Tag: in-the-news

A nation-first site for users to safely inject drugs will not be opening in Philadelphia this week after all.

A U.S. attorney from the Justice Department is taking the project to court to stop them, but that’s not what caused the delay. The roadblock is an angry response from people in the neighborhood.

Officials and activists with the non-profit Safehouse have been working on plans to open a privately operated, donor-funded safe injection facility (SIF). The place would give drug addicts a place off the street where they can inject under the watch of trained medical professionals who could respond to overdoses.

They’ve been fighting the U.S. Department of Justice, which thinks this harm reduction tool is against federal law and encourages drug use. The feds lost the first round of the fight when a federal judge ruled against them last October.

But last week, when Safehouse announced its first site to open, it was not in the Kensington neighborhood, as everybody thought it would be, but in South Philadelphia, a few miles away. Some residents felt blindsided.

Kensington is infamous for open use in homeless encampments—and for high rates of overdoses and deaths. South Philadelphia has its share of drug deaths, too. But the announcement nevertheless sparked outrage, prompting organizers to pull back and “regroup” to decide the best course of action. The lease they had arranged in South Philadelphia has been cancelled.

Christopher Moraff, who has been doing street-level coverage of Philadelphia’s drug abuse crisis for years, reports in Filter that while Kensington was planned for an initial SIF, Safehouse worried that it would not be able to immediately meet demand; meanwhile, the owner of the building they were intending to lease got cold feet and pulled out. Safehouse Vice President Ronda Goldfein told Moraff that they picked South Philadelphia as another location because that part of the city has the second-highest number of drug fatalities.

A big difference in drug use patterns made people more comfortable with having a facility in Kensington than in South Philadelphia. Despite the overdose statistics, Moraff explains, most of the drug abuse in South Philadelphia takes place behind closed doors:

In contrast to Kensington, which is known for its open-air drug markets, drugs and drug paraphernalia are not visible on the streets of South Philly. Most dealers conduct their business by phone and sometimes make house calls. The population is predominantly Italian American, with a tradition of children continuing to live in their parents’ homes into adulthood.

The majority of fatal overdoses here happen inside the home, with no one present to intervene. Compare that to Kensington, where injection drug use is often conducted in the open, and frequently in groups. Kensington’s proximity to Prevention Point Philadelphia also provides ready access to naloxone and sterile syringes.

No comparable program serves people who use drugs in lower South Philly. Few of the injecting drug users I’ve spoken with here carry naloxone, and for most, the only way to obtain sterile syringes is to purchase them from a pharmacy, making access less likely.

Many South Philly residents fear that opening the facility there will draw in Kensington users or even cause a surge in open outdoor use even though the point of a SIF is to serve as an alternative to this behavior.

It’s an unfortunate setback for Safehouse. But with luck they’ll find a path forward and we can start seeing whether SIFs can help reduce overdose deaths, help reduce the spread of diseases, and help connect addicts to resources to assist them.

 

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The Colorado House of Representatives passed a bill last week that would end the death penalty in the state. The legislation is now headed to Gov. Jared Polis’ desk, where he is expected to sign it. The bill will not directly affect the cases of the three men currently on death row in Colorado, but the governor has indicated that if the bill becomes law he would seriously consider commuting their sentences to life in prison.

Two of the men on death row, Robert Ray and Sir Mario Owens, were convicted and sentenced for murdering Javad Marshall-Fields and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe. State Sen. Rhonda Fields (D–Aurora) is Marshall-Fields’ mother, and she is one of the few Democrats in the Senate who has remained opposed to a repeal. Indeed, her strong opposition sank a previous repeal effort and has encouraged other politicians to oppose repeal.

State Rep. Tom Sullivan (D–Aurora) has led a similar opposition effort in the House. Sullivan’s son was killed in the 2012 Aurora Theater shooting. Though shooter James Holmes was eventually sentenced to life in prison, Sullivan maintained that he would continue fighting for the death penalty in the state.

But the families of murder victims have not all come down on the same side of the issue. Some have spoken up in favor of the bill. The American Civil Liberties Union released a video earlier this year featuring Coloradans who opposed the death penalty despite losing a loved one to murder. Some of these testimonies were taken to the state Capitol: Sharletta Evans, whose 3-year-old son was murdered, and Victoria Baker-Willford, whose mother was murdered, told lawmakers why they were opposed to the death penalty despite these tragedies. Some have religious objections, while others said the death penalty would just bring further trauma.

Now that the repeal bill has passed, advocates have had a chance to reflect on the fight.

“While Republicans are not in the majority in the Colorado Legislature, they are among the prime sponsors of the bill, and their support has made it possible to repeal the death penalty,” says Hannah Cox, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. “They are backed by a wide coalition of faith leaders, murder victims’ family members, former members of corrections, and yes, grassroots conservatives, all who feel it is far past time for this antiquated system to be left in the history books.”

“167 innocent people have been officially exonerated from death row since 1973,” adds Cassandra Stubbs, director of the Capital Punishment Project at the ACLU. “There is no excuse for any government that respects justice, fairness, and human dignity to continue to execute its people.”

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Bogota, Colombia—Colombia is about to dust off a controversial weapon from the bloodiest period of the nation’s decades-long battle against cocaine production. The aerial fumigation program was halted in 2014 after the World Health Organization said the main herbicide used in fumigation, glyphosate, probably causes cancer in humans. Experts also pointed to the program’s decreasing effectiveness.

Colombia is currently confronting a massive spike in cocaine production. In 2019, police and army units destroyed a record amount of coca fields—the raw ingredient used to make cocaine—using dangerous manual search and eradicate methods.

Yet during this same period, Colombia produced more cocaine than at any other time in its troubled history, according to the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC). The United States has attributed this recent rise to the halting of Colombia’s aerial fumigation program in 2014.

Local counter-narcotics experts, human rights groups, environmental experts, and the UNODC, by contrast, have criticized aerial fumigation as ineffective, as a health and environmental hazard, and as a waste of money.

WOLA, an advocacy group for human rights in Latin America, has presented evidence suggesting that aerial fumigation actually worsens the social damage caused by coca cultivation.

The Colombian Ministry of Justice announced the decision to resume aerial fumigation in December as part of an approach to “utilize every tool at the disposal of the National government to combat narco-trafficking.”

The decision comes on the heels of threats last year by President Donald Trump to revoke aid to the South American nation over U.S. frustration with spiraling cocaine production. Colombia has “done nothing for us,” as Trump put it. He even threatened to de-certify Colombia as a partner in the drug war, a decision that would leave America’s closest ally in South America in the same category as Venezuela.

A U.S. Embassy Bogota spokesperson told Reason, “An integrated coca eradication program that uses all tools, including manual eradication, crop substitution, alternative development, and aerial eradication, offers the best chance to reduce the high cocaine production that threatens the people of both countries.

In 1998, Colombia produced 90 percent of the world’s cocaine, or just over 600 metric tons. In 2017, Colombia produced more than double that amount: 1,379 metric tons, according to UNODC, and the figure continues to rise.

Global cocaine sales have grown since the late 1990s (after tapering off in the early 2000s) and currently account for more than $150 billion annually, according to the Organization of American States (OAS). Those gains, which dwarf the profits of any legal corporation in the world, fund armed groups, destabilize governments, and empower criminals across all of Latin America. During that same period, domestic consumption of cocaine in Colombia has quadrupled.

Civil War, Narco-Wars, and Plan Colombia

Colombia first began fumigation in 1994 at the insistence of the United States. Colombian drug cartels had recently begun domestically cultivating coca, which they had previously imported from Peru and Bolivia, and Colombian production was skyrocketing. The U.S. decision would prove to be a fateful one. It inspired a period of heavy U.S investment and military involvement as part of an anti-drug initiative called “Plan Colombia.”

Plan Colombia would balloon over the next decade to involve direct military support and training for a Colombian government that found itself besieged not only by the after-effects of the narco-wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by an ongoing civil war as well. As the issues became increasingly intertwined, the United States would find itself increasingly mired in the bloody conflict.

The U.S. transferred $10 billion in bilateral foreign assistance to the Colombian government between 2000 and 2016 to fund Plan Colombia, according to Jorge Mantilla, criminology researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The U.S. also provided helicopters, planes, training, and intelligence.

After the death of Pablo Escobar, the fall of the Medellin cartel, and the subsequent collapse of the Cali cartel in the late 1990s, the cocaine industry became increasingly fractured, and the main armed actors in Colombia’s ongoing civil war, right-wing paramilitary “self-defense forces” and left-wing rebel group the FARC, became major players..

According to Luis Moreno, a former U.S. narcotics affairs section director and coordinator for Plan Colombia, “The FARC were strangling [Colombia]. Our goals were threefold; deprive the rebels of their funding, drive up the price of cocaine in the U.S. while reducing its purity, and make it less available in the United States.”

Data from the early 2000s seems to suggest that the coordinated efforts were initially successful, and led to a temporary plateau in Colombian cocaine production. Today, the U.S. government calls the program a success and claims that Plan Colombia set the stage for Colombia’s historic 2016 Peace Accord as a weakened FARC agreed to lay down arms and join the government. Critics offer a less rosy view.

‘A Horrible Human Price’

“Fumigation dispersed coca crops across all of Colombia,” says Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, Andes director for human rights group WOLA. “As fields were destroyed, armed groups simply pushed into new territories and planted smaller farms among food crops, displacing vulnerable communities or forcing them into their employ.”

Critics call this phenomenon, which displaced millions of Colombians and led to the spread of armed groups across the country, the “Balloon Effect.”

“The rate of re-plantation from forced eradication is [around] 60 percent, meaning that regarding coca production the impact of Plan Colombia couldn’t be called a full success,” says University of Illinois at Chicago criminology researcher Jorge Mantilla.

“The Colombian government cites the hectares of coca fields that have been destroyed, but the narcos simply pushed into new areas, and the price of cocaine has not been impacted,” observes Sanchez.

She believes that while it is arguable that Plan Colombia helped foster an environment for the peace accord, “the efforts came at a horrible human price.” Farmers often planted coca alongside sustenance crops, she points out, and fumigation destroyed indiscriminately, directly harming the food security of vulnerable communities who often had no choice for survival but growing coca. A critical lack of infrastructure made transporting legal crops to market next to impossible, and farmers viewed the aerial attack on coca as an attack on their communities.

Thousands of civilians were also killed during the anti-narcotics program, often at the hands of government forces. Over 3,000 farmers were slaughtered by Colombian soldiers during the conflict and later dressed up as rebels, a ploy to inflate casualty numbers.

Moreno, who headed up U.S. efforts in Colombia between 1997 and 2001, says that “we made extreme efforts to be responsible, we never followed when rebel groups fled to areas [such as] National Parkland and the protected areas of the Amazon jungle. Critics don’t realize how dangerous this work was and how careful we were.”

“Aerial fumigation by itself is neither efficient nor cost-effective,” counters Sanchez. She believes a resumption of the program will endanger an already precarious peace.

“The people took a great risk and made heroic efforts to implement this peace,” Sanchez points out, “and now they risk having their crops burned down by a government that hasn’t lived up to its promises to invest in their communities.”

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Two Chicago cops tackled and then shot a man under very suspicious circumstances. Fortunately, the incident was captured on video, leading to public outrage, an investigation, and dropped charges.

The video, recorded on Friday at the Grand Avenue Red Line Station, shows the tackled man struggling and refusing to let the officers arrest him. (Nothing in the video shows him trying to hurt the officers—just to get away from them.) After they failed to get him under control, a loud gunshot rings out.

The witness posted the video on Twitter:

I don't exactly know what to do with this, but I witnessed and recorded the police-involved shooting at the Grand Red Line station in Chicago a little over an hour ago. This is my unedited video. (Trigger warning, obviously.) pic.twitter.com/tIrv1RfTN3

— The Unaffiliated Critic (@FreeRangeCritic) February 28, 2020

The video prompted outrage. Once the context became more clear, it looked even worse for the two officers. The man, later identified as Ariel Roman, was being arrested because he violated a city ordinance against moving between two train cars.

That’s it. The two officers, assigned to Chicago’s mass transit unit, chased him and tackled him on the train platform. The shots were fired not as Roman was attempting to attack the officers but as he was getting away. He was shot twice, once in the abdomen, and once in the buttocks, according to his lawyer. He was in critical condition but is now recuperating.

Roman was charged with resisting arrest and narcotics possession. But once the video got out, Interim Police Superintendent Charlie Beck asked prosecutors to drop the case. On Sunday, prosecutors agreed. The two officers are on administrative duty, and the FBI has gotten involved in investigating the incident.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has called the video footage “extremely disturbing,” but USA Today notes that the shooting took place just hours after Lightfoot, the Chicago Police, and the Chicago Transit Authority announced plans to tackle crimes on public transit. Maybe they should have been a bit more specific about which crimes.

This encounter is exactly what troubles people when police announce enforcement actions on mass transit. We’d like to assume that police are tackling muggers and other people with violent or larcenous intentions. And perhaps the two cops suspected that Roman was bouncing from car to car because he was planning something bad. But they had no evidence Roman had actually done anything to victimize anybody else.

It’s a familiar pattern. Politicians use fears of serious crimes to push through ordinances that criminalize all sorts of non-threatening behavior, and those are then used to justify police interventions. Whether or not serious crimes get prevented, we get a crackdown on petty offenses. Many people get harassed. And in this case, one gets shot.

Chicago Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of the Police has predictably slammed city leaders for being horrified by the shooting. Union president Kevin Graham asked on Facebook: “Why has the superintendent and the mayor not commented on the fact that not one individual assisted these officers during the struggle to place the offender clearly engaged in felony resisting into custody, an offender who once again failed to comply with police orders?”

Because they were afraid they’d get shot?

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In January, I blogged about an interesting Colorado case, in which the defendants moved to retroactively seal some previously filed court documents. I opposed the motion, and the movant narrowed it, but added this request:

Finally, to ensure that the Restriction is implemented, and in the face of Professor Volokh’s expressed desire to publish documents from this case, which publication would seriously harm Bonsai’s business interests, Bonsai requests that this Court’s order specify that no publication of these documents (or redacted portions of documents) be published, regardless of whether these documents were previously available on the court’s website or otherwise.

That, I argued to the court, would violate my free speech and free press rights, and not just my right of access to court records. Once someone has downloaded publicly accessible documents, that person has a right to quote them and write about them, and that right cannot be taken away by retroactively sealing the documents. The sealing order could bar future access to the documents in the court file, and might also constrain the parties to the case. But it can’t bar continued speech about those documents by outsiders who had lawfully accessed them. (Cf. Florida Star v. B.J.F.)

The motion was resolved a few days later (following an excellent telephonic oral argument by my student Jennifer Wilson), but I got distracted and neglected to blog an update; so here it is.

[1.] Magistrate Judge Michael E. Hegarty didn’t reach the gag order question, because he denied the motion to seal, thus rendering the gag order request moot.

[2.] And he denied the motion to seal chiefly relying on his opinion four years before in Gunn v. WCA Logistics, LLC, No. 13-cv-02197-WJM-MEH, 2016 WL 7868827, at *1 (D. Colo. Jan. 12, 2016). He didn’t issue a detailed written order, but this passage from Gunn summarizes the matter well:

The documents at issue in Defendants’ motion were not filed under [seal]…. Only [some weeks later] did Defendants seek to [seal] the documents. Because Defendants failed to avail themselves of the protections provided by the District’s local rules in filing [the documents], any claim to confidentiality has been waived. The cat has already been let out of the bag. Cf. Gambale v. Deutsche Bank AG, 377 F.3d 133, 144 n.11 (2d Cir. 2004) (“Once the cat is out of the bag, the ball game is over.”) …. After-the-fact sealing should not generally be permitted. See id. at 144 (“… We simply do not have the power, even were we of the mind to use it if we had, to make what has thus become public private again.”).

To be sure, mistakes happen, and in my experience attempts to seal filed just a day or two after an erroneous open-court filing are sometimes granted. But once you wait weeks, and especially once others see the cat and decide to post a cat video of it on the Internet, the feathers don’t go back into the pillow. Courts actually give lawyers considerable latitude to fix procedural errors, especially if the lawyers ask nicely and contritely enough. But some errors are hard or impossible to fix; missed jurisdictional deadlines are a classic example, and so are erroneous filings in open court (again, especially if the request comes after weeks or months rather than days).

[3.] Attempts to unseal can work even years after the sealing, see, e.g., EEOC v. Nat’l Children’s Ctr., 146 F.3d 1042, 1047 (2d Cir. 1998); Blum v. Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith Inc., 712 F.3d 1349, 1354 (9th Cir. 2013); United Nuclear Corp. v. Cranford Ins. Co., 905 F.2d 1424, 1427 (10th Cir. 1990). But some court rules strongly prefer prompt objections to motions to seal—the District of Colorado seeks objections basically within four business days of the motion, which is posted on the District’s web site. As a result, I had to move to oppose sealing right away, if I wanted to easily write about the case in the future; otherwise, moving to unseal later would be dicier and at least more time-consuming. I hope to write more about the case, which involves interesting issues of tort law, waivers of liability for recreational activities, and zip-line accidents, as more develops.

But in the meantime, here’s one of the documents that the court ruled couldn’t be sealed; it was filed as an attachment to the Complaint. (Of course, though it is potentially relevant to the case, it is by no means dispositive of whether the company is liable, and for all I know they may be entirely not at fault.)

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American democracy—or, at least, the California simulation of it—requires that even disinterested and actively hostile non-voters mark a ballot so government officials can gin up participation numbers, says Assemblyman Marc Levine (D-San Rafael). Levine has introduced a bill that would make voting compulsory, with civil penalties for the non-compliant. It’s a proposal that seems guaranteed to make disaffected non-voters become even less impressed with a sketchy political process.

If passed, the measure would “require a person who qualifies and is registered to vote to cast a ballot, marked or unmarked in whole or in part, at every election held within the territory within which the person resides and the election is held. The bill would require the Secretary of State to enforce this requirement,” according to the summary.

In defending the bill, Levine points to the 20-plus supposedly healthier democracies around the world that have some sort of compulsory ballot-marking on their law books. The number is a bit vague, since several countries have experimented with mandatory voting, then dropped it, while others implement it only regionally, and still others have it on the books but don’t bother with enforcement.

“Can a country be considered to practice compulsory voting if the mandatory voting laws are ignored and irrelevant to the voting habits of the electorate?” asks the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. “Is a country practicing compulsory voting if there are no penalties for not voting? What if there are penalties for failing to vote but they are never or are scarcely enforced? Or if the penalty is negligible?”

Belgium and Singapore, for example, threaten to punish non-voters by, ummm, not letting them vote in subsequent elections.

Apparently, that all sounds awesome to Assemblyman Levine.

“Democracy is not a spectator sport – it requires the active participation of all its citizens,” huffed Levine in a press release. “California is a national leader on expanding voting rights to its citizens. Those rights come with a responsibility by registered voters to cast their ballot and make sure that their voice is heard by their government.”

“Heard by their government?” But doesn’t refusing to vote say something loud and clear in and of itself? As a form of speech, refusing to cast a ballot would seem to be an expression of disinterest in or opposition to the political system—certainly clearer than scribbling on a ballot just so you don’t have to pay a fine.

That actually happens a lot in Australia, the one country fans of mandatory voting keep citing because it’s a more-or-less functioning democracy with consistently high (over 90 percent) voter turnout and enforced financial penalties for scofflaws. Voter guides in Australia instruct people on the right way to express their disgust and disinterest on their ballots.

“If you leave the ballot paper blank, or fill it out incorrectly, or draw a dick and balls on the page instead of numbering the boxes, then that’s an informal vote. It doesn’t count,” advises the Australian radio current affairs program Hack. “If you number each box in the order that the candidates appear, that’s a donkey vote—and it definitely counts in the overall tally.”

That guide advises grudging voters on the proper way to cast a thoughtless, low-effort donkey vote because Australia offers something that California doesn’t: ranked voting among numerous competing parties and candidates. If your first choice doesn’t make the cut-off, your vote passes to your second choice, and so on, down the line.

California, by contrast, has a top-two primary system, which often results in a general election ballot featuring “rival” candidates from the same party—usually Democrats, given the state’s current political tilt.

“Millions of California voters saw same-party races on November’s ballot and left the space blank,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2018. Among those races was the U.S. Senate contest between Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Democrat Kevin De Leon.

“This is the system that helped Levine keep his seat in 2018: He defeated another Democrat, Dan Monte,” Scott Shackford pointed out last month.

These kinds of contests, The New York Times insightfully notes, raise “a high school civics class question: should voters have a choice of two different philosophies?”

Nah, says Assemblyman Levine. Make ’em vote, because … because …

Why?

“The bigger the voter pool, the stronger the contract is between citizens and leaders,” insisted economist Dambisa Moyo in an October 2019 New York Times op-ed calling for mandatory voting.

Are we really supposed to believe that the social contract is strengthened by threatening people with fines unless they mail in a sheet of paper with “a dick and balls on the page”?

Levine’s bill says you’re off the hook if you “cast a ballot, marked or unmarked in whole or in part.” He seems content so long as he can to point to a stack of envelopes and crow, “That’s participation! Ain’t democracy grand?”

Rather than reinforce some mythical contract between voters and politicians, mandatory voting would seem more likely to further erode connections and build resentment. “Participate in our bogus process or else” seems designed to sour people on voting and politics, not build enthusiasm.

There may be more to it. Popular belief has it that non-voters lean left, so if you could get them to the polls, you could tilt American elections to Democrats like Levine (economist Moyo alludes to this in her piece). But survey results are iffy on this point.

In the U.S., non-voters generally do prefer Democrats—but not in battleground states, where they lean Republican. And voters are generally split on presidential preferences for the 2020 election: were they to vote, 33 percent say they would support the eventual Democratic nominee, 30 percent would vote for Trump, and 18 percent for somebody else, according to The Knight Foundation’s “The 100 Million Project.”

And what, exactly, would be the advantage in California, where the ballot is already thoroughly rigged? Levine would force more voters to the polls so they could choose between him and clone-him, just to avoid paying a fine.

Mandatory voting isn’t likely to build respect for democracy or make sure that anybody’s voice is heard by the government. But fining non-voters will do an effective job of demonstrating that government is all about forcing people to do things just to make politicians happy.

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More than five years after Mats Järlström was threatened with fines for presenting data that challenged Oregon’s red light camera program, his research has changed the way traffic engineers will calculate the timing of yellow lights.

The Institute of Traffic Engineers (ITE), an international group that publishes guidelines and best practices with an eye towards safety and mobility, published an update to its guidance for traffic signal timing last week. The new standard takes into account a wide variety of factors, including vehicle approach speeds, deceleration rates, intersection width, vehicle length, and more, according to an ITE statement announcing the changes. But Järlström’s research—specifically, his “extended kinematic equation“—is cited as playing a key role in the ITE’s updated yellow light timing formula.

That research never would have seen the light of day if the Oregon Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying had its way.

Järlström got on the board’s bad side because he tried to challenge a traffic ticket given to his wife by a red light camera in Beaverton, Oregon, in 2013. He challenged the ticket by questioning the timing of the yellow lights at intersections where the cameras had been installed, using knowledge from his degree in electrical engineering and his experience working the Swedish Air Force and various technical jobs since immigrating to the United States in 1992. His research landed him in the media spotlight—in 2014, he presented his evidence on an episode of 60 Minutes—and earned him an invitation to present his findings to the ITE.

But the Oregon board said Järlström’s research amounted to practicing engineering without a license. In a 2014 letter, the board told Järlström that even calling himself an “electronics engineer” and the use of the phrase “I am an engineer” were enough to “create violations” that could result in a $500 fine.

Järlström fought back. With the help of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that often challenges ridiculous licensing laws, Järlström took his case to federal court. The trial was a disaster for the licensing board, which was forced to concede that its attempt to silence Järlström “was not narrowly tailored to any compelling state interests.” The board refunded the $500 fine, was prohibited from targeting Järlström again “for his speech about traffic lights and his description of himself as an engineer except in the context of professional or commercial speech,” and got a public dressing-down from Judge Stacie F. Beckerman.

Beckerman’s ruling ordered the Oregon board to restrict its policing of licensing issues exclusively to individuals who are working as professional engineers—that is, being hired to do engineering work—rather than simply practicing engineering skills. That seems like a necessary restriction, considering the board’s history of investigating everyone from amateur engineers like Järlström to political candidates who promised to “engineer solutions” and even a Portland magazine that credited a local leader for being the engineer, metaphorically, of a new bridge project in the city.

Free to work without overzealous licensing boards breathing down his neck, Järlström has now made an important change to how traffic light timing will work. Specifically, his formula takes into account the time required for drivers to slow down if they are turning at an intersection. It has the potential to improve safety and to cut down on erroneous tickets at intersections with automated red light cameras like the one that nabbed Järlström’s wife in 2013.

“It didn’t take an engineering license to realize that the formula for traffic light timing was flawed,” Järlström said in an Institute for Justice press release. “Hopefully this change will give everyone a little more time to get through an intersection safely.”

So the next time you narrowly skip through an intersection before the light turns red, you can thank Järlström—and the attorneys and judges who stood up for his right to do math without a license.

“The First Amendment protects Americans’ right to speak regardless of whether they are right or wrong,” Sam Gedge, an Institute for Justice attorney, said in the press release. “In Mats’s case, the ITE committee’s decision suggests that he not only has a right to speak, but also, that he was right all along.”

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Gloria Álvarez became one of the best-known libertarian personalities in Latin America in 2014, after she gave a talk arguing against populism on both left and right and pointing out the absurdity of admiring the socialist dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba.

The 35-year-old granddaughter of Cuban and Hungarian refugees is the host of the program Liber Viernes, or Free Fridays, on the Guatemalan radio station Libertopolis, and she’s the author of several books, including The Populist Deception, How To Talk to a Progressive, and How To Talk to a Conservative.

Nick Gillespie sat down with Álvarez at a Reason Foundation conference in Guatemala to talk about the resurgence of socialism in Latin America, reaching young people with libertarian ideas, and why she believes that political, cultural, economic, and sexual freedom are all intertwined and non-negotiable.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro by Lex Villena. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Pablo Gordillo.

‘Modum’ by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Photo credit Zuma/Newscom

Related links:

Gloria Álvarez on Instagram.

Gloria Álvarez on Twitter.

Gloria Álvarez at Libertopolis.

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This morning, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Texas v. United States, the ambitious red state lawsuit trying to tear down the entire Affordable Care Act because Congress zeroed out the tax penalty for failing to purchase qualifying insurance. As Josh notes below, the case will be heard on the Fall (though whether before or after the election remains to be determined).

The reason for the cert grant is understandable: A lower federal court invalidated a provision of federal law, with potentially significant implications. This is often reason enough to grant certiorari. Of note, the Court accepted both the petition filed by the blue states challenging the Fifth Circuit’s decision, as well as the cross-petition filed by the red states seeking to ensure that severability is among the questions presented to the Court.

As readers know, I believe this is a dog of a case. The case plaintiffs have standing is quite weak, and the ultimate severability arguments are unmoored from existing doctrine as well as the original understanding of the Article III judicial power.

I critiqued the Fifth Circuit’s opinion here. Most of my other prior posts on this case are listed in this post (except for this one).

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This morning the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the Obamacare cases from Texas. Will the case be argued before or after November 3, 2020, the date of the Presidential election? According to the Supreme Court’s calendar for the October 2020 Term, there are six possible oral argument dates prior to election day: October 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, and November 2. Assuming each case is one hour long, the Court can hear twelve hours of argument time before the election.

So far, the Supreme Court has already granted five petitions (including consolidated cases) that have not been scheduled for OT 2019, and will presumably be granted for OT 2020. (Let me know if I am missing any). I’ve sorted them by date of grant:

• 1/10/20: Salinas v. United States Railroad Retirement Board,
• 2/24/20: Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
• 3/2/20: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service v. Sierra Club, ACA Cases (Consolidated), Borden v. U.S.

The Supreme Court does not always schedule cases based on the order in which the petitions for certiorari were granted. That is, there is no guarantee that Salinas is argued on the first Monday in October.

If the ACA case is scheduled on October 5, 6, 7, 13, or 14, I am fairly confident that the oral argument audio will be used in political advertisements against President Trump. (If the case is argued on Monday, November 2, the audio would not be released until Friday, November 6, after the election.)

The Supreme Court already has some experience with its oral Obamacare oral arguments being used in political ads. Indeed, in 2012, the RNC doctored audio from Solicitor General Verrilli’s oral argument in Florida v. HHS oral argument. NPR offered this report:

The ad has been criticized for doctoring the audio at the start of Solicitor General Donald Verilli Jr.’s argument at which he paused, took a sip of water and cleared his throat.

Verilli’s hesitation was brief, just a few seconds. But the ad makes it appear that Verilli was completely at a loss by lengthening the pause and repeating the sound of the ice clinking in his glass and repeating Verilli saying “Excuse me” to the justices.

The ad ends with the text “ObamaCare: It’s a tough sell.” Bloomberg News’ Julie Hirshfeld Davis and Greg Stohr offers one of the more comprehensive stories about the ad.

I offered this account in Unprecedented:

The Drudge Report blasted a picture of Verrilli with the headline “Obama’s Lawyer Chokes Again.” Within hours a. er the audio of the arguments was released, the Republican National Committee released a YouTube advertisement attacking Verrilli’s performance. The advertisement took the audio of Verrilli choking at the podium and doctored it to make the awkward silence last longer than it actually did. Over a stark picture of the Supreme Court, the headline “ObamaCare: It’s a Tough Sell” appeared. The import was clear—not even the government could justify this law. The Obama administration rallied to defend Verrilli. Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, said that the attack on Verrilli was a “low blow” and that he was “one of the most talented attorneys in this country. He made a very forceful argument and we knew these arguments were going to be tough.”

Tom Goldstein, a frequent Supreme Court litigant and the founder of SCOTUSBlog, described the advertisement as “the single most classless and misleading thing I’ve ever seen related to the Court. It is as if the RNC decided to take an incredibly serious and successful argument that has the chance to produce a pathbreaking legal victory for a conservative interpretation of the Constitution, drag it through the mud, and vomit on it.”

I agree with Goldstein. And this decision went a long way to keep cameras out of the Supreme Court chamber.

I fully expect similar ads to be created if the Supreme Court schedules oral arguments on October 5, 6, 7, 13, or 14. Indeed, I worry that one or more Justices will ask questions that, out of context, seem far more accusatory in a sliced-and-diced advertisement.

If the Court schedules the case after the election, it will be painted as political. If it schedules the case before the election, and arguments seem favorable to President Trump, the Court will be painted as political. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The upshot of the former option, is that these political attacks will be kept out of the election spotlight.

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