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      Trump Organization to face criminal tax fraud charges in New York court on Monday

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      Trump Organization to face criminal tax fraud charges in New York court on MondayFormer CFO is expected to testify about off-the-books compensation scheme to evade paying payroll taxes The Trump Organization is set to face criminal tax fraud charges on Monday in New York in a trial that could start to tease out the many allegations against the company and by extension its patriarch, Donald J Trump.It comes as the former US president faces a maze of legal troubles and mounting costs – by some estimates running at close to $4m a month to his leadership Pac – over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss, the removal of government documents from the White House when he left office and a defamation case relating to a rape allegation.Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order messageRead moreMonday’s case is centered on charges that his Manhattan-headquartered real estate company defrauded New York tax authorities by awarding “off the books” compensation over 15 years to company executives, including lease payments for cars, apartment rent and tuition fees for relatives in lieu of some salary, enabling the company to evade paying payroll taxes.If found guilty, the company, which is run by Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, could face $1.6m in fines and find its ability to operate hotels, golf courses and other assets impeded.But the trial will likely be most interesting for its subplots and how it intersects with a separate, civil investigation by New York state attorney general Letitia James that harvested a 200-page indictment last month accusing the Trump Organization, Trump and three of his adult children of overstating property values and Trump’s net worth to get favorable bank loans and insurance coverage.The Manhattan investigation into Trump’s company has followed its own rocky path to a jury trial. It began under district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr and is now in the hands of his successor, Alvin Bragg. Two prosecutors who led the investigation resigned in February, with one saying felony charges should be brought against the former president.Lawyers for the Trump Organization have claimed the case is a “selective prosecution” motivated by opposition to Trump’s political views – a claim that the judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, has rejected. They also said that prosecutors are seeking to punish Trump’s company because “a handful of its officers allegedly failed to report fringe benefits on their personal tax returns”.But the stakes for both parties – prosecutor and defendant – are high. Unlike Trump’s floundering efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, the Trump Organization has brought in an A-team of lawyers to counter claims by a matched array of prosecutors to meet a high burden of proof in criminal trials.Eyes and ears will be on the testimony of the Trump Organization’s then chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, 75, who was charged in the DA’s 2021 indictment but has since pleaded to 15 counts ranging from grand larceny to tax fraud to falsifying business records in exchange for his testimony.Weisselberg has been subpoenaed to testify but he is not a cooperating witness. Still, his five-month sentence agreed to with prosecutors depends on truthful testimony. Crucially, the Manhattan DA ensured that Weisselberg’s sentencing would be deferred until after the case.To prove the company is guilty, the government is entitled to impute liability from not only Weisselberg but also other executives at the firm, potentially including Donald Trump himself, who they may try to show were aware of the alleged tax scheme.“It’s strategically a really difficult case both for Weisselberg and Trump because they could end winning the battle and losing the war,” says Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches law at New York University.“If they do a typical defense cross-examination of Weisselberg and they catch him in some sort of lie then his deal is over and the pressure on him to flip [on Trump] is going to be that much greater.”Under the circumstances, the Trump Organization’s lawyers can’t simply try to eviscerate the credibility of Weisselberg, Weissmann points out, without potentially rewarding investigators with evidence that their larger quarry, Trump himself, knew of the arrangements to reward executives with untaxed compensation.“The idea that Trump didn’t know is going to be the critical thing that Weisselberg is asked about. If he denies that Donald Trump knew, you can see the judge saying, ‘I don’t believe it and I’m going to take that into account when I sentence you.’”Under those circumstances, Merchan could kick Weisselberg’s sentence up to 15 years in prison, not five months on Rikers Island – an onerous sentence for a 75-year-old.Further, Letitia James’s civil complaint makes an allegation that Weisselberg committed fraud by make false representations to the Zurich North American insurance company. In theory, Weisselberg could be still charged by Bragg if his testimony is deemed untruthful.“Clearly, they still want Weisselberg to cooperate,” Weissmann says.But as the trial gets under way next week, there is a sense that Bragg’s case could be easier to prove than James’s complaint, which centers on building valuations but requires a lower burden of proof.“Bragg’s allegations are much more concrete because they allege making payments that were clearly part of the person’s salary, keeping track of them, but only reporting what was listed as salary,” Weissmann says.“The problem for the defense is that if they say this is a gray area and isn’t a crime, they have to say that Weisselberg is lying. If the judge agrees, Weisselberg is in a tough position.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS crimeNew YorkDonald Trump JrUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’

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      Polly Klaas’s murder fueled the 90s crime panic. Her sisters fear ‘we’re repeating history’ Jess and Annie Nichol want to undo the harsh criminal laws passed after their sister was abducted: ‘We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else’Annie Nichol was seven years old on 19 March 1994 when she was brought to the White House to talk to Bill Clinton.With a stuffed dolphin by her side, the girl spoke to the president about her 12-year-old sister, Polly Klaas, who had been abducted five months earlier from the family’s home in Petaluma, California, while Annie was sleeping nearby.Annie and Clinton watched footage showing how she’d since booby-trapped her room with bells and ropes to stop intruders.“Do you think I’m going to live to grow up?” television cameras captured her asking the president.“You’re a brave girl,” Clinton responded, adding that he was working to make sure people with “serious problems” would remain in prison.Today, Annie is tormented by the memory. Polly’s kidnapping and subsequent murder fueled a host of “tough on crime” laws and a powerful victims’ rights movement, which pushed America to have the highest reported incarceration rate in the world.The meeting at the White House, Annie said, was a reminder of how her family’s story was exploited to expand mass incarceration and racial inequality in America.What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problemRead more“I had just lost Polly and someone had given me that question to ask, and it was a message that wasn’t mine. I was a scared kid who had been through something I couldn’t even begin to process. Being put in the position of going to the White House to be on this television program and seeing Clinton start crying, the shame of that experience still overwhelms me. I was the perfect person to be used like that. What’s more compelling than seeing this scared little girl?”Annie and her older sister Jess are now on a mission to reclaim their family’s legacy and undo the harsh legislation the tragedy that befell them sparked. They say they want a different criminal justice system, one that focuses on preventing violence; accountability, treatment and rehabilitation for people who cause harm; and care and services for survivors.Their message is urgent, the sisters say, as growing concerns over crime in cities across the US since the pandemic have led to familiar calls for more punitive responses from pundits and some politicians facing midterm elections.“There’s the trauma of losing Polly and then there’s the trauma of how her death was used to punish other people,” Jess said. “We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else … We’re on the precipice of repeating a really terrible history. And we don’t want people to make the same mistake.”On the evening of 1 October 1993, Polly was playing a board game at home with two friends when a stranger broke in and snatched her, leaving the two other girls behind.Jess and Annie, aged 12 and six at the time, recall fragments of the aftermath: the reporters camped outside their door, the “Polly, we love you” T-shirts worn by everyone in town, their visits with Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma.Two months after the abduction, the kidnapper led authorities to Polly’s body.Polly’s story led to panic. American media covered every twist in the investigation of the “slumber party that became a nightmare”. Commentators argued the “age of innocence had been lost” and that “the 12-year-old’s awful fate drove home the disturbing message that youngsters are not safe even in their own bedrooms”.By 1994, voters in California had approved the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, which, inspired by the extensive criminal record of Polly’s killer, established life sentences for all felonies if the defendant had two prior convictions for serious or violent offenses.Versions of the law, which also doubled the sentence length for second strikes, were adopted in 23 other states. In September 1994, Congress passed the notorious federal crime bill, sponsored by then senator Joe Biden, which included a three strikes sentencing provision.In California, Three Strikes contributed to an explosion in the state’s prison population. More than 7,500 people were sentenced to life in prison within the first decade after it passed, nearly half of them for non-serious and non-violent offenses.‘America could be truly free’: John Legend on his fight to overhaul the criminal justice systemRead moreAnnie remembers adults trying to comfort her by talking about locking people up, including an officer who held her hand to the wall of the building where the man who killed Polly was incarcerated: “He said, ‘Look how thick these walls are. Don’t you feel safe?’”Marc Klaas, Polly’s father (but not Jess and Annie’s), had advocated for three strikes laws. But as the sisters grew older, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the California legislation and their connection to it.“Since I was 13, I knew it was wrong, and it was stressful to see newspapers on the table for many years, and I kind of stopped looking,” recalled Jess, now 41, on a recent morning in Annie’s backyard. With the sensationalized media and celebrity support, she added, “It didn’t feel right getting attention for Polly’s death and being known and validated for that, and I was repulsed by my own internal identity with it.”In 2019, Jess watched 13th, Ava DuVernay’s documentary on the history of racial inequality in the US, which featured Polly’s story: “When I saw the sequence from slavery to our current mass incarceration crisis, with Polly’s face right there as one of the major reasons incarceration took off in the 90s, I was stunned.”“A lot of people see this history as something that is separate from themselves, but in our case we have a really deep connection to this crisis,” Annie, now 35, added. “It’s such an injustice that the sum of Polly’s life was turned into this harm for others. The story that was told about Polly was used to pass these incredibly terrible laws, and it always felt like a distortion of the truth.”Jess cold called the ACLU of California in 2019, telling a receptionist she and Annie wanted to talk about the law passed in their family’s name and see if there was anything they could do to help repeal it.The sisters felt some initial apprehension about speaking publicly. They had long been intensely private in part out of a desire not to feed the true crime genre obsession with Polly. They were also aware of their privilege as white survivors whose story had received intense attention and were wary of taking up space while the vast majority of victims of violence are people of color whose cases never make headlines.They also weren’t sure their voices would matter, a doubt Annie partly attributes to the way the criminal legal system operates: “There is this kind of paternalistic dynamic in the justice system, which co-opts victims’ stories and claims to represent them without actually listening to them or asking them what they want. It’s, ‘We’re going to handle this for you and solve this problem. And now we fixed it’. It leaves victims feeling disempowered. And for a while, we felt powerless.”The ACLU connected the sisters to policy experts at Stanford university, and they began to learn more about Three Strikes: that it was originally proposed as the “street sweeper” law, but was deemed too extreme until Polly’s death; that it had been disproportionately applied to defendants with disabilities and mental illness; that some people have received two strikes for the same incident; that defendants got life sentences for stealing pizza and baby shoes; and that research had repeatedly suggested there was no evidence that Three Strikes reduced crime or deterred violence. Today, 45% of people serving life sentences with three strikes in California are Black, while Black residents make up only 6.5% of the broader population.In 2020, after the uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder, the sisters started meeting with other crime survivors who were disenchanted with America’s criminal justice system.One of them was Tinisch Hollins, who lost two of her brothers to violence and serves as executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a survivors’ advocacy group. Hollins grew up in San Francisco and remembered when her mother made her watch news reports about Polly so she would be aware of the potential for abductions.“The terror that my mother had when she called me to watch the news of Polly Klaas was the same kind of terror that friends and family had when they talked about loved ones who had been arrested and were potentially going away to prison forever. There was this looming possibility that you could become a victim of the system in the same way you could become a victim of crime.”The sisters came to view Three Strikes as a symptom of systemic problems and started publishing op-eds advocating for an alternative approach to justice.They also launched A New Legacy, a podcast named after their hopes to chart a different legacy for Polly; they interview people fighting to undo mass incarceration, including people previously imprisoned under Three Strikes.“There’s an underlying assumption that the thing that victims want is the harshest sentencing for the people who caused harm. And that’s really the only option,” Jess said. “It’s this revengeful ‘eye for an eye’ culture. I’ve come to realize we don’t really have a ‘department of corrections and rehabilitation’. It’s a ‘department of punishment and revenge’.”Jess and Annie’s advocacy is coming at a pivotal moment. While crime levels remain below the historic highs of the early 1990s, the pandemic has seen devastating spikes in gun violence across the US, and polls have shown that Americans report feeling less safe.Why America overlooks those most hurt by gun violence: ‘Black people are seen as expendable’Read moreSome police officials, pundits and media crime reporting have placed the blame on reform efforts, including “progressive prosecutors” who have sought to reduce incarceration, the “defund the police” movement and efforts to dismantle cash bail so people aren’t jailed because they can’t pay a fee.There’s no evidence any of these reforms have caused crime or violence to increase – and there is research suggesting the contrary – but in the lead up to the midterms, Republicans and some Democrats have argued for an increased police presence, expanded punishments and a rollback of reforms.“Hearing the kind of fear-based rhetoric that is taking over headlines and that politicians are spouting is so familiar with what we grew up with,” Annie said. “It would be so easy to fall back on all these failed solutions just because there were rising crime rates during a pandemic when people didn’t have safe places to go, school programs were shut down, and people lost their jobs and homes. These pro-incarceration agendas tend to exploit people’s fears and make people imagine really terrible things. But arguably the worst thing that could ever happen to a family happened to us. And if we can imagine a better future then I think that’s something everyone can imagine.”They’re not alone among survivors. The children of a murdered pastor in Tennessee recently opposed prosecutors’ decision to charge the 15-year-old suspects as adults, saying it’s not what her mother, an activist, would have wanted; the woman who helped create the sex offender registry after her son was abducted has since argued it has gone too far and is ineffective; and some murder victims’ relatives have argued against the death penalty and in favor of the defendants’ release after years behind bars.Jess and Annie have been talking to survivors about what they actually need and want; their family had access to financial support, but they’ve met many survivors of color who were denied victim compensation from the state, including victims of police killings, who aren’t considered eligible. Many survivors fall into financial crises amid grief and the aftermath of violence and need time off or relocation help.Survivors also want prevention. The sisters said they would like to see the US reallocate a significant portion of the estimated $180bn that the country spends on police and prisons each year toward community resources, including violence intervention, mental health care, restorative justice and services for survivors, such as faith-based programs or trauma therapy: “Unaddressed trauma is one of the major root causes of crime and violence in this society, and it absolutely supports public safety to provide these services to survivors,” Annie said.Annie said she has also heard stories of survivors finding peace in forgiving the people who hurt them. But she is not one of them: “It’s easier for me to feel hatred than compassion for the person who killed Polly. At the same time, I know that before there was a man who did unfathomable harm to our family, there was a boy who was hurt and abused and neglected and abandoned by the social structures that were supposed to help him. And I would rather have a system that would help and protect that child from becoming someone capable of murdering a little girl than one that only seeks to punish him after taking our sister’s life.”Speaking out has provided some catharsis for the sisters after years of struggling to process their trauma.“I was in hiding for so long,” Jess said. “And it has been incredibly healing to come into this work and share our story and advocate for something that matters rather than hiding from shame of the aftermath of Polly’s kidnapping. For us there’s a full-circle healing coming out. It’s wonderful to be in service.”They also hope people think more critically about the impact of true crime and media sensationalism: “There is healing in reclaiming agency over our story, because for the longest time it felt like it wasn’t ours,” Annie said.But as Polly’s name continues to be invoked, in podcasts, videos or by politicians and advocates, there’s one part of their story the sisters are keeping to themselves: their memories of Polly. It’s all they have left of her.TopicsCaliforniaUS crimeUS politicsUS prisonsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order message

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      Republicans’ lawless leaders at odds with midterm law and order messageRepublicans running in next month’s elections cast their party as tough on crime, despite top party names’ legal scrapes “John Fetterman wants to release convicted murderers from prison,” warns the narrator, as a black-and-white photo of Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is shown beside pictures of convicted killers. A caption adds darkly: “Socialist John Fetterman loves free stuff … but we can’t let him free murderers.”The campaign ad from Mehmet Oz, candidate for the US Senate in Pennsylvania, is vintage Republican strategy: casting a Democratic opponent as soft on crime. The party is zeroing in on fears over public safety ahead of November’s midterm elections in an effort to change the conversation from abortion, climate or democracy.But Republicans’ own claim to be the party of law and order is this time undermined, critics say, by the behavior of its party leaders. Former president Donald Trump, who is under myriad criminal, civil and congressional investigations, is not alone. Many senior Republicans have rallied to his defence or displayed their own contempt for the rule of law.“The Republican party is quickly becoming a party of anarchy and lawlessness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “This is supposed to be the party of conservative principles, of tradition, of respect for customs and rules that make society governable.“The idea that the law does not apply to Republicans is something that has now become part of the mainstream of the Republican party. We see it in terms of the approach to elections. We see it in terms of the treatment of immigrants. Some of the actions with regard to abortion may approach that level. The Republican party appears to consider the law and the constitution to be optional and to have lost legitimacy.”Over seven years Trump has refashioned the party in ways obvious and subtle. That has included a willingness to defend conduct that, from any other politician, would have been seen as beyond the pale.US intelligence resumes national security review of Mar-a-Lago documents – as it happenedRead moreAfter FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida in August and seized classified documents, including some marked top secret, Trump could be indicted for violating the Espionage Act, obstructing a federal investigation or mishandling sensitive government records. The former president also faces a state grand jury investigation in Georgia over efforts to subvert that state’s election result in 2020.Last month, Trump and his oldest three children were accused by New York’s top prosecutor of lying to tax collectors, lenders and insurers in a “staggering” fraud scheme that routinely misstated the value of his properties. Despite it all, Trump remains the frontrunner for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024.His chief rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, may have violated federal law recently by using more than $600,000 in taxpayer money to lure about 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers on to flights to the small, upmarket island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and transporting them across state lines with a false reason.Authorities in Massachusetts have requested that the justice department pursue a human trafficking investigation. A sheriff in Texas, where the flights originated, has also opened an investigation into whether DeSantis acted criminally under a Texas penal code that defines the crime of unlawful restraint.The rot goes deep in the party.Republicans won’t commit to honoring vote results this fall. That’s troubling | Robert ReichRead moreNumerous members of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as midterm candidates seeking to join them, have refused to condemn or have actively supported Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, siding with the violent mob on January 6 rather than the US Capitol police officers who resisted them.Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist, faces up to two years in prison after being convicted on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena from the House of Representatives committee investigating the insurrection. Rudy Giuliani, an ex-lawyer to Trump, had his law licence suspended after a court in New York ruled that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while seeking to overturn the results of the election.In addition, Republicans have long been criticised for prioritising laws that protect gun owners over those that protect the victims of gun violence. And since the supreme court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Republican-led states are accused of legal abuses: the justice department is suing Idaho over a near-total abortion ban.Critics believe that such examples make a mockery of Republican efforts to saddle Democrats with rising homicide rates in Atlanta, New Orleans, Philadelphia and other cities.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “The rank hypocrisy of the Republican party trying to use these issues under the auspices of law and order when they continue to support a professional scofflaw in Donald Trump is laughable.“Republicans have turned a blind eye to Trump’s behavior before, during and after his presidency, which is giving a permission structure to other Republican presidential hopefuls like Ron DeSantis to act in potentially extrajudicial ways to accomplish their agenda of fearmongering and ‘owning the libs’.”Trivialising the rule of law extends to party cheerleaders. Last month, Tucker Carlson, a host on the conservative Fox News network, spoke at the funeral of Ralph “Sonny” Barger, the longtime president of the Hells Angels motorcycle club – deemed by the justice department to be linked to organised crime.Self-awareness in short supply as Trump calls for law and order in DCRead moreBrett Favre, an American football star who endorsed Trump for president in 2020, is embroiled in controversy after Mississippi spent millions of dollars in welfare money on his pet project, a university volleyball arena. The state’s then-governor, Republican Phil Bryant, texted Favre in 2019 that federal money for children and low-income adults is “tightly controlled” and “improper use could result in violation of Federal Law”.Yet Republicans have always been quick to accuse Democrats of flouting the law. In 2015 they argued that Barack Obama’s administration acted illegally when it hid a prisoner swap that freed the army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the Taliban. Ilya Shapiro, a former vice-president of the Cato Institute thinktank in Washington, wrote that “the Obama administration has been the most lawless in US history”.But Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, believes that such comparisons are disingenuous. “These are the same Republicans who ran around with their hair on fire, concerned with what President Obama was doing through executive orders on guns and on immigration. That was nowhere near as legally dubious as what Republicans are doing today.”It was 1968 when presidential candidate Richard Nixon claimed the mantle of “law and order” for the Republican party, promising to fix a nation in disarray: “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night.” Six years later, Nixon was forced to resign after breaking the law in his efforts to cover up the Watergate break-in.But Republicans believed they had found a winning message. In 1988, a political action committee supporting George HW Bush’s election campaign funded an ad blaming Democratic rival Michael Dukakis for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, boasted that he would make Horton “Dukakis’s running mate”.Now, the familiar drumbeat is being heard again in midterm races from Oregon to Pennsylvania, from New Mexico to Washington state. House Republicans just launched a “Commitment to America” manifesto that blamed “defund the police” efforts for law enforcement officers’ tough working conditions, “to say nothing of the liberal prosecutors and district attorneys who fail to do their job and keep criminals off the streets”.Joe Biden and other Democrats have worked hard to disown the “defund the police” slogan, with many Democratic-led cities pouring money into police departments. But the issue remains a vulnerability: voters say they agree more with Republicans on crime and policing by a margin of 10 percentage points, a recent New York Times/ Siena College poll found.Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The Republicans are basically using the same playbook that Richard Nixon used. Richard Nixon ran as the candidate of law and order and we all know what happened next: Watergate. This is the same playbook. The Republicans constantly go back to their old playbooks in order to find a new way to reach the electorate. I think voters are smarter.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS midterm elections 2022Donald TrumpRon DeSantisUS crimefeaturesReuse this content More

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem

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      What’s Prison For? Concise diagnosis of a huge American problem Bill Keller, once editor of the New York Times, now with the Marshall Project, shows how the US came to imprison so many of its citizens, disproportionately Black and brown, and how such a gross injustice might yet be addressedThe statistics are familiar but remain startling: America’s incarceration rate per 100,000 is “roughly twice that of Russia’s and Iran’s, four times that of Mexico’s, five times of England’s, six times Canada’s” and nine times that of Germany. In addition, “parole and probation regulate the lives of 4.5 million Americans” – more than twice as many as are confined in prison.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead moreThese numbers come at the beginning of Bill Keller’s smart, short new book, in which he tries to explain how America became so addicted to mass incarceration, and how we might finally reform a system which houses a disproportionally Black and brown population.Keller is a veteran journalist who won a Pulitzer for his first New York Times posting as a foreign correspondent, in Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed. He went on to be executive editor and then a columnist, but in 30 years, criminal justice was never one of his specialties. That all changed when Neil Barsky, a journalist turned investor turned philanthropist, tapped Keller to be founding editor of The Marshall Project, an ambitious effort to produce great journalism about the “causes and consequences” of mass incarceration.Keller’s book highlights many of the best pieces by Marshall Project reporters, but he also uses plenty of his own reporting to illuminate this particularly dark side of American democracy.The “good news”: the incarcerated population has actually been in slow and steady decline, from a peak of 2.3 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2020, including an unprecedented drop of 14% spurred by early releases because of Covid.America’s unfortunate exceptionalism on this subject is actually a fairly recent development. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the rate of incarceration mostly held steady at around 110 out of every 100,000 Americans. But it is nearly 500 today.Liberals and conservatives were equally responsible. A Democratic House speaker, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, sharply overreacted to the crack cocaine overdose of Len Bias, a Boston Celtics draftee, pushing through the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, “which imposed mandatory sentences, asset forfeitures and outlandishly severe sanctions on crack cocaine” favored by Black ghetto residents, while white consumers of powdered cocaine faced much more lenient penalties.As Keller writes, “Rehabilitation was denigrated on the right as coddling”. But a Democratic Senate judiciary committee chairman, Joseph R Biden of Delaware, made everything much worse by championing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which not only spurred a prison-building boom but also eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners enrolled in college courses. President Biden has acknowledged his mistake.It was President Reagan who inserted the profit motive into the prison business, allowing the Corrections Corporation of America to pioneer “the idea of privately run, for-profit prisons”. As Keller explains, “Since the new prison owners were paid the same way as hotel proprietors, by occupancy, they had no incentive to prepare prisoners for release.” Private prisons now house about 7% of state inmates and 17% of federal.Keller makes an unintentional argument for sending more Republicans to jail, by pointing out that three of the more unlikely advocates of prison reform are Republican officials who ended up in prison.Patrick Nolan was the minority leader of the California assembly when, in 1993, he was indicted on charges of racketeering and extortion. He served 25 months in a federal prison near San Francisco. When he was paroled, he was recruited by Charles Colson, a famous Watergate felon from Nixon’s White House who found religion “shortly before serving seven months himself in a federal prison”.Colson campaigned for more humane treatment of prisoners. Nolan became director of a new Center for Criminal Justice Reform at the American Conservative Union Foundation. Meanwhile, Bernard Kerik, Rudy Giuliani’s police commissioner who then did three years in federal prison for tax fraud and other crimes, became an advocate for voting rights for ex-felons.It’s not all good news. By the end of Trump administration, Nolan had succumbed to a rightwing conspiracy theory that “billionaire George Soros was masterminding a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy to elect soft-on-crime prosecutors and bring down the entire criminal justice system”.Keller points to Norway and Germany as providing the best examples for systemic reform. While American prison guards rarely get more than a few weeks of training, Germans get two years of college courses in psychology, ethics and communication. American visitors to German jails are amazed to see unarmed guards “shooting baskets, playing chess, sharing lunch” and having conversations with prisoners.One reason Europe is so far ahead is its depoliticization of the criminal justice system: judges and district attorneys are appointed, not elected.A Fordham University professor, John Pfaff, has pointed out that in the US, during the 1990s and 2000s, “as violent crime and arrests for violent crime both declined, the number of felony cases in state courts” suddenly shot up. Because of political pressures, “tens of thousands more prosecutors” were hired, “even after the rising crime of the 1980s had stalled out”.A Question of Standing review: how the CIA undermined American authorityRead morePfaff attributed the racial inequality in numbers of prisoners to “an imbalance of political power – tough-on-crime prosecutors elected by suburban whites who see the community destruction of mass incarceration from a distance”.Keller reports the most effective ways to reduce the prison population are also the most obvious ones:
      Make low-level drug crimes “non-crimes”.
      Divert people into “mental health and addiction programs, or probation or community service”.
      “Abolish mandatory minimum sentences and encourage” judges to “apply the least severe punishment appropriate under the circumstances”.
      Give “compassionate release to old and infirm inmates” who don’t pose a real threat to the general population.
      The challenge is to get these common-sense ideas to prevail over the rhetoric of politicians who still rail against anyone who is “soft on crime” – the knee-jerk ideology which got us into this catastrophe in the first place.
      What’s Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration is published in the US by Columbia Global Reports
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      Michigan man charged with shooting elderly woman in abortion altercation

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      Michigan man charged with shooting elderly woman in abortion altercationRichard Harvey, 74, says he ‘accidentally’ shot Joan Jacobson, 84, as she campaigned on his doorstep but faces assault charges Michigan authorities have filed criminal charges against a man accused of shooting an elderly woman campaigning against abortion rights in the shoulder while she argued with his wife last week.Richard Alan Harvey, 74, had publicly claimed it was an accident when he shot the 84-year-old woman. But prosecutors from Ionia county, Michigan, charged him on Friday with one count each of assault with felonious assault, careless discharge of a gun causing injury, and reckless use of a firearm in a case that appears to serve as an extreme example of how heated the debate surrounding abortion in the US can become.According to investigators, the woman who was shot was volunteering with an organization named Right to Life and going door-to-door asking voters to oppose Michigan’s protecting abortion rights during a ballot measure in November when she went to Harvey’s home near Lake Odessa on 20 September.Harvey later told the local television news station WOOD that the woman, Joan Jacobson, was arguing with his wife, who supports abortion rights. The couple told Jacobson she was trespassing and she should leave, but Jacobson refused, according to what Harvey told WOOD.Harvey eventually emerged from a barn at his home with a .22-caliber rifle belonging to his wife, aimed at a pine tree out front and fired a warning shot. Then, “without thinking”, he said, he tried to use the rifle to “club” away a clipboard that the volunteer was holding, fearing she would hit Harvey’s wife with it.According to Harvey, one of his fingers accidentally pulled the rifle’s trigger, and the ensuing shot hit the volunteer in the right shoulder.“It went off,” Harvey said of the rifle he had pulled. “It was an accident.”Jacobson received medical treatment for her wound after driving herself to a nearby police department. She told WOOD that she was peaceful throughout the confrontation with Harvey and his wife, Sharon. Jacobson said she was walking away when she was alarmed to see Harvey coming up to her while holding a rifle.“The thing that I noticed the most was that he had a gun, and it was a big gun,” Jacobson said to WOOD. “It was [a] long barrel and by the time that registered in my brain, I heard a shot and I felt some pain.”Authorities did not immediately charge Harvey with a crime. But that changed after an investigation from Michigan state police and the Ionia county prosecutor’s office.The most serious of the charges against Harvey was felonious assault, which can carry up to four years in prison upon conviction.A judge arraigned Harvey on Friday. His bail was set at $10,000.The US supreme court’s 1973 decision titled Roe v Wade established federal abortion rights. But, in June, the supreme court’s current conservative majority voted to repeal those rights and let states individually decide whether abortion should be legal in their jurisdictions.The legislatures of many states have since implemented restrictive abortion bans without putting the issue to voters. Michigan, for its part, is letting voters decide on 8 November whether abortion rights should be protected in their state constitution.Michigan’s abortion referendum is coming after 730,000 of the state’s residents signed a petition requesting a vote.TopicsMichiganAbortionUS politicsUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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      Duo plead guilty to plot to sell Biden daughter’s stolen diary to Project Veritas

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      Duo plead guilty to plot to sell Biden daughter’s stolen diary to Project VeritasAimee Harris stole items from Ashley Biden’s room and conspired Robert Kurlander to sell them to activist group, prosecutors say Two people have pleaded guilty in a scheme to peddle a diary and other items belonging to Joe Biden’s daughter to the conservative group Project Veritas for $40,000, prosecutors said Thursday.The two, both from Florida, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, Manhattan US attorney Damian Williams’s office said.While authorities did not identify Biden, the type of property stolen or the organization that paid, the details of the investigation have been public for months.“Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander pled guilty to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property involving the theft of personal belongings of an immediate family member of a then former government official who was a candidate for national political office,” the US attorney’s office in the southern district of New York announced in a statement on Thursday.Ashley Biden stored the diary, tax records, a digital device with family photos and a cellphone in September 2020 in a Delray Beach, Florida, home where one of the defendants was living at the time, prosecutors said in a release.According to case interviews and documents reviewed by the New York Times, Biden left her belongings in the home of a friend at that time and planned to collect them later that year. The friend, who also knew Harris, allowed Harris to also stay at the home as she was embroiled in a custody dispute and was facing financial struggles.Prosecutors said Harris stole the items and got in touch with the other defendant, a man who contacted Project Veritas, which asked for photos of the material and then paid for the two to bring it to New York.According to Williams, the pair sold the property for “$40,000 and even returned to take more of the victim’s property when asked to do so. Harris and Kurlander sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property, and they now stand convicted of a federal felony as a result.”Trump applauds far-right provocateurs during ‘social media summit’Read moreProject Veritas has said it received the diary from “tipsters” who said it had been abandoned in a room. The activist group, which identifies itself as a news organization, said it turned the journal over to law enforcement and never did anything illegal.According to the group and its founder, James O’Keefe, Project Veritas “was not involved in any theft of property and that all of Project Veritas’s information on how the confidential sources found the property came from the sources themselves”.When asked earlier this year by New York magazine whether he had a right to publish the diary’s details, O’Keefe replied: “Someone can provide information to me – a third party – and I have a first amendment right to publish that.”Project Veritas is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.In efforts to verify the diary’s authenticity, a Project Veritas operative attempted to deceive Biden during a phone call into confirming that the diary did actually belong to her.According to Biden’s lawyers, the group then contacted them in efforts to land an interview with her father prior to the election. Biden’s lawyers, who then reached out to federal prosecutors, accused the group of its “extortionate effort to secure an interview”.Both Harris and Kurlander, who were released from custody after the court hearing, apologized for their actions. “I sincerely apologize for any actions and know what I did was illegal,” said Harris, according to the New York Times.“I know what I did was wrong and awful and I apologize,” said Kurlander.The pair pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property. The count carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. They also each agreed to forfeit $20,000, according to the attorney’s office.Associated Press contributed to this articleTopicsUS crimeJoe BidenFloridaNew YorkUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Paul Manafort admits indirectly advising Trump in 2020 but keeping it secret in wait for pardon

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      Paul Manafort admits indirectly advising Trump in 2020 but keeping it secret in wait for pardon In new book, obtained by Guardian, 2016 campaign manager convicted of tax fraud says he was ‘very careful’ to hide advice Paul Manafort indirectly advised Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign while in home confinement as part of a seven-year sentence for offenses including tax fraud – advice he kept secret as he hoped for a presidential pardon.Murdoch told Kushner on election night that Arizona result was ‘not even close’Read more“I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the president’s re-election or, importantly, a potential pardon,” Trump’s 2016 campaign manager writes in his new book.In May 2020, as Covid-19 ravaged the prison system, Manafort was released to home confinement. He stayed in an apartment in northern Virginia. From there, he re-established contact with Trumpworld.“There was no contact with anyone in the Trump orbit when I was in prison,” he writes. “And I didn’t want any, especially if it could be exploited by the MSM [Mainstream Media, a derogatory term in rightwing circles].“But when the re-election campaign started kicking off, I was interacting, unofficially, with friends of mine who were very involved. It was killing me not to be there, but I was advising indirectly from my condo.”The startling admission is spelled out in Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced, a memoir that will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Throughout the book, Manafort, 73, strenuously denies collusion with Russia and ridicules investigations by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, Congress and the US intelligence community.But in Virginia in August 2018, in a case arising from Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow, Manafort was found guilty on eight counts: five of tax fraud, two of bank fraud and one of failure to report a foreign bank account.In March 2019, he was sentenced to 43 months in prison. Later that month, in Washington DC, Manafort was sentenced to an additional three-and-a-half-year term, having pleaded guilty to conspiracy including money laundering and unregistered lobbying and a count related to witness tampering.Manafort was also found to have violated an agreement with Mueller, by lying.In his memoir, Manafort describes his travels through the US prison system – including a stay in a Manhattan facility alongside the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the Mexican drug baron Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.In another startling passage, Manafort writes that during one transfer between facilities, at a private airfield “somewhere in Ohio”, the sight of “prisoners … being herded in long lines and then separated into other buses and on to … transport planes … reminded me of movies about the Holocaust”.Manafort ran Trump’s campaign between May and August 2016, when he resigned shortly after the arrival of Steve Bannon as campaign chairman and amid a scandal over alleged evidence of payments connected with consulting work in Ukraine.In his book, Manafort denies wrongdoing in connection with the so-called “black ledger” but writes: “My resignation only deflected attention from the Russian collusion story for a short period of time.”Describing his informal advice to the Trump campaign in 2020, after four years of scandal, trial and imprisonment, he writes: “I didn’t have any prohibition against it, but I didn’t want it to become an issue.”He continues: “I still had no promise of a pardon, but I had an expectation. My fear was that if I got in the way of the campaign and Trump lost, he might blame me, and I did not want that to happen.”Trump lost to Joe Biden – an outcome Manafort, whose career in politics began as an adviser to President Gerald Ford, puts down to Biden’s campaign understanding Trump’s limitations better than Hillary Clinton.But he also flirts with Trump’s lie about electoral fraud being the cause of his defeat, writing: “I believed there were patterns that were irregular. The results in battleground states were close enough that the fraud could be the difference between winning and losing.”Trump chief of staff ‘shoved’ Ivanka at White House, Kushner book saysRead moreAfter Trump lost, Manafort writes, he held off “making phone calls the day after to start working for a pardon” and instead waited on Trump.Manafort says the news he would be pardoned came via an intermediary, “a very good doctor friend, Ron, who is also close to Donald and Melania” and “was always one of the judges” at Miss Universe pageants when Trump ran them.The friend spoke to Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump adviser, who relayed the good news. Manafort was pardoned on 23 December 2020 – two weeks before the culmination of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, the deadly US Capitol attack, an event Manafort does not address.“It was like a switch was pressed,” Manafort writes, of telling his wife, Kathy, that he had been pardoned.“We hugged and cried. I was free.”TopicsBooksPaul ManafortDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US elections 2016US politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Uvalde survivor, 11, tells House hearing she smeared herself with friend’s blood

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      Uvalde survivor, 11, tells House hearing she smeared herself with friend’s blood Miah Cerrillo recounts at gun violence hearing how she watched as her teacher and friends were shot and acted quickly to save herself01:59An 11-year-old survivor of the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas testified before the House oversight committee on Wednesday, as lawmakers continued to try to reach a compromise on gun control legislation after a series of devastating mass shootings.‘It all happened too fast’: injured Uvalde teacher recounts school shootingRead moreThe House hearing came two weeks after an 18-year-old opened fire at Robb elementary school, killing 19 children and two teachers, and three weeks after 10 people were killed at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grader at the Uvalde school, recounted how she watched as her teacher and friends were shot and acted quickly to save herself. Miah covered herself in a friend’s blood and played dead until she was able to reach her teacher’s phone and call police.In her recorded testimony, Miah said she no longer felt safe at school.“Because I don’t want it to happen again,” she said.The slow police response to the Uvalde shooting has been the focus of intense scrutiny and criticism.Miah was joined by other families affected by gun violence, including Felix and Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi died in Uvalde, and Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured in Buffalo. Ten people were killed there, in a supermarket by another gunman with an AR-15-style rifle.“We don’t want you to think of Lexi as just a number,” Rubio told the committee. “She was intelligent, compassionate and athletic. So today we stand for Lexi, and as her voice we demand action.”Gun control experts and New York mayor Eric Adams also testified at the hearing on the need to restrict access to firearms and, by extension, reduce violent crime.“It is high noon in America, time for every one of us to decide where we stand on the issue of gun violence,” Adams said. “I am here today to ask every one of you, and everyone in this Congress, to stand with me to end gun violence and protect the lives of all Americans.”But the emotional and searing testimony did not stop Republicans on the committee rehashing talking points about why they oppose gun restrictions.“Kneejerk reactions to impose gun control policies that seek to curtail our constitutional right to bear arms are not the answer,” said James Comer, the Republican ranking member.The Democratic chair of the committee, Carolyn Maloney, criticized Republican efforts to deflect attention from the need to reform gun laws.“They have blamed violent video games. They have blamed family values. They have even blamed open doors. They have blamed everything but guns,” Maloney said. “But we know the United States does not have a monopoly on mental illness, video games or any other excuse. What America does have is widespread access to guns.”The House was working on Wednesday to pass gun control proposals which would raise the age requirement to buy semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21 and enact a federal extreme risk protection order for gun access, known as a “red-flag” law.The House has already passed bills to expand background checks for firearm purchases and increase the time gun sellers must wait for checks to be completed.But all those bills are unlikely to pass the 50-50 Senate, where 60 votes are needed to pass most legislation. A bipartisan group of senators has been negotiating over a potential compromise on gun control, but any legislation that can make it through the Senate will probably be far narrower than proposals approved by the House.Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, indicated on Tuesday that Democrats’ proposal to raise the age requirement for purchasing semi-automatic weapons was unlikely to be included in the Senate bill.“That can be in the discussion, but right now we’re trying to work on things where we have agreement,” Tillis told CNN. “We’ve got a lot of people in the discussion. We’ve got to get 60 votes.”Despite such disputes, senators have voiced confidence that they can craft a compromise bill. Members of the group met again Wednesday, and John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, expressed hope that they would soon strike an agreement.“I think it’s reasonable to expect in the next couple weeks, maybe this work period, that that would be – I’m just speaking for myself – an aspirational goal,” Cornyn said. “But obviously, we have 100 senators who are free agents, and they can do anything they want on whatever timetable.”02:08The families whose lives have been forever altered by gun violence came to the House on Wednesday with specific demands.Everhart asked for more schools to teach Black history so children would understand the violent history of white supremacy, given that the Buffalo shooter voiced support for racist conspiracy theories.Rubio also called on lawmakers to ban assault rifles, raise the age requirement to purchase semi-automatic weapons and enact a national “red flag” law.“We understand that for some reason, to some people – to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns – that guns are more important than children. So at this moment, we ask for progress,” Rubio said.“Somewhere out there, there’s a mom listening to our testimony thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain’ – not knowing that our reality will one day be hers unless we act now.”TopicsUS school shootingsTexas school shootingBuffalo shootingUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressUS SenatenewsReuse this content More