US Politics

The second American civil war is already happeningRobert ReichAmerica will still be America. But it is fast becoming two versions of itself. The open question is: how will the two be civil toward each other? The US supreme court’s upcoming decision to reverse Roe v Wade (an early draft of which was leaked last week) doesn’t ban abortions; it leaves the issue to the states. As a result, it will put another large brick in the growing wall separating blue and red America.The second American civil war is already occurring, but it is less of a war than a kind of benign separation analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce.One America is largely urban, racially and ethnically diverse, and young. The other is largely rural or exurban, white and older.The split is accelerating. Red zip codes are getting redder and blue zip codes, bluer. Of the nation’s total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties – where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote – jumped from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.Surveys show Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values. Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. Forty-two per cent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil”.Almost 40% would be upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party. Even before the 2020 election, when asked if violence would be justified if the other party won the election, 18.3% of Democrats and 13.8% of Republicans responded in the affirmative.Increasingly, each America is running under different laws.Red states are making it nearly impossible to get abortions but easier than ever to buy guns.They’re also suppressing votes. (In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” have been created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, another fallout from Trump’s big lie.)They’re banning the teaching of America’s history of racism. They’re requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that reflect their gender at birth.They’re making it harder to protest; more difficult to qualify for unemployment benefits or other forms of public assistance; and almost impossible to form labor unions.And they’re passing “bounty” laws – enforced not by governments, which can be sued in federal court, but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits – on issues ranging from classroom speech to abortions to vaccinations.Blue states are moving in the opposite direction. Several, including Colorado and Vermont, are codifying a right to abortion. Some are helping cover abortion expenses for out-of-staters.When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15m to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from other states.Maryland and Washington have expanded access and legal protections to out-of-state abortion patients. One package of pending California bills would expand access to California abortions and protect abortion providers from out-of-state legal action.After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families.Another California proposal would thwart enforcement of out-of-state court judgments removing children from the custody of parents who get them gender-affirming health services.California is also about to enforce a ban on ghost guns and assault weapons with a California version of Texas’ recent six-week ban on abortion, featuring $10,000 bounties to encourage lawsuits from private citizens against anyone who sells, distributes or manufactures those types of firearms.Blue states are also coordinating more of their policies. During the pandemic, blue states joined together on policies that red states rejected – such as purchasing agreements for personal protective equipment, strategies for reopening businesses as Covid subsided, even on travel from other states with high levels of Covid.At one point, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut required travelers from states with high positivity rates – Arkansas, Florida, North and South Carolina, Texas and Utah – to quarantine for two weeks before entering.But what will happen to the poor in red states, who are disproportionately people of color?“States rights” was always a cover for segregation and harsh discrimination. The poor – both white and people of color – are already especially burdened by anti-abortion legislation because they can’t afford travel to a blue state to get an abortion.They’re also hurt by the failure of red states to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act; by red state de facto segregation in public schools; and by red state measures to suppress votes.One answer is for Democratic administrations and congresses in Washington to prioritize the needs of the red state poor and make extra efforts to protect the civil and political rights of people of color in red states. The failure of the Senate to muster enough votes to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, let alone revive the Voting Rights Act, suggests how difficult this will be.Blue states have a potential role here. They should spend additional resources on the needs of red state residents, such as Oregon is now doing for people from outside Oregon who seek abortions.They should prohibit state funds from being spent in any state that bans abortions or discriminates on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender. California already bars anyone on a state payroll (including yours truly, who teaches at UC Berkeley) from getting reimbursed for travel to states that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.Where will all this end? Not with two separate nations. What America is going through is analogous to Brexit – a lumbering, mutual decision to go separate ways on most things but remain connected on a few big things (such as national defense, monetary policy and civil and political rights).America will still be America. But it is fast becoming two versions of America. The open question is like the one faced by every couple that separates: how will the two find ways to be civil toward each other?
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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‘Republican and more Republican’: Idaho shifts ever rightward In a state where legislators can boast of membership in the Oath Keepers, the fringe has become mainstreamA peregrine falcon swoops over grazing cows. A giant Stars and Stripes is painted on wood with “Bundy for governor” and “No trespassing” attached. Up a gravel drive, past an upturned wheelbarrow, is a red, white and blue Bundy campaign bus and a sign that declares: “Keep Idaho Idaho.”Ammon Bundy’s compound is situated under rolling green hills and a broad Idaho sky. From his five-bedroom farmhouse, the far-right activist gazes out at his 240 apple trees along with cherry, peach and pear trees. He points to the homes of two neighbors, both military men – and both flying the American flag upside down.“It’s a sign of distress,” Bundy says. “I’m not influencing them in any way but, if there is going to be some type of civil war, I think it will be the military fracturing. I hope not. I believe more in a separation, if it was needed.”The bearded 46-year-old, notorious for armed standoffs with law enforcement that landed him in prison, has no chance of becoming governor of Idaho. But the mere fact that, during a year in solitary confinement, he wrote in his journal about a plan to run for elected office is indicative of a change in the political wind here.Idaho has long been one of the most conservative states in America with its fair share of extremism. Now, critics warn, the extremists are being normalised. Once dismissed as backwoods fanatics, the far right have entered the political arena and identified a path to power.That path leads through a state Republican party that has long exploited tensions between independent-spirited Idahoans and the federal government, which manages two-thirds of the state’s land, and more recently embraced former president Donald Trump’s culture of grievance.Trump beat Joe Biden with 64% of the vote here in the 2020 election. Democrats have not held the governor’s office since 1995 or statewide elected office since 2007. Most elections for the state legislature do not even feature a Democratic candidate.Chuck Malloy, a columnist and former communications adviser to the House Republican caucus, said: “Sure, we have a two-party system: it’s Republican and more Republican. Idaho is shifting more to the right every day.”In the Republican primary election for governor on 17 May, incumbent Brad Little, a stalwart conservative by national standards, is portrayed as a Republican in Name Only (Rino) by his even more extreme challenger, Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin (Bundy dropped out of the Republican race and is running as an independent).McGeachin has sought to grab attention by issuing executive orders banning coronavirus mask and vaccine mandates when Little was out of state only to see them overturned on his return. But the political grandstanding appears to have backfired. Opinion polls suggest that McGeachin is heading for defeat.Little, who can boast of a record $1.9bn budget surplus, could not be described as much of a liberal saviour, however. He made a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida only for the former president to endorse McGeachin four days later. As the state party’s centre of gravity shifts right, he is shifting with it.The governor recently signed one of the most extreme abortion laws in the country, banning the procedure after a foetal heartbeat is detected and allowing family members of rapists to sue providers. He also signed a bill banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.Malloy observed: “Little can’t come across as looking pro-abortion in any way, shape or form so he signs this bill and makes the comments, well, I think it’s unconstitutional, but I’ll sign it anyway. He doesn’t want to go into a Republican primary election by being soft on the abortion issue or guns. He’s been picking his fights.”He added: “Democrats can’t be crazy about Brad Little. But to at least some people it’s a matter of do I vote for sane or insane?”Lauren Necochea, chair of the state Democratic party and a state representative, confirmed that she is unimpressed by the governor. She said: “The difference between Little and McGeachin is really more style than substance. She personifies the far-right extremism while he panders to it.”Although Little is likely to retain the governor’s mansion, elections for other offices of state are more competitive between the hard right and harder right. Priscilla Giddings, a McGeachin ally, is running for lieutenant governor, while Dorothy Moon, a member of the far-right John Birch Society, is a contender for secretary of state.Raúl Labrador, a former member of the influential US House Freedom Caucus who once proclaimed “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to healthcare”, is among the candidates for state attorney general.The extremist faction has also been expanding its influence in the state house and senate, recently attempting to block government funding for healthcare and television and to criminalise librarians for “disseminating material harmful to minors”, though the measures were ultimately thwarted.House member Chad Christensen, for example, proudly declares on his webpage his membership of the Oath Keepers, a militaristic, anti-government group whose founder, Stewart Rhodes, is facing charges of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.Scott McIntosh, opinion editor of the Idaho Statesman newspaper, said: “When I moved here in 2006, the Republican party was very much dominated by reasonable Republicans. Brad Little would be in that category. All they were worried about was running a good small state government.“They’re still here but the Republicans who are getting elected, particularly in the past 10 years, are more interested in coming to the state capitol and pushing transgender rights, abortion, library criminalisation bills that are more culture wars they see going on in other parts of the country that they want to stop from happening here in Idaho.”Perhaps most insidiously, a new far-right generation is targeting and taking over Republican central committees at county level. It means that the election for governor might be less important than it seems since the winner will find themselves tugged to the right by a radicalised state government.Shea Andersen, a marketing consultant who has worked on political campaigns, agreed: “They’ve figured out that the real power in Idaho is not to hold the governor’s seat necessarily – though certainly it would send a great message for them – but any sort of fringe political viewpoint is better served by fanning out and getting your positions represented in more day-to-day operations, whether that is state legislature or county commissioner races or even races for treasurer and secretary of state.”The trend is especially pronounced in northern Idaho, a region infamous in the late 20th century for Richard Butler’s effort to establish a “white homeland” from his 20-acre Aryan Nations compound. Butler was eventually bankrupted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the compound was burned in June 2001.Chris Fillios, a moderate Republican seeking re-election as a county commissioner in Kootenai county, has observed extremists on the march there. “They have been told, infiltrate at every level: school board, county, city offices, anywhere and everywhere they can, state level, federal level, infiltrate, infiltrate.”Fillios sees a connection with “alt-right” figures such as Steve Bannon, a former chief strategist in the Trump White House. “If we start from the national level and we look at Steve Bannon having identified his so-called 40,000 ‘shock troops’, the most fertile ground that they could find would be northern Idaho. If they can get a foothold here, they could use it as sort of a launch pad for the rest of the country.”A driving force is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a thinktank that vets legislation and legislators for their conservative and libertarian credentials. Approached for an interview, the foundation emailed a one-word reply: “Nope.” Approached in person at its office near the state capitol in Boise, the foundation’s staff gave a brusque refusal.Tellingly, the foundation’s website asks: “Are you a refugee from California, or some other liberal playground? Did you move to Idaho to escape the craziness? Welcome to Idaho. We’re glad to have you here. You are one of the new Idahoans. The people who came to the Gem State seeking a home that reflects their values: small government and a freer life.”This is a trend that has been called “right flight” as conservatives pour into Idaho from liberal, racially diverse states. It could be seen as part of the grand sorting of American national politics as liberals move to places where they will find like minds and conservatives do likewise, meaning that blue states turn bluer and red states turn redder.Stephanie Witt, director of the Applied Research Center at Boise State University, said: “The newcomers aren’t liberals. They’re as conservative or more conservative than the people who are here.”“I remember one woman I met at a county women’s forum. She was a recent transplant from southern California and she’s just like, ‘We can’t let California happen here.’ She felt like she was really holding a line.”California is the most diverse state in America; Idaho is 93% white. But Tom Luna, the first Hispanic person elected to statewide office in Idaho as superintendent of public instruction, denies that race is a motivating factor. “I don’t see ‘white flight’ as a reason at all for people moving here. I don’t know the numbers but I’ve met a lot of new people that have moved here and I see quite a diversity that identify themselves as Republicans.”Luna is now chair of the state Republican party. He rejects the notion that it has gone rogue. “This is the same party that has led for the past 20 years resulting in now one of the fastest-growing, if not the fastest-growing, state in the country, and one reason is because of quality of life.”But among the new arrivals is Bundy, who grew up in Utah and lived in Arizona before moving to Idaho seven years ago. The father of six children settled on farmland outside Emmett – also the home of Governor Little, a third-generation sheep and cattle rancher – about an hour north-west of Boise.Bundy was infamous for standoffs with federal agents near his family’s ranch in Nevada in 2014 and at the Malheur national wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2016, which left one man dead. He served prison time but denies that he was leading armed rebellions and claims he won the “PR battle”.“The federal government has been attacking the land users – ranchers, loggers, miners and other people,” he said in an interview, wearing a checked shirt and paint-flecked jeans and sitting near a baby grand piano. “There’s been this almost theological battle that’s been going on for decades and decades over the land in the west.”He articulates the small government ideology of many far-right Republicans here: “I believe that we should become independent. We’ve got plenty resources and we should be able to stand on our own and not be dependent on the federal government to pay our medical bills and to build our buildings and all of that. But we’re like welfare junkies. We can’t seem to get off of it.”Bundy has been arrested multiple times in Idaho. Once such incident occurred in 2020 because he refused to leave a statehouse auditorium while protesting against pandemic legislation after officials ordered the room to be cleared. Earlier this year he was involved in protests that helped force a hospital into temporary lockdown.The rise of such tactics by extremists, which has included harassing and intimidating Republican legislators deemed too moderate, and storming into school or district health board meetings, sometimes with AR-15 rifles, has raised the specter of political violence in the state’s future.McIntosh of the Idaho Statesman said: “I only see it getting worse. I don’t see a way out of it.”TopicsThe far rightIdahoRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Trump-backed Alex Mooney wins GOP nod for West Virginia’s House seatTuesday’s races in West Virginia and Nebraska seen as a measure of the former president’s grip on Republican voters A Trump-endorsed congressional candidate has won the Republican primary in West Virginia, while the former president’s favored candidate fell short in Nebraska’s primary election for governor.Alex Mooney on Tuesday beat fellow incumbent David McKinley in West Virginia’s second congressional district Republican primary on Tuesday.“Donald Trump loves West Virginia, and West Virginia loves Donald Trump,” Mooney said in his victory speech.Dr Oz embraced Trump’s big lie – will Maga voters reward him in Senate race?Read moreMcKinley was sharply criticized by the former president when he broke with his party as one of 13 Republicans to vote with the Democrats to support Joe Biden’s $1.2tn infrastructure bill. Trump called McKinley a Rino, or “Republican in Name Only”, and endorsed Mooney the day Biden signed the infrastructure law.The two incumbents, who have taken dramatically different approaches to their time in office, were pitted against each other in the state’s second congressional district after population losses cost West Virginia a US House seat.In Nebraska, Trump’s choice for governor, Charles Herbster, lost to an official at a university, according to US media reports, even though Trump had hosted a rally for him a little more than a week earlier.The Nebraska contest had been dominated in recent weeks by accusations that Herbster, an agriculture executive, had sexually harassed several women, which he has denied.US media outlets projected rival Jim Pillen, a hog farmer and university board member, would defeat Herbster and win the nomination.Also in Nebraska, Representative Don Bacon was on track to win the Republican primary after Edison Research predicted he would hold off challenger Steve Kuehl. Trump had urged voters to reject Bacon due to his criticism of Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Bacon will face a competitive November election in the Omaha-based district against Democrat Tony Vargas, who was projected by Edison Research to win his party’s primary.The races in Nebraska and West Virginia have provided some measure of the former president’s enduring sway with GOP voters. They come on the heels of a victory in Ohio by JD Vance, author of the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, who defeated six other candidates to win the Republican primary for US Senate last week. Vance was also endorsed by Trump.The former US president is facing some of the biggest tests of his influence in Republican primary elections later this month. In Pennsylvania, his endorsed Senate candidate, Dr Mehmet Oz, is locked in a competitive race against former hedge fund CEO David McCormick and five others, while his candidate in North Carolina, US representative Ted Budd, is competing in a field that includes a dozen other Republicans.In Georgia, Trump has endorsed primary challengers to governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, both of whom defied him by rejecting his false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.In a story last month, the Nebraska Examiner interviewed six women who claimed Herbster had groped their buttocks, outside of their clothes, during political events or beauty pageants. A seventh woman said Herbster once cornered and forcibly kissed her.In Nebraska, the allegations against Herbster, a longtime supporter of Trump’s, didn’t stop the former president from holding a rally with him earlier this month.“I really think he’s going to do just a fantastic job, and if I didn’t feel that, I wouldn’t be here,” Trump said at the rally at a racetrack outside Omaha.Some voters said the allegations didn’t dissuade them from backing Herbster either.As she voted at an elementary school in northwest Omaha on Tuesday, Joann Kotan said she was “upset by the stories, but I don’t know if I believe them”. Ultimately, the 74-year-old said she voted for Herbster “because President Trump recommended him”.The Associated Press contributed reportingTopicsWest VirginiaHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

US politics liveUS politicsJoe Biden calls inflation his ‘top domestic priority’ but blames Covid and Putin – livePresident says he understands American’s frustration with Democrats, who control all three branches of government: ‘I don’t blame them’
US immigration agency operates vast surveillance dragnet, study finds
Divided States of America: Roe v Wade is ‘precursor to larger struggles’
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Joe Biden spoke about the differences between his government’s plan to tacke inflation in the US to the ‘ultra-Maga’ plan put forward by congressional republicans.
During the speech on inflation ahead of the midterm elections, the president said Americans had a choice between ‘different sets of values’ adding his plan would lower costs for American families while the opposition would give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations

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Trump tells court he lost phones linked to alleged fraud by his companyEx-president says he no longer has Trump Organization-issued phones as New York attorney general investigates company Asked by the New York attorney general to turn over personal cellphones to aid her investigation of alleged fraud at his company, Donald Trump said he had lost them.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreIn an affidavit filed as part of an attempt to stop the accrual of fines for non-compliance with subpoenas, a $10,000 daily penalty which has reached $150,000, the former president said: “I am not currently in possession of any Trump Organization-issued phones, computers or similar devices.“I believe the last phone or device I was issued by the Trump Organization was a cellphone in 2015. I no longer have the cellphone in my possession and I am not aware of its current location.“Since January 1, 2010, I previously owned two flip phones and a Samsung mobile phone. I do not have the two flips [sic] phones in my possession and I do not know their current whereabouts.”Trump said he took the Samsung with him to the White House when he was sworn in as president in 2017, but “it was taken from me at some point while I was president. I do not have the Samsung in my possession and I do not know its current whereabouts.”Trump also said he now owns “two personal mobile phones … an iPhone which I have owned for several years and is for my personal use [and] a new phone which I was recently given by Truth Social just last week”.Truth Social is Trump’s own social media platform, set up to counter what he claims to be censorship by Twitter and Facebook, which banned him after his supporters attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Trump has not been a prodigious poster of Truth Social, which has struggled. Nonetheless, in his affidavit, Trump said he used his new phone “exclusively for posting on Truth Social and no other purpose. I have never placed or received a call, sent or received a text message, or used this phone in any other manner.”Trump also said he submitted his iPhone to the New York investigation in late March, to be “searched and imaged”, then did so again in early May, “in an abundance of caution”.He added: “Since at least January 1, 2010, it has been my customary practice to not communicate via email, text message, or other digital methods of communication. I also do not use a computer for work-related purposes.”The civil investigation of Trump’s financial affairs in New York is only one form of legal jeopardy faced by the former president.In one high-profile case, a grand jury has been picked in Fulton county, Georgia, where a prosecutor is examining Trump’s attempts to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in the southern state.Preet Bharara: ‘I didn’t call Trump back and it’s one of the best decisions I ever made’Read moreTrump has said investigations of his financial and political affairs are politically motivated witch-hunts.Nonetheless, Trump’s affidavit and others filed by his lawyers in the New York case described extensive searches for devices and documents at the Trump Organization in New York, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida and at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.Trump’s claim to have lost his phones prompted widespread skepticism online.Preet Bharara, a former US attorney for the southern district of New York who famously refused to take a call from Trump before Trump fired him, wrote: “Let he who has never lost four cellphones cast the first stone.”TopicsNew YorkDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

DeSantis signs bill for Florida students to learn about ‘victims of communism’ Governor establishes ‘victims of communism day’ and students must receive at least 45 minutes of instruction every November Discussions of gender identity and sexual preference are banned in many Florida classrooms because of governor Ron DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” law, alongside dozens of math textbooks blocked for “prohibited topics”.Now the Republican who has loudly condemned what he sees as the “indoctrination” of young people has made another subject compulsory: students must receive at least 45 minutes’ instruction every November about the “victims of communism”.In a ceremony Monday at Miami’s iconic Freedom Tower, where tens of thousands of Cuban immigrants fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution were admitted into the US between 1962 and 1974, DeSantis signed into law House Bill 395, designating 7 November as Victims of Communism Day.Florida is one of a handful of states to adopt the designation, but is believed to be the first to mandate school instruction on that day.The instruction will begin in the 2023-2024 school year, DeSantis said, and will require teaching about Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, as well as “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech” endured under their leaderships in the Soviet Union, China and Cuba respectively.DeSantis, mispronouncing the name of the revolutionary leader Che Guevara as “Che Kay-Farra”, railed against students who wear T-shirts he said were oblivious about what communism represented.“You can see at a college campus students flying the hammer and sickle from the old Soviet Union flag, you will see students that will have T-shirts with Che Guevara, you will see students that will idolize people like Mao Zedong,” he said.“To me, this speaks of a tremendous ignorance about what those individuals represented and the evils that communism inflicted on people throughout the world. While it’s fashionable in some circles to whitewash the history of communism, Florida will stand for truth and remain as a beachhead for freedom.”Educators in Florida are banned, however, from teaching students about racial issues, including the history of slavery, if it makes them “feel uncomfortable”, according to DeSantis’s recently signed Stop Woke Act.DeSantis, seen as a frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has waged a war on perceived “wokeness” and “transgender ideology” in Florida’s campuses and workplaces in recent months.He is feuding with Disney after the state’s largest private employer opposed the “don’t say gay” law that bans “inappropriate” classroom discussions of LGBTQ+ issues, and which is the subject of a legal challenge.The governor, who is seeking re-election in November, has signed a number of other bills popular with the Republican base, including a 15-week abortion ban and a “racist” redrawing of Florida’s congressional maps that critics say robs Black voters of representation.DeSantis’s detractors argue that the governor has focused on culture war issues while ignoring the real challenges facing the state’s residents, such as soaring rents that exacerbate racial inequality.“Why the hell can we not focus for even a moment on what’s impacting people everyday?” Brandon Wolf, press secretary of Equality Florida, said in a tweet.Jeanette Nunez, Florida’s lieutenant governor and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, hailed the move as a continuation of DeSantis’s efforts to remove critical race theory from classrooms, despite the fact it is not taught in them.“We will always ensure that our students are getting the best education free of socialist ideologies and CRT and woke terms that we will not allow,” she said.TopicsRon DeSantisFloridaCommunismUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Louisiana case will determine fate of over 1,000 convicted by split juriesReginald Reddick will argue before the state supreme court he is entitled to a new trial because he was sentenced to life in prison by a non-unanimous jury, a practice banned in 2018 Reginald Reddick is serving life in prison in Louisiana for second-degree murder, even though two jurors at his 1997 trial found him not guilty. Almost anywhere else in the country, he would have been acquitted: even one juror would have been enough to change the outcome.interactiveThis week, the Louisiana supreme court will hear oral arguments in Reddick’s case, in which he argues that he is entitled to a new trial. The court’s decision could affect more than 1,000 people who, like Reddick, are serving time for crimes that some of their jurors did not believe they committed beyond a reasonable doubt.Until recently, Louisiana was one of only two states that did not require the unanimous vote of a jury, a vestige of a Jim Crow-era law designed to negate the growing power of Black jurors.In 2018, Louisiana residents voted to end the practice, and in 2020, the US supreme court found non-unanimous jury verdicts unconstitutional. But the court declined to make the ruling retroactive, leaving it up to Louisiana and Oregon (the only other state that allowed split juries) to decide whether people already serving time in such cases were entitled to new trials.One night in 1993, Reddick was drinking in the same bar as Al Moliere in a small town south of New Orleans. A witness said he saw Reddick shoot Moliere later that night in the course of a robbery, but the story he told on the stand conflicted with multiple versions he had previously told police.All the other evidence against Reddick – including a gun recovered months later with the initials “RR” carved into the handle – was circumstantial, said Jamila Johnson, one of his attorneys. In the more than 20 years he’s been in prison, he’s maintained he did not shoot Moliere.Should Reddick win a new trial, many other incarcerated people in Louisiana may also be entitled to the same opportunity. But Johnson and the New Orleans non-profit the Promise of Justice Initiative have struggled to answer the surprisingly vexing question: who, exactly, was convicted by a non-unanimous jury in Louisiana?“Our record-keeping in the south is horrible,” said Jason Williams, the district attorney in the parish that includes New Orleans. “It has been very difficult just to find all of the records and information necessary to do a complete review.”That challenge was compounded by a deadline: even if the court rules in Reddick’s favor, only those who filed applications with the state courts within one year of the US supreme court’s 2020 ruling will have a shot at new trials. Anyone who discovered later that their jury was not unanimous would need legislators to pass a new law in order to ask for relief, Johnson says.Racing the clock to find people sitting in prison due to split juries, three paralegals attended community meetings, visited prisons and sent letters trying to reach people who might have been sent to prison by a split jury. “Their job was talking to family members, walking them through documents that were in their closets. ‘You have a giant box. Let’s start in envelope one,’” said Johnson.Eventually, the team filed petitions on behalf of about 1,000 people they could prove were convicted by split juries. In these cases, each juror’s vote was recorded in court transcripts or polling slips at the defendants’ original trials years, or even decades, ago.Hundreds more had no recourse, said Sara Gozalo, a paralegal with the Promise of Justice Initiative, because the results of the polling were not recorded anywhere, or the polling never happened in the first place. “Maybe you were convicted by a 10-2,” Gozalo had to tell them. “You’ll never know.”In most cases, district attorneys have opposed attempts to challenge these convictions, arguing that the supreme court’s ruling should not apply to older cases. But in more than 50 cases, prosecutors have been willing to revisit the convictions without waiting for a ruling in the Reddick case.Williams, who was elected Orleans parish district attorney in 2020, campaigned on a promise to right many of the wrongs of his predecessors.“There are a realm of cases that are wrongful convictions because, for example, they used a law that was specifically written to exclude Black voices from the jury – whether or not they actually did it,” said Emily Maw, who heads Williams’ Civil Rights Division. For 68 people, that meant vacating their convictions and negotiating pleas that resulted in less prison time.Mark Isaac was convicted of second-degree murder in 1992 and had spent decades behind bars before a fellow prisoner at the Louisiana state penitentiary in Angola told him, “Man, check your paperwork, you might have 10-2,” Isaac recalled. He had maintained all along that he had acted in self-defense, and it wasn’t until he reached out to the Promise of Justice Initiative that he discovered two jurors may have agreed with him. His attorneys struck a deal with Williams’s office to have Isaac plead to the lesser charge of manslaughter and he was released with time served last year.When Gozalo joined the Promise of Justice Initiative, she soon discovered that each parish in Louisiana had its own system of keeping records and its own rules about how to request them. Court clerks often demanded requests be faxed. Who uses fax machines in 2020, she wondered.“I’m at an office with a fax machine, but what does an incarcerated person do?” Gozalo said. “These random rules … from one clerk to the next, seem arbitrary and almost violent to me – like little landmines that make it harder for people to fight their cases.”The non-unanimous rule has its roots in the years after Reconstruction, known as the “Jim Crow era”, when white lawmakers were looking to dilute the civic power of newly enfranchised Black citizens.In crafting the rule, “Our mission was, in the first place, to establish the supremacy of the White race in this State,” said delegates to the state’s 1898 constitutional convention. They determined how many Black people were likely to be seated on a jury, and then set the minimum number of votes so prosecutors could reliably obtain convictions over Black jurors’ objections. While the number of votes has changed over the years – first it was 9-3, then it was 10-2 – critics argue, the impact has not.An investigative series by the Louisiana newspaper the Advocate analyzed six years of trial records, finding that Black defendants were more likely to be convicted by non-unanimous juries. A subsequent analysis of the same dataset by a Harvard professor as part of a 2018 court case found that Black jurors were significantly more likely to cast votes that don’t change the outcome of the case. He argued that “the non-unanimous jury verdict system operated today just as it was intended in 1898: to silence African-Americans on juries and to render their jury service meaningless.”The state attorney general’s office and the Louisiana District Attorneys Association did not respond to requests for interviews. But in court filings, attorneys for the state argue that “the State’s interest in the finality of its non-unanimous verdicts is overwhelming and untainted by racial discrimination,” and warn that hundreds of new cases would flood the courts if the new rule were to be made retroactive.“Evidence deteriorates, memories fade and witnesses become unavailable over time. It will be difficult – if not impossible – for the State to retry these cases,” they write. “Even if the State could retry some defendants, doing so would subject the victims of their crimes to fresh pain and difficulty.”Gozalo and her colleagues say they are hopeful the state’s high court will recognize that people convicted by non-unanimous juries deserve new trials. “We’re not saying, ‘Free everyone,’” she said. “We’re saying, ‘Give everyone a fair trial.’”This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. 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