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Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report

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When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.

That’s the primary theme of a new report, “Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent,” released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.

This new report drills into all of the exonerations they’ve archived up until February 2019. That’s 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.

In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.

Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.

The most common type of misconduct involved concealing exculpatory evidence, which is evidence that suggests the defendant is not guilty. The National Registry of Exonerations found that evidence was deliberately concealed in 44 percent of the cases that ultimately resulted in exonerations. The 218-page report documents the many ways that police and prosecutors break the rules in order to get convictions, from fabricating evidence and manipulative conduct during interrogations to fraudulent forensics and flat-out lying in court.

But what happens when a person is ultimately exonerated and the truth of police and prosecutorial misconduct is revealed? Are the police officers or prosecutors disciplined for their behavior? Often the answer is no. The report analyzed what happened to cops and prosecutors who engaged in misconduct and found that some sort of discipline was imposed in only 17 percent of these cases. Prosecutors are hardly ever punished for misconduct, even though the report notes that they are equally culpable as cops. In only four percent of cases did they find prosecutors disciplined in any way for misconduct. Just two have been fired, three disbarred, and only two have ever themselves been criminally prosecuted and found guilty of misconduct.

Police officers, on the other hand, were disciplined in some fashion in 19 percent of all exoneration cases involving police misconduct. That’s still remarkably low, but police are far more likely than prosecutors to be criminally charged with misconduct in these cases. At least 30 officers have been convicted. That number may seem low, but the report notes that a single police officer may actually be responsible for several false convictions (most notably in Chicago, which has seen mass exonerations over police misconduct).

After examining a couple of specific cases where problems in police and prosecutor culture contributed to the convictions of innocent people, the report gets to the heart of the matter: Are there any specific, substantive policy changes that can reduce behaviors that lead to false convictions? The final quarter of the report is devoted to recommendations: record police interrogations; have forensic crime labs operate independently of police departments to reduce the pressure to fudge results; create special units in prosecutors’ offices to revisit old cases and look for errors; implement open-file discovery and better information-sharing practices with public defenders; and, obviously, institute actual consequences for officers and prosecutors who engage in misconduct that leads to the innocent being convicted.

“Official misconduct damages truth-seeking by our criminal justice system and undermines public confidence. It steals years—sometimes decades—from the lives of innocent people,” wrote Samuel Gross, University of Michigan law professor emeritus, lead author of the report and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations. “The great majority of wrongful convictions are never discovered, so the scope of the problem is much greater than these numbers show.”

On Monday, after 37 years in prison, Robert DuBoise was formally exonerated in Florida for a rape and murder from 1983 that DNA evidence now proves he did not commit. He was convicted partly due to testimony from unreliable jailhouse informants and controversial, discredited bite mark analysis. His case is a perfect example of how much our justice system is plagued by bad behavior.

The National Registry of Exonerations is a joint project by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School, and the Michigan State University College of Law. The full report can be read here.

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SF Author David Brin, Prof. Jane Bambauer, Prof. Mark Lemley, and I …

We had a very interesting and enjoyable preliminary private conversation on the subject a couple of weeks ago (just for The Practice Effect), and I much look forward to this public version. Please join us! Here are the details:

UCLA Law’s AI Pulse Project and University of Arizona TechLaw present:

The Brinternet: A conversation with futurist and science fiction author David Brin and Professors Jane Bambauer, Mark Lemley, and Eugene Volokh, moderated by Professor Ted Parson

What: Is the dominant advertising-supported business model for Internet news and opinion unsustainable?  In a pair of essays published on Evonomics, David Brin says yes. But alternative models, including subscriptions and paywalls, also increasingly appear unrealistic for most apps and content producers. Can micropayments (in the 1 to 5 cent range) solve this problem?

When: this Friday, September 18, 2020, 2:00 – 3:00 PM Pacific time.

Register to attend here.

Panelists:

David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Prof. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Prof. Bambauer’s own data-driven research explores biased judgment, legal education, and legal careers. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. Prof. Lemley teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of eight books and 181 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and an academic affiliate at the law firm Mayer Brown LLP. He teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic, and has taught copyright, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He has been writing on the Internet and the law since 1995.

Edward A. (Ted) Parson (Moderator) is the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the director of the AI Pulse Project at UCLA School of Law.

Background reading: 

Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution.

Beyond Advertising: Will Micropayments Sustain the New Internet?

Neither micro- nor macropayments are required to attend this conversation.

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SF Author David Brin, Prof. Jane Bambauer, Prof. Mark Lemley, and I …

We had a very interesting and enjoyable preliminary private conversation on the subject a couple of weeks ago (just for The Practice Effect), and I much look forward to this public version. Please join us! Here are the details:

UCLA Law’s AI Pulse Project and University of Arizona TechLaw present:

The Brinternet: A conversation with futurist and science fiction author David Brin and Professors Jane Bambauer, Mark Lemley, and Eugene Volokh, moderated by Professor Ted Parson

What: Is the dominant advertising-supported business model for Internet news and opinion unsustainable?  In a pair of essays published on Evonomics, David Brin says yes. But alternative models, including subscriptions and paywalls, also increasingly appear unrealistic for most apps and content producers. Can micropayments (in the 1 to 5 cent range) solve this problem?

When: this Friday, September 18, 2020, 2:00 – 3:00 PM Pacific time.

Register to attend here.

Panelists:

David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Prof. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Prof. Bambauer’s own data-driven research explores biased judgment, legal education, and legal careers. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. Prof. Lemley teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of eight books and 181 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and an academic affiliate at the law firm Mayer Brown LLP. He teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic, and has taught copyright, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He has been writing on the Internet and the law since 1995.

Edward A. (Ted) Parson (Moderator) is the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the director of the AI Pulse Project at UCLA School of Law.

Background reading: 

Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution.

Beyond Advertising: Will Micropayments Sustain the New Internet?

Neither micro- nor macropayments are required to attend this conversation.

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Joe Biden’s Proposed Budget Would Hike Spending, Raise Taxes, and Further Inflate the National Debt

rtrltwelve189314

The national debt has reached levels not seen since the end of World War II, but Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is calling for a combination of spending increases and tax hikes that will require trillions of dollars of additional borrowing in the next 10 years.

Biden is calling for more than $3 trillion in new taxes that would be imposed primarily on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. But two recent analyses of Biden’s spending plans agree that his proposals would not come close to paying for themselves over 10 years. If enacted, Biden’s plans would push federal spending to higher highs while also adding to the national debt—which is already on pace to eclipse the size of the entire American economy next year.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan organization within the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, crunched the numbers and concluded that Biden’s proposed tax increases would cost Americans about $3.4 trillion over 10 years. To get there, Biden would repeal some of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for high earners, raise income taxes on the very highest earners, tax capital gains at the same rate as other income, raise the corporate tax rate, and institute a series of changes to the payroll taxes that fund mandatory spending on entitlements like Social Security.

Cumulatively, Biden’s tax plans would not raise taxes on households that earn less than $400,000 per year, the Wharton analysis concludes, though lower-earning households would likely see knock-on effects like “lower investment returns and wages as a result of corporate tax increases.”

Those huge tax increases, however, wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the cost of the new spending Biden has proposed. The Wharton analysis says Biden plans to hike spending by $5.35 trillion over 10 years, with the largest piles of new federal outlays going toward education ($1.9 trillion) and infrastructure ($1.6 trillion). Biden has also called for $1.6 trillion in new health care spending—mostly by expanding the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance subsidies and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60—but his campaign plans to offset some of that new spending by saving money on the federal government’s purchases of prescription drugs.

If enacted—and that, of course, depends on whether Biden wins November’s elections and whether he can get Congress to go along with these proposals afterward—Biden’s budget, the Wharton analysis says, would push federal spending to 24 percent of gross domestic product, a rough estimate for the overall size of the U.S. economy. Excluding temporary stimulus spending passed in 2009 and again this year to combat economic downturns, the federal budget has not consumed that large of a share of the economy since World War II.

And, actually, the Wharton analysis might be an overly rosy assessment.

“I think they missed a lot,” says Brian Riedl, former chief economist to Sen. Rob Portman (R–Ohio) who’s now a senior fellow at the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute. On Twitter, Riedl explained that the Wharton analysis of Biden’s spending plans seems to ignore huge amounts of money that the campaign has promised to spend. The spending that’s left out of the Wharton report is mostly temporary—like the additional $3 trillion that Biden wants to spend on coronavirus relief efforts—rather than being part of the long-term budget.

That $3 trillion is roughly in line with what House Democrats passed in May, though the spending package has not moved forward in the Republican-controlled Senate. Biden didn’t explicitly propose that spending, but he has endorsed it. The Wharton report also gives Biden credit for planned prescription drug cost savings that Riedl says may not materialize. Additionally, the report does not count other one-time spending like Biden’s proposed $125 billion to combat the opioid epidemic.

Add it all up, as Riedl did recently for a post at The Dispatch, and Biden’s budget would hike government spending by $11 trillion over 10 years. On the tax side, Riedl’s view is closer to what Wharton says: He expected Biden’s proposals to generate about $3.6 trillion in new taxes over 10 years.

It’s true that Biden’s plans are less expensive than what some other Democrats proposed during this year’s primary campaign, but that fact mostly serves to illuminate just how wildly unserious those other proposals were. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) called for roughly $40 trillion in new spending, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) wanted to add almost $100 trillion.

But Biden’s tax and spending proposals only look moderate in comparison to those outlandish ones. When stacked up against other recent Democratic nominees’ budget plans, Biden’s is far more expensive—he’s proposing more than twice as much new spending as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, the Wall Street Journal notes. Even if he’s not fully supporting Sanders-level budgetary insanity, there is no doubt Biden has been pulled leftward this year.

You don’t need a fancy calculator to do the math: Biden is proposing to raise taxes by an exorbitant amount—more than $3 trillion dollars, the largest tax hike in decades—and spending by an even larger amount. The result, of course, is more debt.

Riedl calls that approach “breathtakingly irresponsible” given the country’s current fiscal condition. Social Security and other entitlements are steamrolling toward insolvency and the national debt is already on pace to reach $35 trillion by the end of the decade without any new spending. As the debt grows, interest payments on it grow, too—and if interest rates rise, you can add another $500 billion ($3,600 per American household) for each percentage point.

It’s also true, of course, that Trump has done a terrible job of managing the country’s finances. Even if you ignore the emergency coronavirus spending, Trump has authorized a $937 billion increase in government spending in just four years—a larger increase than the one President Barack Obama presided over during his eight years in office.

Trump is clearly no fiscal conservative, but Biden is promising even more profligacy.

“Essentially, Biden and the Democrats are gambling that building the largest government debt in world history will not endanger the economy, and that interest rates will remain low forever,” writes Riedl. “If they are wrong, the costs to taxpayers and in economic growth could be devastating.”

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Joe Biden’s Proposed Budget Would Hike Spending, Raise Taxes, and Further Inflate the National Debt

rtrltwelve189314

The national debt has reached levels not seen since the end of World War II, but Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is calling for a combination of spending increases and tax hikes that will require trillions of dollars of additional borrowing in the next 10 years.

Biden is calling for more than $3 trillion in new taxes that would be imposed primarily on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. But two recent analyses of Biden’s spending plans agree that his proposals would not come close to paying for themselves over 10 years. If enacted, Biden’s plans would push federal spending to higher highs while also adding to the national debt—which is already on pace to eclipse the size of the entire American economy next year.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a nonpartisan organization within the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, crunched the numbers and concluded that Biden’s proposed tax increases would cost Americans about $3.4 trillion over 10 years. To get there, Biden would repeal some of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for high earners, raise income taxes on the very highest earners, tax capital gains at the same rate as other income, raise the corporate tax rate, and institute a series of changes to the payroll taxes that fund mandatory spending on entitlements like Social Security.

Cumulatively, Biden’s tax plans would not raise taxes on households that earn less than $400,000 per year, the Wharton analysis concludes, though lower-earning households would likely see knock-on effects like “lower investment returns and wages as a result of corporate tax increases.”

Those huge tax increases, however, wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the cost of the new spending Biden has proposed. The Wharton analysis says Biden plans to hike spending by $5.35 trillion over 10 years, with the largest piles of new federal outlays going toward education ($1.9 trillion) and infrastructure ($1.6 trillion). Biden has also called for $1.6 trillion in new health care spending—mostly by expanding the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance subsidies and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60—but his campaign plans to offset some of that new spending by saving money on the federal government’s purchases of prescription drugs.

If enacted—and that, of course, depends on whether Biden wins November’s elections and whether he can get Congress to go along with these proposals afterward—Biden’s budget, the Wharton analysis says, would push federal spending to 24 percent of gross domestic product, a rough estimate for the overall size of the U.S. economy. Excluding temporary stimulus spending passed in 2009 and again this year to combat economic downturns, the federal budget has not consumed that large of a share of the economy since World War II.

And, actually, the Wharton analysis might be an overly rosy assessment.

“I think they missed a lot,” says Brian Riedl, former chief economist to Sen. Rob Portman (R–Ohio) who’s now a senior fellow at the fiscally conservative Manhattan Institute. On Twitter, Riedl explained that the Wharton analysis of Biden’s spending plans seems to ignore huge amounts of money that the campaign has promised to spend. The spending that’s left out of the Wharton report is mostly temporary—like the additional $3 trillion that Biden wants to spend on coronavirus relief efforts—rather than being part of the long-term budget.

That $3 trillion is roughly in line with what House Democrats passed in May, though the spending package has not moved forward in the Republican-controlled Senate. Biden didn’t explicitly propose that spending, but he has endorsed it. The Wharton report also gives Biden credit for planned prescription drug cost savings that Riedl says may not materialize. Additionally, the report does not count other one-time spending like Biden’s proposed $125 billion to combat the opioid epidemic.

Add it all up, as Riedl did recently for a post at The Dispatch, and Biden’s budget would hike government spending by $11 trillion over 10 years. On the tax side, Riedl’s view is closer to what Wharton says: He expected Biden’s proposals to generate about $3.6 trillion in new taxes over 10 years.

It’s true that Biden’s plans are less expensive than what some other Democrats proposed during this year’s primary campaign, but that fact mostly serves to illuminate just how wildly unserious those other proposals were. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) called for roughly $40 trillion in new spending, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) wanted to add almost $100 trillion.

But Biden’s tax and spending proposals only look moderate in comparison to those outlandish ones. When stacked up against other recent Democratic nominees’ budget plans, Biden’s is far more expensive—he’s proposing more than twice as much new spending as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, the Wall Street Journal notes. Even if he’s not fully supporting Sanders-level budgetary insanity, there is no doubt Biden has been pulled leftward this year.

You don’t need a fancy calculator to do the math: Biden is proposing to raise taxes by an exorbitant amount—more than $3 trillion dollars, the largest tax hike in decades—and spending by an even larger amount. The result, of course, is more debt.

Riedl calls that approach “breathtakingly irresponsible” given the country’s current fiscal condition. Social Security and other entitlements are steamrolling toward insolvency and the national debt is already on pace to reach $35 trillion by the end of the decade without any new spending. As the debt grows, interest payments on it grow, too—and if interest rates rise, you can add another $500 billion ($3,600 per American household) for each percentage point.

It’s also true, of course, that Trump has done a terrible job of managing the country’s finances. Even if you ignore the emergency coronavirus spending, Trump has authorized a $937 billion increase in government spending in just four years—a larger increase than the one President Barack Obama presided over during his eight years in office.

Trump is clearly no fiscal conservative, but Biden is promising even more profligacy.

“Essentially, Biden and the Democrats are gambling that building the largest government debt in world history will not endanger the economy, and that interest rates will remain low forever,” writes Riedl. “If they are wrong, the costs to taxpayers and in economic growth could be devastating.”

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Viral Videos Show Georgia Deputies Beating a Passenger for Not Having a Driver’s License

Roderick Walker

Viral videos from over the weekend captured Georgia deputies using force on a passenger after he told them that he didn’t have identification on him.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Roderick Walker and his girlfriend were passengers in an SUV. The incident began when Clayton County deputies stopped the vehicle because of a broken tail light. Shean Williams, Walker’s attorney, told the paper that when deputies asked Walker for his driver’s license, he informed the officers that he didn’t have his identification and didn’t need one since he wasn’t driving the vehicle.

Williams said the deputies told Walker to exit the vehicle and says that they used excessive force while arresting him.

Separate videos from various angles show one deputy striking Walker while he’s pinned to the ground. A woman screams in distress in the background.

Sheriff Victor Hill gave a statement about the incident on Saturday, saying that the unnamed deputy who struck Walker was placed on administrative leave without pay pending an internal investigation. In a follow-up statement on Sunday, Hill announced that the still-unnamed deputy had been terminated “for excessive use of force” and that the Clayton County District Attorney’s Office would take over the investigation.

Walker was charged and arrested for obstructing law enforcement officers and battery. Because Walker has a felony probation warrant in another Georgia county, his lawyers must resolve separate legal issues before they can secure his release, per Hill’s Sunday statement.

Gerald A. Griggs, another attorney representing Walker, tweeted in support of his release over the weekend, arguing on Monday morning that the traffic stop charges against Walker, which are unrelated to his prior warrant, should be dropped.

Law enforcement in Clayton County recently faced scrutiny for another incident where an officer pulled a gun on five teenagers while bystanders spoke out.

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Viral Videos Show Georgia Deputies Beating a Passenger for Not Having a Driver’s License

Roderick Walker

Viral videos from over the weekend captured Georgia deputies using force on a passenger after he told them that he didn’t have identification on him.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Roderick Walker and his girlfriend were passengers in an SUV. The incident began when Clayton County deputies stopped the vehicle because of a broken tail light. Shean Williams, Walker’s attorney, told the paper that when deputies asked Walker for his driver’s license, he informed the officers that he didn’t have his identification and didn’t need one since he wasn’t driving the vehicle.

Williams said the deputies told Walker to exit the vehicle and says that they used excessive force while arresting him.

Separate videos from various angles show one deputy striking Walker while he’s pinned to the ground. A woman screams in distress in the background.

Sheriff Victor Hill gave a statement about the incident on Saturday, saying that the unnamed deputy who struck Walker was placed on administrative leave without pay pending an internal investigation. In a follow-up statement on Sunday, Hill announced that the still-unnamed deputy had been terminated “for excessive use of force” and that the Clayton County District Attorney’s Office would take over the investigation.

Walker was charged and arrested for obstructing law enforcement officers and battery. Because Walker has a felony probation warrant in another Georgia county, his lawyers must resolve separate legal issues before they can secure his release, per Hill’s Sunday statement.

Gerald A. Griggs, another attorney representing Walker, tweeted in support of his release over the weekend, arguing on Monday morning that the traffic stop charges against Walker, which are unrelated to his prior warrant, should be dropped.

Law enforcement in Clayton County recently faced scrutiny for another incident where an officer pulled a gun on five teenagers while bystanders spoke out.

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Court OKs Deportation of Hundreds of Thousands of Immigrants, Another Says Homeland Security’s Head Might Have No Legal Authority

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Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf is likely illegitimate, a federal court says. That means some of the Trump-era asylum rules Wolf presided over are on hold, too.

The appointment of former Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan “was invalid under the agency’s applicable order of succession, and so he lacked the authority to amend the order of succession to ensure Wolf’s installation as Acting Secretary,” wrote Judge Paula Xinis in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland’s opinion, issued Friday (a day after President Donald Trump formally nominated Wolf—who has been acting DHS secretary since November—as the agency’s official head).

“Because Wolf filled the role of Acting Secretary without authority, he promulgated the challenged [asylum] rules also ‘in excess of…authority,’ and not ‘in accordance with the law,'” Xinis continued.

The lawsuit was brought by Casa de Maryland Inc. (CASA), the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), and three other nonprofit groups, and it challenges 18 DHS rules “that overhaul the criteria for issuing work authorization to asylum applicants,” notes the court’s opinion. “Plaintiffs mount a full-throated attack on the challenged agency rules, invoking the Administrative Procedure Act (‘APA’), the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (‘FVRA’), and the Homeland Security Act (‘HSA’).”

The court concluded that “preliminary injunctive relief” was warranted for both CASA and ASAP (but not the other plaintiffs), temporarily blocking “enforcement of the following rule changes against CASA and ASAP’s members”: 

The Timeline Repeal Rule, 85 Fed. Reg. at 37,545 (printing parts of the regulations to be codified at 8 C.F.R. § 208.7(a)(1)); –

The 365-day waiting period, 85 Fed. Reg. at 38,626-28 (referenced throughout and as codified at 8 C.F.R. § 208.3(c)(3); § 208.7(a)(1)(ii), (a)(1)(iii)(E), and (b)(1)(i); and 8 C.F.R. § 274a.12(c)(8)); –

Removal of “deemed-complete” rule, 85 Fed. Reg. at 38,626 (codified at 8 C.F.R. § 208.3); –

The discretionary review rule, providing that agency is no longer required to issue EADs to eligible asylees, 85 Fed. Reg. at 38,628 (changes reflected at 8 C.F.R. § 274a.13(a)(1)); –

The one-year filing bar, 85 Fed. Reg. at 38,626 (codified at 8 C.F.R. § 208.7(a)(1)(iii)(F)); and –

The rule requiring submission of biometric information as part of EAD applications, 85 Fed. Reg. at 38,626 (codified at 8 C.F.R. §§ 208.7(a)(1)(i) and (a)(1)(iv)(E),

It’s a limited reprieve for now, but positive news nonetheless.

Another federal court ruling regarding immigration isn’t so heartening. This one from Monday says the Trump administration can force out hundreds of thousands of immigrants who reside legally in the U.S. under what’s referred to as “temporary protected status.”

Judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to vacate a 2018 district court ruling that preliminarily blocked enforcement of the administration’s order, which end the protected status program for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan.

In finding “that the Trump administration acted within its authority in terminating legal protections” for these immigrants, the court “effectively strips legal immigration status from some 400,000 people, rendering them deportable if they do not voluntarily leave the country,” The New York Times reports.

FREE MARKETS

Congress is out of touch on tech companies. “While Democratic and Republican officials have been criticizing the conduct of U.S. ‘Big Tech’ companies, a growing disconnect separates those crusading politicians from the way a lot of consumers are feeling,” writes Art Raymond at Utah’s Deseret News, in a look at consumer polling and political posturing around tech products. “It turns out, a close look at the attitudes of the average Jills and Joes who use the tech products and platforms every day reveals that, frankly, they really don’t care that much.”

FREE MINDS

Trump is fearmongering about Iran again. “According to press reports, Iran may be planning an assassination, or other attack, against the United States in retaliation for the killing of terrorist leader [Qassem] Soleimani,” the president—who has lately been talking up his supposed anti-war bona fides—tweeted late last night. “Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!”

QUICK HITS

• Pennsylvania “Gov. Tom Wolf’s pandemic restrictions that required people to stay at home, placed size limits on gatherings and ordered ‘non-life-sustaining’ businesses to shut down are unconstitutional,” held U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV in a Monday ruling.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that it’s OK for Florida to make people convicted of felonies who have served their sentences pay off all court debt before they regain the right to vote.

• Ruling parties use the instruments of power to ensure their dominance, example 8 billion:

• A new lawsuit alleges a range of abuses against immigrant detainees at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia. You can read all the allegations here.

• Who had “agreeing with Chuck Schumer on something” on their 2020 bingo card?

• All the clap emojis:

• Another good piece on the controversy surrounding the movie Cuties:

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