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    ‘You cannot undo a wrongful execution’: push to halt killing of Texas man in ‘shaken baby’ case

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    At 6pm next Thursday, barring a last-minute reprieve, Robert Roberson will become the first person in America to be executed under the theory of “shaken baby syndrome”, a medical diagnosis from the 1970s that is so disputed it is now widely denounced as junk science.Roberson, 58, will enter the death chamber at the Huntsville unit in Texas, where he will be strapped to a gurney and injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs. He will be put to death having been convicted of shaking to death his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002.A coalition of advocates is calling for the execution to be called off, arguing Roberson is innocent of a crime that never even happened. They include several people exonerated from shaken baby syndrome convictions; more than 80 bipartisan Texas lawmakers; the lead detective in Roberson’s original investigation; and members of his trial jury.Roberson’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Guardian that not only was her client’s life in the balance – so too was justice. “If Robert is executed next week, with all that is known about the profound due-process problems on top of his actual innocence, then Texas would have no legitimate justice system.”She added: “How could you have confidence in a system that cannot fix a case like this, where the science has been so thoroughly discredited?”A year ago, Roberson came within two hours of dying by lethal injection and was only saved by a frenzied late-night intervention by Texas legislators. In an interview with the Guardian from death row shortly before that execution date, he denied having shaken his daughter.“I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that to be on nobody: to lose a child, especially if you tried to do right and you loved her and tried to get to know her, then to be accused.”Now Sween and Roberson’s legal team are scrambling yet again to prevent him becoming a statistic – as the first person on death row to be judicially killed on the back of disputed shaken baby syndrome.Last week his defense team petitioned the US fifth circuit court of appeals requesting a federal review of new evidence that points to an alternative explanation for Nikki’s death. The petition includes expert testimony from 10 medical pathologists who question the findings of Nikki’s 2002 autopsy.The experts conclude that the child’s brain swelling was not caused by violent shaking, but was the result of serious infection. Nikki had undiagnosed pneumonia at the time she slumped into a coma, according to the experts, exacerbated by improper prescription of dangerous medicines and a short fall from the bed in which she was sleeping.The petition also highlights that a few years ago Roberson was found to have autism, a condition which had gone undiagnosed at the time of his daughter’s death. His lawyers argue that this helps explain how flat and unemotional he appeared when he brought the dying girl into hospital, a demeanor that was used against him at trial as evidence of guilt.A separate petition has been pending for eight months at the state’s top criminal court, the Texas court of criminal appeals. The 163-page document filed by Roberson’s lawyers in February argues that science behind shaken baby syndrome had been so undermined by new evidence that today “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder”.A decision from the court is expected any day.Last year, the same criminal appeals court overturned the 35-year sentence of Andrew Roark, who had been found guilty of injuring his girlfriend’s 13-month-old child in 1997. The judges found that key scientific testimony at Roark’s trial had been unreliable, and concluded that if it were presented to a jury today it would “likely yield an acquittal”.There are glaring similarities between the Roark case and Roberson’s conviction. Both men became the subject of shaken baby syndrome accusations on the back of a diagnosis from the same child abuse specialist, Janet Squires, delivered from the same hospital.“The similarities between the cases are overwhelming,” Sween said.The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, continues to stand by Roberson’s death sentence, describing the efforts of the condemned man’s supporters as “11th-hour, one-sided, extra­ju­di­cial stunts that attempt to obscure facts and rewrite his past”.In an unusual move, Paxton secured next week’s execution date while the prisoner’s petition was still pending before the appeals court.Some of Nikki’s other family members are also pressing for the execution to go ahead.Shaken baby syndrome (SBS), which often now goes under the name “abusive head trauma”, was developed in the early 1970s to diagnose children who became severely ill or died from internal brain injuries without necessarily showing outward signs of harm. One of its earliest proponents was the British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch.View image in fullscreenBy the 1980s the theory had hardened into the presumption that a triad of symptoms in children under two years old conclusively indicated abusive shaking. If those three symptoms were indicated – brain swelling, bleeding between the tissues covering the brain, and bleeding behind the eyes – then a crime must have been committed.In the past 15 years medical understanding has grown. It is now widely recognised that other factors can lie behind such brain injuries, including underlying conditions, infections, and even relatively short falls.Studies have also shown that it is physically unlikely that severe brain trauma is caused by shaking alone, without there also being visible injuries to the spine or skull. In Roberson’s case, Nikki displayed no such injuries.Guthkelch himself warned in 2012 that the three symptoms he had identified should not be taken as categoric signs of abuse. “There was not a vestige of proof when the name was suggested that shaking, and nothing else, causes the triad,” he said.In 2023 a group of global experts drawn from many disciplines including pediatrics, pathology, ophthalmology, neurology, physics and biomechanics reviewed the literature on SBS. Their work was published as a book, Shaken Baby Syndrome: Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy.The book’s co-editor, Keith Findley, said that “we consistently reached the conclusion that the scientific underpinnings for shaken baby syndrome are just not there. This is not to deny that abuse happens. It’s to say that medical findings alone simply cannot be a reliable basis for diagnosing child abuse.”Findley, who is founder of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, said: “It is absolutely horrifying to think we are days away from killing a man based on scientific assertions that are known to be wrong”.As medical doubts have grown about the reliability of an SBS diagnosis, so too have concerns about its application in criminal cases. Since 1989, 39 parents and caregivers have been exonerated in the US having been convicted largely on the grounds of a faulty SBS hypothesis, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.Two of those exonerations were in Texas, including Roark’s last November.Josh Burns, 49, is an SBS exoneree. In 2014, when he was working as a Delta Air Lines pilot and living in Michigan, his daughter Naomi suffered a bout of vomiting and he was accused of having harmed her by violent shaking.The girl was taken into foster care, and he was convicted of child abuse and spent a year in jail. It took him 10 years to clear his name.An investigation by the state’s conviction integrity unit last year concluded there had been no reliable evidence of harm. Naomi’s symptoms could be explained by dehydration caused by a stomach bug.Burns and his family paid a devastating price for his wrongful conviction. He lost his job as a pilot, and his family was forced to move out of Michigan – ironically, they ended up in Texas, where Roberson is now scheduled to be executed.“I know how gut-wrenching and soul-crushing it is to be accused of harming the person that you love the most,” Burns told the Guardian. He has joined other SBS exonerees to campaign for a reprieve for Roberson, viscerally aware that there is a critical difference between his plight and Roberson’s.“You can undo a wrongful conviction like mine,” he said. “But you cannot undo a wrongful execution.”Audrey Edmunds, 64, has also joined the campaign to save Roberson. She was babysitting a neighbor’s child, Natalie, in Wisconsin in 1995 when the girl fell ill and died.She was convicted a year later of first-degree reckless homicide under the SBS hypothesis. At trial key facts, including that Natalie had visited the doctor 24 times in the 27 weeks before her death, were glossed over.Edmunds served 11 years of an 18-year sentence, before the forensic pathologist in her case recanted his own testimony having taken on board changes in scientific understanding. In 2008 she was released and all charges against her dismissed.“Mr Roberson should never have been put on death row,” Edmunds said. “Executing him would be a crime. He has been through more than enough.”She said that she saw strong parallels between her case and Roberson’s. “They checked into junk science. They went down a one-way road, and didn’t look at all the other factors.”Texas was the first state in the country to allow prisoners to challenge their sentences on grounds of junk science. Since its inception in 2013, the so-called “junk science writ” has been taken up by about 70 death row prisoners.None of their challenges have been successful. More

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      ‘It’s hard to know what day it is’: families tell of grim Ice detention in Texas

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      At the South Texas Family Residential Center, guards allegedly refer to detained immigrant families as “inmates”, spouses aren’t allowed to hold hands, and children don’t know where they can kick around a ball without getting in trouble, according to a stark court filing.Yet those are minor indignities compared with accounts given to outside monitors of a lack of clean drinking water, sleep, healthy food, privacy, hygiene supplies and appropriate healthcare. Alongside government admissions of what attorneys called “prolonged unexplained detention” at the facility in the remote town of Dilley, Texas anxiety levels for detainees are high.“It is hard to know what day it is because we have been at Dilley for so long,” one 35-year-old parent told watchdogs who had been sent in to assess the conditions.Legal experts made a barrage of allegations about illegal deprivations, violations of basic detention standards and humanitarian concerns at the only known Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) center in the US currently holding immigrant families, as initially detailed in part one of the Guardian’s report.“My main question is: when can I get out of here?” asked an 11-year-old child who had already been detained at Dilley for 53 days, far longer than the general 20-day legal limit for immigrant children in unlicensed facilities, according to the filing in federal court in Los Angeles.The detainees’ accounts were published earlier this month by attorneys acting as outside monitors for standards of child detention, who visited Dilley four times since it reopened as a family detention facility after Donald Trump returned to the White House with his mass deportation agenda.The center is run for Ice by the private corrections and detention company CoreCivic, which declined requests for comment on conditions at Dilley and referred the Guardian to Ice, which then referred on to its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from which the Guardian also requested comment but none was forthcoming.However, CoreCivic, in response to similar allegations made by detainees at a different facility, in California, company spokesperson Brian Todd said that all its facilities “operate with a significant amount of oversight and accountability, including being monitored by federal officials on a daily basis, to ensure an appropriate standard of living and care for every individual”.Families held at Dilley gave accounts of their experiences, with their names and countries of origin redacted in the publicly available court documents. Some described a “prison-like” environment, even though immigration proceedings are civil matters in the US, not criminal. Detainees spoke of the many rules they endure under lock and key.“I got in trouble for touching my mom,” one 13-year-old said. “The lady [staff member] said: ‘You can’t touch her.’ And I said: ‘But she’s my mom.’ And she said: ‘You can’t touch her.’”The Dilley center is surrounded by a metal perimeter fence.Within, families live in “isolated, cell-like trailers”.“I tried to sit outside to look at the moon and stars one time, but they wouldn’t let me,” the 13-year-old said.Adults lamented the struggle to parent and comfort their children without autonomy over their lives, unable to fulfill a kid’s simple requests, like going to a playground to break the monotony, or providing a banana to eat.
      “It feels so hard to be a good mother here, where there is so much stress and we have so little control over what happens to us,” said one parent, adding: “I am doing all I can to be strong for my children and take care of them. They do not understand why we have to be in this prison. It is impossible to be a good parent in this place.”Detainees described a lack of potable water, even when it’s supposedly filtered.“We just don’t trust that the water is cleanly dispensed and sometimes the water really smells bad. Maybe that is why so many people here are sick,” said one parent.The paid commissary sells bottled water, but its cost – over a dollar per bottle – is out of reach for many of the families. One parent, who had been detained at Dilley for 42 days, said the available free water “has a strong smell of bleach”. The parent bought bottled water for their toddler but could not afford more for personal consumption. “The staff here will not drink the water, but we do not have any other choice,” the parent told the visiting attorneys, according to the court filing.The 11-year-old who had been detained for 53 days and asked when they could get out, described the food as “the same, the same, the same”. Another family said they “eat just enough to survive”.“I don’t eat a lot here and I’ve lost weight since being at this center. I usually do not want to eat because I feel so much anxiety,” a 16-year-old said.Similarly, a 14-year-old already detained for 54 days with their seven-year-old brother said “the chicken tastes like plastic” and “if I don’t like the food that day, I usually just have bread and water and that’s it”. Their brother had stopped eating, they said, and “my parents had to almost beg the medical staff to give him PediaSure”, a nutritional drink for children.“Being here has affected my little brother a lot,” the 14-year-old added. “He doesn’t sleep well. He cries all night. Yesterday he had an attack where he would not stop crying from 7pm to 9pm, and he was outside the room crying that he didn’t want to go back in, and he wanted to be free.”Several families described their children falling behind on their education and development. The onsite school consists mainly of coloring, drawing, painting and doing basic worksheets, with only one hour a day of class for each age group, they said. Many of the children got so bored they stopped attending.“My parents are so worried for me that we are not studying or able to do anything to support our future here,” said a 13-year-old.In terms of health, families described inadequate care and medical staff who downplayed illnesses or even disabilities, according to the filing. One nine-year-old with autism was so sensitive to cleaning chemicals and other odors in the bathrooms that he would vomit when he entered.“Because he would not want to go in there, he would hold it and hold it, and then eventually he would pee his pants. Some days, I would need to change his clothes five or six times,” his parent said, describing the ordeal as “heartbreaking”. The boy started soiling himself and “was in the bathroom crying and yelling and hitting himself”. They had to resort to diapers for the first time since he was two, the court document said.Meanwhile sleep was chronically elusive for many. One family described frequent checks by guards.“They come in and out of the room without knocking. Some are polite, but others barge in without warning … They do not turn off the lights at night. It is difficult for my son to sleep because of the lights and … the staff talk on very loud walkie-talkies throughout the night.”When they did sleep, some families also reported that children suffered from nightmares, but when they went to see the resident mental health staff, they were just told to pray, do breathing exercises and participate in activities.“The psychologist did not ask what the nightmares were about,” said a parent, whose sons aged eight and 10 were having “so many” bad dreams. “She didn’t check if the boys were thinking about hurting themselves or if they had thoughts about wanting to die. She just said nightmares are normal.” More

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      FBI arrest man who allegedly threatened to shoot people at Texas Pride parade

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      Federal authorities in Texas have arrested a man for allegedly threatening to shoot people at a pro-LGBTQ+ parade, to avenge the murder of Charlie Kirk.According to court documents viewed by the Guardian, on 18 September, the FBI’s field office in Dallas was notified by Abilene, Texas, police about online threats from a local resident.The resident, identified as Joshua Cole, allegedly used a Facebook account under the name “Jay Dubya” where he “threatened to commit a shooting” at a Pride parade in Abilene on 20 September.“Fk their parade, I say we lock and load and pay them back for taking out Charlie Kirk,” Cole allegedly wrote, referring to the rightwing political activist, in one comment.Kirk was shot to death on 10 September at Utah Valley University (UVU).Citing investigators’ interviews with people close to the suspect in the case, Utah prosecutors have alleged Tyler Robinson killed Kirk after becoming sick of what he perceived to be Kirk’s “hatred”. Investigators reported being told by his family that Robinson had become “more pro-gay and trans rights oriented” in the year prior to Kirk’s killing.Another comment Cole allegedly posted about the Abilene Pride parade read: “Theres only like 30 of em we can send a clear message to the rest of them.” Invoking an insult used to demean LGBTQ+ people, Cole also allegedly wrote: “come on bro let’s go hunting fairies.”In a sworn affidavit, FBI special agent Sam Venuti wrote that investigators confirmed the “Jay Dubya” account belonged to Cole.Venuti said that he had attempted to contact Cole at his place of work, where he had been employed for the past year. But the employer said that Cole had “just quit” and had “stormed out of the facility in anger”, Venuti said.Co-workers reportedly described him as a “hot head”, according to Venuti’s affidavit.Not long after, local police, with Venuti present, conducted a traffic stop on Cole.When the agent told Cole that he wanted “to talk to him about his online activity”, Venuti wrote that “Cole then sighed and his body posture indicated that [he] knew the reason for our discussion”.Venuti’s affidavit added that Cole “did not appear surprised”.Cole was then detained. According to the FBI, Cole waived his rights against self-incrimination and – during questioning – reportedly admitted to owning a firearm, to operating the “Jay Dubya” Facebook account and to making the threatening posts.The affidavit states that Cole reportedly agreed that “a reasonable person could interpret his comments as a threat”. He also said he did “not believe that the gay pride event should be allowed” though denied “that he was going to take action or shoot parade participants”.Venuti concluded in the affidavit that Cole’s “threats were not conditional”.“The threats were specific,” Venuti wrote. “The threats were also specific to a particular set of victims: people participating in the gay pride parade.”Based on the evidence, the FBI agent wrote, he believed that there was probable cause to arrest Cole for violating a federal law that prohibits threatening communications.Cole could face up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the Cornell University law school’s Legal Information Institute.After being jailed, Cole appeared briefly at a preliminary hearing, where a judge ordered him to remain in custody pending further proceedings.An attorney listed for Cole did not immediately respond to a request for comment.On 26 September, the Abilene Pride Alliance issued a public statement about the incident.“We want to reassure our community that the safety of everyone at Pride has always been, and will continue to be our top priority,” they wrote. “The swift action and continued diligence of [authorities] reflect their commitment to protecting our city and ensuring that Pride remains a safe, inclusive and celebratory space for all.”The Trump administration – which has threatened to crack down on leftwing groups who opposed Kirk’s views – did not announce and has not commented publicly on Cole’s arrest. More

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      Texas Ice facility shooting: Republicans blame ‘radical left’ as Democrats focus on victims and gun control

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      A deadly shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas has been met with markedly different reactions from the political right and left.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed shortly after the news broke that detainees were the victims of the sniper attack on the facility and that no federal agents had been injured. The president and his allies, however, were quick to frame the shooting as an attack on Ice and place blame on the “radical left”.The department previously said two detainees were killed, but later issued a clarifying statement saying the shooting killed one detainee. It said two other detainees were shot and are in critical condition.Official statements have lacked focus on the victims having been detainees, and at a press conference officials said the identities of the victims would not be released at this time. Figures on the left have centered on the victims’ families, pushed for greater gun control and urged a rejection of anti-immigrant sentiment.Donald Trump rushed to politicize the incident, blaming the violence squarely on “Radical Left Terrorists” and the Democratic party. “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.JD Vance called the shooting an “obsessive attack on law enforcement” that “must stop”. The vice-president claimed it was carried out by “a violent left-wing extremist” who was “politically motivated to go after law enforcement”.Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem also said: “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about Ice has consequences. Comparing Ice Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.”The FBI said authorities recovered shell casings with “anti-Ice messaging” near the shooter, but officials said the investigation was continuing and have neither confirmed the motive behind the attack, nor corroborated claims about the shooter’s ideological background.The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of targeted violence. The DHS said the shooter “fired indiscriminately” at the Ice facility, “including at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot”. The attacker died from a self-inflicted gun wound.Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor and staunch Trump ally, called the attack an “assassination” and said that “Texas supports Ice”. He wrote on X: “This assassination will NOT slow our arrest, detention, & deportation of illegal immigrants. We will work with ICE & the Dallas Police Dept. to get to the bottom of the assassin’s motive.”Texas senator Ted Cruz also invoked the killing of rightwing commentator Charlie Kirk as he told reporters that political violence “must stop” and rebuked politicians who have been critical of Ice. “Your political opponents are not Nazis,” Cruz raged at Democrats, who he accused of “demonizing” Ice. “This has very real consequences,” he said.Later, after a reporter brought up reports that the victims were detainees, Cruz acknowledged that the motive of the shooter was not known.The attack comes amid fears the Trump administration plans a crackdown on leftwing organizations and amid the censorship of critical or nuanced commentary in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, targeting people from visa holders to late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel.Marc Veasey, a Democratic representative for Texas who represents the area where the shooting took place, told the Notus website that political “gamesmanship” was spiraling out of control, and said he was “sickened” by officials’ focus on law enforcement and lack of acknowledgement that the victims were detainees.He added that he lacked trust in the FBI, which had become “overly political” under Trump, and said smears against Democrats were not helpful, citing that the GOP also routinely call colleagues on the left “Marxists”.“We have to start condemning this rhetoric from both sides,” Veasey said. “I was hoping that after the assassination of Charlie Kirk that we would have learned lessons and that we realize that this is not about gamesmanship. This is not about one-upsmanship … This is about public safety.”Former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who leads the gun violence prevention group Giffords, said her heart broke for the victims’ families and urged leaders to take action against the “gun crime crisis” gripping the country.Congresswoman Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, wrote on X: “Leave it to this administration to use a shooting against immigrant detainees to score political points and further provoke violence. We have to get guns off our streets and reject xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment that makes all of us less safe.”Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta said: “Kristi Noem couldn’t get to Twitter fast enough to use the Dallas Ice shooting for political points. But local news now says it was detainees who were shot – not Ice agents.” More

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      Texas A&M University president resigns after ‘gender ideology’ controversy

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      The president of Texas A&M University’s main campus is stepping down less than two weeks after a student’s viral complaint about “gender ideology” in the classroom set off a chain of repercussions, including the firing of the teacher as well as the dismissal of a dean and department chair.Mark A Welsh III, a retired air force four-star general, has been leading the university since 2022. His career before higher education included time as a fighter pilot, service on the joint chiefs of staff, work as the CIA’s associate director for military affairs, a term as commandant of cadets at the Air Force Academy, and a stint as dean of the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M.“President Welsh is a man of honor who has led Texas A&M with selfless dedication,” the university’s chancellor, Glenn Hegar, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and contributions. At the same time, we agree that now is the right moment to make a change and to position Texas A&M for continued excellence in the years ahead.”Welsh has not offered a specific reason for why he is leaving his position or clarified whether it is a result of the viral incident, instead simply saying: “Over the past few days, it’s become clear that now is that time” to step down, in a Friday statement.Welsh became president following the 2023 departure of Margaret Katherine Banks, who left amid uproar over the mishandled hiring of a journalism professor, Kathleen McElroy. That controversy drew fire from Texas Republicans because of McElroy’s ties to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are now prohibited in the state.According to the Thursday evening announcement, Welsh’s resignation will take effect on Friday.“Today, President Welsh has submitted his resignation, and both the Board of Regents and I agree that this is the right moment for change,” Hegar said in a post on X.Brian Harrison, a Republican state representative who circulated the viral footage and pressed for Welsh’s removal, applauded the outcome.“As the first elected official to call for him to be fired, this news is welcome, although overdue,” Harrison wrote on X. “Now… END ALL DEI AND LGBTQ INDOCTRINATION IN TEXAS!!”The video clip at the center of the controversy, which Harrison shared on 8 September, was originally filmed in July during a children’s literature course. The student who spoke out, whose identity Harrison withheld at their request, and the instructor, Melissa McCoul, are not visible in the footage.In another recording Harrison shared on social media, the same student can be heard speaking with Welsh. She asks Welsh if he approves of LGBTQ+ content being taught at Texas A&M, to which Welsh replies that the courses are typically for students entering fields such as psychiatry, counseling, education and non-profit work.“Those people don’t get to pick who their clients are, what citizens they serve, and they want to understand the issues affecting the people they’re going to treat,” Welsh tells the student. “So there is a professional reason to teach some of these courses.”The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, had threatened to fire Welsh in January after the university’s business school invited advanced PhD students and faculty to a conference designed to recruit Black, Hispanic and Indigenous graduate students.Though Abbott cannot fire university presidents, he appoints the members of the Texas A&M University System board of regents, who do have that authority. Following the threat, Welsh said Texas A&M would pull out of the conference completely. More

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      Texas bill allowing residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers reaches governor

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      A measure that would allow Texas residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers advanced to the desk of the governor, Greg Abbott, on Wednesday, setting up the state to be the first to try to crack down on the most common abortion method.Supporters say it’s a key tool to enforce the state’s abortion ban, protecting women and fetuses.Opponents see it not only as another way to rein in abortion but as an effort to intimidate abortion providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states – and to encourage a form of vigilantism.If the measure becomes law, it’s nearly certain to spark legal challenges from abortion rights supporters.Under the measure, Texas residents could sue those who manufacture, transport or provide abortion-inducing drugs to anyone in Texas for up to $100,000. Women who receive the pills for their own use would not be liable.Under the bill, providers could be ordered to pay $100,000. But only the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other close relatives could collect the entire amount. Anyone else who sued could receive only $10,000, with the remaining $90,000 going to charity.Lawmakers also added language to address worries that women would be turned in for seeking to end pregnancies by men who raped them or abusive partners. For instance, a man who impregnated a woman through sexual assault would not be eligible.The measure has provisions that bar making public the identity or medical details about a woman who receives the pills.It wasn’t until those provisions were added, along with the limit of a $10,000 payment for people who aren’t themselves injured by the abortion, that several major Texas anti-abortion groups backed the bill.The idea of using citizens rather than government officials to enforce abortion bans is not new in Texas. It was at the heart of a 2021 law that curtailed abortion there months before the US supreme court cleared the way for other state bans to take effect.In the earlier law, citizens could collect $10,000 for bringing a successful lawsuit against a provider or anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion. But that measure didn’t explicitly seek to go after out-of-state providers.Pills are a tricky topic for abortion opponents. They were the most common abortion method in the US even before the 2022 supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.They’ve become even more widely used since then. Their availability is a key reason that the number of abortions has risen nationally, even though Texas and 11 other states are enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.The pills have continued to flow partly because at least eight Democratic-led states have enacted laws that seek to protect medical providers from legal consequences when they use telehealth to prescribe the pills to women who are in states where abortion is illegal.Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice, said the measure is intended to threaten those out-of-state providers and women in Texas.“This is about the chilling effect,” she said. “This is yet another abortion ban that is allowing the state to control people’s health care lives and reproductive decisions.”Earlier this year, a Texas judge ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for providing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.The same provider, Dr Maggie Carpenter, faces criminal charges from a Louisiana prosecutor for similar allegations.New York officials are invoking their state’s shield laws to block extradition of Carpenter and to refuse to file the civil judgment.If higher courts side with Louisiana or Texas officials, it could damage the shield laws.Meanwhile, the attorneys general of Texas and Florida are seeking to join Idaho, Kansas and Missouri in an effort to get courts to roll back US Food and Drug Administration approvals for mifepristone, one of the drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions, contending that there are safety concerns. They say it needs tighter controls because of those concerns.If the states are successful, it’s possible the drug could be distributed only in person and not by telehealth.Major medical organizations including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say the drug is safe. More

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      Can the Democrats win by trolling Trump? – podcast

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      Archive: ABC 7, ABC 10, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, DRM News, Fox 11 Los Angeles, Fox Business, KARE 11, KPRC 2 Click2Houston, MSNBC, WHAS11, WKYC Channel 3 Texas, WSYX ABC6, WTKR News 3
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      NAACP sues Texas over congressional redistricting, saying it strips Black voters of political power

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      Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.The lawsuit, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, names Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and secretary of state, Jane Nelson, as defendants. It asks a federal judge for a preliminary injunction preventing the use of the redrawn maps, arguing that the redistricting violates the US constitution by improperly reducing the power of voters of color. It also argues that the maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.“We now see just how far extremist leaders are willing to go to push African Americans back toward a time when we were denied full personhood and equal rights,” the president of the Texas NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, said in a statement. “We call on Texans of every background to recognize the dangers of this moment. Our democracy depends on ensuring that every person is counted fully, valued equally and represented fairly. We are prepared to fight this injustice at every level. Our future depends on it.”Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map on Saturday, with the expected result of an increase in Republican representation by five seats in the next Congress. Democratic state legislators are a minority in both chambers of the Texas legislature, leaving them with few options to block it. A group of state house representatives spent nearly a month away from the state to deny Republicans a quorum. That maneuver ended last week, after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the state legislature began a process to counter the Republican gerrymander with a Democratic gerrymander of their own.“The state of Texas is only 40% white, but white voters control over 73% of the state’s congressional seats,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP. “It’s quite obvious that Texas’s effort to redistrict mid-decade, before next year’s midterm elections, is racially motivated. The state’s intent here is to reduce the members of Congress who represent Black communities, and that, in and of itself, is unconstitutional.”Democrats in Texas promised lawsuits out of the gate.The League of United Latin American Citizens – a group of 13 Texas voters – filed suit within hours of the redistricting bill’s passage. The map “eviscerates minorities’ opportunity to elect their candidates of choice in four key areas of the state”, the filing states.Other challenges are likely to follow. Republicans, however, believe that they are operating on favorable legal ground, hoping to overturn key sections of the Voting Rights Act as the lawsuits work their way through the courts.The US supreme court will hear a re-argument of Louisiana v Callais in the term to come. In that case, the court will be asked to upend the core tenet of the Voting Rights Act and hold that the use of racially identifying voter data to prevent voters of color from being able to select a candidate of their choice is actually an act of racial discrimination.Without that protection, Republican state lawmakers across the country can be expected to redraw maps for increased partisan advantage by cutting Black-majority districts into ribbons.Meanwhile, Donald Trump said the Department of Justice would sue California for its redistricting. Last week, the Democratic-led legislature placed a measure to redraw the state’s district lines on the 4 November ballot.In a sharp break against longstanding progressive efforts to turn redistricting over to neutral commissions, the NAACP said today that it “is urging California, New York and all other states to act immediately by redistricting and passing new, lawful and constitutional electoral maps” to counter expected efforts in Texas and other states to redraw maps for midterm advantage. More

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      Republicans are trying to ensure we’ll never have another fair election | Judith Levine

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      “Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Donald Trump exhorted the audience at a campaign event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action in July 2024. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”Since his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has been building toward delivery on that promise, first by fomenting suspicion of widespread election fraud, then by trying to overturn the results via legal challenge and intimidation, and finally, on 6 January 2021, by force. Now the White House and Republicans both in Washington and the states are colluding more brazenly than ever to “fix it” – “it” meaning free and fair elections they might lose.Republicans’ aim is permanent control of the US government. Trump’s is the crown. As their assaults on voting rights – and the institution of elections itself – escalate, their success begins to look, if not inevitable, alarmingly possible.Trump’s tactics are working.The 2020 election was the cleanest and most efficient in memory. Claims of rampant fraud are lies – the big lie, as the 2021 House impeachment committee put it. But not among Republican voters. A Pew survey taken before the 2024 election found that Trump supporters were “deeply skeptical about the way the election will be conducted”, especially compared with Harris supporters. Whereas over 85% of Democratic voters believed in 2024 that absentee ballots would be counted accurately, and ineligible voters prevented from voting, among Trump supporters only 38% and 30%, respectively, felt the same.Buoyed by the big lie – and liberated by the supreme court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act – voter suppression attempts reached a peak after the 2020 elections, when legislators introduced more than 400 restrictive bills. Signing Georgia’s 98-page Election Integrity Act in 2021, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, was unambiguous about its partisan aim. “After the November election last year” –when record turnout in the reliably red state yielded victories for Biden and two Democratic US senators, and the secretary of state resisted Trump’s shakedown to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse the outcome – “I knew, like so many of you, that significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” he said.By September 2024, 31 states had enacted 114 such laws.In May 2024, Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would accept the results of the election only if “everything’s honest” – that is, if he won. This definition of honesty took hold. According to some polls, before election day, fewer than a quarter of Trump supporters believed the election would be fair. After it, their confidence rates more than doubled. And while Republican concerns about fraud were pervasive in 2020, they were – surprise, surprise – virtually nonexistent when the 2024 results came in.With their man in the White House, congressional Republicans set about preparing for his coronation. Three days into Trump’s term, the Tennessee representative Andy Ogles introduced a bill to amend the constitution to allow presidents to serve three terms. At Trumpstore.com, you can buy a red “Trump 2028” cap for $50.On 25 March Trump issued the executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which melds his xenophobic paranoia-mongering with his desire to “fix” elections. Its mandates range from requiring proof of citizenship to vote (an answer to the spectral threat of undocumented people stuffing the ballot boxes) to a ban on the bar codes that expedite vote counting.The executive order itself is illegal. The constitution gives the states, not the president, the power to regulate elections.On 4 April, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, requiring registrants and voters to document citizenship.The GOP’s election-interference campaign is accelerating. On 7 July, the justice department’s civil rights division wrote a letter to Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, and Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, alleging that four of its majority-minority “coalition districts” are illegal under the Voting Rights Act and directing the state to redraw its electoral map. Voting rights experts dispute this interpretation. In fact, the law prohibits the dilution of the electoral power of voters of color either by packing them into one district or spreading them out by gerrymandering–which is what the new map would do.In mid-July, the justice department issued broad requests to state election officials to turn over their election data and voter rolls. In Colorado, where Biden won by 11 points in 2020, a guy called Jeff Small – chief of staff to the Colorado Republican representative and Save Act cheerleader Lauren Boebert – began contacting officials claiming he was working with the Trump administration on election “integrity” and asking if they would kindly let the feds, or somebody, inspect their voting machines, according to Washington Post reporting. After one such request, the Department of Homeland Security called to follow up.Officials of both parties were outraged, especially when it came to monkeying with the equipment, an illegal act. “Anybody who is asking for access to the voting machines outside of the law” is suspicious, the Republican executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association told the Washington Post. “That automatically raises red flags in terms of their intent.”Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state made the larger point: “This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country,” she said. “They are actively in a power grab.”Meanwhile, the White House was leaning on Texas’s governor and legislative leaders to redraw their electoral map according to Trump’s specifications, dismantling Democratic strongholds to create five more Republican House seats – to which the president averred his party was “entitled”. When Texas got onboard, on 3 August the state’s 51 Democrats left the state, risking fines and arrest, to thwart the effort.To cover all bases, on 7 August, Trump ordered the commerce department to prepare a new US census leaving out undocumented immigrants. Under the constitution, the census counts the number of “persons”, not citizens; it must be conducted “within every … ten years”, and states must redistrict to concur with new data. In a post on Truth Social, the president described a bespoke tally “using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.The same day, the vice-president, JD Vance, descended on bright-red Indiana with a trio of Trump appointees to strong-arm its leaders to redistrict as well. Afterward, on X, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, genuflected to Vance: “Your bold leadership and unwavering support for President Trump’s mission to expand the conservative majority in Congress is exactly what America needs right now.”On Fox News, the vice-president echoed Trump’s contention that counting undocumented immigrants in the census unfairly gives the advantage to Democrats, whom he also charged with “aggressive” gerrymandering. “We’re just trying to rebalance the scales,” Vance said.After two weeks, Democrats returned to the Texas state house. Republican leaders forced them to sign “permission slips” to leave the chamber and assigned police escorts to monitor them. After refusing to sign, one Democrat spent nights in the chamber. While speaking on the phone with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, from the bathroom, she was informed the call constituted a felony, she said.On Saturday, the Texas senate approved legislation creating the new map, which Abbott says he will sign “swiftly”. The move had already set off an avalanche of mid-decade redistricting, led by California. Other states, controlled by both parties, may follow.Last week on Truth Social, Trump announced he would “lead a movement” to eliminate mail-in ballots – an idea he apparently picked up from Vladimir Putin – and also “inaccurate” voting machines. He said he would sign an executive order to this effect soon. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump fantasized. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”Maybe the following order will eliminate voting altogether – for the good of our country, of course.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More