Category: reason

Tyler Harrington and his wife were asleep in their beds when four Harris County, Texas, Constable Officers burst into their home and held the terrified couple at gunpoint. While the cops eventually realized they were in the wrong house, they didn’t leave without admonishing the couple for keeping their door unlocked.

Harrington has now filed a lawsuit, arguing that the officers’ invasion of his home was an unconstitutional breach of his Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

On September 24, 2022, Officer James Lancaster responded to a call from a woman, named “Mrs. H” in the complaint, who said that she heard a knock at her back door. Lancaster spoke to Mrs. H and examined the outside of her property, finding nothing suspicious. 

Mrs. H also told Lancaster that her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend would arrive to check out the house themselves. Mrs. H then decided to “get in her car and drive around until others came home.” When Mrs. H’s daughter and her boyfriend arrived, another neighbor, named “Mr. S,” called the police to report their truck as suspicious. When talking to dispatchers, Mr. S accidentally gave the wrong address for Mrs. H’s house, reporting Harrington’s address instead.

Soon, two more officers arrived. According to the complaint, Lancaster clearly should have known that dispatch had been given the wrong address. While pointing to Mrs. H’s house, he told the other officers, “That’s the house with the person knocking on the back door, that was the house earlier….I checked the one across the street.” In reference to Harrington’s address, he said he had “never been to this house.”

But the officers decided to enter the Harrington’s home anyway, testing both the front and back doors and finding them unlocked. A fourth officer arrived, and according to the suit, Lancaster told him that they were “waiting on the owner,” despite knowing that it was a different house than the one owned by Mrs. H, where the owner had left and was to return shortly.

Around midnight, two of the officers burst into the Harrington’s home with their guns drawn, shouting “Constable’s Office, come up with your hands out!” Harrington’s wife, whose full name wasn’t identified in the suit, was woken up by the officer’s shouting. She confirmed that she lived at the house, and one of the officers, Jared Lindsay ordered her to get her ID and come to the door.

Around the same time, Lancaster entered the home with his gun drawn, shouting the Spanish phrase for “hands up,” and began searching the home. As the officers held his wife at gunpoint, Tyler Harrington woke up and walked out of the bedroom, at which point the officers began pointing their guns at him as well, shouting questions at the couple. 

Eventually, the officers realized they were at the wrong house but still led the couple back into their own home at gunpoint. After releasing the couple, Lindsay told them that “someone had reported people searching the front and back doors of this house,” adding that the caller had told them the owner was gone. 

After again confirming that the Harringtons were the owners of their own home, the complaint claimed that Lindsay lectured the couple for not keeping their doors locked, telling them “because when we see a door unlocked like that, we’re gonna come in and make sure everybody’s safe.”

Several minutes later, the complaint alleges that Lindsay said of the couple, “Oh yeah they’re gonna complain…they’re gonna complain…we scared them.”

“No reasonable officer could have believed there was probable cause to enter and search Mr. Harrington’s house,” the complaint states. “Defendants’ flagrant disregard for Mr. Harrington’s constitutional rights subjected him to agonizing emotional pain, fear, severe and ongoing emotional injuries.”

Unfortunately, the Harringtons are far from the first people to be terrorized by police entering the wrong home. In 2020, Seattle police terrified an innocent woman when they burst into her apartment, which wasn’t even in the same building as the apartment they meant to search. In 2021, Illinois police detained a family for over six hours when they executed a search warrant on the wrong house. And a report released last year found that Chicago police raided the wrong house over 20 times between 2017 and 2020.

The post Texas Cops Held a Terrified Couple at Gunpoint After Raiding the Wrong House appeared first on Reason.com.

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The post (at Balkinization) is here; as I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t studied the issues in this case closely enough to speak to this myself, but Prof. Lederman is a leading constitutional expert, and his thoughts struck me as much worth passing along:

1. Colorado Is Not “Enforcing” or “Implementing” Section 3.

The briefs of all four of the parties in the Supreme Court (and those of many amici, as well) proceed on the assumption, articulated repeatedly in their briefs, that if Colorado were to omit Donald Trump’s name from its presidential primary ballot—something that, as I explain in this post, Colorado has not in fact done and is unlikely to do—the state would acting to “enforce” or “implement” Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, some of the parties’ arguments take this as a jumping-off point, and depend upon it.

But it’s wrong. Colorado isn’t purporting to “enforce” Section 3, and states don’t have any power to enforce its disqualification directive with respect to federal officers.

To be sure, a state has the power to enforce Section 3 with respect to state officers who are subject to Section 3’s disqualification rule. Relevant state officials or courts with statutory or state constitutional authority, for example, can refuse to appoint a Section-3-disqualified person, or remove such a person from office. And, if state law prescribes it, a state legislature might be able to remove state legislators, as well as other state officers by way of impeachment, etc.

But a state does not have any legal authority—nor, to my knowledge, has any state ever claimed such power—to enjoin a disqualified federal official from holding office, or to remove him or her from such office….

Once one understands that Colorado is simply enforcing its own state-law rule prescribing exclusion of ineligible candidates from primary election ballots for purposes of state election management—a rule not confined to presidential candidates—one can see that Trump’s argument that Colorado is imposing an additional “qualification” for Trump to hold office (according to Trump, Colorado has effectively required a candidate not to be subject to Section 3 ineligibility at the time of the primary election rather than on January 20, 2025) rests upon a category error: By declaring that candidates for President may not appear on its presidential primary ballot unless they meet certain conditions (including apparent eligibility to hold the office), Colorado is no more imposing extraconstitutional “qualifications” on persons holding that national office than Virginia did in 2012 when it excluded Rick Perry from its presidential primary ballot because he failed to timely submit the necessary number of voter signatures. See Perry v. Judd, 471 F. App’x 219 (4th Cir. 2012). (I pulled that example from Derek Muller’s excellent amicus brief.)

2. Colorado Also is Not (Yet) Exercising Its Authority Under Article I’s “Electors” Clause

One of Trump’s arguments (see Part V of his brief) is that the Colorado Supreme Court violated the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Art. I, § 1, cl. 2, which requires states to appoint presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,” by misreading Colorado law to require exclusion of Trump’s name from the presidential primary ballot. Somewhat surprisingly, the Anderson plaintiffs appear to accept this framing, insisting (at page 46 of their brief) that the Electors Clause “gives the states ‘far-reaching authority’ to run presidential elections, ‘absent some other constitutional constraint'” (quoting Chiafalo v. Washington, 140 S. Ct. 2316, 2324 (2020)) (emphasis added). Secretary of Griswold likewise implies (Br. at 25) that Colorado is exercising its “far-reaching” Electors Clause authority here, and several amicus briefs do the same.

The Anderson plaintiffs have misquoted Chiafalo. The Chiafalo Court did not say that Article I, section 1, clause 2 gives the states “far-reaching authority” “to run presidential elections” such as the primary election currently ongoing in Colorado. The Court wrote, instead, that “Article II, § 1’s appointments power gives the States far-reaching authority over presidential electors, absent some other constitutional constraint.” 120 S. Ct. at 2324 (emphasis added). By replacing the words “over presidential electors” with “to run presidential elections,” the plaintiffs’ brief misleadingly implies that the U.S. Constitution empowers the states to run presidential primary elections. But it doesn’t. And this case involves a primary election ballot….

3. Whether and How the Supreme Court’s Decision Could Affect the Content of Colorado Ballots in 2024

In my first substantive post in this series, I suggested that the case might be moot unless the U.S. Supreme Court is persuaded that its decision could possibly affect the content of the primary election ballot in Colorado—or at least the state’s general election ballot in November. As I read the state supreme court’s judgment and the Colorado Election Code, it’s not clear to me how the Supreme Court’s decision could make any difference at all on any Colorado ballots, particularly because the statute upon which the state supreme court relied to establish a governmental authority to strike from the primary ballot the names of unqualified candidates for federal office does not, best I can tell, apply to the general election….

If you’re at all interested in the subject, read the whole post.

The post Prof. Marty Lederman (Georgetown) on <i>Trump v. Anderson</i>: "Two Important Things All the Parties Get Wrong, …" appeared first on Reason.com.

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The beginning of Godzilla Minus One, the latest installment in the 70-year series of kaiju flicks made by the Japanese production company Toho, upends one part of the usual formula: Tokyo is already a smoldering wasteland.

That’s not because of a monstrous mutant reptile. It’s from the relentless firebombings carried out by the American military near the end of World War II.

Before evolving into an anti-hero in later movies who protected Japan from other monsters (and the occasional alien invasion), the original Godzilla was a fantastical metaphor for the destruction rained down on Japan’s citizens during the war: terrifying, inescapable, monstrous. Minus One plumbs those same depths, and writer/director Takashi Yamazaki brings to the screen the most dreadful version of Godzilla since the franchise began.

Caught up in the horror is fighter pilot Koichi Shikishima, who returns to the bombed-out remains of Tokyo after refusing to kill himself in a kamikaze mission. Wracked by survivors’ guilt, he joins others who are rebuilding their lives brick by brick, seeking some sense of normalcy—until the inevitable arrival of Godzilla blows that away.

By its final act, Godzilla Minus One delivers something else unexpected from a monster movie: a compelling rumination about the value of a single life and the emptiness of the notion of a “noble death” in war.

The final showdown with Godzilla is led by an all-volunteer force of private citizens who have used their human capacity for reason to engineer a solution. Shikishima, once ordered by the state to throw away his life pointlessly, discovers that virtue lies not in being willing to die for an abstract cause but in choosing to live for your neighbors, friends, and community.

The post Review: <i>Godzilla Minus One</i> Rejects the Idea of a 'Noble Death' in War appeared first on Reason.com.

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Between 2015, when a sleek and innovative nicotine delivery device known as Juul hit the market, and 2019, when that product was falsely implicated in a rash of lung injuries, its manufacturer’s reputation and financial potential plummeted. The four-part Netflix documentary Big Vape, based on Time correspondent Jamie Ducharme’s 2021 book of the same name, is a surprisingly evenhanded and fair-minded account of how that happened.

As even their critics concede, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, the former smokers who founded Juul Labs, were sincerely determined to do well by doing good, offering a potentially lifesaving alternative to combustible cigarettes. Their harm-reducing zeal was widely shared within the company, which helps explain the internal dismay at tobacco giant Altria’s 2018 investment in Juul.

In addition to the sin of collaborating with the enemy, Juul was charged with luring underage consumers by selling a cool, convenient, discreet, and addictive product in “kid-friendly” flavors, thereby triggering a youth vaping “epidemic.” But as Big Vape makes clear, the same features that appealed to teenagers also appealed to adults, including the smokers who had the most to gain from products like Juul.

The docuseries does a commendable job of presenting contrasting perspectives on the controversy over those products. We hear from anti-vaping agitators, but we also hear from harm reduction advocates. The latter include David Abrams, a tobacco control expert at New York University, who wisely counsels against sacrificing the health interests of adults in the name of protecting children.

The post Review: Netflix Delivers a Surprisingly Balanced Take on Vaping appeared first on Reason.com.

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Five and a half months ago, in August 2023, our article on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, was accepted for publication by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

The article’s core thesis – that Section Three’s disqualification of insurrectionists from office is legally operative, self-executing, sweeping in scope, and likely disqualifies numerous participants in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election – obviously has enormous implications for our national political life today.  Among other important consequences, it means that former president Donald J. Trump, who is running for president again in 2024, is constitutionally disqualified from holding that or any other covered office, unless and until two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to remove his disqualification.

Shortly after being accepted for publication, we posted the draft manuscript of the article on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN).  The article (and its thesis) immediately attracted wide interest:  For an academic article, The Sweep and Force of Section Three has provoked an unusual amount of interest and attention.  It has been widely discussed on air, in print, online, and in the academy. And it has been widely cited in the current litigation about the enforcement of Section Three. As readers surely know, the Colorado Supreme Court held that Mr. Trump is indeed disqualified by Section Three from future office as a matter of federal constitutional law; and that this renders him ineligible for inclusion on the state primary ballot for election to that office as a matter of Colorado state law.  The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari to review that decision in what is sure to be one of its most important cases of the term.

For the most part, we have been content to let the analysis and arguments of The Sweep and Force of Section Three speak for themselves and have not participated in the subsequent public debate and litigation over its thesis.  The manuscript itself is quite detailed – it runs 126 pages in its pre-publication form – and frankly it anticipates many of the objections that have been raised against its legal conclusions.  Up until now, we have not elsewhere responded to these objections in print, at least not systematically.

But the occasion of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision in Anderson v. Griswold, and the Supreme Court’s pending review of that decision in Trump v. Anderson, provides, we think, an appropriate occasion for us to address some of the arguments that have been made about Section Three.  As noted, we discuss some, even many, of these points in our original article.  The article is now in the final stages of editing with the excellent staff of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.  In the editing process, we decided against burdening the article’s discussion with many responses to specific objections that have been made to its thesis, as those objections have arisen in public debate over the last four months, for two reasons: First, the version from last fall, as edited, largely stands on its own and has already been read by many in that form, which would makes it somewhat awkward (and perhaps irritating to some readers) to revise that text significantly to respond to assertions or critiques offered since September.  Second, and relatedly, responding on the fly in the main text to objections as they arose would have made the article something of a moving target, and perhaps further delayed publication.

We adhere to all the points we made in that manuscript and have changed little.  Nothing in the ensuing commentary, discussion, and litigation has caused us to revise our core propositions:

• that, as a matter of the original public meaning of the text, the structure, and the history of the Constitution – our methodology for interpreting and applying the Constitution – Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment remains legally operative and in force;
• that it directly enacts a specific and discernable set of constitutional rules of disqualification of prospective officeholders and requires no further action or legislation in order to have immediate and binding legal effect;
• that the rules enacted by Section Three are binding on all officials of government whose duties are affected by those rules (including state and federal officials, legislatures, and state and federal courts);
• that Section Three supersedes or qualifies (or satisfies) prior constitutional rules to the extent of any conflict between them;
• that Section Three enacts a set of sweeping but readily ascertainable set of rules of constitutional disqualification from office, defined by the meaning of specific constitutional language that should be understood and applied in its original sense, in context;
• that those rules apply to persons who have held or who now seek the office of President of the United States;
• and that the operation of those rules renders Donald Trump constitutionally ineligible for the office of President or any other.

Because of the fast timetable for the Supreme Court’s consideration of Trump v. Anderson, we have chosen to address in a short series of blog post/essays a few points in response to the ongoing Section Three debate – points that we might otherwise have reserved for a later law review essay.  We will address certain discrete arguments that have been raised, elaborating where necessary on points we make in The Sweep and Force of Section Three, responding to certain discrete points of contention, clarifying points of possible confusion, and parrying objections we could not fully have anticipated but that we think badly flawed (or simply very odd – which might in part explain why we did not anticipate them).  We will also address a few general points that have arisen in connection with the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of the issues presented in the Trump v. Anderson case.  Finally, we will point out minor respects in which we have modified, or qualified, positions taken in our article, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, in the course of editing and consideration of further comments. We may collect and revise them into a more final form when they are complete.

Our goal is for each blog post/essay to address a single specific point or theme unburdened by extensive footnotes.   For example, we will soon discuss the objection that applying Section Three would be “undemocratic.”  Another may take on the argument, offered by some, that we should decline to enforce and apply Section Three because complying with the Constitution in this regard would be politically disruptive and perhaps dangerous.  Another may examine arguments that Section Three issues are “political questions” that courts should refuse to decide as a matter of constitutional law.  Another may look at the way “constitutional legislative history” has been used, and in some instances severely misused, in debating the meaning of Section Three.  Another may examine further the assertion (already addressed in our main article) that Section Three does not apply to Donald Trump because he was not, as President, “an officer of the United States” and because the Presidency, the office he seeks again, is not an “office under the United States.”  Another may examine the suggestion that even if Trump is constitutionally disqualified from being President of the United States, that does not mean he is constitutionally ineligible to be elected as President of the United States.  And so on.  (We make no promises at this point.)

This introductory essay reflects a broader theme to the anticipated series, reflected in the title of this post: “Fighting the Meaning of Section Three.” While we do not in any way doubt the good faith of our many critics, it seems to us that many of the objections and arguments raised against our thesis do not join issue with the legal arguments from text, history and structure. Some are political objections to complying with and carrying into effect the constitutional rules set forth in Section Three, even assuming our analysis is correct.  (Or, what is much the same thing, they use burdens of proof or presumptions to override what would otherwise be the correct understanding of Section Three, for essentially political reasons.)  Such arguments resist our claims about the meaning of Section Three, but they do not refute it.  Others have sought to develop escape hatches, or loopholes, or (in one common expression) “off ramps” to avoid the legal conclusions set forth in our article.  Still other objections wrestle forthrightly with the legal analysis of our article on conventional legal terms, but they are ultimately unavailing. Each of these classes of objections is “fighting” the meaning of Section Three in a different sense, but all of them are wrong.

As Gerard Magliocca recently observed, judges often use the phrase “the opinion won’t write,” to “describe the following situation: Their instinct is to decide a case in a particular way. But when they sit down to write the opinion, they find that they can’t logically reach that result. This forces them to reconsider their initial conclusion.” He further observes: “In a nutshell, this is what is happening with the Trump case. The instincts go one way and the law goes the other way. The more you look at the legal arguments, the less sure you are that Trump is eligible.” This, we think, is the same process we are witnessing with those who are fighting the meaning of Section Three. At some point, it is time to conclude that one is fighting for the wrong side.

Enough said for now. In the next essay, we begin with the question of whether applying Section Three’s disqualification to disqualify a presidential candidate is “undemocratic” in any constitutionally relevant sense.

The post Fighting the Meaning of Section Three appeared first on Reason.com.

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An appeals court in Thailand has sentenced democracy activist Mongkol Thirakot to 50 years in prison for Facebook posts he made that were critical of the country’s monarchy. A trial court had sentenced him to 28 years, but the appellate court found him guilty on 11 more counts during his appeal and gave him a longer sentence.

The post Brickbat: Royal Trouble appeared first on Reason.com.

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American students experienced historic losses in reading and math performance during COVID-19 school closures. Years after schools reopened, there is continuing evidence of lasting harm to student learning, with everything from ACT scores to school attendance showing continued slumps when compared to pre-pandemic years. 

But a new study shows that students have regained some of the ground lost after the pandemic, sparking hope that depressed academic achievement may not be permanent.

Researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth looked at test scores of third- through eighth-graders from around 8,000 school districts in 30 states. They found that 35 percent of school districts lost more than half a year of instruction immediately after the pandemic, while just 27 percent saw either no change or improved results. 

Unsurprisingly, learning losses were most extreme in low-income school districts. In many states, recovery in scores is driven primarily by improvements in higher-income school districts. However, there were some outliers—poor districts where scores made seemingly miraculous improvements and wealthy districts where scores continued to decline.

The researchers found that by 2023, students had regained about one-third of their losses in math and about one-quarter of their losses in reading. Of the 30 states studied, only one—Oregon—failed to improve upon its 2022 scores in 2023.

An analysis of the researchers’ data published in The New York Times on Wednesday proposed that how schools spent federal relief dollars played a major role in which schools improved and which didn’t. When the federal government poured $190 billion in a bid to help schools recover after closures, only 20 percent of the funds schools received were required to be used to address learning loss. 

As a result, many school districts devoted the majority of their funds to cover expenses that have nothing to do with student learning—like building new athletic facilities, paying custodial workers, or even building a city-owned birding center. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that schools that spent a higher portion of their funds on addressing learning loss rebounded better after the pandemic. When the Times interviewed educators at school districts with unusually high score recovery rates, school employees emphasized how their schools focused on spending federal aid money primarily on academics. 

Unfortunately, the study also found that many students would likely never recover from the losses they experienced as a result of extended school closures—meaning that thousands of American schoolchildren are likely to enter adulthood with major academic gaps and could face permanently depressed earning potential.

“Few would be content to know that poor children paid a higher price for the pandemic than others—but that is exactly the path many states are on,” wrote the researchers in a report of their findings. “Last year, students made up one-third of the pandemic loss in math and one-quarter of the loss in reading. Although good news, it also means that even if schools maintain the same pace this year, students, especially in lower-income districts, are unlikely to have returned to 2019 levels of achievement when the federal dollars are gone.”

The post Test Scores Are Rebounding After Pandemic School Closures, but Some Students Will Never Catch Up appeared first on Reason.com.

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From WFLA (Kaycee Sloan) Monday:

According to documents, Palestinian-American student Seif Asi, 21, approached a table of Jewish students and got into a one to two-minute “heated conversation” during a UCF Office of Student Involvement approved pro-Israel free expression event on Jan. 23….

When UCFPD stopped Asi, he told them that he was Palestinian and had family in Palestine, adding that he was tired of seeing Jewish supporters on campus and complained about a pro-Israel match that occurred last week.

The arrest report shows that Asi told police he saw the same group of students at the march, and it made him upset when he saw them setting up their table on Tuesday. He also told police that he’s “tired of seeing students on campus defend the killing of Palestinian people.”

The 21-year-old said he was on his way back from working out when his “emotions got the better of him.” … The three victims, who are part of a group called “Students Supporting Israel” or SSI, provided sworn verbal and written statements consistent with each other. The students said Asi accused them of supporting the death of his family members back home. Then, all three students allegedly heard Asi say, “You won’t be here anymore when I come back and shoot you.”

Asi was charged with three counts of intimidation based on display of indicia of religious or ethnic heritage, under Fla. Stat. § 784.0493, which reads:

784.0493 Harassment or intimidation based on religious or ethnic heritage.—

(1) As used in this section, the terms “credible threat” and “harass” have the same meaning as in s. 784.048(1).
(2) A person may not willfully and maliciously harass or intimidate another person based on the person’s wearing or displaying of any indicia relating to any religious or ethnic heritage.
(3) A person who violates subsection (2) commits a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.
(4) A person who violates subsection (2), and in the course of committing the violation makes a credible threat to the person who is the subject of the harassment or intimidation, commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
(5) A violation of this section is considered a hate crime for purposes of the reporting requirements of s. 877.19.

The post Florida Student Arrested for Threatening to Shoot Jewish Students appeared first on Reason.com.

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From University of Missouri’s The Maneater (Sophia Anderson & Vivi Hirshfield) last Friday:

On Wednesday, Jan. 17, an MU student pled guilty to second degree property damage in Columbia Municipal Court for flipping a display Shabbat table with symbolic place settings for Israeli hostages in Speakers Circle in November 2023….

[Students Ilay] Kielmanowicz [of Mizzou Students Supporting Israel] and [Daniel] Swindell had set up two tables — one of which was arranged like a Shabbat table to show support for Israeli hostages. The other had “books and pamphlets about Israel and Jews and Zionism and the Israeli Palestinian conflict, which students were able to take,” Kielmanowicz said. The Shabbat table included fliers with photos of Israeli hostages that read “KIDNAPPED” above them….

The police report states that the student approached Swindell because he was wearing a garment that said “Zionist.” Swindell confirmed this detail, and Adam Kruse, Assistant City Prosecutor, cited it in court.

The student stated they found the display “insensitive and offensive,” according to Kielmanowicz. The two engaged in a conversation about display and the Israel-Hamas war until the student reportedly flipped over the volunteers’ Shabbat table, breaking the place settings consisting of Swindell’s dishes….

“The university is committed to ensuring everyone on our campus continues to have the right to demonstrate in a peaceful manner,” Christian Basi of the MU News Bureau wrote in a statement to The Maneater. “We will not tolerate actions that disrupt others[‘] rights to demonstrate or exercise their free speech rights.” …

UPDATE: I erroneously omitted the sentence: “a year of probation, 20 hours of community service and a court fee of $31.50.”

The post Missouri Student Pleads Guilty for Damaging Display Supporting Israeli Hostages appeared first on Reason.com.

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From a Justice Department press release Jan. 30:

Aimenn D. Penny, 20, of Alliance, Ohio, was arrested and charged last year with one count of violating the Church Arson Prevention Act, one count of using fire to commit a federal felony, one count of malicious use of explosive materials, and one count of possessing a destructive device. On Oct. 23, 2023, Penny pleaded guilty to the church arson hate crime and using fire and explosives to commit a felony.

According to court documents, on March 25, 2023, Penny made Molotov cocktails and drove to the Community Church of Chesterland (CCC), in Chesterland, Ohio. Angered by the church’s plan to host two drag events the following weekend, Penny threw two Molotov cocktails at the church, hoping to burn it to the ground. Through Penny’s guilty plea, he admitted to using force through fire and explosives, intending to obstruct CCC congregants in their enjoyment and expression of their religious beliefs….

The post "Ohio Man Sentenced to 18 Years in Prison for Firebombing a Church that Planned to Host Drag Show Events" appeared first on Reason.com.

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