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      Arizona Republicans denounce revived 1864 abortion ban in sudden reversal

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      Hours after Arizona’s supreme court declared on Tuesday that a 160-year-old abortion ban is now enforceable, Republicans in the state took a surprising stance for a party that has historically championed abortion restrictions – they denounced the decision.“This decision cannot stand,” said Matt Gress, a Republican state representative. “I categorically reject rolling back the clock to a time when slavery was still legal and we could lock up women and doctors because of an abortion.”First passed when Arizona was still a territory, the ban only permits abortions to save a patient’s life and does not have exceptions for rape or incest.“Today’s Arizona supreme court decision reinstating an Arizona territorial-era ban on all abortions from more than 150 years ago is disappointing to say the least,” said TJ Shope, a Republican state senator.“I oppose today’s ruling,” added Kari Lake, a Republican running to represent Arizona in the US Senate and a loyalist of Donald Trump. Lake called on the state legislature to “come up with an immediate commonsense solution that Arizonans can support”.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, leading the GOP to stumble in the 2022 midterms and abortion rights supporters to win a string of ballot measures, including in purple and red states, Republicans have struggled to find a way to talk about abortion without turning off voters. But their response to the ruling on the 1864 ban may mark their fastest and strongest rebuke of abortion bans since Roe fell.“This is an earthquake that has never been seen in Arizona politics,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican consultant in Arizona, of the decision. “This will shake the ground under every Republican candidate, even those in safe legislative or congressional seats.”The 1864 ban is not currently in effect, and may not go into effect for weeks due to legal delays. Abortion is currently allowed in Arizona up until 15 weeks of pregnancy.Some of the criticisms of the Tuesday ruling came from politicians who had previously supported the 1864 ban or cheered the end of Roe v Wade. Lake previously called the ban a “great law”, according to PolitiFact. David Schweikert, an Arizona congressman who is facing one of the most competitive House races in the country this November, said on Tuesday that he does not support the ruling and wants the state legislature to “address this issue immediately”, but in 2022 said the fall of Roe “pleased” him.The speaker of the Arizona state house and the president of the state senate, who are both Republicans, also released a joint statement saying that they would be “listening to our constituents to determine the best course of action for the legislature”. In contrast, on the day Roe fell, the Republican-controlled state senate released a statement declaring that the 1864 ban was in effect immediately. That statement unleashed confusion and chaos among abortion providers in Arizona, prompting them to stop offering the procedure out of an abundance of caution.“They are trying to play it both ways. They’re trying to have this illusion that they’re moderate to get votes, because they know that Arizonans do not want a total ban,” said Dr Gabrielle Goodrick, one of the providers who temporarily stopped performing abortions when Roe fell. “This is just ridiculous. Now they’re saying that they oppose it? Yeah, yeah – a little too late.”Arizona is one of roughly a dozen states where voters may be able to directly decide abortion rights come November. Activists in the state have now collected more than half a million signatures in favor of giving Arizona residents a chance to vote on a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.Democrats hope that turnout for this proposal, which has yet to be officially added to the ballot, will also lead to surge in support for their candidates, including Joe Biden. A similar dynamic is at play in Florida, whose state supreme court recently paved the way for a six-week abortion ban, and where voters will be able to vote in November to constitutionally protect abortion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe decision also exposed the deepening rift between Republicans and their longtime allies in the anti-abortion movement. As Arizona Republicans raced to distance themselves from the long-dormant law, abortion opponents cheered the decision.“We celebrate the Arizona supreme court’s decision that allows the state’s pro-life law to again protect the lives of countless, innocent unborn children,” said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Jake Warner, who argued the case before the court in favor of the ban.Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who disappointed religious conservatives on Monday when he said states should decide their own abortion laws, did not immediately weigh in on the Arizona ruling.Abortion rights are popular in Arizona: nearly one-third of Arizona voters in the 2022 midterm elections said abortion was the issue that mattered most in helping them decide who to vote for, according to exit polling. By a 2 to 1 margin, voters in the state said abortion should be legal, and 40% said they felt “angry” about the supreme court decision ending the federal right to an abortion.A poll conducted in late February by the Phoenix-based firm, Noble Predictive Insights, found that 40% of Arizona voters expected Trump, if elected, to attempt to ban abortion altogether, while 45% expected Biden, if re-elected, to increase access.Vice-president Kamala Harris will go to Arizona later this week, in a visit that was planned ahead of the Tuesday decision. She blamed the impending state ban on Trump, whose three supreme court appointees voted to eliminate the federally guaranteed right to an abortion.“Arizona just rolled back the clock to a time before women could vote – and, by his own admission, there’s one person responsible: Donald Trump,” Harris said in a campaign statement. “The alarm is sounding for every woman in America: if he has the opportunity, Donald Trump would sign off on a national abortion ban.” More

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      Arizona Abortion Ban: What We Know

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      The state’s highest court reinstated an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions. Here’s what to know about the ruling.Arizona’s highest court reinstated an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for women’s health care and election-year politics in a critical battleground state.Here’s what to know about the ruling, the law and its possible impact.What is the 1864 law?The law, which was on the books long before Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, outlaws abortion from the moment of conception, except when necessary to save the life of the mother, and it makes no exceptions for rape or incest. It bans all types of abortions, including medication abortions.Until now, abortion had been legal in Arizona through 15 weeks of pregnancy. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago, supporters and opponents of abortion rights in Arizona had been fighting in court over whether the 1864 law, which had sat dormant for decades, could be enforced, or whether it had been effectively neutered by decades of other state laws that regulate and restrict abortion.Doctors prosecuted under the law could face fines and prison terms of two to five years for providing, supplying or administering care to a pregnant woman.What does the ruling say?On April 9, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in a 4-to-2 decision that the pre-statehood law was “now enforceable.”The court said that because the federal right to abortion had been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, there was no federal or state law preventing Arizona from enforcing the near-total ban. It noted that the State Legislature had not created a right to abortion when it passed the 15-week ban in 2022.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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      US election workers face thousands of threats – so why so few prosecutions?

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      Shortly before midnight on 14 February 2021, James Clark tapped out a message on his home computer in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, that would change his own life and shatter the peace of mind of several others.Clark, then 38, was surfing the internet having been drinking and taking drugs. Social media platforms were overflowing with heated debate around Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.Five days earlier, Trump’s second impeachment trial had opened over his alleged incitement of the insurrection at the US Capitol. Over in the battleground state of Arizona the online debate was especially raucous, with conspiracy theories raging that the vote count had been rigged.Though Clark lived 2,700 miles away from Phoenix, the Arizona capital, he felt driven to intervene. He found the contact page of the state’s top election official and typed: “Your attorney general needs to resign by Tuesday February 16th by 9am or the explosive device impacted in her personal space will be detonated.”Then he signed the message “Donny Dee”, and hit send.Clark’s bomb threat was discovered two days later, with instant seismic effect. Terrified staff fled from the state executive office building, sniffer dogs scoured several floors, and top state officials had to shelter in place.Four months after the panic at the Arizona executive building, the US Department of Justice circulated a memo to all federal prosecutors and FBI agents. There had been a “significant increase in the threat of violence against Americans who administer free and fair elections”, the memo said.The increase in threats amounted to “a threat to democracy. We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders.”The memo announced the formation of a new unit within the justice department, the election threats taskforce. Its job was to respond to a phenomenon that had barely existed before Trump unleashed his 2020 stolen election lie – violent and abusive messages, including death threats, specifically targeting election officials and their families.The taskforce was devised as a crack multi-disciplinary team bringing together experts from across the justice department and linking them with local FBI and US attorney offices. Its mission: to protect election officials from the intimidation let loose by Trump, by coming down hard on perpetrators.As the November presidential election fast approaches, the taskforce faces its greatest challenge. With Trump back on the ballot, and with swing states such as Arizona continuing to be roiled by election denial, the federal unit is at the frontlines of what promises to be a combustible election year.Much is riding on it. The Brennan Center, a non-partisan law and policy institute, has estimated that since 2020, three election officials have quit their jobs on average every two days – that’s equivalent to about one in five of those who run US elections nationwide bowing out in the face of toxic hostility.View image in fullscreen“What the election threats taskforce does this year is going to be critical,” said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “They have the biggest megaphone, and they need to use it to make clear that threats of violence against election workers are illegal and will not be tolerated.”Day-to-day efforts of the taskforce are headed by John Keller, principal deputy chief of the public integrity section of the justice department’s criminal division. As the election year gets under way, his team is preparing itself for whatever lies ahead amid a collapse of confidence among some sections of American society in election results – and by extension, election workers – which Keller described as “incredibly concerning”.“Any criminal threat to an election official that seeks to intimidate them, or change their behavior or how they perform their critical functions, is a significant problem,” he told the Guardian. “The election community in the current climate feels attacked, they are scared, and the department recognizes that.”As part of those preparations, the election threats taskforce is stepping up its contact with election administrators from coast to coast. Since its inception, the team has held more than 100 trainings and engagements with election officials and regional prosecutors to share knowledge on how to deal with hostile attacks.Over the next eight months the taskforce will continue to hold a series of tabletop exercises in which federal experts and their regional partners role-play responses to possible worst-case scenarios, from serious death threats aimed at election administrators to bomb threats against polling places or other election infrastructure. Similar war games will act out what would happen in the event of a cybersecurity attack or attempt to bring down the power grid on election day.At the core of the taskforce’s operations are criminal prosecutions of the most serious threats against election staff and volunteers. In almost three years, the unit has prosecuted 16 cases involving 18 defendants, two of whom are women.Ten perpetrators have so far been sentenced, with punishments ranging from 30 days to 3.5 years in prison. A further three people have pleaded guilty, and five have been charged and are awaiting plea deals or trials.Clark was sentenced to 3.5 years’ imprisonment earlier this month for his Arizona bomb threat. At his sentencing hearing in federal district court in Phoenix, a prosecutor from the election threats taskforce requested a strong deterrent punishment, pointing out that within minutes of sending his threat Clark had searched online for information on “how to kill” the then secretary of state.Arizona is the ground zero of election threats, accounting for seven of the taskforce’s 16 prosecutions. On Monday Joshua Russell was sentenced to 30 months in prison in federal court in Phoenix for leaving a series of voicemails in 2022 for Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona who was then acting as secretary of state.He said: “Your days are extremely numbered. America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life, you communist traitor.”One of the striking features of the taskforce is the relatively few cases it has prosecuted compared with the mountain of hostile communications that has been dumped on the election community in the Trump era. In its early stages, the unit invited election offices around the country to forward all the offensive material to its Washington headquarters and was inundated with thousands of obscene, abusive and hostile messages.View image in fullscreenBut when it pored over the reports it found that up to 95% of them failed to meet the threshold for conducting even a criminal investigation, let alone prosecution. That standard was set by the US supreme court in the 2003 ruling Virginia v Black, which weighed the need to shield public servants from criminal threats of violence against the robust protections for political speech under the first amendment of the US constitution.The court’s conclusion was that for a communication to be a crime it has to be a “true threat”. The justices defined that as a “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence”.Most of the messages reviewed by the taskforce were distressing and inappropriate, certainly, but in its analysis fell short of that criminal bar. They were indirect rather than direct, implicit rather than explicit, ambiguous and aspirational rather than an active statement of intent to carry out illegal violence.“The difference between what is criminally actionable, and what feels like a threat to an election administrator on the ground, is an inherent problem in this space. What is potentially actionable is closer to dozens of cases, compared with the thousands of hostile communications we have received,” Keller said.Despite the legal complexities of a “true threat”, some at the receiving end of the vitriol are calling for more urgent action. Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s current secretary of state whose office has been the target of several of the most serious threats, told the Guardian that in his view it was taking “monstrously long” for federal prosecutors to secure sentences.He called for an increase in penalties, and a broadening of the scope of what constitutes a criminal threat against election officials. “I don’t know that the federal bureaucracy has been nimble enough. They’re not treating it like the domestic terrorism that it is,” he said.Bill Gates, a Republican supervisor with Arizona’s largest constituency, Maricopa county which covers Phoenix, is quitting his job as a top election administrator after the November election in part because of the terrifying threats he and his family have suffered. He also called on the taskforce to step up the intensity of its operations at this critical moment.“I’m grateful for what they’ve done, but we feel like they could do more,” he said. “We all feel that the January 6 prosecutions [over the attack on the US Capitol] have been very aggressive and well-publicized, and we’d like to see the same level when it comes to threats against election workers.”The taskforce said that the 12- to 24-month gestation period for its election threats prosecutions was similar to any other federal case, from violent crime to fraud. Keller agreed though that deterrence was vital.View image in fullscreen“The deterrent value of the cases is critical. Like most things in most spaces, I’m sure that we could do more and do better, and we are trying to come up with new ways to attract more attention to this work to maximize that deterrent impact,” he said.It’s not just legal constraints that affect the number and speed of prosecutions, there are other technical hurdles that the taskforce has to negotiate. Identifying perpetrators who disguise themselves by using foreign internet service providers or burner phones can be a challenge, and subpoenas seeking the information from companies such as Facebook and Twitter or Verizon and AT&T usually take six to eight weeks.Against such impediments, the taskforce is hoping to build up resilience against the anti-democratic onslaught by improving communications between the central justice department and the FBI’s 56 field offices and 94 US attorney’s offices around the country. Each FBI office has an election crime coordinator, working in tandem with the taskforce’s election community liaison officer.The network has been used to share information about how to deal with growing problems such as swatting – hoax calls to 911 reporting crimes or fires at public officials’ homes. Lists are being compiled of potential swatting targets in sensitive areas like Maricopa county so that officers are aware that the emergency calls may be false as soon as they come in.Norden of the Brennan Center said that as the election year hots up, relationships between beleaguered local election workers and the powerful federal hub will become ever more important. “The taskforce’s presence lets election officials know the federal government has their backs. That’s essential, because a lot of them, particularly in the immediate aftermath, felt kind of abandoned.” More

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      California Faces Heavy Rain and Flooding From Coastal Storm

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      Los Angeles had received one to two inches of rain as of Saturday morning. Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming were also expected to get significant precipitation this weekend.An unseasonably cold and vigorous storm system was cutting through the southwestern Pacific Coast this weekend, bringing rain, flash flooding and snow to parts of California and other states, forecasters said.The National Weather Service in San Diego had issued a flash flood warning on Saturday morning, cautioning the public about potential flooding in the southwestern part of the state.The storm was expected to continue moving along the coast and, eventually, inland.“This storm is going to have an impact all the way across the country, but right now the storm center is off the California coast,” said Bob Smerbeck, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “There’s going to be some flooding issues, mudslides and debris. People should keep their guard up.”The storm was coming off the coast of California and was expected to shift south and eastward on Saturday or Sunday, creating the risk of flash flooding in Southern California, said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md.Los Angeles had received one to two inches of rain as of Saturday morning, and in Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties, the rainfall amounts were two to four inches, Ms. Santorelli said.The Transverse Ranges and Sierra Nevada could get heavy snowfall, Ms. Santorelli said. Since this was a fairly cold system, significant snowfall was expected above 6,000 feet, with one to three feet of accumulation, and higher amounts possible above 7,500 feet.Windy conditions were expected to continue, including gusts of 50 to 60 miles per hour above 5,000 feet through Saturday morning, the Los Angeles office of the National Weather Service wrote on Saturday.Strong winds, combined with the heavy snow, could produce short-term blizzard conditions in the mountain areas, forecasters said. Winter storm warnings were in effect for most of the mountains through Sunday evening.California is expected to dry out by Monday, Mr. Smerbeck said, but the storm will continue to move into Arizona over the weekend. Western Arizona was expected to experience heavy rain overnight on Saturday and into Sunday.Arizona was under a wind advisory from noon until 10 p.m. Saturday. The south-central and southwestern portions of Arizona could get a quarter of an inch of rain, according to the National Weather Service in Phoenix.The storm was also expected to bring significant precipitation to parts of Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. As of Saturday, AccuWeather was forecasting a foot of snow in Flagstaff, Ariz. More

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      Why It’s So Expensive to Live in Phoenix

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      In the five years since they began their life together in the desert sprawl of greater Phoenix, Devon Lawrence and Eren Mendoza have bounced from one itinerant home to another.They have camped alongside a freeway off-ramp, using a gas station sink as their bath and a plastic tarp as their refuge from the relentless sun. They have slept on an air mattress in a friend’s living room. For the last two years, they have crammed into rooms at motels, paying as much as $650 a week.Ms. Mendoza and Mr. Lawrence are both 32, and both have jobs. She works at a supermarket deli counter. He stocks shelves at a convenience store. Together, they earn about $3,500 a month. Yet they have been stymied in their reach for a modest dream: They cannot find an affordable home in a safe neighborhood in Phoenix, where rents have roughly doubled over the last decade.“These prices are just wild,” Ms. Mendoza said. “It’s pretty much all anybody talks about. The fact that a dual income can’t support us is insanity.”The impossible arithmetic of housing is a potent source of economic anxiety in Phoenix, and in many major American cities — a reality that could influence control of the White House.Devon Lawrence and Eren Mendoza earn about $3,500 a month together, but they have been unable to find affordable housing in Phoenix.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesWe 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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      Kari Lake won’t contest claims she defamed Arizona election official

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      Kari Lake signaled on Tuesday that she will not contest claims that she lied about a top Arizona election official and defamed him, a significant legal concession from the Arizona Republican who has become one of the country’s most prominent election deniers.Stephen Richer, the top election official in Maricopa county, sued Lake, her campaign and an aligned Pac last year after she lost her gubernatorial bid and repeatedly lied about him. Lake, who is now running for the US Senate, falsely accused him of injecting 300,000 illegal votes into machines and intentionally misprinting ballots so they would be rejected by ballot tabulators.Richer said the claims turned the lives of him and his family “upside down” and made them “the targets of threats of violence, even death”. He asked a jury to award compensatory and punitive damages and wants Lake and her team to remove all false information about him from the internet.In a court filing on Tuesday, Lake essentially conceded she won’t try to prove that her claims were true or that she had a reasonable basis to believe they were. Instead, she asked a Maricopa county judge to quickly set a hearing for a “default judgment” against her and move to hold a hearing to determine what damages, if any, she should have to pay. Lake is still requesting the empaneling of a jury to resolve any factual disputes around the damages issues.Richer and lawyers for Protect Democracy, a non-profit organization representing him, said Lake’s filing was essentially a surrender and claimed victory. “After months of doubling down and defending their lies across Arizona, in the media, and on social media, when push came to shove, the defendants decided to completely back down and concede that their lies were just that: lies,” Richer said in a statement.Lake denied she had conceded anything.“I didn’t surrender, I simply cut-to-the-chase. We filed papers demanding a hearing in 30 days for Stephen to prove how my words harmed him. I am ready to go to court now, Stephen. Are you?” she wrote in a Twitter post.In her filing, her lawyers suggested they would use the damages proceedings to dive into Richer’s medical history and political funding. Her lawyers also wrote that her request for a default judgment did not concede anything about damages because Richer had not been specific enough in his complaint about how any damages he suffered were traceable to her.“Defendants request a jury to adjudicate any factual disputes. It is often said that defaulting admits the allegations in the operative complaint. This is a misnomer,” her lawyers wrote.Lake’s filing is the latest development as several groups have turned to defamation lawsuits as a tool to try to hold those who spread misinformation accountable for their lies. The voting equipment vendor Dominion settled with Fox for $787.5m last year. Rudy Giuliani was ordered to pay $148.1m to two Georgia election workers. Giuliani, who received a default judgment order in his case after declining to turn over evidence, has claimed bankruptcy and has yet to pay the workers.Earlier this year, the far-right outlet Project Veritas admitted it falsely accused a US postal worker of fraud during the 2020 election as part of a defamation suit settlement. The postal worker was also represented by Protect Democracy.Lake’s filing came right before the case entered the discovery phase – the process during which parties exchange potentially relevant evidence, including emails and other documents in their possession. In other defamation cases, information obtained in discovery has led to humiliating public disclosures, including revelations that key Fox News talent knew claims about the election being stolen were false.Daniel Maynard, a lawyer who is helping represent Richer, maintained in a statement that by permitting a judgment to be entered against her, Lake is conceding that she intentionally lied about Richer’s actions in the 2022 election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“These types of unwarranted attacks on our public servants need to stop,” he said. “Those who run for public office and lose need to learn to accept defeat with grace rather than falsely attacking those who administer our elections.”Lee Levine, a longtime first amendment lawyer, said it was not unheard of for a defendant to concede liability in a defamation case in order to focus on damages. Such a strategy may prevent the jury from hearing inflammatory information about how the defendant knew the information was false and make the case a more “antiseptic” discussion of how much money the plaintiff is owed. “From a PR perspective, it’s changing the narrative,” he said.Still, Levine added, it was a risky strategy to solely focus on damages.“If the plaintiff is claiming injury to reputation, they should be allowed to put on reputation witnesses to talk about how their reputation was injured,” he said. “So somebody can talk about the devastation of what was said, they believe what was said, why they thought less of the plaintiff as a result, and all the ways they were influenced by the defamation. And then, of course, family members would testify about the extreme emotional stress that the plaintiff suffered.”RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said Lake may have chosen to ask for default judgment, despite appearing to have a legal advantage, to avoid an expensive defamation suit and having to turn over potentially embarrassing discovery to the plaintiffs in the case.“As a free speech matter, the deck was stacked in Kari Lake’s favor in a case like this. She would have been litigating under the most defendant-generous standard in the world,” she said. “The plaintiff suing her would bear all of the heavy burden of proving not only that she lied but that she did so deliberately or with reckless disregard for the truth. A defendant who was confident that the things they’d said were true might not be expected to concede the case.” More

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      Arizona court rules Mexico can proceed with lawsuit against five US gun dealers

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      A trial court in Arizona has ruled that the Mexican government may proceed in its trailblazing lawsuit against five US gun dealers, who stand accused of facilitating gun trafficking across the border into Mexico.Mexico argues that the companies’ marketing campaigns and distribution practices mean that they are legally responsible for the bloodshed that their guns contribute to.This is the second such case that the Mexican government has brought in US courts this year, having also accused US gun manufacturers of facilitating the cross-border arms traffic in a case in Massachusetts.“[The Mexican lawsuits] emphasize the responsibility of companies regarding how they produce and sell their weapons,” said Carlos Pérez-Ricart, a political scientist in Mexico.Gun sales are highly restricted in Mexico itself, where there is just one gun store, run by the state.Yet the Mexican government estimates that 200,000 firearms are smuggled over the border from the US every year.This fuels a level of insecurity and violence that is extraordinary in peacetime: for the past six years, Mexico has seen more than 30,000 homicides a year.Some 70% of the guns used in homicides in Mexico have serial numbers that can be traced back to US gun shops.Between the two cases, Mexico is seeking $25bn in damages. But it also seeks to shine a light on industry practices and force change, thereby reducing the flow of weapons into Mexico and the gun violence they add to.In both cases, the gun companies sought protection under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents them from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products.The trial court in Massachusetts initially dismissed Mexico’s case on those grounds, but Mexico appealed, and the decision was reversed in January.The gun manufacturers have said they will ask the supreme court to take the case on. But the supreme court only takes a fraction of cases where review is sought by defendants.By contrast, the trial court in Arizona accepted Mexico’s case against gun dealers. This means the “discovery” phase can begin right away, in which Mexico is entitled to ask for documents from defendants, and company executives may be questioned under oath.“We’re off to the races in the Arizona case,” said Jonathan Lowy, president of Global Action on Gun Violence, which is co-counsel in both cases.To win, Mexico will need to convince the juries that the companies’ design choices, marketing campaigns and distribution practices are sufficiently connected to gun violence in Mexico for them to be considered responsible.The lawsuits could provide a template for future legal actions to change the way the gun industry operates, for example forcing manufacturers to produce firearms in a way that makes it harder to convert for greater lethality.“This could lead to a massive reduction in the sale of crime guns supplying both cartels in Mexico and also criminals in the US, because the same industry practices supply both,” said Lowy. “It would save a great deal of lives – on both sides of the border.”Even if Mexico doesn’t win the lawsuits, it has put the issue of smuggled firearms as a catalyst of violence squarely into the public debate for the first time.“For many years the conversation was dominated by drugs going from Mexico to the US, and nobody mentioned firearms,” said Pérez-Ricart. “It’s crucial that we talk about firearms as a matter of greatest importance in foreign policy.” More

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      Man Who Threatened to Kill Arizona Official Over Election Gets 2½ Years in Prison

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      Joshua Russell, 46, of Ohio, left threatening messages for Katie Hobbs in 2022, when she was Arizona’s secretary of state and successfully ran for governor.An Ohio man who threatened to kill Katie Hobbs in 2022 when she was secretary of state in Arizona and running to be governor was sentenced Monday to two and a half years in prison, prosecutors announced.The man, Joshua Russell, 46, of Ohio, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Arizona in August to one count of making an interstate threat, according to the Justice Department. He was indicted in December 2022 on charges that he had left several voice messages containing death threats with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office during the midterm election season, in which Ms. Hobbs was elected governor.Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, was secretary of state in Arizona and was the state’s top election official when Joe Biden’s 2020 victory there was certified. She was not named in court documents, but a letter filed in court last week on Mr. Russell’s behalf was addressed to her.In the letter, Mr. Russell apologized to Ms. Hobbs and said that he was being treated for anger and drug and alcohol abuse, which he cited as a factor in making the threats.“Social media and news reports (that I didn’t know if they were true or false) became another addiction for me, and only fueled my depression, anxiety and anger,” Mr. Russell wrote.The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night, and Mr. Russell’s public defenders could not immediately be reached.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