Decisions and Verdicts

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      Appeals Court Allows Trump Administration’s DEI Crackdown to Proceed, but Judges Debate DEI Merits

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      A federal appeals court on Friday allowed the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government to go forward by pausing a lower-court ruling in Maryland that had blocked enforcement of a series of President Trump’s executive orders.However, the concurring opinions provided by the three judges revealed a sharp political line dividing the jurists on whether diversity was a nonpartisan value of American life or a political philosophy open to scrutiny.Mr. Trump has made aggressive moves to purge diversity initiatives from the government, and administration officials have threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they fail to report on colleagues who defy the orders. Judge Adam B. Abelson of the District of Maryland had written in the lower court ruling last month that the orders sought to punish people for constitutionally protected speech.On Friday, the three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, Va., found that the Trump administration had “satisfied the factors for a stay” of that order, writing that the orders “are of distinctly limited scope” and “do not purport to establish the illegality of all efforts to advance diversity, equity or inclusion.”Chief Judge Albert Diaz, who was appointed to the Fourth Circuit by President Barack Obama in 2010, wrote that ruling in the Trump administration’s favor was warranted but pushed back against the attacks on diversity initiatives, saying that “people of good faith who work to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion deserve praise, not opprobrium.”“When this country embraces true diversity, it acknowledges and respects the social identity of its people,” wrote Judge Diaz, who became the first Hispanic jurist to serve as chief judge of the court in 2023. “When it fosters true equity, it opens opportunities and ensures a level playing field for all. And when its policies are truly inclusive, it creates an environment and culture where everyone is respected and valued.”He continued, “What could be more American than that?”Judge Pamela Harris, writing in her own concurring opinion, said that she shared Judge Diaz’s sentiment.“My vote should not be understood as agreement with the orders’ attack on efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion,” wrote Judge Harris, who was also appointed to the court by Mr. Obama.But Judge Allison Jones Rushing, who was appointed by Mr. Trump during his first term, used her own concurring opinion to criticize Judge Diaz’s declaration of support for diversity, equity and inclusion.“Any individual judge’s view on whether certain executive action is good policy is not only irrelevant to fulfilling our duty to adjudicate cases and controversies according to the law, it is an impermissible consideration,” Judge Rushing wrote.She continued, “A judge’s opinion that D.E.I. programs ‘deserve praise, not opprobrium’ should play absolutely no part in deciding this case.” More

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      Jury Awards $120 Million to Illinois Men Wrongfully Convicted of Murder

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      John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were teenagers when they were coerced into giving false confessions in a 2003 murder in Chicago.A federal jury in Chicago awarded $120 million on Monday to two Illinois men who spent more than 16 years behind bars for a 2003 murder they did not commit.John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were teenagers when they were convicted in 2006 for the murder of Christopher Collazo, whose body was found bound and partly burned in an alley on the South Side of Chicago in the early hours of March 10, 2003. Their convictions were vacated in 2019.Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell each filed a federal lawsuit in 2020 against the City of Chicago, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and several Chicago police officers, arguing that the men had been framed and were coerced into giving false confessions.After a month of testimony, a federal jury deliberated for two days before finding that the men had been railroaded into giving false confessions and that detectives had fabricated evidence against them, according to court records. Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell were each awarded $60 million in damages.Mr. Fulton said in a phone interview on Tuesday that he knew his day of justice would come.“It was a sense of relief,” he said of the verdict. Referring to others still serving time for crimes they did not commit, he added, “I also thought about all the others who haven’t gotten a chance to see this day for themselves.”Jon Loevy, a lawyer for Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell, described the moment the jury read its verdict as “very emotional.”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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      Judge Orders U.S.A.I.D. and State Dept. to Pay Funds ‘Unlawfully’ Withheld

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      A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Monday from “unlawfully impounding congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds” that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development owed to grant recipients and contractors, requiring it to pay for work completed in the first several weeks of President Trump’s term.The ruling, handed down by Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, was the latest step in a winding dispute over foreign aid payments since Mr. Trump has tried to vastly shrink the nation’s foreign assistance. While forcing the administration to pay for work completed before Feb. 13, Judge Ali said the limits of the case prevented him from ordering payments on future work or restoring canceled contracts.But he left no doubt that he believed that the administration had exceeded its authority in trying to block funding, a warning that could echo through a deluge of lawsuits over Mr. Trump’s efforts to unilaterally halt spending.“Here, the executive has unilaterally deemed that funds Congress appropriated for foreign aid will not be spent,” he wrote. “The executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place.”The order on Monday prohibited the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. from implementing much of a Jan. 24 memorandum outlining plans to reorient and shrink U.S. foreign aid. It further required them to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars still owed to a constellation of groups for work completed before Feb. 13, as Judge Ali had ordered last month.The order dealt with a broad freeze on foreign aid funding that Mr. Trump put into effect the day he took office. It stopped short of the much more significant step of invalidating the Trump administration’s decision to cancel thousands of contracts through what it described as an expedited line-by-line review, after the lawsuit was already underway. Judge Ali found that the court was restrained to addressing the specific harms laid out in the lawsuit, not “supervision of discrete or ongoing executive decisions.”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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      German Court Convicts Five Over Plot to Kidnap Health Official and Spread Chaos

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      The defendants, part of a group known as “United Patriots,” aimed to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution by giving power to an all-powerful Kaiser.Five people have been sentenced to prison over what the authorities in Germany described as a plot to kidnap the country’s health minister on live television in 2022 in an attempt to destabilize the German state.After a nearly two-year trial, a court found on Thursday that the five, under a group billed as the “United Patriots,” had planned to create a widespread weekslong power outage and then use the chaos to reinstate a 19th-century Constitution ceding power to an all-powerful Kaiser.They were convicted of founding or joining a terrorist group, of treason and in some cases of owning illegal guns, rifles and explosives.Jörn Müller, a spokesman for the court, in Koblenz in western Germany, said the trial had “shown that a democratic constitutional state is capable of dealing with its alleged opponents on the basis of law and order in a fair and independent trial.”The court sentenced a 46-year-old man whom it had determined to be the group’s central figure to eight years in prison. A 77-year-old woman who holds a Ph.D. in theology and frequently interrupted the court hearings with antisemitic and conspiracy-theory-laced diatribes was handed a sentence of seven years and nine months. Three other men, all in their 50s, received sentences ranging from six and a half years to two years and 10 months.In accordance with German privacy laws, the court identified the defendants only by their initials.The five were part of the Reichsbürger scene, a loosely affiliated antisemitic far-right grouping that does not accept the legitimacy of the modern German state. Their planned overthrow was not directly related to a far more complex, and far more dangerous, plot surrounding a disgruntled prince that is currently being tried in three separate courts in Germany.After meeting and radicalizing on a Telegram chat group during the pandemic, members of the plot tried to buy and hoard weapons and other tools for their plans, according to the case brought by the prosecutors. Police searches after their arrest in 2022 yielded 52 packets of low-grade explosives, with which the authorities said the group hoped to use to disable large parts of the power grid.Members of the group were arrested while trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles, mines and bulletproof vests. The seller was an undercover police officer and the exchange was a setup.The five convicted on Thursday had focused their ire on Germany’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, a medical doctor and former professor who has taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. During the pandemic, he was an outspoken proponent of vaccination rules, often appearing on television panel shows to explain the medical science behind the spread of the coronavirus.On Thursday, he thanked the German police for keeping him safe. “The state has shown that it can defend itself against violent conspiracy theorists,” he said on social media. More

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      Maine Lobster Industry Can Sue Seafood Watchdog for Defamation, Judge Rules

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      A group of fishermen says that it lost business after Seafood Watch, a program run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, advised consumers not to buy lobster from the state.Maine’s lobster industry can proceed with a defamation lawsuit that it brought against a seafood watchdog group, which had placed a do-not-buy designation on the crustaceans because of the dangers it said that the industry’s fishing nets posed to an endangered whale species.A federal judge last month denied a motion to have the case dismissed, drawing an appeal on Thursday from the group Seafood Watch, a nonprofit run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium that publishes seafood sustainability ratings.It has been nearly two years since the Maine Lobstermen’s Association and several other plaintiffs sued the nonprofit after it downgraded the sustainability rating for American lobsters caught off Maine from yellow to red in 2022. The nonprofit advised consumers to avoid those lobsters, saying that endangered North Atlantic right whales were at significant risk of becoming entangled in fishing gear.The fishermen blamed Seafood Watch in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Maine, for damaging the reputation of the billion-dollar industry and prompting some of their customers to cancel contracts.“Reputation and goodwill cannot be adequately replaced through awarding damages and this injury lingers as long as the ‘red listing’ does,” Judge John A. Woodcock Jr. wrote in the 137-page order denying the motion to dismiss the case.The fishermen applauded the judge’s ruling in a statement, having argued in the lawsuit that the average price per pound of lobster dropped by 40 percent after Seafood Watch changed its sustainability rating.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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      Judge Rules Trump Can’t Fire Head of Federal Watchdog Agency Without Cause

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      A federal judge said that the president’s efforts to remove Hampton Dellinger, who leads the Office of Special Counsel, were unlawful.A federal judge in Washington on Saturday blocked the Trump administration from ousting the top official at a federal watchdog agency, finding that its efforts to do so were unlawful.In an order on Saturday evening, Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted a permanent injunction against the government, allowing Hampton Dellinger to remain the head of the watchdog agency, the Office of Special Counsel. The order required the Trump administration to recognize Mr. Dellinger’s authority in that position, barring it from taking any action to “treat him in any way as if he has been removed” or otherwise interfere with his work.The administration immediately indicated it would challenge the ruling, starting an appeals process that appeared likely to end at the Supreme Court.In a 67-page opinion explaining the order, Judge Jackson, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, stressed the unique responsibilities Congress gave the office when it was created under a 1978 law. She noted its central role in protecting whistle-blowers in the federal government, a role that she said would be compromised if Mr. Dellinger were allowed to be removed without a cause stipulated under the law. The judge had earlier put a temporary block on the firing.“It is his independence that qualifies him to watch over the time-tested structure that is supposed to bar executive officials from taking federal jobs from qualified individuals and handing them out to political allies — a system that Congress found intolerable over a century ago,” she wrote. The ruling came a week after the Supreme Court declined to intervene in the temporary block on removing Mr. Dellinger. Lawyers for the government argued to the court that Mr. Trump had the authority as the head of the executive branch to place his preferred pick in charge of the office. More

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      Prison Officials Detail Treatment of Trans Inmates Under Trump Gender Order

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      The federal Bureau of Prisons is banning the use of preferred pronouns, stopping special pat-down procedures and rejecting underwear requests from transgender prisoners.The Bureau of Prisons on Friday laid out strict new guidelines for the treatment of transgender inmates to comply with President Trump’s executive order on gender recognition, including ending special procedures for pat-down searches and barring prisoners from purchasing the underwear of their choice.The guidelines, dated Feb. 21 and obtained by The New York Times, show the extraordinary steps that the federal government will have to take to comply with the president’s edict that there are only two sexes, established at conception, and that men who “self-identify as women” pose a threat to the safety of women.The prison memo was issued on the same day that a new group of transgender women rushed to court to try to stop their transfer from all-female prisons to all-male facilities, saying that the move would place them at an elevated risk of physical and sexual violence. Already, a preliminary injunction issued Feb. 18 had blocked the transfer of three transgender women to male prisons.But the new lawsuit said the bureau informed the trans women not participating in earlier suits that they were to be transferred to male prisons “imminently.”The Bureau of Prison’s two-page memo details the treatment expected of transgender inmates at length. The guidelines require prison staff to refer to inmates by “their legal name or pronouns corresponding to their biological sex.”It said that transgender women would no longer be shielded from pat-down searches by male guards and that they would no longer be permitted to buy bras and other women’s clothing at the commissary. Public funds would no longer be used to purchase items that bind breasts, remove hair or allow trans men to use urinals.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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      Former Sheriff’s Deputy Is Convicted in Killing of Colorado Man

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      Andrew Buen was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the 2022 killing of Christian Glass, who was experiencing a mental health crisis on a mountain road.A former Colorado sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a 22-year-old man who was experiencing a mental health crisis on a dark mountain road in 2022 was convicted Thursday of criminally negligent homicide.The former deputy, Andrew Buen, could face up to three years in prison when he is sentenced on April 14, according to the Clear Creek County District Attorney’s Office. The jury declined to convict him on the more serious charge of second-degree murder in the killing of Christian Glass, whose death prompted scrutiny of how the police handle crisis intervention, prompted changes to how officers train for similar situations and resulted in a $19 million settlement for Mr. Glass’s parents.Last year, Mr. Buen was found guilty of reckless endangerment in connection with the shooting, but the jury could not reach a verdict on the second-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 48 years in prison. That set up this month’s trial, which lasted two weeks.Mr. Glass’s father, Simon Glass, said Thursday that conviction of Mr. Buen had brought him significant relief.“We don’t have to be constantly worrying, ‘Will he get away with it?’” Simon Glass, 56, said by phone after attending the trial. “The jury probably showed him a little more mercy than he showed our son, but it’s a conviction.”A lawyer for Mr. Buen, Mallory Revel, said in a statement that a murder count “was never the appropriate charge in this case, and we are grateful to all of the jurors for recognizing that.”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