Category: reason

Last night, Alabama executed death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith in what is believed to be the first ever execution by nitrogen hypoxia. The experimental method has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, with a United Nations spokesperson going so far as to declare that the execution method “may amount to torture.”

Smith, 58, was sentenced to death for the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of Elizabeth Sennett, a 45-year-old preacher’s wife in Sheffield, Alabama. The state first attempted to execute Smith in November 2022 but ultimately called off the execution after prison officials failed to place an IV line to begin the lethal injection process. 

Smith’s first attempted execution was part of a series of botched executions carried out by Alabama, which led Gov. Kay Ivey to place a moratorium on executions in November 2022. However, she lifted the pause in February 2023, following an opaque internal investigation. 

While Alabama began carrying out lethal injection executions again in July 2023, Smith had already initiated a legal battle to be executed instead by suffocation with nitrogen gas, a largely theoretical execution method approved by the state Legislature in 2018.

The state originally pushed back against Smith’s request, arguing that they did not have proper facilities and procedures to kill Smith through the experimental method. But the Supreme Court disagreed, denying cert to the state’s attempt to overturn an earlier ruling allowing Smith to choose execution by nitrogen hypoxia.

In an apparent attempt to save his life, Smith’s lawyers have pivoted in recent months to instead argue that nitrogen hypoxia would lead to a tortuous death for Smith and that the experimental nature of the execution meant that the state could not guarantee a smooth execution. 

“The evidence establishes that executing Mr. Smith by nitrogen hypoxia using the Protocol would subject him to a substantial risk of serious harm,” Smith’s lawyers wrote in December. “It is undisputed that depriving a human of sufficient oxygen (below normal levels but above fatal levels) can cause dire consequences short of death.”

The Supreme Court rejected a last-minute attempt to halt Smith’s execution earlier this month, and Smith’s execution began shortly before 8 p.m. on Thursday night. According to a witness report obtained by CNN, Smith made an extended statement before he died, saying “Tonight, Alabama caused humanity to take a step backward,” and adding.” I’m leaving with love, peace, and light.”

Witnesses reported that Smith was strapped to a gurney with a gas mask affixed to his face. Smith remained conscious for several minutes after nitrogen began flowing into the mask, and he appeared to be holding his breath for as long as possible. He “struggled against his restraints” and “shook and writhed on a gurney.” Witnesses additionally reported that Smith eventually began breathing deeply, before his breathing slowed and finally stopped. He was pronounced dead at 8:25—about 15 minutes after prison officials began the flow of nitrogen.

“There was some involuntary movement and some agonal breathing, so that was all expected and is in the side effects that we’ve seen and researched on nitrogen hypoxia,” John Hamm, the Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner, said in a press conference Thursday night. “So nothing was out of the ordinary of what we were expecting.”

While prison officials were cavalier about Smith’s execution, others who witnessed his death were not so relaxed about the apparently grisly process. 

The execution was “the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” the Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, told CNN. “An unbelievable evil was unleashed tonight.”

The post 'The Most Horrible Thing I've Ever Seen:' Alabama Executes Inmate With Experimental Method appeared first on Reason.com.

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Bills filed in Florida would allow law enforcement agencies to hide the names of police and correctional officers who kill people.

Such legislation was widely expected after the Florida Supreme Court ruled in December that police departments could not invoke Marsy’s Law, a crime victims’ rights law adopted by Florida voters in 2018, to hide the names of officers involved in deadly shootings. The ruling was much broader than expected, though, and stripped privacy protections from civilian crime victims as well.

The legislation is one of several efforts in the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to further insulate police in the Sunshine State—once lauded for its expansive public record laws—from scrutiny. As Reason reported yesterday, two other bills advancing through the Legislature would ban cities and counties from forming civilian police oversight boards.

State Rep. Chuck Brannan (R–Macclenny) filed House Bill 1605 and House Bill 1607 earlier this month. The former would expand the definition of “crime victims” to include “law enforcement officers, correctional officers, or correctional probation officers who use deadly force in the course and scope of their employment or official duties.” 

The latter would exempt records that could be used to identify and harass crime victims from the state’s public records law unless the victim opts to have it disclosed. “The Legislature finds that the release of any such information or records that could be used to locate or harass a crime victim or the victim’s family could subject such victims or their families to further trauma,” the bill says.

The bills have the backing of powerful police unions in the state as well. “For people to exclude police officers just because we wear the badge and we protect and serve, that’s not fair to us,” John Kazanjian, president of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, told the Tampa Bay Times. 

The legal battle over whether law enforcement was covered by Marsy’s Law began in 2020 after reporters filed records requests for the names of the officers involved in two fatal police shootings in Tallahassee. The Florida Police Benevolent Association filed a lawsuit against the city to prevent disclosure, arguing that the identities of the officers were confidential under a provision of Marsy’s Law that protects “information or records that could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family, or which could disclose confidential or privileged information of the victim.”

In another case in 2022, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office invoked Marsy’s Law to attempt to shield the identities of six jail deputies involved in the death of Scott Whitley, a mentally ill man who died during a violent cell extraction after being bumrushed, tased, and pepper-sprayed.

However, the conservative Florida Supreme Court disagreed with the police unions. “One’s name, standing alone, is not that kind of information or record,” Florida Supreme Court Justice John D. Couriel wrote. “It communicates nothing about where the individual can be found and bothered.”

In the Florida Supreme Court case last year, opponents of police secrecy included not just media organizations and civil rights groups but also supporters of Marsy’s Law.

“When reviewing the conduct of an on-duty law enforcement officer who has used physical force, the right to privacy of their name must quickly yield to the public’s right to know,” Marsy’s Law for Florida told the Tallahassee Democrat in October.

It’s an example, once again, of crime victims being invoked by lawmakers and law enforcement—and ignored when their opinion is inconvenient.

The post Florida Bills Would Hide the Names of Police Officers Who Kill People  appeared first on Reason.com.

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In response to the news that an aluminum smelting plant in southern Missouri will soon close, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has asked—nay, demanded—that President Joe Biden use his powers to keep the plant open.

“I urge you to take the appropriate actions necessary to keep the smelter open, to ensure the continuity of operations, and to preserve production jobs—including by deploying the authorities of the Defense Production Act of 1950,” Hawley wrote in a letter to the White House this week. “Doing so will preserve good-paying union jobs and safeguard national security.”

The modern presidency has tremendous powers, of course, but this is still quite the stretch. Hawley is asking the White House to engage in central planning at an absurdly micro-level—and there is, thankfully, no law that actually allows the president to order a factory to continue producing aluminum if its owners have decided to stop.

Even so, the fact that Hawley is even making this request illustrates something important about how Republicans now view the relationship between government and business. It also says something about how the failures of protectionism will spur calls for more protectionism. And, finally, about how the phrase “national security” has become warped beyond recognition to justify further governmental intrusions into the economy.

But let’s start with the Defense Production Act, which allows presidents to expedite governmental purchases of certain materials viewed as critical to national defense. Though it had been rarely used before the COVID-19 pandemic, it has recently become a favorite tool of would-be economic authoritarians on both sides of the aisle, and some lawmakers now seem to believe there are virtually no limits to how it can be used. Democrats have asked Biden to use it to promote green energy projects, and Biden has already invoked it to “accelerate domestic production” of solar panels under the questionable notion that solar panels are “essential to the national defense.” Even home insulation is now the subject of a Defense Production Act order, because it is somehow critical to defending America from a foreign invasion—of cold air, one assumes, likely a nefarious plot by those shifty Canadians.

The act was also invoked during the baby formula shortage of 2022, as if a government-created problem could be solved by the White House simply demanding that more formula be brought into existence. That’s how economies work, right?

It might shock Hawley and some of his colleagues to learn that the Defense Production Act is not a set of magic words that allow presidents to do whatever they’d like. In fact, all the law does is require that businesses fulfill orders from the government before other orders from private customers.

That’s because it is a law meant to be used during wartime. Here’s how it works: Let’s say there’s a war going on and the U.S. military desperately needs 10,000 widgets to ensure victory, lasting peace, and blah blah blah. The Pentagon sends a guy to the widget factory in Albuquerque to request those 10,000 widgets, but the owner of the factory says the 10,000 widgets sitting on his lot have already been purchased by his friend Bob and that the government will have to wait until the factory can produce another 10,000 widgets—so come back in two weeks.

Ah, but wait! The president just signed an order invoking the Defense Production Act for widgets, so now the guy from the Pentagon gets to cut the line. He can buy those 10,000 widgets, and Bob has to wait for the next set to come off the assembly line.

That’s what the Defense Production Act allows. It can’t conjure up new solar panels or additional supplies of insulation out of thin air. It doesn’t allow the government to put a gun to anyone’s head and force them to make baby formula or to keep an aluminum smelter running.

And that’s good. Let’s consider for a moment the alternative reality where Hawley apparently resides—a reality where the Defense Production Act somehow gives the sitting president the power to shape not only whole industries but to direct exactly what products are manufactured in which places. Sure, why shouldn’t presidents have the authority to decide how many people are employed in which factories all across the country?

Once, I might have asked a different rhetorical question about whether conservatives would want to live in a country where the president had such immense powers over the market—but it is now increasingly apparent that many of them do. That’s a seriously toxic problem in our politics right now: large portions of both major parties are committed to the idea that more central planning and a more powerful chief executive would benefit the country economically. And that’s why there is so much chatter about the Defense Production Act, and why the federal government is wasting so much money on other centrally planned boondoggles.

Hawley’s call for more government intervention to protect aluminum manufacturing jobs should also spur some reflection about the last major government intervention that was supposed to protect aluminum manufacturing jobs. Remember those 10 percent tariffs on imported aluminum imposed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018? That was naked protectionism, and the announced closure of this Missouri smelter seems like pretty good evidence that it failed. There’s other evidence too: As Hawley points out in his letter, this is the third aluminum smelter in the U.S. to announce plans to downsize in recent months. Unfortunately, the failures of protectionism only ever seem to spur calls for more protectionism.

Finally, let’s address the idea that American national security is somehow weakened by the closure of a single aluminum plant that employs 400 people. In some ways, this is the crux of Hawley’s argument for the federal government to get involved. In that letter to the White House, he wrote that “the impending shutdown of the smelter will also materially degrade our defense posture, as the Department of Defense has deemed aluminum a strategic material of interest.”

It’s true that the United States does not produce enough aluminum to meet its annual demand, which is why we imported 5.9 million metric tons of it in 2022. But here’s the good news: there is plenty of aluminum available on the global market—and there would be more if the Biden administration lifted those tariffs. In 2022, more than 41 percent of the aluminum imported to the U.S. came from Canada and Mexico, hardly places that are likely to cut off trade in the event of a war. South Korea and Australia, also close U.S. allies, are the fastest-growing suppliers of aluminum to the United States.

It is, of course, unfortunate that the closing of this aluminum smelter means about 400 workers will be out of a job. Hopefully, they will quickly find others. Tragic as it might be in the short term, this is the sort of thing that happens all the time in healthy economic systems, where resources (including labor) are constantly in flux.

The idea that the closure of a single aluminum plant is a national security crisis that should require the direct intervention of the White House is, frankly, insane. By demanding that Biden get involved, Hawley is suggesting that there should be effectively no limits to a president’s power to intervene in the economy—exactly the sort of unchecked expansion of executive power that Republicans used to understand would be dangerous and counterproductive.

The post Josh Hawley Thinks the White House Can Force an Aluminum Plant To Stay Open appeared first on Reason.com.

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Repealing “blue laws” and allowing Sunday alcohol sales has much less of a negative effect than doomsayers predicted.

That’s according to a new research paper by Cristina Connolly and Alyssa McDonnell of the University of Connecticut, Marcello Graziano of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Sandro Steinbach of North Dakota State University. The study, published in the Journal of Wine Economics by Cambridge University Press, “examine[d] the impact of repealing Sunday blue laws on alcohol sales and retail competition, focusing on Connecticut’s 2012 policy change allowing Sunday beer sales in grocery stores.”

Connecticut repealed its long-standing prohibition on Sunday alcohol sales in 2012—more than a century after the law was introduced and three decades after the Connecticut Supreme Court deemed most of the state’s other Sunday sales prohibitions unconstitutional. Liquor stores would also be allowed to open on Sundays, in addition to letting grocery stores sell beer on that day.

The repeal of blue laws is not without its critics. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Tech Talk newspaper, a 2008 study found that “repealing America’s blue laws not only decreased church attendance, donations and spending, but it also led to a rise in alcohol and drug use among people who had been religious.”

Connecticut’s repeal was opposed at the time by liquor store owners themselves, who expressed concern about everything from the “social costs” of more alcohol sales to the extra expense incurred from being open an extra day.

“Proprietors of liquor stores in Connecticut and store association lobbyists claimed that allowing Sunday sales would negatively impact their livelihoods,” write the authors of the new study. “Not only would they need to pay operating costs for an extra day of the week, but there was also a concern that consumers would shift to purchasing beer at grocery stores as Sunday is one of the most popular grocery shopping days. Specifically, Connecticut’s liquor store association claimed that, as a direct result of this policy, liquor stores would lose sales and reduce employment, or close.”

The authors examined Connecticut’s sales figures for grocery and liquor stores both before and after the repeal, using other states without Sunday alcohol laws as a control group. They found “no evidence of negative impacts on beer sales in liquor stores.”

“Despite repeated claims by liquor store associations,” the report concludes, “repealing these laws did not harm liquor stores, suggesting that it is possible to repeal Sunday blue laws without negatively impacting smaller businesses.” Incidentally, the study also contradicted claims by grocery store lobbyists, who said Sunday alcohol sales would “have large, positive economic impacts.”

The same data also provides comfort for those who worry that being able to buy alcohol one additional day per week would lead to an explosion in alcoholism and addiction. “Our estimates indicate that repealing these laws significantly increased beer sales at grocery and liquor stores directly after the policy shift, but these effects disappeared afterward.”

“There is an initial bump in sales, possibly due to the novelty of the policy,” they found. “This impact levels off after the initial month, with no discernible effect on sales after the seventh week.”

As it turns out, the repeal benefited both consumers and vendors while proving the doomsayers wrong. But it was also a net positive for economic liberty as another piece of Prohibition falls by the wayside.

The post Study: If You Let People Buy Beer at Grocery Stores, the Liquor Stores Still Survive appeared first on Reason.com.

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Appealing emergency powers ruling: Earlier this week, Canada’s finance minister said the government will appeal a court ruling that declared unreasonable its use of emergency powers to shut down the Canadian trucker COVID-19 mandate protests in 2022.

“A federal judge earlier on Tuesday said the Liberal government’s use of the Emergencies Act to clear the ‘Freedom Convoy’ demonstrations that paralyzed the national capital in 2022 was unreasonable and violated Charter rights,” reports Reuters. The “Freedom Convoy” was a group of truckers who flooded into Canada’s capital, Ottawa, to protest the cross-border vaccine mandate between Canada and the U.S., which threatened their ability to work and infringed on their medical freedom.

It lasted for a month, spanning the end of January 2022 and much of February, and resulted in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau using his emergency powers to arrest protesters and freeze their bank accounts (which they then countered by using bitcoin to buy basic necessities) to attempt to suppress their political speech.

“I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires,” wrote Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley in a ruling issued this past Tuesday.

“I was convinced at the time it was the right thing to do, it was the necessary thing to do. I remain and we remain convinced of that,” said Canada’s finance minister in response, announcing the intention to appeal.

For more on the Canadian trucker protests, check out this excellent documentary produced by my Just Asking Questions co-host Zach Weissmueller.

TED fellows pitch a fit over “genocide apologists”: Who are these genocide apologists, you might wonder? Defenders of the state of Israel and its response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, during which innocent civilians were burned alive!

“Five participants in the TED fellows program, which supports and promotes emerging voices in a variety of fields across the globe, resigned Wednesday after the public-speaking organization invited hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and journalist Bari Weiss to speak at its 2024 flagship conference in Vancouver,” reports National Review. A letter sent to TED’s leadership accused the organization of choosing “not only to align itself with enablers and supporters of genocide, but to amplify their racist propaganda.”

Ackman has purportedly “defended Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and has cynically weaponised antisemitism in his programme to purge American universities of Pro-Palestinian freedom of speech” while Weiss has, in their telling, “weaponised antisemitism to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza and has a track record of transphobic extremism.” No nuance contained within, about how the Israel-Palestine conflict is, uh, fairly complicated. (And detail provided to substantiate the transphobe claim? A truly unhinged laundry list of all the wrongthinkers Weiss has platformed over the years.)

It remains to be seen whether TED will kowtow to the haters. But it’s a very bad sign when people ostensibly affiliated with the organization due to their intellectual rigor and nuance end up showing such profound incuriousness, and want to dissociate from those with whom they disagree.

For more on TED-related craziness, check out this recent Nick Gillespie x Coleman Hughes interview, in which Hughes details how he was treated by the organization.

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Scenes from New York: The city has a law on the books, called right-to-shelter, that forces it to provide emergency housing for those in need—frequently homeless people, but now also newly-arrived migrants. The only problem, other than the fact that New York City taxpayers are coughing up for it, is that the city is beyond capacity, with no end in sight to the influx. “The Legal Aid Society, which monitors the city’s compliance with the right-to-shelter mandate, said on Monday that it had been told by the city that on any given night, 800 to 1,000 migrants are left on the waiting list, and that the average wait for a bed is more than eight days,” reports The New York Times.

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QUICK HITS

• California legislators can’t seem to get basic quality of life issues under control but, sure, let’s regulate this:

A bill by State Sen. Scott Wiener would require new cars to have tech that would stop them from going more than 10 mph over the speed limit. https://t.co/966CZEDccW

— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard) January 24, 2024

• Xi Jinping is in trouble, reports Bloomberg: “Confidence in the Chinese economy is at its lowest ebb in decades.”
• Latest Just Asking Questions just dropped, in which Zach Weissmueller and I interview Marcos Falcone and chat about Javier Milei’s Davos speech, Argentina’s shock therapy, and whether the new president’s critique of social justice is correct. PLEASE reach out via DM or email if you like what you see, have suggestions for how to improve the show, or want to see a particular guest or topic covered.
• “Have you ever wondered why empty storefronts in major cities stay empty for so long?” asks Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution, linking to a new paper on “high-rent blight.”
• More weird AI applications.
• “Almost anything that is considered a big deal in Hollywood gets discussed, and treated, as if it is a big deal for America,” writes Jim Geraghty over at National Review, covering Margot Robbie.
• Stunning media malpractice from The New York Times:

Found something fucked up. THIS is how the New York Times describes Milei's deregulatory actions?

"Would have consequences" is bizarrely (I might even say DELIBERATELY) vague.

The omnibus bill is *not* consolidating more power in Milei's hands; it's returning power to… pic.twitter.com/kV7ExhgIIi

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) January 25, 2024

• Is this a democracy? 

Congressional staff are increasingly challenging their own bosses in a bid to shift the balance of power on Capitol Hill, representing a sea change in the relationship between lawmakers and the legions of workers who ensure the House and Senate function. https://t.co/0Am5wA2t8V

— Bloomberg Government (@BGOV) January 24, 2024

• BRB renaming my New York section Dispatches from Dumbopolis:

The ACLU's recent settlement with the NYPD requires that when a protest "temporarily blocks vehicular or pedestrian traffic or otherwise obstructs public streets or sidewalks, the NYPD shall whenever possible accommodate the demonstration"

— Sanjana Friedman (@metaversehell) January 25, 2024

The post Canada's Trucker Crackdown appeared first on Reason.com.

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An excerpt from Wednesday’s article:

What made the congressional hearing so sad was not merely the accusatory quality of the committee’s questions, or even the evasive quality of the presidents’ answers. It was that the presidents were being asked to interpret their own rules on campus speech — and couldn’t.

They’re not alone. Existing campus speech rules have led to all sorts of horror stories. Many are true. Because the regulations tend to be standardless — often, deciding what’s hateful based on the response of the listener, a so-called “heckler’s veto” — they give no fair warning of what’s forbidden, leading to such absurdities as stopping a student from passing out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day; or investigating a professor for the sin of stopping to watch a “Back the Blue” rally; or rebuking an untenured lecturer who in a discussion about race showed a documentary that included graphic images of lynching, and read aloud from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Evidently the film, like the letter, included what we’re now supposed to call the N-word. (Full disclosure: I’ve used the word often in my books — fiction and nonfiction alike — and, seemingly only yesterday, I used it in the pages of The Times.)

But even were the rules crystal clear, they’d have both students and faculty looking over their shoulders, wondering which of their ideas might bring forth not disagreement — the mother’s milk of academic life — but condemnation from their fellows and, most dreaded of all, investigation. The inculcation of fear as part of daily work on campus is very McCarthyist; more McCarthyist, even, than hauling college presidents before Congress to try to force them to place even more speech off limits. Because having to look over your shoulder is something you contend with every day….

I agree with the philosopher Seana Valentine Shiffrin that when we search for the justifications for free speech, we tend to overlook its value in crafting our own identities, the way that a self can try on ideas like clothes, to discover which fit best. Sometimes the ideas will be beautiful; sometimes they’ll be ugly; sometimes they’ll look better on one person than another.

This process of testing ideas should be encouraged, particularly among the young. But it carries risks, not least because of what we might call influencers, who wind up dictating which ideas it’s fashionable to wear and which should be tossed out. When large majorities of college students report pressure to self-censor, this is what they’re talking about….

The post "College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech." appeared first on Reason.com.

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1/26/1832: Justice George Shiras Jr.’s birthday.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: January 26, 1832 appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Canadian government’s use of emergency powers against the Freedom Convoy protest of restrictive COVID-19 policies was unreasonable and led to the infringement of individual rights, a federal judge ruled this week. The case was brought by two protesters whose bank accounts were frozen, with support from civil liberties groups. While the plaintiffs will receive some compensation for legal costs, the main result of the decision, which the government plans to appeal, is to limit the power of the state to treat political opposition as an “emergency.” It also further hobbles the prospects of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is wildly unpopular among Canadians.

Pandemic Policy and Pushback

While Americans argued over pandemic restrictions from the beginning, with opponents taking to the streets and the courts, lockdowns were more draconian in many other countries—including Canada.

“The onset of COVID-19 in March 2020 brought restrictions on personal activities and business activities across the country,” notes Statistics Canada. “The policies and mandates put in place to address the spread of COVID-19 were adapted as successive waves of the pandemic provided more data and insight on how the disease was affecting Canadian society.”

As elsewhere, such measures initially won compliance. But as business closures and other restrictions took their toll on people’s livelihoods and their sanity, angry Canadians sued, agitated, and protested against vaccine mandates and lingering restrictions. In January 2022, the Freedom Convoy, which started with truckers, converged on Ottawa so participants could voice their concerns to the federal government. Compared to demonstrations pretty much anywhere else, the convoy was only mildly disruptive. But Canada isn’t accustomed to large displays of dissent.

“By the standards of mass protests around the world, the ‘Freedom Convoy’ snarling Downtown Ottawa ranks as a nuisance,” The New York Times editorialized on February 10, 2022. “The number of protesters, about 8,000 at their peak, is modest.”

Four days later, panicked by the modest nuisance, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act to authorize extraordinary measures against the protest. In particular, the government froze the bank accounts of over 250 people and businesses linked to the protest, without due process, and compelled reluctant towing companies to remove protesters’ trucks.

The move understandably proved controversial. The resulting court challenge by two people whose accounts were frozen, supported by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation, resulted in a federal court decision this week against the government.

Protest Is Not an Emergency

“I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration,” wrote Justice Richard Mosley.

Mosley found that, while the protest “reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order,” it didn’t satisfy legal requirements for declaring a national emergency in terms of dangers to national security and threats of violence.

“Parliament’s intent in enacting the legislation was to ensure the Act would be a measure of last resort and, in particular, only where the provisions of existing Federal law could not handle the situation,” Mosley observed. “I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires,” a Latin phrase meaning “outside the law.”

As a result, he added, “the decision to issue the Proclamation was unreasonable and led to infringement of Charter rights.”

Surprise Victory for Liberty

The ruling that the Trudeau government’s actions violated Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms may surprise some Canadians, since it hasn’t provided much protection in the past. The charter’s protections are, well, squishier than those of the U.S. Bill of Rights.

“The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” the document hedges in Section 1.

“The existence of Canada’s limitations provision was controversial back when Canadians were actually debating what the charter ought to look like,” the National Post‘s Tyler Dawson observed two years ago in a piece on failed attempts to challenge pandemic restrictions by citing the Charter. “Peter Hogg, one of the leading authorities on Canadian constitutional law, wrote that of the 46 groups that addressed Section 1 in their discussions of how to improve the charter, 38 of them said it had to go.”

Under Charter protections, Dawson noted, “it’s relatively clear the courts have not been sympathetic to the idea that public-health measures have unreasonably infringed upon Canadians’ rights.”

Given the Charter’s weaknesses and coming after a mandatory government review of the use of the Emergencies Act that hemmed and hawed its way through signing off on the proclamation, Mosley’s decision represents a welcome surprise for both opponents of restrictive public health policies and for advocates of free and open dissent.

“The invocation of the Emergencies Act is one of the worst examples of government overreach during the pandemic and we are very pleased to see Justice Mosley recognize that Charter rights were breached and that Cabinet must follow the law and only use the Act as a tool of last resort,” commented Canadian Constitution Foundation Executive Director Joanna Baron.

A Big Decision with Political Implications

The decision comes as Canadians grow disenchanted with restrictive government policies as well as with the guy behind them.

“Lockdowns and vaccine mandates hit a nerve and mobilized populists who denounced it all as an encroachment on personal freedom,” Politico‘s Zi-Ann Lum wrote earlier this month. “The ‘Freedom Convoy’ showdown demonstrated that Trudeau could win a fight over substance — he prevailed in a legal battle over his emergency crackdown — but lose in a war of sentiments.”

Since then, Trudeau appears to have lost the legal battle too, with this week’s court ruling. As the decision sinks in, his approval sits at a sub-Biden-esque 32 percent, with 64 percent disapproval, according to Angus Reid Institute.

Even lawmakers from Trudeau’s own Liberal party are flirting with the idea that he should step down.

The Canadian government immediately announced that it plans to appeal Mosley’s ruling against the use of the Emergency Act. Officials may ultimately save face in court, but it looks like tolerance for authoritarianism, and for the creatures who wield it, is waning north of the border.

The post Crackdown on Freedom Convoy Violated Canadians' Rights, Says Court appeared first on Reason.com.

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In Rutherford County, Tennessee, kids as young as 7 years old were getting thrown in jail for incredibly minor offenses—stealing a football or pulling someone’s hair. Some kids were even jailed for acts that weren’t crimes at all, such as failing to stop an after-school fight. Worse still, the kids were frequently put in solitary confinement, even though that’s explicitly prohibited for children under Tennessee law.

Not only were these jailings illegal, but pretty much everyone working in the Rutherford County Juvenile Court knew it—including the county’s sole juvenile court judge, Donna Scott Davenport.

In The Kids of Rutherford County, a four-part podcast series from Serial Productions and The New York Times, Meribah Knight examines how so many kids could be unlawfully detained and why it took so long to stop the practice.

The podcast follows two public defenders, Wes Clark and Mark Downton, who eventually launched a successful lawsuit against the county after years of maddening attempts to convince Davenport that her practices were illegal.

Thanks to Clark and Downton’s suit, Rutherford County is no longer illegally detaining its children on minor offenses and Davenport is no longer on the bench. But the pair didn’t end up with an unalloyed victory. The $11 million payout that Clark and Downton won in court? Only 23 percent of the eligible recipients could be contacted to make claims, so just $2.2 million was distributed to the jailed kids.

The Kids of Rutherford County showcases just how difficult it is to force broken government systems to change, and how difficult it is to make the victims of injustice whole.

The post Review: Exposing a Broken Juvenile Court System appeared first on Reason.com.

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Police Scotland has agreed to pay £5,500 ($6,967 U.S.) to settle a lawsuit brought by Angus Cameron, a street preacher who was handcuffed and detained for “homophobic language.” The agency will also pay £9,400 ($11,907 U.S.) for Cameron’s legal costs. The police also agreed to remove a “non-crime” hate incident report from Cameron’s record. Last year, Police Scotland entered more non-crime hate reports into its records than the actual number of hate crimes it responded to.

The post Brickbat: Thought Crime appeared first on Reason.com.

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