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      Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shock | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shockMoustafa BayoumiThe jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted because, in America, white reasoning rules | Michael HarriotRead moreThe facts of the case have never been in dispute, and yet they were also often distorted or ignored to aid the defense. The McMichaels claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Arbery, an avid athlete who had been out jogging a mere three miles from his home that day. Father and son McMichael found Arbery suspicious, they told police, because there had been “several break-ins in the neighborhood”. This statement has been repeated so often in the last year that it has assumed the status of fact.And yet, according to the local Brunswick News, there had been just one burglary reported to county police between 1 January and 23 February 2020, the day of Arbery’s murder. That singular incident referred to property taken from a Satilla Shores vehicle – Travis McMichael’s truck. (McMichael reported a theft because, after he left his truck unlocked, his gun had been taken, he said at trial.) While surveillance video also captured an unidentified white couple possibly taking some property belonging to Larry English, a man building a home in the area, English testified that nothing had been stolen from the construction site of his second home, where Arbery stopped directly before being chased by the McMichaels. And during the trial, we heard that in all of 2019, there had been only four reported car break-ins. So, yeah, hardly a runaway crime spree.Then why did it keep getting reported this way?There’s more, of course. It took almost three months for the Georgia bureau of investigation, which took over the case, to arrest Travis and Gregory McMichael. (Bryan was arrested months later.) The elder McMichael had been a police officer and investigator for the district attorney’s office. The favoritism shown the men ran deep, so deep that the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who first oversaw the case, was later indicted on charges of violating her oath as a public officer and obstructing a police officer, as she was accused of “showing favor and affection to Greg McMichael during the investigation”, according to the indictment.Like Johnson, the next prosecutor, George E Barnhill, was also forced to recuse himself from the case. His son had previously worked with McMichael in what again was a clear conflict of interest. Barnhill wrote a letter to the police department explaining his recusal. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit’, a burglary suspect, with solid first-hand probable cause, in their neighborhood,” he wrote. We now know just how completely and utterly false this account of events was. By the time the trial began, jury selection was also looking highly problematic. The population of Glynn county is over a quarter Black, and yet the seated jury for the trial was overwhelmingly white, with only one Black juror selected. Even the judge acknowledged the appearance of “intentional discrimination” in this outcome, as defense attorneys struck virtually every Black potential juror from serving on the jury.Defense attorneys also used every tool at their disposal to dehumanize Ahmaud Arbery. Laura Hogue, lawyer for Greg McMichael, characterized Arbery as a “recurring night-time intruder” whose presence was “frightening and unsettling”, as if adopting every stereotype of “the dangerous young Black man” she could find. It got even worse when she told the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”.What a morally bankrupt and shameless statement, but such are the lengths that this system will go to preserve its ill-gotten power. Any honest student of the history of this country will recognize what was happening in this case and in this trial. On display was nothing short of an American fear in all its guises.First, there is the irrational and racist fear of Black people that has motivated so much white vigilantism. It’s no mere coincidence that Georgia’s (now-defunct) self-defense statute dates to the civil war era. As Carol Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others have shown, the violence at the heart of the American system begins with a fundamental fear of Black and Indigenous people.Then there’s the establishment’s fear that its power will be exposed for what it too often is, a precarious system that serves and protects not the public but its own interests through its prejudices and favoritisms. And finally, there’s the fear that those who don’t look like us will stand in judgment. Thus a system of power built on racial hierarchy will seek its own self-preservation.The good news, heard in the courtroom, is that the rest of us are not afraid. The mostly white jury was not afraid to return the proper verdict. The assistant district attorney Linda Dunikoski was not afraid (and was completely convincing) in her prosecution. The attorney S Lee Merritt was fearless and eloquent in his advocacy for justice. But the bravest, most fearless, most admirable person in this saga has to be Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother.It’s hard to believe that justice would have prevailed here were it not for Cooper-Jones’ indefatigable efforts to push and challenge prosecutors like Johnson and Barnhill and the whole damn system at every turn. She pushed Georgia’s legislature to pass a hate crimes bill. She filed the federal lawsuit against the men now convicted of killing her son. She even met with the then president Donald Trump to discuss police reform.Cooper-Jones is a real hero, both for her son and in the fight for a truly just society. She was willing and able to fight a system that, if the past be a guide, was more than willing to exonerate itself.But here’s the problem: what happens when there is no Cooper-Jones? Why should our rights depend on grieving mothers fighting for the rights of their murdered children? What kind of justice system is that?I’m thankful that people like Wanda Cooper-Jones exist, but what we really need is more than that. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of power. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of doing what’s right. What we really need is a justice system that doesn’t depend on grieving mothers at all.
      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
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      House investigates possible shadow operation in Trump justice department

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      Top Democrats in the House are investigating whether Trump justice department officials ran an unlawful shadow operation to target political enemies of the former president to hunt down leaks of classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter.The House judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, is centering his investigation on the apparent violation of internal policies by the justice department, when it issued subpoenas against Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell in 2018.The use of subpoenas to secretly seize data from the two Democrats on the House intelligence committee – and fierce critics of Donald Trump – would ordinarily require authorization from the highest levels of the justice department and notably, the attorney general.But with the former Trump attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions denying any knowledge of the subpoenas, Democrats are focused on whether rogue officials abused the vast power of the federal government to target Trump’s perceived political opponents, the source said.That kind of shadow operation – reminiscent of the shadow foreign policy in Ukraine that led to Trump’s first impeachment – would be significant because it could render the subpoenas unlawful, the source said.And if the subpoenas were issued without proper authorization from the attorney general level, it could also leave the officials involved in the effort open to prosecution for false operating with the imprimatur of law enforcement.The sharpening contours of the House judiciary committee’s investigation into the Trump justice department reflects Democrats’ determination to uncover potential politicization at the department.Current and former justice department officials have described the subpoenas as part of a fact-gathering effort that ensnared Schiff and Swalwell because they had been in contact with congressional aides suspected of leaking classified information.As the justice department investigated leaks, they obtained records of House intelligence committee staffers, as well as the records of their contacts. Schiff and Swalwell were not the target of the investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported.But Democrats are also concerned about the denials from Barr and Sessions and are set to look at whether they made publicly misleading representations to obfuscate the extent of their involvement.The two former attorneys general appeared to issue very carefully worded denials, the source said, which raised the prospect that they may have been at least aware of the leak inquiries into Schiff and Swalwell.Barr said in an interview with Politico that while he was attorney general, he was “not aware of any congressman’s records being sought in a leak case”, while Sessions also told associates he was never briefed on the subpoenas.In examining the denials, Democrats could demand testimony from Barr and Sessions, as well as other Trump justice department officials. Nadler told the Guardian he would also consider deposing the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.But the committee is not expected to issue subpoenas for their testimony for some time, in large part because Democrats and counsel on the committee are not yet certain what information they need to compel.The committee took its first step in trying to establish what testimony it needed for its investigation last week, when Nadler sent a lengthy document request to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and demanded a briefing before 25 June.Democrats on the House judiciary committee are not likely to receive a briefing until next month, the source said. But the House inquiry is sure to be the most potent investigation into the data seizure after Republicans vowed to stymie a parallel inquiry in the Senate.Although justice department investigations into leaks of classified information are routine, the use of subpoenas to seize data belonging to the accounts of sitting members of Congress with gag orders to keep their existence secret remain near-unprecedented.Justice department investigators gained access to, among others, the records of Schiff, then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee and now its chairman, Swalwell and the family members of lawmakers and aides. More

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      US Capitol attack: first defendant in 6 January riot expected to be sentenced

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      Three years of probation, 40 hours of community service and $500.That is the punishment federal prosecutors have requested for the first Capitol rioter expected to be sentenced in court, Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old Donald Trump supporter from Indiana.“Best day ever. We stormed the capitol building,” Morgan-Lloyd wrote on Facebook on 6 January, prosecutors said. She added that she and her friend “were in the first 50 people in”, authorities said.With nearly 500 people already arrested and charged for their roles in the 6 January attack, the sentencing of Morgan-Lloyd, a grandmother from a small town in Indiana with no known connections to extremist groups, will be the first indication of what kinds of sentences federal judges may impose on the hundreds of people who invaded the Capitol during the official certification of Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.While some members of extremist groups are facing more serious conspiracy charges for allegedly planning the violence at the Capitol in advance, and others are facing charges for assaulting law enforcement officers, many defendants, like Morgan-Lloyd, are facing only misdemeanor charges.Morgan-Lloyd has agreed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building,” which carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment, and is scheduled to be sentenced by a federal judge on Wednesday afternoon.In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors said Morgan-Lloyd and her friend Donna Sue Bissey were inside one hallway of the Capitol for a little over 10 minutes, that she did not engage in any acts of violence or destroy any government property, and that she did not appear to have planned her actions in advance or coordinated with any extremist groups.In a letter to the court, prosecutors said, the 49-year-old took responsibility for her actions, and wrote, “At first it didn’t dawn on me, but later I realized that if every person like me, who wasn’t violent, was removed from that crowd, the ones who were violent may have lost the nerve to do what they did.”Because she had no previous criminal record, Morgan-Lloyd quickly confessed to her participation and cooperated with law enforcement, and later expressed regret for what she had done, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, they believed it was appropriate to request no prison time for Morgan-Lloyd, only an extended period of probation, community service, and a $500 restitution payment towards the nearly $1.5m in damages the Capitol building sustained during the invasion.“I think she’s learned a lot,” Morgan-Lloyd’s attorney, Heather Shaner, told the Guardian. “This has been a trauma for her, and she knows it was a trauma for the United States of America that people did what they did, and she would never do it again.”Shaner said that her client was “from a very small town and has had very limited life exposure”, and that she believed that many of the people who participated in the Capitol riots were “were uninformed or misinformed”.“She’s a very fine woman, and I hope she gets probation,” Shaner said.Prosecutors wrote that Morgan-Lloyd spent “approximately two days” incarcerated after she was initially arrested in February and that the time inside the criminal justice system was likely “eye-opening” and a deterrent to any future criminal behavior.The conditions of her probation should include barring her owning firearms, prosecutors requested.Unlike most federal defendants, who typically remain in detention before trial, the vast majority of people charged in the Capitol riots have already been released, a Guardian analysis found. The stark contrast in pretrial detention rates has prompted questions about whether the predominantly white Capitol defendants were getting different treatment from prosecutors and judges than most federal defendants, who are Black and Latino. More

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      Revealed: majority of people charged in Capitol attack aren’t in jail

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      At least 70% of people charged in the Capitol riot have been released as they wait for trial, according to a Guardian analysis.That high pretrial release rate stands in stark contrast with the usual detention rates in the federal system, where only 25% of defendants nationwide are typically released before their trial.Eric Munchel, known as “Zip Tie Guy”, who was allegedly photographed wearing tactical gear and carrying wrist restraints in the Senate chamber, was released in late March, along with his mother, after an appeals court questioned whether he posed any danger outside the specific context of 6 January.Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man photographed with his foot on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, was released in late April, nearly two months after screaming during a court hearing that “it’s not fair” that he was still in custody when “everybody else who did things much worse are already home”.Multiple alleged members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two groups facing the most serious conspiracy charges related to their alleged plans for violence, have been released before trial, though some prominent leaders in these groups remain in custody.The disparity in pretrial detention rates highlights what legal experts said was a broader development in the 6 January cases: the likelihood that a substantial swathe of the alleged rioters may not serve any prison time at all, even if they are convicted or plead guilty.Many Capitol defendants are being released ahead of trial because they are facing relatively low-level charges, experts said, though other factors, including racial bias, may also play a role.“I’m both surprised and not surprised. Most of these people are white,” said Erica Zunkel, associate director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “The majority of people in the federal system are people of color.”The US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which is prosecuting the cases, said in a statement that the alleged Capitol rioters were facing very different kinds of charges than most people in the federal system.“Comparing the per cent of January 6 defendants detained with the overall federal average is comparing apples and oranges,” a spokesperson for the office said. “The majority of federal defendants are charged with immigration or drug crimes, both of which are typically accompanied by detention. The January 6 defendants are charged with a variety of obstruction, assault, and trespassing charges. The comparison makes no sense.”Zunkel, a former federal defense attorney, argued that it was absolutely fair to ask why prosecutors and judges were making different detention decisions for drug and immigration cases than for the people charged with participating in the 6 January attack, who are more than 90% white.More than 96% of the people charged with federal immigration crimes are Hispanic, and more than 70% of those charged with federal drug crimes are Hispanic and Black, Zunkel said, citing federal sentencing data.“We have a problem with our system, something has gone wildly wrong, if we have a 75% detention rate nationwide, and we have a subset where we have a more than 70% release rate,” she said.Zunkel and a colleague, Judith P Miller, both former federal defense attorneys, said that the level of skepticism and care federal judges were bringing to the decision of whether Capitol defendants were truly dangerous enough to keep incarcerated was not at all the norm.The problem, they said, was not that judges were making the wrong call in releasing Capitol defendants, but that judges were not making similar calls for the majority of people in the federal system.“For my Black and brown clients, it feels like they have to meet such an impossibly high threshold to be released,” Miller, a University of Chicago law professor, said. “The kind of sensitivity the courts have shown to the capitol defendants’ claims for relief – I wish some of that sensitivity would be shown more broadly.”The US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia declined to confirm how many Capitol defendants were currently in pretrial detention, noting that the number “has the potential to fluctuate frequently based on ongoing detention decisions”.By mid-May, at least 440 people had been arrested on charges related to the 6 January Capitol breach, according to the justice department, including at least 125 charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.Of 398 defendants listed on the justice department’s Capitol breach case site as of 10 May, at least 330 were listed on the site, or in federal court records, as released from custody. At least 56 of those defendants remained in detention.The precise number and percentage of Capitol defendants who are released versus in detention changes often, as new alleged rioters are arrested, others secure release, and a few risk re-arrest for violating the conditions of their release. The number and status of cases on the justice department’s Capitol breach website also lags behind court filings.But the broader trend in the cases is clear: the overwhelming majority of Capitol defendants are not being detained ahead of trial.Based on their likelihood of flight risk or danger to their communities, some of the Capitol defendants have been required to meet more intensive release conditions, including GPS monitoring, curfews or home detention, and limitations on their access to the Internet or social media, according to court records.Many of the Capitol defendants are facing only relatively low-level federal charges, such as entering a restricted building or disorderly conduct within a restricted building. A Washington Post analysis of court documents in mid-May concluded that 44% of the Capitol defendants faced only misdemeanor charges.Some of the federal judges hearing the Capitol cases have expressed concern that certain defendants may have already spent more time in custody than they are likely to face as a punishment for their crimes.“For those who end up only charged with misdemeanors, it’s likely that they won’t serve any substantial time, or potentially no time at all,” said Mary McCord, an expert on extremism who served for nearly 20 years as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Washington DC. “It’s quite possible if they were to plead guilty, they would be sentenced to whatever time was served, or 30 days.”There is a tension between the dramatic collective effect of the 6 January mob, which halted the official certification of Biden’s election as president and threatened the legitimacy of American democracy, legal experts said, and what federal prosecutors can prove that individual people did.“The irony is that we have so many laws – so many things are illegal – it’s somewhat surprising that they’re not able to find charges that are more serious,” Zunkel said.Some more serious potential charges, like conspiracy or seditious conspiracy, would require evidence of prior agreement to commit a crime that appears to be lacking for many participants in the chaotic Capitol mob, said Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor.“When you look at each individual, what they did might amount to destruction of property or illegal entry, and that’s in all likelihood what they’ll be charged with, but the larger dimension of their participation in a massive attack falls by the wayside,” Richman said.Part of the current dynamic of the Capitol cases, Richman cautioned, was seeing the very normal limitations of the criminal justice system come up against the heightened expectations of a public who watched the shocking violence of 6 January unfold in real time.“Criminal prosecutions never end in these glorious accountability moments where everyone is satisfied that right was done,” Richman said.For many Capitol defendants facing these lower-level charges, justice department prosecutors did not even attempt to keep them detained ahead of trial, and they were quickly released on standard conditions.Federal prosecutors did fight for months to keep other defendants in custody, with federal judges eventually overruling them, particularly after the pivotal appeals court ruling questioning the detention of Munchel, the alleged “Zip Tie Guy”, and his mother, who both gave interviews talking about their willingness to engage in violence to further their beliefs but were not accused of any specific acts of violence or vandalism as they roamed the Capitol, wrist restraints in hand.“My guess is the judges who decided to release some of these folks on bond were thinking: on January 6, there were an ideal storm of conditions for these people to commit a crime, and now there aren’t those ideal conditions any more, so they’re not likely to do it again,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit that focuses on the harms of mass incarceration.But the same logic could be applied to low-level crimes: “investing in people’s communities” to “create different conditions” that would make it unlikely for them to repeat the same behavior, Bertram said.“The treatment of the people who are involved in the Capitol riot should show us what is possible and what is logical in terms of how to treat people in the future.”Former prosecutors defended the justice department’s work in the Capitol cases, and said that the continuing effort to identify and arrest a large proportion of the hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol was a massive, demanding endeavor, and showed how much the government wanted to ensure that there were real consequences for participating in the attack.“They’ve been aggressive, and continue to be, in trying to find everybody who was at that riot,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School. “For the attorney general, numbers matter. It really matters that hundreds of people are held responsible. That’s the message to people: you don’t want to game the system.”“I think they pretty much want on everyone’s records that they were responsible for these actions,” Levenson added. “It means something that these people are going to walk away with even a federal misdemeanor record. That has an impact on their employment, on their life, on their situation in their community. Even if they just get probation, they’re going to have to watch their step.” More

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      Trump’s revenge: tilting of supreme court to the right poised to bear fruit

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      Donald Trump’s presidency was capricious and chaotic, but there was one issue on which he focused with laser-like discipline: tilting the judiciary to the right.Now America is about to reap that harvest. In the next year the supreme court is set to consider healthcare, voting, LGBTQ rights, guns and, most explosively, abortion. The cases provide a vivid demonstration of how, after being rejected at the ballot box, conservative partisans could push their agenda through the courts instead.“Next year’s supreme court term is shaping up to be the revenge of Donald Trump,” said Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School.It was always said that, long after the tweets and leaks were forgotten, Trump’s judicial legacy would endure. He appointed 234 judges, including 54 appellate judges, outpacing Barack Obama’s first term total of 172 and George W Bush’s 204.The blitz included three supreme court justices, most recently Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg following the liberal linchpin’s death, handing conservatives a 6-3 majority.Just after Barrett’s arrival and Joe Biden’s victory, the court heard arguments in a new challenge to Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act. A decision is expected soon. If the court’s conservatives overturn Obamacare, they would succeed where Republicans in Congress failed.That outcome is seen as unlikely, but the right is expected to fare better in two cases brought by Democrats contending that voting restrictions in Arizona are racially discriminatory. A ruling, expected soon, could make it harder to challenge dozens of other Republican-led voting measures in the wake of last year’s election.Another looming case involves a Roman Catholic adoption agency in Philadelphia that argues it is entitled to discriminate against potential foster parents on the basis of sexual orientation. Arguments at a hearing last November again implied that the conservative majority will rule in favour of the agency.The supreme court’s 2020-21 term offers further flashpoints. The nine justices will review a challenge to New York’s restrictions on people carrying concealed handguns in public. It will be the court’s first major gun rights case in more than a decade, even as Biden pushes for Congress to tackle America’s firearm violence epidemic.And, it emerged this week, America’s highest court will also consider a bid to revive a Republican-backed state law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The eventual ruling could undercut the seminal 1973 Roe v Wade decision that enshrined a woman’s right to abortion nationwide.Fallone believes the move is a sign that the court’s conservatives are no longer worried about Chief Justice John Roberts casting a decisive vote against them. “The only reason to take this case would be to overturn Roe,” he said. “They’re pretty confident they can succeed without it.”Despite holding the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats have few options in the short term. Fallone, who unsuccessfully ran for the Wisconsin supreme court as a Democrat, added: “I don’t really think realistically that there is much that the Democrats can do about the court. The conservative majority is going to be emboldened next term.“They’ve been waiting for that moment for a long time and it’s finally going to arise. The second amendment case involving the New York law against carrying firearms openly in public is also setting up next term to be a big win for conservatives potentially as well.”A commission established by Biden to study potential changes to the supreme court held its first meeting on Wednesday. It has six months to issue a report on reforms including possibly expanding the number of justices to 13, an idea championed by some liberal activists and Democratic members of Congress.Christopher Kang, co-founder and chief counsel of the pressure group Demand Justice, said: “From the gun violence prevention case to the abortion case, the Republican super majority on the supreme court is showing that it is full steam ahead with its ultra-conservative agenda regardless of what the country thinks.“Ultimately we have to grapple with the need for structural reform of the supreme court. We’re just starting to build the education and activism around this and gaining momentum in Congress. As the supreme court continues to take these grossly political steps, unfortunately they’re going to make the argument for us about why the supreme court needs to be reformed.”A bill to expand the court was introduced in Congress last month but Democratic moderates have expressed scepticism. Kang insisted: “Sooner or later, this is going to be a question that comes to the Democrats about how we’re going to preserve our democracy. The need to add supreme court seats, regrettably, is going to become very clear within the next couple of years.”Republicans have opposed the idea of expanding the number of justices, sometimes described as “court packing” and last seriously attempted by the Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. They deny that they are using the courts as a workaround to subvert democracy and impose a form of minority rule.Curt Levey, president of the rightwing advocacy group the Committee for Justice, said: “I don’t see Biden’s narrow victory as an endorsement of abortion on demand, which is pretty much the current regime or, for that matter, as an endorsement of draconian restrictions on handguns. So I guess I don’t really see it as being out of step.“I think the opposite was true for many decades where the supreme court represented elite opinion that was out of touch with the majority. Perhaps for the first time, the supreme court is more in line with the American people generally. I certainly understand why the left is upset that they’ve lost an institution that helped them to implement their agenda.”In fact Biden won the national popular vote by 7m ballots. About six in 10 Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center, although the partisan split over the issue has deepened in recent years.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the grassroots movement Indivisible, said: “Most people in the United States think that abortion should be legal and easy to access so it’s not really a political winner for Republicans, especially among suburban women, to go at women’s bodily autonomy like this legislatively.“If the courts do it, then they get what they want and they don’t face any blowback for it because it wasn’t them that did it. They didn’t pass a law that says abortion is bad; they got the supreme court to do it. And so that’s what this 40-year project has been about: stacking the courts with people that are conservative loyalists and who will do the unpopular dirty work of Republicans that they can’t get done legislatively.”It is a very long game. A recent article in the Atlantic magazine noted that Trump’s judges will not reach the peak of their influence until the early 2040s, when they are likely to lead nearly every appeals court at the same time.Hatcher-Mays warned: “The lower courts also have been hijacked, frankly, by people who are loyal not just to conservative values but Republican political outcomes. That was Trump’s big legacy. Not every case goes to the supreme court; a lot of them are decided at the lower level; a lot of those people that he picked are Trumpian-type judges. So that’s really, really scary.” More

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      George Floyd: will Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict change US policing?

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      Oliver Laughland, the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, covered the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd on Tuesday – a landmark moment in US criminal justice history. Oliver looks at what the verdict means for America

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      Former police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murder for killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes, a crime that prompted waves of protests in support of racial justice in the US and across the world. The jury swiftly and unanimously convicted Chauvin on Tuesday of all the charges he faced – second- and third-degree murder, and manslaughter – after concluding that the white former Minneapolis police officer killed the 46-year-old Black man in May through a criminal assault, by pinning him to the ground so he could not breathe. Anushka Asthana talks to the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief, Oliver Laughland, who has been in Minneapolis covering the trial. He discusses the case and whether the verdict will usher in police reforms. On Wednesday, US attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced that the Department of Justice would investigate the practices of the Minneapolis Police Department. More

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      Engineer who stole trade secrets from Google among those pardoned by Trump

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterIn his final hours of office, Donald Trump pardoned a former Google engineer who was convicted of stealing trade secrets from the company before taking up a new role with competitor Uber.Anthony Levandowski, 40, had been sentenced in August 2020 to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to inappropriately downloading trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car operation Waymo, where he was an engineer.The surprise pardon was remarkable for its star-studded list of supporters and its justification. “Mr Levandowski [pleaded] guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation,” read the White House announcement. “Notably, his sentencing judge called him a ‘brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs’.”The single guilty count was the result of a plea bargain; the engineer was originally charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. And the sentencing judge, William Alsup, described Levandowski’s theft as “the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen” and refused the engineer’s request for home confinement, saying, it would give “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison time is the answer to that.”Levandowski had not yet begun his prison sentence due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A hearing on the timing of his prison sentence had been scheduled for 9 February.Levandowski was a leader in the race to develop self-driving cars. He made a name for himself in the autonomous vehicle space after building a driverless motorcycle in a contest organized by the Pentagon’s research arm, Darpa, in 2004.Levandowski went on to found his own startup, 510 systems, which was acquired by Google in 2011. At Google, he helped to develop driverless cars until 2016. Upon leaving the company and while negotiating a new role at Uber, he later admitted, he downloaded more than 14,000 Google files to his personal laptop.Whether any secrets from those files made their way into Uber’s self-driving technology became the center of a bitter legal battle between the two tech giants that resulted in a $245m settlement for Google’s self-driving spin-off, Waymo, and criminal prosecution for Levandowski.The White House cited the support of 13 individuals in its pardon statement, including the billionaire Facebook board member Peter Thiel and several members of his coterie: Trae Stephens and Blake Masters, who have both worked for Thiel’s various investment firms, and Ryan Petersen, James Proud and Palmer Luckey, who have all received investments for startups from Thiel.Thiel donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign, spoke at his nominating convention, and gave a press conference in which he argued that the then-candidate’s calls for a ban on immigration by Muslims should not be taken “literally”. In 2016, as Thiel was growing more engaged with the pro-Trump far right, Thiel met with a prominent white nationalist, BuzzFeed News reported. As Trump’s presidency floundered, Thiel distanced himself from his former support.Luckey is best known as the founder of Oculus, the virtual reality headset startup that was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in 2014. His politics came under scrutiny during the 2016 campaign when it was revealed that he was funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” and anti-Hillary Clinton memes, and he was pushed out of Facebook in 2017. In July, his new startup, Anduril Industries, won a five-year contract with US Customs and Border Protection to provide AI technology for a border surveillance.Other supporters of the pardon include the former Disney executive Michael Ovitz and three of Levandowski’s attorneys.Levandowski was one of 143 people to be granted clemency by Trump on his last day in office. The former president has pardoned 70 people and commuted the sentences of a further 73 people. The recipients include Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon, rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, the Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and scores of others.The White House said Levandowski had “paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good”.Since his legal troubles began, Levandowski has founded a new self-driving car company and established a church focused on “the realization, acceptance and worship of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software”. The website for the Way of the Future Church appears to have become defunct at some point in March or April 2020.Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      Death penalty kills belief that people can change | Letters

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      Austin Sarat writes powerfully about the Trump administration’s rush to execute federal prisoners (Trump is spending the last days of his presidency on a literal killing spree, 15 December). In the past weeks, it was Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois. Next in line are Lisa Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs.
      Joe Biden proposes to introduce legislation to abolish the federal death penalty. This will take time and its success is not guaranteed. But there is something he could do as soon as he takes office. This is to use his clemency power to spare the lives of the 50 or so individuals who will remain on federal death row. I estimate that it would take him four minutes to sign the required notices of commutation. This would ensure that the trail of bodies Sarat describes could not grow any longer.
      Is it too much to hope that Biden will set aside the time to do this during his first 100 days? It would be a magnificent gesture. Prof Ian O’Donnell School of Law, University College Dublin
      • When my friend, Brandon Bernard, was executed this month, he was a different man from the 18-year-old accessory to a double-murder (Trump administration puts Brandon Bernard to death amid rushed series of executions, 11 December). Spending two decades in solitary confinement changed him. Brandon never had a single infraction on death row. He did church youth outreach to help teens make better choices in life.
      He taught me many life lessons. To be open-hearted yet level-headed. To remain calm and patient. To be respectful and thoughtful and an attentive listener. To be kind. To live with a sense of optimism like one I’ve never witnessed. I want to hate the sin, but forgive the sinner after a horrible mistake and two decades of regret and reform. Martin Luther King Jr said “violence begets violence” and that holds true when the violence is committed by the government. Brandon became a beautiful person. When we killed Brandon, we killed the belief that one can change. Jen Wasserstein Washington DC, US
      • It has long been my view that any country that condones judicial murder in the name of justice cannot be deemed civilised. Suellen Pedley Stanford in the Vale, Oxfordshire More