When Tyrone Pettway saw his water bill in October 2021, he thought it was a typo. The bill was for $ 2,384.51, some $ 2,300 more than what he usually owed the Prichard, Alabama water board every month.

The document claimed Pettway, his wife, and their five kids had used 167,000 gallons of water over the course of the 34-day billing period, amounting to nearly 5,000 gallons a day. But Pettway was sure they had used no more water that month than they normally did: 3,700 gallons total, or about 18 gallons per person per day—much less than the national average of 82 gallons a day per person.

They hired a plumber who said there was no leak on their property. Pettway was not surprised. “If I had a leak, pushing that kind of water, I would see it somewhere,” he told NBC 15 News following the incident. “Even if it was underground. It’s going to float up somewhere.” So they disputed the amount. They did not have much choice. Pettway is a self-employed construction worker. He makes enough to provide for his family and his community—he builds ramps for free for disabled people—but that’s about it. Instead of acknowledging Pettway’s concerns, however, the Prichard Water Works and Sewage Board sent him a new bill for November, which took his charges and added extra expenses, bringing the cost to almost $ 3100, according to court records. Pettway again disputed the bill. In response, his water was shut off.

It was two days before Thanksgiving. The family had to move their holiday plans. They showered at the neighbor’s house and brought in water from outside sources to drink. “It was an emotional strain,” said Roger Varner, a lawyer who Pettway hired. “You have to say to your son or daughter, ‘We have to bathe elsewhere because I can’t afford to provide as a parent.’”

After the technician left, Pettway found Varner, a young Black man and rising star attorney in Mobile, a city seven minutes south of Prichard. Varner had never heard anything about Prichard Water before meeting Pettway. But once he did, 10 other Prichard residents came to him with similar stories. In May, he filed a complaint against Prichard Water for negligence, breach of contract, and deceptive trade practices, among other things. “Prichard is one of the poorest cities in Alabama,” Varner told me, referring to the fact that 30 percent of the nearly 19,000 residents live in poverty and the median household income is $ 32,900. “These are just completely unpayable bills.”

Prichard is not alone in facing astronomical water bills. They are a problem in communities of color across the country, where repairs of decaying infrastructure have not kept apace with inflation. “These issues are pervasive,” Marccus Hendricks, an advisor to the White House Council’s environmental justice team, told the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “There are cities, both big and small across the nation that are suffering from infrastructure in disrepair.”

Some argue that the trouble with Prichard Water Works & Sewage Board began in early 2018, when members of the board allegedly began embezzling public funds. An early 2022 joint FBI-Mobile sheriff raid found items ranging from Gucci bags to plasma TVs hidden away at the home of Water Board manager Nia Bradley. Further investigation led to Bradley’s arrest and subsequent charges of theft for embezzling as much as $ 3 million between 2018 and 2021, according to a local news station. Since then, several other Prichard Water employees have been arrested on similar charges. Mobile County District Attorney Ashley Rich said during a press conference that residents’ high-water bills were also part of the investigation, AL.com reported. Ross, the water board’s own attorney, called it “the worst case of public corruption I have ever seen.” (Bradley’s lawyers have said some of the purchases were authorized as part of her compensation package and denied the existence of other purchases.) 

Meanwhile, the pipes were falling into disrepair. In the weeks before the raid, Prichard Water asked the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which supervises utilities and enforces environmental policy in the state, to award it over $ 300 million for infrastructure projects, including repairing leaks. ADEM commented that it was the highest ask of any Alabama utility. In a statement at that time, ADEM External Affairs Chief Lynn Battle wrote, “ADEM will prioritize funding based on financial and engineering needs.” ADEM awarded Prichard $ 400,000, about 13 percent of their original request.

A later request for funds by Prichard Water to the Alabama’s Department of Environmental Management’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund—made in September 2022, after Bradley and her co-conspirators were off the board—was also denied. In an email to Prichard Water, ADEM stated the utility “failed to demonstrate the technical, financial and managerial ability to operate and maintain the facilities over the useful life and to repay the loan.” Six months later, the federal government filed a complaint under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management for “withholding resources from communities of color lacking proper sanitation access.” Despite its fair share of sewage problems, Prichard was not included in the complaint, which focused on the unique disparities in the Black Belt.

While ADEM was denying Prichard resources, they were also monitoring the dangers of the city’s water system. “The state of disrepair of Prichard’s water lines cannot be overstated,” the department concluded in a report released this year. They explained that “with such infrastructure conditions, providing reliable water service remains challenging…a matter that warrants expedited attention for the protection of public health.” But their most notable finding, perhaps, was that between between 2019 and 2022, as much as 60 percent of the water Prichard Water bought to serve residents was lost. ADEM’s recommended system water loss is 15 percent. While some of this is due to expected causes—liked documented water main breaks or water used for fire suppression—the board can’t account for what happened to most of its water, the report concluded. Those losses have cost Prichard Water some $ 2.7 million per year.

In July, Varner filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and organizations in Alabama Village, connecting the dots between the water loss and the high bills. “Prichard Water Board’s water system has at all material times experienced high levels of water loss due to poor and aging infrastructure,” his case alleges. “This led to a reduction of water quality for customers and lead to a financial drain on customers.”

Ross maintains that the two are not related. “There’s a lot of leakage,” he admitted. But, he insisted, it’s been contained to the Alabama Village area of Prichard, known for having the worst infrastructure in the area. Yet that doesn’t account for the inexplicably high bill at the Pettway home, just 2 miles from Alabama Village.

The utility’s solution to the leakages is eliminating Alabama Village as a problem. Prichard Water has threatened to end service to the area entirely and has started the process of eminent domain. “Instead of trying to start to help the people of Alabama Village,” said resident Archie Rankin, “they want to abandon Alabama Village.”

All this trouble has gotten Prichard Water into an even deeper hole. Not only are they being sued by their customers, they are being sued by their bank, who are calling on a judge to appoint a receiver to manage the utility. In their suit, Synovus Bank alleges that Prichard Water is “suffering from gross mismanagement, a lack of fiscal integrity, and endangering public safety by failing to maintain vital system infrastructure.”

For Prichard residents, the rising bills are just one problem. The ADEM report notes that “excessive water loss can adversely affect system pressure, potentially leading to public health concerns that would warrant boil water notices.” It also found several instances where chlorine—which is used to protect against bacteria like E. coli—was at significantly lower levels than the required amount. “Potential for inadequate disinfection is an added concern,” the report states.

The mayor has claimed the water is safe to drink; residents are not so sure. Many have begun to boil water or buy it bottled. “We’ve had millions of tons of sewage spilled out in our community,” says local environmental justice activist Carletta Davis, in reference to Prichard’s frequent sewage overflows. “It is our belief that if the infrastructure is so poor, and they’re losing water, then what is stopping the other contaminants from coming into the pipes as well?”

Davis and many others argue that Prichard Water’s problems started long before Bradley was using public money to buy Gucci bags. In fact, for Davis, the story is more complicated than “Prichard Water is bad.” While she was one of many who called for Bradley’s ouster, she feels the gutpunch of déjà vu. Just years before, Davis was fighting against a leak of Mercaptan, the bad-smelling chemical that is added to natural gas as an alert for leak protection and is itself dangerous—it can cause skin irritation, breathing problems, and even comas. The leakage went ignored for over 8 years, despite Davis and others’ activism.

“We have suffered for years from disinvestment,” Davis said. Case in point is the historic redlining in the area, which was once a hub of industry with its own railroad station. No formal study has been done of lending practices in Prichard, but Mapping Inequality, a project of University of Richmond that looks at New Deal era redlining, has documented how, in nearby Mobile, areas with Black residents and business were marked by banks as “hazardous” and labeled with notes such as “should be demolished.” Even today, Mobile is ranked the worst in Alabama for modern-day redlining, a now-illegal lending practice. Black residents are more than 5 times less likely to be approved for a loan than other residents.

There is a strong correlation between the value of housing and the potential for community infrastructure. “The vast majority of spending on local water services in the US is by local governments,” says Erika Smull an advisor at Breckenridge Capitol. “We live in a country with extreme decentralization of fiscal responsibility for water infrastructure. It is truly the fiscal responsibility of local municipalities.” But local municipalities are funded by local taxpayers, and not all taxpayers have been given the same opportunities to accrue capital. “If you really want to understand the quality and condition of broader neighborhood infrastructure, you can usually look to the quality and condition of the housing stock,” said Hendricks, the public health professor. “That is directly connected to a broader community tax base, which is the fundamental financing mechanism for community infrastructure.”

All this is compounded by the fact that it is harder for Black communities to get outside funding for repairs. A recent study by Smull found that there was a penalty against communities of color in the municipal bond market, which is the main source of funding for projects in low-income communities. “Rating agencies aren’t supposed to look at race,” Smull explained to me. It is not so simple, however. “Race is so intertwined with all the variables that would impact overall credit.” 

“We are not unlike many other black communities around the country,” says Davis. “Our community just really has been totally neglected.” She worries that focusing too much on the board’s embezzlement will contribute to the stereotype that “Black people can’t manage or run anything,” and she wants people to look at the larger picture: Even the most talented water board does not have the ability to fix a broken water system without adequate resources. “These majority white cities and majority white communities. They’re flooding them with grants, Community Development Block Grant funding, and all this other kind of stuff. And they thrive,” says Davis. “And it’s like, well, try withholding some of that money from over there and see what will happen.”

But Davis is not waiting around for ADEM to rethink its approach. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently partnered with We Matter Eight Mile Community Association, the local environmental justice group Davis leads, to investigate the finances and distribution of funds in both Prichard Water and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

“We are requesting records, we’re investigating.” Crystal McElrath, a SPLC senior supervising attorney said at a local meeting in July. “We know that when you take our access to water, when you take our access to healthcare, when you take our land, you are stripping us over and over and over again and preventing our ability to build generational wealth. And the Black people in America, Black people in the South, have been dealing with this on so many fronts over and over and over again.”

And while the Pettway family remains on the hook for a multiple-thousand-dollar charge, the small army of residents battling unfair bills that he has helped build is not going anywhere. “You can’t terminate their water because you haven’t done your job as a government,” says Varner.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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This article is a collaboration between Mother Jones and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. 

Sequestered in a small interrogation room, sipping an iced coffee, Nicole Chase was trying to explain just how dysfunctional things had become at Nodine’s Smokehouse Deli and Restaurant, a family-owned place in Canton, Connecticut, that specialized in smokehouse meats and toxic masculinity.

There was the time one of her colleagues came to work high on acid, she said. On a day the restaurant made only $ 100, a manager closed early and got fired. Her boss, Calvin Nodine, was constantly telling sexist jokes and drinking on the job—even the customers saw it.

Chase thought she’d learned how to handle Nodine’s roving eyes and rude remarks. Until one night in May 2017, after his wife had gone home, when Chase said he pulled her into the men’s room, exposed himself, and ordered her to perform oral sex.

Chase reported the incident to police the next day, an awkward, abbreviated interview with a rookie officer in the main lobby of the station as her mother sat next to her. Chase decided to quit that day, and six weeks later, she’d almost given up hope that anything would happen when she was asked to meet with Detective John Colangelo, who was now taking over the case as the lead investigator. She’d never spoken to him before, but he was friendly in a professional way as he ushered her into the interrogation room, listening to her stream-of-consciousness recollections and jotting down contact info for people who might corroborate her story. Chase felt a glimmer of optimism: Maybe her now-ex-boss would face some accountability after all, she thought.

An hour into their videotaped interview, though, Colangelo’s tone and posture subtly shifted. Soon, he was chiding her for interrupting him and getting off-topic. “You know, no one comes and tells us the entire truth,” he told her. “No one.”

But there was one person in this conversation who was allowed to lie. Colangelo, as a police officer, had no obligation to tell the truth at all. He leaned into a common interrogation tactic known among law enforcement as a ruse or a bluff. Most would call it a lie.

He asked Chase what she’d say if he told her Nodine had already taken two polygraph tests. She was skeptical.

“I know he’s taken two polygraphs, and I know that there are issues in some of these stories,” he said.

In fact, police records showed Nodine had refused to take a police-administered polygraph. He told Colangelo that he paid for a privately administered test, but Colangelo never saw the results. Besides, Nodine admitted to Colangelo that he’d failed it.

Chase fell for the ruse, though, and just like that, her frenetic energy shifted to despair. It was true: There was something she hadn’t told police or her lawyer or her mother; she hadn’t told anyone.

She began frantically drumming her hands on her thighs, then burst into tears.

“As soon as he told me to do it, I just did it,” she blurted. “I just didn’t know what to do.”

“So you did give him oral sex,” Colangelo stated matter-of-factly. “Yes,” Chase sobbed. “Everything else is completely true.”

Now it all came flooding out: the humiliating details of what had happened between her and her boss in the bathroom, Chase’s history of abusive relationships, her embarrassment when people wondered why someone as smart and strong as she is would tolerate such abuse, her self-loathing that the pattern continued with Nodine and she’d given in to him without a fight. The 26-year-old mother had been afraid of losing her job, then worried that no one would understand, and now she was terrified that by not telling the complete story from the beginning, she’d wrecked her case.

But Colangelo did seem to understand. In his 25 years as an officer, he’d seen it all, he assured her. He offered to work with her to revise her written statement and asked if she was going to be OK when she left.

“I kind of want to thank you for making me do this,” Chase told the detective as she wiped her eyes.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Colangelo replied. “I’m here to serve everyone.”

In the weeks following the interview, Chase emailed Colangelo and went down to the station to revise her statement. But the detective had already done the last thing anyone in her situation would expect. He’d sent a warrant to the state’s attorney charging her with making a false statement and requesting her arrest.

By some estimates, more than half of women and nearly a third of men in the US will experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes. Most of those crimes go unreported. Of the cases that make it to law enforcement, the least likely outcome is the arrest of a perpetrator. The vast majority of complaints to law enforcement end with no trial, no conviction, and, for victims, no closure—instead, they leave with a deep mistrust of the legal system, while some predators go free and attack again.

But sometimes there’s another outcome: The victim becomes the suspect, charged with false reporting—even when the attack actually occurred. “Between the way that the police treated me and the assault itself, the police treatment has definitely hit me harder,” said Emma Mannion, who was charged with false reporting in Alabama in 2016. “Half of my nightmares are of the assault. And the other half is court.”

No one knows how often victims have been charged with falsely reporting a sexual assault. There’s been little effort by law enforcement authorities to document how many assault victims are wrongfully arrested or to understand the circumstances that lead victims to be accused of false reporting.

To understand the scope of the problem, I’ve spent the past five years digging into cases like Nicole Chase’s. I’ve found at least 230 cases in which alleged sexual assault victims were charged with a lying offense and these cases represent only the proverbial tip of the iceberg: A 12-year-old was charged with making up a rape by a family member, only to prove her innocence later when the same man raped her again—and she recorded the assault. I found college students interviewed without advocates or their parents, buckling under psychological manipulation from detectives and backtracking their statements. Megan Rondini, a 20-year-old University of Alabama student, accused a wealthy and connected businessman of rape in 2015 and quickly found herself under police suspicion. Tuscaloosa police turned the tables, investigating her for theft because she went through his car and took items she said she needed to get home. Seven months later, she killed herself. A grand jury had been tasked with deciding whether to indict Rondini on two theft charges, but she died before it voted. The jury ruled only on charges against the man she accused of rape—and did not indict him.

I’ve also amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence showing the main factors that can lead victims to be wrongfully accused, featured in “Victim/Suspect,” a documentary film by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and Netflix. Police routinely unleash a slew of interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects on unsuspecting young and vulnerable people. They told a young woman that surveillance footage (marked from the wrong day and time) disproved her entire account, confusing her and causing her to question her sanity. When an 18-year-old recounted to a detective how a man she accused of sexual assault grabbed her arm and tugged her away from a party, he used a flattery technique and commented that she was a “pretty young lady” and wondered who wouldn’t want to pull on her arm.

Both would go on to recant or backtrack on their claims, leading to false reporting charges. 

My most startling discovery: Over and over again, it’s police who lie. And those lies can be used to gaslight and confuse reporting victims until they make inconsistent statements that undercut their credibility—and sometimes even make them recant. Of the 52 cases I analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds involved a recantation. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police in the records Reveal obtained.

People do sometimes lie about rape, just like any other crime: Criminal justice experts estimate that 2 percent to 8 percent of sex crime accusations are false. American history is replete with horrific examples. In the Jim Crow South, White people’s fabricated allegations of sexual assault were often the pretext for lynching Black men and terrorizing entire communities. In recent years, a few hyper-publicized incidents, like the 2014 Rolling Stone piece in which an anonymous source seemed to have made up her account about being repeatedly raped at a University of Virginia frat party, have stoked the belief—embraced by the men’s rights movement—that rape accusations are often made up.

Rape denialism runs alarmingly deep in the law enforcement community, too, for male and female officers. It’s common for police officers to overestimate the rate of false reporting of rape, even if they are assigned to work with victims of sex crimes. A 2010 study for the National Institute of Justice analyzed interviews with 49 detectives in different sex crime units and found that a majority of officers with limited or moderate experience (fewer than seven years) estimated that between 40 percent and 80 percent of all reports of rape were false. And a 2018 study published in Violence and Victims found that the more an officer believed in rape myths—the idea that women report rape after regrettable sex, for example, or that they bear responsibility if they were drunk—the higher they estimated the rate of false rape reports.

“If you think large numbers of people are lying,” says Lisa Avalos, an associate law professor at Louisiana State University who has spent a decade studying wrongful prosecutions of assault victims in the US and abroad, “your No. 1 approach to rape investigation is going to be, ‘Let me see if I can prove that she’s lying.’” 

Sexual assault cases are inherently difficult to investigate, often plagued by a lack of corroborating evidence. “If you haven’t received really solid training and you don’t have a good professional support system to investigate the cases properly, what you’re thinking about is, ‘This is a case that’s taking my time…I need to clear it and get it off my plate as quickly as I can,’” Avalos says. “One of the ways that an officer can clear a sexual assault case is to decide the case is unfounded because the victim was actually lying.”

Police officers can be especially critical of acquaintance-rape cases, which make up an estimated 80 percent of sexual assaults. “The reality is that most victims actually know their assailants,” Avalos says, but among law enforcement, “there is sort of a blanket assumption…that if you know the guy, he can’t have raped you.” Often in such cases, she says the default police reaction is “to just assume the victim must be lying—’the victim must have some kind of vendetta against this individual.’”

That impulse is further fueled by a lack of trauma-informed training in how to interview victims of sex crimes. In recent decades, a large body of research has emerged showing the debilitating effects of sexual trauma on memory and behavior. Assault victims often can’t recall details of their attack, even in the immediate aftermath. They frequently omit important information—like the fact that they performed a sexual act because they were too afraid to fight back—out of embarrassment or shame or fear that they won’t be believed.

“It’s called avoidance behavior. We train on this all the time: ‘I’m gonna avoid talking about this part of the assault because it’s just too painful,’” says Tom Tremblay, a former police chief and former state public safety commissioner in Vermont who consults with police departments across the country on trauma-informed investigating. Avoidance is most common in settings “when the victim doesn’t feel physically, psychologically and emotionally safe,” Tremblay says.

Even something as basic as the way officers typically ask questions can be problematic, he says. “Police are trained to ask, ‘What happened? What happened next? What happened after that?’ ” That can force victims to relive a trauma before they’re ready, which can make them more confused—and seemingly unreliable. “We should not be demanding or expecting a chronological narrative for someone who’s experienced trauma.”

But many police officers don’t understand—or don’t take seriously—how trauma and stress can warp a victim’s memory and cognitive functioning. They view inconsistencies and omissions as evidence that a victim is dishonest. This is an error law enforcement makes again and again, Tremblay says. “We’ve misinterpreted trauma repeatedly and looked at it like it was deception.”

And because police officers don’t get much specialized training in talking to sex crime victims, they resort to techniques they do know how to use, including ruses and bluffs – methods designed specifically to interrogate suspects and obtain confessions, not to elicit a victim’s painful and truthful story. “It’s OK for police to present hypotheticals in an interrogation of a suspect of a crime,” Tremblay says. “That is not good police procedure to do that to a victim of a crime who’s experienced trauma.” A big part of a victim interview is to build trust, he says. “And you can’t build trust when you lie.”

The betrayal goes deeper, Avalos argues. “You are confusing a person who is already traumatized and already has memory difficulties. This is not how you get information.” In the context of a sexual assault, bluffing is “a really toxic thing to do to a victim,” Avalos says. “She’s wondering, ‘Am I crazy? Did I make this whole thing up?’ ”

Tremblay acknowledged that sexual assault cases are one of the most complex crimes to investigate. They can be hard to prove, and prosecutors tend to hold cases up to a standard of whether a jury would convict—even though the vast majority of criminal cases end in a plea agreement. But Tremblay says he is absolutely sure of one thing: Chase’s omission does not amount to a lie.

I first met Nicole Chase last year at her house in a small town in Connecticut, close to Hartford. It had been her grandmother’s house, where Chase and her mother both grew up. Now Chase owns it, sharing the cozy, spotless space with her fiancé, two kids, a cat and a bloodhound puppy. She’s down to earth, quick to admit when there’s legal jargon she can’t pronounce, but she tries anyway. She is surprisingly open and willing to talk about past traumas.

It had been five years since the ordeal with her former boss Calvin Nodine, and she felt like it was finally behind her. “I’m hoping that this is the end of the cycle of all the bad,” she says.

For Chase, the cycle of bad started early. Her father was addicted to crack cocaine, she has reported, and she was using it too by the time she was 11 or 12. Before long, she was addicted, eventually spending a year in rehab. In her 20s, she was involved with a man who she says abused her physically and emotionally. By the time she found the Nodine’s job, “I had no savings. I didn’t even have a bank account…I had not a pot to piss in.” Eager to impress her new employer, Chase threw herself into her job, doing a little bit of everything—ringing up orders, cleaning, preparing food. Her mother sometimes worked at the restaurant, too.

Nodine was 30 years older and far more affluent, though in blue jeans and suspenders, he gave off a casual country vibe, much like the decor of his restaurant. Nodine’s Smokehouse, founded by his late father in the 1960s, produced high-quality Connecticut-made hams, bacon, and sausages for sale in grocery stores around the country. The restaurant opened in 2016. He liked to tell dirty jokes, and his female employees were often the target. Chase’s younger colleague Allie Archer told me Chase was singled out. One of Nodine’s favorite jokes was about blondes being like butter, “easy to spread.” Chase, who was the only blonde working there, says she brushed him off and just kept working.

After a promising opening, the restaurant began to struggle, and Nodine started attracting the wrong kind of attention. “Very inconsistent,” a Yelp review from April 2017 reads. “Owner can be seen randomly wandering in his socks with beer in hand.” In May 2017, Nodine’s stepson—the head chef and general manager—quit abruptly, and the staff turmoil deepened.

The bathroom incident occurred a few days later, during this chaotic period. Earlier that day, a visibly inebriated Nodine told one of his trademark dirty jokes, this time going so far as to grope Chase’s butt as Archer watched. “I wish I had actually said something to him,” Archer said. “I wish I’d slapped him, honestly.”

At some point that same day, Nodine informed Chase she was getting a promotion—she would be the new manager. Later that night, her ride home already waiting for her in the parking lot, she encountered Nodine standing alone in the hallway. Chase said he hugged her and told her that they were going to get through this hard time. Then, according to Chase, he pulled her into the men’s room, shut the door behind them, and demanded oral sex.

That was as much as Chase felt safe telling a young officer named Adam Gompper in a recorded interview the next day in the lobby of the Canton Police Department. She’d brought along her mother for support. She left out the worst parts of it all—how Nodine had pushed her head down toward his exposed genitals and that out of fear, she gave him oral sex.

Gompper never asked whether she complied, and he said he didn’t think the incident sounded like a sexual assault. But he agreed that Nodine’s actions were inappropriate and said Chase could make a formal report when and if she was ready.

In the meantime, he suggested that she confront Nodine and tell him to leave her alone. Gompper added that he hoped things worked out for her. “But it sounds like he’s never going to change,” he told her.

Chase returned to the restaurant later that day. She hoped Nodine had been so drunk that he wouldn’t remember what happened. Maybe he’d even apologize. Instead, he summoned her to help clean his small, closet-like office. She declined.

“Can you think of something else better to do than fuck me?” he asked, according to Chase.

Chase worked the rest of her shift, enlisting two male co-workers to stay near her so she wouldn’t be alone with her boss. At the end of the day, she grabbed a photo of her daughter that she kept at work, walked out the door, and never went back.

A few days later, she and Archer went to the police station to give written statements. But once again, Chase couldn’t bring herself to disclose everything that had happened in the bathroom. She thought she didn’t need to.   

“I just figured that I was going to say as much as I was comfortable saying and that he’d be held accountable for something or just even get a restraining order,” Chase told me. “And I’d go on my merry way.”

Calvin Nodine declined to be interviewed. Detective John Colangelo’s attorney said in an emailed statement that Colangelo “acted appropriately at all times,” and that she advised Colangelo not to speak with me. But I obtained a police interview between Nodine and Colangelo that occurred a few weeks after the incident, and what’s most striking about it is how differently the police detective handled major changes in Nodine’s story. Colangelo didn’t just ignore the inconsistencies; he gave Nodine and his lawyer a strategy for how to explain them away and even turn Chase from the accuser into the suspect.

The recorded meeting took place in the same claustrophobic room as Chase’s interview, but with four people in attendance—Officer Adam Gompper and Nodine’s lawyer were also there.

Colangelo, now the lead detective, does most of the talking. In classic TV cop-show fashion, he started off chummy and casual, chit-chatting about golf before introducing the issue at hand.

“You got employees in an uproar or something…What’s this girl’s name? Nicole?” Colangelo asks, sounding disgruntled. “What’s Nicole’s deal?”

The detective notes that Chase’s complaint alleged inappropriate talk and “sexual stuff.” He hadn’t questioned Chase yet, but he makes it clear that he already has his doubts.

“Let me put it this way: I’m not so sure I believe everything she’s telling me,” Colangelo says.

In the video, Nodine appears uncomfortable, his legs crossed and twisting away from his slumped shoulders. He acknowledges that he uses crude language sometimes—“I’m a meat guy, I grew up in meat plants,” Nodine says—but he insists nothing happened that night, or ever, with Chase.

Colangelo tells him he’s got conflicting accounts—from Chase and another employee. He offers Nodine another scenario. “If you were fooling around with (Chase) consensually, that’s a whole different story.”

Before Nodine can respond, his attorney cuts him off. He asks to speak with his client alone.

A few minutes later, Nodine comes back with a new story: In this telling, something did happen, but it was Chase who was the aggressor. Now, Nodine claims she grabbed him in the dark hallway and told him that she needed to show him something in the men’s room. Then she pulled down his pants and performed oral sex.

“So you think she’s a liar?” Colangelo asks.

“As far as it not being consensual? Absolutely,” Nodine replies.

Nodine’s old and new stories clearly conflicted. At least one of them had to be a lie.

At this point, according to sexual assault experts who’ve seen the video, Colangelo had the advantage. If his goal was to prove or disprove the case against Nodine, he should have started asking detail-oriented questions to confirm Chase’s statement or expose inconsistencies in Nodine’s story: How long were you in the bathroom? How much did you have to drink? Did you lock the door or did she? Where were your hands while this was taking place?

Instead, Colangelo suggests that Nodine take a polygraph. If he passes, the detective says he’ll have the leverage to ask Chase to take a polygraph, too. He tells Nodine he’s done this before with another woman he suspected of lying.

“So you switch the case,” Colangelo explains. “That’s all.”

As for Nodine’s initial lie that nothing had happened, Colangelo shrugs it off with a sports analogy, telling Nodine he’ll give him “a bit of a base on balls on the first false statement.”

Even Nodine’s claim later that he failed a private lie detector test—he blamed medication he forgot to take—didn’t prompt Colangelo to interview any of the people Chase named or to take any other steps to corroborate her story.

Despite the inconsistencies in Nodine’s story, Colangelo chose to lie to Chase about the polygraph and use the omissions in her own story to charge her with giving a false statement to a law enforcement officer, a misdemeanor. In early September 2017, four months after making her initial report, Chase found herself back at the police station, where she was fingerprinted and her mugshot taken. If convicted, she faced a fine of $ 2,000 and up to a year in jail.

In numerous ways, Nicole Chase is typical of the victims-turned-suspects in my analysis. Nearly all were women; most were under 30 when arrested. More than two-thirds knew their alleged assailant; few put up any physical resistance to their assailant or suffered visible injuries.

The victims charged with false reporting in my analysis were usually White. Even though Black and Brown people experience sexual violence at higher rates, they are less likely to report their assaults due to historical mistreatment by police, law professor Lisa Avalos says. “There are many women of color today who don’t believe that the police are going to help them, and so they don’t even go to begin with.”

And as in Chase’s case, I found others in which the central evidence supporting a false reporting arrest was derived from police bluffs or ruses. Sometimes police told a lie to manipulate a reluctant victim into coming to the station for arrest. In a 2018 case, a law student in Kansas was asked to come to the station to help police decipher an anonymous letter connected to her report that a colleague had raped her. But when she arrived, the detective admitted there was no letter. “I got you here under, basically, a ruse,” he said in their recorded interview.

Instead, he had a warrant for her arrest. A short while later, she left in handcuffs on her way to jail. She was charged with three counts of false reporting—one for each time she said she was raped. The prosecutor’s office later dismissed the charges, saying it believed in the “merits” of the case but didn’t want to discourage other survivors from reporting their attacks.

In three instances, investigators lied about supposedly damning video evidence that they claimed contradicted the victims’ stories. After 18-year-old freshman Nikki Yovino reported being raped by two men at a college party in Connecticut in 2016, a detective told her there was cellphone video of the entire sexual act, proving that she wasn’t assaulted. Faced with such “proof,” she recounted to me, “I told him what he wanted to hear just so he can leave me alone.” He asked repetitive questions, and when he didn’t like her first, second, or third answers to the same question, she backed down, edited her statements, and eventually agreed when police insisted the encounter was consensual. But the police claim about the video was a lie; investigators had only an eight-second video that offered no insight about whether Yovino consented. After a year of fighting the charges and on the verge of trial, Yovino pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree falsely reporting an incident and one count of interfering with police. She was sentenced to a year behind bars and three more on probation.

The detective told her that surveillance evidence contradicted her story, that she was caught making out with the man she accused and went willingly into his car. She was lying, he said, and taking time away from his “true” victims. She apologized and was arrested that day. But she never saw the footage. Her mental health was rapidly declining and she was fearful that she might not survive a trial, so she pleaded guilty to a youthful offender charge—a catchall used for young people so they can keep records sealed. She never saw any surveillance footage until Reveal sued in 2020 to obtain it. There were no cameras recording the parking lot where she said she was raped. The only footage of Mannion showed a brief kiss while walking with the suspect, which she’d already told police about. 

Dyanie Bermeo was 21 in 2020 when she told deputies in Washington County, Virginia, that a police officer or someone impersonating one had pulled her over and groped her. Officers doubted her account and told her they found surveillance footage proving that no one pulled her over. She never saw the footage – which was dark, grainy, and labeled with the wrong date and time—before they interrogated her. So when they asked if the stop really happened, she said it didn’t; Bermeo told me it was because she was tired of trying to prove herself and wanted the interrogation to end. A judge later vindicated her by finding her not guilty of the false reporting charge on appeal.

In nearly all the cases in my data sample, the alleged victims-turned-suspects were charged with misdemeanors, which carry lower sentences than felonies. Still, law enforcement’s zeal to punish their alleged lies was sometimes evident in the creativity of the charges. In Yovino’s false reporting case in Connecticut, prosecutors used her rape kit to tack on an extra felony charge, arguing that she “used her own vaginal secretions, which were indicative of recent intercourse, to mislead the nurse and law enforcement,” according to court records.

More routinely, law enforcement agencies promote the arrests, creating the conditions for public shaming. “It’s as though police are proud,” Avalos says. “They’re telling the community, ‘We have identified a false reporter of sexual assault, and her name is Jane Doe.’ ” In many of the cases I examined, alleged victims saw their full names, mugshots, and horrific details of their alleged assaults published in newspapers or on police social media accounts—often without their knowledge, much less their consent—triggering a cascade of online harassment and vicious slurs. Some cases became national news, stoked by media reports and men’s rights groups. Women were told by online commenters that they should get longer prison sentences or that they weren’t attractive enough to have been assaulted.

Public shaming doesn’t just compound the trauma of being sexually assaulted and then not being believed. In the internet era, the injuries—social, legal, mental, moral—are life-altering and almost impossible to overcome. Many of the women in my investigation cut short their schooling, left jobs, and moved to places where their cases weren’t known, but their efforts were often futile. Mannion tried to rebuild her life after her arrest, leaving the University of Alabama and moving back home to New Hampshire. She applied for several open positions to teach dance and got a call back for one. Mannion arrived expecting an interview. Instead, the hiring manager said she had Googled her and called her foolish for thinking the studio would ever hire a “criminal.”

“The whole thing felt unnecessarily malicious,” Mannion recalls.

The consequences for false reporting prosecutions are devastating not just for wrongly accused victims, but also for the criminal justice system and the safety of entire communities. “They are chilling the reporting of sexual assault because other victims are going to be afraid to come forward,” Lisa Avalos says. “The message that they send to all the sexual assault survivors in their community is that if the police don’t believe you, they might prosecute you.”

I’ve seen how this plays out firsthand. During my investigation, a former roommate of one of the prosecuted women in my database confided that she, too, had been sexually assaulted, not long after her roommate’s attack. She was worried she might get the same treatment from police if she came forward. So she never did.

Yet instead of taking steps to protect sex crime victims from being wrongfully accused, at least four state legislatures – Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Missouri—have introduced bills in recent years aimed at making false reporting a more serious crime. Montana passed such a law in 2021. A few other bills would open the door to bring civil lawsuits against a person who makes an alleged false report. West Virginia, and Illinois introduced bills in 2021 that were so broad that a person who was simply questioned by police could sue for being falsely accused. The Illinois proposal specified that the claim could go forward even if the other person was acquitted of filing a false report. Neither bill passed.

Bills in at least eight states have targeted false reports motivated by bias, which is intended to deter people from calling law enforcement on people of color or other vulnerable groups of people. But the increased penalties could inadvertently affect sexual assault victims. Another spate of bills designed to stop “swatting,” or reporting a fake emergency, could ensnare some sexual assault reports. But at least one proposal was squarely aimed at people reporting rape: One lawmaker in Alabama—where Emma Mannion and Megan Rondini were both charged—tried in 2019 to upgrade the penalty for false reports of rape and sexual assault from a misdemeanor to a class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The bill died in committee.

A far better approach, Avalos says, would be to ban the use of bluffs and ruses against people who’ve reported a sexual assault.

Additionally, if police want to press charges against a reporting victim, prosecutors should use their discretion to determine whether criminal charges are the best course of action to promote public safety, according to the organization End Violence Against Women International, a nonprofit that teaches trauma-informed law enforcement responses.

One of the organization’s training bulletins points out that prosecutors have an ethical obligation to balance their duty to enforce the law with the public’s interest. “They are not required to file charges just because they have the evidence to do so,” it says.

In a case like Nicole Chase’s, it was the state attorney who signed the warrant, leading to her arrest.

Police must also change their attitudes about sexual assault allegations, says police consultant Tom Tremblay—instead of automatic skepticism, they should begin every investigation by assuming the attack happened. Tremblay didn’t come up with this idea; End Violence Against Women International has built an entire training campaign around the idea that police should “Start by Believing.” But he’s a big fan, in part because he thinks it helps police do a better job of getting to the truth of what happened and solving a case. Skepticism or doubt signals to a victim that reporting the crime was the wrong course of action and is likely to make her shut down, he says – or in a worst-case scenario, falsely recant just to get away from police. If a victim feels they’re being helped, they’re more likely to participate in the investigation, providing better details, evidence, and leads to follow, Tremblay says.

Trauma-informed training for police is also critically important, he says. This involves everything from understanding how trauma affects memory to knowing how to question victims and understanding that just because victims leave out major details from their initial accounts doesn’t mean they’re lying.

When Chase revealed that she had complied with Calvin Nodine’s demands, Tremblay said he would have asked what he summarizes as “thinking, feeling, and experiencing” questions: “We’re gonna support you in this process, but help us understand your thought process when you said this. Help us understand what you were experiencing when you said this. Help us understand what you might have been feeling when you left this information out.” Chase would have had the chance to explain what she told me: that she was scared, worried what Nodine would do if she denied him, and feeling like she had left her own body. A trauma-informed detective would recognize that this sounded like disassociation—a common psychological response for victims of sexual violence.

But police departments have to improve many other aspects of sex crime investigations, too. Avalos wants to see new requirements that would place the burden on police to prove elements of the case before resorting to false reporting charges. First, Avalos argues, a thorough investigation of the sexual assault is a necessity. Officers should interview key witnesses, review lab results and give the victim time to rest and recover memories, for example. After that investigation, if charges are pursued, there should be evidence that no sexual assault occurred or was attempted—and not be based solely on a recantation. Avalos says it’s also necessary that police not rely on rape myths or trauma responses to conclude that the victim lied.

There is one important way that Nicole Chase’s case stands out from many others in my five-year investigation. She used the legal system to fight back. Her criminal case was dropped a month after her initial court appearance, and she decided to sue everyone. Her lawyer filed a civil suit against the city of Canton, the police department, Detective John Colangelo, Officer Adam Gompper, and Calvin Nodine, which in turn triggered an internal affairs investigation of Colangelo’s conduct in the case.

Colangelo was suspended for three days without pay for his actions. He then sued the police chief and the city in 2021 for a “sham” investigation to “appease the #metoo movement,” according to court records, but a judge dismissed his claim. He retired that same year and is now the head of security at a local nonprofit. After a series of disciplinary incidents unrelated to Chase’s case, Gompper also resigned and now works as a police dispatcher for a nearby department. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Nodine denied ever having sexually assaulted or harassed Chase and was never criminally charged, but he agreed to settle for an undisclosed amount. His restaurant closed in 2019. The city fought the lawsuit for years, including an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but finally settled with Chase for $ 800,000 last year.

For Chase and her lawyers, the victory wasn’t just about money. The lawsuit also set an important legal precedent, as federal District Judge Vanessa L. Bryant ruled that victims have no obligation to report their assaults or to include every painful detail.

And it prompted a change to Canton police policy: If an officer decides to go after a reporting victim, a supervisor now must review the case first.

These days, Chase is no longer working on anyone’s schedule but her own. She’s not on her feet all day. She decorates epoxy tumblers and sells them on Facebook, when time allows. She’s home for her kids after school, makes dinner for them and her fiancé, and takes care of the dog and cat, in the childhood home they were able to buy due to the settlement money.

She still deals with vivid nightmares about Nodine and the police and anxiety that prevents her from driving. But life is peaceful, stable, comfortable, and maybe even predictable most days – a far cry from the chaos of before. The string of trauma from her father, her ex, Nodine, and the police – she says she is ready to put it all behind her.

“I pray that there’s no more,” Chase says. “I’m hoping that is the last thing that comes to me in this life in the form of men.”

Katharine Mieszkowski and Melissa Lewis contributed reporting. Betty Márquez Rosales, Skyler Glover, Vanessa Ochavillo, and Elena Neale-Sacks and Sinduja Rangarajan contributed research. Sarah Cohen and Soo Oh contributed data analysis. This story was edited by Kate Howard, Nina Martin, and Amanda Pike and copyedited by Nikki Frick.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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It’s a riveting, baffling, and/or solemn day in this country when the highest court must step in to adjudicate a definitional dispute as basic as this: Does “and” mean “and”? Or does it mean “or”? Lower courts want to know. As do legal scholars, criminal defendants, and copy editors everywhere.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in Pulsifer v. United States, a case that turns on a federal law’s use of “and.” Circuit courts are divided over what the word means in a statute aimed at reducing mass incarceration through an array of criminal justice reforms. For thousands of defendants, eligibility for relief from mandatory minimum sentencing depends on whether “and” in a provision of the landmark First Step Act was deliberately or mistakenly written to conjoin requirements for reduced prison time—and to what extent Congress’ intent matters.

Below is the fine print. Don’t let your head spin. There’s math involved, plus parsing of semicolons and em dashes. But one hopes the Supreme Court justices, in their nontrivial copy-edit wisdom, can swiftly untangle this knot. (“Points” below refers to the system of sentencing based on points assigned to past crimes and current crimes being sentenced for.) A defendant is eligible for relief if:

the defendant does not have—
(A) more than 4 criminal history points, excluding any criminal history points resulting from a 1-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines;
(B) a prior 3-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines; and
(C) a prior 2-point violent offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines;

Taken at face value, defendants qualify for relief if they do not simultaneously meet all three conditions, because “and” bundles them. But read differently, “and” could be construed to mean that any of the conditions satisfies the “does not” test—if “does not” distributes across them, and, by implication, if Congress meant “and” to function as “or.” And this isn’t pedantic. Vastly different prison outcomes are at stake. More than 10,000 people sentenced in recent years could be affected.

Lawyers for the petitioner, Mark Pulsifer, who pleaded guilty to felony drug distribution with a prior conviction, argued he should be granted relief because “‘and’ is still conjunctive” after the negative “does not,” much like “Don’t drink and drive” would mean you could maybe do either but can’t do both. His lawyers cited that analogy, but the First Step Act punctuates unclearly, as in “Don’t—(A) drink; and (B) drive.” Would that mean don’t drink and don’t drive, instead of merely not doing both at the same time?

Justice Elena Kagan tackled that very example during Monday’s oral arguments, comparing it to a hypothetical medical test:

So you’re going in for a medical test and you receive something from the hospital, and it says, to receive this test, the patient should not, and then, you know, it has a list of things that the patient shouldn’t do, and it says the patient shouldn’t eat any food, drink any liquids, and smoke. So I’m going to assume…that you’re not a smoker. Do you feel perfectly able to eat and drink as much as you want?

Kagan suggested that this hypothetical hospital’s use of the word “and”—and perhaps, by extension, the First Step Act’s “and”— would be “different from an example like drink and drive” because “there’s something that connects those two [verbs] so that we know that the harm comes from the relationship between the two, whereas in this case we know that the harm follows from any one of the things. Either way you’re using context to establish meaning, aren’t you?”

Kagan’s framing is the crux of the controversy: Appellate courts for the 4th, 9th, and 11th circuits have read “and” conjunctively, which would lighten prison sentences. But the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th circuits have come down differently, interpreting “does not” as distributive across the three conditions, which would deny relief to defendants who meet any of the provision’s conditions. This approach would make mathematical sense of the First Step Act. The law’s calculations are confusing because someone with both the 3-point offense from (B) and the 2-point violent offense from (C) would have at least 5 points and would automatically exceed the 4 criminal history points in (A)—making (A) meaningless or extraneous. To give (A) meaning, some courts have said “and” has to mean “or.” But does it?

I’ve asked several legal scholars. (Disclosure: A family member of mine is a circuit court judge who has ruled on this law, but we have not discussed the case, the statute, this article, or theories of textualism, and I learned of Pulsifer only through a newsroom colleague.)

Pulsifer presents, “at least plausibly, a situation in which Congress simply misspoke” by “substituting ‘and’ for ‘or,’” says Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler in an email, “but because existing doctrine requires such linguistic mistakes (known as ‘scrivener’s errors’) to be unmistakable, the government is forced to argue that Congress’s wording in the statute is precise but that the statute is disjunctive nonetheless.” And the government’s case is conceivable. It is possible “that Congress meant the statute to read ‘the defendant does not have (A); (the defendant does not have) (B); and (the defendant does not have) (C).’”

“Scrivener’s errors” are legislative drafting mistakes. It is widely accepted for courts to correct them if the mistakes are absolutely clear, Doerfler has written. But the risk of courts rewriting law rather than correcting mere drafting mistakes is tremendous. That would constitute a staggering judicial overreach—especially in a criminal context—so the bar is purposefully high for courts to fix legislative errors. But is the bar too high? Doerfler has argued that the standard is indeed “much too strict” because it prevents judges from recognizing legislative typos. In their efforts not to rewrite law, courts can misinterpret text by failing to name drafting errors in the law, a pendulum swing past the best balance. So some courts assert themselves by interpreting “and” as “or.”

“I’m sure [this legal dispute] seems strange to a copy chief,” says professor Erica Zunkel of the University of Chicago Law School. “How crazy to ask whether ‘and’ actually means ‘and’ or if it means ‘or.’ Only in law…(or if you’re a U.S. President).”

“Sometimes Congress doesn’t do a great job drafting legislation that is clear and unambiguous and there can be serious implications for people’s freedom when that happens,” she says. “One of the reasons there’s even purported ‘ambiguity’” in Pulsifer “is that there’s an instinct to assume that Congress can’t possibly have meant to expand relief for individuals charged with drug offenses so much.”

“In many charging contexts, ‘and’ is regularly interpreted as ‘or,’” says Daniel Richman, a Columbia Law professor and former federal prosecutor. “It is also a world in which, not surprisingly, judges are quite open to interesting arguments that, if accepted, would increase judicial discretion to put aside mandatory minimums.”

The court has become “more and more obsessed with language and grammar in recent years,” says Stanford Law professor Jeff Fisher. “Oral argument these days can seem like being in a sixth grade English class.”

“The Court has had cases, for example, that turned on the word ‘so’” and “the use of a definite article instead of indefinite (‘the’ instead of ‘a’),” he says. “This is all a product of the ascendancy of ‘textualism’—the theory of statutory construction that aims to discern precisely what the words Congress enacted mean, as opposed to what Congress probably intended to say.”

Pulsifer captures top-court attention “in no small part because a majority of judges to address the issue have said that ‘and’ in fact does mean ‘or,’” says professor Adam Davidson, also of the University of Chicago. The rise of textualism has led “some conservative justices to liberal outcomes in recent cases.” He cites Bostock v. Clayton County, the civil rights case that centered on defining “sex”; Niz-Chavez v. Garland, the immigration case that atomized the single letter “a”; and Borden v. United States, the sentencing case that parsed the word “against” in a federal statute.

The Supreme Court hears “lots of cases [that] turn on the meaning of a single (common) word,” says Aziz Huq, also a University of Chicago law professor. “There’s a famous case that all law students read in contracts about what the word ‘chicken’ means; I used to teach a class on what ‘fruit’ meant in a federal statute.”

“And” clashes are not new. Justice Department litigators have long seen this day coming and kept a department playbook for defining the word. The Criminal Resource Manual, now archived, says exactly how and when to deploy certain interpretations of “and” for preferred outcomes. And grammatical lawsuits are increasingly common, from the $ 5 million settlement in a serial comma clash to an attempt to overturn Obamacare based on an apparent drafting error; the wrangling over the Second Amendment’s syntax; and the comma collision in a federal robocall ban.

This is all a big problem, Doerfler says, not because precise word choice isn’t important for encoding policies in law, but because written language invites competing interpretations. Linguistic analysis only gets you so far. Atomization of words cannot resolve every textual dispute, but “because the Court today feels either compelled or entitled to pretend that legal [linguistic] analysis can resolve every dispute it is presented with, the Court’s linguistic analysis is, in my view, frequently stilted as it attempts to present statutory language as linguistically clear when, in reality, multiple readings are entirely plausible,” he says.

As you were, copy editors. Your democratic duty is robust and/or recognized. Listen to the arguments, read the transcript, and send outcome predictions to styleguide@motherjones.com.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the “social cost of carbon,” one of the most important calculations in US climate policy, on Tuesday. The controversial metric attempts to quantify the hidden price of emitting carbon dioxide, from flood damage to health effects. The court’s surprise decision sets the stage for the Biden administration to broaden the metric’s use across federal agencies when formulating climate-related regulations.

One of President Joe Biden’s very first executive orders in January 2021 directed agencies to recalculate the social cost of carbon—currently placed at $ 51 a ton while the government finalizes its revised estimate. In the meantime, Republican state attorneys general have been flinging lawsuits at the administration in an attempt to block its ability to use the metric in evaluating regulations.

But their plans were thwarted by Tuesday’s order from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Without any explanation, the justices declined to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case in which 12 states alleged that Biden’s executive order violated the constitutional separation of powers. A federal appeals court ruled last year that the states suing over the use of the estimate didn’t have legal standing because they couldn’t show they’d been harmed by the way agencies had applied the metric.

It’s the second time the Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge to the social cost of carbon. Last year, the justices blocked a similar request led by Louisiana.

The social cost of carbon is likely to have cascading effects on agriculture, power plants, oil and gas leases, and more. That’s because federal agencies have to weigh the costs and benefits of any regulation they adopt. If the government accounts for the true costs of emitting greenhouse gases—lost lives, dying crops, homes swallowed by rising seas—then decisions that result in more carbon emissions start to look a lot more expensive, while those that reduce emissions look like a smart deal.

The Obama administration, the first to require agencies to use this metric in assessing rules, placed the social cost of carbon at $ 43 a ton—a move that helped justify things like stronger emissions standards for vehicles. The Trump administration calculated the number differently and, in typical fashion, slashed the number down to a couple bucks per ton. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed $ 190 a ton, nearly four times higher than the estimate the Biden administration currently uses. (The EPA’s number is in line with estimates from independent experts.)

Because the social cost of carbon is so influential in developing climate policy, some Republicans consider it a paragon of the “radical climate agenda.” In response to the Supreme Court’s rejection of Missouri’s challenge, Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general, vowed to “continue to combat government overreach at every turn.” 

Analysts say the fight isn’t over yet. In a note to clients, the research firm ClearView Energy Partners said the ruling doesn’t preclude states—or anyone else—from suing over specific agency actions and rules that rely on the social cost of carbon, E&E News reported.

In recent months, the White House announced that it was considering applying the social cost of carbon more broadly across agencies, in everything from annual budgets and permitting decisions to fines for violating environmental regulations. It represents a sea change in how the government approaches climate policy: For decades, policies to reduce emissions had been cast as an economic burden, a narrative propelled by oil industry-backed studies that made legislation look prohibitively expensive.

Now, the frame has switched: Carbon emissions are viewed as the economic harm, and climate policy is the balm.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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In recent years, thousands of foster kids have been admitted to psychiatric facilities owned by health care giant Universal Health Services, according to a yearlong Mother Jones investigation. Sometimes, they leave far worse off than when they arrived. 

While the investigation focuses on the story of Katrina Edwards, who spent years in UHS’s North Star Behavioral Health, in Anchorage, several former foster children in Alaska shared similar accounts. They talked about the violence, seclusion, and overmedication at UHS facilities, and of feeling abandoned by the Office of Children’s Services, the state’s child welfare agency.

Below, five former foster youth recount their experiences at North Star and another UHS center. (UHS couldn’t comment on the specific stories, but has denied similar allegations.) Their stories reflect claims made in pending lawsuits against UHS, and have been lightly edited for clarity.

Alexies Ezell

20 years old; at North Star three times between 2017 and 2019, totaling six months

“It was just really lonely. No one would call unless it was a court date. I felt really forgotten about. And when [OCS] would check in, it’d be just very brief, just like, ‘Oh, you’re okay? You’re still alive? Okay, well, we’re still looking for a placement.’”

Mateo Jaime

21 years old; at North Star for two months around 2018

“With North Star, once you’re there long enough, you want to be a juvenile delinquent. You want to cause trouble. Everything’s so gray. There’s no purpose to be there. Therapy’s once every two weeks—so-called therapy. During that time, they just want to send you to Nevada. They want to send you to Oklahoma, send you to California. It was this merry-go-round, merry-go-round.”

Nathon Pressley

26 years old; at North Star for eight stays from 2003 to 2011, totaling 14 months

By age 6, “they stick me with people that are [older]. I could say one wrong word and suddenly I had my face in the ground. So I started misbehaving as well. I would get angry at people keeping me there. I would tell adults to fuck off. I learned those words very quickly. That’s how the chain started. They would throw me into a cage and treat me like an animal. I would act like an animal in return, and they would keep on caging me.”

Abigail Redmon

19 years old; at North Star three times from 2016 to 2020, totaling roughly 3.5 months

“We weren’t supposed to bring bugs inside, but there was a small outside part with a basketball hoop. I used to go back there and lift up the mats and find worms. I found an inchworm one time, and I named him José. I tried to keep him alive as long as I could, sneaking pieces of broccoli and carrots in my clothes to bring upstairs. I also had a spider. His name was Mark. José and Mark, they were in styrofoam cups all the way in the back of the desk.”

Jyasia Batts

22 years old; at North Star an estimated 11 times and Texas NeuroRehab Center for two years starting in 2011

“There was this male [staffer at Texas NeuroRehab]—he slammed my head into the floor. And he put his elbow on the side of my face, just digging it in. It got to a point where I couldn’t breathe because he was putting so much pressure on me. After that, they put me in my room and told me I couldn’t come out. I was obviously hysterically crying. I was in pain. The fact that the bruises were so visible was traumatizing. That’s when OCS should have taken me out. But I stayed there. I remember [my caseworker’s] response was, ‘You just have a few more months and you will be discharged.’”

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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On Friday, Mother Jones published a yearlong investigation into the warehousing of foster children at facilities owned by the nation’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, Universal Health Services. Today, we’re pleased to share a new podcast version of the investigation as part of a special collaboration with Reveal:

The investigation follows the story of Katrina Edwards, a former Alaska foster child who spent years at UHS facilities. She was put on high doses of psychiatric medications, physically restrained, held in seclusion, and forcibly injected with sedatives, according to medical and court records. Perhaps worst of all, there was no end in sight. At times, she remained locked in long after she was ready for discharge because there was no foster home available for her. 

Our investigation found that Edwards’ story isn’t uncommon: Foster children from 38 states were admitted to UHS inpatient psychiatric facilities more than 36,000 times between 2017 and 2022, where they often spend weeks or months. Foster kids are a lucrative patient base for the same reasons they’re vulnerable: There’s rarely an adult on the outside scrambling to get them out, and often, they don’t have anywhere else to go. Plus, Medicaid typically foots the bill. As one expert put it, for companies like UHS, foster kids are a “cash cow.”

You can listen to the investigation here, on your local NPR station, or wherever you get your podcasts.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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The national outcry after major mass shootings always includes calls to keep guns away from dangerously troubled people. That possibility existed ahead of the devastating violence in Lewiston, Maine, as much as with any case in recent memory.

Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition, according to CNN. (It’s not yet clear whether Card was involuntarily committed.)

By mid-September, the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence. According to a statement released Monday by the Sheriff’s Office, after a deputy was unable to locate Card on September 15, the agency notified other law enforcement in the state: “The alert included a warning that Mr. Card was known to be armed and dangerous and included details of his behavior. The alert urged that officers use extreme caution.”

According to the sheriff’s statement, Card’s unit commander and brother then said they were acting to keep firearms away from Card and working to help get him additional treatment. The sheriff’s office canceled the alert to law enforcement on October 18, a week before the massacre. Card purchased firearms legally up until shortly before his attack. 

More details of a systemic failure to intervene effectively with Card are certain to emerge in the days and weeks ahead. Those will further implicate Maine’s weak gun regulations, as well as the apparent failure to use the state’s so-called “yellow flag” law, a particularly narrow version of a tool for petitioning a judge to remove firearms from a dangerous person after an evaluation by a medical practitioner.  

The tragedy in Lewiston has also been compounded by the typical blame on mental illness as the fundamental cause of the attack. While Card clearly was an aggrieved and disturbed person, we don’t yet know what, if any, clinical diagnosis he may have had or to what degree such a condition might have influenced his planning for the massacre.

We do know that blaming mental illness as the primary cause of mass shootings is not only misguided in most cases but also stigmatizing and counterproductive when it comes to reducing the problem. Despite popular myth, mass shooters are not inexplicably crazy people who just “suddenly snap.” They plan, they justify their intentions, and they prepare to kill and to die. That process involves observable patterns of behavior and can be disrupted. 

While no mass shooter, in a basic sense, is a mentally healthy person, most mass shooters have not been diagnosed with clinical mental illness. Only about 5 percent of these attacks involve psychosis or other severe mental illness as a key factor, according to separate studies by Columbia University psychiatrists, experts at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, and my own extensive case research for my book Trigger Points.

On Monday, I spoke at length with Mary Harris of Slate’s What Next podcast about the complicated equation of mental health and mass shootings—and about how an attack so fraught with warning signs might have been prevented through the work of behavioral threat assessment. You can listen to our conversation here.

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On a Thursday in September 2019, Philip Esformes arrived for his sentencing at the federal courthouse in downtown Miami looking pale and gaunt. The previous April, after an eight-week trial, Esformes, heir to a large, successful chain of nursing homes, had been convicted of fraud, kickback and money laundering crimes, and obstruction of justice. Citing more than $ 1 billion in false reimbursement claims, prosecutors described him as the linchpin of the “largest single criminal health care fraud case ever brought against individuals by the Department of Justice.” Esformes, then 50, had been in jail since his arrest more than three years earlier. The deep tan he ordinarily cultivated had faded. He’d developed skin rashes and shed some 50 pounds.

His father, Morris, an Orthodox rabbi, philanthropist, and founder of the family business, was notably absent, but the courtroom gallery was filled with other relatives, friends, and associates, some of whom had benefited from the family’s charitable giving. Several addressed the court, attesting to the defendant’s decency and asking for leniency. At the appointed moment, Philip, who’d remained silent throughout his trial, rose to speak.

“I want to talk from the heart to tell you the hard lessons I have learned,” he said. Through tears, he apologized to his family. “I stand before you a humbled and broken man…I have lost everything.” Referring to covert recordings played at his trial, Esformes continued, “The tapes depict me as a man willing to cut corners without fear of consequences, unappreciative of all the good that surrounded me, a man who acted as if the rules do not apply.” Now, he said, “I accept responsibility for what I have done.”

It was a striking departure from the defense’s closing arguments that March, wherein one of his lawyers had compared Esformes to Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird. Yet Esformes went on to project a sense of victimhood. Behind bars, he’d been threatened and had witnessed terrible violence, he said. At night, “the inmates begin to shout, swear through the vents and the toilets, throw things against the walls.” He was sometimes prevented from speaking to his family or bathing regularly. “I haven’t felt the sun,” he said. “I have no control over any aspect of my life.”

Witnesses at the trial had detailed conditions at Esformes’ nursing facilities not dissimilar to those he was describing, but if he perceived the irony, he didn’t acknowledge it. Nor, Judge Robert Scola observed, did the defendant take full ownership of his crimes. His apologies were vague, seemingly crafted to preserve his ability to deny guilt on appeal. “I don’t know what he was accepting responsibility for,” Scola remarked, and, as such, Esformes would be ineligible for a reduced sentence. The judge gave him 20 years in prison.

By the time Esformes was indicted, he and his father had spent decades dodging a steady stream of lawsuits, criminal investigations, and regulatory inquiries. Court documents and testimony, together with dozens of interviews with experts and associates of the Esformeses, offer a vivid tale of how Morris and Philip, by exploiting the perverse incentives of the health care system, had managed to turn society’s failure to ensure proper care for the elderly, the mentally ill, the addicted, and the unhoused into an engine of enormous profit.

Again and again, Morris and Philip used loopholes and payoffs to escape serious consequences for alleged wrongdoing. Even a prison sentence didn’t mark the end of their lucky streak. Amid Philip’s prosecution, Morris donated $ 65,000 to the Aleph Institute, a Jewish criminal justice nonprofit with ties to Jared Kushner, and whose founder, Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, was on hand for the sentencing. Morris’ philanthropy more broadly appears to have paved the way for a decidedly unorthodox clemency grant from none other than President Donald Trump, who commuted Philip’s sentence shortly before leaving office.

Now, Justice Department officials, in an unorthodox move of their own, have decided to retry Esformes on outstanding charges, setting up a postclemency showdown that may well be unique in the annals of American jurisprudence.

When Philip Esformes was young, his father used to talk about building an empire. Wiry, with angular features and heavy eyebrows, Morris was witty and fiercely intelligent. An old friend from Chicago, Harry Maryles, remembers him as “one of the coolest guys in the Yeshiva.” Morris married, and after being ordained as a rabbi, he took a job at a Hebrew day school. Philip, the first of his three children, was born in 1968. To help support the family—and with a loan from his parents, according to Maryles—Morris bought his first nursing home the following year.

Then, as now, the nursing home industry was dominated by for-profit operators. It was also expanding, bolstered by longer life expectancies and payments from Medicare and Medicaid, which were introduced in 1965. Nursing home capacity nearly doubled between 1966 and 1973; by 1980, the federal government was spending almost $ 21 billion a year subsidizing facilities. (As of 2021, roughly 14 million Americans were receiving some form of long-term care.)

In the absence of strong oversight, the reimbursement bonanza was accompanied by rampant patient abuse and neglect—the subject of multiple congressional hearings. But federal regulation remained vague and ineffectual; inspections to ensure proper staffing, safety, and quality of care were—and largely still are—left to state agencies.

By the late ’90s, Morris was among the most successful nursing home owners in Chicago, with additional facilities in Missouri and Florida. Decades of federal incentives had resulted in a glut of nursing home beds in Illinois and elsewhere, but Morris insulated himself. During the 1980s, with state psychiatric hospitals shutting down in response to President Ronald Reagan’s spending cuts for mental illness, Morris flung open his doors. States, in turn, received federal money for the psych patients they were able to place in nursing homes. Morris “would have regular meetings with the Illinois Department of Mental Health,” Alan Litwiller, the former chief nursing home inspector for Northern Illinois, told me. “He would say, ‘An empty bed in a nursing home makes no money. How many residents can you give me?’”

By 2013, roughly one-quarter of new nursing home residents nationwide had been diagnosed with a mental illness. “States have relieved themselves of long-term care for the mentally ill,” said Beatrice Coulter, a veteran psychiatric nurse and co-founder of the group Advocates for Ethical Mental Health Treatment. “Where there’s a vacuum, something will fill it. And that’s what happened.”

Morris filled hundreds of beds this way. He and a business partner, Leon Shlofrock, together housed more psychiatric patients than anyone else in Illinois; Morris would eventually even come to employ “bed brokers” to trawl shelters and soup kitchens for potential residents. “There is a vacancy issue out there,” he explained to a journalist in 1998. “And people are fighting for patients.” To help maintain a hospitable business climate, Shlofrock founded a lobbying group for which Morris served as vice president. The two men doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawmakers and candidates. In return, they got access to the halls of power. “It’s almost impossible not to make money,” Shlofrock told one reporter, “unless you’re a total and complete idiot.”

As he grew wealthy, Morris remained in the modest home he shared with his family in suburban Lincolnwood. He owned hundreds of tailored suits but favored gym clothes, and his vices were pedestrian: the Sun-Times sports section, Crown Royal whisky, cigarettes. He spread his riches around, ultimately giving out more than $ 122 million, largely to Jewish causes. His grandparents had emigrated from Salo­nika, a Greek city whose once-vibrant Jewish community was largely effaced by the Nazi occupation, and Morris harbored a deep sense of communal peril. Jewish schools, hospitals, and community centers in the United States and Israel benefited from his largesse. A professorship at the University of Chicago and a Jewish museum in Alaska, among other things, came to bear the family name. The Esformeses “built the Chicago Jewish community and infrastructure into what it is today,” noted a family friend.

In Israel, Morris befriended eminent Jewish scholars. “They recognized him as a true servant of Torah,” another friend, a rabbi, said, “awaiting orders to be fulfilled without question.”

But Morris’ reputation was challenged in 1998, when the Chicago Tribune ran a series questioning his business practices. Unlike most nursing home residents, many of the psych patients Morris recruited into his facilities were not elderly, the Tribune reported. Some were men and women in their 30s and 40s who struggled with addiction. Housing younger patients in nursing homes isn’t illegal, but Morris’ homes were often understaffed and generally unequipped for psychiatric care. One of his facilities, the Sovereign Home, erupted in chaos after several men were transferred there from a shelter and began menacing employees and accosting neighbors. Another, Emerald Park Health Care Center, was beset by neglect. “The majority of homes with the greatest number of mentally ill patients consistently fail to provide adequate treatment for psychiatric disorders or provide clean facilities,” one article noted.

The state opened an inquiry, but Morris was by then used to tangling with investigators. He’d been run out of Kansas—unfairly, in his view—after a home he owned there failed inspections. In 1982, the FBI had investigated him for allegedly bribing a state lawmaker to help him escape charges involving the death of a patient from infected bedsores. Woody Enderson, a former FBI agent who worked the bribery case, told me his investigation also surfaced evidence that Morris had billed Medicaid for services that were unnecessary or fictitious. But such charges are difficult to prove and require jurors to parse technical medical records and testimony. The prosecution was abandoned. Subsequent state and federal investigations into four heat-related deaths at an Esformes facility in Missouri also failed to bring indictments.

In 2009, Tribune reporters David Jackson and Gary Marx set out to determine what had changed since their paper’s series a decade earlier. Not only were the Esformes facilities still taking in surplus psychiatric patients, they found, but Morris was now also warehousing large numbers of former convicts. This arrangement, combined with inadequate staffing, resulted in dozens of assaults and the fatal bludgeoning of an elderly man in a wheelchair. “It wasn’t like he could stand up and protect himself,” the victim’s sister said.

Deep into their reporting process, Jackson­­ and Marx landed a sit-down interview with Morris at his office in Lincolnwood. Morris loved The Godfather, once even having his car horn customized to play the film’s theme. In person, he channeled a Jewish Don Corleone. “He was an enormously powerful figure,” Jackson told me. “Constantly, a secretary would come in with a message for him or a phone call. It was clear that he was not just funding synagogues and schools, but helping individual people in a way that was dramatic.” Morris was dressed for the interview in a purple-and-gold Lakers uniform and matching yarmulke. “There was something clownish about him,” Jackson recalled, but also frightening.

Morris complained to the reporters that the Tribune’s coverage was unfair and anti-­Semitic. “He said, ‘You can’t be Jewish if you are asking me these questions,’” recalled Marx, who is Jewish. “He believed that he could do no wrong.” He also let it be known that he had the ear of a powerful Chicago alderman, Ed Burke, who has since been indicted on federal racketeering and extortion charges. Morris “was an extremely manipulative person,” Jackson said. “He was trying to poke his way into the journalism to see how he could influence it, change it, or stop it.” In subsequent conversations, Morris told Marx and Jackson that a council of rabbis in Israel had preemptively absolved him of spiritual consequences should any harm befall the reporters. Fed up with the unwelcome attention, he said, he would divest from Chicago and focus on his interests in Florida.

Philip Esformes often rose before dawn to exercise. As an overweight child, he’d enjoyed acting out the final fight scene from Rocky II, always playing the underdog while casting a playmate as the defeated Apollo Creed. By his senior year of high school, Esformes was captain of the basketball team. He’d grown up tall and handsome, with olive skin, a flashing smile, and the simpering manner of a man acutely aware of his good looks. He attended business school in New York and then returned to Chicago, where he helped launch and later sell a hospice and a rehab company before committing himself to the family business.

In the mid-’90s, Morris began buying up skilled nursing and assisted living facilities in and around Miami that would eventually be co-owned by his son; they also acquired an ownership interest in a small area hospital. Philip took charge of the family’s Miami operations. In 2001, seeking to expand his access to ancillary providers of prescription drugs, lab services, and medical equipment, he formed a business alliance with Nursing Unlimited, a home health company co-owned by three young men: Nelson Salazar, Gui­llermo (Willy) Delgado, and Willy’s kid brother, Gabriel (Gaby) Delgado.

Gaby grew close to Esformes; he became Philip’s wingman, driving him between the family’s Miami properties, which came to include seven skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and 10 assisted living facilities (ALFs). Esformes had multiple cell phones and would sometimes conduct several conversations at once. As Gaby later testified, the calls revolved around keeping his beds filled. Every day, he listened as Esformes recorded census numbers for each facility, often repeating them aloud like a Bingo host: “288, 60, 15.” He then frequently called his father with the latest figures.

Some numbers were more important than others. Assisted living facilities house residents who need help with basics like meals, dressing, and bathing. They cannot provide medical services, and as such are not covered by Medicare, and only partially by Medicaid at low rates. Skilled nursing facilities, on the other hand, offer short-term rehabilitation and physical therapy for people recovering from serious illness, injury, or hospitalization. Patients tend to be older and relatively immobile: stroke victims undergoing speech therapy, people with wounds that require expert nursing care, recipients of knee and hip replacements regaining the ability to walk again. Most of Esformes’ SNF patients were covered by Medicare at rates of up to about $ 800 per day.

An occupied skilled nursing bed can be quite profitable, but the eligibility rules are strict. A new patient must have been hospitalized for at least 72 hours within the previous 30 days, and a doctor must certify that their condition warrants placement. Patients who fail to make progress, or who deteriorate, must be discharged. And Medicare only covers skilled nursing treatment for up to 100 consecutive days. SNFs are often units within larger nursing homes, so patients who need 24-hour care after their SNF benefit lapses often end up as long-term residents of the same facility, at a far lower reimbursement rate.

Even in Florida, with its large elderly population, only so many patients are eligible for skilled nursing at a given time. Dr. ­Roberto Del Cristo, who worked for Esformes during the 2000s, estimated that SNFs in Miami were 85 to 90 percent full on average. But Esformes wanted his facilities running at 100 percent capacity. In this the Delgados proved valuable partners. Large, fun-loving men, they excelled at drumming up referrals from ethically flexible physicians and assisted living owners. They would pick up the check for parties at high-end restaurants and nightclubs and even invite sex workers to entertain doctors at Willy’s condo in Coconut Grove. “We were hustlers,” Willy later testified. “I was the master at the orgies.”

Their social connections greased the skids. “Phil would tell me, ‘Hey, Gabs, if anybody you can get from the ALFs you deal with,’” Gaby recalled, “‘and the doctors you know, if they could refer me a patient, we will take care of them.’”

In an echo of Morris’ Chicago operations, many of the patients recruited to boost ­Esformes’ census numbers in Florida—a state whose spending on mental health care is among the nation’s lowest—were relatively young and living with psychiatric disorders and addiction. To justify their admission, court records show, unscrupulous doctors deployed a common set of descriptions, exaggerated or wholly fictitious: unsteady gait, weakness, muscle wasting. “What I would do is…embellish,” Del Cristo later testified. “If the patient had pain in his shoulder, doesn’t mean that it was dislocated” (an injury that, if severe, might justify admission). “But instead of giving him medicines, I prescribed physical therapy.”

The commingling of these patients, whom SNF staffers called “walkie-talkies,” with frail seniors gave some employees pause. “We could have the 35-, 45-, 49-year-old men on very heavy psych drugs put into a room with an elderly patient that is ­bedbound,” Ada Maxine Ginarte, a former nurse at an Esformes skilled nursing facility, testified. These men often were visibly disturbed and could be intimidating, even to medical professionals, she added. “You could have them walking around among the little ladies in their wheelchairs.”

Court records and testimony cast light on other aspects of the operations as well. As payment for his dubious referrals, Del Cristo received access to a pool of Esformes patients for whom he could then bill insurers, earning about $ 100,000 extra per year. Other doctors—and assisted living owners—took cash kickbacks from Esformes’ lieutenants. Nursing Unlimited’s relationship with Esformes was similarly tainted. Salazar and the Delgados paid ­Esformes for access to hundreds of assisted living residents and would then bill Medicare for unnecessary equipment and services, including diabetes care, intravenous injections, and mobility devices. “We are banging up all these Medicare numbers, running them like credit cards,” Gaby testified. “And I’m kicking back to Phil.”

Larkin Community Hospital, in which the Esformeses owned a stake, played a crucial role, often hosting the 72-hour stays that made patients eligible for SNF reimbursement. Esformes also employed “marketers” who found physicians at other hospitals who were willing to play ball. As before, society’s failings offered a sheen of legitimacy. “They took very difficult patients,” explained Julia Capote, who worked in social services at a Miami Beach hospital prior to taking a job with Esformes. “You are calling all these places to help you place patients. They don’t want them—and you need to get the patient out as fast as possible. And then you call somebody who is willing to help you, and that is really good.”

Within the Esformes network, patients were fungible. After exhausting Medicare’s 100-day skilled nursing maximum, they were frequently transferred to one of Esformes’ assisted living homes, where, after 60 days, they became eligible for another round of skilled nursing. “It’s a fairly closed system,” Del Cristo testified. Billing at the highest rates possible was Esformes’ priority. Court documents show how he pressured his employees to find more patients whose needs were covered by Medicare—a practice he called “building skill.” In one exchange with an admissions coordinator, Esformes texted “build skill” three times in four minutes. “Time to move,” he wrote.

Some staffers looked askance at the questionable SNF admissions and at co-workers who were hustling to grow the census. “Your nasty admissions person is gonna continue to not listen to me & bring in criminals!!” one nursing director texted Esformes. “De madrePhilip!” Stephen Sugar, an SNF administrator, messaged his boss regarding two patients Esformes didn’t want discharged: “I can get mds to write rx for additional therapy but the therapists will fight it.” Frequently, Esformes demanded outright that his employees scare up patients: “Get more,” he ordered a beleaguered admissions director in 2015. “Do what I say.”

Soon after taking over in Miami, Esformes and his wife, Sherri, bought a large home on North Bay Road, in an exclusive Miami Beach neighborhood. They purchased the adjacent property as a guest residence and office for their house manager, overseer of gardens, private chef, and housekeepers. A third house nearby was converted into a training facility with a gym and basketball court for their kids. They also had homes in Chicago and Los Angeles, and Esformes’ cars included a LaFerrari Aperta with a sticker price of $ 1.65 million. Like his father, Philip was a philanthropist, but even when he gave quietly, it bore a trace of ego. “Giving charity is close to being angel-like,” he told a friend. “Giving charity anonymously is close to being godlike.”

Esformes resisted Miami’s most illicit temptations at first, steering clear of the Delgados’ orgies. “Philip did not engage,” Del Cristo, a regular, testified. “He was a hardworking, religious gentleman who was very family-oriented.” By 2014, though, he was having affairs, often with young models. Gaby took Philip’s kids Jet Skiing and arranged his boss’s liaisons, booking suites at the Ritz-Carlton and the Mandarin Oriental and visiting the rooms in advance to set the thermostat to Esformes’ preferences and lay in a supply of his favorite teas. “I knew all his intimate things,” testified Gaby, who proffered his own credit card for incidentals—charges included a $ 786 spa treatment for a former Playboy Venezuela cover model—and sometimes paid the women, too.

These and myriad other payments were all part of a complex web of financial relationships connecting Esformes, the Delgados, and dozens of outside health care operators and hangers-on. To increase billings, as the prosecutors demonstrated at trial, the Delgados created new companies that peddled items like hospital beds and suction pumps. The kickbacks grew in kind; for roughly a decade, Gaby estimated, he delivered Esformes about $ 20,000 a month in cash, often wrapped in Publix bags. The Delgados also arranged pay-to-play access to his assisted living facilities for several pharmacies. Esformes, Gaby testified, would exhort him to open new relationships with laboratories, psychiatrists, home health agencies, and equipment providers; “Get in your A game!” he would say. 

The illicit payments were disguised using doctored invoices and phony leases and consulting agreements. The Esformeses also conducted business through dozens of nested shell corporations, which allowed them to obscure their financial interests and write off payments for rent or staff that were in fact going to other family­-owned LLCs. This engineered complexity, a common practice in the elder care business, allows its lobbyists to use the appearance of meager profits to push for minimal staffing and hefty government reimbursements. (The industry’s true profitability is reflected in its private equity investment—some $ 10 billion today.)

As their crime network expanded, Gaby and his partners increasingly served as a protective layer between Esformes and the vendors paying kickbacks—of which ­Salazar and the Delgados enjoyed a cut. To a certain kind of Miami health care operator, Gaby’s fixer role was common knowledge. “Everybody knew in the street,” Willy explained, “if you wanted to provide any services for [Philip], you had to meet with my brother.”

Among the firms doing business with Esformes was American Therapeutic Corporation, which ran partial hospitalization programs across Florida. Partial hospitalization is an alternative to inpatient treatment, providing half-day courses of therapy for people with severe depression, mental illness, and addiction. ATC’s business model was not dissimilar to that of Esformes. Owners Lawrence Duran and Marianella Valera sourced patients from hundreds of halfway houses and assisted living facilities—including Esformes’—and maintained a kickbacks budget of some $ 350,000 per month, Valera would later testify. Payments to Esformes were funneled through Salazar, who held a no-show job with ATC.

Most of the patients at ATC’s facilities were too impaired to be good candidates for partial hospitalization, which requires that participants be sober and fully oriented, capable of meaningfully participating in therapy. Some had dementia or psychosis. Others were actively using drugs. And even within this population, the patients Esformes sent over stood out. They appeared so neglected, Valera said, that her staff brought in clothing for them. “They haven’t been bathed on a regular basis,” she recalled. “Some of them came high to the facility.”

Esformes’ patients drew attention elsewhere, too—especially the ones from Oceanside Extended Care, a dingy SNF with unreliable elevators and a poor, troubled patient population. In testimony, Borinquen Hall, a homelessness liaison for the Miami Beach police, recalled encountering Oceanside patients at a nearby bus stop, “getting high, drinking, causing havoc.” He added, “A lot of times, we didn’t think they were patients in Ocean­side because they seemed homeless.”

One such patient was Robert Dingman, now 53, who arrived in Miami Beach in 2007, unhoused, alcoholic, and addicted to crack. When the street grew unbearable, he learned what to say to get himself admitted to a hospital. “Then I would be sent to a shelter for a period of time,” he recalled. Oceanside was ideal. “It was a good spot for a homeless person,” said Dingman, who got sober in 2015. “My drinking and drugging weren’t hindered there.” After a brief physical therapy session each morning—during which “I had to move my ankle back and forth”—he walked to the beach, where he and other patients took turns panhandling and drinking. The facility itself was hellish, a warehouse of neglected long-term residents and younger patients with mental illness who got little treatment beyond antipsychotic drugs. “I couldn’t get drunk enough not to hear the screaming, yelling, smell diapers on the floor,” Dingman recalled.

Stephanie Jones described a similar experience. Now 47, Jones has bipolar disorder and has been addicted to opioids. She, too, stayed in Esformes’ facilities to escape homelessness. In court, when a lawyer showed her the long list of services billed in her name at Oceanside and elsewhere, she was flabbergasted. “I remember very clearly what they did,” Jones said. “And it was not all these things that they are saying they did.” At Superior Living, another Esformes ALF, she testified, staffers bribed her and other residents with opioids to get them to stay. “There were many different kinds of people thrown together,” a former staffer at a different Esformes assisted living facility told me, from teens to octogenarians with dementia: “We had a client that should have been in a locked facility” and was known to torture and kill stray cats that prowled the grounds. In 2016, another resident wandered off and was found drowned in a canal.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. In 2013, an elderly patient at Esformes’ South Dade Nursing and Rehabilitation Center was beaten to death by his mentally ill 41-year-old roommate. A second drowning, of 75-year-old Coleman Felts, occurred two years later at another Esformes skilled nursing facility. Local reporting in Florida and Missouri, and court records in Illinois, show that families filed more than two dozen wrongful death complaints against facilities owned by Philip and his father. (Most were settled without any admission of wrongdoing.) Some of their nursing homes were at the bottom of the federal government’s rankings, with long rap sheets of violations. But the state imposed no meaningful consequences.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration has treated nursing home owners with striking deference. Between 2013 and 2018, according to an investigation by the Naples Daily News, 46 of Florida’s worst homes faced lawsuits related to mistreatment or neglect that led to at least 191 deaths. The state closed only two facilities during that period. The feds have not fared much better. The Nursing Home Reform Act of 1987 mandated in-depth, unannounced “quality surveys” of nursing facilities roughly once a year. Based in part on these surprise inspections, the industry improved in some areas, like reducing the use of physical restraints, which can cause pressure ulcers. But the inspection process is widely considered inadequate; that Covid resulted in the deaths of more than 150,000 residents surprised no one who had been paying attention.

In September, the Biden administration announced its intention to beef up enforcement of the existing rules and proposed a battery of new ones, including stricter staffing requirements, stronger safety standards and penalties, and greater oversight of the industry’s creative accounting practices. But fierce resistance by the industry and the long-standing reluctance of regulators to hold facility owners accountable hardly inspires confidence. “You have a pipeline into nursing facilities because there is nowhere else to send these individuals,” nurse and patient advocate Coulter told me. “There isn’t a big uprising because no one’s gonna fund what needs to happen,” she added. “Among mental health professionals, we normalize that. We don’t have any other choice.”

Amid this Wild West atmosphere, South Florida stands out as ground zero for health care fraud. “Not only perpetrated by independent, scattered groups,” a special agent from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General told NBC News in 2011, “but also by competitive, organized businesses complete with hierarchies and opportunities for advancement.” A Miami-based federal prosecutor uninvolved with the Esformes case recently told me that health care fraud in Florida “has replaced cocaine trafficking as the crime du jour.”

Gaby Delgado awoke to pounding on his front door in the wee hours of May 12, 2014. He’d been on edge for some time. In 2011, 20 people associated with American Therapeutic Corporation were arrested and charged in a $ 200 million Medicare fraud case. The next year, Jose Carlos ­Morales, a pharmacy owner and associate of the Delgados in several schemes, pleaded guilty in a separate fraud case and ultimately got a 14-year sentence. In March 2014, Salazar was visited by inquisitive FBI agents and hadn’t been himself since. Gaby and Willy suspected, correctly, that Salazar was wearing a wire and cooperating against them. Still, Gaby’s first thought that morning was that someone was breaking in, and he reached for his gun.

Outside, he saw a cluster of cruisers illuminated by blue and red lights. “Gaby, we are here for you,” a cop on his front step informed him, “and we’re doing the same thing at your brother’s house.” The jig was up. The Delgados were indicted for receiving kickbacks, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit health care fraud. A superseding indictment charged Willy with opioid trafficking, significantly increasing his potential sentence.

The brothers saw themselves as honorable crooks who would never cooperate with the feds. “I didn’t want to be a rat,” Gaby later testified. After they were released on bail, he went to see Esformes. To prove he wasn’t wired, Gaby undressed in front of him, and they talked in Esformes’ pool. “Phil’s telling me, ‘I got your back, man. Just stay firm, and we are going to get through this,’” he recalled. “Philip had always told us that he had always an ace up his sleeve,” Willy said. “He told me one day that he had connections to make things go away.”

There was reason to take the claim seriously. Philip and Morris had demonstrated a knack for getting out of tight spots. Ten years earlier, for $ 15.4 million and without admission of wrongdoing, they’d settled a civil fraud case brought by the Justice Department in relation to the revolving door between Larkin Community Hospital and their skilled nursing facilities. (The Esformeses sold their interest in Larkin soon thereafter but continued sending and receiving patients to and from there.) Philip was also implicated as a co-conspirator during the 2009 federal criminal trial of a Chicago facility owner convicted of participating in a bribery and kickback conspiracy—but he was never charged. A lawyer who deposed both Esformeses in one of several additional cases that were dropped or settled told me that they seemed to consider themselves “untouchable.”

But as the Delgados’ September 2015 trial approached, Philip clearly perceived the brothers as a threat. Court documents show he pressured them to sign affidavits swearing they’d never done anything illegal with him and to fire their lawyers in favor of a defense team of his choosing. He suggested to Willy that he should flee the country and alter his appearance with plastic surgery; Gaby could then use an “empty chair” defense at trial, blaming everything on his absent brother.

The Delgados actually thought about it, but Willy was reluctant. He had been married more than 20 years and had two daughters; Gaby, too, had a wife and kids. Their parents were elderly and frail, and their lawyers were talking to the government about a plea deal. Then, sometime that May, ­Esformes said something that brought everything into focus. If he were in their position, he told the Delgados, he would kill himself. “I was at a loss for words,” Gaby recalled. He and Willy, born in Puerto Rico, had seven other siblings. They’d come to the mainland as young children and grew up in a Miami that was then one of the nation’s poorest cities. Such a comment from a man of inherited wealth and privilege drove home the imbalance in their relationship. “This guy won’t hold any heat for me,” Gaby realized. “This guy gets confronted, he’s going to fucking talk like a canary.” He and Willy decided to cut a deal with the feds.

Philip Esformes was arrested in July 2016 and charged with health care fraud, paying and receiving kickbacks, and money laundering, among other crimes. His trial, which began in Miami three years later, included dramatic testimony from the Delgados and from Jerome Allen, the former coach of the University of Pennsylvania men’s basketball team, who said Esformes had paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure his eldest son’s admission. (Evidence showed that Esformes also paid at least $ 400,000 to Rick Singer, ringmaster of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, to get his daughter into the University of Southern California as a phony soccer recruit.) At one point, Scola, otherwise forbearant and good-humored, felt compelled to caution Esformes’ 71-year-old mother for staring down witnesses. He later ejected her from the courtroom.

During the trial, Esformes’ defense team tried to claim that his operations met urgent social needs. “The United States government does not provide health care,” his lawyer Roy Black told the jury. “They’ve created a system run by businessmen who take over a health system they do not want to provide.” The defense also suggested that the way Esformes cycled through patients was altogether legal. “I want to make sure that we are clear that doctors referring patients to a nursing home and a nursing home assigning patients to a doctor—that symbiotic relationship, cross-referrals—that is not a kickback,” argued Howard Srebnick, another Esformes lawyer.

Nor, his lawyers argued, did this referral system depart entirely from the norm. In 2021, roughly 40 percent of hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries were discharged to a rehab facility, where they often deteriorated and were subsequently readmitted to a hospital. Dr. Sarguni Singh, who researches geriatric care at University of Colorado Hospital, told me that, like the psychiatric patients in Esformes’ SNFs, many seriously ill elders who end up in nursing homes are unlikely to make the rehabilitative gains they hope for. What’s more, the government reimbursement structure encourages facility owners to send long-term patients to the hospital for minor issues, knowing they will likely return to the skilled nursing unit at a far higher reimbursement rate. The cycling of patients can result in harmful losses of physical and mental dexterity. “In many cases, there’s no clinical need for the patient to be in the nursing home, but it’s the default,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute focused on health care policy, told me. Singh added, “Setting aside nefarious intent, nursing home operators will behave in whatever way the system incentivizes them to.”

A lawyer who represents whistleblowers in health care cases offered an even less generous view: “If you are honest and not taking kickbacks, it is hard to make a go of it, because Medicaid does not pay enough,” the lawyer told me. “Usually if they are making it, they have all kinds of side deals.”

The timing of Esformes’ conviction, in April 2019, proved serendipitous. Federal clemency grants are normally the result of a slow, tightly controlled process in which the Justice Department plays a large role. Past presidents have sometimes deviated from standard operating procedure, notably by pardoning Richard Nixon (Gerald Ford) and the disgraced financier Marc Rich (Bill Clinton). But Trump went further in dispensing with the process. “It was a free-for-all,” said attorney Sam Morison, who specializes in federal executive clemency. Trump’s pardons and commutations, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly favored the wealthy and well connected. They included his disgraced former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, who’d committed bank and tax fraud; adviser Roger Stone, convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction; Judith Negron, who got 35 years for her role at American Therapeutic Corporation; and Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, who’d served time for tax evasion.

Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, was closely involved in Trump’s clemency decisions. So was the Aleph Institute, the group that received $ 65,000 from Morris after his son’s arrest, and to which Kushner has ties. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, spoke in 2016 at founder Lipskar’s Shul of Bal Harbour, near Miami, and Lipskar attended a December 2019 Hanukkah ceremony at the White House. “Of the 238 total pardons and commutations granted by Mr. Trump during his term, 27 went to people supported by Aleph, Tzedek [another Jewish organization], and the lawyers and lobbyists who worked with them,” the New York Times reported. Celebrity lawyer and Trump ally Alan Dershowitz, who has volunteered with the group, told the Times that Aleph advocated extensively for Esformes’ release. An Aleph spokesperson told Mother Jones that the group has returned Morris’ donations, which it claims were unrelated to its advocacy. (Esformes did not respond to questions submitted for this story via a family representative.)

In any case, Trump commuted Esformes’ sentence and ordered his release in December 2020—though the conviction remained intact, as did a $ 44.2 million restitution and forfeiture order. (Court filings put Philip’s net assets at $ 78 million.) A White House statement said the commutation was supported by former Republican attorneys general John Ashcroft and Edwin Meese and that Esformes had “been devoted to prayer and repentance” since his 2016 arrest. He was sprung just in time to attend his daughter’s New Year’s Eve wedding at his Miami Beach mansion, where guests in formal attire danced beneath a disco ball in the backyard. The nuptials were officiated by Aleph’s Lipskar.

The clemency decision was “a kick in the teeth,” Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who supervised the early stages of the Esformes investigation, told the Times. “It sends the wrong message to crooks,” Pelletier, now in private practice, told me. “You make enough money, you can fucking buy your way out of jail. I find it appalling.”

So did Esformes’ prosecutors. But they appear to have found a work-around. Although the jury convicted him on more than two dozen charges, they weren’t able to reach a verdict on a handful of others, including perhaps the most significant original count: conspiracy to commit health care and wire fraud. The hung charges might have seemed like a victory for Esformes, but the double-jeopardy principle that protects defendants from re-prosecution only applies to charges for which jurors have rendered a verdict. Blessed with a second chance, the Justice Department promptly signaled its intent to try Esformes again. Though highly unusual, “I think it’s the right move,” Pelletier said. “I know how big the fraud was. And I know how important messaging is in stopping health care fraud. That’s exactly what I would do.”

The revived prosecution angered Trump loyalists. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) depicted it as an attempt to undermine a grant of clemency. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland, decrying “your selective, vindictive, and unconstitutional prosecution” and the “dangerous precedent” it creates. It also drew criticism from less biased onlookers. Josie Duffy-Rice, a lawyer and former editor of the progressive legal news website The Appeal, told me that even if the decision to re-prosecute is technically legal, in her view, it violates the spirit of executive clemency and risks setting an unsound precedent. “It immediately set off alarm bells as being completely outrageous and a pretty serious violation of important constitutional protections,” she said.

But the Justice Department appears to be within its rights. Esformes has lost several appeals alleging prosecutorial misconduct, and in March, the Supreme Court declined to stay his prosecution. A hearing to determine the new Miami trial date was scheduled for November; Esformes’ lawyers have petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case instead, which could further draw out the timeline. (The Justice Department declined to comment.) “I don’t see it as a difficult question,” said Morison, who spent 13 years as a staff lawyer at the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney. “Unless these hung counts were expressly included within the scope of the [clemency] grant, they aren’t covered.”

After Philip was arrested, Morris became more involved in day-to-day management of the Miami facilities. In a letter to the court, he wrote, “I am questioning how the son I raised put himself in the position in which he now finds himself. As I followed his case, I was deeply disturbed by what I learned about my son’s behavior. Philip had veered from the path that his family had paved for him.” (Esformes and his wife divorced in 2020.)

Yet it stretches credulity that the man after whom Esformes fashioned himself had no inkling of his son’s crimes. An ongoing lawsuit against several Esformes-related entities, filed in 2017 by Mario Gonzalez, a former longtime manager at an Esformes SNF in Florida, suggests that Morris was well aware of what was going on. When Gonzalez refused to unnecessarily extend skilled nursing therapy for several patients as ordered, the suit alleges, Morris had him demoted and transferred—a tactic more aggressive than any that Philip appears to have applied. “I think what motivated Philip,” defense lawyer Srebnick said at the sentencing, “is he wanted to prove to his father, living in the shadow of his father, that he could be successful, that he could run the facilities with no bed left empty.”

Morris died last December. He was 76. At his funeral, a procession of rabbis spoke with emotion about his deep religiosity and his support for Jewish communities. “When a person comes into this world, we don’t know what their life will be like,” one said. “But when they leave this world and you can make an accounting of what they accomplished, that’s a day of simcha[joy].”

Rebecca, Morris’ elder daughter, spoke last, thanking siblings Philip and Rachel for caring for their father in his final days. She remembered Morris’ devotion to family and how he always sent flowers. He loved Elvis, she said, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” and the old Perry Mason TV series, whose titular attorney defends clients wrongfully accused—often by slow-witted agents of law enforcement. Morris once said that regulators treated him like “we are in Nazi ­Germany,” and it is easy to imagine his affinity for Mason’s clients, beset by unfounded charges but always vindicated at last. Up to a point in his own life, he’d had comparable experiences. It was in part the reversals of fortune that he enjoyed, Rebecca recalled. “He would say, at the end of every episode, ‘Now that I didn’t see coming.’”

Morris may have gone to his grave believing in the rightness of his actions, and perhaps even taking pleasure in having had the chutzpah to evade his would-be punishers. One of his ultimate acts was to help secure the same kind of last-minute escape for his son that he’d orchestrated many times for himself. But his family’s story may yet contain a final reversal, in which Philip ­Esformes is at last called to account.

This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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Ivanka Trump took the stand on Wednesday in her father’s civil fraud trial, but to hear her tell it, she wasn’t sure why. Trump was polite and relaxed, in stark contrast to her father—who took the stand on Monday, rambling and frequently devolving into emotional outbursts during his testimony—and brothers, whose testimony was often defensive. But as personable as her demeanor may have been, she displayed an astonishingly bad memory.

Ivanka Trump was originally named as a defendant in the fraud case, brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has accused former president Donald Trump, his company, and his two adult sons of fraudulently inflating the values of his assets to get better terms from banks and insurance companies. A higher court removed Ivanka from the case in June, saying she had largely cut ties with the Trump Organization during the period in which the fraud occurred. She attempted to avoid testifying at all, claiming that she knew little about the business details at the heart of the case.

Indeed, on the stand, Trump insisted she didn’t remember the details of almost everything James’ attorneys inquired about. Over and over, asked about a particular deal or relationship with this or that bank, she drew a blank, answering “I don’t recall” at least two dozen times. When prompted with emails and letters she had written or that had been sent to her, or confronted with accounts from others about her involvement, Trump generally conceded to remembering only the most basic details.

Even when Louis Solomon, an attorney with James’ office who led Wednesday’s questioning, showed her copies of the documents in question, Trump said her memory wasn’t jogged. Incredibly, she claimed she couldn’t recall how much money she’d received when her father sold his downtown Washington, DC, hotel in 2021—more than $ 4 million. She said she remembered only that she had been paid.

Trump was, however, very firm in her insistence she had nothing to do with any of the Trump financial statements that the judge, Arthur Eragon, has deemed fraudulent. And her memory seemed much improved when her father’s attorneys cross-examined her about some of the same deals that she’d struggled to recall just a few minutes earlier.

Take the Doral golf course in Miami, for which the Trump Organization got favorable interest rates from Deutsche Bank via an executive whom Ivanka had introduced to her father—rates based in part on fraudulent statements of her father’s financial status. Under questioning by the prosecutors, she said she didn’t remember details any of the competing loan offers—and didn’t even remember some of the offers—that she’d personally solicited from a slew of lenders. But upon friendly cross-examination, she lit up and spoke warmly about her father’s hopes for the golf course.

“My father had a deep and nostalgic love for that property, telling me about going to that property with his own father,” she said. “He told me he took my mother there.”

In contrast to her professed inability to remember how much she profited from the sale of Donald Trump’s DC hotel, she remembered exactly how much the Old Post Office building (which was renovated to build the hotel) had been costing taxpayers annually ($ 7.5 million). She also spoke very positively of her father’s relationships with Deutsche Bank executives—the defense focused heavily on how the banks that lent money to Trump based on fraudulent financial statements did, in the end, get all of their money back.

But Trump’s claim that she couldn’t remember any of the fine details also rendered her unable to push back on any of the dozens of documents introduced as evidence during her testimony. These included loan offers from lenders who hadn’t seen the fraudulent statements and had offered interest rates nearly double what Deutsche Bank provided the Trump Organization. This goes to the heart of James’ claim: that the company saved hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and insurance fees because companies believed he was wealthier—and thus less of a financial risk—than he really was.

Outside of the courthouse, James, who watched the testimony from the front row, said that Ivanka Trump’s amicable affect didn’t change anything about the case. “At the end of the day, this case is about fraudulent statements about the financial condition that she benefited from,” James told reporters. “Despite the fact that she was very, very nice, very friendly—facts basically demonstrate the truth.”

Ivanka is James’ final witness. Donald Trump’s attorneys will begin arguing their side next week.

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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‘Tis the season for politicians to spend an hour in front of cameras with turkeys. Two turkeys from a Hormel subsidiary in Minnesota were apparently shipped to Washington D.C. in a stretch black Cadillac Escalade for their White House pardoning ceremony. At a library in the tiny Texas city of Van, the mayor appointed a bird named Dolly Pardon to be a city ambassador. And in Arkansas on Friday morning, the turkeys sat motionless on a table littered with fake leaves while Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave a speech granting them clemency.

But in the case of Sanders, what might seem like a lighthearted political stunt is much darker when you consider the context, the Arkansas Times pointed out this week. Earlier this month, Sanders denied a request for executive clemency for a man with severe developmental disabilities who has spent 32 years in state prison for crime he almost certainly did not commit, according to an investigation by journalist Radley Balko. 

Charlie Vaughn was one of four men convicted for the 1988 murder of 81-year-old Myrtle Holmes. According to Balko, Vaughn was held in jail for a year and insisted on his innocence before a publicly assigned attorney advised him to confess in order to avoid the death penalty. Vaughn’s confession contradicted the facts of the crime, but the judge sentenced him to life in prison anyway, commenting, “I’m sure that some governor somewhere down the road will reduce the sentence or commute it to a term of years.”

Decades later, another one of the four, Reginald Early, confessed to the crime and insisted he had acted alone. As a result, the two other suspects had their convictions overturned, but because Vaughn—imprisoned, illiterate, and without an attorney—did not file a claim within a year, the state argued that he could not benefit from the new evidence. Federal courts rejected Vaughn’s appeals to be freed. Last year, the Arkansas Parole Board rejected his petition. 

Vaughn’s lawyer told Balko he received no explanation for why the Sanders rejected Vaughn’s clemency petition. Unless the Arkansas Supreme Court grants a habeas petition from Vaughn—an unlikely event—his best hope for release from prison is to reapply for clemency in six more years.

Sanders, meanwhile, is spending her time pushing to expanding her state’s carceral system. The morning before her turkey pardoning ceremony, she called on the state Board of Corrections to approve 500 additional prison beds, claiming that that Arkansas had weak penalties for violent crime and required space to lock up an additional 2,000 people.

If every US state were a country, Arkansas would have the 11th-highest incarceration rate in the world, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. 

View Article Here Crime and Justice – Mother Jones

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