We can only speculate why the Constitution’s Framers omitted a national recall in their lengthy deliberations in drafting the rules governing this young nation. They seem to have counted on a provision that a House impeachment and a Senate trial could oust a president. Somehow, they could not conceive of an autocratic or impaired president failing to uphold the Constitution, ruling a cowardly Congress, ignoring the courts, and crowning himself as the nation’s first lifetime dictator.

For starters, they obviously did not want a parliament or royalty to rule, nor voting by women, the property-less, and Native Americans. After all, how could the uneducated read or understand such ballot issues as budgets, taxes, war, corruption, property lines, gerrymandering, and the like? Besides, political leaders and officeholders recognized that voters might oust Senate and House members, Supreme Court judges.

Also, logistics of conducting a nationwide referendum or initiative was a factor, much less paying millions for it. Interestingly, it certainly hasn’t been a problem in electing a president in our 250-year history.

It also took a century before people recognized that state legislators failed to pass laws desperately needed. As an election expert on Ballotpedia’s website explained the origin of such oversight:

By the late 19th century, many citizens wanted to increase their check on representative government. Members of the populist and progressive movements were dissatisfied with the government; they felt that wealthy special interest groups controlled the government and that citizens had no power to break this control. A comprehensive platform of political reforms was proposed that included women’s suffrage, secret ballots, direct election of [legislative] senators, recall elections and primary elections.

The theory of the referendum process was that the individual was capable of enhancing the representative government. The populists—who believed citizens should rule the elected and not allow the elected to rule the people—and the progressives took advantage of methods that were already in place for amending state constitutions, and they began pushing state legislators to add an amendment that would allow for an initiative and popular referendum process.

Thus, the recall referendum/initiative system was born in those 19 states—but not for a president and other federal officials.

Soon, recalls took out mayors, judges, and two governors (North Dakota in 1921, California in 2003) and nearly California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. He won by 69.1 percent of the vote, having raised $70 million for media promotion. And he also campaigned around the state to “meet-and-greet” voters. The estimated cost to California taxpayers: $215 million. Last year, Newsom faced yet another recall by opponents who then failed to get the required 1,311,963 petition signatures in time to make the state ballot.

A presidential recall referendum would require a Constitutional Amendment by passage from Congress and state legislators—and approval by 38 states with a seven-year deadline to gather signatures. So prospects for expelling Trump do seem bleak. But all the 27 Amendments once had the same challenges and met them despite geographic distances and lacking today’s electronic communication systems.

But the majority of states passed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) within the first year. Trump has three and a half years left to continue wreaking havoc on the American public and exchanging democracy for a dictatorship. If his first six months is any indication of peoples’ reaction to his rule, it brought at least five million angry protesters to the streets in a “No Kings” demonstrations against him a day before his 79th birthday. So consider what his continuing violations of the Constitution and democracy will do to destroy both during this term.

However, a new factor about election numbers can now foretell favorable outcomes if a recall movement gets started:

If the political marker of 3.5 percent of a nation’s voters opposes a dictator, the regime will fold, according to extensive long-term quantitative research noted recently by Harvard University professor Erica Chenoweth . America’s electorate was 154,000,000 in 2024, so 3.5 percent means it would take only 5.4 million voters to win a Constitutional Amendment referendum for recalling Trump.

Another factor is that far more millions would be voting in a Trump recall election than in 2024. For example, those five million No Kings protesters have family and friends who vote. So do those who couldn’t or wouldn’t participate. Then, add Trump’s social and healthcare victims affected by his “Big, Beautiful” budget-cutting bill he just signed into law. Like the 71, 258, 215 currently enrolled in Medicaid who will lose its benefits. Not to mention recipients’ families and friends. The 41 million on Trump’s chopping block for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) certainly would vote for a recall Amendment. So would the 73.9 million receiving Social Security benefits he is threatening. Include, too, the tens of thousands of federal employees (plus family/friends) who have just been fired/laid off by Trump’s hatchet man Elon Musk.

Multiply the total by 3.5 percent.

Republicans in Congress who voted for that bill because of Trumpian and donor threats can count that percentage. If they can’t or won’t, furious and outspoken constituents in town halls or at campaign rallies will awaken them in the months before the 2026 mid-term elections. So will public confrontations of state legislators.

In such a hostile constituent climate, it would seem to be fairly easy for them to ignore heavy pressure by Trump and donors to pass a recall Amendment. He will, of course, veto it, but Congress can override the veto with a two-thirds affirmative vote in both houses (House: 290; Senate: 67). Apply that 3.5 percent to those totals.

Another supportive factor for a recall Amendment is the historical precedent of success by people finally ridding their countries from years of repressive and rapacious rulers. The French did it with revolution and guillotine, beginning in 1789. Our revolution began brewing in 1775 and took eight years of war to free us from Britain’s mad King George III. Both bloody uprisings were inspired and patterned by the achievement of democracy and people’s rights, first won 800 years ago in England. That’s when its barons forced King John to apply the royal seal approving Magna Carta (the Great Charter) June 15, 1215 on Runnymede meadows.

That monumentally important document ended immunity for imperious, narcissistic kings under the centuries-old “Divine Right” policy, starting with the feckless King John’s tyrannical reign (1166-1216). Most of its 63 clauses set out the rights of subjects and kings, established British law, and influenced the authors of both the U.S. Constitution and France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

John was a pampered, favored youngest son of Henry II and one of four brothers. He inherited a fortune, vast taxable properties in England and whole sections of France. With a lascivious nature, he married twice and had numerous mistresses despite often being away with the army to fight the French from stealing his holdings. His early struggle to seize the throne revealed deviousness, murderous ambition, insecurity, paranoia, physical cowardice—and greed. As a king, he jailed opponents, bullied absolute loyalty from his officials and the army, stole lands from the nobility. Worst of all, he never ceased extorting excessive taxes from the elite, commoners, and the English church.

Sound like a president we know?

The bad years began for King John in 1209. He was briefly excommunicated for opposing Pope Innocent III’s choice of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury. He suspected the candidate’s involvement with the growing unrest of barons and the people. After an attempted assassination in 1212 in the 14th year of his reign of terror, John went after the barons he suspected of the deed. But they had banded together, began drafting Magna Carta (chiefly protecting themselves from future kings), and raised an army against him for a civil war.

Only fear of certain defeat by the barons and a near-empty treasury could have brought a humbled King John to use negotiation to escape Magna Carta’s clauses. He had no intention of obeying them—especially the security clause (61) permitting 25 barons to seize his property and “distrain” him if he disobeyed the charter. He even got the Pope to annul the document a month later. The war ended with John’s death from dysentery the following year. By 1225, Magna Carta was in force.

This extraordinary historical event could now be repeated almost exactly 810 years later, lacking only the same solution: a final uprising of the high and low classes to strip Trump of his office and fortunes by a recall Amendment. It’s not so wild a dream at all.

We don’t have the vast organizational obstacles of the 13th century that took 17 years to put Magna Carta in place. But we do have the same furious energy and zeal of King John’s outraged public to oust a dictator and save the Constitution and democracy.

Consider that some 500 national organizations exist—MoveOn, Indivisable, and SEIU to Win Without War, Greenpeace, Patriotic Millionaires, and ACLU—to set up a nationwide alliance for such a cause.

The speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of the recent No Kings protest against Trump’s dictatorial regime shows what’s possible when a coalition is galvanized for a great historical cause. Its organizers in the 50-50-1 group (“50 states, 50 protests, one movement”), American Opposition, and Indivisible linked 193 powerful progressive “partners” driven by a singleness of purpose: to depose Trump and his regime.

So why not a repeat of this astonishing logistical success for a national recall referendum? Millions of volunteers would be more than willing to knock on doors, do teach-ins and phone-banking, lead rallies and marches, design signs and flyers, write articles, stuff envelopes, send emails and other electronic “reach-outs,”—and contribute funds large and small for expenses.

Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people will only get worse if we do nothing in the next few weeks. Let’s get to it!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

“What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”

This statement was made not by a foreign or liberal critic of Israel but by the former Prime Minister and former senior member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, Ehud Olmet.

Nightly, we witness live-streamed evidence of the truth of his statement — lethargic and gaunt children dying of malnutrition, a bereaved doctor and mother of 10 children, nine of them killed by an Israeli strike (and her husband, another doctor, died later), 15 emergency ambulance workers gunned down by the IDF as they tried to help others injured by bombs, despite their identity being clear.

• READ MORE: Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36

Statistics reflect the scale of the horror imposed on Palestinians who are overwhelmingly civilians — 54,000 killed, 121,000 maimed and injured. Over 17,000 of these are children.

This can no longer be excused as regrettable collateral damage from targeted attacks on Hamas.

Israel simply doesn’t care about the impact of its military attacks on civilians and how many innocent people and children it is killing.

Its willingness to block all humanitarian aid- food, water, medical supplies, from Gaza demonstrates further its willingness to make mass punishment and starvation a means to achieve its ends. Both are war crimes.

Influenced by the right wing extremists in the Coalition cabinet, like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s goal is no longer self defence or justifiable retaliation against Hamas terrorists.

Making life unbearable
The Israeli government policy is focused on making life unbearable for Palestinians and seeking to remove them from their homeland. In this, they are openly encouraged by President Trump who has publicly and repeatedly endorsed deporting the Palestinian population so that the Gaza could be made into a “Middle East Riviera”.

This is not the once progressive pioneer Israel, led by people who had faced the Nazi Holocaust and were fighting for the right to a place where they could determine their own future and be safe.

Sadly, a country of people who were themselves long victims of oppression is now guilty of oppressing and committing genocide against others.

New Zealand recently joined 23 other countries calling out Israel and demanding a full supply of foreign aid be allowed into Gaza.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters called Israel’s actions “ intolerable”. He said that we had “had enough and were running out of patience and hearing excuses”.

While speaking out might make us feel better, words are not enough. Israel’s attacks on the civilian population in Gaza are being increased, aid distribution which has restarted is grossly insufficient to stop hunger and human suffering and Palestinians are being herded into confined areas described as humanitarian zones but which are still subject to bombardment.

People living in tents in schools and hospitals are being slaughtered.

World must force Israel to stop
Like Putin, Israel will not end its killing and oppression unless the world forces it to. The US has the power but will not do this.

The sanctions Trump has imposed are not on Israel’s leaders but on judges in the International Criminal Court (ICC) who dared to find Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of war crimes.

New Zealand’s foreign policy has traditionally involved working with like-minded countries, often small nations like us. Two of these, Ireland and Sweden, are seeking to impose sanctions on Israel.

Both are members of the European Union which makes up a third of Israel’s global trade. If the EU decides to act, sanctions imposed by it would have a big impact on Israel.

These sanctions should be both on trade and against individuals.

New Zealand has imposed sanctions on a small number of extremist Jewish settlers on the West Bank where there is evidence of them using violence against Palestinian villagers.

These sanctions should be extended to Israel’s political leadership and New Zealand could take a lead in doing this. We should not be influenced by concern that by taking a stand we might offend US president Donald Trump.

Show our preparedness to uphold values
In the way that we have been proud of in the past, we should as a small but fiercely independent country show our preparedness to uphold our own values and act against gross abuse of human rights and flagrant disregard for international law.

We should be working with others through the United Nations General Assembly to maximise political pressure on Israel to stop the ongoing killing of innocent civilians.

Moral outrage at what Israel is doing has to be backed by taking action with others to force the Israeli government to end the killing, destruction, mass punishment and deliberate starvation of Palestinians including their children.

An American doctor working at a Gaza hospital reported that in the last five weeks he had worked on dozens of badly injured children but not a single combatant.

He noted that as well as being maimed and disfigured by bombing, many of the children were also suffering from malnutrition. Children were dying from wounds that they could recover from but there were not the supplies needed to treat them.

Protest is not enough. We need to act.

Phil Goff is Aotearoa New Zealand’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs. This article was first published by the Stuff website and is republished with the permission of the author.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As part of our Memorial Day special, we continue our interview with Ohio death row inmate Keith LaMar live from the Ohio State Penitentiary, after the release of The Injustice of Justice, a short film about his story that just won the grand prize for best animated short film at the Golden State Film Festival. LaMar talks about his case, conditions in solitary confinement, and his work with musicians and others to raise awareness about his case as he fights to stop his pending execution scheduled in 2027.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Calls are growing for President Biden to posthumously exonerate Ethel Rosenberg following newly publicized documents proving that the FBI knew of her innocence long before she was prosecuted by the federal government more than 60 years ago. Rosenberg and her husband Julius were charged with sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union and executed on June 19, 1953. A federal pardon or exoneration would be “the right thing to do,” says Massachusetts Congressmember Jim McGovern, who is part of an effort led by the Rosenbergs’ son Robert Meeropol “to get history right.” Ethel Rosenberg “was framed,” says Meeropol. “She was not a spy.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a staff writer.

Sunny Eaton never imagined herself working at the district attorney’s office. A former public defender, she once represented Nashville, Tennessee’s least powerful people, and she liked being the only person in a room willing to stand by someone when no one else would. She spent a decade building her own private practice, but in 2020, she took an unusual job as the director of the conviction-review unit in the Nashville DA’s office. Her assignment was to investigate past cases her office had prosecuted and identify convictions for which there was new evidence of innocence.

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The enormousness of the task struck her on her first day on the job, when she stood in the unit’s storage room and took in the view: Three-ring binders, each holding a case flagged for evaluation, stretched from floor to ceiling. The sheer number of cases reflected how much the world had changed over the previous 30 years. DNA analysis and scientific research had exposed the deficiencies of evidence that had, for decades, helped prosecutors win convictions. Many forensic disciplines — from hair and fiber comparison to the analysis of blood spatter, bite marks, burn patterns, shoe and tire impressions and handwriting — were revealed to lack a strong scientific foundation, with some amounting to quackery. Eyewitness identification turned out to be unreliable. Confessions could be elicited from innocent people.

Puzzling out which cases to pursue was not easy, but Eaton did her best work when she treaded into uncertain territory. Early in her career, as she learned her way around the courthouse, she felt, she says, like “an outsider in every way — a queer Puerto Rican woman with no name and no connections.” That outsider sensibility never completely left her, and it served her well at the DA’s office, where she was armed with a mandate that required her to be independent of any institutional loyalties. She saw her job as a chance to change the system from within. Beneath the water-stained ceiling of her new office, she hung a framed Toni Morrison quote on the wall: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

If Eaton concluded that a conviction was no longer supported by the evidence, she was expected to go back to court and try to undo that conviction. The advent of DNA analysis, and the revelations that followed, did not automatically free people who were convicted on debunked evidence or discredited forensics. Many remain locked up, stuck in a system that gives them limited grounds for appeal. In the absence of any broad, national effort to rectify these convictions, the work of unwinding them has fallen to a patchwork of law-school clinics, innocence projects and, increasingly, conviction-review units in reform-minded offices like Nashville’s. Working with only one other full-time attorney, Anna Hamilton, Eaton proceeded at a ferocious pace, recruiting law students and cajoling a rotating cast of colleagues to help her.

By early 2023, her team had persuaded local judges to overturn five murder convictions. Still, each case they took on was a gamble; a full reinvestigation of a single innocence claim could span years, with no guarantee of clarity at the end — or any certainty, even if she found exculpatory evidence, that she could spur the courts to act. One afternoon, as she weighed the risks of delving into a case she had spent months poring over, State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze, she reached for a document that Hamilton wanted her to read: a copy of the journal that the defendant’s wife, Kaye Maze, wrote about the events at the heart of the case.

The journal began a quarter-century earlier with Kaye’s unexpected but much wanted pregnancy in the fall of 1998. Then 34 and the manager of the jewelry department at a local Walmart, Kaye had been unable to conceive in a previous marriage, and she was elated to be pregnant. Her husband, who shared in her excitement, accompanied her to every prenatal visit. But early on, there were signs of trouble, and Kaye was told she might miscarry. “I found out at four weeks that I was pregnant,” she wrote. “I was in the hospital two days later with cramping and bleeding.” The bleeding continued intermittently throughout her pregnancy, and she suffered from intense, at times unrelenting nausea and vomiting. She was put on bed rest, and Russell cared for her while also working the overnight shift at a trucking company. For the next six months, they hoped and waited, while Kaye remained in a state of suspended animation.

Eaton noted dates and details as she read. “After developing gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension and having low amniotic fluid, it was decided to induce labor at 34 weeks,” Kaye wrote. When she gave birth to her son, Alex, on March 25, 1999, he weighed 3 pounds, 12 ounces.

Alex spent the first 13 days of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit. Kaye and Russell roomed with him before he was discharged, taking classes on preemie care and infant CPR. Because he had been diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, or an unusually rapid heart rhythm, they were provided a heart monitor and taught to count his heart rate. The Mazes were attentive parents, Eaton could see. In the three weeks that followed his release from the hospital, they took him to doctors and medical facilities seven different times. When they took him to an after-hours clinic on April 18 to report that he was grunting and seemed to be struggling to breathe, a physician dismissed their concerns. “We were told that as long as we were able to console Alex, there was nothing wrong with him, except he was spoiled,” Kaye wrote. The doctor advised them, she continued, “that we, as new and anxious parents, needed to learn what was normal.”

It was the admonition — that they were too vigilant — that discouraged them from seeking medical attention when a bruise emerged on their son’s left temple and then his right temple. Another bruise appeared on his stomach. Russell worried that the tummy massage he had given his son to relieve a bout of painful constipation was to blame. “We are concerned,” Kaye wrote, “but trying not to jump at shadows.”

On May 3, Kaye left their apartment to buy formula. Half an hour later, Russell placed a frantic phone call to 911 to report that Alex had stopped breathing. He performed CPR until paramedics arrived. The baby was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered he had a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging; blood had collected under the membrane that encased his brain and behind his eyes. Preliminary medical tests turned up no obvious signs of infection or illness. With bruising visible on both his forehead and his abdomen, suspicion quickly fell on the Mazes. “We were told Alex had injuries that you only see with shaken baby syndrome,” Kaye wrote. A doctor who was called in to examine the 5-week-old for signs of abuse “told me she thought Russell hurt Alex.”

Eaton read the journal knowing that in the years since the infant was taken to the emergency room, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the triad of symptoms doctors traditionally used to diagnose the syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes — are not necessarily produced by shaking; a range of natural and accidental causes can generate the same symptoms. Nevertheless, shaken baby syndrome and its presumption of abuse have served, and continue to serve, as the rationale for separating children from their parents and for sending mothers, fathers and caretakers to prison. It’s impossible to quantify the total number of Americans convicted on the basis of the diagnosis — only the slim fraction of cases that meet the legal bar to appeal and lead to a published appellate decision. Still, an analysis of these rulings from 2008 to 2018 found 1,431 such criminal convictions.

When Alex was discharged from the hospital three weeks later, he had been removed from his parents’ custody and placed in special-needs foster care. The DA’s office charged Russell with aggravated child abuse. He was jailed that June and found guilty by a jury the following February.

Alex’s health continued to deteriorate, and on Oct. 25, 2000, over the Mazes’ emphatic objections, he was taken off life support. When Russell’s conviction was later vacated on a technicality, prosecutors charged him again, this time with murder. He was found guilty in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison. By the time Eaton examined the case, he had been behind bars for nearly a quarter-century.

She turned to the journal’s final entry. “My beautiful baby took 20 minutes to leave us,” Kaye wrote about the day of Alex’s death, when she was permitted to cradle him in the presence of his foster parents. “I held him in my arms, rocked him and sang him into Heaven. This is the most horrific thing for any mother to have to endure. The agony that my husband felt at not being allowed to be there is an agony no father should have to endure. What the state of Tennessee has taken from us can never be replaced or forgiven.”

Eaton understood that if she decided to take on the Maze case and concluded that Russell did not abuse his son, she was still looking at long odds. She would have to go before the original trial judge — a defendant with an innocence claim typically starts with the court where the case was first heard — to argue that the police, prosecutors and jurors got it wrong. That judge, Steve Dozier, was a no-nonsense former prosecutor and the son of a veteran police officer, who might be disinclined to disturb the jury’s verdict. But it was still early in Eaton’s investigation, and she did not know what she would find — only that she needed to first understand what persuaded jurors of Russell’s guilt.

That evidence included testimony from the diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, who told jurors that the bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Russell’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.” Eaton also needed to make sense of a set of X-rays suggesting that Alex’s left clavicle had been fractured and a recording of an interrogation that prosecutors characterized as an admission of guilt.

When Eaton listened to the scratchy audio of Russell’s interrogation, she could hear the insistent voice of a police detective, Ron Carter, posing a series of increasingly combative questions. The investigator’s confrontational style had been considered good police work, Eaton recognized, but she observed that Carter would not take no for an answer when Russell denied hurting his child. Carter was mirroring what Starling told investigators; informed that the baby had been shaken, Carter predicated his questions on that seemingly incontrovertible fact. “You had to have shaken the child,” he told Russell. “That’s the only way it could’ve happened.” The detective repeated this idea more than a dozen times. Russell was already in a state of distress; he had just withstood four previous rounds of questioning at the hospital — from the treating physicians, Starling, another detective and a child welfare investigator — and he did not know if his son was going to live or die.

As Eaton studied the interview, she could see that Russell consistently denied harming his son. But he never asked for an attorney, and in unguarded comments, he sought to help the detective fill in the blanks of a situation that he himself did not seem to understand. He agreed that it was “possible” that while picking up Alex or putting Alex in a car seat, he had accidentally jostled the baby. “But as far as physically shaking him to the point of causing injury, no,” he said. Carter warned him that he was getting “deeper and deeper and deeper in trouble” and that his baby boy was “lying up there, and it’s for something that you caused.” The detective continued to insist that Russell was not telling the truth and that only he or Kaye could be to blame because they were Alex’s sole caretakers. Worn down, Russell finally hypothesized that he might have jostled, or even shaken, his son to try to revive him after finding him unresponsive. “I guess I could,” Russell said, sounding bewildered. “It’s possible.”

To Eaton’s ears, this did not amount to a confession. As she understood it, Russell was pressured to either accept blame or point the finger at his wife. He had remained steadfast that he did nothing to cause Alex to become unresponsive but found the baby that way.

The case did not look like the abuse cases she saw as a public defender; rather than hiding their son away, the Mazes put him in front of doctors again and again. But Eaton knew that once investigators and then prosecutors settle on the theory of a case, the state’s narrative calcifies, and DAs will go to great lengths to defend it. DA’s offices often reflexively reject innocence claims and even block defendants’ efforts to have the courts consider potentially exonerating evidence. Their faith in the underlying police work, and their certainty about a defendant’s guilt, can make prosecutors resist acknowledging a mistake. So, too, can the political pressure to protect the office’s record and to appear tough on crime. “It’s ingrained in some prosecutors to fight for the sake of fighting,” says Jason Gichner, the Tennessee Innocence Project’s deputy director, who now represents Russell Maze.

When Nashville created a conviction-review unit to try to disrupt this prosecutorial mindset, it was following the earlier lead of another reform-minded DA’s office. In 2007, Dallas’ newly elected district attorney, Craig Watkins, established what he called the conviction-integrity unit. The office he inherited had a long and ugly history of tipping the scales of justice against Black citizens, and Watkins wanted to harness the power of an innovative technology, DNA analysis, to see if he could undo some of the harms of that legacy. The unit reviewed hundreds of convictions in which defendants’ requests for testing had been denied. “When a plane crashes, we investigate,” Watkins told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2012 when he testified about wrongful convictions. “We do not pretend that it did not happen; we do not falsely promise that it will not happen again; but we learn from it, and we make necessary adjustments so it won’t happen again.” By the time he left office in 2015, his conviction-integrity unit had exonerated 24 people, nearly all of them Black men. Since then the office has secured nine more exonerations.

Watkins’ vision for changing the system from inside inspired prosecutors in cities across the country to form their own conviction-review units. But because unraveling complex, long-ago criminal cases is labor-intensive, conviction-review units are unheard-of in the smaller, resource-strapped DA’s offices that dot rural America. Of some 2,300 prosecutors’ offices nationwide, just around 100 have them. In jurisdictions that have the funding and the political will for them — and where they are staffed not with career prosecutors but with attorneys who have defense experience — they can be powerful tools. According to data collected by the National Registry of Exonerations, these units have helped clear more than 750 people. Last year, they played a role in nearly 40% of the nation’s exonerations.

In the years that followed Russell’s murder conviction, doctors who challenged the notion that shaken baby syndrome’s symptoms were always evidence of abuse faced resistance from prosecutors. Brian Holmgren, who led the Nashville DA office’s child-abuse unit until 2015, and who tried the Maze case, built a national profile as one of the most strident critics. While a prosecutor, he served on the international advisory board for the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, a nonprofit advocacy group, and he lectured around the country about how to conduct shaken baby prosecutions. He also was a co-author of two 2013 law-review articles, which lambasted doctors who testified for the defense in such cases as unethical and mercenary, suggesting that they were willing to offer unscientific testimony for the right price.

Holmgren made no secret of his disdain for these doctors when he delivered a keynote presentation at a National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome conference in Atlanta in 2010. Standing before an image of Pinocchio, he read from the testimony of physicians who had refuted shaken baby diagnoses, the puppet’s nose growing longer with each quote. He concluded his talk by inviting a guitar-playing pediatrician to lead the audience in a sing-along to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz”:

I will say there is no basis for the claims in shaking cases,

My opinion’s in demand.

Though my theories are outrageous, I’ll work hard to earn my wages

If I only get 10 grand.

Holmgren’s impassioned advocacy on behalf of child victims made him a polarizing figure in Nashville. In 2015, The Tennessean ran a front-page article revealing that he told a public defender he would not offer a plea deal in a child-neglect case unless her client, who was mentally ill (she had stabbed herself in the stomach during one pregnancy), agreed to be sterilized.

His dismissal soon after was part of a sea change at the DA’s office that began in 2014, when voters elected Glenn Funk, a longtime defense lawyer, to be the city’s top prosecutor. As a sign of his commitment to reform, Funk created the conviction-review unit in late 2016, when CRUs were virtually nonexistent in the South. But for the first three years, it was by all measures a failure. Hamstrung by its own bureaucratic rules — a panel of seven prosecutors had to agree before any formal investigation could occur — the unit had yet to reopen a case. In 2020, Funk persuaded Eaton to come run the unit with assurances that she would not have to contend with the panel of prosecutors and that she would answer only to him.

Eaton needed qualified medical experts to evaluate the evidence in the Maze case, but she thought the public vilification of doctors might still give pause to one she wanted to talk to: Dr. Michael Laposata, who previously served as chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville.

Laposata had spent much of his career recommending that physicians rigorously search for underlying diseases when evaluating children who are bruised or bleeding internally, rather than leaping to a determination of abuse. His body of work has shown that the symptoms of certain blood disorders can mimic — and be almost indistinguishable from — those of trauma. In 2005, he and a co-author wrote a seminal paper for The American Journal of Clinical Pathology, which acknowledged at the outset that child abuse too often goes undetected. But the fear among clinicians that they might inadvertently overlook a child’s suffering “has produced a high zeal for identifying cases of child abuse,” and that zeal, the paper argued, combined with a lack of expertise in blood disorders, had led to catastrophic mistakes. “It is very easy for a health care worker to presume that bruising and bleeding is associated with trauma because the coagulopathies” — disorders of blood coagulation — “that may explain the findings are often poorly understood.” Such a misinterpretation, the paper cautioned, could result in the false conclusion that a child had been abused.

Now the chief of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Laposata was initially guarded when the conviction-review unit asked if he would assess the Maze case, explaining that he was already overcommitted. He agreed to look at Alex’s lab reports and Kaye’s prenatal and birth records, but he made no promises that he could do more. His hesitance fell away after he reviewed the material. One fact leapt out at him immediately: Alex’s blood work was not normal. The infant’s hematocrit, or concentration of red blood cells, was not only extremely low; the size and shape of those cells were also atypical. This suggested a problem with red blood cell production that would have taken time to evolve, making it inconsistent with acute trauma. He put this into simpler language when he spoke with Eaton and her team, and she wrote down and underlined his words: “Abnormal red blood cells are not created from child abuse.” These abnormalities raised the suspicion of an undiagnosed blood disorder.

The pathologist also zeroed in on Kaye’s prenatal history. In addition to the health issues she enumerated in her journal, Laposata noticed a positive result for an antinuclear antibody test, commonly associated with an autoimmune disorder. Pregnant women with such disorders often develop antibodies and can pass them to the fetus, he explained. Those antibodies can remain in their infants’ systems for months and may lead to the formation of blood clots. He could see that the treating physicians did not conduct all the necessary tests to determine if Alex carried antibodies that would have predisposed him to clotting abnormalities. “It is surprising that these tests were never performed on the child given the extreme circumstances and the clinical implications of having a clot in the brain,” Laposata later wrote.

The likelihood that Alex suffered from an undiagnosed health condition raised serious questions about the prosecution’s case, and from that point on, Eaton did not look back; this was the conviction on which her team would focus. That there was a plausible medical explanation for Alex’s bruises also had profound implications for Kaye. Prosecutors had pointed to them as evidence that Kaye should have known her husband was abusing their son, and for failing to protect him, they charged her in June 1999 with aggravated assault. After she was told that having an open criminal case would make it harder to regain custody, Kaye took an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence. She received a two-year suspended sentence and never regained her parental rights.

Eaton often thought about Kaye as she sifted through the case file. If Kaye had been willing to testify against her husband, she might have won back custody of her son, and in return for her cooperation, her criminal charge could have been reduced or dropped. Yet she always stood by Russell. She was unequivocal when she testified at his murder trial, insisting that he was not capable of hurting their child. She moved to rural East Tennessee after he was incarcerated there, so she could visit him as often as possible. She never abandoned their marriage. Eaton knew that such loyalty was rare; long prison sentences often lead to divorce, and the more time a person remains locked up, the more likely the marriage is to fall apart. Kaye’s resolute belief in her husband was not the kind of hard evidence Eaton was seeking, but she filed it away, another data point to consider.

Eaton had noticed a detail in the trial transcripts that she found telling: A police officer named Robert Anderson testified that when he arrived at the apartment as paramedics worked to revive Alex, he saw Russell looking on, impassive. He was acting “rather calmly, just kind of watching,” Anderson told the jury. “He didn’t appear upset, no, not from the outside.” The inference was that Russell was callous, even cold-blooded.

Eaton, having followed the emerging research on trauma, saw something different in his emotionlessness. The encounter with police came just after Russell struggled to resuscitate his son, who had turned blue and gone into cardiac arrest. She was struck by how little the investigators who first interacted with the Mazes understood acute stress and how much that lack of knowledge shaped the investigation that followed.

Eaton had educated herself about the effects of trauma because it had altered not only the lives of her defense clients but also her own. She arrived in Nashville during a tumultuous adolescence, after running away from home in Clarksville, Tennessee, at the age of 16. “I’d experienced a significant trauma, and I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she told me. She was from a peripatetic military family that was not equipped to give her the intensive support she needed. In a Nashville phone booth, Eaton spotted a sticker that read, IF YOU ARE A TEENAGER AND YOU NEED HELP, CALL THIS NUMBER. She dialed the number and, weeping into the receiver, said she had nowhere else to turn.

That phone call, Eaton believes, saved her life. It led her to an emergency shelter for teenagers, where she found counselors who were trained in crisis intervention, and after receiving daily therapy, she returned to Clarksville to finish high school. From that point forward, she knew she wanted to go into a helping profession — a journey that led her first to psychology and then to the law. She was drawn to representing defendants, whom she saw as survivors of trauma too. “No 5-year-old dreams of growing up to become a felon,” she told me. She joined the public defender’s office in 2007, and squaring off against the DA’s office day after day, she proved to be both quick on her feet and tenacious. Three years later, she started her own private practice.

Funk, the district attorney, had always regarded her as one of the brightest stars in Nashville’s criminal defense bar, and as his conviction-review unit foundered, he began talking to her in 2019 about taking the helm. He knew that if he wanted to make the unit effective, he had to put someone with her singular focus and defense experience in charge. Nashville’s CRU was not the only one to fall short of expectations; many conviction-review units have not produced an exoneration. Some are simply overburdened and underfunded, while others have met resistance from local judges. But underperforming conviction-review units have also given rise to suspicion, among defense attorneys, that there is a more cynical calculus at work; they see DAs who want to signal their commitment to justice reform without actually doing the hard work of challenging fellow prosecutors and local police officers.

“The C.R.U., as presently constituted, is a complete and utter sham,” the defense lawyer Daniel Horwitz wrote in 2018, when the Nashville DA’s office declined to act on new information that his client, convicted of murder, was the wrong man.

In Funk’s willingness to try to do better, Eaton saw an opportunity to give defendants with credible innocence claims a fair hearing, while using the resources of the state to investigate. The first case she took on, in the summer of 2020, was Horwitz’s client, Joseph Webster. Tennessee law does not give prosecutors any clear mechanism to get back into court if they uncover a potential wrongful conviction. Eaton coordinated with Horwitz, who had already obtained DNA testing of the murder weapon and tracked down eyewitnesses to the killing whom the police had ignored. After conducting her own independent investigation, which built on two years of work by her predecessor, she went to court to jointly argue with the defense that Webster should walk free. His conviction was vacated, and he was released, having served nearly 15 years of a life sentence.

This became the template for how Eaton worked. Conducting her own parallel investigations alongside the Tennessee Innocence Project, she probed more troubled cases. Of the five convictions she helped undo, three relied on forensic findings that are now seen as flawed.

One of those defendants, Claude Garrett, had already spent nearly 28 years in prison when Eaton began looking at his case in 2020. He survived a 1992 house fire only to be charged with murder after fire investigators determined that the blaze, which claimed the life of his fiancée, was intentionally set. He was locked up when his daughter was 5 years old. In the intervening years, many once-accepted tenets of arson science were debunked. The “pour patterns,” or burn marks, that arson investigators saw as proof that someone poured an accelerant around the house had come to be understood as a natural byproduct of fast-burning fires. Several nationally recognized fire experts who reviewed the case testified that there was no evidence the fire was intentionally set. “When stripped of demonstrably unreliable testimony, faulty investigative methods and baseless speculation,” Eaton wrote to the court, “the case against Garrett is nonexistent.”

Garrett’s conviction was vacated, and he was released in May 2022 at the age of 65. He died suddenly, five months later, of heart failure. “When we have advancements in science, why don’t we look at every single case in which that science convicted someone and see whether the evidence still stands up?” his daughter, Deana Watson, says. “People are going to die in prison who don’t belong there — human beings who literally have no reason to be there, who are stuck there based on what we thought was true 30 years ago.”

Claude Garrett’s death would always hang over Eaton — a nagging reminder, as she worked on the Maze case, that there was no time to spare. She and Hamilton, who was a former federal defender, threw themselves into their reinvestigation. The lawyers learned about blood disorders and genetic diseases, poring over medical journals and buttonholing doctors. They spoke to experts about police interrogation techniques and the effects of emotional trauma on suspects. They visited the Mazes’ former apartment complex to visualize the sequence of events. They conferred with lawyers at the Tennessee Innocence Project, who were talking to other medical experts around the country. Still, the question remained: What had happened to Alex?

Eaton wanted to stay focused on the specifics of Alex’s case and not get lost in the controversy over shaken baby syndrome. While there is no disagreement that the violent shaking of an infant causes harm, there is fierce dissent over whether the symptoms associated with the diagnosis can be taken as proof that abuse has occurred. (“Few pediatric diagnoses have engendered as much debate,” the American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledged in a 2020 policy statement.) This has left both doctors and the courts divided. Over the past four years, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, nine people whose convictions rested on the diagnosis — five parents and four caregivers — have been exonerated. Last year, a New Jersey appellate court backed a lower-court judge who pronounced the diagnosis “akin to junk science.” But appellate judges in recent years have also upheld shaken baby convictions, including that of a man on death row in Texas, Robert Roberson, whose execution date is set for October.

Eaton reached out to experts in the fields of pathology, radiology, neonatology, genetics and ophthalmology, and over the spring and summer and then fall of 2023, physicians who looked at the medical records independently of one another came to the same conclusion: Alex’s symptoms were not consistent with abuse. They observed that the bleeding in his brain and around his eyes continued to progress during his hospitalization. Such ongoing hemorrhaging “suggests a mechanism other than abusive trauma,” explained Dr. Franco Recchia, an ophthalmology specialist. So, too, did the increased bleeding around Alex’s brain. The doctors were in agreement: This progression of symptoms pointed to an undiagnosed, underlying condition — like a metabolic disease or blood disorder — which most likely resulted in a stroke. After reviewing the autopsy slides and other medical records, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, determined that Alex “had a systemic disorder that was never properly worked up due to the early fixation on the alleged nonaccidental head trauma.”

The doctors noted the absence of obvious evidence of violence; Alex had no neck injuries, broken ribs, limb fractures or skull trauma. They also zeroed in on what Eaton and Hamilton found noteworthy in Alex’s hospital records: Starling rendered her diagnosis within hours of Alex’s arrival at the ER, before receiving all the results of blood work and other testing. And she did not consult his pediatrician’s records, which documented a sudden increase in his head circumference weeks before he arrived at the emergency room. (Starling did not respond to requests for comment.)

But it was the analysis of one last piece of evidence, a set of X-rays known as a skeletal survey, that helped Eaton understand something that she had been trying to make sense of, but that had remained stubbornly perplexing: the clavicle fracture. A close examination of the medical records showed that chest X-rays, performed when Alex was first admitted to the emergency room, did not detect any breaks. Only after he was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome was a fracture identified on the skeletal survey, on his second day in the hospital.

Interpreting radiological images like a skeletal survey can be subjective, and when evaluating a curved bone like the clavicle, radiologists may disagree about whether a tiny abnormality is a fracture or not. When Dr. Julie Mack, a Harvard-trained radiologist, reviewed the images last fall for the Tennessee Innocence Project, she said she saw no evidence of a bone break. She left open the possibility that a slender hairline fracture was present, which she could not detect in her copy of the original images. But, she explained, “He underwent CPR, which, if a clavicle fracture was present, is a sufficient explanation for such a fracture.” Mack’s review of the records, which included several CT scans and an MRI of Alex’s brain, led her to conclude that the infant had suffered not from abuse but rather from “an ongoing, abnormal, natural disease process.”

In coordination with the conviction-review unit, Russell’s attorneys filed a motion in state court in December, seeking to reopen State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze. “Physicians who suspect abusive head trauma can no longer stop their analysis with the identification of the shaken baby syndrome triad,” it read. “Instead, they must seriously consider all other etiologies that may plausibly explain the constellation of symptoms and eliminate them as causes.” Horwitz — the attorney who once called the CRU a sham — and one of his law partners, Melissa Dix, also filed a motion on behalf of Kaye, petitioning the court to vacate her felony conviction. The decision about whether to reopen the case was in the hands of the judge, Dozier; he had been on the bench since 1997, having won reelection or run unopposed in every election since his appointment.

Eaton walked over to the courthouse that day with Hamilton to file the unit’s 71-page report, which detailed their investigation. Eaton and her team wrote a report each time they went before a judge to ask that a conviction be overturned. It was imperative, she believed, to establish trust with judges before asking them to take the weighty, and sometimes politically perilous, step of tossing out a jury’s verdict, and to signal that they had the full backing of the DA’s office. “While it was reasonable for the treating doctors to consider abuse,” the report read, “every other medical possibility was either overlooked or completely ignored. Law-enforcement officers blindly followed the course set out by Dr. Starling and failed to consider any other explanation for Alex’s condition. After an investigation comprised of a hasty medical determination, an interrogation of traumatized parents and little else, the case was considered closed.”

The lawyers recommended that the court vacate Russell’s and Kaye’s convictions. “The tragedies in this case cannot be overstated,” they concluded. “What every single expert the C.R.U. consulted with agrees upon is that Alex Maze did not die from abuse.”

Shortly after they filed their report, Dozier agreed to set a hearing so that he could evaluate the findings from the state’s and defense’s expert witnesses.

When Russell was led in handcuffs into the courtroom on a drizzly morning this past March, he bore little resemblance to the ruddy-cheeked new father paramedics found in 1999, struggling to revive his infant son. At 58, his careworn face was framed by thick, prison-issued glasses. He walked with a cane, which he had to maneuver with both hands manacled together, and as he took his seat at the defense table, he winced. Beside him sat Kaye, her expression guarded, her shoulder-length hair shot through with gray. The husband and wife, who last lived together when Bill Clinton was president, were instructed not to have physical contact. Wordlessly, they gazed out at the courtroom and waited for the hearing to begin.

Eaton had not slept well. She knew that the experts who were slated to testify would be good witnesses, but she worried that their testimony would not be enough to satisfy Dozier. It was Dozier who signed off on Kaye’s plea deal and Dozier who presided over not only Russell’s trials but also his appeals and postconviction proceedings. It was Dozier who sentenced Russell to life in prison.

She studied him as he sat on the dais before them, quietly conferring with his clerk, and tried to read his mood. Eaton appeared before him when she was a public defender, and she was well aware of how tough he could be. But some of her biggest victories came in his courtroom, including the Joseph Webster case, her first exoneration. That case had included the persuasive power of DNA evidence, something she was painfully aware, at that moment, that the Maze case lacked.

The state’s opening statement would be delivered by Funk. District attorneys seldom appear in court to throw their weight behind their prosecutors, but both Funk and Eaton thought it would send the right message to Dozier. Funk struck a note of deference as he underscored his support of the CRU’s findings, playing not to the local TV news cameras in the courtroom but to an audience of one. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” he told the judge. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.”

But Dozier appeared unreceptive from the start. When Russell’s lead attorney, Jason Gichner, gave his opening statement outlining the defense experts’ findings, Dozier grew impatient, interjecting, “Do they factor in that there’s a history of a statement that the child was jostled?” When it was time for the physicians to testify, he remained obstinate. He grilled them about granular aspects of their testimony, repeatedly breaking in to interrogate them and questioning whether their opinions were grounded in any kind of new scientific thinking. He wondered aloud if different experts, evaluating the same evidence, might reach a completely different conclusion. Even when he said nothing, he radiated disapproval; he arched his eyebrows, pursed his lips and shot exasperated glares at whoever was sitting in the witness box. He grew more skeptical as the hearing went on, accusing Russell’s attorneys of only presenting experts who had been “picked and chosen” to best suit the defense’s narrative.

During breaks, the lawyers conferred with one another, unsure how to interpret the judge’s intransigence. Dozier was always prickly, and in the absence of an adversarial party, he seemed to have decided to take on the role of adversary himself. Perhaps the judge was just putting them through their paces, pushing back on them to elicit answers that would only strengthen their arguments. Or maybe, Eaton feared, they had lost him. For months, her team worried that Dozier would balk at the fact that their experts had not coalesced around a single diagnosis that could explain all of Alex’s symptoms, and yet without new blood and tissue samples to test, it was all but impossible to agree upon a definitive cause of death. When she called Dr. Carla Sandler-Wilson, a neonatologist, to the stand on the second day of the hearing, she had the doctor inform the court that newborn screening tests — which can identify genetic, blood and metabolic abnormalities — were so limited at the time of Alex’s birth that he was screened for just four disorders. “There are over 50 tests on the Tennessee State Newborn Screen now,” Sandler-Wilson explained.

The Mazes remained composed throughout hours of graphic testimony about the condition of their son’s body and the details of his autopsy. All told, seven experts from around the country took the stand to attest to the fact that Alex’s symptoms resulted from natural causes, not trauma.

In the weeks leading up to the hearing, Eaton had written and rewritten her closing argument. She paced her house for hours, practicing until she could recite it from memory. She rehearsed it in the shower, and in her car, and in the quiet of her home office. She delivered it for friends and colleagues so she could gauge whether the most important lines were resonating, and she recited it to her therapist. Her closing argument was a very different narrative from the one prosecutors presented at trial. “If Alex Maze could speak to us,” the argument she had prepared began, “he would tell us his parents loved him, cared for him and, to his last breath, did not give up on him.”

As Eaton watched Gichner deliver his closing argument, which Dozier cut into with rapid-fire questions, she realized that she needed to change course. An emotional plea was not going to win the judge over. She set aside the speech she knew by heart. She would have to improvise.

When her turn came to speak, Eaton rose and walked across the courtroom to face the judge. Gripping the lectern, her face rigid with concentration, she tried to find the right words. “Our office receives hundreds of applications for review per year,” she began. “Out of those hundreds, we take on less than 5%. And of that 5%, sometimes we have to ask experts to review the information in the case.” She continued: “We’ve had experts look at cases and tell us, ‘No, you got this right — this was trauma, this was abuse.’ And we turn down those cases. But sometimes, your honor, a case is different.”

She spoke quickly, as if by racing forward, she could prevent the judge from interrupting her. “Over the last two years, this unit has analyzed every detail of this case,” she said. “We’ve read every record. Every line of testimony. We’ve consulted expert after expert. And we did not just rely on the petitioner’s experts. We got baby Alex his own independent experts, including the chief medical examiner for Knox and Anderson county, who more typically testifies for the state. Including a local practitioner trained at Vanderbilt, who we trust with our babies every single day. Including the former chief pathologist for Vanderbilt University. And one by one, expert after expert, told us this was not abuse —”

Dozier leaned forward in his high-backed chair. He wanted to know about the doctor who had diagnosed Alex with shaken baby syndrome, Starling, and whether she had been consulted. “But she wasn’t?” he asked sharply.

Eaton was startled by the question because it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the work that the conviction-review unit did. Her duty was not to double-down on the state’s original trial theory but rather to investigate whether there was new evidence to consider, and whether that evidence was consequential enough that it should change the outcome of the case. Just as she did not ask the original prosecutors to evaluate the soundness of the conviction, so she did not ask Starling to review the accuracy of her diagnosis. Eaton had sought out physicians who did not have a record to defend.

“No, she was not,” Eaton said. “But we consulted experts in every possible field that could be relevant to this case. And one by one, they told us that the science presented to this court was outdated. One by one, they told us that our understanding of things has changed. And one by one, they told us that Russell and Kaye Maze did not abuse their son, and they did not cause his death.” She looked directly at the Mazes as she spoke. Then she turned to the judge and raised her voice to signal the importance of the point she wanted to make, drawing out each word: “The state got this wrong.”

When she finished, Dozier offered no reaction as he looked down from the dais. “All right,” he said flatly. “I will take this under advisement.” Court was adjourned for an indeterminate period of time — as long as it took for him to make his ruling. There was nothing more to do but wait.

A few days after the conclusion of the hearing, the two prosecutors who originally tried the case wrote to the court voicing their opposition to the effort to clear Russell Maze. Brian Holmgren and Katrin Miller expressed outrage that they had learned of the hearing only from local media coverage, and they pushed back against the notion that the science behind shaken baby syndrome had grown weaker in recent years. That idea had been promulgated, they asserted, by a “small cadre of medical witnesses” and shaken baby “denialists.” They went on to suggest that the push to exonerate Russell was part of a concerted, nationwide campaign to discredit the diagnosis. The hearing, they wrote, had given “denialist medical witnesses another opportunity to publicize their false scientific claims.”

Dozier informed the two lawyers that they could not insert themselves into the proceeding, and he denied them the opportunity to file a brief with the court that would have formalized their opposition. He did not, however, hand down his ruling. One week passed, then two. A third week came and went without any word. As the days dragged on, Eaton had trouble focusing. Briefly, she entertained a bit of magical thinking; maybe the judge was drafting such a sweeping ruling in the Mazes’ favor that it was just taking him a little extra time. She stared at her phone, checking her messages again and again. “I’m worried,” she told me on April 23. “I’m worried for Russell. I’m worried for Kaye. I’m worried for the morale of my team and worried that if we lose this case, it will make it a million times more difficult to help anyone else.”

Two days later, Eaton was working on her laptop when she spotted an email from the court. She could see that it landed in her inbox a half-hour earlier. The silence of her phone — no calls, no texts — signaled bad news.

The decision leaned heavily on the findings at Russell’s preceding trials. “Substantial evidence presented at two trials is not sufficiently overridden by the new scientific evidence,” it read. Dozier did not give the witnesses’ testimony at the hearing any more weight than the original testimony of witnesses like Starling. The present-day testimony did not represent a new scientific consensus; in the judge’s estimation, it was nothing more than “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the experts.’” He went on to find fault with the hearing itself, which he criticized for lacking “the adversarial role of the prosecutor” — a weakness, in his eyes, that rendered experts’ testimony less credible. With no opposing counsel to cross-examine the witnesses, he argued, “fresh opinions were offered but not probed.” Ultimately, Dozier wrote, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.”

Bewildered, Eaton tried to grasp what she had just read: The judge was penalizing them because everyone — the state, the defense, the witnesses — agreed that the Mazes committed no crime. As she wrestled with the implications of the ruling over the days that followed, she began to ask herself increasingly absurd questions. By the judge’s logic, should she have been performatively combative with the defense’s witnesses? Would Russell have stood a better chance if the DA’s office had fought the defense’s efforts to prove his innocence? Did the “adversarial role of the prosecutor” leave no room for the state to right a wrong — or worse, did it require prosecutors to uphold a bad conviction? Dozier’s ruling went to the heart of what a conviction-review unit is supposed to do, and it seemed to eviscerate it.

Never had there been a day, since taking on the Maze case, when Eaton did not know that losing was a possibility. But the implications of Dozier’s ruling made her worry for the future — both for the chilling effect it might have on other judges at the courthouse and, more broadly, for the system as a whole. Her own office filed the original criminal charges against the Mazes, but the same office could not undo them. If the DA’s office could not fix this, who could?

Russell remains one of many defendants who have been behind bars for decades based on the testimony of expert witnesses who believed in the inviolability of shaken baby syndrome. In April, Starling — who, by her own account, has testified in court more than 100 times — was a state witness at a hearing for a case in Atlanta that was similar to Russell’s. Danyel Smith, who was convicted in 2003 of the shaking death of his 2-month-old son, was asking for a new trial, asserting that the infant died from trauma sustained during childbirth. Starling, who was not involved in the original prosecution, testified that the only explanation for the baby’s symptoms was abuse. During cross-examination, Starling was asked about Tennessee v. Maze. “I’m not familiar with this case,” she told Smith’s attorney. The lawyer then produced hundreds of pages of testimony bearing her name. “That does prove that I was there,” she allowed. But the facts of the case had escaped her, she said. “If you say he was convicted, then I will take you at your word.”

“He has served 25 years in prison?” the lawyer pressed.

“Again, not in my personal knowledge,” she replied.

Russell’s case is currently before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, which must decide whether to grant him permission to appeal the ruling. “The Tennessee Innocence Project fully believes in Russell’s innocence, and we will not stop fighting until he is released from prison,” Gichner told me. (Kaye’s appeal to vacate her felony conviction will proceed separately.) The case now faces a new challenge: Lawyers working for Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee, a conservative Republican, are handling the appeal. That office is often at odds with Funk’s; in late June, it called on the appellate court to deny Russell permission to appeal.

Russell is now back at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, a notoriously rough private prison northeast of Nashville, where five men were stabbed in the course of three weeks earlier this year. Kaye has returned to her home in the mountains of East Tennessee, where she moved when Russell was incarcerated nearby, before his transfer to Trousdale. She lives alone, her brief time with her son preserved in photos that stand alongside her collection of framed family portraits. Her, beaming, with Alex in her arms; him, wearing tiny overalls, his gaze unfocused.

Eaton’s powerlessness, as an assistant DA, to rectify what she sees as a wrongful conviction felt more crushing than any failure, as a public defender, to prevent a client from facing an unjust punishment. “The weight is heavier because we did this,” she says. She wakes up in the night thinking about the Mazes — of how Kaye stepped out one afternoon to buy baby formula and returned home to find her life irrevocably broken. Of how Russell, as of this June, has endured 25 years of imprisonment. Of how the Mazes lost their son and then each other. And she agonizes over whether her decision to take on the case caused them harm. “We gave them a whole fresh set of trauma, and I’m haunted by that,” she says. “Before we got involved, I imagine Russell was trying to make peace with his situation and live the best life he could behind bars. He and Kaye had their visits together. And then we came along and disrupted all that. Teams of lawyers! Doctors! The elected DA! More than losing, what is weighing on me is that we gave them hope.”

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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Pamela Colloff, photography by Stacy Kranitz.

Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

Between BlackRock and a hard place

According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III —  is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19^th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

On April 13, police officers arrested the two television journalists at Matanda Grounds, a public space in the town of Kafue, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital, Lusaka, where the opposition United Kwacha Alliance planned to hold a political rally, according to news reports and the two journalists, who spoke with CPJ. Authorities banned the rally on the grounds that the recently formed opposition coalition was not registered.

Mwiimba and Phiri, who work with the privately owned Millennium TV and KBN TV respectively, told CPJ that they were filming an altercation between police officers and two opposition party leaders on their phones when about three other officers grabbed Phiri, and forced him into an armored police vehicle.

Mwiimba said that four other officers confronted him, kicked him to the ground, and bundled him into the same vehicle, even though he showed them his Millennium TV employee ID card to prove that he was a journalist.

“I was traumatized. I have never experienced anything like this before,” Mwiimba said via messaging app. “They kicked me all over my body. One police officer even stepped on me for just trying to collect news.”

Mwiimba and Phiri told CPJ that they were taken to Kafue Police Station, where they were questioned on suspicion of conduct likely to breach the peace and an officer ordered them to delete the footage shot at Matanda Grounds from their phones. The journalists said they were released without charge about two hours later.

“In reporting on the activities of the opposition, Rodgers Mwiimba and Innocent Phiri were fulfilling their duties as journalists and the police should never have harassed or acted violently towards them,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo, in Nairobi. “Zambian authorities should investigate why and how these journalists were arrested. If the officers involved are found guilty of misconduct, they should be held to account to send a warning to others that Zambia does not tolerate attacks on the press.”

Mwiimba told CPJ that although his body ached, his injuries were not severe enough to require medical treatment.

Police spokesperson Rae Hamoonga said in a statement that the journalists were arrested for filming and conducting interviews with two politicians in “the venue for the intended UKA rally which was not lawfully sanctioned.” The politicians were also arrested, he said.

Hamoonga told CPJ via messaging app on April 13 that the journalists were arrested for crossing a police cordon. Hamoonga said he was not aware that Mwiimba was assaulted or that the journalists were forced to delete their footage at the station and promised to “check and revert.” As of April 22, Hamoonga had not provided additional comment to CPJ.

In 2022, Phiri and another journalist were arrested for filming police officers preparing to arrest an opposition leader and detained for 21 hours. They were freed after signing a document admitting that they were guilty of disorderly conduct and paying a small fine.

Press freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in Zambia but state-owned outlets usually support the government, police have arrested journalists for reporting critical stories, and political activists have attacked reporters.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

New Zealand would likely continue funding the United Nations agency delivering aid in Palestine if concerns about its staff were dealt with, the Foreign Affairs Minister says.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on Tuesday confirmed New Zealand was reviewing future payments to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

It follows accusations by Israel that 12 agency staff were involved in the Hamas’ attacks on October 7, which left about 1140 dead and about 250 taken as hostages.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘What is the critical issue here, it is the humanitarian crisis that we face and war in Gaza’ – Foreign Affairs Minister Peters
• Defunding UNRWA will cause Gazans ‘more misery and suffering’, warns former PM Clark
• Which countries have cut funding to UNRWA, and why?
• Other UNRWA reports

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters told RNZ Morning Report the allegations warranted a proper investigation.

But he said the critical issue was the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

According to the Palestine Health Ministry more than 26,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a war on the besieged enclave in response to October 7.

Awaiting UN investigation
Peters said it was possible there were a few “rotten apples” within UNRWA.

“If the matter has been dealt with, and with assurances that it does not happen in the future, then the crisis is of a level, we must, I believe, and I think the New Zealand people would want us to respond to the crisis rather than to react in that way and punish a whole lot of innocent people because of the actions of a few.” he said.

Peters said it would be premature to make a decision before the UN finished its investigation.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

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Secrets of Stardom

Only a few bones remained and there was no clear cause of death.

In the realm of murder cases gone cold, this was a challenging one — even for Kelly Siegler, a veteran prosecutor from Houston, Texas, with a nearly perfect conviction record and an evangelical fervor for solving cold cases using circumstantial evidence.

There were a few facts to start with. Twenty-nine-year-old Margie Pointer had disappeared in 1987. What was left of her was found in a ravine near Alamogordo, New Mexico, 17 years later. Despite the best efforts of a local cop haunted by the case, it remained unsolved. The Alamogordo Police Department needed help, and Siegler, star of the true-crime reality show “Cold Justice,” was there to answer the call.

Siegler arrived in town with her co-stars, Yolanda McClary, a former Las Vegas crime scene investigator, and Johnny Bonds, a retired Houston homicide detective. They had their work cut out for them, but there was an additional hurdle: “The statute of limitations for second-degree murder has run out,” Siegler explained at the start of the episode. “So our job this week is to see if the evidence warrants a first-degree murder.”

“A first-degree murder in New Mexico has to be committed in a willful and deliberate way,” she went on. “Since we don’t have a crime scene or any DNA, we’re gonna need to find witnesses who can show that it was committed in a willful or deliberate way.”

In other words, determining what happened to Pointer wasn’t the aim so much as ensuring they landed on a scenario that would make her alleged killer eligible for punishment.

In the world of “Cold Justice,” identifying new suspects isn’t what Siegler and her team are there to do. Instead, they arrive in town with the objective of wrapping up a cold case within a week. They always have a couple of suspects in mind, individuals the local cops have previously investigated. In Alamogordo, they quickly latched onto Pointer’s former co-worker, a man with whom, rumor had it, she was having an affair. The day Pointer went missing, he showed up at a friend’s cabin 4 miles from where her bones were later found with a hurt thumb and a scratch on his cheek. In the absence of a body, cause of death, or any other physical evidence, these injuries convinced Siegler that she knew how Pointer had met her demise.

At the Alamogordo Police Department, Siegler reenacted her theory of the murder. She and Bonds demonstrated how Pointer could have been strangled to death and her attempts to fight back could have produced the injuries found on their suspect. With his hands around Siegler’s neck, Bonds explained that Pointer would have tried to pull the killer’s thumb off her throat. Siegler, pulling his thumb with one hand, reached toward his cheek with the other. “Scratch, scratch,” she said. Bonds said it would take 15 to 20 seconds for Pointer to black out and at least another minute to kill her.

“A minute and a half of consistent pressure without letting go, never changing your mind,” Siegler said. “How is that not deliberate?”

“All right, sounds good,” the police investigator said. They decided to take it to the district attorney.

The DA was less convinced and declined to seek an indictment. Siegler and the investigator returned looking crestfallen. Bonds sunk his head into his hands.

“Here’s the good news: Your case is strong, your case is great,” Siegler told the investigator. “It might be circumstantial, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s ready to go right now. But she doesn’t want to do it yet.”

The episode, titled “Sunspot Highway,” aired in July 2014 as part of the show’s second season. Although “Cold Justice” had been running for less than a year, Siegler had already attracted a devoted following, and the Alamogordo DA’s decision did not go over well. Fans were convinced that Pointer’s co-worker had killed her and Siegler had figured it all out. “This is a slam dunk case for everyone except the DA,” one viewer wrote on the show’s Facebook page. “WTF is with that idiot DA,” another wrote. “You guys handed her the killer on a silver platter and she refused to charge him!”

That a case so lacking in direct evidence could convince Siegler’s fans of the man’s guilt was a testament to her skill in crafting a narrative, whether for a TV audience or a real-world jury.

As an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas, Siegler was known for her courtroom theatrics. She once famously straddled her colleague atop a bloody mattress at trial to reenact for jurors how the defendant had stabbed her husband 193 times. Siegler’s flair for the dramatic was perfect for TV, while her reliance on circumstantial evidence allowed her to spin bare facts into a compelling theory that might or might not be supported.

While “Cold Justice” often boasts about its track record — it has helped bring about 49 arrests and 21 convictions over six seasons, the Oxygen network reported in May — the show has also weathered a series of defamation lawsuits. Many of the cases Siegler assembled eventually fell apart precisely because there was too little direct evidence to convict whomever she identified as the killer.

Siegler’s TV career has not suffered for the controversies. In September, she took the stage before a cheering crowd in Orlando, Florida, as one of the headliners at CrimeCon, an annual conference for true-crime fans and creators. She was there to promote two shows. Not only had “Cold Justice” begun taping its seventh season, but she would also be starring in a new series, “Prosecuting Evil With Kelly Siegler.” The program, which premiered on November 18, takes her back to her home state to examine “the most harrowing homicides and toughest trials in Texas history — all told with Kelly Siegler’s unique insight and unparalleled access.”

“Prosecuting Evil” will revisit some of Siegler’s old Harris County cases, offering fans a behind-the-scenes look at the celebrity prosecutor’s “superhero origin story,” as one of her fellow speakers put it. “Both of our shows are about reality. There’s no faking,” Siegler told the crowd. “We’re the real deal.” She waxed nostalgic for her years in the district attorney’s office. “All those big cases,” she said, “no one’s ever told those stories.”

On paper, Siegler’s record as a Harris County prosecutor is far more impressive than the stats boasted by the Oxygen network. Over her two decades in Houston, Siegler handled more than 200 trials, securing more than 60 murder convictions and 19 death sentences. But the stories behind some of those convictions raise serious questions about their integrity. While Siegler’s formula for closing cold cases might make for great television, it has left a trail of wreckage in its wake.

Kelly Siegler, left, and Yolanda McClary, center, on Season 1 of “Cold Justice” in 2013.

As Siegler’s TV star has been rising over the last decade, a parallel reality has been playing out in Texas courts, where allegations of prosecutorial misconduct have tarnished Siegler’s reputation. Appellate litigation in murder cases handled by Siegler has exposed a history of withholding exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys, including in death penalty cases. One prominent criminal defense attorney has called on the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to review all of Siegler’s convictions.

Some of the most disturbing evidence of Siegler’s conduct is documented in the files of a case that has largely gone unnoticed: the 2002 conviction of Ronald Jeffrey Prible. Prible was sent to death row for the murder of a Houston family. The evidence tying him to the crime was entirely circumstantial. He has maintained his innocence for more than 20 years.

In 2020, a federal district judge overturned Prible’s conviction on the basis of Siegler’s suppression of evidence, ordering the state to retry or release him within six months. Instead, Texas fought the order, persuading the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate Prible’s death sentence on procedural grounds. The court did not address Siegler’s actions. Prible appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, the justices declined to intervene.

Today, Prible faces execution despite the fact that the case against him has unraveled. A monthslong investigation by The Intercept — including a review of thousands of pages of court records — shows that Prible’s case contains numerous hallmarks of wrongful convictions, from a shockingly inept police investigation to unsupportable junk science peddled by prosecutors at trial.

But particularly alarming is the way Siegler weaponized a network of confidential informants to construct her case against Prible, as the federal district judge found.

The star witness was a man named Michael Beckcom, who testified that Prible confessed to the killings while they were imprisoned together in southeast Texas. Beckcom, who was doing time for the audacious murder of a federal witness, was part of a ring of informants at the same lockup in Beaumont, each trying to game the system in an effort to shave time off their sentences. Several informants offered information to Siegler before they had even met Prible, according to a petition challenging his conviction filed in federal court. The petition details how Siegler encouraged Beckcom to extract details from Prible that would help her convict him and hid the extent of the informants’ involvement at trial.

“American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information.”

To Harvard law professor Alexandra Natapoff, author of “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice,” the role of informants in Prible’s case is emblematic of a deeper problem that corrupts the criminal legal system. “American criminal law has essentially created an underground market in which we permit the state to trade leniency for information,” she said. Prosecutors have wide discretion to avail themselves of informants who have an obvious incentive to lie about what they know — a leading cause of wrongful convictions.

“Because so much of these negotiations and transactions take place under the table, the likelihood that anyone will ever find out is extremely low,” Natapoff said. “And because we reward police and prosecutors for arrests and convictions, we have a baked-in, dysfunctional incentive for them to use bad witnesses, bad evidence, over and over again.”

Court records reveal that Siegler repeatedly used informants in murder cases despite reasons to doubt their credibility. Details of the Beaumont snitch ring only came to light after Prible and another man Siegler sent to prison realized that she had relied on the same network of informants in both their cases. Despite strict limits on communication between incarcerated people, the two men, whose cases were otherwise unrelated, managed to connect the dots.

Siegler not only gained a reputation as a prosecutor who was willing to help informants seek sentence reductions, but she also advocated for them even when she didn’t consider their information reliable, court records show. Taken together, the records paint a damning picture of a prosecutor who cut corners and betrayed her professional obligations in order to secure convictions in weak or shaky cases. At best, Siegler was reckless in her use of informants and careless about scrutinizing the information they provided. At worst, as Prible’s lawyers argue, she actively conspired to use dubious testimony from a ring of snitches to win a conviction despite knowing the case wouldn’t otherwise hold up — framing an innocent man for murder.

Siegler has denied any wrongdoing. She declined to be interviewed for this investigation. “A second grader could see that you are biased and in no way inclined to listen to the truth or appreciate what really happened with these prosecutions,” Siegler wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “I took an oath to seek justice and justice is what these defendants got.”

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House Full of Bodies

Gregory Francisco lifted his garage door before sunrise on Saturday, April 24, 1999, and immediately smelled smoke. As he rushed across the street toward the home of his neighbor Steve Herrera, Francisco could see it too, billowing from the turbines on the roof and curling out from the garage doors.

The night before, Herrera had invited Francisco to one of his regular get-togethers to drink beer, play pool, and listen to music inside the two-car garage. Francisco didn’t make it, but as far as he could tell, things looked like they usually did: The music was on, and the garage doors were raised to shoulder height. By the time Francisco headed to bed around midnight, the gathering appeared to be winding down.

Now, however, as Francisco rang Herrera’s doorbell, he could hear music blaring — “maxed out,” he later testified. No one answered, so he rushed to a side door, which was hot to the touch. Francisco kicked it open. Inside the garage, he found Herrera face down on the floor between the pool table and a washer and dryer. Francisco yelled for Herrera to wake up, but then he saw blood. His neighbor was dead.

Firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene. In a den just beyond the garage, they made a grisly discovery: Herrera’s girlfriend, Nilda Tirado, was slumped on a smoldering loveseat. Next to her charred body was a can of Kutzit, a volatile solvent; on the floor was a red gas can. The walls were covered in soot, and the couple’s big screen TV had melted.

First responders found the children in the bedrooms. In one, Herrera’s 7-year-old daughter, Valerie, was face down on a bed; Tirado’s 7-year-old daughter, Rachel, was nearby on the floor. In the master bedroom, firefighters found the couple’s 22-month-old daughter, Jade. The medical examiner determined that Herrera and Tirado had been killed before the fire was set, each shot once through the back of the neck in what she called an “assassin’s wound.” The children, whose airways were full of soot, had died from smoke inhalation.

Word of the murders spread quickly. Relatives of Herrera and Tirado gathered outside the brick home as investigators processed the scene. The house was tidy, and there were no signs of forced entry or a robbery gone wrong. Herrera’s wallet, with approximately $900 inside, was found in the back pocket of his shorts. No weapon was found, nor any shell casings, which led investigators to believe a revolver had been used to shoot the couple. They gathered bottles and cans from the garage to process for fingerprints but failed to preserve what appeared to be blood stains on the wall and washing machine — evidence that could have been left by the perpetrator.

Curtis Brown, a detective with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, led the investigation. Court records reflect it was a less than robust inquiry. At trial, Brown confirmed that he spoke to just four people the day of the murders, including Herrera’s brother Edward and his brother-in-law Victor Martinez. Those interviews led him to Jeffrey Prible, who had been a friend of Herrera’s since grade school. From there, Brown looked nowhere else.

According to Edward, Herrera and Prible were at the house playing pool Friday night and had paged him looking to score an eight ball of cocaine. Edward and Herrera were both dealers, Edward told investigators, and Herrera was a regular user. Edward said he tried to find some but never did.

Martinez had been at Herrera’s that night. He told Brown that he picked up cigarettes and a 12-pack of Bud Light on his way to the house, arriving around 10 p.m. Later, with the beer almost gone, Herrera and Prible loaded into Martinez’s white Ford Escort, and the three men made their way to Rick’s Cabaret, a nearby strip club. Prible was friendly, Martinez said, and nothing seemed off. After several drinks, the men headed back to Herrera’s around 2 a.m. They smoked a joint outside before Martinez headed home. Prible and Herrera went back into the garage to continue playing pool.

On Saturday afternoon, Brown and Deputy Ramon Hernandez made their way several blocks west to Prible’s home. Prible, then 27, had been honorably discharged from the Marines in 1995 and was living at his parents’ place along with his 7-year-old son. The deputy said Prible was shocked to learn about the murders. He agreed to go down to the sheriff’s station to provide a statement.

Prible’s statement largely mirrored Martinez’s. After Martinez left, Prible said, he and Herrera played pool until Tirado came into the garage, fixing Herrera with a “look” that Prible took as a sign it was time to wrap things up. He said Herrera drove him home around 4 a.m. Prible went straight to bed and slept until early afternoon. He was hanging around the house, playing with his son, until the cops came knocking.

The deputy later testified that he believed Prible’s statement to be “truthful.” Nonetheless the cops asked Prible to take a polygraph, the results of which indicated deception. They read Prible his rights, and he sat down to provide a second statement. There was something he’d left out, he told them: He and Tirado were involved in an affair and had sex in the bathroom after the men got home from the club. He failed to mention this, he said, because he worried it would “ruin” Tirado’s reputation.

Prible provided a DNA sample and let the cops photograph him naked. They did not find any soot, burns, or other wounds on his body. Investigators searched Prible’s parents’ house, collecting the clothes he’d worn Friday night, which had no traces of blood, smoke, or any accelerant. They collected firearms, magazines, and ammunition. They found paperwork related to a .38 revolver but didn’t find the gun. DNA collected from Tirado was soon matched to Prible, but given his story about their sexual tryst, there was an explanation for that.

On Monday, police took a statement from Cynthia Garcia Flores, a childhood friend of Tirado’s. It was the first in a string of statements that raised new questions, not only about Prible, but also about Herrera — and what the two were up to in the weeks before the murders.

Flores said Herrera had told her husband that he and Prible were involved in a bank robbery and Herrera’s take was $12,000. Herrera had paid her husband, Vincent, for a “job” with some of the cash from the heist. Vincent said Herrera used the money to pay him for cocaine. Another woman, who said she’d been having an affair with Herrera, told police that a month before the murders, Prible handed Herrera a bag full of money. And Edward, Herrera’s brother, said that he’d seen both Prible and Herrera with large amounts of cash.

As it turned out, Prible had robbed six banks since March. The robberies went down the same way: Prible donned a ball cap and drove his mother’s car to a bank carrying a stack of manila envelopes and a note for the teller. One read, “This is a robbery,” while later iterations included a warning that he had a gun or a bomb, though he never brandished a weapon. Prible would instruct the teller to put the cash in an envelope and wait 15 minutes before “doing anything,” he later told a detective with the Houston Area Bank Robbery Task Force, which had dubbed the serial robber the “15-Minute Bandit.”

The robberies were part of an absurd scheme Herrera and Prible had devised to come up with enough money to buy their own nightclub. Prible would rob the banks, then Herrera would launder and grow the cash by buying drugs that he would sell for a profit. “After we bought one club, we would then open some more,” Prible told a task force investigator. “I trusted Steve. … I thought he could use his drug connections to make us a lot of money. Steve was a smart guy when it came to things like that.”

In all, the robberies netted the friends about $45,000. In the wake of the murders, the cash disappeared and has never been found.

On May 21, 1999, Prible confessed to the robberies. Three months later, he was sentenced to five years and shipped east to the federal correctional institution in Beaumont.

The investigation into the murders of Herrera, Tirado, and the three children went cold.

Prosecutor Kelly Siegler, right, points toward defendant Susan Wright, left, during closing arguments at Wright’s murder trial on March 2, 2004, in Houston.

3

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A Real Trial Tiger

The day after Christmas in 1999, the Houston Chronicle published a glowing profile of a star prosecutor at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office: 37-year-old Assistant District Attorney Kelly Siegler. Titled “One shrewd cracker-barrel lawyer,” the article traced her evolution from a small-town girl from Matagorda County to a gifted prosecutor who’d shot through the ranks to “symbolize the aggressive and colorful spirit of a powerful office in a county that sends more people to death row than anywhere else.”

Born Kelly Renee Jalufka, Siegler grew up in tiny Blessing, Texas, “a wart of a town on State Highway 35 … surrounded by rice farms,” as Texas Monthly described it in a 1977 feature highlighting her mother’s homestyle cooking. Siegler’s father, known as Big Billy, ran a barbershop and worked as the local justice of the peace; he “went shoeless and held court between haircuts,” the Chronicle reported. Siegler played high school basketball and was valedictorian of her graduating class. At the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated early after studying international business, she was known in her dorm as “the hick.”

Siegler joined the DA’s office straight out of law school in 1987. As an intern in the office’s family criminal law division, she had come face to face with domestic violence cases, which fueled a desire to seek justice for victims. The issue was personal for Siegler, who was just a child when she urged her mother to leave her abusive stepfather and watched helplessly as the system protected him. “I grew up in a world where ladies walked around all the time with black eyes,” she later said in a clip from “Cold Justice.”

Siegler arrived at the DA’s office as legendary District Attorney Johnny Holmes was becoming famous for seeking the harshest possible punishments. Before long, she was making her mark as an overachiever. Evaluations contained in her personnel file show that Siegler quickly gained a reputation as “a real trial tiger,” in the words of then-supervisor Chuck Rosenthal, who would eventually replace Holmes as DA. “I have seen her try a murder case based solely on circumstantial evidence and get a life sentence from the jury,” another supervisor wrote.

Siegler won her first death sentence in 1992. Her mother sat in the courtroom as Siegler urged jurors to send an alleged skinhead with a low IQ named Brian Edward Davis to death row for a crime he committed when he was 22. Despite her victory, Siegler cried and was sick to her stomach after the trial. “He was like every boy I grew up with,” she told the Chronicle.

But if she had any reservations about seeking the ultimate punishment, there was no hint of it in her record. Siegler was repeatedly lauded for securing convictions when the evidence was thin, or as Rosenthal put it, for her ability to make “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Investigators and police detectives sent letters to Holmes praising her talent. “No average ADA would have gone to trial under the heading ‘Murder,’” one letter read. “‘Luckily, you don’t have an average ADA in Kelly Siegler.’”

Jurors were won over by Siegler’s folksy appeal and knack for weaving compelling stories from circumstantial evidence. She spent a ton of time preparing her witnesses — and it showed. Siegler credited her humble roots for helping her relate to jurors. “I practice every argument and time it out like I’m in that barbershop,” Siegler told the Chronicle. “I figure if I can talk to a jury like I’m explaining it to Daddy and his buddies, then I’m doing OK.”

At the start of the new millennium, Siegler was at the top of her game. Holmes, who retired in 2001, had transformed the DA’s office, putting Houston on the map as the most aggressive death penalty jurisdiction in the country. Siegler was both a product of the office and a trailblazer: a woman who thrived in a good ol’ boys club while pushing the boundaries of prosecutorial performance. She estimated that she’d won “at least 80 percent of the 150 felony jury trials” she’d handled, according to the Chronicle, although co-workers said the number was “much higher.” If there was anyone who could resurrect the cold case murders of Herrera and Tirado and win a conviction, it was Siegler.

The Season 4 “Cold Justice” cast from left to right: Aaron Sam, Steve Spingola, Tonya Rider, Kelly Siegler, and Johnny Bonds.

It’s not entirely clear when Siegler first decided Prible was guilty of murder.

Brown, the lead detective, testified that he first brought his file on the murders to her office in late 2000. But it was another detective who helped Siegler revive the cold case: Harris County DA’s investigator Johnny Bonds, who would later become Siegler’s co-star on “Cold Justice.”

Like Siegler, Bonds started his career as an overachiever. Once the youngest Houston Police Department officer ever assigned to the homicide unit, he was immortalized in “The Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit,” a 1983 book chronicling his quest to solve a triple murder. After leaving the police force, Bonds did short stints working private security and home remodeling but quickly returned to detective work. In 1989 he joined the Harris County DA’s Office.

On March 1, 2001, Bonds received a fax from a Dallas-based DNA analyst named Bill Watson, who had examined forensic evidence submitted by the sheriff’s department, including the blood, hair, and saliva samples taken from Prible. The fax was a copy of Watson’s original two-page report from 1999. His findings were not revelatory. Scrapings taken from beneath Tirado’s fingernails had yielded only her DNA. A pair of white tennis shoes belonging to Prible was tested for blood, but Watson found none.

Still, one part of the report interested Siegler. Two male DNA profiles had been obtained from semen collected from Tirado’s body. Vaginal and anal swabs showed sperm that came from Herrera. Sperm from an oral swab was linked to Prible.

In his statement divulging the affair, Prible told detectives that Tirado had performed oral sex on him in the bathroom, which would explain the presence of sperm in her mouth. But Siegler was skeptical. Although Prible said the two had been “messing around” for some time, friends of Tirado’s rejected the notion that she was cheating on Herrera with Prible. Flores, the friend who told police about Herrera’s involvement in the bank robberies, said she’d known Prible since middle school and he gave her the creeps. Another friend said Tirado shared this opinion. “Nilda told me that she always thought Jeff was creepy,” the woman told detectives.

When these statements were first collected in 1999, the DA’s office did not consider the evidence strong enough to form the basis of a murder case. But with Siegler in charge, things changed. By the summer of 2001, Siegler had concluded that the DNA evidence from the oral swab could only be the result of sexual assault. In the absence of any other physical evidence against Prible, this would be a linchpin to her case.

In a probable cause affidavit, the DA’s office laid out the evidence against Prible, describing the bank robbery scheme and noting that Prible was the last person known to have seen Herrera and Tirado alive. The affidavit mentioned the weapons and paperwork recovered from the home of Prible’s parents; records from a local firearm retailer showed that Prible had purchased a .38 Taurus revolver in 1998, yet this weapon “has yet to be found among the defendant’s possessions.” A firearms examiner said that a projectile recovered next to Tirado’s body was “consistent with a .38 caliber.” The affidavit suggested that Prible shot Herrera and Tirado with the .38 Taurus, then successfully got rid of it.

Finally, the state cited the DNA evidence taken from sperm on the oral swab and the woman who said Tirado found Prible “creepy.” She “does not believe the complainant was having any sort of affair with the defendant based on what she thought about him.”

On August 29, 2001, a grand jury indicted Prible for capital murder.

The Harris County Criminal Justice Center on Sept. 12, 2023, in Houston.

4

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Texas v. Prible

Opening statements in the State of Texas v. Ronald Jeffrey Prible Jr. took place on October 14, 2002, at a courthouse in downtown Houston. Presiding over the trial was District Judge Mark Kent Ellis, a former Harris County prosecutor-turned-defense attorney who was elected to the bench on a Republican ticket. Siegler was accompanied by Vic Wisner, an ex-cop and veteran of the DA’s office with whom she’d teamed up in previous death penalty cases.

Siegler kicked off the state’s case with a provocation: “‘What kind of a man can go in a house and take out a whole family and come out clean?’” she began, over an objection from Prible’s lawyers. “‘That kind of person is a bad motherfucker — and I’m that kind of motherfucker.’ Those are the words of this defendant. … That’s what this man said about what he did on April 24, 1999.”

Prible’s words, Siegler told jurors, had been revealed by a man named Michael Beckcom, who was incarcerated at the federal prison known as FCI Beaumont. “And I’m going to stand here today and tell you he’s a vile, disgusting man himself,” she said. “He’s going to make you sick to your stomach.” But his testimony was crucial. This man would describe how he befriended Prible at Beaumont — and how Prible ultimately confessed to the crime.

Siegler previewed the state’s other key piece of evidence: the DNA taken from sperm found in Tirado’s mouth. A forensic expert would prove that Prible assaulted Tirado just moments before he shot her, set her on fire, and left her children to die, Siegler said. That’s the kind of man Prible is, she declared. “And he’s guilty of capital murder.”

The trial lasted two weeks, with the first several days focused on the fire and the deaths of the three little girls. Amid repeated warnings from the judge, who urged people in the courtroom to control their emotions, prosecutors introduced autopsy photos showing soot and mucus on the children’s faces, emphasizing their struggle to breathe before they died. Yet basic elements of the fire remained unclear, including precisely how or when it was set. Also puzzling was the missing murder weapon. Despite the affidavit arguing that Prible had used a .38 revolver, the same ballistics expert now testified that the weapon had likely been a 9 mm pistol.

But perhaps the most confounding testimony came from Brown, who said that he’d never considered any other suspect apart from Prible, a fact Siegler saw fit to reiterate. Yet the detective could not explain why his investigation justified such a singular focus. He didn’t pay attention to Prible’s interrogation, he said. Nor did he remember the names of anyone he interviewed in the aftermath of the murders.

Among the people Brown apparently did not recall was the most critical witness for the defense: a 12-year-old girl named Christina Gurrusquieta, who lived next door to Prible’s parents. She told police that she had seen Prible and Herrera arriving before dawn on April 24, 1999. Although there was no record of her eyewitness account in the police reports — Brown said he did not document their conversation — Gurrusquieta’s testimony lent credence to Prible’s claim that Herrera had driven him home around 4 a.m.

Gurrusquieta had turned 15 by the time she took the stand. She said she knew both Herrera and Prible; Herrera used to curse at her and her siblings when they played kickball and accidentally hit his car. In the early morning hours of April 24, she said, she got out of bed to use the bathroom and spotted the two men from her window, which faced the front of the house. It had to be after 1 a.m., since that was when her parents came home after working at the Mexican restaurant they owned. Gurrusquieta and her sister waited up for them on Friday nights. That night, Prible and Herrera “were just standing outside beside Jeff’s dad’s truck talking. And then I saw Jeff walk into his house and I seen Steve leave.”

Siegler did her best to pick apart Gurrusquieta’s account. “Is it possible, Christina, that the night you’re remembering was Thursday night instead of Friday night?” No, Gurrusquieta said. Did she “look at the clock to write down or memorialize forever what time it was when this all happened?” No, Gurrusquieta said. “Because a 12-year-old little girl would never do that, right?” Siegler said.

Siegler asked Gurrusquieta to read part of Prible’s statement aloud. “I then asked Steve to take me home. It was about 4 a.m.,” she read. So if Herrera did drop Prible off, Siegler said, “you wouldn’t have been awake to see if Jeff snuck back out of the house to get back over to Steve’s house anyway, would you?”

If it seemed like a stretch for Prible to have left Herrera’s place after a night of heavy drinking only to return to murder the whole household, Siegler and Wisner didn’t push this scenario very hard. Instead, they left the timeline vague. Jurors sought clarity during deliberations, asking the court to read back testimony about what happened when. The jury also seemed intrigued by Gurrusquieta, requesting more detail on when she was first interviewed by Brown.

But in the end, the alibi provided by Gurrusquieta was no match for the two witnesses at the crux of the state’s case: Beckcom, the jailhouse informant, and Watson, the DNA analyst.

A 41-year-old former bodybuilder who once managed a Gold’s Gym, Beckcom was a smooth talker, fit and confident in his prison uniform. Siegler was upfront about Beckcom’s incentive to testify, asking him to describe his deal with the state. “We have an understanding that if I testify truthfully to this court that you will reciprocate by calling my federal prosecutor,” he said. The prosecutor would file what’s known as a Rule 35 motion to Beckcom’s judge. Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the judge could reduce Beckcom’s sentence if he was satisfied that Beckcom had provided “substantial assistance” in the Prible case. But he had to be truthful, Siegler emphasized, or else no deal. Right, Beckcom said.

Beckcom testified that he’d gotten Siegler’s name from his cellmate at Beaumont, Nathan Foreman. After getting in touch with Siegler in the fall of 2001, Beckcom met with her and Bonds. She seemed skeptical of “another inmate maybe spinning a yarn,” Beckcom said. But after he laid out everything he knew in a letter, Siegler was convinced.

Beckcom said he’d met Prible through his exercise partner at Beaumont. Prible used to stop by while they worked out. One day he struck up a conversation with Beckcom directly. “I was sitting on the bleachers in the rec yard just catching some sun, listening to my radio, and Prible approached myself and Nathan Foreman,” Beckcom said. According to Beckcom, Prible was seeking advice on his case. Before long, they were discussing it every day, while also making plans to go into the asphalt business together.

Beckcom said that Prible’s account evolved over time. At first he said, “I didn’t do it.” He conceded that his DNA had been found on the female victim but said everyone knew they were having an affair. Did he say anything about a weapon? Siegler asked. Yes, Beckcom said. Prible said the cops were looking for a .38 caliber revolver he owned but that he’d sold it. That wasn’t even the murder weapon, Prible told him. Instead, he intimated that he’d successfully gotten rid of the weapon, telling Beckcom, “Asphalt’s good sometimes for hiding things.”

Eventually, Beckcom decided to get as much information as he could from Prible, thinking he could use it to his advantage. After becoming aggravated by Prible insisting on his innocence, Beckcom said, he told him, “I know what you did. … I don’t care.” After that, Prible spilled everything. The details Beckcom shared on the stand could only have come from Prible, Siegler told the jury. “How would Mike Beckcom know all the things that he does know unless the killer told him?” When Beckcom asked Prible how he got in and out of the house without being seen, he said Prible pointed to his time deployed as a Marine. “It’s a typical high-intensity, low-drag maneuver,” he said, in what was presumably special ops speak.

“It was over money,” Beckcom said Prible confessed. Herrera “fucked me out of my money and then he was going to kill me, so I handled my business.”

To illustrate the level of trust that had developed between the informants and Prible, Siegler displayed a photograph taken at the Beaumont visiting room in November 2001. It showed Prible with his mother, Beckcom with his mother, and Foreman with his parents. “He called us his brothers and said he loved us,” Beckcom said. Still, Prible was aware they might betray him. At one point he told them, “You’re the only ones that could convict me,” Beckcom said. “If you do that you’ll have to live with it. I’m prepared to die.”

He used those words? Siegler asked. “He used those words,” Beckcom said.

A group photo taken at FCI Beaumont on the day that Jeffrey Prible, right, allegedly confessed to Michael Beckcom, center, and Nathan Foreman, left. The three men are accompanied by their parents.

Prible’s lead attorney, Terry Gaiser, asked Beckcom if he had ever lied under oath. “Yes, I have,” Beckcom answered. In fact, Gaiser continued, hadn’t a federal judge in California explicitly found that Beckcom lied in a different case? “That’s correct,” Beckcom said. Yet Gaiser did not elicit further details about Beckcom’s apparent history of perjury.

If Beckcom’s testimony filled the gaps in the state’s case against Prible, Watson, the DNA analyst, gave prosecutors the tools they needed to conjure a final harrowing image of Tirado’s death. “Have you thought about what Nilda went through in the last moments of her life?” Siegler asked the jury. According to Siegler, DNA had unlocked this story.

Watson, 36, had spent two years as a forensic analyst for the Fort Worth Police Department and one year at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office before moving to a lab called Gene Screen. In his years testing swabs for the presence of semen, Watson testified, he’d found that anal and vaginal swabs could retain usable quantities of sperm for roughly two to three days. But he couldn’t recall ever getting even a partial male profile from an oral swab, even in cases where the evidence was submitted quickly.

Watson drew a damning — and highly speculative — conclusion from this: Given the large amount of sperm on the swab, Tirado had not had a chance to eliminate Prible’s semen by spitting or swallowing before she was shot. Would the evidence “be consistent with the male depositing the semen in Nilda’s mouth moments, if not seconds, before she was killed?” Wisner asked. “It certainly would be consistent with that,” Watson said.

In his closing, Wisner exaggerated Watson’s testimony for maximum effect. “There is no way in the world that that semen wasn’t deposited either moments before or seconds after Nilda died,” he said. Prible shot Herrera, then “forced Nilda to orally copulate him at gunpoint and executed her as soon as he finished. As horrific as that sounds, that is the only logical conclusion that you can draw from that evidence.”

Siegler was even more dramatic: “She left this world with his penis in her mouth, knowing her husband was dead, hoping to God that her babies would survive the nightmare that is Jeff Prible.”

On October 23, Prible was convicted of murder. Two days later, jurors sentenced him to death.

It was another signature Siegler victory. “Her ability to do what few others can is a continual amazement to some, but not to those who watch her work,” her supervisor wrote in her next performance review. But while her colleagues in the DA’s office celebrated, others watched with a growing sense of alarm. For one man sitting in a Beaumont prison cell staring at a life sentence, the secret to Siegler’s success was starting to come into focus — and the picture looked eerily familiar.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jordan Smith.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Janine Jackson: Islamophobia existed before September 11, 2001, but the response to that day’s attacks leveraged the power of the state in service to that discrimination in ways that continue to shape foreign and domestic policy, and everyday life.

And all along the way, corporate news media have not just platformed, but megaphoned the idea that Muslims, because they are Muslim, are dangerous and suspicious; that their humanity is, at best, contingent.

That media’s looks back on the day overwhelmingly failed to even acknowledge the so-called “War on Terror’s” ongoing impacts on Muslims is just testament to the mainstreaming of this particular brand of scapegoating.

(Broadleaf Books, 2023)

Maha Hilal is the founding executive director of the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, from Broadleaf Books. She joins us now by phone from Arlington, Virginia. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Maha Hilal.

Maha Hilal: Thank you so much, Janine, for the invitation.

JJ: When we think about the wreckage from the attacks of September 11, 2001—not just the attacks themselves, but the actions in the wake of them—for a lot of people, our minds go to the wars on Afghanistan and on Iraq, with validity, right?

But it’s important for Americans not to see the “War on Terror” only as something that the US state is inflicting on others, elsewhere—particularly as the domestic facets, while maybe not front-page news, are still very much in effect, right? It’s not somewhere else, and it’s not in the past.

MH: Absolutely. So there’s been this notion, as you are describing, that the “War on Terror” was just something that happened abroad. And in fact, when we look at the trajectory of the “War on Terror,” immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Muslims and Arabs were targeted, were racially profiled, and were being scrutinized and surveilled domestically within the United States.

And it’s always been interesting to think about how the “War on Terror” has been constructed so narrowly, so that Americans think it’s abroad.

And there was a summer in which there was a lot of discourse around the 1033 Program, and the ways that the military was giving equipment to police offices around the country. And the narrative there was that now the “War on Terror” is “coming home”; whereas, as I write about in my book, the “War on Terror” started at home, and the “War on Terror” has been home.

And this speaks a lot to, who do we understand as being American? Who do we understand as being within the borders of this country? And who do we care about when it comes to state violence?

And we know that it’s obviously not just Muslims who are treated with little to no regard, but also other BIPOC communities. So it does raise this question of, who do we actually care about?

And so I think it’s important, as I outline in the book, to really look at the taxonomy of the “War on Terror.” What is the “War on Terror” in its totality? And it’s only by answering that question that I think we can ask the other question, which is, what do we need to do to abolish the “War on Terror”?

JJ: And you talk about the various aspects of it. It’s so in the ether that we almost don’t think about it, but things like registration, things like detaining people, there are multiple questions around immigration, so-called. There are multiple elements that reflect the domestic manifestation of the “War on Terror.”

Daily Beast (9/10/23)

MH: Absolutely. I just wrote an op-ed in the Daily Beast about the terrorism watch list, which turns 20 this week. And that has been a very systemic, systematic, pervasive policy that has impacted not just Muslims, but also Muslim Americans.

And this is a policy that has been in place to scrutinize and surveil Muslims, many of whom face extremely harsh interrogations at airports when they’re flying and when they’re traveling. And for a lot of others, it’s this process that needs to be done. Muslims are the enemy, so it’s OK. It’s normal to see them being singled out in places like airports, because that’s the sort of places of violence that we associate Muslims with.

But suffice it to say, there are so many ways that the “War on Terror”—I think on this point, it’s important to mention—has been so normalized. So not only is there a lack of knowledge and understanding that it has a very domestic front, but also we’re so accustomed, I think we’ve just sort of accepted everything that the “War on Terror” has entailed, to the point where there are so many tentacles of the “War on Terror” that we no longer see.

And that’s why, again, we think about the narrative around that 1033 Program, and the idea that the “War on Terror” was coming home, as opposed to the “War on Terror” has always been home.

That’s one of the problems that we come across when people aren’t informed about what’s happening domestically to people in their communities and their societies and their neighborhoods.

JJ: I think some people might actually be surprised to hear that what we used to call the “No-Fly List,” that that’s still a thing. That is an enduring impact. You may have read about it 20 years ago and thought that it disappeared, but, in fact, it’s still affecting people’s lives around this country and around the world.

MH: Absolutely. And I think with things like the No-Fly List, people can sort of brush it off as minor inconveniences, right, that it’s just additional scrutiny, and eventually the person is able to travel. As opposed to recognizing the complete humiliation that is repeated over and over again.

And the symbolic message that it sends to Americans and to people traveling that Muslims continue to be the enemy, and that when it comes to Muslims traveling and Muslims in general, there’s always this propensity of violence, because Muslims are inherently violent. And so these policies reiterate that over and over again.

JJ: You talk a bit about the power of language in the book, the work that language has done. I always thought that when news media took “War on Terror” out of quotation marks, that something really changed, once they started saying that this was an unironic term.

Because, of course, once we’re “at war,” well, media have a lot of imagery around that that takes over. But “War on Terror” itself is, at the same time, deeply evocative and also a total thought-stopper of a term. It just justifies endlessly, doesn’t it?

Maha Hilal: “When you use nebulous phrases like ‘War on Terror’…it opens the door for basically the US government to do whatever it wants.”

MH: Yeah, absolutely. And the first time that Bush used the phrase “War on Terror” was in his speech nine days after the 9/11 attack. And so the context in which he was using it was to actually say that, essentially, we’re going to wage an endless war. There’s no timelines. There’s no boundaries. We’re basically going to do whatever we want. And, in fact, he said that Americans should expect a “lengthy battle.”

And that’s what happens when you use nebulous phrases like “War on Terror,” is that it opens the door for basically the US government to do whatever it wants, because the phrase is unclear as it is. But also, you can always fit things into, what does terror look like? And this is our “War on Terror,” this is how we have to seek out revenge, this is how we have to intervene into the ways that we were victimized.

JJ: And media’s acceptance, journalists’ acceptance of that term, I really thought, all bets are off at this point. And a thing that I thought that media never acknowledged: I remember Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, telling Howard Kurtz, who was then at the Washington Post, talking about the “War on Terror”: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine…. We’re going to lie about things.”

And I always thought, a self-respecting press corps, that would’ve set them on just a categorically different course. And I wonder, can you talk about the role of media here, which of course is so important in propagating this idea and sustaining this idea of Muslims as the enemy?

MH: Yeah, absolutely. I think media in the “War on Terror” have often just basically operated as a mouthpiece for government. Not only have they reported very uncritically about what the government is doing, they’ve repeated a lot of the terminology and the phraseology and accepted, for example, what does “terrorism” mean, right, in the ways that the US government chooses to define it.

Or the idea, for example, that I write about in the book as well, that state violence is inherently more moral than non–state actor violence. And this is not to say that any violence should be condoned, but it is to say that there should be a critical lens in terms of what kind of violence is actually more destructive. But the government is able to continue to assert its violence as morally superior, in part because of the way that the media operates.

And another specific problem with the media, I think, is, in the last two decades-plus, whenever there is, for example, an attack or an act of violence by someone who’s not Muslim, the ways that it’s described is often in terms like “non-jihadist violence” or “non-Islamic extremism.” And that is to say that Muslim violence is essentially the gold standard, that we cannot conceive of violence as organic, included in this country, that it has to be in comparison to Muslim violence.

And that has been a particular construction that has been repeated over and over again. And obviously, the point of that is to entrench the idea that Muslims are inherently terroristic and violent.

JJ: Some of us may remember folks like Steve Emerson, who, right after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said: “This was done with the attempt to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait.”

Now, of course, we know who was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. The point is Steve Emerson continued to appear as a terrorism expert on news media for years afterwards. So it’s just exactly what you were saying: You never lose in US news media and corporate news media by linking violence and Islam. Even if you’re wrong, even if you’re incredibly wrong, somehow it’s never points off.

MH: Yeah, and Steve Emerson belongs in the category of what we would refer to as a moral entrepreneur. And these are people that operate in the space between media and government. And their specific role is to present a particular problem, a social issue or political problem, and attach it to one particular group. That is to say, that that problem can be attributed to that group. And so they continue to forge those connections and repeat it over and over again.

And he’s one of many, right? There’s been Daniel Pipes, many others, and I don’t know if you’ve come across this term, but Daniel Pipes came up with this idea of “sudden Jihad syndrome,” which is basically about Muslims randomly erupting into violence. And that is obviously the trope that has been entrenched over and over again, that we’re inherently violent. So it’s not a matter of if they’re going to commit violence, it’s a matter of when, because they’re inherently predisposed to committing acts of violence.

JJ: And the point that you’re making, and that we’re underscoring, is that this isn’t just a cultural bias; this isn’t just Steve Emerson showing up on TV. US policy is shot through with this bias. US policy is reflecting this bias in terms of actions, in terms of policies and behaviors, and the way people are treated. It’s not just a wackadoo prejudice that’s sort of floating around. It’s actually institutionalized.

MH: Absolutely. And I think one of the ways that the US government tries to be evasive about this is, a lot of the laws and policies and bills that are passed, the language in them is neutral. It doesn’t specify you must target Muslims, or Muslims are the target of the specific policy. But when it comes to implementation, that’s when you can begin to understand exactly who the policy was intended to target.

And when you continue targeting a particular group, you’re also entrenching, again, a particular construction, and you’re positioning them as the problem.

And I think that in the “War on Terror,” what has been extremely frustrating, even in left and liberal spaces, is this idea that the targeting of Muslims was either unintentional or coincidental, as opposed to being extremely intentional, well-thought-out.

And you have to know that in order to inflict the amount of violence that the United States has inflicted on Muslim communities domestically and across the globe, there has to be such a deep level of dehumanization in place. And for that to happen, there has to be a robust narrative infrastructure. And that’s exactly what was developed in the aftermath of 9/11, as well as built on by successive administrations after Bush.

JJ: And let me just pick you up on that point, because if we think of this as a George W. Bush policy, we’re missing it, because it’s Obama and it’s Trump, and it’s Biden, too. You want to talk about that?

MH: Yeah, the “War on Terror” is bipartisan, and I think that tends to get ignored. I know under Obama, he sort of backed away from the use of the phrase “War on Terror,” but he didn’t change anything about what was happening, the violence that was being unleashed under the guise of the “War on Terror.” So it was basically just a semantic change.

And I just want to offer this, is that I use the term “War on Terror” specifically. Obviously, you can think about it in multiple ways, as to whether or not that’s helpful. But to me, when you take away that term “War on Terror,” especially two decades later, then it becomes harder to map out what this war has entailed, and the violence that has been waged under its scope. And if you do that, then what you see is disparate policies that are disconnected, when in reality they’re part of a robust infrastructure.

Now, when we think about Biden, Biden is also continuing the “War on Terror.” There is no president thus far who’s been willing to challenge the status quo on the “War on Terror,” and national security in particular.

And we know Democrats always fear being seen as too liberal on national security and counterterrorism. And so what often happens is that there’s overcompensation, as opposed to withdrawing from these problematic policies.

TomDispatch (9/5/23)

JJ: Your recent piece for TomDispatch focused on drone warfare in particular, and the particular role that that is playing in targeting Muslims. There’s little evidence, you say, that anybody is really thinking seriously about the failures of drone warfare at all. What is key for you in that issue, as a particular element of what we’re talking about?

MH: It’s the ease through which this form of violence is committed. And when I started writing this particular piece, I was focusing mostly on the Biden administration’s policies governing drone warfare, and then I started looking into the psychology of what it takes to enable people to kill so mercilessly.

So basically you have the policies, you have the rules governing drone warfare, and then you have the psychology of what makes it so easy. And when you put those two things together, it becomes exponentially more catastrophic.

And a lot of times the US government has said the “War on Terror” is over, and I always ask the question, “over for whom?” Because the “War on Terror” is not over for the countries that the US continues to drone strike. We know that, right?

And in the piece, I refer to a quote by a young Pakistani. It was said at a congressional hearing in 2013: “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

And to me, that is a particular form of violence, when a young child looks up at the sky and associates its color with the probability of state violence. And until that is no longer the case, then the “War on Terror” is not over.

For Americans whose lives have pretty much resumed normalcy, right, since 9/11, they might think the “War on Terror” here is over, but it’s not. And I think when we talk about Muslims and people that are being targeted, right, by the “War on Terror,” and by US state violence in general, as “collateral damage” or other ways that dehumanize them, then they become inconsequential. It doesn’t even really matter.

Whenever there’s American deaths, there’s a specific number. It’s “13 service members died,” for example. When it’s Muslim deaths, it’s like, oh, well, there’s a lot of Muslim deaths. We don’t really know how many. We couldn’t even bother to count, because it doesn’t really matter anyway.

JJ: What, finally, has been the response to the book so far, and what would you like folks to use the book to do? What are you hoping for?

MH: The response to the book has been pretty positive, minus some Islamophobic backlash here and there, but I think it’s been pretty positive, especially because I tried to take such a broad approach, and also to really look at not just the way that external factors have impacted the Muslim community in the form of state violence, but also the Muslim community itself has played a part in its own demonization, because of internalized Islamophobia.

What I really want to impart in this book, and what I hope that readers really get out of it, is the understanding that in order to dismantle and abolish the “War on Terror,” we have to include a lens of Islamophobia. Islamophobia has to be mainstreamed into the analysis. Because unless we understand the targeting of Muslims as integral to the “War on Terror,” then it can’t truly be abolished.

And throughout the book, obviously, I repeat and illustrate, examine, criticize the ways in which the targeting of Muslims has been intentional, leaving the reader, hopefully, with no doubt that that has always been the case; it has always been the intention of the “War on Terror.” and that the US government continues to inflict violence, harm, destruction, humiliation on the Muslim community, with no end in sight.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Maha Hilal. The book is Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, out from Broadleaf Books.

You can find her recent piece “Ordinary US Muslims Still Victimized by War on Terror” at the Daily Beast, and “22 Years of Drone Warfare and No End in Sight” at TomDispatch.com. Thank you so much, Maha Hilal, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MH: Thank you so much, Janine.

The post ‘There’s This Notion That the “War on Terror” Was Just Something That Happened Abroad’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

(Broadleaf Books, 2023)

This week on CounterSpin: New Yorkers who were here 22 years ago remember the proliferation of signs and stickers reading “our grief is not a cry for war”—and then the way that voice was shouted over by corporate news media, calling for war crimes with US flags on their lapels. Hosting old general after old general, as peace and human rights activists and the overall public begged for an answer to violence that wasn’t just more violence, for a conversation that would allow us to see one another as human beings.

Pretend-neutral news media have done crucial work in selling Islamophobia, in weaponizing centuries of misinformation and demonization for wartime purposes, with the war being the undefined, unending “war on terror.” Media’s job has involved lying to us about many things—but, crucially, about what we believed, what we were capable of, and what we wanted to see as the way forward. Key to that campaign has been the idea that Muslims are the enemy—violent, dangerous, irrational—if not now, soon; if not your friend, his friend.

September 11, 2001, is the exemplar of a past that isn’t dead, or even past, and for no one more particularly than Muslims. We talk about that with Maha Hilal, author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Ukraine, the UAW strike and Biden’s trip to Vietnam.

Featured Image: Texas Muslim Capitol Day, Austin, Texas, January 28, 2015 (Creative Commons photo: Manuel Garza)

The post Maha Hilal on Innocent Until Proven Muslim appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

But having less than 10,000 followers on the platform means her posts often fail to attract as many attractions as she would like. Luckily, a different app has got her covered. 

“On Instagram the number of followers just stops at a certain point, and beyond that it’s tough to break through the algorithm,” said Lee. “But a single spur-of-the-moment post on Xiaohongshu easily gets thousands of views.”

Xiaohongshu is a popular Chinese social media app with 200 million monthly active users. It caters to post-millennial female users who want to share lifestyle content, including beauty products, fashion, interior design, travel and spiritual growth.

The app, which means literally “Little Red Book,” a reference to the book of Mao Zedong quotes, has taken off in Taiwan, where it is the go-to fashion reference for many young social media influencers.

In order to catch up with the latest trends, Lee spends day after day diligently swiping and posting on the platform. She has even begun writing her posts in mainland China’s simplified characters instead of Taiwan’s more commonly used traditional characters “because they have more reach.”

Lee is not alone. Many Taiwanese cosmetic designers have even begun including Xiaonghsu in marketing their products. One well-known pharmacy AFCL visited displayed five or six Chinese brands under advertisements such as “Xiaohongshu bestseller” and  “As seen on Xiaohongshu.” 

Taiwan stood as the app’s second largest user base outside mainland China between March and May. It also often trends on Taiwan’s  IOS and Android app stores. 

The rise of Xiaohongshu in Taiwan is evident. But what are the implications? Taiwan already imposed a public sector ban on TikTok after the FBI warned that the Chinese social media service posed a national security risk. Is it not the case for Xiaohongshu?

‘Behind the enemy lines’

“Posts in Xiaohongshu promote lifestyle habits or self-realization and usually have nothing to do with politics,” says Wang Pin-yi, a Taiwanese college student who is a staunch advocate for Taiwanese independence. Wang also declined to reveal her real name due to security concerns.  

“It’s a convenient replacement for all other apps, so [users] spend more time on it,” she said. 

Wang’s view was echoed by other Xiaohongshu users interviewed by AFCL who said that the app was “less political” and “better in quality” than similar Chinese platforms such as TikTok.

But after a year of use, Wang said, she feels at times like she is “behind enemy lines.” 

“I noticed that negative messages about China are hard to find on the app, creating the illusion that China seems like it’s a really nice, cozy place to live,” said Wang.  

The app is also full of China-centered discourse that Wang believes carries a strong sense of ethnic superiority. 

“They don’t necessarily attack, but they always leave comments praising China as better,” Wang says, referring to some videos of foreign bloggers that Xiaohongshu users often spontaneously post. 

She believes this signals a desire to use any topic – whether food or cosmetics – to help promote and strengthen a sense of “Chinese” identity.

The experiment

Xiaohongshu promises to be the user’s “guide to life” by helping them “discover a real, beautiful and diverse world.” 

AFCL decided to do a little experiment to see if all the facts in Xiaohongshu’s world matched our own, starting with the 34th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre.

Publishing or sharing any content about the protests on Chinese social media platforms is the quickest way to have one’s post deleted and account banned – particularly during the most sensitive days preceding or following the protests anniversary. 

Posting such content is the most practical and easy way to test whether Xiaohongshu follows Beijing’s long standing policy of censoring discussion of the event. 

Between June 2 to June 5 two AFCL team members searched for, commented on and posted messages about the protests on Xiaohongshu, with a similar test conducted on TikTok as a control measure. 

Keyword searches on Xiaohongshu related to the protests such as “June 4th,” “Tiananmen Square,” or “tanks” only produced irrelevant information. The result was no different when searching for “candles.” Posting photos or emojis of candles on social media has also long been a way Chinese netizens silently commemorate and mourn on the anniversary of the protests.

So AFCL decided to take it to the next level. 

One AFCL member who left a comment “64 Tiananmen” on a Xiaohongshu post was immediately sent the following message:

“This comment violates our terms of service. You are banned from posting for 2 hours.” 

Another member received a similar message within 20 minutes of uploading a photo of the “Tank Man” -- an iconic figure associated with the 1989 protests – quickly followed by a notice that the member’s account would be blocked due to violations of the app’s standards.

AFCL’s inquiry for clarification on standards went unanswered. 

Separately, Wang Pin-yi claimed that a private message on the app sent by a friend which jokingly mentioned “Papa Xi,” referring to President Xi Jinping, was never delivered. 

She told AFCL that she later received a system reminder to report any messages violating the app’s terms of service. 

Dr. Ruei-Hau Hsu, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University, told AFCL that Chinese software developers analyze filter keywords related to the Tiananmen protests based on frequency and popularity. 

Hsu added that developers may have allowed candle advertisements to pass censors due to the low likelihood they referenced the protests, whereas articles or posts run a greater reaching of touching upon the subject. 

‘High degree of risk’

Now we know that Xiaohongshu has achieved significant popularity in Taiwan, that it promotes a positive image of China, and that, like other China-born social media platforms, it censors “sensitive information” for Beijing. But what does this imply for its users in Taiwan?

Xiaohongshu’s user service agreement and privacy policy seen by AFCL show that the company stores personal user data – including all text, photos, videos, audio, comments, likes and favorites on the app – in China. Data will be collected and provided to Chinese authorities if requested to do so. 

And such provisions put Taiwanese citizens at “a high degree of risk,” said Lai Zhongqiang, the convenor of the Economic Democracy Union think tank in Taiwan.

Taiwanese who post anything on the app that could be interpreted as violating one of China’s frequently vague and ambiguous national security laws – such as China’s recently enacted counter-espionage law or the 2020 Hong Kong national security law – should avoid going to Hong Kong or China, Lai added.  

“Chinese law doesn’t care whether a person is inside or outside the country. If [the government] wants to arrest people, it will,” Lai noted.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs restricts public officials’ use of Chinese-made software listed as national security threats, including Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Talks with Taiwan’s Ministry of Education about potentially extending such restrictions to campuses are ongoing. 

Lai however believes that the Taiwanese government should consider extensively expanding the current list of Chinese software deemed a threat and forcibly removing them from Taiwanese app stores.

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe and Zhuang Jing for Asia Fact Check Lab.

“The brazen detentions of Botswanan journalists Ryder Gabathuse and Innocent Selatlhwa and the seizure of their electronic devices must be thoroughly repudiated by President Mokgweetsi Masisi’s government, and the intelligence agents responsible must be held to account,” said CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, Angela Quintal, in New York. “It is particularly concerning that the journalists have not received their electronic devices back from authorities, given Botswana’s abuse of digital forensic tools that compromise journalists’ sources.”

Authorities arrested Selatlhwa, a senior reporter for the Mmegi newspaper, without presenting a warrant, according to news reports and statements by local press freedom groups.

Following Selatlhwa’s detention, DISS officers raided Mmegi’s office in the capital city of Gaborone on Thursday evening and detained Gabathuse, the newspaper’s editor. According to a tweet by the outlet, one of the officers said “I am a warrant myself” when asked for a warrant during the raid.

Both journalists were released Friday morning without charge, but authorities kept custody of mobile phones, iPads, and laptop computers seized during their arrests, according to news reports and Gabathuse, who spoke to CPJ after his release.

CPJ has previously documented how Botswana has used Israeli Cellebrite technology to extract and analyze thousands of messages, call logs, emails, and web browsing history from phones and other devices confiscated from journalists.

CPJ called and texted DISS spokesperson Edward Robert for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

“The brazen detentions of Botswanan journalists Ryder Gabathuse and Innocent Selatlhwa and the seizure of their electronic devices must be thoroughly repudiated by President Mokgweetsi Masisi’s government, and the intelligence agents responsible must be held to account,” said CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, Angela Quintal, in New York. “It is particularly concerning that the journalists have not received their electronic devices back from authorities, given Botswana’s abuse of digital forensic tools that compromise journalists’ sources.”

Authorities arrested Selatlhwa, a senior reporter for the Mmegi newspaper, without presenting a warrant, according to news reports and statements by local press freedom groups.

Following Selatlhwa’s detention, DISS officers raided Mmegi’s office in the capital city of Gaborone on Thursday evening and detained Gabathuse, the newspaper’s editor. According to a tweet by the outlet, one of the officers said “I am a warrant myself” when asked for a warrant during the raid.

Both journalists were released Friday morning without charge, but authorities kept custody of mobile phones, iPads, and laptop computers seized during their arrests, according to news reports and Gabathuse, who spoke to CPJ after his release.

CPJ has previously documented how Botswana has used Israeli Cellebrite technology to extract and analyze thousands of messages, call logs, emails, and web browsing history from phones and other devices confiscated from journalists.

CPJ called and texted DISS spokesperson Edward Robert for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Rodrick Reed was preparing to fly to Washington, D.C., for a vigil commemorating the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling that briefly abolished the death penalty when he got the news: The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, or the CCA, had once again ruled against his brother Rodney Reed, who has been on death row since 1998 for a crime he swears he did not commit.

The news made Rodrick’s remarks at the vigil even more urgent. “My brother was convicted of the murder and rape of Stacey Stites, and since that time, we’ve been living a nightmare that we cannot wake up from,” he said. “The reason I say it’s a nightmare is because the truth is out there, but nobody is willing to look at it or to pay attention to it. Evidence is out there that proves my brother’s innocence, but nobody is admitting it into the court.”

“I say, let all the evidence be looked at and heard and give him a new trial,” he continued. “We don’t need to free Rodney Reed, the truth will free Rodney Reed.”

“We don’t need to free Rodney Reed, the truth will free Rodney Reed.”

Reed, who is Black, was sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stites, who was white. Her body was found on the side of a country road just outside Bastrop, Texas. Sperm recovered from Stites’s body was eventually matched to Reed, which prosecutors called the “Cinderella’s slipper” linking Reed to her death. But Reed insisted he was innocent; he said he’d been having an affair with Stites, who was engaged to a white police officer named Jimmy Fennell. Fennell denied the possibility of an affair, claiming that he and Stites had a loving relationship and she didn’t know anyone named Rodney Reed. Fennell was questioned several times but was never seriously considered as a suspect.

In the decades since Reed’s conviction, a host of evidence has emerged showing that Reed and Stites did know each other and Fennell was aware of their dalliance, dismantling the state’s theory of the crime. Evidence of Fennell’s propensity for violence has also surfaced; in 2008, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman while on duty and in uniform. He threatened to kill her if she told anyone about it. Meanwhile, the courts — most notably the CCA — have shrugged their shoulders and rebuffed Reed’s efforts to win a new trial.

In a pair of rulings issued on June 28, the CCA again denied Reed’s pleas, which the court has now done at least a dozen times since 2000. Each time, the court has flatly rejected the mounting evidence of Reed’s innocence, often in ways that mischaracterize the evidence or interpret the law to make the revelations meaningless. In the most recent rulings, the court trivializes nearly every detail that casts doubt on Reed’s guilt.

I have covered Reed’s case for more than 20 years and have repeatedly fielded questions from people bewildered by the CCA’s position. Dozens of witnesses have come forward with information that supports Reed’s account and points to Fennell as the more likely killer, including friends of Stites’s and Fennell’s law enforcement colleagues. How can the court discount every single one of these witnesses? There are no good answers. The conclusion I’ve come to is one that is beyond the law and something that veterans of Texas’s criminal legal system have grumbled about for years: There are just some defendants the CCA judges don’t like and will steadfastly rule against, regardless of the evidence that might support their bid for a new trial or release. Rodney Reed is one of them.

A Secret Affair

When Reed was first questioned by police in connection with the murder, he denied knowing Stites aside from what he’d seen in the news. It was only after his DNA came back as a match that he relented and said the two had been having a clandestine affair. Although the CCA has pointed to Reed’s initial denial as undercutting his claim of an affair, which they deemed “manufactured and implausible,” it isn’t hard to see why Reed might have withheld this information: Even in mid-1990s Texas, a Black man dating a young white woman engaged to a white cop would have been a risky endeavor.

With the DNA match to Reed, the state devised a theory of the crime. Stites left the apartment she shared with Fennell around 3 a.m. to make the 30-mile commute to the grocery store in Bastrop where she worked the early shift stocking produce, only to be waylaid by Reed. Traveling on foot, Reed somehow stopped Stites’s vehicle, overpowered her, then raped and strangled her with her own belt — all presumably inside the truck — before dumping Stites’s body on the roadside and leaving the truck in the Bastrop High School parking lot.

Prosecutors didn’t offer any conclusive evidence demonstrating how all of this might have taken place. And the timeline itself was predicated on information that Fennell provided to investigators. He wasn’t awake when Stites left that morning, he told them, but he filled them in on what he said was her normal routine. Inexplicably, the cops failed to search the apartment the couple shared, even though it was the last place Stites was known to be alive. Days after the murder, the state released the truck to Fennell, who immediately got rid of it.

Although Reed’s trial attorneys promised to deliver evidence of his alleged affair with Stites, they fell far short, calling to the stand only a few witnesses, each with some connection to the Reed family. The defense was hamstrung by the fact that they had done little work to prepare for the capital trial. Records reflect that they only began working on the case in earnest a month before jury selection — hardly enough time to conduct their own investigation into who might have known what. They repeatedly asked the judge to postpone the trial but were denied.

In contrast, prosecutors told the jury that they had interviewed anyone with a plausible connection to the case — including all of Stites’s co-workers at the grocery store — and found no one who could back up Reed’s story. Investigators talked to “every boyfriend, every co-worker, every friend, every family member, everybody,” prosecutor Lisa Tanner told the jury. “Nobody connects them. Nobody. Folks, this secret affair was so secret that Stacey Stites didn’t know about it. That’s how secret it was — because it didn’t exist.”

Rodney Reed waves to his family in Bastrop County District Court on Oct. 13, 2017, in Bastrop, Texas.

Photo: Ricardo B. Brazziell/Austin American-Statesman via AP

Straining Credulity

It wasn’t long after Reed was convicted that other witnesses started coming forward. Not only did they confirm a preexisting relationship between Reed and Stites, but they also shared stories about Fennell’s jealousy, racism, and volatility — indications that he knew about the relationship and was furious about it. Every time, however, the CCA rejected the evidence.

There was a woman named Mary Blackwell, for example, who said she’d been in a law enforcement training class with Fennell. In an affidavit she provided to Reed’s lawyers in 2004, she said she heard Fennell tell a fellow trainee that if he ever caught his fiancée cheating on him, he’d strangle her with a belt. Texas prosecutors pointed out that no one else had admitted to hearing the comment, leading the CCA to discredit Blackwell’s story.

More recently, the CCA’s reflexive dismissal of witnesses whose claims call the state’s case into question has bordered on the absurd. In 2021, a judge in Bastrop presided over a nine-day evidentiary hearing that featured dozens of witnesses, including friends of Stites’s from work, members of law enforcement who knew Fennell, and former inmates imprisoned with Fennell. The witnesses testified that Stites and Reed had been involved in a relationship, that Fennell knew about it, and even that Fennell had confessed to Stites’s murder. None of these witnesses had any connection to Reed or his family.

Among the witnesses was a co-worker of Stites’s named Suzan Hugen, who testified that she and Stites were friends. She said she was aware that the relationship between Fennell and Stites was off; among other things, she’d seen finger-shaped bruises on Stites’s arms, which the younger woman tried to hide. Hugen also said that Stites had introduced her to her friend “Rodney.”

Hugen provided this information to the state well before Reed’s 1998 trial, yet it was never turned over to Reed’s attorneys. In fact, it wasn’t until just before the evidentiary hearing commenced in 2021 that the state finally made Hugen’s information available, along with statements from three other individuals that suggested other grocery store employees might also have known about a relationship between Stites and Reed. The decades-late disclosures prompted Reed’s lawyers to file an appeal claiming that the state had violated its obligation to turn over exculpatory information to the defense as required by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Brady v. Maryland.

Despite overwhelming testimony in favor of Reed, the judge presiding over the evidentiary hearing fully embraced the state’s position that none of Reed’s witnesses were credible. Judge J.D. Langley signed off on findings written by the state, concluding that only the state’s witnesses, including Fennell, were reliable.

Reed’s attorneys challenged the ruling before the CCA, arguing that Langley had abdicated his responsibility to make independent determinations about witness credibility by simply adopting the state’s proposed conclusions, which were rife with errors and factual misrepresentations about various testimony, including Hugen’s.

In one of the rulings released on June 28, nearly two years after the evidentiary hearing concluded, the CCA lamented the errors — it listed several in a footnote with the caveat that the list was “by no means exhaustive” — before undertaking its own assessment of the witnesses’ credibility. Ultimately, the CCA concluded, as Langley had, that none of Reed’s witnesses were credible, save for one man whose father lived in the apartment just below Stites and Fennell, who reported hearing violent arguing on multiple occasions.

The man, Brent Sappington, said that he and his father, Bill, who has since died, approached a prosecutor the family knew at church to report what they’d heard. According to Sappington, the prosecutor, a man named Ted Weems, told them to hush up because investigators already had their suspect. Weems testified that Bill had reported the fighting upstairs, but he denied discouraging the family from coming forward. The CCA credited Sappington only to the extent that Weems “corroborated” his account; where the stories diverged, the CCA concluded that Weems was the one telling the truth. Sappington explained that he was initially hesitant to come forward because Fennell was in law enforcement and he feared his story would be dismissed, an explanation the court found to be an excuse that “strains credulity.”

Several other witnesses provided similar reasoning, saying they didn’t come forward sooner because they feared retaliation from a law enforcement community that they expected would protect its own. The court repeatedly found this explanation unconvincing. Other witnesses, who said they didn’t realize that what they knew was important, were dismissed as likely fabricating their recollections. While it’s true that memory can be tricky, the CCA failed to engage with any nuance and instead deployed a false-memory blanket across multiple witness statements as a one-stop discrediting device.

“For 23 years, Texas illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Rodney Reed.”

Where Hugen was concerned, the court stated that the account she offered was “unremarkable, even mundane.” The judges also took aim at her recollection about seeing bruises on Stites’s arms, concluding that jurors would not have believed that since no bruises were found on Stites’s arms during the autopsy.

As for the state’s alleged Brady violation, the CCA concluded that the information Hugen had was “immaterial” since one witness had previously testified at Reed’s trial that she’d seen Reed and Stites together at the grocery store. Hugen’s account wouldn’t have added anything, the judges wrote, despite the fact that Hugen had no connection to the Reed family, and had her information been disclosed in a timely way, it would have offered Reed’s defense another avenue of investigation.

The court took the position that other witness statements were immaterial because the state had deemed them dead leads. In other words, if Texas prosecutors decided that the statements were meaningless, then they had no obligation to turn them over — a bastardization of Brady’s disclosure requirement that would afford prosecutors total discretion over what evidence is released to the defense. Although prosecutors cited their Brady obligation in releasing the witness information to Reed’s attorneys in 2021, the CCA’s opinion seemed to endorse the notion that it would have been perfectly fine for them to leave the information forever buried in the state’s files.

“The Whole World Will Know”

That the CCA would rule against Reed is neither new nor surprising — nor is the judges playing mental gymnastics with legal standards to get them to their desired result.

For decades, the court has been a myopic, hegemonic institution, composed largely of middle-aged, white, male jurists who were former prosecutors — a mix of factors that has created an insulated worldview within the court’s chambers in Austin. When the current presiding judge, Sharon Keller, first ran for a seat on the court back in 1994, she described herself as “pro-prosecutor,” meaning, she told a reporter, “seeing legal issues from the perspective of the state instead of the perspective of the defense.” That view has dominated the CCA bench for the last 30 years and reflects its approach to the Reed case.

The judge who wrote the June 28 opinions was its newest member, Jesse McClure, a former prosecutor-turned-Houston district court judge who was appointed to the bench in December 2020 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Notably, he is only the third Black CCA judge since the court’s establishment in 1891. One judge, Scott Walker, dissented from the rulings but did not explain why.

Reed’s lawyers are frustrated. “For 23 years, Texas illegally hid evidence that could have exonerated Rodney Reed. He is an innocent man,” Jane Pucher, a senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project, said in a statement. “Texans should be outraged that prosecutorial misconduct is going unchecked, and the state is being given a license to cheat — even if it means sending an innocent man to his death.”

Pucher said Reed’s legal team is considering all its options, including asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. Meanwhile, a separate legal effort to obtain DNA testing on key crime scene evidence, including lengths of the braided belt used to strangle Stites, is ongoing. Texas has long fought Reed’s bid to have the evidence tested; predictably, the CCA sided with the state, offering a novel interpretation of Texas’s DNA testing law to block Reed’s access. The dispute made it to the Supreme Court on a technical point, and this spring, the court ruled in Reed’s favor, sending the case back to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Rodrick is frustrated by the CCA’s continued hostility toward his brother, but he has vowed to keep fighting. At the vigil in Washington, D.C., he recalled something that his mother, Sandra, told the court back in 1998 when Reed was convicted. “She said, ‘You may try to take my son’s life, but I guarantee you the whole world will know about it.’”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jordan Smith.

The post Provocation is Not an Innocent Act appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alfred de Zayas.

Around 6:30 p.m. on November 13, police arrested Phiri and Kapunda as they filmed officers preparing to arrest opposition Economic and Equity Party leader Chilufya Tayali at his home in the capital, Lusaka, according to multiple media reports, a statement by the Zambian chapter of the regional press freedom group Media Institute of Southern Africa, and a Facebook post by Phiri. 

Phiri and Kapunda work for the privately owned broadcaster Muvi TV, and CPJ spoke to both journalists and Muvi TV’s CEO, Mabvuto Phiri, by messaging app for this report.

The journalists were detained for 21 hours and spent the night in a cell before they were released on November 14, after signing an admission of guilt and paying a fine of 54 Zambian kwachas (US$3.25) for disorderly conduct, they told CPJ. The journalists said they wouldn’t challenge the matter further.

“Authorities in Zambia must ensure that journalists are free to cover breaking news in the public interest without having to contend with censorship and heavy-handed actions of police, including arbitrary detention,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “The fact that journalists Innocent Phiri and Obvious Kapunda had to plead guilty and pay a fine under duress or risk continued detention is unacceptable, and their admission of guilt and fine must be nullified.”

Police were angered by the journalists’ presence at the operation and ordered them to leave or risk being shot at, claiming the operation was “sensitive,” Phiri and Kapunda told CPJ. The journalists continued to report, and the officers arrested them and threatened to shoot Phiri if he did not comply, according to Phiri and security footage uploaded to Facebook.

Phiri said the officers took them to Le Soleil Police Post in the Lusaka suburb of Roma and briefly confiscated their phones and camera.

On November 14, police charged the journalists with disorderly conduct contrary to Section 60 of the Zambia Police Act, according to the journalists’ lawyer Leon Lemba, who spoke to CPJ by phone, and a report quoting police spokesperson Rae Hamoonga.

Police initially intended to charge the journalists with obstruction of police under the penal code, which carries a sentence of up to five years, Lemba said.

Police spokesperson Rae Hamoonga and chief government spokesperson Chushi Kasanda did not respond to CPJ’s requests for comment sent via messaging app and text.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

Murray Hooper just needs more time. He says this over and over again, with an urgency bordering on despair. He is six days away from execution and not ready to give up. But he doesn’t want to delude himself either. “I’m just trying to deal with reality,” he says. “I don’t like that wishful thinking.”

It’s Thursday, November 10. We’re sitting face to face in a small visiting room inside the Browning Unit, part of the sprawling desert prison in Florence, Arizona. An hour southeast of Phoenix, the Arizona State Prison Complex is home to the state’s death row as well as the death chamber, which was recently reactivated following a long moratorium. After eight years without an execution, Arizona has killed two people in 2022. Hooper, 76, who most people call Hoop, is supposed to be the third.

The visitation table has a red and black checkerboard in the center and backgammon points on the side. The company that produced it boasts its rehabilitative ethos, designing furniture that creates a “normalized environment for inmates and staff alike.” But this is not a normal place — and Hooper was not brought here to be rehabilitated. He was brought here to be kept in total isolation until he is strapped to a gurney and killed. In the month that he’s been on “death watch,” Hooper has been under 24-hour surveillance, with someone documenting his every move from a few feet away. This despite the fact that there is a camera inside his cell, he points out. “All that is designed, I think, to wreck you psychologically.” So he tries to block it out, reading as much as possible.

Hooper, who is Black, wears thick glasses and a bright orange sweatshirt. He has short white hair. He is uncuffed but wearing leg irons, along with a belly chain around his waist. An officer in tactical gear has halfheartedly informed me that I’m entitled to a stab-proof vest, but he clearly considers it unnecessary. I get a waiver to sign instead.

Hooper bristles at the absurdity of it all. He has not gotten a single write-up in his years on Arizona’s death row. “I’m not a threat,” he says. But the staff has to follow the rules, so they shackle him even when he is taken to shower. Hooper doesn’t believe that they want to see him put to death. “They’ve never said it, because they can’t.”

I’ve come to see Hooper because he wants to tell his story. But he is not here to reflect upon his life. And he’s certainly not here to demonstrate redemption or remorse. He wants me to know that he is innocent: that he was railroaded by crooked cops, corrupt prosecutors, and a judge who saw the state’s misconduct firsthand but sentenced him to die anyway.

This is a story Hooper has been telling in court filings for 40 years. He was condemned to die for carrying out a contract killing in Phoenix on December 31, 1980. His case turned on eyewitness testimony — a leading cause of wrongful convictions. Research into eyewitness accounts and the science of memory has rendered such evidence increasingly unreliable in the decades since his trial, even more so in cases where the accused is Black and the victim is white.

But attempts to present that research have gone nowhere, most recently at Hooper’s clemency hearing, where prosecutors laid out an ugly criminal history that includes gang violence in his native Chicago and a guilty plea for manslaughter for killing his girlfriend in 1968. Hooper does not deny this. He says he paid the debt society demanded of him — but that these crimes don’t mean he should be executed for something he did not do.

Some have been exonerated. Others have died behind bars. Of four death sentences, only Hooper’s remains.

“It took 32 years” to correct the miscarriage of justice in Illinois, Hooper tells me. He insists the same would be true in Arizona if he had more time.

Murray Hooper, third from left, is shown in a lineup conducted by the Chicago Police Department in February 1981.

Photo: Murray Hooper appellate record

Although the gunmen had taken money and jewelry, suggesting a burglary gone wrong, the state adopted a more sinister theory of the crime.

William Bracy, left, Murray Hooper, and public defender J. Grant Woods listen in court as the jury returns its verdict on Dec. 24, 1982.

Photo: John Williard/ Arizona Republic

“That should tell people something, that it’s possible to lock a person up and not let them breathe fresh air.”

An illustration shows the all-white jury in the first-degree murder trial of William Bracy and Murray Hooper in late December 1982.

Illustration: Kee Rash

“He was very concerned that once I started to learn about his case that I would think that he did those things.”

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This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Liliana Segura.

The sun rises over a strange landscape. Come with me and meet these people over here.

Even though they have stayed awake all night, now that the sun has risen, they are jumping up and down, singing happy songs and even expressing tears of joy.

Next to them, there is a wooden post freshly buried in the ground. There is carved writing on the post which reads: “Memory of Year 2000″.

• READ MORE: Justice for sorcery accusation related violence in PNG?
• Other sorcery-accusation related reports

It was New Years Day, January 1, 2000, and this small community somehow thought that the sun might not rise, ever again.

Why? Because someone had come to their village and told them stories about the Year 2000, Y2K, and how the sun might not rise, ever again. The villagers believed the stories.

They gathered firewood to prepare for the endless night to come and set up vines to their outhouses so they could find them in the dark. At midnight, they drove the carved pillar into the ground, and then stood awake, praying through their fear, until the sun finally rose and they began to celebrate!

Amazing true story, right? But I wonder what would have happened if someone had told them a different story.

What if …?
What if someone told them that since it is Y2K, the sun might not rise again unless each family sacrificed their oldest child by burying them alive at midnight?

What if someone told them that the right way to ensure the sun will rise again is to blame a witch and torture her, burn her skin, threaten to kill her and terrorise her children? Would they have tortured innocent citizens of Papua New Guinea trying to get the sun to rise?

People have believed the strangest things on the worst evidence. When you believe wrong things, you do wrong things too. My ancestors believed wrong things. Your ancestors believed wrong things.

Anton Lutz on sorcery-related violence in Papua New Guinea in a 2020 video.

The Y2K villagers believed wrong things. Luckily, they didn’t hurt anyone as a result of their wrong beliefs.

Telling the truth
Here’s a thought: What if someone had told the villagers the truth? Planet Earth revolves on an axis and orbits a star. That is the reason why we experience sunrises and sunsets, years and seasons.

Unless the 5.9 sextillion metric tons of planet Earth — spinning at 30km per second — comes to a stop, or unless the star unexpectedly collapses into a black hole, there is every reason — barring a supernatural, multi-dimensional or alien apocalypse — to think there will be sunrises and sunsets on planet Earth for the next 7.6 billion years.

This means that we should use the time we have to be curious and to examine evidence and to educate our children in the truth.

Just because someone came to our village once upon a time and told us an amazing story about how “dangerous” women need to be tortured sometimes, that doesn’t mean we should just believe it.

There will be a sunrise tomorrow. Let’s make sure it’s a better day.

Anton Lutz has lived in Papua New Guinea for 30 years. He works with remote communities on infrastructure development projects, and is a leading advocate against sorcery accusation-related violence. This article was first published on the PNG Post-Courier and is republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Nine suspects arrested over a barbaric machete attack on Sunday outside the counting venue at Port Moresby’s Sir John Guise Stadium have been labelled “innocent” and released this week from Papua New Guinean police custody at Waigani.

The act stirred up public fear, anxiety and created a lot of debate on the 2022 national general election in the National Capital District (NCD). It also got the attention of international media from the video circulated widely on social media showing a group of men chasing two men with bush knives, iron bars and other weapons and attacking them on the road at Waigani.

Reports from reliable security forces said that the nine suspects arrested behind Sports Inn, just next to Sir John Guise Stadium after discovery of bundle of knives inside their vehicle, had never taken part in the fight and were innocent.

• READ MORE: Other reports on the Port Moresby attack

Police picked them up after they ran down to their camp location fearful of being attacked by other candidate supporters following the fight that had erupted outside the counting venue.

Police said the men were all from Chimbu province, employed by a security firm, and the owner of the company was also an election candidate.

The bush knives discovered inside their vehicle belonged to the company.

The vehicle impounded by police is under investigation.

Marjorie Finkeo is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Firearm companies have raked in over $1 billion from selling AR-15-style rifles over the past decade, a U.S. congressional committee revealed in a report ahead of a Wednesday hearing, prompting calls from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for a renewed assault weapons ban.

"The business practices of these gun manufacturers are deeply disturbing, exploitative, and reckless."

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held the hearing on gunmakers' responsibility for a national crisis that costs tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

In the wake of recent massacres in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, the House panel queried five leading gun manufacturers—Bushmaster, Daniel Defense, Ruger, Sig Sauer, and Smith & Wesson—about their sales and marketing of AR-15-like and other assault-style semi-automatic rifles. Such weaponry is used in around three-quarters of mass shootings, attacks that are far deadlier when they involve assault weapons, according to the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

"How much are the lives of America's children, teachers, parents, and families worth to gun manufacturers? My committee's investigation has revealed that the country's major gun manufacturers have collected more than $1 billion in revenue from selling military-style assault weapons to civilians," House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a statement ahead of the hearing.

"These companies are selling the weapon of choice for mass murderers who terrorize young children at school, hunt down worshippers at churches and synagogues, and slaughter families on the Fourth of July," she continued. "In short, the gun industry is profiting off the blood of innocent Americans."

"My committee has found that the business practices of these gun manufacturers are deeply disturbing, exploitative, and reckless," Maloney said. "These companies use aggressive marketing tactics to target young people—especially young men—and some even evoke symbols of white supremacy. Yet we found that none of these companies bothers to keep track of the death and destruction caused by their products."

Among the panel's findings:

• Sales of assault-style weapons are increasing as gun deaths and mass shootings rise;
• Gun companies utilize a variety of financing tactics and manipulative marketing campaigns to sell assault weapons to customers, including teens;
• Firearm manufacturers fail to track or monitor deaths, injuries, or crimes that occur using their products, or when their products have been illegally modified.

"Congress must act to rein in the irresponsible business practices of the gun industry, prohibit the sale of dangerous weapons of war to civilians, and reassess the liability protections that prevent the American people from accessing the courts to hold gun manufacturers accountable for the deadly effects of their business decisions," the committee concluded.

The panel added:

Congress and federal agencies should also consider requiring death and crime reporting requirements for the gun industry, similar to those imposed on other industries, which will force manufacturers to develop compliance systems and take reasonable precautious to ensure their products are not misused. Additionally, Congress should consider imposing reasonable regulations on how the gun industry advertises its products, such as age limitations, content warnings, and further enabling agencies like the Federal Trade Commission to regulate misleading advertisements.

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), who is not a member of the committee, was even blunter, tweeting, "ban assault weapons NOW."

"These companies made a BILLION dollars selling weapons of war. Assault rifles are designed to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible," she added. "They irreparably shatter families and communities. They have no place in our country."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When guards first brought Daniel Taylor into a room at the Stateville Correctional Center outside Chicago, we were strangers. It was 2001. I was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He was an inmate serving a life sentence.

He had written to me earlier. His was one of the dozen or so letters I’d get from inmates each month — each in an envelope red-stamped with a note saying they were from an inmate at the Illinois Department of Corrections, as if to warn me about their contents. But his letter stood out. He had been convicted of a 1992 double murder, he wrote, but he had records that showed he was in a police station holding cell when the murders were committed.

Even in Chicago, which was fast becoming known for its miscarriages of justice, it was stunning.

Over more than a decade, I talked with Taylor scores of times on the telephone. I visited him in prison. And with Tribune reporters Maurice Possley and Ken Armstrong, I investigated his case as part of a series of stories on false confessions, then followed it until he was exonerated in June 2013.

That it took some two decades for Taylor to be exonerated and win his release spoke to many things, but none more so than the frailties of the criminal justice system and Taylor’s fierce persistence.

Taylor had a kindness and openness I liked immediately. He was candid about his troubled childhood growing up in foster homes and shelters, about leaving school and about life on the streets. Some three months before the murders, he joined the Vice Lords street gang, largely because his friends were in it. He had been arrested a handful of times for such minor offenses as mob action and theft.

Over the years, we got to know each other better. More than anything, I came to admire his tenacity in the face of a justice system that had repeatedly turned aside his innocence claims. His persistence was another indication to me that he might well be innocent, though it was the facts of the case that mattered the most.

This week, the Chicago City Council approved a $14.25 million wrongful-conviction settlement for Taylor in a vote that brought to an end a saga that had begun three decades earlier. His journey should have been so much shorter.

After all, Taylor, then 17, had what seemed the best imaginable alibi: When Jeffrey Lassiter and Sharon Haugabook were shot to death on Nov. 16, 1992, in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, Taylor was behind bars in a nearby police lockup. He had been arrested for fighting two hours before the murders and released more than an hour after the murders.

The Police Department’s own records, and officers working at the lockup, showed he was in their custody at the time of the shooting. But by the time police found those records, they already had built their case against him. Two other young men had been picked up and confessed to being lookouts; they implicated Taylor and others. All told, eight young Black men were charged with the murders.

Taylor confessed, too. He said he concluded it was futile to resist after detectives hit him with a flashlight and told him that he could leave if he told them what they wanted to hear. In the end, he gave a lengthy statement. In it, he said he and the others had killed Lassiter and Haugabook, four of them carrying out the crime, the other four acting as lookouts.

The other young men confessed, too, implicating one another in interlocking statements that, in the end, sent five of them to state prison; the cases against three of the eight fell apart at various stages. Some of the others said they were mistreated as well. Police have repeatedly denied wrongdoing in all these cases.

In Chicago, as elsewhere, confessions are potent pieces of evidence, and it is hard for people to understand how someone could admit to a crime they didn’t commit. But it happens with troubling regularity.

And once a confession is made, it is almost impossible to move law enforcement off that narrative. Police and prosecutors have proceeded with cases even when DNA evidence exonerates a defendant and points to another suspect. They have proceeded when a confession doesn’t match the physical evidence. And they have proceeded with other cases besides Taylor’s where a suspect was in jail when the crime occurred. There have been so many dubious confessions in Chicago — including the false confessions obtained through torture by former Cmdr. Jon Burge and his detectives, cases that have led to tens of millions of dollars in settlements — that criminal justice advocates have called the city the capital of false confessions.

Taylor’s case upends the idealistic notion that injustices, and particularly those that seem more obvious, will be quickly corrected. That when evidence emerges to undermine the theory of a case, there will be an aggressive and thorough reexamination of the facts to be sure the right people are taken to trial and sent to prison. That there will be an honest soul-searching to make people whole when they have been wronged rather than the legal brawl that so many have experienced.

When Taylor went to trial in 1995, prosecutors attacked his alibi. They said the records that showed him behind bars were unreliable, essentially arguing that their own documents and employees couldn’t be trusted. They offered witnesses who said they saw Taylor on the streets when he was supposedly in custody.

At 19, Taylor was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Two of the other men who had confessed were sentenced to life in prison as well, while another two were given 30-year terms.

As we investigated Taylor’s case at the Tribune, we found ample new evidence of his innocence — documents and witnesses who undermined the case against him. If Taylor’s case fell apart, all the cases would fall apart, since they depended on confessions that linked all the young men to the crime. Prompted by our investigation, prosecutors said that they conducted a reexamination of the case; they said they were confident Taylor was guilty. Taylor was upset. My reporting partners and I were not surprised.

Over the next decade or so, as Taylor languished in prison, Possley and I continued to report on the case, increasingly troubled that the system refused to right what seemed so clearly wrong. We uncovered additional evidence that pointed to his innocence. In 2003, one of the convicted men — the only one significantly older than the other seven — admitted he was involved in the slayings and the others weren’t. Other witnesses were found. More exculpatory documents were uncovered. No one else has ever been arrested for the murders; Taylor’s lawyers said there’s no indication they were ever reinvestigated.

And so it went. A slow accumulation of evidence suggested what seemed clear from the start: Daniel Taylor was innocent. At the same time, attorneys at the Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions took on the case, developing additional evidence over many years and making powerful arguments in court that a miscarriage of justice had been perpetrated.

Over time, the case gained traction. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2011 that there was “strong proof that Taylor’s participation in the crime was physically impossible.” The Illinois attorney general’s office took an interest and turned over records that Taylor’s lawyers hadn’t seen.

Faced with spending his life in prison, Taylor educated himself and, like many inmates, studied his case. He learned to play chess and he lifted weights. He was doing what seemed impossible to me: making a virtue of necessity. But there were times he lost hope. He cried at night. At one point, he cut his wrist. His life seemed defined by an injustice. We talked every few weeks for years, but I was never sure our conversations offered much in the way of hope or solace. Too often, I had no news to offer him. Investigating wrongful conviction cases, some of them decades old, is slow, painstaking work. You can go months, even years without making any progress.

And then, in 2013, prosecutors agreed to dismiss Taylor’s conviction, saying that a review of documents and interviews with additional witnesses had persuaded them that it was not in the “interest of justice to proceed on this matter” — clinical language that failed to convey the legal battles the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had waged to keep Taylor behind bars.

After spending more than half of his life behind bars, his beard now turning gray, Taylor strode out of the Menard Correctional Center on a hot and sunny afternoon with $41 in his pocket. He walked into the embrace of his family. He walked into freedom. He got an apartment. He found a job at Northwestern University, in shipping and receiving. He became a father.

In 2014, a judge granted him a certificate of innocence. Later that year, he filed his lawsuit, alleging that police had arrested him though they knew he was guilty. That set the stage for the legal fight that followed — years of depositions and motions that led finally to the settlement.

Now, nearly three decades after he was arrested, the city of Chicago will pay Taylor millions of dollars to make up for the years he lost in prison. A police spokesperson declined to comment. Jessica Felker, a deputy corporation counsel for the city, told the Finance Committee last week that settling the case was a “cost-effective measure to limit the city’s exposure.” Felker said that if the case went to trial, Taylor’s lawyers could ask for $21 million to $42 million in damages, plus an additional $4 million in fees.

When Taylor receives his settlement, the city will have paid roughly $40 million to Taylor and the three others who were also exonerated, a stunning amount for a case that seemed dubious from the outset. Police and prosecutors have never revealed publicly if any of the people who handled the investigation or prosecution were disciplined, and Taylor’s lawyers have not found any evidence that anyone has been held accountable. My guess is that no one ever will be.

“Rather than admitting there was a grievous injustice here, the city of Chicago chose to fight and drag this out. They chose to maintain the position that Daniel was guilty,” David Owens, a lawyer at the Chicago firm Loevy & Loevy and one of Taylor’s attorneys in his lawsuit, said in an interview. (The Loevy firm has represented ProPublica in open records lawsuits.)

At every stage, Owens said, Taylor faced opposition. Even after a jury awarded $13.4 million to one of Taylor’s co-defendants in 2017, and after the city of Chicago agreed to pay two others $5.25 million each, the city continued to fight Taylor’s lawsuit. It did so at a steep cost, too, paying outside attorneys more than $2 million in fees, according to Felker.

“They saw Daniel as a defendant,” Owens said, “rather than someone who was traumatized.”

I no longer have Taylor’s initial letter to me; I think I lost it when I moved from the Tribune to ProPublica five years ago. Until this week, I hadn’t talked to him for several years. He had attorneys he had grown close to, including the late Karen Daniel of Northwestern, and I didn’t want to intrude on his freedom. I didn’t want to remind him of his old life. He is charting a new one.

But, with his case now concluded, the time seemed right. We met on Monday at his lawyers’ office and embraced. He looks the same, though his small beard is now more white than gray. At 46, he is focused on his 7-year-old son. He and his girlfriend and son are now planning to move, to leave behind Illinois and the memories of his arrest, prosecution and imprisonment.

Taylor told me he is mostly at peace. He said he has let go of his anger that no one has been held accountable for his wrongful conviction. Instead, he chooses to be excited for the future, for the chance to live “a comfortable life” and to give his son “the opportunities I didn’t have.” His life has changed, but he knows the criminal justice system hasn’t.

“Mark my word,” he said, “I won’t be the last one to be proved innocent.”

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Steve Mills.

Legal experts responded with alarm Monday to a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority that could lead to the indefinite imprisonment and even execution of people who argue their lawyers didn't provide adequate representation after convictions in state court.

"The conservative majority is very much in the midst of a revolution. And it is a brutal one."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor—joined by the other two liberals on the court—also blasted the majority opinion in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, writing in her scathing dissent that the decision is both "perverse" and "illogical."

The case involved two men, David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones, who are on death row in Arizona. The majority determined that inmates can't present new evidence in federal court to support a claim that their post-conviction attorney in state court was ineffective, in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which affirms the right to "the assistance of counsel" in criminal all prosecutions.

"A federal habeas court may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise consider evidence beyond the state court record based on ineffective assistance of state post-conviction counsel," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, adding that "serial relitigation of final convictions undermines the finality that 'is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal law.'"

Sotomayor, meanwhile, wrote that "the Sixth Amendment guarantees criminal defendants the right to the effective assistance of counsel at trial. This court has recognized that right as 'a bedrock principle' that constitutes the very 'foundation for our adversary system' of criminal justice."

"Today, however, the court hamstrings the federal courts' authority to safeguard that right. The court's decision will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel," she warned, also noting that the ruling "all but overrules two recent precedents," Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler.

In a piece for Slate highlighting how the ruling "will cause profound suffering and perhaps even death as people are denied their constitutional rights," University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman declared that the majority "took a wrecking ball to those decisions."

As Litman detailed Monday:

Indigent defense—defense for people who lack the resources to hire their own lawyer—is in crisis in this country. Indigent defense is woefully underfunded, and public defenders handle hundreds of cases per year, many more than they have the time or resources to manage effectively. States also heavily restrict the procedures and resources that would allow public defenders to develop their cases in greater depth…

But just as there is an indigent defense crisis in this country, there is also a post-conviction crisis. Post-conviction proceedings are woefully underfunded, and lawyers are limited in the time and resources they have to pursue post-conviction relief. So defendants who are represented by ineffective lawyers at trial may then be represented by an ineffective lawyer during their post-conviction proceedings, when they are supposed to be arguing that their trial lawyer was ineffective. And—surprise—the ineffective post-conviction lawyer may fail to argue that the trial lawyer was ineffective, or may fail to develop any evidence in support of that claim.

In a series of tweets, fellow Michigan law professor Andrew Fleischman pointed out that "without ineffective assistance of counsel claims, there is no procedural vehicle to bring evidence of actual innocence in most states."

"So, if you have a shitty conflict trial lawyer, and a shitty conflict appeals lawyer, and a mountain of evidence you are innocent, no relief," Fleischman said, noting Jones' argument that there is evidence of his innocence.

Other legal experts were similarly critical on social media. University of Texas professor law Lee Kovarsky called the opinion an "abomination" while public defender Eliza Orlins said: "This is radical. This is horrifying. This is extremely scary."

Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern tweeted that the "absolutely atrocious" opinion "effectively ensures that innocent people will remain imprisoned."

"The unceasing stream of callous, radical, reactionary decisions coming from the Supreme Court is fairly easy to miss because so many of them involve complicated points of law," Stern added. "But the conservative majority is very much in the midst of a revolution. And it is a brutal one."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Read the entire essay at Countercurrents.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kristin Christman.

On Wednesday, Dr. Gisli H. Gudjonsson, the world’s leading expert on compliance, suggestibility, and false confessions voiced his grave concerns about the case in an op-ed published in the Independent.

“Melissa Lucio’s case is one of the most tragic I have come across in my 40-year career as a clinical forensic psychologist,” wrote Dr. Gudjonsson who is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry of King’s College London. Ms. Lucio has been on death row in Texas for 14 years for the death of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah, who died two days after an accidental fall. Just two hours after her daughter passed, officers began interrogating Ms. Lucio. 

Dr. Gudjonsson, who started his career as a police officer, conducted a comprehensive review of Ms. Lucio’s case, interrogation, and recent psychological testing. He submitted a report that was included in the clemency petition filed by Ms. Lucio’s attorneys to Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles last month.

Ms. Lucio, who was interrogated for five hours within hours of her infant dying, asserted her innocence more than 100 times. But officers used coercive and manipulative interrogation tactics known to produce false confessions, until Ms. Lucio falsely accepted responsibility for some of her daughter’s injuries.

As a life-long survivor of sexual assault and domestic abuse, Ms. Lucio is particularly vulnerable to succumbing to such aggressive intimidation and coersion. 

In the op-ed, Dr. Gudjonsson highlighted the officers’ use of the controversial Reid interrogation technique, which he said “is guilt-presumptive, uses psychological manipulation to coerce confessions, and has been linked to countless false confessions.”

Nearly 1 in 3 people proven innocent by DNA were wrongly convicted based on false confessions elicited by coercive police interrogation tactics, like those used against Melissa. 

Dr. Gudjonsson found that the investigators failed to show compassion and understanding toward a grieving and sleep deprived mother still in shock from her baby’s death.

“Instead, officers played on her vulnerabilities by relentlessly accusing her of having abused and beaten her daughter to death and being a bad mother,” he wrote. “[They] forced her to enact the alleged beatings on a doll, with one of the investigators instructing her to hit the doll harder and harder, until she complied. By the end of the five hours, in apparent distress, Lucio told officers she wished she was dead.”

Dr. Gudjonsson wrote that Ms. Lucio’s “admissions” were “tentative and inadvertent,” noting that she simply parroted back to the officers the words and narrative that they had suggested to her for the past several hours of her interrogation.

“There was no tangible confession to murder,” he wrote, adding that her “inadvertent admissions” were nevertheless exaggerated by the prosecution and used against Ms. Lucio at her trial.

Dr. Gudjonsson urges Ms. Lucio’s case to be reconsidered and explains that it is “an extraordinarily potent example of how a vulnerable person can be psychologically manipulated into falsely implicating themselves in a crime in response to interrogative pressure.”

The post ‘Texas Is Executing An Innocent Woman,’ Says False Confessions Expert Dr. Gudjonsson appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Alicia Maule.

Melissa Lucio at Mountain View Unit Texas. (Image: Courtesy of the Innocence Project)

Ms. Lucio is facing execution on April 27 in Texas for a crime that never happened — the tragic, death of her daughter. In 2008, Ms. Lucio was convicted and sentenced to death based on a biased and inadequate death investigation and a shockingly inadequate defense. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ms. Lucio has maintained her innocence for 14 years.

She was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death after her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah, died in 2007 following an accidental fall. Although Ms. Lucio repeatedly told the police that she did not kill or abuse her daughter, they continued to interrogate her for five hours the same night  her daughter died. Around 3 a.m., Ms. Lucio, exhausted and in shock from the loss of her child, agreed, falsely, to take responsibility for some of Mariah’s injuries. Ms. Lucio, a life-long survivor of abuse, succumbed to the detectives’ demands to bring the nightmarish interrogation to an end.

The lifetime of sexual abuse and domestic violence that Ms. Lucio had endured made her especially vulnerable to the police’s coercive interrogation tactics. But her defense was not allowed to present this evidence at trial. Her attorney failed to mount a proper defense or present evidence pointing to her innocence. 

Lacking solid physical evidence, Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos presented Ms. Lucio’s statement to the jury as a “confession” to homicide and sought the death penalty, a “win” he thought would help him get re-elected. Today, the former district attorney is serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion.

There is simply too much doubt in this case, and people must speak out to prevent Texas from executing an innocent person on April 27.

While Ms. Lucio’s attorneys are working diligently within Texas’ legal system to have Ms. Lucio’s execution date withdrawn, to hopefully obtain a new trial, the power to stop this irreversible injustice may lie in the hands of Gov. Greg Abbott — the only person in the state who can stop Ms. Lucio’s currently scheduled execution. 

Here are four ways you can take action and encourage Gov. Abbott to intervene.

1. Add your name to this petition.

More than 100,000 people have already signed, but we need more signatures. If Gov. Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole see the overwhelming support for Ms. Lucio, that can make a big difference. If the courts do not weigh in before April 27, only Gov. Abbott can stop Ms. Lucio from being executed. 

Cameron County Courthouse in Brownsville Texas. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

2. Call the Cameron County District Attorney and ask him to withdraw Ms. Lucio’s execution date. Not from Texas? Send this to friends and family who do live in the state.

When elected officials hear from their constituents, they pay attention, especially when they receive phone calls. Help us get as many phone calls in support of Ms. Lucio as possible. Call 956-300-3881 or click here (If you’ve never called an official before and don’t know what to say, don’t worry! We’ve provided an example of what you can say, but elected officials always take notice of personalized messages, so we encourage you to make it your own.)

3. Make a video, a post, or story about Ms. Lucio’s case on Instagram, TikTok, or any other platform. Use the hashtag #SaveMelissaLucio. Check out these talking points below to get started.

Not on social media? No problem! These talking points work just as well in conversations with friends and family, just help spread the word. 

• Melissa Lucio is scheduled to be executed on April 27 for a tragic accident.
• In 2007, her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah, fell down a flight of stairs, and she died two days later.
• Melissa has no history of abusing her children or violence.
• Melissa repeatedly maintained her innocence, but police kept interrogating her, yelling at her and intimidating her for five hours — the same night her daughter died. 
• Melissa is a survivor of a lifetime of sexual abuse and domestic violence, and the kinds of deceptive and intimidating techniques officers used are particularly traumatic for people with those experiences. And those techniques are known to produce false confessions.
• The jury did not hear Melissa’s defense or mitigating factors.
• There is too much doubt in this case.
• Texas has to review her innocence case before they kill an innocent person.
• Visit savemelissa.org before it’s too late.

4. Wear your support for Ms. Lucio and help bring attention to her case. Purchase Save Melissa gear.

If you live in Texas, we encourage you to attend the 26th Annual Cesar E. Chavez March for Justice in San Antonio on Saturday, March 26, 2022, beginning at 8:30 a.m. CST. Details here. Bring your Save Melissa signs and join supporters.

The post Four Ways to Help Melissa Lucio, Innocent Woman Set to Be Executed on April 27 in Texas appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Alicia Maule.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says New Zealand joins its international partners in condemnation of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and has immediately taken a range of measures against the Russian government.

Giving a statement today about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ardern said Russia began a “military offensive and an illegal invasion” yesterday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine and launched a full-scale land, sea and air attack on the country.

• READ MORE: New Zealand announces bans on Russia in reply to Ukraine invasion

Putin said his goal was the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, but US President Joe Biden has asserted the evidence clearly showed Russia was the aggressor and it had no evidence for its justifications.

New Zealand has joined with the United Nations in launching economic sanctions against Russia.

Ardern said: “The UK’s Ministry of Defence communicated this morning that more than 80 strikes have been carried out against Ukrainian targets and that Russian ground forces are advancing across the border on at least three axis from north and northeast, and south from Crimea.

“There are reports of attacks in a range of locations around Ukraine, including heavy shelling in eastern Ukraine and fighting in some areas, including around airports and other targets of strategic importance.

‘Unthinkable’ loss of lives
“By choosing to pursue this entirely avoidable path, an unthinkable number of innocent lives could be lost because of Russia’s decision,” she said.

New Zealand called on Russia to do what was right and immediately cease military operations, and permanently withdraw to avoid a “catastrophic and pointless loss of innocent life”, she said.

The invasion posed a significant threat to peace and security in the region and would trigger a humanitarian and refugee crisis, she said.

Russia had demonstrated a disregard for diplomacy and efforts to avoid conflict in the lead-up to the attack, she said, and “must now face the consequences of their decision to invade”.

As a permanent UN Security Council member, Russia has “displayed a flagrant disregard for international law and abdicated their responsibility to uphold global peace and security” and now must face the consequences, Ardern said.

New Zealand has immediately imposed measures in response which include targeted travel bans against Russian officials and other individuals associated with the invasion. They will be banned from obtaining visas to enter or transit New Zealand.

Secondly, this country is prohibiting the export of goods to Russian military and security forces.

Blanket ban a ‘significant step’
“While exports from New Zealand under this category are limited, a blanket ban is a significant step as it removes the ability for exporters to apply for a permit and sends a clear signal of support to Ukraine,” she said.

Finally, New Zealand has suspended bilateral ministry consultations until further notice.

Ardern says there will be a significant cost imposed on Russia for its actions. New Zealand will also consider humanitarian response options, she said.

“Finally our thoughts today are with the people in Ukraine affected by this conflict. Decades of peace and security in the region have been undermined.

“The institutions built to avoid conflict have been threatened and we stand resolute in our support for those who now bear the brunt of Russia’s decisions.”

She again called for Russia to cease military actions and return to diplomatic negotiations to resolve the conflict.

During questions from journalists, Ardern said New Zealand was not constrained by being unable to launch autonomous sanctions.

Additional measures
“There are additional measures that we can take. Obviously already you’ll see those targeted travel bans, we do have the ability to extend those as required and as those involved with this activity grows,” she said.

“We also have the ability to continue to restrict the amount of diplomatic engagement that we have … and obviously the autonomous sanction regimes that have been proposed in the past don’t for instance cover situations of human rights violations.”

Ardern admitted there were some limitations on economic sanctions New Zealand could impose, but the government continued to get advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the tools that could be used and “we want them all to be on the table”.

The measures New Zealand has imposed are limited but send a very clear message.

“What this does say is that there’s no ability to apply or seek to export … this is a blanket ban,” she says.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Despite no other evidence connecting Mr. McCroy to the crime, he was sentenced to life in prison and has suffered almost four decades of wrongful incarceration. 

On February 14, 2022, the Circuit Court of Covington County, Alabama, denied Mr. McCrory’s petition that sought relief based on new evidence that proves his innocence.

Read 10 key facts about this case to help fight for justice for Mr. McCrory.

1. The only evidence that connected Mr. McCrory to the crime was a “bite mark” on his wife that Dr. Souviron had allegedly found and linked to Mr. McCrory’s teeth. Dr. Souviron has since recanted that testimony, and no other evidence connects Mr. McCrory to the crime.

At the 1985 trial, Dr. Souviron testified that a bite mark on Ms. Bonds’s body matched her husband’s teeth. He has since recanted this evidence in a sworn statement. He and two independent experts also now agree that the testimony never should have been presented to a jury because the injury was never an actual bite mark.

At trial, the Tiplers relied on testimony stating that a car that looked like Mr. McCrory’s may have been near the crime scene. However, evidence from the 2021 hearing demonstrated that it would have been nearly impossible to have observed any vehicle from the witness’s vantage point. 

No other evidence at trial was presented that connected Mr. McCrory to killing his own wife — not an eyewitness, not a confession, not forensic evidence. At the time of the trial, there were no known wrongful convictions attributable to the use of bite mark evidence. Without the alleged bite mark, Mr. McCrory would not have been convicted. Today, at least 36 innocent people have been wrongfully convicted through the use of bite mark evidence and have lost a total of 400 years behind bars. Nearly all of these wrongful convictions occurred during the era of Mr. McCrory’s trial.

2. Hair in Ms. Bonds’s hand did not match Mr. McCrory.

Hairs clutched in Ms. Bonds’s hand were examined, presumably because they were pulled from the attacker’s hands during the violent struggle. Those hairs were conclusively determined not to belong to Mr. McCrory or Ms. Bonds.

3. A red bandana like the one worn by Alton Ainsworth, who committed a similar home invasion and rape five weeks after the murder, was found at the crime scene. He worked at a construction site next to the victim’s house.

Alton Ainsworth worked at a construction site next door to Ms. Bonds’s home. He was known for wearing a red bandana similar to the one found next to her body. Evidence showed an open window and a nearby footprint, indicating a likely home invasion by the attacker. Five weeks after the murder of Ms. Bonds, Mr. Ainsworth committed a home invasion and rape, similar to what had happened to Ms. Bonds, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He has never been charged in relation to her murder.

4. A red bandana like the one worn by Alton Ainsworth, who committed a similar home invasion and rape five weeks after the murder, was found at the crime scene. He worked at a construction site next to the victim’s house.

The Covington County District Attorney did not prosecute the case. Instead, Frank Tipler and his son Harvey Tipler, private attorneys, were hired by Ms. Bonds’s brother to prosecute Mr. McCrory, because Ms. Bonds’s brother believed the local county prosecutors were insufficiently invested in Mr. McCrory’s guilt. This is a rare occurrence but permitted under Alabama law.

5. Key evidence that could have exonerated Mr. McCrory was destroyed.

The physical evidence in the case, including the red bandana, was destroyed. The Innocence Project has helped free more than 200 people from prison using DNA testing,  but the absence of this key evidence makes justice for Mr. McCrory extremely challenging, especially because, in this case, the State used the lack of DNA evidence against him. 

6. Mr. McCrory has maintained his innocence for 40 years.

When he was wrongly convicted, Mr. McCrory had no previous history of violence or criminal record. The day he found his wife murdered, he cooperated with police and consented to a search of his own body, home, and vehicle. No incriminating evidence was found, despite that he was alleged to have just committed a brutal murder. He consistently explained his whereabouts at the time of the murder and testified on his own behalf at trial. At the time of the incident, Mr. McCrory was a loving father and Information Technology consultant, who had earned a college degree and served as a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician. Given his exemplary behavior while incarcerated, he is currently permitted to leave the prison on work details, notwithstanding the nature of the charge. His son, now grown, fully supports his father’s innocence.

7. In April 2021, the current District Attorney Tippler attorneys offered Mr. McCrory a plea to time-served, but he refused it.

In an effort to avoid an evidentiary hearing in this case, the current District Attorney offered Mr. McCrory a “time served” plea just moments before the 2021 hearing, but Mr. McCrory turned the offer down because he would not admit guilt for something he didn’t do. Although Mr. McCrory denied the offer, many innocent people are actually often pressured into plea deals and do accept pleas to avoid a harsher punishment and for various other reasons. 

8. At an evidentiary hearing in April 2021, Mr. McCrory presented evidence from three forensic dentists who agreed that the injury to the victim was not a bite mark.

At the evidentiary hearing before Judge Short in Andalusia, Alabama, in April 2021, two forensic dentists corroborated Dr. Souviron’s recantation and testified not only that the injury to Ms. Bonds was not inflicted by Mr. McCrory’s teeth, but also that it was not even a bite mark in the first place. In addition, attorneys for Mr. McCrory demonstrated why none of the other evidence presented against him at trial pointed to his involvement in the crime. In response, the current District Attorney re-read the original trial testimony and had no response to the new evidence pointing to Mr. McCrory’s innocence. 

9. The court took nearly a year to write its opinion — only to simply sign the prosecutors’ proposed findings of fact against Mr. McCrory.

Following the evidentiary hearing seeking a new trial in 2021, the court issued a decision on February 14, 2022.  In this decision, however, the judge simply signed a short set of proposed findings written by the prosecutors. Though experts at the hearing had unanimously testified that the injury was not a bite mark, the court found that any lay juror reliably could have matched Mr. McCrory’s teeth to the injury on Ms. Bonds themselves. In other words, the judge ruled that jurors are capable of doing what the scientific community has unanimously agreed is impossible: identify bite marks and “match” them to teeth. In fact, jurors are no better than “experts” at engaging in unvalidated science. 

10. Following the trial, Harvey Tipler was convicted of solication of murder of an assistant state’s attorney and is now serving a 35-year sentence in prison.  

Harvey Tipler, the prosecuting attorney, responsible for investigating and making much of the case against Mr. McCory, has since been disbarred and convicted of solicitation of murder. He is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence in Florida. 

Act now by sharing Mr. McCrory’s story.

Share on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram so everyone knows Mr. McCrory’s story.

The post Charles McCrory Is an Innocent Man Incarcerated for Over 35 Years in Alabama — Here’s What You Need to Know appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by cat-ip-main.