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    US judge bars Alabama from purging thousands of voters before election

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    Alabama cannot remove thousands of people from its voter rolls on the eve of the presidential election, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.The US district judge Anna Manasco, an appointee of Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction halting an effort by Alabama’s top election official to try to remove more than 3,200 people from the voter rolls who it suspected of being non-citizens until at least after the presidential election.The office of Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, conceded in court filings this week that the list of non-citizens it had compiled was not accurate. At least 2,000 people of the more than 3,200 people were actually eligible to vote, the secretary of state’s chief of staff said in a sworn declaration. That means that almost two-thirds of the people on the list accused of being non-citizens were wrongly flagged. Civil rights groups and the Department of Justice had both sued Alabama, saying that the removals violated a federal law that prohibits systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.“Alabama’s initial splashy announcement gave a total misimpression,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that helped challenge the purge. “It’s clear now that 63% of those people on the list were wrongfully on the list and were had to take time out of their lives and had to deal with this problem.”Both the justice department and the groups challenging the program also said that the state was using unreliable methodology to flag non-citizens and that many eligible voters were being flagged for removal.Allen said in a statement he would abide by the court’s ruling.“I have a constitutional duty to ensure that only eligible American citizens are voting in our elections. State and federal laws are clear that only eligible American citizens can vote in our elections. Today’s order does not change that,” he said.The justice department also sued Virginia on Friday over a similar program that has also drawn scrutiny for being inaccurate.Both of the suits rely on a 1993 federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act, which creates a 90-day period ahead of any federal election in which states cannot systematically remove voters from their rolls. The buffer was designed to ensure that eligible voters would not be wrongly removed from the rolls at the last minute without any recourse.On 13 August, 84 days before the November election, Allen announced that the state had identified 3,251 people on the rolls who at some point in time had received a non-citizen number from the Department of Homeland Security. Even though he acknowledged some of those people may have become naturalized citizens, he instructed local election officials to require all of them to prove their citizenship to vote and referred them to the state attorney general for possible criminal investigation.Alabama and Virginia are both part of a handful of states that have loudly touted misleading efforts to remove suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls. Their announcement comes as Republicans nationwide have leaned into false claims about non-citizen voting to seed doubt about the outcome of the election.In addition to halting the removals, Manasco’s order also instructs Allen to oversee a mailing to flagged voters informing them that they can vote. The notice must also tell voters that they are not subject to criminal penalties for registering or voting.Manasco also ordered Allen to write to the attorney general and inform him that several of the voters sent for further investigation were wrongly included on the list and to identify those voters.“We know from talking with our plaintiffs and from talking with others in Alabama that this really created a chill for naturalized citizens who were intimidated and deterred from registering to vote and from voting,” Huddleston said. And it’s really important that all Americans have access to the ballot.” More

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      How a Michael Portillo BBC film inspired a US push for nitrogen-gas executions

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      Shortly after Alabama last week carried out its second-ever execution using nitrogen gas, state officials took credit for pioneering what they see as a breakthrough approach to the death penalty – even though it has sparked outrage and revulsion among critics.But the idea to execute inmates in the US with nitrogen was actually set in motion by a rebellious and ultra-conservative lawmaker in Oklahoma, and surprisingly involves a former British Conservative MP turned television personality, Michael Portillo.Both promised such executions would be free of the complications that had plagued lethal injections and that sentenced prisoners would drift off painlessly to sleep – though witnesses to both executions have described a very different process.Nitrogen executions were first legislated in 2015 by Oklahoma, a US state boasts the highest execution rate per capita and a long history of death penalty innovation, having also been the first to introduce the lethal injection in 1977.The story of its most recent innovation in execution methods involves a documentary hosted by Portillo. After a career in British politics, where he was once seen as a darling of the Conservative right, Portillo reinvented himself as a television presenter. He later became famous for shows on the BBC such as Great British Railway Journeys.But in a bizarre collision of worlds, it was his film How to Kill a Human Being, broadcast by the BBC in 2008, that helped persuade the Republican representative Mike Christian and a high-school friend of his to pursue a bill writing nitrogen executions into law. So convinced were they by Portillo’s film and findings that they screened it at the Oklahoma capitol in September 2014.“I remember it being quite disturbing,” said Emily Virgin, a Democratic representative present at the time who voted against the nitrogen bill Christian later authored. In 2015, it passed 85 to 10 in the Oklahoma house and unanimously in the Senate.View image in fullscreenThe bill had been a while in the making. By 2014, states across the country were struggling to enforce capital punishment. Anti-death penalty advocates had successfully lobbied drug companies to stop supplying them with lethal injection drugs and many states were forced to improvise. Some attempted to get their drugs via illegal backchannels while others sought out substitute compounds, but both contributed to a string of botched and messy executions.In April 2014, things came to a head. Oklahoma’s supreme court issued a stay on the execution of death-row inmate Clayton Lockett over issues of secrecy around its lethal injection drugs. Incensed by the move, Christian, who was also a former state trooper, drafted a resolution to impeach the five justices who had supported the stay and was quoted in newspapers around the country for saying of Lockett’s execution: “I realize this may sound harsh but as a father and former lawman, I really don’t care if it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, guillotine or being fed to the lions.”The stay was soon overturned by Oklahoma’s governor, and Lockett’s execution went ahead. The executioners tried for almost an hour to establish an intravenous line before inadvertently injecting the drugs into the tissue around his groin. Witnesses saw him writhing in a pool of blood and according to an inquiry by the Oklahoma department of public safety the execution took 41 minutes, during which his heart rate dropped to six beats per minute.Months later, Christian was back with another plan. He had gathered more than a dozen or so Oklahoma legislators and public officials for a judiciary committee meeting at the Oklahoma capitol to make the case for something new.“We knew there was a problem after the Lockett execution,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting. “In 1977 we became the first state to adopt lethal injection. My wishes are in 2015 we abolish, possibly, lethal injection and we go to this new innovative method, which is death by nitrogen hypoxia.” Then, on a television in the meeting room, he screened Portillo’s BBC documentary.At the start of the 50-minute film, Portillo sets out to discover the “perfect killing device” for carrying out humane executions. After touring labs and meeting with experts across the US and Europe, he finds that all the methods known to the west – including the firing squad, electric chair, cyanide chamber, and hanging – are flawed. But, he concludes: “I think hypoxia is the solution.”View image in fullscreenThe term hypoxia simply describes when the body’s cells receive insufficient oxygen to function and can be induced in many ways. In the film, Portillo attempts to experience hypoxia at a Dutch air force training facility, where he sits in an altitude chamber that simulates oxygen-thin air. Satisfied that the experience was painless, he seeks out a more practical way to starve somebody of oxygen and meets a veterinarian who tells him that if a human were forced to breathe just pure nitrogen they would lose consciousness “within 15 seconds” and die “within a minute”.“It turns out a canister of gas, a tube and a mask can be the perfect killing machine. It’s as simple as that,” says Portillo.On the day his film was screened for Oklahoma officials in 2014, some six years after it first aired in 2008, Christian brought along with him a part-time professor of political science at Oklahoma’s East Central University, Michael Copeland, who was also a high-school friend and had been involved in his election campaign.“People that aren’t familiar with the legislative process might think that state governments like Oklahoma have a bunch of experts on their payroll to advise them, but that’s not really what happens. Members can go out and they dispatch people that work at colleges,” said Copeland when asked about his involvement.He and some peers at the university produced a 14-page research paper which found that the use of nitrogen would not require the participation of a “licensed medical professional”, nor the “cooperation of the offender being executed”.“It’s such a simple procedure, it would be hard to do it wrong,” said Copeland when asked about the specifics of a nitrogen execution. “You won’t find one person who is for the death penalty in general but thinks that this method is somehow complicated, or you won’t be able to implement it correctly.”Another person present at the meeting was David Cincotta, legal counsel to the Oklahoma department of corrections at the time. “The details provided in the research that had been done were not close to what would be required to defend the method in court,” he said when asked about the material presented.Christian was part of a highly conservative rebel faction of Republicans in Oklahoma who were further to the right than the mainstream Republicans, according to Virgin. One of his friends in that group was Senator Randy Terrill, who in 2013 was sentenced to a year in prison for bribing a Democratic candidate to withdraw from a Senate election so that Christian could have her otherwise unwinnable seat. Their mutual friend Copeland testified in support of Terrill during his trial.Before that, the group pursued a controversial bill calling for the installation of a monument of the Ten Commandments outside the Oklahoma capitol. And when Christian ran in 2017 for the Oklahoma county sheriff’s office, documents emerged indicating that in 1999 he was reprimanded for toasting to the death of a judge who had ruled against a lawsuit seeking to have the Confederate flag returned to the state capitol. The group that brought the suit was an Oklahoma division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.View image in fullscreenWhen asked why Oklahoma passed its nitrogen bill in 2015 but never followed through on developing and finalizing a protocol, Copeland said: “Nobody wants to be the first. You don’t want to be the one who gets blamed if something goes wrong.”But just a few states over in Alabama, Republican senator Trip Pittman caught wind of the Oklahoma bill and figured nitrogen might cure the execution woes they were facing in his own state, so he authored his own. “Misery loves company,” he said. “Oklahoma had passed the bill and they had done the research.”Fortunately for Pittman, a dogged attorney in the Alabama attorney general’s office by the name of Lauren Simpson was ready to step up, and wasn’t scared to do the legal work necessary to get nitrogen executions over the line. But she didn’t come out unscathed. In a rare and humiliating move, in 2021 she was fined for misleading the courts over whether Alabama’s death row inmates were properly briefed on how and when they could choose between lethal injection and nitrogen. Simpson declined to comment on her involvement, citing a lack of permission from her office.The Alabama protocol she had a hand in developing sees a firefighter-style gas mask attached to the prisoner’s face, which is then filled with a stream of pure nitrogen, thus depriving them of oxygen and causing them to die.The smoothness of Alabama’s two nitrogen-gas executions has been widely disputed by their few witnesses. While the state has claimed they were “textbook,” others have described them as more violent than some botched lethal injections.“Despite misinformation campaigns by political activists, out-of-state lawyers, and biased media, the State proved once again that nitrogen hypoxia is both humane and effective,” said Alabama’s attorney general Steve Marshall, minutes after the second execution last week.Yet in both nitrogen executions almost all witnesses spoke of jerking against restraints and gasps for air over several minutes. A prison official involved in the first execution, carried out in January, later acknowledged in a sworn statement that it took “longer than I had expected.”In a statement to the Guardian, Copeland disputed that Alabama’s executions had gone wrong, saying: “There was some movement during the procedure, which could be interpreted as either conscious struggling or the involuntary movements typically exhibited by people who are dying.”“The death penalty is never going to be something pleasant,” he said. “Nobody wants to die.” More

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      Trump Says He’s in Danger. So Why Did He Seek Out the Embrace of 100,000 Fans?

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      After two assassination attempts, the former president seems to be relishing the dangers of his job. Some at the Georgia-Alabama football game wondered if his appearance was wise.Chicken tenders and cynicism were flying through the air.It was Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and former President Donald J. Trump was in the bowels of Bryant-Denny Stadium at the University of Alabama, surrounded by screaming football fans. He began hurling boxes of chicken at them. His aides filmed his every movement, uploading the footage to social media.One popular pro-Trump influencer reposted a video of Mr. Trump traipsing through the concourse, writing: “There have been two assassination attempts on this man in the past three months and he walks into a stadium full of 100,000 people like a boss. Next week he’s returning to the site where he was shot. Total badass.”It was a perfect encapsulation of the ways in which Mr. Trump and those around him have plied the plots against his life for political benefit.The shooting in Butler, Pa., which left two men dead, including the gunman, was a terrifying event that was rewatched endlessly in the era of social media streaming. And it was shocking how close a second would-be assassin got to the former president weeks later at his golf club in Florida. These near misses have rattled the country and stirred memories of dark chapters in American political history.Mr. Trump plans to return to Butler for a rally on Oct. 5, and he relives these attempts on his life at nearly every campaign stop. Lately he has taken to saying that he has one of the most dangerous professions in the world, more dangerous than racecar driving or bull riding. He has bragged about the mortal danger in which he finds himself (“they only go after consequential presidents”); used it as evidence of divine intervention (“God has now spared my life — it must have been God, thank you — not once, but twice”) and as inspiration for set design (he decorated the stage at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with images of his bloodied face).There has been a new assassination threat against him from Iran, as retaliation for ordering the killing of the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani in early 2020, and some recent campaign events have been scaled back, modified or canceled altogether. “I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before,” he wrote on Truth Social last week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Fans Want to Watch Football. Trump and Walz Will Be There, Too.

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      Donald Trump and Tim Walz are attending college games on Saturday that will draw plenty of viewers in the swing states of Michigan and Georgia.For college football fans, they are temples of the sport: the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium and the Big House at the University of Michigan.But to the presidential campaigns, they are this Saturday’s soundstages: ready-made stops for former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president, to try to prove their Everyman mettle to any battleground-state voters who might be in the stands or watching from afar.“College football in the fall is the only place where you can find 100,000 potential voters in one location and you don’t have to pay for it,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist and Alabama football loyalist.“To pay for the amount of coverage and publicity and a crowd like that would cost millions,” she added. “They’re getting it for free — and you get to see a really good football game.”Mr. Trump is headed to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where the second-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, the gridiron pride of the neighboring swing state, will meet the No. 4 Alabama Crimson Tide. Mr. Walz is scheduled to visit Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, trawling for votes in one of the country’s biggest battlegrounds as the 12th-ranked Michigan Wolverines, last season’s national champions, host Minnesota’s Golden Gophers.Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz cannot reliably assume they will be Saturday’s star attractions as the campaigns encroach on a sport that is a cultural mainstay and surpasses Washington for ancient feuds and partisan obsessives. But their visits have been designed to invite a crush of local news coverage and social media posts and, their allies hope, cameos during national broadcasts that will soak up viewers in Michigan and Georgia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      US Department of Justice sues Alabama for purging people from voter rolls

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      The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Friday against Alabama and its top election official, accusing the state of illegally purging people from voter rolls too close to the November election.Federal officials said the purge violates the “quiet period provision” of the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits the systemic removal of names from voter rolls 90 days before a federal election.Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, in August announced an initiative “to remove noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama”. More than 3,000 people who had been previously issued noncitizen identification numbers will have their voter registration status made inactive and flagged for possible removal from the voter rolls. The justice department said both native-born and naturalized US citizens, who are eligible to vote, received the letters saying their voting status was being made inactive.“The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy,” assistant attorney general Kristen Clarke, who heads the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “As election day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law.”The lawsuit asks for injunctive relief that would restore the ability of affected eligible voters to vote on 5 November.“I was elected secretary of state by the people of Alabama, and it is my constitutional duty to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections,” Allen said in a statement issued on Friday night. He said he could not comment on pending litigation.Allen in August acknowledged the possibility that some of the people identified had become naturalized citizens since receiving their noncitizen number. He said they would need to update their information on a state voter registration form and would be able to vote after it was verified.The Campaign Legal Center, the Fair Elections Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center earlier this month filed a lawsuit also challenging the voter roll purge. They said the state purge targets naturalized citizens who once had noncitizen identification numbers before gaining citizenship.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe plaintiffs in that lawsuit include two US citizens who received letters telling them they were being moved to inactive voter registration status because of the purge. One is a Dutch-born man who became a US citizen in 2022. The other is a US-born citizen. More

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      America Does Not Need the Death Penalty

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      Capital punishment is not a front-burner political issue this year. In fact, the Democratic Party dropped the subject from its 2024 platform, eight years after becoming the first major party to formally call for abolishing the death penalty. But in 2020, President Biden’s campaign platform included a pledge to “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Once elected, he became the country’s first sitting president openly opposed to capital punishment.It would be an appropriate and humane finale to his presidency for Mr. Biden to fulfill that pledge and try to eliminate the death penalty for federal crimes. Such an effort would also remind the nation that this practice is immoral, unconstitutional and useless as a deterrent to crime.For more than two decades now, most barometers of how Americans view capital punishment — the number of new death sentences, the number of executions and the level of public support — have tracked a steady decline. There were 85 executions in 2000 but only 24 last year and 13 so far this year, all carried out in only seven states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.While a majority of Americans, about 55 percent over the past several years, remain in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, half no longer believe it is used fairly. The Gallup Crime Survey, which has been testing opinions on this subject of fairness since 2000, found in last October’s sampling that for the first time, more Americans believed the death penalty was applied unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent).“I regret deeply that we followed the easiest path.”This editorial board has long argued that the death penalty should be outlawed, as it is in Western Europe and many other parts of the world. Studies have consistently shown, for decades, that the ultimate penalty is applied arbitrarily, and disproportionately to Black people and people with mental problems. A death sentence condemns prisoners to many years of waiting, often in solitary confinement, before they are killed, and executions have often gone awry, arguably violating the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The chilling effect’: behind GOP-led states’ efforts to purge some voters from the rolls

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      Earlier this week, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent out a press release with an eye-popping headline: his state had removed more than 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Among them were 6,500 non-citizens. A little under a third of those non-citizens had some sort of voting history in Texas, where there were nearly 18 million registered voters as of March, and were referred to the attorney general for further investigation.Two days later, the governor’s office quietly revised the statement posted online. Instead of saying 6,500 non-citizens had been removed, the updated version said 6,500 potential non-citizens had been removed. Renae Eze, an Abbott spokesperson, said that the statement sent out to an email list of reporters on Monday contained the phrasing “potential non-citizens”. She did not respond to a query on why the version that was publicly posted initially omitted the word “potential”.The statement was the latest example of how Republican-led states are touting aggressive efforts to remove people with early voting, scheduled to begin in weeks and less than 70 days until election day. Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio have all made similar announcements recently.Voting rights groups are concerned these announcements are misleading, and that the efforts to purge are putting naturalized citizens – eligible voters – at risk for being removed. There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally. The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen. That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship. All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.“We’re extremely concerned about the chilling effect this has on registered voters generally speaking, and particularly newly naturalized citizens,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, one of several groups that signed on to the letter warning Alabama that it may be running afoul of federal law.The Alabama secretary of state’s office did not say how many people had responded indicating they were citizens. In Jefferson county, one of the largest in the state, 557 were flagged as potential non-citizens, according to Barry Stephenson, the county’s registrar. Three people have responded to notices that went out so far, Stephenson said. Two people said they did not know how they had become registered voters. The third said they were a citizen.One Alabama voter, a Huntsville man named James Stroop, told the local news outlet WAFF 48 that he had been wrongly flagged. The Alabama department of labor had incorrectly noted he was a non-citizen on a form years ago. Even though he had corrected the issue with the department of labor, he was still marked as a non-citizen when the agency sent data to the Alabama secretary of state.“Imagine if Alabama’s DMV had different information about a different group of voters and they knew that some vanishingly small percentage of people with green eyes were ineligible to vote for some reason,” she added. “And then they pulled everyone with green eyes off the rolls. I think the problem would be obvious to everyone that you can’t just deregister voters because some vanishingly small percentage of them may be ineligible to vote.”In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order noting that his administration had removed 6,303 non-citizens from the rolls since taking office. That represents an incredibly small fraction of the more than 6.3 million people registered to vote in the state as of 1 July.Like Tennessee and Alabama, Virginia is flagging non-citizens on its rolls using both data from its DMV and the Department of Homeland Security to identify potential non-citizens. Anyone removed is given 14 days to indicate they are in fact citizens. It’s unclear how many of the people removed were actually non-citizens and how many simply didn’t respond.“We take seriously the potential for errors in database matching, the consequences for voters and the public at large of any erroneous removal of eligible voters from the voter registration rolls, and Virginia’s recent history of mistakes and errors with data sharing protocols in particular,” a group of civil rights groups wrote to Youngkin and Susan Beals, who runs the state’s department of elections.Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose has promoted his office’s efforts to remove 137 suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls using DMV data. Several naturalized citizens have come forward to say they were wrongly flagged, including one man who said his voter registration was challenged months after he was naturalized.“We know that the number of non-citizens who vote is a vanishingly small number based on all available evidence,” Huddleston said. “By inflating the issue and sweeping in very predictably naturalized citizens, the Alabama secretary of state and others are preventing naturalized citizens from being able to vote and creating this chilling effect.” More

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      Utah Officials Backtrack on Untested Execution Drug

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      An execution, scheduled for next month, would have used an experimental three-drug combination that critics said could inflict serious pain.Plans to use an experimental three-drug combination in an upcoming execution in Utah — a cocktail that critics said could inflict serious pain — have been scrapped after state officials said in court documents released Saturday that they would be able to seek an alternative.Taberon D. Honie, who was convicted of aggravated murder in 1999, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Aug. 8. It would be the first execution conducted by that method in the state in nearly 25 years. The Utah Department of Corrections recommended using an untested three-drug cocktail of ketamine, fentanyl and potassium chloride when it could not find sodium thiopental, the drug required by Utah law, or other alternatives.That drug has been challenging to obtain for more than a decade, after Hospira, the only American producer of sodium thiopental, announced it would stop selling it, citing concerns about producing the drug in Italy. But many states across the country where the death penalty is legal have struggled for years to obtain and properly use suitable drugs for lethal injections.A lawsuit filed last week by Mr. Honie’s lawyer against several Utah prison officials expressed many concerns about the proposed drug cocktail, including that it would not create the anesthesia Mr. Honie needed to be “unconscious, unaware and insensate to pain,” when the potassium chloride, which stops the heart, is administered. The drugs carried the risk “of serious pain and unnecessary suffering,” the lawyer, Eric Zuckerman, wrote in the complaint.On Friday, Brian Redd, the executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections, agreed instead to obtain the sedative pentobarbital for Mr. Honie’s execution, a drug that is now used by other death penalty states. Mr. Redd also vowed to abandon the idea of using the three-drug combination in any execution if pentobarbital could be supplied.“We still believe that the three-drug combination would have been effective, but we also recognize we could’ve been caught in a lengthy court battle,” said Glen Mills, a spokesman for the department.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Black Alabama mayor reinstated after nearly four-year battle

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      Patrick Braxton, the first Black mayor of an Alabama town that has not held elections in several decades, has spent the last four years fighting to be recognized. Finally, after an extensive legal battle, he and the town officials who refused to acknowledge him as mayor have reached a settlement, according to federal court documents.Per the settlement agreement, Braxton will be officially seated as the mayor of Newbern, Alabama, and be able to fully serve in this capacity for the first time in nearly four years, pending approval by Judge Kristi K DuBose of the southern district of Alabama.The town has also committed to holding regular municipal elections, which will happen openly and transparently, beginning in 2025. Until then, all current town council members will resign. An interim town council, composed of new people and members of the town council Braxton originally appointed, will help guide the town until it has elections.Morenike Fajana, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF), which has been involved with the case since last year, said: “It’s been a really long battle.“It’s been four years that this has been ongoing and there have been different setbacks and challenges. But I feel like [Braxton] is appreciative of the fact that this is happening now and he is proud to have the opportunity to serve the town of Newbern.”Braxton said that he has kept his church and community members informed of daily updates about the court case and is happy to finally give them some good news.“Everybody is pleased and happy,” he said. “They’re glad we can put this behind us and start moving forward and working for the town … The children, some of them don’t quite understand about everything, and then some of them are old enough to know this is a big deal for the community.”All of the community will hear the news by 30 August, by which time the parties will hold a public town meeting informing Newbern residents of the agreement.Braxton is excited to finally do what he set out to do nearly half a decade ago: to unify and improve the town.“I think I got a wonderful team, people that’s going to work with me and help the community,” he said.Newbern, located about an hour and a half away from Montgomery, captured national attention in 2023 when it became widely known that white officials had refused for three years to allow Braxton, the first Black mayor in Newbern’s history, to exercise his mayoral duties.The 133-person town is about 80% Black and 20% white, but the town’s leadership, excluding Braxton and his town council, has been majority white for decades. The defendants in the lawsuit, including the previous mayor and council, refused to hold elections.During discovery for the case and last month’s hearing about a motion for preliminary injunction, those on the former town council admitted to never holding elections.“They claimed that they didn’t know they had to,” Fajana said. “Instead, their process was when a position became vacant, they would just kind of recruit among their community and the people that they knew. They would just appoint that person and it would happen, basically, in a covert manner. That had been the process for as long as anybody could remember. Anybody who was serving in the past town council said that’s how they came to power.”Per the settlement, the defendants “specifically deny having engaged in any wrongful practice, or other unlawful conduct”, saying instead they reached the “compromise” to avoid protracted litigation.Braxton told the Guardian in 2023 that the town’s previous mayor had told him that it wasn’t possible to have elections in the small town. He decided to run anyway, out of a desire to help his community, which has a significant poverty rate.“For decades, officials in my town have excluded me and other voters from participating in elections and having a say in what happens here,” Braxton said in a statement provided by the LDF earlier this year.In 2020, Braxton became mayor by default when he was the only person to file for office. Following his election and swearing in, he appointed a town council.Unbeknownst to him, or anyone else in the town, the previous town council and mayor held a secret, special election during which they voted themselves in as town council. Braxton did not attend their parallel town council meetings, not recognizing them as legitimate. The parallel town council removed him from office and reappointed the former mayor to the position. They were aided, the lawsuit alleges, by the town’s bank and clerk.“It’s really about those facts, it’s about what happened in 2020 with this alleged parallel election process and then also, which is equally important, the failure of the town to have any sort of municipal election, whether for mayor or town council, for decades dating back to as long as anyone who has been involved in this case can remember,” Fajana said.Now that he’s fully recognized as mayor and able to serve in that capacity, Braxton is looking towards the future.Per the agreement, he will submit a list of potential names for town council to the Alabama governor, currently Kay Ivey, who will fill the positions. If she does not, the probate judge of Hale county will declare a special election on 31 December 2024. All elected officials elected or appointed before the 2025 municipal election, including Braxton, will have their terms end that year, in pursuance with Alabama law.“Once we get my town council in place,” he said, “I think the town is going to take off and start moving from here.” More