fennell made callous remarks about Ms. Stites soon after her death. Two other witnesses testified that Mr. Fennell confessed to killing Ms. Stites. If this evidence had been presented at trial, it would have undercut the image of Mr. Fennell as a grieving fiancé, shown that Mr. Fennell had a motive to kill Ms. Stites, and the jury would not have convicted Mr. Reed. (Objections at pp. 27-29.)

    In addition to Mr. Fletcher’s testimony that Mr. Fennell was aware of an affair with a Black man, James Clampit, a deputy in the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and an acquaintance of Mr. Fennell’s, testified that he attended Ms. Stites’s viewing, where he heard Mr. Fennell say “she got what she deserved.” (Objections at p. 27.) That testimony was corroborated by another member of law enforcement and former co-worker of Mr. Fennell’s, Cindy Schmidt, who testified that she overheard Mr. Fennell say at Ms. Stites’s viewing: “at least the bitch got to wear her wedding dress.” (Objections at p. 27.)

    Two people who were incarcerated with Mr. Fennell, when he was serving a ten-year sentence for sexually assaulting a woman in his custody as a police officer, testified that Mr. Fennell knew about Ms. Stites’s affair with a Black man and confessed to killing her. One testified
    that Mr. Fennell said that he “took care of her” and “that damn n[-word] is going to do the time” while making a strangulation gesture. (Objections at p. 28.)

    The court did not credit any of these witnesses, including the former law enforcement officers, and instead credited the statements of Mr. Fennell, whose testimony was uncorroborated and self-serving. (Objections at p. 29.)

    The court clearly erred in crediting Mr. Fennell’s self-serving and uncorroborated testimony over more reliable witnesses who, unlike Mr. Fennell, had no motive to lie. Mr. Fennell had a strong motivation to lie because he was once the prime suspect in Ms. Stites’s murder and would be again if Mr. Reed’s conviction was overturned. (Objections at p. 29.)

    At the evidentiary hearing, Mr. Fennell was caught in lies numerous times. For example, he said he only texted with a State investigator once or twice before the hearing, but Mr. Reed’s counsel presented evidence that he and the investigator texted over 100 times. Mr. Fennell denied cleaning out his bank accounts after Ms. Stites’s death, but a police report and bank records showed that he did. Mr. Fennell also testified that he did not use the “N” word very often, but several witnesses testified to the contrary, and he later admitted that he did use the word. (Objections at pp. 29-30.)

    Mr. Fennell asserted, implausibly, that every single one of Mr. Reed’s witnesses – nearly two dozen witnesses – was lying at the evidentiary hearing. Mr. Fennell was forthcoming on one key point: he testified that he pled guilty to kidnapping and improper sexual contact with a person in his custody as a police officer and served 10 years in prison for the offense. (Objections at pp. 30-31.)

    In addition, nationally recognized experts who testified at the evidentiary hearing completely debunked the forensic case against Mr. Reed. Two nationally recognized forensic experts testified pro bono that the conviction against Mr. Reed was based on flawed forensic testimony. The State’s two forensic experts agreed with Mr. Reed’s experts on several key points, including that the State sponsored false scientific testimony at Mr. Reed’s trial. Despite this agreement, the court refused to credit any of Mr. Reed’s forensic experts. Former Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo filed an affidavit in 2012 stating that key points of his trial testimony were “incorrect” and not “medically or scientifically supported,” but the court, in adopting the State’s proposed order without changes, incorrectly found that Dr. Bayardo did not recant his testimony. (Objections at pp. 31-38.)

    The court ignored compelling evidence that Mr. Reed’s expert witnesses were more credible than the State’s experts. Significantly, Mr. Reed’s forensic experts testified pro bono, while the State’s experts charged up to $500 per hour. After Mr. Reed’s experts issued their report, 14 other respected forensic pathologists agreed with its conclusions. The court did not acknowledge this overwhelming support for Mr. Reed’s experts’ conclusions in its order. (Objections at pp. 39-40.)

    On the eve of the July 2021 evidentiary hearing, the State revealed, for the first time, that friends and co-workers of Ms. Stites told police — before Mr. Reed’s trial — that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other and were romantically involved. This testimony disproved the State’s theory at Mr. Reed’s trial that he and Ms. Stites were strangers, who would not have associated with each other, and therefore he had to have kidnapped and sexually assaulted her. Despite having these witness statements in its files, the State falsely told the jury investigators “talked to all these people” and looked high and low for evidence of a relationship and found no evidence. (See Mr. Reed’s Request for Grant of Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus at here.)

    The State also illegally suppressed statements from Ms. Stites’s neighbors about loud domestic violence arguments between Ms. Stites and Mr. Fennell. After Ms. Stites’s murder, her downstairs neighbor, William Sappington, reported violent domestic arguments between Ms. Stites and Mr. Fennell to a police officer and a District Attorney in neighboring Lee County, Ted Weems. Although then-District Attorney Weems was required to turn this information over to Mr. Reed’s attorneys, he — like other police and prosecutors — did not do so. (See Mr. Reed’s Request for Grant of Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus at here.)

    These two crystal clear Brady violations follow a pattern of earlier Brady violations that are still pending before the CCA and are detailed in Mr. Reed’s 2019 habeas petition.

    Pucher added, “For 23 years, prosecutors illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Mr. Reed. Under the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady vs. Maryland (1963), the State had an affirmative duty to turn over all evidence that was favorable to Mr. Reed’s defense. Instead, the State hid the evidence pointing to Mr. Reed’s innocence for more than two decades. Under the black letter law of Brady, Mr. Reed’s conviction and death sentence must be overturned.”

    The post Judge at Rodney Reed’s Innocence Hearing Abandoned his Duty as a Neutral, Thoughtful Fact Finder appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Exxon Is Using an Unusual Texas Law to Intimidate Critics of Its Climate Denial

    The oil firm, headquartered in Houston, Texas, claims its history of publicly denying the climate crisis is protected by the first amendment.

    ExxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.

    The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.

    The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.

    Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.

    Rule 202 in effect allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence. They are able to question individuals under oath and demand access to documents even before any legal action is filed against them.

    Exxon wants to use the provision to force the California officials to travel to Texas to be questioned by the firm’s lawyers about what the company describes as “lawfare” – the misuse of the legal system for political ends.

    Exxon claims in a petition to the Texas supreme court that it is entitled to question the officials in order to collect evidence of “potential violations of ExxonMobil’s rights in Texas to exercise its first amendment privileges” to say what it likes about climate science.

    “The potential defendants’ lawfare is aimed at chilling the speech of not just ExxonMobil, but of other prominent members of the Texas energy sector on issues of public debate, in this case, climate change,” the company claims in its petition.

    The oil giant’s critics say Exxon’s attempt to use claims of free speech to curtail the first amendment rights of others follows a pattern of harassment toward those who challenge the company’s claims about the climate crisis.

    Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, has described the company’s move as “intimidation” intended to make “it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon” whether or not the company wins its case.

    In a highly unusual move, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies”.

    “When out-of-state officials try to project their power across our border, as respondents have done by broadly targeting the speech of an industry crucial to Texas, they cannot use personal jurisdiction to scamper out of our courts and retreat across state lines,” Abbott wrote.

    In backing its claim, Exxon’s petition to the Texas supreme court gives the example of the Oakland city attorney, Barbara Parker, who in 2017 “issued a press release seeking to stifle the speech of the Texas energy sector or, as she likes to refer to it, ‘BIG OIL’”.

    The press release said: “It is past time to debate or question the reality of global warming … Just like BIG TOBACCO, BIG OIL knew the truth long ago and peddled misinformation to con their customers and the American public.”

    The company also names the then San Francisco city attorney, Dennis Herrera, because he accused fossil fuel companies of launching a “disinformation campaign to deny and discredit” the reality of global heating, and pledged to hold the companies responsible “to account”.

    Exxon has, in addition, targeted an environmental lawyer in Boston, Matthew Pawa, who represents some of the California municipalities. The firm describes him as “an outspoken advocate of misusing government power to limit free speech” and alleges that Pawa “recruited” the California cities and counties to sue Exxon.

    “Those lawsuits are an affront to the first amendment,” the company claims.

    Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor and co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, said Exxon had a long history of attempting to bully its critics into silence.

    “Now that the arguments have moved into the legal sphere, this feels to me like an extension of the sort of harassment, bullying and intimidation that we’ve seen in the scientific sphere for the last two decades,” she said.

    Oreskes said that the legal strategy is also part of a broader public relations campaign to paint the company as a victim of radical environmentalists and opportunistic politicians when Exxon argues that it should be heralded for its efforts to combat the climate crisis.

    “Exxon Mobil has for a long time now tried to make themselves out to be the victim, as if somehow they’re the innocent party here,” she said.

    The Texas supreme court is considering the case after a lower court backed Exxon’s attempts to use rule 202 against the California officials. The ruling was later overturned on appeal.

    The appeal court sympathised with Exxon by acknowledging “an impulse to safeguard an industry that is vital to Texas’s economic well-being” and saying that “lawfare is an ugly tool by which to seek the environmental policy changes” pursued by California municipalities. But the appeal court said the defendants did not have sufficient direct connection to Texas for the case to be heard in the state.

    Exxon has tried to head off climate litigation before with lawsuits claiming that the attorney generals of Massachusetts and New York were violating the company’s rights by investigating it. Those moves were blocked by the Massachusetts supreme court and by a federal court.

    If the Texas supreme court allows its rule 202 bid to proceed, Exxon might expect a more sympathetic hearing for its claims in a state court system that has shown deference to big oil.

    Exxon is facing a barrage of other lawsuits across the US. A number accuse the company and other fossil fuel firms of breaching consumer protection laws by propagating misinformation about climate science.

    Oreskes said Exxon went further than most other oil companies in seeking to hide the evidence of its own scientists collected about global heating and in running a disinformation campaign.

    “They’re pushing their freedom of speech as an issue because more than any other company, it’s been proven by people like me and others that they have a track record of promoting half truths, misrepresentations and in some cases outright lies in the public sphere,” she said.

    “This is so well documented that unless they can come up with some strategy to defend it, they’re in potentially pretty serious trouble.”

    • This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Suppression Efforts Escalate as Voting Rights Bill Fails in Senate

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference at Buc-ee's travel center on November 22, 2021.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not wait for fellow Republicans in the Senate to finish blockading federal voting rights legislation to start ramping up racist suppression efforts in his home state.

    In an unusual move on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, DeSantis proposed an alternative political map for Florida that experts said would dilute the power of Latino voters and effectively eliminate two majority-Black voting districts out of only four in the state. DeSantis then asked Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature for nearly $6 million to fund a new police agency to enforce election laws, including sweeping new voting restrictions he signed into law last year.

    DeSantis’s proposed poll patrols would ultimately answer to the governor, raising fears of voter intimidation in a state where Republicans gutted a constitutional amendment meant to restore voting rights for hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people. Ash-Lee Henderson, the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, the legendary incubator for the southern civil rights movement where King and Rosa Parks trained, said DeSantis’s call for an Office of Election Crimes and Security targeting voters “wasn’t even a dog whistle, it was overtly racist.”

    “I’m disgusted, because literally residents across the state — and Florida is a huge state — said that formerly incarcerated people deserve the right to vote, said they wanted drive-through voting and mail-in ballots, and his response is, ‘all this is voter fraud,’” Henderson said. “But there is no scientific evidence to show there is this intentional voter fraud happening.”

    DeSantis is hungry for right-wing media attention, and the proposals were a broad swipe at Democrats and civil rights groups, who spent the past year accusing Republican-controlled states of reviving Jim Crow with a wave of voter suppression laws. The laws passed in the wake of former President Trump’s mendacious attempts at overthrowing the 2020 election with false claims of voter fraud.

    DeSantis is signaling that the GOP will take up every inch of ground abandoned by Democrats in the fight over ballot access, which has once again ignited mass civil rights protests. While it’s unclear whether DeSantis will ultimately implement new election police in Florida, he knew the federal legislation that could block such a proposal was likely to fail on Wednesday. And it did.

    After an intense day of debate over race and democracy in the U.S., the Senate rejected by a razor-thin margin the Democratic push to pass their landmark voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote: John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was championed by Black leaders as an important step toward addressing racist suppression. The Senate’s 50 Republicans united against the bill, which they deride as a federal takeover of elections — a revival of segregationist arguments against the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to voting rights groups.

    Henderson and other observers say DeSantis’s timing is obvious as Republicans continue to push back on any progress made by Black people since the 2020 uprisings for racial justice. The governor rails against anti-racist education, and is pushing a bill designed to shield white people from feeling “discomfort” from discussion about the nation’s racist past at work and in public schools this week.

    “DeSantis is using his bully pulpit to wave a flag of white supremacy and fascism and anti-democracy in the face of what has been amazing multi-racial, Back-led movement for voting rights and racial justice,” Henderson said.

    Two Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who say they support the voting rights bill, sided with Republicans and refused to tweak filibuster rules so the bill could pass with a simple majority. Both senators refused to budge on the filibuster despite intense pressure from civil rights activists and warnings from colleagues and President Joe Biden that a “no” vote would land them on the wrong side of history.

    “When exceptions to the filibuster are made to raise the debt limit and to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, we refuse to believe that you can’t make the exception so that Black and Brown folks, folks with disabilities, folks with criminal records, and so many more of us can have our right to vote protected,” said Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Democrat from Missouri, in a statement after the vote.

    The Senate prepared to vote, election officials and disabilities advocates continued raising alarms about voter suppression in Texas, where voting rights groups and the Justice Department are challenging new statewide voting restrictions and alleged attempts at brazen racial gerrymandering that aggressively dilute Black and Brown voting power.

    Thousands of Texans are receiving letters from the state informing them that they are flagged as potential non-citizens and could be purged from voter rolls, forcing long-time U.S. citizens to hand over paperwork, according to the Associated Press. Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk of Travis Country, which includes Austin, said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications were rejected due to confusion over strict new ID requirements passed by the Republican lawmakers last year.

    “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like,” DeBeauvoir said in a press conference on Tuesday.

    While DeBeauvoir tussled with Republican state officials over who’s to blame for the confusion over the ID rules, voting rights groups warned a number of other changes to Texas law are designed to intimidate voters and purge them from the rolls. The Texas law, known as SB1, enhanced criminal penalties and paperwork for people who assist voters, creating hurdles for elderly and disabled voters and the people who care for them.

    “Different needs require different forms of assistance,” said Molly Broadway, a voting support specialist with Disability Rights Texas, told KXAN Austin. “They can misinterpret a proper form of assistance as illegal assistance.”

    About 200 new measures passed in at least 19 states last year that make it harder to vote, and more are expected to come now that the Senate failed to pass the voting rights legislation. Along with other measures, the voting rights bill would make Election Day a federal holiday, mandate two weeks of early voting and restore federal oversight of states that erected barriers for Black and Brown voters in the past.

    Henderson said the gears of voter suppression are now grinding beyond Texas and Florida, including in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Henderson, who is a leader of the Movement for Black Lives coalition, said it’s clear why voters are increasingly threatened with criminal penalties, polling police, empowered partisan poll watchers and immigration enforcement in the wake of intense protests against police violence. After all, Black and Brown are disproportionately criminalized and targeted by police.

    “It’s not hyperbolic to understand this as a racist intervention; the highest concentration of Black people in the country is in the South,” Henderson said. “The timing of it is very clearly and overtly a response to Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian-descended and white folks coming out to say we have a different vision, a vision for Build Back Better and defunding the police.”

    Republicans flatly reject that their “election integrity” efforts have a racial dimension and say Jim Crow ended years ago, but Henderson said the fight for voting rights did not end in the 1960s. Voters in majority-Black districts still wait in long lines all over the country. Attempts at racial gerrymandering in states such as Texas and Florida follow a long tradition splitting up Black, Brown and Indigenous voter strongholds to dilute their power.

    “It’s a tactical intervention in order to consolidate their wealth and power because they are losing it,” Henderson said.

    Democrats exploit their structural advantages as well, including through gerrymandering, allowing Republican to paint the voting rights legislation as a partisan power grab. However, Republicans have controlled a majority of state legislatures for the past decade, giving their party disproportionate control over political maps that shape elections. Before losing the Senate majority, the GOP stacked federal courts with conservatives as voting rights cases wound their way through the judiciary.

    In 2020, unprecedented voter turnout gave Democrats their own an advantage by handing the party control of Congress and the White House — and, activists say, a mandate to deliver on voting rights. Yet Manchin and Sinema ensured that the Democrats could not use this advantage, and the voting rights fight would continue as it has for decades.

    “We are not starting a conversation yesterday,” Henderson said. “We are talking about a centuries-old conversation in this country — if Black people are able to patriciate in this democracy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Under New TX Law, Number of Rejected Mail-In Ballot Applications Is Skyrocketing

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during the Houston Region Business Coalition's monthly meeting on October 27, 2021, in Houston, Texas.

    The number of rejected mail-in ballot applications is skyrocketing in Texas counties under new Republican-authored voting restrictions recently signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott.

    The Texas crackdown on mail-in voting appears to be hitting hardest in the state’s most densely populated counties, which also tend to have more voters of color and predominantly vote Democratic. In Travis County, which includes Austin, about half of all mail-in ballot applications have been rejected ahead of the state’s March primaries, up from a rate of about 11% in the 2020 election cycle, according to the county clerk’s office. About half of applications were rejected in Hidalgo County as well, according to elections administrator Yvonne Ramon.

    Dallas County has rejected 43% of the applications it received, according to elections administrator Frank Phillips. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, more than half of the applications received on Monday were rejected under the “ridiculous” new law, said county elections administrator Jacque Callanen. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said the county is rejecting applications at a rate 700% higher than previous cycles because of the new “voter suppression laws that create a maze of technicalities.” Harris County includes the city of Houston, and with 4.7 million residents has a higher population than 24 U.S. states.

    “Voters are being mistreated in this circumstance,” Travis County election clerk Dana DeBeauvoir told reporters on Tuesday. “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like.”

    Many of the applications have been rejected because of the new identification requirements under Texas’ new voting law, SB 1. Texas law already restricted mail-in voting by people under age 65 but the new law requires voters to include their driver’s license or state ID number in their application, or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Counties must match those numbers against the information in each individual’s voter file to approve their application.

    Counties have struggled to match ID information because they lack certain data, particularly because voters are not required to provide both their state ID and Social Security numbers when they register to vote. The Texas secretary of state’s office last year said more than 2 million of the state’s 17 million registered voters did not have one of the two ID numbers on file and more than 250,000 did not have either number on file. The numbers have declined since then, but more than 700,000 voters still do not have both numbers on file and more than 100,000 don’t have either, according to the secretary of state’s office.

    Nearly 500,000 Texas voters do not have a driver’s license on file, which is the first number voters have to provide on their applications.

    “The voter is playing a guessing game with this,” DeBeauvoir said at a press conference. “The voter is trying to remember the number they signed up with at the voter registration office 10, 20, 30 years ago. ‘What number did I use for the voter registration database? Was it my driver’s license number? Did I use my Social Security number?’ Do you remember what you signed up with? I didn’t. I had to go back and look it up. Voters are going to have to play the same guessing game.”

    DeBeauvoir said some voters’ applications were rejected because they used an older form that did not include the new voter ID requirement.

    “A lot of people are still trying to use the old form because we’ve had a paper shortage, and printing of these new forms means they’re scarce,” she explained. “They’re hard to come by. Nevertheless, you have to use the new form. If somebody sends in an old form, their ballot will be rejected.”

    Election officials have sought to help voters avoid mistakes that lead to rejections but the new law also bars election officials from sending unsolicited mail-in voting applications, which would include the updated form and instructions on how to properly fill it out.

    “So far, we have not received instructions from the secretary of state’s office to tell voters how to look up this information, and therein is the beginning of the problem for voters,” DeBeauvoir said.

    Republicans are pushing back on the concerns raised by election clerks. Republican Secretary of State John Scott said the rejection rate in Travis County was “surprising” and demanded a review of the applications.

    “We call on Travis County to immediately review and re-examine the mail ballot applications in question to determine whether they were processed in accordance with state law, with the goal of reinstating and minimizing any disruption to eligible voters who have properly submitted their application for ballot by mail. We anxiously await the results of their re-processing of these mail ballot applications,” he said in a statement.

    Voting rights advocates say the new law was largely aimed at restricting voting expansions in areas like Harris County, which sent mail-In ballot applications to every voter in 2020.

    “They sent vote-by-mail applications to every registered voter in the county, and it caused state leadership to go berserk,” James Slattery, the senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Texas Public Radio.

    Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator, filed a federal lawsuit last month challenging the law’s ban on sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications.

    “SB 1 makes it a crime for me to do a critical part of my job, and it hurts the most vulnerable voters,” Longoria said in a statement. “SB 1 subjects me to criminal prosecution for encouraging eligible voters to vote by mail so they may participate in our democracy — an option they have under Texas law.”

    While county officials are banned from sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications, candidates and political parties are not. The Texas Democratic Party said Monday it will send out hundreds of thousands of mail ballot applications to voters 65 and older.

    “We can’t rely on our Republican-run state government to do this for us,” Rose Clouston, the party’s voter protection director, said in a statement. “Texas Republicans have made it very clear that they only think Republicans should have the right to vote and it is therefore incumbent on us to help voters navigate the maze of voting laws Republicans have erected — too much is at stake if we don’t.”

    Texas is one of 19 states that passed new voting restrictions last year that Democrats worry will suppress voter turnout, particularly among voters of color, especially after the U.S. Senate failed multiple times to pass new voting rights legislation in the face of a Republican filibuster.

    Georgia, which also passed a sweeping new voting law last year, saw absentee ballot applications increase by 400% in November’s municipal elections, with more than half of those rejected because they were submitted past the deadline set under the new law.

    The laws were prompted by a campaign of false claims of voter fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump after his election defeat. Trump’s ire was particularly directed at cities with large Black populations like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. President Joe Biden last week highlighted the importance of protecting Black voters from “new laws designed to suppress your vote” as he called on the Senate to change filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation after Republicans repeatedly blocked debate on the bills. The renewed voting rights push died this week, at least for now, when Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., joined all 50 Republicans to block the filibuster changes.

    “Across the United States, dozens of voter suppression laws have been introduced in state legislatures, with 34 laws enacted in 19 states,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said in a statement. “These laws are clearly aimed at restricting access to the ballot box, disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, Latino and other communities that have borne the historical weight of voting restrictions. The failure of the U.S. Senate to restore the Voting Rights Act and protect our communities from these restrictions is a failure of our nation’s moral compass.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Appeals Court Remands Texas Abortion Case to State Supreme Court

    Women rights activists hold up signs as they gather at Freedom Plaza for a pre-march rally of the annual Women's March on October 2, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Texas’s restrictive abortion law, which prohibits the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy and allows individuals, rather than the state, to enforce the ban through lawsuits, will remain in place after a legal challenge to the law’s constitutionality was remanded to the state court system, likely delaying the appeals process by months.

    The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected a request from abortion providers in the state to return a case challenging the law to the original judge who had found it unconstitutional. Instead, the three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court is transferring the case to the Supreme Court of Texas, where the question over who can be sued will be scrutinized.

    The move ensures that the law will remain in force in Texas while being adjudicated in the state — rather than in the federal court system — for what could be a period of several more months.

    In a 2-1 ruling, the majority opinion of the Fifth Circuit Court panel said that the decision was “consistent” with the Supreme Court’s ruling last month. But the High Court had already determined that state officials — including those on the Texas Medical Board, the Texas Board of Nursing, the Texas Board of Pharmacy, and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission — could be sued over enforcement of the law.

    Last month, when the Fifth Circuit agreed to hear an appeal brought on by state officials who wanted the state Supreme Court to decide on the matter, critics lambasted the decision to go forward with the idea, noting that it would ultimately lead to a longer delay on the question of the law’s legality.

    In his dissenting opinion against the ruling on Monday, Judge Stephen Higginson agreed with those concerns.

    “This further, second-guessing redundancy, without time limit, deepens my concern that justice delayed is justice denied, here impeding relief ordered by the Supreme Court,” Higginson wrote.

    Observers who are following the case said that the way the case was being handled — first with the federal Supreme Court allowing it to remain enforced, even as it’s being further deliberated, and now with the Fifth Circuit’s decision this week — parallels how the law itself was designed to evade legal challenges.

    “The gyrations from courts to avoid issuing a stay rival the law itself for elaborate lawlessness,” wrote Harry Litman, a former U.S. Attorney.

    Others, such as Alice Miranda Ollstein, a health care reporter for Politico, noted that the decision by the appellate court seemed to be a deliberate attempt to keep the matter open, at least until the Supreme Court rules on other challenges to abortion access later this year.

    “The judge who wrote tonight’s ruling explicitly floated running out the clock during oral arguments, saying: ‘Maybe we should just sit on this until the end of June and leave the hot potato with the Supreme Court,’” Ollstein wrote.

    Marc Hearron, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, blasted the decision by the Fifth Circuit Court. The appeal of the law, Hearron said, is “being delayed and strung out while patients across Texas are denied their constitutional rights.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Abortion Providers Ask Supreme Court to Invalidate Circuit Court’s Delay

    Activists participate in a candlelight vigil on abortion rights in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on December 13, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Abortion providers seeking to challenge Texas’s restrictive abortion law have filed a brief to the Supreme Court, following a decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last week which would delay the litigation process.

    The Fifth Circuit is planning to hold additional hearings regarding who can be sued over the law’s enforcement later this week. In a brief filed to the Supreme Court on Monday, abortion providers alleged that this action is time-consuming and unnecessary.

    “Absent intervention by the Court, the Fifth Circuit is poised to entertain questions already decided by the Court in direct violation of this Court’s mandate and delay further resolution of this case in the district court by at least weeks, and potentially months or more,” wrote Marc Heron, a lawyer working on behalf of the abortion providers in the state.

    Abortion providers want the matter to be returned to a lower federal court instead, so it can remain in the federal judicial system. There, the case can be ruled upon more expeditiously, which is critical because Supreme Court justices have already ruled that the law will remain enforced while it is being challenged.

    The Supreme Court has already heard arguments about who abortion providers can sue regarding the law’s constitutionality. Last month, the court decided that state officials on a number of health boards in Texas can face lawsuits from providers in the federal court system.

    Last week, the Fifth Circuit ruled that it would hold a hearing on whether the matter can be returned to the state Supreme Court, where that judicial body would decide whether or not state officials can be sued. That hearing is scheduled for January 7.

    One judge on the circuit court panel dissented with his colleagues, stating that the federal Supreme Court “could not have been more explicit” in its ruling.

    “In its exact holding, the Court stated, ‘we hold that sovereign immunity does not bar the petitioners’ suit against these named defendants at the motion to dismiss stage,” Judge Stephen Higginson said, adding that the ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals would result in an “impermissible delay to the vindication of the constitutional rights of Texas women in federal court.”

    Abortion providers are urging the Supreme Court to act quickly, citing the “urgency of the situation” and noting that the delay allows the law to remain intact for longer.

    In tweets on Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agreed with providers’ assertions, claiming that the actions of Fifth Circuit Court ran counter to the Supreme Court’s previous order.

    “The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is defying the Supreme Court’s opinion by refusing to send our case back to the district court, delaying our challenge against Texas’ extreme ban,” the ACLU wrote. “The Supreme Court must put an end to the appeals court’s attempts to delay our fight. This delay is unconscionable, cruel, and downright dangerous.”

    Texas’s abortion law bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, a standard that is far below what the Supreme Court established in prior rulings. But even though the law clearly infringes upon the constitutionally protected right to access abortion services, it has evaded scrutiny from a number of courts — including the Supreme Court — because the law places the onus of enforcement on private citizens rather than the state.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Oklahoma Republican Wants to Deputize Private Citizens to Sue School Districts

    A hand pulls a book out from a library shelf

    The country by now is well acquainted with S.B. 8, the draconian new Texas anti-choice law that could massively undo abortion rights upon the ultimate whim of the Supreme Court. Beyond severely limiting the window of time available to have an abortion, S.B. 8 essentially deputizes average citizens to play the role of spy against their neighbors.

    “The new law in Texas effectively banning most abortions has ignited widespread controversy and debate,” reports The New York Times, “in part because of the mechanism it uses to enforce the restrictions: deputizing ordinary people to sue those involved in performing abortions and giving them a financial incentive to do so. The law establishes a kind of bounty system. If these vigilante plaintiffs are successful, the law allows them to collect cash judgments of $10,000 — and their legal fees — from those they sue.” (Emphasis added.)

    That $10,000 prize jumped up and poked me in the eye again recently, when I came across a report out of Oklahoma regarding the widespread, ongoing effort to ban or stifle certain books deemed “offensive” or “dangerous” to students. In Oklahoma, this effort has been aimed specifically at books that offer support or give advice to LGBTQ+ students.

    State Senate Bill 1142, authored by Republican State Sen. Rob Standridge, would place the power to ban books into the hands of parents in a profoundly unprecedented manner. “Under Senate Bill 1142, if just one parent objects to a book it must be removed within 30 days,” reports the McAlester News-Capital. “If it is not, the librarian must be fired and cannot work for any public school for two years.”

    There was also this tidbit buried in the same report: “Parents can also collect at least $10,000 per day from school districts if the book is not removed as requested.” (Emphasis added.)

    Call me paranoid, but some things are just too cute to be coincidence.

    It is no secret that conservative think tanks across the country have become highly adept at turning out drafts of right-wing legislation covering a variety of issues. Conservative legislators at both the state and federal levels use these drafts to craft heavy-handed legislation exactly like S.B. 8 in Texas and Senate Bill 1142 in Oklahoma. The Center for Public Integrity explains:

    A two-year investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity reveals for the first time the extent to which special interests have infiltrated state legislatures using model legislation. USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.

    The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search — powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months — compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers. The phenomenon of copycat legislation is far larger. In a separate analysis, the Center for Public Integrity identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.

    Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They’ve called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks. They’ve limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters. In all, these copycat bills amount to the nation’s largest, unreported special-interest campaign, driving agendas in every statehouse and touching nearly every area of public policy.

    It is likewise no secret that the Republican Party has undergone a fundamental change in strategy and tactics because of, and in the aftermath of Donald Trump. Gone are the days when they believed they could win elections on policy arguments. Many of the battlefields of the “culture wars” are lost to them as the country grows younger, and as generations devoted to equal rights and climate action move into positions of greater and greater influence.

    The new tactics, therefore, rely solely on muscle and money. Jam the legislatures with far right bills while packing the courts with far right judges and justices, gerrymander the voting districts and restrict voting rights wherever possible. When all else fails, swarm the Capitol building in a spasm of violence and try to overthrow fair and legal elections.

    “Conservatives see no reason to back off of this plan, no matter how much generational replacement occurs,” writes David Atkins for Washington Monthly. “They have no intention of moderating themselves or their ideas to meet new challenges — in part because it’s impossible to imagine a ‘conservative’ response to the climate crisis, housing costs, or radical inequality that does not decenter conservative white evangelicals who have no intention of giving up ill-gotten power. They only intend to rule — no matter what it takes, and no matter how many lines they cross.”

    Now, though, come these $10,000 prize payments meant to inspire citizens to put real muscle behind these terrible pieces of legislation. I’ve never seen it before, much less in two separate states on two separate issues; one could almost make a living off that kind of money if you went pro and did it full time. Abortion bounty hunters and school library plunderers making bank, because in Republican World, there is nothing that cannot be monetized.

    The fact that this money award idea has appeared simultaneously in two different states makes me believe there is a guiding think tank hand behind it. The bills themselves are silent on the subject, no press reports indicate outside help, and calls to the sponsors of S.B. 8 and Senate Bill 1142 were not returned. Unless the Supreme Court specifically chops the practice down, I believe we will be seeing more and more of this particular trick in legislation to come. There is always a new lane on the low road.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • With Another Birthday on Death Row, Rodney Reed Hangs on to Hope

    Rodney Reed has been on death row in Texas since 1998 for a crime he’s always said he didn’t commit. This year, he’ll be spending his birthday and holiday season in prison for the 24th year in a row. Though Mr. Reed will be apart from his family yet again, his thoughts are with the hundreds of thousands of people who have come to support his case in recent years.

    “I appreciate everyone, and I want everybody to stay safe,” said Mr. Reed, when asked what message he wants to share with his supporters. Mr. Reed was convicted of the 1996 murder of a white woman named Stacey Stites, with whom he had a consensual relationship, in Bastrop, Texas. He has always maintained his innocence.

    Growing up, Mr. Reed would spend his birthday and Christmas (just three days apart) with his five brothers, sharing all their toys and gifts with one another. He has fond memories of going from one family member’s house to the next and tasting home-cooked dishes — his favorites were his father’s giblet gravy and his aunt’s pecan pie.

    “As long as we were all together, the holidays were special,” said Mr. Reed. “It was always just special to be together with family and friends, just breaking bread together and enjoying each other’s time. Doing that even on any given day of the week — it didn’t have to be a holiday — was special.”

    Mr. Reed said the hardest part of spending the holidays wrongly imprisoned has been missing out on seeing his children grow up and creating memories with them like the ones he has from his own childhood.

    “As long as we were all together, the holidays were special.”

    “I know that them growing up without me in their lives has been rough on them, but when I see the strength that they have in life, it’s all good,” he said.

    Despite missing out on another series of celebrations with his family, Mr. Reed has hope.

    “When I see [the strength] in their eyes and the smiles on [my children’s] faces — I know it’s good. It kind of boosts me up,” he said.

    Just ahead of his birthday, on Dec. 17, Mr. Reed’s legal team filed a request for grant of application for Writ of Habeas Corpus, which states that the prosecution illegally hid favorable evidence at his 1998 trial and committed a Brady violation — a breach of the constitutional requirement that the prosecution turn over favorable evidence to the defense.

    The application states that the prosecution hid evidence of Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites’ consensual relationship before her death. At the time of Mr. Reed’s trial, prosecutors claimed that “not one” person could confirm their relationship; however, evidence that the State withheld for more than two decades shows that at least three of Ms. Stites’ co-workers gave statements to law enforcement and the prosecution that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other and were, in Ms. Stites’ own words, “good friends,” before his trial. Additionally, prosecutors hid reports from Ms. Stites’ neighbor about violent domestic arguments between Ms. Stites and her fiancé Jimmy Fennell, a police officer who was the prime suspect in her murder for nearly a year.

    Mr. Reed’s application is still pending, and his fate remains uncertain, but he said he continues to draw strength from the memories of his grandfather, who was a World War II veteran, and his grandmother, whom he described as “the backbone of the family” and his best friend throughout his childhood.

    As he continues his fight for justice, send him a birthday wish or holiday message and let him know he’s not alone.

    The post With Another Birthday on Death Row, Rodney Reed Hangs on to Hope appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Texas Abortion Law Opens Door for Vast Array of Bounty Hunter-Type Legislation

    A collage shows California Gov. Gavin Newsom and protesters against the Texas SB 8 abortion law

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom is going to war against gun manufacturers. Three months out from the recall campaign that he handily defeated, an emboldened Newsom is looking for creative ways to rein in an industry that dumps tens of millions of high-powered weapons onto the civilian population each year and then walks away from the body count left in its wake. Specifically, last week the governor asked state politicians to present him with legislation that he could sign deputizing private citizens to sue gun and ghost gun manufacturers (producers of untraceable guns that are built from kits rather than purchased fully assembled with serial numbers), as well as gun distributors, in the event their weapons are used in the commission of a crime.

    California already has some of the country’s toughest laws limiting the sale and ownership of war-grade weapons such as the AR-15 rifle, as well as recent legislation limiting the number of rounds of ammunition that a magazine can hold to 10 or below; but that legislation is extremely vulnerable to judicial opposition, especially given the conservative tilt of courts impacted by Trump appointees. This year, a lower court found that the state’s ban on assault weapons was unconstitutional, although the ruling was put on hold and was then subsequently blocked by Ninth Circuit judges. It is almost certainly a case that will wend its way up to the pro-Second Amendment U.S. Supreme Court, with its three Trump-nominated justices. The state also has tough background check laws for the purchase of weapons, although courts have ruled aspects of those laws, in particular background checks before people can purchase ammunition, to be unconstitutional as well.

    Now, in an explicit nod to the opportunities opened up by the Supreme Court’s hands-off approach to Texas’s Senate Bill 8 (S.B. 8) — encouraging private citizens from around the country to sue anyone who aids or abets a person more than six weeks into their pregnancy seeking an abortion — Governor Newsom is taking a similar provocative tack to confront weapons manufacturers. He has urged the Democratic supermajority in California’s legislature to pass legislation empowering private citizens to sue for at least $10,000 anyone “who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in the State of California.”

    S.B. 8, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law more than three months ago, is unprecedented. It seeks to do an end run around constitutional protections guaranteeing a pregnant person the right to an abortion until such time as the fetus becomes viable outside the womb — currently set by court decision at 23 weeks — and replacing that cutoff with a six-week time limit instead. So extreme is Texas’s legislation that it doesn’t even contain carve-outs to allow abortion in the case of rape or incest.

    The spine of this act is in clear contravention of judicial rulings over the past 50 years, at both the lower and higher court levels, and thus it ought to have been a no-brainer that the Supreme Court would strike it down. Yet, as a testament to just how far right and how overtly political that court has become, its justices have refused to do so. In delegating the enforcement strategy to private individuals rather than state officials, the legislators who drafted and passed the bill hoped to neutralize the judicial response. Their rationale was that if state officials aren’t involved in illegally policing abortion — even if their allowing bounty hunters to sue those who aid and abet people securing abortions to all intents and purposes makes them complicit in an unconstitutional action — they couldn’t be sued to stop implementation of the measure. Shockingly, a majority of justices seem to have bought into that nebulous line of reasoning.

    Over the coming months, even before the justices potentially use the Mississippi abortion case to gut Roe v. Wade, one GOP-controlled state after another is likely to model anti-abortion legislation after S.B. 8. We may, as a result, rapidly become a nation of legislatively approved bounty hunters — or, I should say, “become again” such a nation, since paid slave-catchers once roamed this land with similar financial incentives codified by state laws.

    But, of course, the buck won’t stop with abortion. It’s becoming stunningly clear that the court, in tying itself into legal pretzels in order to find any and every way to slash abortion rights, has actually greenlit a potentially limitless array of bad legal practices, and given a broad incentive to state legislators to pass bounty hunter-type legislation, modeled on S.B. 8, on any pet issue of the day. Gun rights advocates in Texas have seen the writing on the wall on this, joining with pro-choice advocates in opposing S.B. 8, not out of a love of abortion but out of a fear of spin-off legislation in blue states that will target the gun industry.

    Such legislation — intended to poke the bear, to be legislative attacks rather than scrupulously worded, constitutionally sound policy — will rapidly corrode the role of the courts and undermine whatever capacity they have left to mediate complex societal problems. Privatized enforcement of the law, with financial incentives for the enforcers will, like the privatized tax collection systems of pre-revolutionary France, ultimately corrode the legitimacy of the state itself. This path risks empowering vigilantes and infringing upon basic human rights.

    Governors and legislators know that, at the very least, deputizing private citizens to enforce laws on everything from gun control to pollution emissions will raise constitutional law scholars’ eyebrows. Yet, since Texas seems to have gotten away with it when it comes to abortion, why not push the envelope as far as possible on other issues, too? That’s certainly what a number of constitutional law scholars have been arguing in recent weeks, calling on progressive governors to model gun control and climate change policy on the Texas legislation. And that’s exactly what California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now urging legislators to do.

    There is a risk here of endless tit-for-tat legislation between blue and red states, with each go-around broadening the area of law open to bounty-hunter enforcement. That risk, identified by Chief Justice John Roberts in his opposition to the majority rulings on S.B. 8, serves the interests of no one concerned with constitutional integrity.

    In Texas, abortion remains theoretically legal; it’s just that the consequences for Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers (not to mention medics, social service workers, taxi drivers who drive people to abortion clinics, and anyone else involved in the process) are so potentially ruinous that they have chosen to stop providing abortions. So, too, in California if the law passes and if the Supreme Court doesn’t step in, in theory these weapons will still be legal, but anyone who manufactures, distributes or sells guns could face potentially devastating lawsuits.

    Of course, it’s entirely possible, even likely, that the Supreme Court’s super-conservative majority will do yet another pretzel twist and decide that while it can’t stop bounty hunters in the abortion arena, it can and will stop them if their interpretation of the Second Amendment comes under threat. And, as Roberts seems to realize, that would be the worst of all possible judicial worlds. For it would peel back the court’s veneer of legitimacy – its always laughable claim to impartiality — to show that at the end of the day, the conservative Supreme Court justices are far less concerned with consistency than with propping up, at all costs, political projects such as banning abortion and neutralizing any and every effort at gun control.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • For 23 Years, Prosecutors Illegally Hid Evidence That Could Have Exonerated Rodney Reed

    (Austin, Texas) Prosecutors at Rodney Reed’s 1998 trial illegally concealed statements from Stacy Stites’s co-workers showing that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other and were romantically involved, according to a Request for Grant of Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus filed at the 21st Judicial District Court in Bastrop County, Texas and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals early this morning. Mr. Reed’s Application also states that the State illegally suppressed statements from Ms. Stites’s neighbors about loud domestic violence arguments between Ms. Stites and her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a police officer who was the prime suspect in Ms. Stites’s murder for nearly a year.

    Mr. Reed’s Request for Grant of Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/49r7e7mx

    Under the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady vs. Maryland (1963), the State had an affirmative duty to turn over all evidence that was favorable to Mr. Reed’s defense. Instead, the State hid the evidence pointing to Mr. Reed’s innocence for more than two decades.

    “The prosecution’s concealment of statements from Stacey Stites’s co-workers and neighbors is a textbook example of a Brady violation. The constitutional violation is as crystal clear as the remedy: Rodney Reed’s conviction and death sentence must be overturned,” said Jane Pucher, Senior Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project, and one of Mr. Reed’s attorneys.

    “The constitutional violation is as crystal clear as the remedy: Rodney Reed’s conviction and death sentence must be overturned.”

    At trial, prosecutors repeatedly told Mr. Reed’s jury — falsely — that investigators “talked to all these people, and not one of them … ever said she was associated with that defendant. Ever. They weren’t dating according to anyone, there weren’t friends, they weren’t associates.”

    The Application states that the “withheld information is crucial because it demonstrates that the key factual theory of the State’s capital murder case against Mr. Reed – that he had to have kidnapped Ms. Stites because the two were strangers – was false.” (Application at p. 2.)

    Less than a month before Mr. Reed’s July, 2021 evidentiary hearing on a separate petition still pending before the CCA, the State “discovered” exculpatory evidence revealing that before trial at least three of Ms. Stites’s co-workers gave statements to law enforcement and the prosecution that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other and were, in Ms. Stites’s own words, “good friends.” (App. at pp. 1-2.) The Application states: “[H]ad the Court [of Criminal Appeals] not remanded Mr. Reed’s prior Brady, false testimony and actual innocence claims for a determination on the merits, this information would have remained hidden forever.” (App. at p. 3.)

    On June 25, 2021, the State disclosed for the first time to Mr. Reed’s lawyers that Suzan Hugen, a friend and co-worker of Ms. Stites, gave a statement to police that she saw Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites at the H.E.B. where the women worked and she introduced Mr. Reed to Ms. Hugen as a “good or close friend.” Ms. Hugen told police that Ms. Stites and Mr. Reed appeared “friendly, giggling, and flirting.” Ms. Hugen also told police that she believed that Mr. Fennell was physically abusive toward Ms. Stites. (App. at pp. 17-19.)

    Two other H.E.B. co-workers of Ms. Stites also told police that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other. These pre-trial interviews were not disclosed to Mr. Reed’s attorneys for 23 years,  until the eve of the July, 2021 evidentiary hearing. (App. at pp. 19-21.)

    In addition, after Ms. Stites’s murder, her downstairs neighbor, William Sappington, reported violent domestic arguments between Ms. Stites and Mr. Fennell to a police officer and a District Attorney in neighboring Lee County, Ted Weems. Although then-District Attorney Weems had an affirmative duty under Brady v. Maryland to turn this information over to Mr. Reed’s attorneys, he — like other police and prosecutors — did not do so. (App. at pp. 22-23.)

    The Application further states that the State sponsored false forensic testimony at Mr. Reed’s trial, which it used to argue that Mr. Reed’s defense, that he and Ms. Stites had consensual sex a few days prior to her death, was scientifically impossible. The State’s own experts conceded at the July, 2021 evidentiary hearing that the central points of the State’s forensic case were false. (App. at pp. 33, 54-55.)

    An all-white jury convicted Mr. Reed, a Black man, of the murder of Ms. Stites, a white woman. Mr. Fennell, Ms. Stites’s fiancé, was the prime suspect, but police turned their attention to Mr. Reed when DNA recovered from Ms. Stites matched Mr. Reed, with whom Ms. Stites was having a relationship. Mr. Reed was scheduled for execution on November 20, 2019, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his execution to allow the courts to consider new evidence of his innocence. At a two week evidentiary hearing in July, 2021, Mr. Reed demonstrated that he did not kidnap, sexually assault, or murder Ms. Stites and that no reasonable jury would now convict him.  While a decision on that hearing is still pending before the CCA, this new writ shows that Mr. Reed’s conviction violates the most central tenets of our Constitution and cannot stand.

    The post For 23 Years, Prosecutors Illegally Hid Evidence That Could Have Exonerated Rodney Reed appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Jiminy Hegemony

    As a native Texan, I used to be fairly oblivious to outside perceptions of my home state.

    I never watched a single episode of Dallas, for example; but when I visited Western Europe in the summer of 1984, I was surprised that practically everyone I met assumed I owned horses and oil wells. Then, the following summer, when some New York City girls saw me surfing in Hawaii, they were surprised to learn I hailed from the Lone Star State. They condescendingly remarked that they thought Texans were all farmers. Later, in college, one of my favorite professors (from the upper Midwest) found my Texas drawl so off-putting that I was mildly scolded. “You’re going to be famous someday,” the professor said. “You need to learn how to speak English.”

    When I backpacked through Europe in 1994 with shoulder-length dreadlocks and my Texas drawl still intact (if not even more pronounced), many Europeans thought my accent was Australian and assumed I was an Aussie. And every Aussie I met—themselves hailing from a “renegade” state—quickly recognized in me a kindred spirit.

    The years passed and I still remained relatively oblivious to outsider speculation. We’d had Ann Richards as governor and still had Molly Ivins. George W. Bush was a horrendous jagaloon, but voices with Molly’s mettle laid him bare for all to see. Sheesh, Texas had even been home to American Atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. And when I was young, Cowtown was a mecca for famous gay folks, including transplanted tennis legend Martina Navratilova, world-renowned pianist Van Cliburn and heirless, business magnate Sid Richardson (now all deceased), some of whose vast wealth fell to contemporary business legends, the Bass brothers. These three wildly visible, LGBTQ-before-LGBTQ-was-cool figures never came out, but plenty of people knew. It just wasn’t a big deal.

    Farther back, native Texan and thirty-fourth U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower had helped lead us to victory in WWII, but quite pointedly called out the American Military-Industrial complex in his farewell address. Native Texan and thirty-sixth U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson—the war in Vietnam notwithstanding—was the most progressive president in American history, responsible for an unprecedented amount of legislation designed to protect our air, water and wilderness, expand quality of life initiatives, improve education, create Headstart, fight poverty, establish racial equality and improve workplace safety.

    Unbelievable, now—right? But it’s true.

    In 1963, LBJ signed the Clean Air Act, the Higher Education Facilities Act, and the Vocational Education Act. In 1964, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, the Urban Mass Transportation Act, the Wilderness Act, the Nurse Training Act, the Food Stamp Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Housing Act. In 1965, LBJ signed the Higher Education Act, the Older Americans Act (the first federal initiative created to provide comprehensive services for older adults), the Social Security Act of 1965 (which established Medicare), the Voting Rights Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Services Act. In 1966, LBJ signed the Animal Welfare Act and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In 1967, LBJ signed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Public Broadcasting Act (creating NPR). In 1968, LBJ signed the Bilingual Education Act (the first U.S. federal legislation addressing the needs of limited English-speaking ability students), a second Civil Rights Act and the Gun Control Act (banning mail order sales of rifles and shotguns and prohibiting most felons, drug users and people found mentally incompetent from buying guns).

    Let me restate: the most powerful, effective progressive in American history was a Texan.

    And now his home state is one of the most backwards places on the planet.

    It’s depressing.

    Ann and Molly are gone and many of our neighbors mumble “abomination” under their breaths when they see homosexuals. Texas has as many God-botherers as anywhere else in the country, and the Lone Star State attracts military-industrial profiteers like bees to honey. And my old Aussie mates live in a country where gun laws have evolved, not devolved.

    For my part—like most Texans—I still don’t have any horses or oil wells, or do much farming. I still, however, talk like a Texan and probably exhibit at least the half-swagger of someone oafishly belligerent—like many of my fellow Texans. I came closer to being infamous than famous and, now aged, more resemble a character on Duck Dynasty than a surfer or a world traveler. I still live in Texas, but I hardly recognize my state. I still consider myself a Texan, but I am appalled by so many Texans who don’t know or simply ignore their own history.

    In Lone Star vernacular, the porch light’s on, but no one’s home. And half the folks I meet are several bricks shy of a load.

    Lately, we look like superficial, xenophobic morons who never produced an LBJ or Eisenhower, much less an Ann or Molly. Nobody with any real standards wants us in their bedrooms, bathrooms or classrooms. Our men are all hat and we treat our women like chattel. We’re a pathetic caricature of independence and bravery and all the lies the Alamo was always based on. And we’re like an uber-obtuse exercise in word association.

    If someone says “good,” we say “bad.” If someone says “scientist,” we say “liar.” If someone says “evil,” we say “necessary.” If someone says “black,” we say “blue.” If someone says “white,” we say “right.” If someone says “oil,” we shout “Hallelujah, pass the global warming!” And if someone says “woman” (or, Heaven forbid,  “a woman’s sovereignty of her own body”), we respond with a sneering, faux-righteous “not on my watch.”

    Beloved Lone Star hero Willie Nelson used to say, “I’m from Texas, and one of the reasons I like Texas is because there’s no one in control.” But now Willie’s simply mistaken.

    Red state, white, male hegemony is where we’re at . . . and we seem to like it that way.

    Today we ban honest books and refuse to punish (much less censure) dishonest, corrupt politicians. Today, Texans no longer lead—Texas is a breeding ground for fear and ignorance and moral cowards. And today, though we didn’t succeed at all as our own country or separate republic, we ludicrously threaten to secede more than we say the Pledge of Allegiance.

    Hell, this past year Texas conservatives did their batshit, crazy best to gerrymander the state back to the middle-19th century, hoping to make us look like the Great White Hope for America in the 21st century. But to the rest of the world—and anyone paying attention in this country—we look more like a stunted confederacy of vaccs hoaxers, Roe-revokers, Jim Crow stokers, and reinstate-Scopes-Monkey-decision coaxers. We’re not a Great White Hope.

    We’re an ignorant gaggle of grating, white supremist, misogynist dolts.

    The post Jiminy Hegemony first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Books That Inspired the Innocence Project in 2021

    The past two years have been filled with ups and downs, but these must-reads reminded our staff why we’re in this fight and inspired them to keep pressing forward in challenging times.

    Our staff named these their most powerful books of 2021. The list includes books by scholars, lawyers, exonerees, and children of incarcerated parents. The writing included touches on everything from the history of the flawed death penalty system to the 1971 Attica Prison uprising to an allegorical sci-fi story about a post-prison abolition world. 

    If you’re looking to take your understanding of justice and equity to the next level, you’ll want to read these and even consider them as holiday gifts.

    New Releases

    1. Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty by Maurice Chammah

    Texas has shown a dogged commitment to carrying out executions, most of which unfairly target Black men, people with intellectual disabilities, and those in poverty, for more than 100 years. Prior to 2003, when Texas executed Larry Allen Hayes, the state had not executed a white man convicted of murdering since 1854, when a white man was executed for killing another white man’s favorite slave. Maurice Chammah’s book investigates the use of the death penalty in the state, which is responsible for about one-third of all executions in the U.S.

    “It’s about the history of the death penalty in Texas and shares the stories of many individuals who have been part of this history, for better and for worse,” said Emma Bratman, Innocence Project’s post-conviction litigation paralegal. “It’s my favorite book that I have read.” Available to purchase here.

    2. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones

    If you have not caught up with the New York Times’ 1619 Project, first published online and in the New York Times Magazine in 2019 you can now read the expanded version of the Pulitzer Winning-project in book form. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work is foundational in understanding the societal, cultural, and economic impact that slavery had and continues to have in the United States, including its impact on mass incarceration. Available for purchase here.

    3. Redeeming Justice by Jarrett Adams

    Exoneree and former Innocence Project Post-conviction Legal Fellow Jarrett Adams reflects on his journey from wrongly convicted teenager to jailhouse attorney to exoneree in this moving memoir. 

    While in prison, Adams devoured every legal book he could get his hands on, hoping to chart a pathway to freedom. In the process, he became the go-to legal scholar in the prison and assisted others with their cases. Today, Adams is an attorney who represents wrongfully convicted people and the founder of Life After Justice, an organization that supports exonerees through the challenges of re-entry.

    “This right here is a blockbuster,” said Christina Swarns, Innocence Project’s executive director, of the memoir. Available to purchase here.

     

    4. Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice by Yusef Salaam 

    Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, arriving to court. (Image: New York Daily News Archive)

    Innocence Project board member and member of the Exonerated Five, Yusef Salaam is a prolific writer, but this is his first memoir reflecting directly on what he experienced as a teenager wrongly convicted in the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger case. 

    “His inspiring story is motivational and highlights the need for criminal justice reform in America,” said Nigel Quiroz, Innocence Project’s community organizer.   

    While the case has been written about extensively, is the subject of a documentary, and was most recently dramatized by Ava Duvernay in the series When They See Us, in this poignant memoir we hear straight from Dr. Salaam. He brilliantly illustrates what it was like to be an innocent Black child, ferociously attacked in the court of public opinion in what amounted to one of America’s most polarizing media and political assaults. Available to purchase, here.

    5. Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America by Keisha Blain 

    Keisha Blain thoughtfully positions Fannie Lou Hammer’s impact as a civil rights advocate alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks. Hammer, co-founder of the Mississippi Democratic Party and the National Women’s Political Caucus, led efforts to register thousands of disenfranchised Black voters and organized movements to advance women’s rights. Facing immeasurable challenges as an impoverished and disabled Black woman from Mississippi, Hammer was nonetheless willing to make sacrifices to win equality for others, which is why Innocence Project executive director Christina Swarns keenly recommends the book. Available to purchase here.

    6. Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford  

    Stories about incarceration are often centered on the person in prison and the victim of the crime, leaving aside the deeply damaging impact of incarceration on families and communities. In her memoir, Ashley Ford reflects on her father’s incarceration and complicated relationship with her mother.

    “This memoir of the author’s childhood and growing up with an incarcerated father explores the consequences of the criminal legal system from the perspective of family,” said Tara Thompson, Innocence Project’s senior staff attorney. “If you want to know why the old adage that ‘when someone does time, their family does the time with them’ is true, read this book.’” Available to purchase here.

    7. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

    If you have ever wondered what the economic cost of racism is and how it touches all of us, Heather McGhee writes a brilliant analysis that examines history, politics, and economics to answer this question. Her writing takes a deep look at just how much racism has set us back as a society and assesses its consequences on each and every one of us. Available to purchase here.

    Must-Reads

    8. I Am Troy Davis by Jen Marlowe, Martina Correia-Davis, and Troy Davis 

    Troy Anthony Davis entering Chatham County Superior Court on Aug. 22, 1991, during his trial. (Image: AP Photo/Savannah Morning News)

    It’s been a decade since Troy Davis was executed in Georgia for a crime he always maintained he did not commit. Davis’ case galvanized support from around the world and inspired thousands of advocates to join the anti-death penalty movement. The book provides an intimate view into the loving person Davis was and the racially charged world around him that led to his wrongful execution. Available to purchase here.

    9. Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S. Klinger

    To prepare for her externship at the Innocence Project, Natalie Tamblyn found this collection of stories of wrongful conviction helpful. “I feel it really highlights how important it is for law enforcement to do their homework in investigating crimes but also how important the work we do at the Innocence Project is,” Tamblyn said.

    The riveting anthology includes the stories of 14 exonerees as told to mystery and thriller writers, including Lee Child, Sara Paretsky, and Laurie R. King. Available to purchase here.

    10. A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays by Marc Bookman

    Marc Bookman has dedicated his career to fighting the death penalty as the executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and a former public defender in Philadelphia. In this collection of essays, Bookman makes compelling arguments to end the death penalty based on the many ways it has shown itself to be flawed, innacurate, racist, and ineffective.

    “He weaves an unflinching portrait of twelve cases that illustrate in painful detail why the death penalty remains one of the greatest stains on the moral fabric of our society,” Innocence Project board member and ambassador Tony Goldwyn said. “These essays will make your blood run cold.” Available to purchase here

    11. Pet by Akwaeke Emezi 

    In Akwaeke Emezi’s whimsical novel, Black transgender teen Jam, is on the hunt for a child abuser in her fictional town of Lucille — inspired by the depiction of similar settings in Toni Morrison’s novels. Jam joins forces with a creature who comes alive from her mother’s painting in her quest to uncover the truth.

    “This book is actually about prison and police abolition and what justice could look like in a post-abolition world,” said Laurie Gottesman, Innocence Project staff attorney. “I can’t stop recommending this book to adults even though it’s a young adult book. Available to purchase here.

    12. The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

    Richard Rothstein, a leading voice in housing policy, ”describes how our government deliberately segregated America,” according to Rebecca Brown, Innocence Project’s director of policy. His book examines how practices intentionally administered through the laws and policy decisions made by our local, state, and federal government continue to harm us today and prevent racial equity, even though redlining policies have been banned. Available to purchase here.

    “Blood in the Water”

    13. Blood in the Water about the Attica Uprising of 1971 by Heather Ann Thompson 

    Fifty years ago, over 1,300 people incarcerated in New York’s Attica Correctional Facility organized an uprising to protest years of gross mistreatment within the institution. Imprisoned people held guards hostage while they negotiated for more humane living conditions over the course of four days. On the fourth day, the state sent armed troops to overthrow the revolt, killing 39 people and injuring hundreds. In the end, only those incarcerated were prosecuted, and the state failed to support the families of those they had killed.

    In her book, Heather Ann Thompson amplifies the voices of the people impacted by the atrocity and their fight for justice. “It’s riveting and so well researched,” Ed Boland, Innocence Project’s director of development, said of the Pulitzer Prize winning book. Available to purchase here.

    14. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas

    Fred Hampton.

    In November, Innocence Project clients Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam were exonerated from the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Their exoneration was based on evidence that supported their innocence and pointed to other suspects, which the NYPD and FBI hid at the time of their trial. Files unearthed in the investigation into their cases showed that law enforcement had information that could have prevented their wrongful conviction and years of incarceration. 

    Seeing justice delayed for Aziz and Islam, Natalie Baker, an Innocence Project fellow, was reminded of the government’s killing of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. His murder, orchestrated by the FBI and Chicago police who perceived the Black liberation group as a threat to national security, was depicted in the 2021 Netflix’s film Judas and the Black Messiah. “[It’s] a timely reminder of who actually murdered another revolutionary Black leader and organizer — a powerful must-read,” Baker said. Available to purchase here.

    15. Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea Ritchie

    Andrea Ritchie’s book examines the racial profiling of and police brutality against Black, Indigenous, and brown women in America, an often overlooked demographic. She focuses on the experience of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, and Mya Hall, who were all killed by police, and Dajerria Becton and Monica Jones who survived violent and unwarranted altercations with police. Ritchie centers women and trans women’s voices in the larger conversation of mass incarceration and police brutality, ensuring that they are not forgotten.  

    “This is a critical book in 2021,” said Denise Tomasini-Joshi, Innocence Project’s chief of staff. Available to purchase here.

    The post Books That Inspired the Innocence Project in 2021 appeared first on Innocence Project.

    This post was originally published on Innocence Project.

  • Supreme Court Says Abortion Providers Can Challenge Texas’s Restrictive Law

    A pro-choice demonstrator is seen outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on November 1, 2021.

    The United States Supreme Court has announced that it will vacate lower court rulings and allow abortion providers to sue the state of Texas over a highly restrictive abortion bill that bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.

    Although that process will be allowed to move forward, the Court said it won’t stop enforcement of the law in the meantime. The decision not to halt the law means that the restrictions will remain in place unless a lower court issues a ruling that would place a stay on the law sometime in the future.

    The Friday morning decision, issued with eight justices in agreement, took note of a 1908 Supreme Court precedent that says petitioners can challenge state laws by suing state officials. Justice Clarence Thomas was the only dissenter.

    Texas lawmakers sought to avoid challenges to the abortion law by placing the onus of enforcement on private individuals, allowing them to sue abortion providers or anyone who helps someone get an abortion in the state for sums of up to $10,000. The law bans abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy and makes no exceptions for rape or incest, making it the most restrictive anti-abortion measure in the U.S.

    Although most of the justices agreed that abortion providers should be able to sue the state over the law, some dissented with allowing the law to remain in place, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

    In her dissent, Sotomayor referenced the Court’s failure to block enforcement of the law back in September.

    “The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago, before [Texas’s law] first went into effect,” Sotomayor wrote. “It failed to do so then, and it fails again today.”

    By refusing to place a stay on the law, “the Court effectively invites other States” to use Texas’s restrictive law as a “model for nullifying federal rights,” Sotomayor said, adding that “the Court thus betrays not only the citizens of Texas, but also our constitutional system of government.”

    The Court’s opinion on the Texas law comes shortly after it heard arguments on a Mississippi abortion law, which restricts abortion access after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In that case, the Court is considering overturning the abortion rights protections established in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Observers of the case’s proceedings have suggested that the conservative bloc justices, who currently comprise a majority of the High Court’s bench, are prepared to undo those precedents.

    The Court’s ruling on the Texas law comes just a day after a separate ruling by a Texas judge, who found that the law was not compliant with the state constitution. In an opinion issued on Thursday, Texas District Court Judge David Peeples wrote that the statute was an “unlawful delegation of enforcement power to a private person.”

    Peeples also noted that the law’s unique and strategic framework could be used to curtail a number of other constitutionally protected rights, including marriage rights, gun ownership and freedom of speech.

    “We are a diverse and creative people and it seems naïve to hope that these procedures will be cabined voluntarily,” Peeples said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Justice Department Sues Texas Over Racist Congressional Maps

    Attorney General Merrick B. Garland speaks at a press conference at the Department of Justice on December 06, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it is suing Texas over Republicans’ newly-drawn congressional maps, which marginalize Latinx people and other nonwhite communities while giving disproportionate influence to white voters.

    In its lawsuit, the Justice Department says that the Texas legislature “refused to recognize the State’s growing [non-white] electorate” in their new congressional maps, which they drew in an “extraordinarily rapid and opaque legislative process.” The maps, which were signed into law in October, were rammed through the legislature by the state’s Republican majority.

    “This is not the first time Texas has acted to minimize the voting rights of its minority citizens. Decade after decade, Texas has enacted redistricting plans that violate the Voting Rights Act,” the Justice Department wrote. “In enacting its 2021 Congressional and House plans, the State has again diluted the voting strength of minority Texans and continued its refusal to comply with the Voting Rights Act.”

    This is the second time that the Department of Justice has sued Texas over voter suppression in a little over a month. In November, the agency charged that the state Republicans’ marquee voter suppression bill, S.B. 1, limited the voting rights of people with disabilities and elderly people. The bill outlawed drive-through and 24-hour voting, measures that had greatly expanded voting access for marginalized groups.

    The Department of Justice joins voting rights groups that have also sued the state over its new district map. These groups similarly argue that the map violates the Voting Rights Act by diminishing people of color’s voting power in the state.

    The new map creates two additional heavily Republican-leaning congressional districts, meaning that — if the map is upheld by courts — there will be 24 heavily-Republican districts, one competitive district and only 13 Democratic districts in the state.

    Though non-Latinx white people make up only about 41 percent of the state’s population, they are a majority in 60 percent of congressional districts in the new map. Meanwhile, Latinx people are a majority in only 18 percent of districts, despite making up 40 percent of the population. Under the new map, Black, Asian, and other populations don’t represent a majority in any district.

    These maps have also marginalized the state’s new residents, 95 percent of whom are people of color. Although the state will be gaining two seats in the House due to recent population growth, Republicans are giving white voters a majority over both new districts in Houston and Austin — a move that the Department of Justice has rebuked in its lawsuit.

    Republicans “surgically excised minority communities from the core of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) by attaching them to heavily Anglo rural counties, some more than a hundred miles away, placing them in a congressional district where they would lack equal electoral opportunity,” the agency wrote.

    The party has marginalized these voters despite the fact that many of the people that politicians would consider Latinx voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (Notably, many of the so-called Latinx people in Texas label themselves as Tejanos.) But despite wins in South Texas, Trump still lost the Latinx vote in the state overall, according to exit polls.

    Regardless of political affiliations, however, it seems Republicans are set on taking extreme measures to suppress nonwhite voters, even when those measures are based on bunk conspiracy theories. For instance, S.B. 1 creates a monthly review for voter rolls to ensure that undocumented immigrants aren’t registered to vote. This rule was made after Trump lied by saying that undocumented people were voting en masse.

    The last time Texas did a sweep of its voter rolls was in 2019, when Secretary of State David Whitley ordered a review of nearly 100,000 voters to check for noncitizens. After voting rights groups sued the state, alleging that the review violated voting rights protections, the state gave up its search.

    Whitley instructed officials not to take action on the list of people that his office had categorized as “possible non-U.S. citizens.” It’s unclear what methodology Whitley’s office used to create that list, but voting rights advocates noted that the very concept behind the project was discriminatory.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Indigenous Leaders Pledge To Oppose New Enbridge Developments

    On November 5, the Canadian oil company Enbridge announced that it plans to increase capacity on its pipeline system that connects a crude-oil storage hub in Oklahoma to the Texas Gulf Coast, now that the Line 3 pipeline linking Alberta and Wisconsin is complete. The Carrizo Comecrudo and other Indigenous groups in the area, along with the Indigenous Environmental Network, have pledged to protect Indigenous sacred sites and oppose future pipeline developments. 

    Increasing capacity may include building a new pipeline linking the Houston area to the Port of Corpus Christi, more than 200 miles away. In October, Enbridge acquired the Ingleside Energy Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, the largest crude-exporting hub in the U.S. 

    The post Indigenous Leaders Pledge To Oppose New Enbridge Developments appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Texas Town Stopped an Energy Giant from Drilling Next to a Day Care. But It’s Trying to Start Up Again.

    A drilling rig in Arlington Texas

    When the City Council of a Dallas suburb last year rejected TotalEnergies’ bid to drill behind a day care, the story made national news as a sign that the racial reckoning underway had helped a Texas town do what it had almost never done: Say no to drilling.

    Wanda Vincent, the owner of Mother’s Heart Learning Center, had campaigned in front of the Arlington City Council, pleading for politicians to protect the children – most of them Black – in her care from the toxic gases the wells leak. She thought she’d won.

    So she was stunned to learn a few months ago that TotalEnergies had again proposed to drill behind her day care, which serves some 60 young children. City rules let companies reapply after a year – and TotalEnergies was going for it. Vincent ramped up her activism again, gathering signatures from parents and staff and speaking out at a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting last month. Then she watched as the commissioners voted unanimously in favor of TotalEnergies’ plan to drill next to her day care. 

    She has one more chance to stop the drilling, when the final vote goes before the City Council today. If TotalEnergies gets its wishes, it will add three wells to the two that are about 600 feet from the playground at Vincent’s day care.

    She believes the increased passions for racial justice that helped propel the council to reject drilling in 2020 have ebbed. Although the City Council members have not declared how they will vote, she’s worried. “They’ll see things differently, seemingly for a moment,” Vincent said. “But it just didn’t seem to last.”

    When world leaders met for a climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, earlier this month, they committed to slashing methane emissions and weaning off fossil fuels more quickly to slow catastrophic climate change. But Arlington’s experience shows how difficult it can be to stop the production of a potent greenhouse gas – even when it’s happening right next to small children and putting their health at risk.  

    Arlington is one of the few places in the United States where lots of drilling takes place in an urban area, close to schools, homes and offices. TotalEnergies, which is headquartered in France and is one of the world’s richest energy companies, does most of it. Regardless of where the drill sites are, the oil and gas operations leak methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the air. 

    And while methane gets less attention than carbon dioxide, it has recently become a prime target for fighting climate change, because in addition to being nearly 90 times more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide, methane lasts about a decade in the atmosphere, compared to hundreds of years for carbon dioxide. That means cleaning up methane now will have a much quicker impact on slowing down the warming of the planet.

    However, in a place like Arlington, the threat is twofold: In addition to warming the planet, methane and other gases, like toxic benzene, that leak from wells can cause severe health consequences for people nearby. The federal Environmental Protection Agency this month proposed tightening rules to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas operations like TotalEnergies’ existing wells behind Vincent’s day care and any new ones.

    In June, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that more than 30,000 Arlington children go to public school within half a mile of wells, and up to 7,600 infants and young children attend private day cares within that radius. Eighty-five percent of the public school students are children of color. Altogether, more than half of Arlington’s public schools and day care facilities are within a half-mile of active gas production.

    In Arlington, officials say they are limited in their authority to stop drilling because of a state law that restricts cities from regulating drilling. The city also has financial incentives to keep the drilling going. 

    While it’s no secret that the city earns money from gas royalties, the actual amount from each well or each company has never been disclosed publicly. Records obtained by Reveal through a public records request show for the first time the actual figures: Over a four-year period, Arlington received about $5 million in royalties from TEP Barnett, a subsidiary of TotalEnergies. Nearly half of those royalties, $2.2 million, came from the five drill sites that are within several hundred feet of day care facilities. Additionally, the city also has received nearly $3 million in bonus revenue for those five TotalEnergies drill sites.

    Three years ago, the City Council rejected TotalEnergies’ bid to drill just 324 feet from another day care and then reversed itself three months later, after the company asked for some its bonus money to be returned, according to an email obtained by Reveal. 

    In February 2018, the City Council in Arlington, Texas, rejected TotalEnergies’ bid to drill a few hundred feet from Cornerstone Academy. But it reversed itself three months later. Credit: Livable Arlington

    It’s normal for companies to pay royalties to the entities that own the gas or oil they’re producing. However, the city’s report on TotalEnergies’ proposal to drill behind Mother’s Heart said it would have no financial impact. Richard Gertson, assistant director of planning and development services, said that language is included by default and has no significance. 

    Vincent was unaware of royalties and bonuses the city receives, but she and other drilling opponents believe that money has driven leaders’ decisions to allow so much drilling so close to day cares, schools and homes.

    “They took advantage of the community because it is a minority community, with Brown and Black people for the most part,” said Vincent, who is Black. 

    In recent years, scores of scientific studies have linked proximity to drilling to increased health risks, including childhood asthma, childhood leukemia and birth defects. The exposures can come from the fumes of diesel trucks, generators or drilling rigs. They can also come from chemicals used in fracking, as companies extract oil and gas from shale by injecting mixtures of water, sand and chemicals. The exposures can be most intense during the months it takes to drill and fracture wells, but they can continue over the estimated 25-year lifespan of the wells, as gases leak from wells, tanks, pipes and valves.

    Children and developing fetuses are especially vulnerable to toxic air pollution, fine particles and other emissions from oil and gas extraction, according to public health experts. Tarrant County, where Arlington is located, has suffered high rates of childhood asthma, birth defects and other potential effects of drilling, but no government agency has ordered the kind of thorough public health assessment to determine whether there’s a connection.

    TotalEnergies declined to be interviewed but in a statement said it safely operates 163 wells in 32 locations in Arlington, including its well site near Mother’s Heart.

    Kevin Strawser, senior manager for government and public affairs, did not directly answer a question about why TotalEnergies is again trying to drill despite the 2020 vote rejecting the drilling there and petitions by hundreds of parents, teachers and other Arlington residents. “We listen to and do understand the concerns of the local communities with whom we interact frequently to ensure we operate in harmony with them and the local authorities,” he wrote in an email.

    When the city does talk about its revenues from gas, it talks about all the benefits it brings. Arlington put the first $100 million in royalties and bonuses into its Tomorrow Foundation, which awards several million dollars a year to a variety of programs, including some that provide medical care to infants or install energy-saving streetlights. The royalty revenues the city receives from TotalEnergies, about a million dollars per year, represent a small fraction of the city’s nearly $565 million annual budget.

    Dr. Ignacio Nuñez, a former City Council member and current member of the zoning commission, voted in TotalEnergies’ favor both when the City Council rejected drilling near Mother’s Heart last year and when the commission approved the company’s proposal last month. 

    Nuñez, a retired obstetrician, says drilling doesn’t belong so close to so many people. But he said he repeatedly approves drilling proposals because he fears the city would be sued. Nuñez and other city officials say their hands are tied by a state law prohibiting fracking bans, one of a wave of state preemption laws limiting local government control over things such as minimum wage, LGBT rights, providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants and mask mandates. 

    TotalEnergies did not sue after the City Council denied its 2020 request to drill behind Mother’s Heart. 

    Vincent suggested that if TotalEnergies did sue, the city could use some of its millions from the company to defend itself, and the children, in court. “They‘ve taken all of this money and now they’re acting like their hands are tied. Their hands are not tied,” she said.

    During the zoning commission meeting, Strawser said TotalEnergies would take many steps to minimize toxic gas leaking from its equipment at its well sites, including the one near Mother’s Heart.

    Arlington required the company to use electric rigs when it began drilling seven wells near two day cares last year. Ten days after TotalEnergies started drilling, local anti-drilling activists saw black smoke billowing from the equipment and alerted the city inspector. After being caught, Total told the city it had been using a diesel rig because an electric rig wasn’t available yet. 

    “So why didn’t you just wait until December to start?” a city official asked, according to an email chain released to Reveal in response to its public records request. 

    “I sincerely apologize for catching you and your team off guard. This was not intentional on our end. It was honestly an oversight. We have worked extremely hard to ensure compliance and safety on all aspects of our activities as we prepare for the large operations ahead,” responded TotalEnergies’ Julie Jones.

    Diesel exhaust causes serious health conditions, including asthma, and is especially harmful to children. 

    As the next vote on drilling near Mother’s Heart approaches, drilling opponents fear their big victory in 2020 could be reversed. They watched something similar happen in 2018. After voting in February that year to reject drilling within a few hundred feet of another day care, Cornerstone Academy, the council in May reversed itself. Between those two votes, TotalEnergies wrote the city citing the $800,000 that the company stood to lose and asking for relief from its bonus payment to the city. 

    The city rejected TotalEnergies’ request for a break on its bonus payment, according to Susan Schrock, a city spokesperson.

    Vincent and other drilling opponents believe the money clearly influences the city’s decisions. 

    “It seems like Cornerstone is extremely lucrative for the city,” said Ranjana Bhandari, executive director of Liveable Arlington, who fought to block drilling at that site. “This was not revealed to us in 2018 when the city reversed its vote, and it would have been good to know. I think transparency in government is extremely important. I think it’s important for public officials to let the community know what’s what.”

    This story was edited by Andy Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

    Elizabeth Shogren can be reached at eshogren@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @ShogrenE.

    A Texas Town Stopped an Energy Giant from Drilling Next to a Day Care. But It’s Trying to Start Up Again. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Matthew McConaughey Says He Won’t Run for Governor of Texas Next Year

    Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey announced on Sunday that there is one role he isn’t interested in taking on just yet: that of Texas governor.

    Although McConaughey had been mulling over the idea of running for the state’s top political post, he said in an Instagram video on Sunday that he would not be running for governor in 2022.

    “As a simple kid born in the little town of Uvalde, Texas, it never occurred to me that I would one day be considered for political leadership,” McConaughey said. “It’s a humbling and inspiring path to ponder. It is also a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.”

    McConaughey had decent polling results against the two main candidates in the gubernatorial race, Democrat and former congressman Beto O’Rourke and incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. But it was unclear whether the actor, who doesn’t have any political experience, could hold his own in a long campaign against the two.

    It was also difficult to pin down where McConaughey stood on many issues. While he expressed support for vaccinations to protect against COVID-19, he also announced that he was reluctant to have his own kids get the shots, even though evidence demonstrates the smaller dosage vaccines for children are safe.

    McConaughey’s announcement means that O’Rourke and Abbott are the two main contenders in the race. O’Rourke, a former congressional representative from El Paso who announced his gubernatorial candidacy earlier this month, is hoping to become the first Democrat to win the governorship since 1995.

    But O’Rourke faces his own challenges. Although he is now seen as the sole anti-Abbott candidate, a recent poll found that only 35 percent of Texas residents view him in a favorable light.

    Abbott is also seeing his popularity in the state wane, likely due to a number of authoritarian moves by him and legislative Republicans. This year, Abbott has signed voter suppression laws, anti-trans legislation and a bill that effectively banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The governor has also been condemned for his weak response to the coronavirus pandemic and his lackluster leadership during an energy crisis in February, when Texas’s energy grid stopped working during an unusual winter storm.

    In spite of Abbott’s tanking approval numbers, he still leads O’Rourke in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up. In a Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll published last week, voters were asked who they preferred to win the governor’s race in 2022. O’Rourke received 39 percent support, while Abbott received 45 percent.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ed Dept. Opens Inquiry on District That Wanted “Opposing” Lessons on Holocaust

    A Black student raises their hand as white teacher speaks, out of focus

    The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has opened an investigation into a Texas school district where an administrator pushed teachers to present “opposing” perspectives of the Holocaust.

    On Wednesday, the OCR acknowledged that an inquiry had been opened in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas. The district faces three separate allegations of discrimination based on race and gender filed by students, and claims to be “fully cooperating” with the agency’s work.

    The details of the three instances the agency is looking into have not been revealed. However, Carroll Independent Schools has made national headlines several times this year over a number of disturbing choices by administrators — including telling teachers during a staff training that they should offer “opposing…perspectives” to the Holocaust, and removing anti-racist books from libraries after parents complained the books went against their “morals and faith.”

    Several parents within the district — which is majority white but which has become more diverse in recent years — have lauded the decision to open an investigation, noting a number of troubling actions taken by students and teachers alike.

    Three years ago, the district had promised to address racism after a video of white students chanting the n-word went viral. After that video was posted, former students came forward noting a number of cases of harassment toward nonwhite and LGBTQ students in the recent past.

    The school district’s promises to address racism went unfulfilled after conservative parents packed school board meetings to block the district’s Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) in 2020. A number of those parents had complained that giving diversity training to teachers and students amounted to “reverse racism.”

    Parents in favor of the OCR’s decision to investigate also noted specific instances involving their own children facing bigotry from other students and teachers. One Muslim parent told local media that their child was forced to sit through a classroom lesson on 9/11 five years ago that “insinuated that all Muslims are terrorists.” After the lesson was over, the child’s peers asked whether she was a terrorist and whether she was going to kill them, the parent added.

    But much of the community remains starkly opposed to any action seeking to address bigotry in the district, including this latest intervention by the Department of Education. Southlake Mayor John Huffman lashed out at the OCR investigation, claiming — without evidence — that the inquiry was a response from the federal government over the schools dropping curricula on Critical Race Theory (CRT) from its planned lessons.

    “I don’t think I am alone in wondering if this investigation is retaliation for our voters rejecting the pro-CRT CCAP plan, especially since the threat to involve the federal government was made by some CCAP supporters to the media,” Huffman alleged.

    The district had never intended to teach lessons on Critical Race Theory, a subgenre of legal studies, normally reserved for college or university-level coursework, that examines the effects of race and gender structures in society and in the law. Conservatives across the U.S. have sought to turn Critical Race Theory into a new “boogeyman” for parents to fear, in order to block any lessons that critically examine the country’s history of racism, colonialism and white supremacy.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Gulf Coast Tribe Vows to Resist Enbridge’s New Pipeline Expansion Plans

    As Indigenous Water Protectors and allies in northern Minnesota are stuck with legal and environmental fallout of Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline’s construction and operation, Enbridge is already moving on — eyeing ways to streamline and further expand its ability to deliver Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast for export to global markets.

    The Canadian oil giant is looking to increase capacity across its fossil fuel infrastructure systems that connect to the Texas Gulf Coast, including potentially building a pipeline linking the Houston area to its newly acquired crude-export hub at the Port of Corpus Christi in order to accommodate Line 3’s ramped up capacity, according to reporting by S&P Global Platts.

    The company is also looking at ways to expand its capacity across its Southern Access Extension and Flanagan South pipelines, corporate officials reportedly said on its third-quarter earnings call. It’s just waiting on a major Canadian regulatory decision later this month that will determine whether Enbridge can overhaul the way it awards space on its biggest tar sands pipeline network into the U.S., allowing it to contract up to 90 percent of its capacity on its Mainline system by signing long-term deals with potential shippers, rather than operating as a so-called “common carrier.” Corporate officials say they will provide more details on future projects at a December investors event.

    Last month saw the startup of Enbridge’s Line 3 expansion, which is now bringing 760,000 barrels of tar sands bitumen a day from Edmonton, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin. It also saw its Wisconsin-to-Illinois Southern Access pipeline expansion come online, increasing its capacity to 1.2 million barrels of crude per day. On top of that, the oil giant closed in mid-October its $3 billion acquisition of the Moda Ingleside Energy Center, the U.S.’s largest crude-export hub near Corpus Christi, which also delivers fracked gas from the Permian and Eagle Ford basins to global markets.

    “Returning the line to full capacity sets us up for downstream expansion to the US Gulf Coast,” Enbridge CEO Al Monaco told Platts, referring to the Line 3 and Southern Access expansions, which, he says, promote “full path access for Canadian [tar sands] to the US Gulf Coast.” Like TC Energy’s hopes with the now nixed Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge wants to light its own fuse to what climate scientists have described as the world’s largest climate emissions bomb in Alberta’s tar sands, even as oil prices finally slipped to their lowest level in six weeks Wednesday amid signs of impending oversupply after rising to their highest levels in seven years last month.

    Enbridge’s Gulf Coast expansion plans promise to lock in increased planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions over the long term, not only from Alberta’s tar sands climate bomb, but also from another major emissions bomb in West Texas and southeast New Mexico’s sprawling Permian Shale Basin. Enbridge’s plans worsen the findings of a new analysis showing fracked gas extraction in the Permian is expected to increase 50 percent over the next decade.

    The plans also come at a time when many climate justice activists are reeling from a watered-down agreement at the United Nations’ COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, that they say is too weak to meaningfully reduce emissions and limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius — the target scientists say we must stay under to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis.

    To make matters even worse, the plans come as the Biden administration held the largest federal offshore drilling auction of Gulf waters in U.S. history Wednesday. ExxonMobil and Chevron were among the top buyers at yesterday’s federal auction of oil leases in the Gulf, which generated more than $190 million — the highest since 2019.

    “You have to wonder if Big Oil enablers like Enbridge are following world climate news at all. Experts are telling us to move as quickly away from fossil fuels as possible, including fossil fuel infrastructure,” Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, told Truthout. “No new pipelines and export terminals in the Gulf region is the way to go, especially for a climate criminal like Enbridge. The new Line 3 pipeline is already the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired power plants. This new line in Texas is not something we need in the time of the ‘Code Red’ climate crisis, especially after an ultimately dismal climate conference in Glasgow.”

    Now, Texas Gulf Coast Indigenous communities are vowing resistance to Enbridge’s Gulf expansion plans in solidarity with the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Water Protector LaDuke and other Anishinaabe peoples’ continued resistance to Enbridge and Line 3.

    “A lot of the organizations that I work with down here in Corpus Christi Bay that are dealing with the Enbridge expansion and the Cheniere [Energy liquified natural gas export terminal] expansion and the whole fossil fuel industry here, … we’re ready,” said Love Sanchez, co-founder of Indigenous Peoples of the Coastal Bend (IPCB) who is descended from the Karankawa Kadla Tribe of the Texas Gulf Coast. “We’re just kind of on standby to see what’s next and planning behind the scenes, and seeing how we could prevent the expansion from happening.”

    Love tells Truthout Gulf South communities aren’t afraid, even though they know opposing Enbridge’s expansion will be a challenge. “I was upset [about Enbridge’s expansion plans] because it’s like: They really are in a position of confidence that they’re just like, ‘We’re going to keep going.’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, we’re going to keep going too.’ We’re not going to bow down. We’re not going to back out of what we’re doing.”

    IPCB, the Karankawa Kadla Tribe and the Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association filed a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August for issuing a permit for the then-Moda Midstream-owned Ingleside terminal — the same crude-export terminal Enbridge purchased in mid-October and wants to link with its Seaway Pipeline — to double its capacity and expand operations into an undeveloped area sacred to the area’s Native people.

    The suit argues the plans to construct an additional deep-water dock and turning basin failed to address environmental and community concerns as required under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act, and that the expansion will destroy a Karankawa cultural site and ecologically sensitive seagrasses and wetlands. Enbridge says it plans to delay construction until August 2022.

    The Karankawa peoples’ ancestors have lived in the area of the McGloin’s Bluff site, where the proposed terminal expansion is slated to be built, for hundreds of years. In fact, archeologists uncovered more than 39,000 artifacts, including pottery shards, arrowheads, tools, and fish and animal bones, from a historic Karankawa village during an investigation of McGloin’s Bluff in 2008-2009, and recommended that the site be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

    One archaeologist who worked on the assessment of the site has said that because the area was so heavily occupied by the Karankawa people, there’s a chance the site still contains Indigenous burials. In 2002, the skull of a prehistoric or early historic Indigenous woman was found by a pipeline construction crew at Ingleside on the Bay, according to a 2006 report obtained by The Texas Tribune.

    The plaintiff groups are also concerned about damage to seagrass beds, which not only reduce coastal erosion but also provide important habitat and nurseries for marine species including waterfowl, sea trout, red fish, and juvenile shrimp and crabs.

    The Army Corps wrote in a response to public comments that because the Karankawa Kadla are not a federally recognized tribe, “They have no special consultation rights and are considered members of the public.” In permit documents, the Corps said the project’s required archaeological surveys and environmental mitigation had been done.

    Enbridge Spokesperson Michael Barnes said the expansion won’t impact the historic Karankawa village site at McGloin’s Bluff: It’s new megaship dock will require dredging of up to eight acres of seagrasses located within an active ship channel, he says. As the Army Corp permit documents specify, the company promises to plant new seagrass beds at a separate site to compensate for those it will destroy, while also setting aside 70 acres of land (excluding McGloin’s Bluff) as permanent green space. “We are confident the nearly year-and-a-half application review process was comprehensive, and that the permit was properly issued,” Barnes told Truthout.

    IPCB Co-founder Sanchez says Enbridge’s promised mitigation and compensation measures aren’t enough, and that its permit was rubber-stamped, like most fossil fuel infrastructure projects in the U.S. “They say they’re not dredging over sacred lands, but they are,” Sanchez tells Truthout. “They have to dredge into the bay to, of course, get the pier out there…. They have to make some room for it. Then they’re going to dredge onto the land, of course, because they’re going to be constructing. So when they say they’re not, they’re lying. So how do we prove that? That’s why we’re in court.”

    In the meantime, Sanchez tells Truthout she’s concerned about the plaintiff groups’ ability to monitor the difficult-to-see areas above the bluff site in case construction activity does start before August 2022: Texas passed a bill outlawing small drone flights over “critical” oil and gas infrastructure, including export terminals.

    She called Enbridge’s broader plans to expand its capacity and infrastructure connections in order to bring Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast “a whole new mess.” In addition to its new Ingleside export terminal, the company has been steadily securing a number of infrastructure projects on the Texas Gulf Coast, including the Rio Bravo and Valley Crossing Pipelines in South Texas. The company co-owns the Seaway Pipeline with Enterprise Products Partners and is likewise partnering with Enterprise to build the Sea Port Oil Terminal offshore of the Houston Ship Channel.

    On top of all the expansions in the Gulf, Enbridge could potentially ramp up its Line 3 capacity even beyond what it has been previously permitted for, and has also been in talks with shippers about reversing the flow of its Line 13 pipeline, which transports diluent from the Chicago area to Alberta’s tar sands region, in an effort to boost crude export capacity. Enbridge is targeting a 2023 startup date for the Line 13 project, which is part of its larger Mainline system optimization.

    Climate activists who have long been engaged in the fight against Line 3 say Enbridge’s creation of an abundant supply of Canadian tar sands through its new infrastructure acquisitions and expansions artificially inflate demand while promising a disastrous climate future in the long term.

    “The expansions you’re seeing right now are not an add-on to Line 3. Those are part of the integral reason for building Line 3 for Enbridge,” said Andy Pearson, Midwest tar sands coordinator for the Minnesota branch of 350.org, in an interview.

    The Minnesota Department of Commerce challenged Enbridge’s long-term oil demand forecast, which the state’s Public Utilities Commission ultimately accepted when it approved the Line 3 pipeline. In the forecast, the company assumes constant demand for tar sands by refineries.

    To justify Line 3’s expansion and replacement in northern Minnesota without having major U.S. or Midwestern market demand for its product, Pearson says, the company needs to be able to move its extracted product to global markets, so its Gulf Coast expansion plans are simply “a natural outcome of Line 3 getting completed.”

    “The expansion of export capacity in the Gulf is, I would say, them fulfilling the other half of that forecast,” Pearson tells Truthout. “What they had submitted was like a piece of paper with the infinity symbol drawn on it, saying, ‘We don’t really need to tell you anything about demand because we’ll just export it, and we could export the whole of Canada’s tar sands if we need to and that would be fine.’”

    Moreover, he says, the Biden administration’s near-exclusive focus on demand-side fossil fuel economics fails to tackle one of the most critical parts of the global climate equation by preventing infrastructure buildouts that promise to lock in the continued extraction and use of one of the most greenhouse gas and water-intensive fossil fuels on the planet.

    Between ballooning Permian extraction, oil and gas leasing, and infrastructure buildouts in and along the Gulf, the Biden administration is overseeing one of the largest oil booms across the Gulf South — a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by its most-impacted communities.

    “I’m not going to be like, ‘Yeah, I believe in the Biden administration’ because he was the vice president when the oil export ban was lifted at the end of ’15,” IPCB Co-founder Sanchez says. “So that’s very disheartening to know that he was a part of that. And to be asking him to roll that back and then to see him not do that, and to see [fracking projects expand under his administration].… It’s just sad to see these Indigenous communities, people-of-color communities experience the brunt of that because he’s not listening.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Beto O’Rourke Officially Announces Run to Unseat Gov. Greg Abbott

    Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke speaks during the Georgetown to Austin March for Democracy rally on July 31, 2021, in Austin, Texas.

    Democrat Beto O’Rourke has officially launched his campaign for governor of Texas, challenging Gov. Greg Abbott in a time when the extremist governor has been leading a right-wing charge to slash rights and suppress marginalized groups in the state.

    O’Rourke is a leading Democratic candidate in the race for the state that is undergoing quick population growth, with many of the new residents being nonwhite. He served as a representative for El Paso in Congress for six years and in 2018 lost his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, an election that nonetheless launched O’Rourke into national prominence.

    If he were elected, he would be the first Democrat to hold the governor’s office since 1995, nearly 30 years ago. This would break a nineteen-year streak of Republicans controlling the state legislature and governorship, and potentially usher in the long-vaunted blue state status for Texas.

    O’Rourke criticized Abbott in a video announcing his campaign on Monday, saying that Texans were “abandoned by those who were elected to serve and look out for them” during winter storm Uri earlier this year and other crises. He highlighted priorities like expanding Medicaid and marijuana legalization, and panned Abbott for “extremist” policies that he’s put in place.

    The challenge comes as Abbott’s approval ratings have plummeted to record lows amidst an especially difficult year for Texas. The right-wing firebrand oversaw a devastating energy crisis in February, pushing climate denial in the press despite the fact that it was the climate crisis that largely caused the winter storm to begin with.

    Later in the year, the governor led the charge in implementing some of the harshest voter suppression laws in the country as a backlash to Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election — laws that voting rights advocates say would disproportionately affect poor and nonwhite communities. He pushed hard for anti-trans legislation, culminating in a bill he signed late last month that bars transgender students from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity and potentially endanger trans students’ lives with ensuing mental health impacts.

    Perhaps most infamously, Abbott signed the nation’s most restrictive abortion ban into law that went into effect in September, banning most abortions in the state and effectively overturning rights afforded by Roe v. Wade. It allows vigilantes to sue anyone who has assisted a person in obtaining an abortion, placing a huge chilling effect on abortion providers. Backlash to this law has been fierce, and Abbott’s supposed reasons for supporting the law have been flimsy at best, and actively harmful at worst.

    O’Rourke, though not an extremist far-right figure, has baggage of his own, however — moreso than when he ran for senator in 2018, as the Texas Tribune points out. Only about 35 percent of respondents in a recent survey said that they view O’Rourke favorably, while half of respondents said that they had an unfavorable opinion of him.

    That poll, from October, showed O’Rourke trailing Abbott in a hypothetical matchup by 9 points. A more recent poll showed more optimistic results for the Democrat, showing O’Rourke only behind by 1 percentage point, which is considered a tie because it’s within the poll’s margin of error.

    O’Rourke’s record as a public figure is checkered at best. As Susie Aquilina wrote for Truthout in 2019, among El Paso activists, “he is best remembered for his support to transform downtown by driving out low-income residents and demolishing immigrant neighborhoods.” As a city councillor, O’Rourke allied with wealthy developers in gentrifying Mexican neighborhoods in the city.

    The Democratic establishment favorite has also been criticized for standing for very little during his 2020 presidential campaign outside of platitudes and flowery rhetoric. He offered few concrete policy ideas to back up his speeches, often delivered from atop a table or a counter. Democrats say this time around, O’Rourke should focus his campaign on positioning himself against Abbott.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Loopholes in Clean Air Act Are Letting a Texas Refinery Get Away With Pollution

    A Texas plant emits as much lung-damaging sulfur dioxide as it did before the Clean Air Act was passed 51 years ago.

    Billionaire William Koch’s industrial plant in Port Arthur, Texas, is small compared to the three sprawling oil refineries that surround it — just 112 acres compared with the 10,000 acres occupied by Motiva, Valero and Total.

    But Koch’s Oxbow facility towers over its neighbors in one respect.

    It produces 10 times as much lung-damaging sulfur dioxide, SO2, as the three refineries combined. And it does so legally because of a quirk in the 1970 Clean Air Act, which allowed older facilities to delay complying with the law until they expanded or modernized.

    As the refineries upgraded over the years, they installed sulfur scrubbers — large tanks that vacuum up most of the SO2. Their emissions dropped by 90 percent or more.

    But the 86-year-old Oxbow plant, which manufactures something called calcined coke, hasn’t made any “major modifications” that would require it to fully comply with the federal act. Texas could set its own, tighter standards and require the plant to install scrubbers. But it hasn’t done that.

    Today Oxbow releases as much SO2 — 22 million pounds a year — into Jefferson County as it did before the Clean Air Act was passed 51 years ago. That’s more than 80 percent of all the industrial SO2 emitted in a county that has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of petrochemical plants.

    From the sky, the largely open-air facility looks like a black pockmark on the landscape, a jumble of rusting silos, boilers, pipes, kilns and towers cobbled together over time as intricately as a Jenga puzzle.

    William Koch owns two other U.S. plants that make calcined coke – one in Enid, Oklahoma, and one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Both benefit from the Clean Air Act loophole. Like his plant in Port Arthur, neither has been fitted with scrubbers.

    Koch is the youngest of four brothers. Two of them took over their late father’s company, Koch Industries Inc., and became famous for supporting conservative political causes. William, now 81, built his own business empire. Forbes puts his net worth at $2.1 billion.

    Koch is renowned for his sailing exploits and for his art and wine collections. He’s also known for blocking construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod, which would have impaired the view from one of his mansions. He spent millions of dollars opposing the clean-energy project, asking, “Why would you want to sail in a forest of windmills?”

    Koch and Oxbow declined, through a representative, to comment for this story.

    “You’re Just on Edge”

    People who live near Koch’s Port Arthur plant look out on a vista of chemical plants and refineries, not the ocean.

    Those most affected by Oxbow’s emissions live on the city’s west side, where Black residents were segregated in the early 20th century and built a thriving community. The narrow streets today are dotted with boarded-up homes and empty lots. A hazy, brown plume frequently trails over the neighborhood, bringing with it a foul smell.

    Of the 2,600 people who live within three miles of the Oxbow plant, 98 percent are people of color and 62 percent have incomes of $53,000 or less for a family of four, according to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project.

    West-siders who live closest to Oxbow suffer disproportionately from respiratory illness. They report a 13.7 percent asthma rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The overall rate for Port Arthur is 10.5 percent. The national average is 8 percent.

    Children, older adults and those with asthma are more likely to be hospitalized if they breathe large amounts of SO2. Long-term exposure can make people more susceptible to respiratory infections and damage their lungs. Children are at special risk.

    When seemingly minor irritations, such as coughing, become chronic, the inflammation makes the immune system work overtime, said Dr. Albert Rizzo, chief medical officer for the American Lung Association.

    “Ultimately it kind of decreases the defenses against viral or bacterial infections as well, so that can lead to more recurrent infections,” he said.

    Etta Hebert, 63, who lives about two miles north of Oxbow, frequently suffers shortness of breath. Her husband and 2-year-old great-granddaughter also have trouble breathing. In May, she posted disturbing family photos on Facebook.

    “All three of us were taking our breathing treatments at the same time,” she said. Her great-granddaughter “was on a breathing machine. I was on a breathing machine. My husband was on a breathing machine.

    “This should not be a thing a family does.” ​

    Proving Oxbow is the primary culprit in the illnesses that plague the west side isn’t easy because it’s almost impossible to link one person’s health problem to a specific smokestack. Port Arthur’s petrochemical plants spew many pollutants into the air, including benzene and 1,3-butadiene, which are both proven to cause cancer in humans. Although SO2 hasn’t been definitively linked to cancer, the World Health Organization classifies outdoor air pollution in general as a carcinogen.

    In addition to coping with breathing problems, Hebert is surrounded by cancer. She lost her brother, her best friend, her mother and her first husband to the disease. She’s on her second bout of cancer and her daughter is in remission. Her current husband, who seemed to have overcome cancer, has been admitted to hospice care. At night she stays awake, waiting for the reassuring sound of him snoring.

    “If I don’t hear him snore, I can’t sleep,” she said. “I have to just sit there and watch, you know?

    “It feels overwhelming, so you block a lot of things. You’re not thinking. You’re just on edge.”

    A Multibillion-Dollar Global Market

    The Oxbow plant uses petroleum coke, or petcoke — a waste product from oil refineries — to produce calcined coke, a carbon substance used to make aluminum and other products. Raw petcoke is also used by China, India and other rapidly industrializing countries to run power plants, even though it’s a dirtier fuel than even coal.

    Despite environmental and health concerns, petcoke’s multibillion-dollar global market continues to grow, because ever-more oil is being refined, creating ever-more petcoke as residue.

    Koch’s company, West Palm Beach, Florida-based Oxbow Carbon LLC, is a leader in the growing petcoke market.

    Ships carry raw coke from oil refineries around the world to the Oxbow facility on the banks of Taylor Bayou in Port Arthur. The powdery black coke is transferred into kilns a few feet away, where it is calcined – or baked at super-high temperatures – to remove impurities.

    When the plant began operating in 1935, it was the first calcining plant in the United States to use rotary kilns. The long, cylindrical kilns revolve like cement mixers as they dry-heat the raw coke at 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. The rattle of the churning petcoke can be heard across the facility.

    To maintain this extreme heat, the plant burns some of its petcoke, whose combustion creates SO2. The heat and SO2 are expelled through smokestacks. The stacks also release particulate matter, which can irritate the lungs, cause shortness of breath, worsen conditions such as asthma and lead to heart disease. Long-term exposure to these fine particles has been linked to as many as 52,100 deaths in the U.S. each year.

    State, EPA Renew Permits Despite Complaints

    Residents have been trying — and failing — for years to get Oxbow’s SO2 emissions reduced. Their best opportunity comes every five years when Oxbow must renew its federal air permit. First, the state’s environmental watchdog, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) vets the application. Then the U.S Environmental Protection Agency gives final approval.

    When the permit came up for renewal in 2019, about 40 people showed up at a TCEQ public hearing.

    Michael Holtham, Oxbow’s plant manager at the time, defended the company at the meeting.

    “We’re proud of our operations in Port Arthur, and the positive economic impact that we have in our community,” Holtham said. “As you know, our operations are highly regulated, and we work hard to maintain compliance with our environmental permits and other applicable requirements.”

    But west side residents wanted to know why the billionaire-owned company won’t install scrubbers for the sake of the community. Several shared stories of relatives and friends who suffer from respiratory problems.

    “Yes, we need jobs, but to what expense?” asked Hilton Kelley, a west-side resident who leads a local organization, Community In-Power and Development Association Inc. “We don’t need jobs so bad to where we’re willing to give up the lives of our children and our grandchildren, our mothers and fathers, and our grandparents and ourselves.”

    It would cost Oxbow an estimated $56 million to install scrubbers and $10 million a year to operate them, according to information the company provided in a 2018 lawsuit involving a former business partner. According to Forbes, Oxbow’s annual revenue is about $2 billion.

    The company’s executive vice president, Roy Schorsch, was asked in court why Oxbow hadn’t made that investment. Doing so, he replied, “has no payback potential except environmental compliance.
    “It just will not economically pencil out,” he said later in his testimony.

    In September 2020, the TCEQ and the EPA renewed Oxbow’s permit until 2025.

    In response to the public’s objections, the TCEQ said it acted “in accordance with the applicable law, policy, procedures and the Agency’s mission to protect the state’s public health and natural resources consistent with sustainable economic development.”

    Four nonprofit groups, including the Environmental Integrity Project and Lone Star Legal Aid, filed a petition with the EPA protesting the decision. They’re still waiting for a response more than a year later, even though the agency was legally obligated to respond within 60 days.

    When asked about the petition, the EPA told Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop that it’s “currently in the process of responding to multiple petitions in Texas. One or more of the petitioners in the Oxbow Calcining title V petition are parties to the petitions we are currently in the process of addressing.”

    Texas Fails to Close Out-Dated Loophole

    The loophole that allows some industrial relics like Oxbow to avoid adopting modern pollution controls seemed logical when the Clean Air Act was enacted a half-century ago. ​​​​Congress didn’t want older plants to be crippled by the potentially devastating cost of immediately upgrading their pollution controls. They’d be allowed to comply gradually, as they expanded or modernized.

    “The theory was that no [industrial pollution] source can just keep operating forever without modifying or upgrading, because it’ll come to the end of its useful life,” said Victor Flatt, a University of Houston law professor and an expert on the Clean Air Act.

    Over the years, however, the EPA narrowed its definition of “major modification.” Ever-more and bigger modifications were treated as minor repairs and maintenance, Flatt said.

    “EPA, unfortunately, created an incentive to try to get the camel through the eye of the needle and get as big and many upgrades as possible without triggering a new-source performance review.”

    Oxbow’s plant in Oklahoma, for example, was “modernized and automated” in the 1990s, according to the company’s website. But apparently none of the upgrades was big enough to require scrubbers.

    Oklahoma, like Texas, could create regulations that would override the loophole because states have the authority to exceed federal air standards. California, for instance, created additional SO2 regulations specifically for calcining plants.

    Texas already has many regulatory tools that could force Oxbow to install scrubbers, said Neil Carman, a former air pollution investigator for the state who is now clean air program director for the Sierra Club’s Texas chapter. But enforcing them to that extent would probably trigger a lawsuit from Oxbow, Carman said, something the TCEQ would prefer to avoid.

    “The TCEQ has a history statewide of bending over backward for these older plants, letting them pollute the communities and not taking enforcement action,” Carman said.

    John Beard, who spent 38 years as a processing technician at ExxonMobil, has watched that pattern play out for decades.

    Beard grew up on Port Arthur’s west side and served nine years on the city council. After he retired in 2017, he founded the Port Arthur Community Action Network, or PACAN. His goal isn’t to shut down Oxbow or any of the other industrial facilities that fuel the local economy – he says he just wants them to reduce their pollution wherever they can, within reason.

    “It’s not necessary for them to pollute to the extent that they do,” he said. “It’s a matter of choice, of dollars and cents. It makes sense to me that they invest their dollars in their facilities to make sure they minimize pollution impacts on the communities that surround them.”

    TCEQ spokesman Gary Rasp wrote in an email that the agency “performs investigations of regulated industrial facilities, regardless of the age of the facility, and enforces against facilities that are not in compliance with applicable rules and regulations.”

    Asked why the agency hadn’t taken action that would require the plant to install scrubbers, Rasp wrote, “Oxbow has not submitted an application to modify the plant that would trigger a control technology review” under the Clean Air Act.

    But Beard says the TCEQ and the Texas Legislature need to do more. In June he wrote an opinion piece for the Port Arthur News, urging state representatives to join him in Port Arthur for a “toxic tour” of pollution.

    “They can meet with residents like Mrs. Hebert who suffer daily from environmental exposure, property damage and depreciation and health issues from these facilities. Our representatives owe it to them to hear their stories,” Beard wrote. So far, he hasn’t had any takers.

    Lax Enforcement, Paltry Fines

    Beard pointed to a 2017 industrial fire in Port Arthur as proof that enforcement is too lax and fines too paltry to protect the community.

    The fire broke out at a storage facility owned by German Pellets, which makes wood pellets used for fuel. It burned for 102 days and created a noxious plume that blanketed nearby homes.

    Kiah Fontenot-Young, 29, was pregnant at the time. She and her mother and grandmother were taken to the hospital, overcome by smoke. Doctors moved up Fontenot-Young’s scheduled C-section because they worried the smoke might affect her unborn child.

    Fontenot-Young’s son, now 4, was born with asthma, an acute sensitivity to allergens and behavioral and developmental issues, which she attributes to the smoke. Her 82-year-old grandmother is on two separate oxygen machines, three inhalers and a CPAP machine.

    “She’s basically walking around suffocating,” Fontenot-Young said. “For the rest of her life, she’s slowly suffocating.”

    The TCEQ fined German Pellets $12,000 for failing to prevent “nuisance odor conditions,” a penalty so small that Beard saw it as disrespectful to his community.

    “There are some who believe if we put too much of an onus on them to clean up their act, then these companies will leave,” Beard said. “They’ve made billions of dollars all these years … These cities ought to be flush with cash. It’s far from the case. Port Arthur looks like Beirut, bombed out and depleted.”

    Rasp, the TCEQ spokesman, said the agency considered the fire’s “impact to human health or the environment” when determining the fine.

    More than 600 people are seeking up to $25 million in damages from German Pellets for illnesses they said they suffered from inhaling the fire’s smoke and chemicals, and for emotional distress and property damage. The trial is tentatively scheduled for December.

    Measure to Strengthen Law Dies in Texas House

    In February, state Rep. Erin Zwiener, a Democrat from suburban Austin, introduced legislation she hoped would make life better for Texans living in industrial neighborhoods such as Port Arthur’s west side.

    HB 1820 would have increased the maximum penalties for polluters. It also would have allowed the TCEQ to tack on additional penalties for companies with a history of violations and would have eliminated loopholes that allow many violators to avoid paying fines.

    But the speaker of the Texas House, Dade Phelan, a Republican from Beaumont, allowed the bill to die, even though his district had suffered its own disaster just a few years earlier.

    In 2019, an explosion at a petrochemical plant in Port Neches, just outside Beaumont, forced 50,000 residents from their homes. At the time, Phelan seemed eager for new regulations. He urged the legislature “to ensure all plants and refineries are following the necessary procedures to ensure the safety of their workers and the citizens that live in the surrounding communities.”

    Phelan didn’t respond to questions about why he didn’t support Zwiener’s bill.

    TCEQ Violates Human Rights, Complaint Says

    In August, west-siders tried a new tactic to force Oxbow to reduce its pollution. With the help of the nonprofit groups that have been representing them over the years, they filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA.

    It accused the TCEQ of violating the civil rights of the residents of the mostly Black community “by allowing dangerous amounts of air pollution to pour from an industrial plant for years, without any modern pollution controls.”

    Public Health Watch and the Investigative Reporting Workshop asked the TCEQ whether it had considered civil rights when issuing Oxbow’s latest permit.

    Rasp, the TCEQ spokesman, replied that the agency “is fully committed to protecting the health of all the citizens of Texas and its environment, regardless of race or socioeconomic status.”

    In October, the EPA announced it had accepted the complaint and was beginning an investigation.

    Meanwhile, a new wave of people is moving to the west side – people in search of homes they can afford.

    “They don’t know the danger they’re moving into — but they call it cheap housing,” said Beard, whose organization, PACAN, joined the EPA complaint. “You know, some people are willing to put up with it. But why should you have to put up with it? Everybody has a right to clean air. Everybody has a right to be able to live and be healthy.”

    This story was originally published by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit newsroom based at American University.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Cruz Proposes Texas Secession If Democrats Pass Voting Rights Reforms

    Sen. Ted Cruz departs from the Senate Chamber following a vote on November 3, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Texas may have to consider seceding from the United States if Democrats pass agenda items designed to enfranchise marginalized voters, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said during a public appearance last month.

    Speaking at Texas A&M in mid-October, Cruz, in response to a question from an audience member on the issue of Texas secession, said he’s “not ready to give up on America yet.” But if Democrats end the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, make Washington D.C. a state or pass federal reforms intended to make voting more accessible nationwide, “there may come a point where it’s hopeless,” Cruz added.

    Those types of reforms would “fundamentally destroy the country,” he said.

    Democrats have discussed the possibility of changing filibuster rules in order to pass legislation on voting rights protections, through allowing a simple majority in the Senate to create national standards to be followed in every U.S. state. Meanwhile, making Washington D.C. a state would allow residents of that jurisdiction to have representation in Congress, a goal many have sought for several decades. Polling on the issue of D.C. statehood shows that a majority of Americans back the idea.

    Some polls have also shown that nearly half of the country supports “packing” or increasing the size of the Supreme Court. There is precedent for doing so, as the High Court has changed its size several times in its history, although the last time was in 1869.

    Coincidentally, that was the same year that the Supreme Court ruled that states don’t have the right to secede from the Union, five years after the Confederate States lost the Civil War. In Texas v. White, the court found, by a 5-3 majority, that individual states could not decide to leave the Union, even if they had the support of their residents.

    Recent Supreme Court justices have also weighed in on the issue. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a conservative stalwart of the Supreme Court before he passed away in 2016, responded to a letter from a screenwriter in 2006 about the issue of states seceding.

    “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede,” Scalia said in his reply.

    In his remarks last month, Cruz said that he wasn’t ready to support secession quite yet. But he also said that if the changes he mentioned occurred, Texas should “take” NASA, the military infrastructure located in the state, and the oil that the state produces.

    Whether Cruz is serious about the issue of secession is unclear. Indeed, when asked whether Texas would be willing to take Joe Rogan, a popular Austin-based podcaster who regularly spreads false information about the coronavirus pandemic on his program, the Texas senator responded with enthusiasm.

    “Joe Rogan, he might be president of Texas!” Cruz said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Alleging Civil Rights Violations, DOJ Sues Texas Over Restrictive Voting Law

    The Texas state capitol building with USA and Texas flags

    The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas over recently-passed legislation that imposes restrictions on voters from marginalized communities.

    The Republican-authored law, known as Senate Bill (SB) 1, passed the legislature late this summer after Democrats unsuccessfully tried to block it by fleeing the state to prevent a quorum on its vote. The law created a number of new restrictions, including outlawing drive-through voting, creating an application process for people with disabilities to have others assist them in voting, implementing strict ID requirements for voting by mail, and making it easier for poll watchers to intimidate voters at the ballot box.

    The DOJ is focusing its lawsuit on two specific provisions of the statute, which it claims are in violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Justice Department contends that the law will make it harder for people with disabilities and people who do not speak English to vote. The law also puts undue constraints on mail-in voting through additional ID requirements.

    “The challenged provisions will disenfranchise eligible Texas citizens who seek to exercise their right to vote, including voters with limited English proficiency, voters with disabilities, elderly voters, members of the military deployed away from home, and American citizens residing outside of the country,” the lawsuit states. “These vulnerable voters already confront barriers to the ballot box, and SB 1 will exacerbate the challenges they face in exercising their fundamental right to vote.”

    Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas), who signed the law in September, responded to the lawsuit by writing “Bring it” on Twitter and alleging that the statute “is legal.” But Democratic lawmakers in Texas welcomed the lawsuit from the DOJ.

    “Senate Bill 1 is a sweeping piece of legislation that creates unnecessary and deliberate barriers to voting,” read a joint statement from the Democratic chairs of the state House Democratic Caucus, Mexican American Legislative Caucus, Texas Legislative Black Caucus, and Legislative Study Group.

    Leading voices within the DOJ, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, said the lawsuit was necessary in order to preserve Texas voters’ rights.

    “Our democracy depends on the right of eligible voters to cast a ballot and to have that ballot counted. The Justice Department will continue to use all the authorities at its disposal to protect this fundamental pillar of our society,” Garland said in a statement.

    “Texas Senate Bill 1’s restrictions on voter assistance at the polls and on which absentee ballots cast by eligible voters can be accepted by election officials are unlawful and indefensible,” added Kristen Clarke, head of the DOJ’s civil rights division.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Shows O’Rourke Ties Abbott in Hypothetical Race for Texas Gov. Next Year

    New polling from Texas demonstrates that former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke is polling evenly with current Republican Gov. Greg Abbott — meaning that the results of the gubernatorial race may be closer than originally predicted.

    O’Rourke, who also ran for president in 2020, has not yet formally entered the governor’s race. But it’s widely speculated he will throw his hat into the ring sometime in the near future, potentially unseating Abbott, who is midway through his second term in office.

    A survey conducted by the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation found that, among voters who took part in the 2020 election, 44 percent would vote for Abbott in 2022 while 43 percent would vote for O’Rourke. Among registered voters overall, the numbers are similar: 43 percent prefer Abbott, while 42 percent back O’Rourke.

    Those numbers are considered a statistical tie between the two candidates, as the poll has a margin of error of 2.6 percentage points.

    O’Rourke’s numbers are buoyed by support he is receiving from Latino residents, the poll said. Among Latino voters, O’Rourke has an 18-point lead over Abbott.

    Actor Matthew McConaughey has also signaled that he’s thinking about running for governor of Texas next year. However, McConaughey didn’t do well in polling, garnering just 9 percent of voters in the poll who said they voted in 2020, compared to Abbott, who received 41 percent support, and O’Rourke, who got 39 percent, when all three are polled against each other.

    Mark Jones, a professor who heads the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, which assisted in conducting the poll with the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, said the numbers demonstrate that McConaughey may not be a serious contender in the race.

    “Matthew McConaughey is a very popular actor, but his popularity is not turning into support at the ballot box in this survey,” Jones said.

    Polling this close can sometimes be deceiving. In the summer of 2018, when O’Rourke was running for senator in Texas against current Sen. Ted Cruz (R), an Emerson College poll found that the two were in a statistical tie; Cruz then went on to win the race by 2.6 percentage points.

    Still, O’Rourke’s numbers are likely causing Abbott’s campaign team to panic somewhat, especially considering how they’ve shifted in the past few months alone. In July, O’Rourke was losing to Abbott by 12 points in a hypothetical matchup. A poll in September saw that gap tighten, with Abbott ahead by just five points.

    The polling numbers from this recent survey seem to align with the idea that Texas is no longer the solidly “red” state that it once was. Indeed, in last year’s presidential race, former President Donald Trump, a Republican, only defeated President Joe Biden by a margin of less than six points — the smallest gap between a Republican and Democratic president in the state since 1996. Other polls show Texans are warming up to progressive ideas, including on the climate crisis, where a Data for Progress poll found that nearly 3 in 5 voters (59 percent) backed the idea of transitioning away from fossil fuels in favor of more sustainable options.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Texas’s 6-Week Abortion Law Monday

    On Monday, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in the cases challenging Texas’s repressive abortion law, which effectively bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

    The Court, which granted expedited review of the law in late October, will hear two cases relating to the statute, examining whether the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) and/or abortion providers in Texas have legal standing to challenge the law.

    The law, which contains no exceptions for rape or incest, is uniquely cruel in that it places the onus of enforcement on private individuals rather the state, incentivizing individuals to sue abortion providers or anyone who helps a person access an abortion for sums of up to $10,000. Because of this strategic framework, the conservative bloc majority of the Supreme Court refused to place a hold on the law’s implementation in a 5-4 decision in September.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the four justices dissenting with the order, described the Court’s decision to enable enforcement of the law as “stunning.”

    “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” she wrote.

    Texas is planning to continue asserting that neither abortion providers suing the state or the DOJ have standing to challenge the law — a dubious claim considering that abortion providers are directly targeted by the law, facing lawsuits from individuals who allege that they helped someone procure an abortion. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is invested in continuing the precedent protecting abortion rights set in past cases.

    Texas’s abortion law “is clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in September. “The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that no state can deprive individuals of their constitutional rights through a legislative scheme specifically designed to prevent the vindication of those rights.”

    The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the lawsuit against Texas on behalf of providers in the state, condemned the law for impeding a person’s right to undergo a safe and routine medical procedure.

    “Here, [where] a state enacts a blatantly unconstitutional statute, assigns enforcement authority to everyone in the world, and weaponizes the state judiciary to obstruct those courts’ ability to protect constitutional rights, the federal courts must be available to provide relief,” the organization said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 26 States Are Primed to Effectively Ban Abortion If Roe v. Wade Is Overturned

    A sign reads "Bans don't stop abortions, they make them dangerous" at a march for reproductive freedom on October 2, 2021, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

    With the Supreme Court set to hear arguments on two high-profile abortion cases later this year, many are beginning to question what would happen if the Court overturned or severely curtailed the abortion access rights that were laid out in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

    A report released on Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health care advocacy organization, reveals that consequences could be dire for millions of people seeking abortions in the future.

    The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is set to hear two cases on abortion restrictions imposed by states. In November, the Court will hear a case relating to Texas’s six-week abortion ban, which has thus far evaded judicial review due to a unique and strategic enforcement method that incentivizes private citizens to sue abortion providers for sums of $10,000. In December, the Court will hear a case involving a Mississippi law that banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy; the state’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch has presented this case as a direct challenge to the Roe decision.

    If either of those cases result in Roe being undone, abortion access across the country would be curtailed drastically — but the report from the Guttmacher Institute details just how devastating this decision could be.

    According to the report, 26 states across the U.S. are certain to effectively ban abortion if Roe is overturned. As it stands right now, nine states continue to have abortion bans on the books from before Roe was decided, and those laws would go back into effect if the Supreme Court undoes the ruling from almost 50 years ago. Another 12 states have “trigger” laws in place, statutes that automatically ban abortion as soon as the federal government ends enforcement of Roe, while five states have a “near-total” ban on abortion that would also be enacted, the report says.

    In all likelihood, those states wouldn’t be alone in curtailing abortion, the organization warned.

    “Beyond the 26 states certain or likely to attempt to ban abortion immediately, other states have demonstrated hostility toward abortion by adopting multiple restrictions in the past, but are not likely to ban abortion in the near future,” the Guttmacher Institute report said. “However, this analysis may change in the next few years.”

    A total overturning of Roe is unnecessary for curtailing abortion access right away. Eleven states, not including Texas, currently have a six-week ban on abortion on the books that isn’t being enforced but could be, depending on the Court’s future ruling.

    The outcome of a ruling ending or severely limiting Roe’s protections would be devastating, affecting around 36 million individuals of reproductive age who would have to travel to neighboring states or beyond to undergo what is a safe and routine medical procedure.

    The report noted that a person seeking an abortion may have to travel hundreds of miles just to reach an abortion clinic.

    “You’re talking about people in Texas and Mississippi traveling vast distances, not just trying to cross the border, but trying to go through multiple states in order to access care,” said Elizabeth Nash, the principal policy associate for state issues at the Guttmacher Institute. “The distances will take you days to access an abortion and return home.”

    A person in Texas would have to travel up to 525 miles to get an abortion, while a person in Mississippi might have to go as many as 428 miles to the nearest provider, in a state where the dismantling of Roe would not threaten abortion rights. In Florida, a person could have to travel up to 567 miles to get an abortion out of state; in Louisiana, the distance could be as long as 630 miles.

    If the Court overturns Roe or enables restrictions on it, the outcome will cause tremendous harm, particularly to underserved groups like low-income people, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

    “There can be no compromise on abortion — not at 15 weeks, not at 20 weeks, not in any context — because as this data makes clear, a restriction on abortion anywhere means less access for all, everywhere,” wrote Caroline Reilly, reporting fellow for Rewire News Group, regarding the Guttmacher Institute’s findings.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.