29 November 21
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Not on Twitter, not on Facebook, not even in front of the cops.
Mazza stopped by the Capitol on January 6. He was accompanied by his weapon that looks like it was pried off the deck of the USS Iowa. Originally, Mazza told investigators that he had lost track of his Precious in the parking lot of an Ohio casino on his way back from Washington. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, this story was complete bullpucky. Mazza also lied to the local police about his whereabouts on January 6. The Capitol Police soon found that Mazza had uploaded videos of himself inside the Capitol on that date that Mazza had posted to his own Twitter account. Tradecraft!
Now, back to that mutant firearm that Mazza somehow misplaced. When the Capitol Police came to Shelbyville—“Join The Capitol Police And See The World!”—Mazza was initially reluctant to walk away from the obvious nonsense he’d been peddling. But after what appeared to be at least 25 seconds of prodding, he came clean.
The police asked him how his hand-cannon had come to be “stolen.” According to the affidavit filed by the investigating officer, Mazza began his response by saying,
“Uhh…do you want the official version?”
This is not anything Mazza’s eventual lawyers are likely to find helpful. They replied that the truth would be just fine, thanks, whereupon Mazza told them the truth which, as it happens, was worse.
First, he insisted that he and a “friend” had entered the Capitol to try and stop what Mazza believed were obvious left-wing agitators from ruining the high purpose of the authentic insurrectionists. “We knew it was Antifa,” Mazza told his visitors, “because we don’t loot.” He says he lost his firearm at some point when he was being bum-rushed out of the Capitol. Why, then, did he bring his Judge—no kidding, that’s what the big boom-boom really is called—into the Capitol in the first place. This is where it gets really terrible:
“It was cold as hell that day…all three days…Never did talk to Nancy. I think Nan and I would have hit it off. I was glad I didn’t because you would be here for another reason, and I told my kids if they show up, I’m surrendering because I may go down as a hero.”
Dude, you just copped to wishing you’d “hit it off” with the Speaker of the House of Representatives while carrying a firearm that could stop a garbage truck at top speed. Good luck getting out of this one.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., is the leader of a group of centrist Democrats. She backed the domestic spending bill that the House approved last week but says internal fights complicated the effort to get the message out on the measure's components. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But the last time the Democratic party created a new social safety net government program — the Affordable Care Act in 2010 — the backlash created a red wave that saw Republicans gain 63 seats and capture control of the House of Representatives.
Still, Democrats say they've learned lessons from that debate. They are working to point out all the ways they are delivering on their 2020 campaign promises and to get credit for an economy that was jolted by the coronavirus pandemic. More importantly, they say they also have time to connect to communicate how the broader federal reach will improve people's lives in tangible ways.
Chris Carney thinks this time is different. He represented a red district in south central Pennsylvania for two terms, but was one of the several dozen of Democrats to lose in 2010 after voting for the Affordable Care Act. He said when it comes to voting for the Biden agenda now he told NPR "it's an easy yes."
He said back then Obamacare "wasn't explained well." He said Democrats "allowed the opposition to get out in front of the argument" and left them on the defensive.
But when it comes what Congress has been working on these past few months, Carney said the benefits will be easier to explain. Take the first part of the agenda, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that will fix potholes and make tunnels and bridges safer, will be easy to identify in communities.
"When somebody sees the road in front of their house improved — that they're not blowing out their tires or their front end alignments on potholes — when they know that the bridge that they're crossing is going to be safe," Carney said, "those kinds of peace of mind issues are very important to people every day."
The House recently passed the second component of the agenda, the roughly $2 trillion domestic spending bill. But it's expected to change in the Senate, where West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., wants to strip out the four weeks of paid family leave, and other Democrats also want to make adjustments.
Almost all Democrats in both chambers agree on one thing: getting it over the finish line by the end of the year is critical to their political fortunes in 2022.
Swing district Democrats tout various pieces of the agenda
Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., voted for both the infrastructure and Build Back better bills. Still, she's warned her party about trying to roll out too many new policies at once.
"I thought we should pick a few things that mattered a lot to our constituents and and do them well and do them in sustainable and lasting way," Murphy explained.
She said the fights inside the party have also complicated getting the message out. "It makes it difficult to communicate when there is Democrat on Democrat attacks."
But Murphy was quick to point out that some pieces of the broader bill are already resonating with voters back home, "I think that my constituents in Florida clearly understand the impact of climate change and the need to take action on that."
Unlike Carney who lost in 2010, Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., voted for the ACA and survived that wave election. But he is a top tier GOP target in 2022 and expects Republicans to nationalize the election again.
He said he plans to talk about his role getting specific things in the bill. "I am going to run on the prescription program that I negotiated. I'm going to run on the bipartisan infrastructure package that I started with my problem solvers group. I think those are winning messages, but you got to have the resources to get your message out," Shrader said last week.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., maintains that the situation in 2010 and the environment going into 2022 are different, pointing to the fact that Biden has already been on the road touting the agenda's impact in several states.
"There's no substitute for the bully pulpit of the president of the United States," Pelosi said last week.
Selling hard infrastructure v. human infrastructure
Still, Democrats admit it's harder to explain the immediate value of the elements in the social spending and climate bill. Programs like Universal Pre- K for 3 and 4 year olds and elder care enjoy support across the political spectrum, even though some people don't always back expanding the government.
Carney told NPR "government can, and in some times should do, big things to improve the overall well being of the nation."
Democrats who were in Congress in 2010 — and those that have heard about the political fallout in the dozen years since that debate — say talking specifics sooner will be key ahead of the 2022 midterms.
The House Democrats' campaign arm is pushing for over 1,000 events across the country.
Kristin Hawn, a Democratic strategist and partner at ROKK Solutions, worked for the moderate Blue Dog Coalition in 2010 and told NPR that explaining the component parts of the Build Back Better act as soon as possible is the way Democrats move beyond the messy process talk that has dominated the last few months.
"We always say that the second that you get into having to explain what you're doing, you're losing the messaging battle already. That's the difficult part about legislating," Hawn said. She said things like getting affordable health care if you have pre-existing conditions or having adult children stay on their parents health care plans are popular now, "but we weren't able to effectively communicate that at the time and that was detrimental to us in the midterm elections in 2010."
Hawn also noted that back in 2010 there was a Tea Party movement that focused on the ACA, but also channeled anger more broadly at Washington. She said people had to be escorted out of town hall meetings when they were talking about things beyond the ACA. "It was it was at times violent. It was angry. And I think you have some of that same sentiment here, certainly with the former President Trump stoking those fires and stoking that anger and that anger is still out there."
Messaging is only part of the equation
Carney said, unlike Obamacare, the Build Back Better bill can be a potent political weapon because Democrats can show concrete ways they are changing peoples' lives for the better. "I would go on the offensive with this. I would ask everybody who voted against it, why?"
The messaging war over "Build Back Better" is in full swing with the GOP campaign committees and its allies working to define it as a "socialist spending spree" to voters.
The president's low standing in the polls, and the historic trend of the party in power losing seats in midterms, could mean this push is Democrats' last chance to enact major public policies for a while.
Hawn said the dip in approval ratings are a motivating factor to get the full agenda through before the end of the year. "The President is at the top of the ticket. And his numbers need to come up in order for for these candidates in the House to to be successful in their reelection campaign or their election."
Carney said he knew the ACA was unpopular in his district before the vote, but is glad he voted yes.
"I was able to get health care for 33,000 more families and individuals. So yeah, that's worth losing a seat over frankly," he said.
Over time, ACA has become a political plus as more people are covered. Democrats' warning about GOP efforts to dismantle the law was key to their ability to retake the majority in 2018. In fact, Pelosi has pushed to strengthen the ACA by making sure subsidies that were included in recent coronavirus relief bills were extended in the recent spending package.
Democrats on Capitol Hill believe the Build Back Better agenda can also turn into a political plus, and some argue it already has with things that help people now like the child tax credit.
But as they work to avoid a repeat of 2010, Democrats are relying on Biden to aggressively tout policies in the coming year that will help families and the economy.
Kim Potter, pictured in 2007, shot Daunte Wright. She resigned from the Brooklyn Center, Minn., police on Tuesday after 26 years on the force. (photo: Bruce Bisping/Minneapolis Star Tribune/Getty Images)
Jury selection begins Tuesday for a white former suburban Minneapolis police officer, Kim Potter, who says she meant to grab her Taser instead of her handgun when she shot and killed motorist Daunte Wright, who was Black
But legal experts say a conviction for Potter, who says she meant to pull her Taser, isn’t as certain as it might seem — at least on the most serious charge she faces, first-degree manslaughter. Jury selection begins Tuesday.
The shooting of Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, by the white officer sparked intense protests in Brooklyn Center just as nearby Minneapolis was already on edge as that city's fired officer Derek Chauvin was on trial in George Floyd’s death.
The concrete barriers, chain-link fencing and National Guard soldiers that surrounded the courthouse for that trial are gone, but enhanced security will be in place for Potter's trial — with fewer entry points and the closure of a parking garage.
Potter, who resigned two days after the shooting, says she made an innocent mistake when she reached for her pistol instead of her Taser. But prosecutors, including the leader of the team that got Chauvin convicted for murder, say Wright's death was manslaughter and that Potter, an experienced officer who was trained to know better, should go to prison.
The big questions for the jury will be whether Potter's actions rose to recklessness or culpable negligence, as the law requires. Defense attorneys also argue that Wright was responsible for his own death because he tried to drive off from a traffic stop and could have dragged an officer to his death if Potter hadn't intervened.
“What we have basically is an innocent mistake," defense attorney Earl Gray said in a preview of his arguments. “That she wasn’t culpably negligent and that she didn't cause the death of Mr. Wright. He caused his death himself."
According to the complaint, the officer Potter was training, Anthony Luckey, told Wright they stopped him the afternoon of April 11 for the air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror and the car's expired license plate tabs. Luckey then found an arrest warrant for a weapons violation. They went back to arrest him, joined by Sgt. Mychal Johnson.
Wright obeyed Luckey’s order to get out. But as Luckey was handcuffing him, Wright pulled away and got back in. As Luckey held onto Wright, Potter said "I’ll tase ya.” The video then shows Potter, holding her handgun in her right hand and pointing it at Wright. Again, Potter said, “I’ll tase you,” and then two seconds later: “Taser, Taser, Taser.” One second later, she fired a single bullet into Wright’s chest.
“(Expletive)! I just shot him. ... I grabbed the wrong (expletive) gun,” Potter said. A minute later, she said: “I’m going to go to prison.”
Prosecutors allege that Potter committed first-degree manslaughter by causing Wright’s death while committing a misdemeanor crime, namely recklessly handling a gun, when death was reasonably foreseeable. The second-degree manslaughter count alleges that she acted with culpable negligence. Neither charge requires the intent to kill.
Prosecutors suggested in pretrial filings that Potter should not have even used her Taser. Police probably could have found Wright later so the officers should have let him drive away, they suggested.
Experts agree that drawing a firearm instead of a stun gun is rare. To avoid confusion, officers typically carry their stun guns on their weak sides, by their nondominant hand, and away from handguns carried on their strong side. That’s how Brooklyn Center officers are trained and how Potter had her duty belt arranged. And there are several obvious differences between the two weapons. For one thing, a Taser is yellow. A Glock is all black.
Joe Friedberg, a local defense attorney who isn't connected to the case, said Wright’s attempt to drive off when Officer Johnson was partly inside the car would have been sufficient grounds for Potter to shoot and kill him intentionally — and that is enough to acquit, he said.
Mike Brandt, another local defense attorney not connected with the case, saw it differently. He said it’s clear Potter mishandled a firearm — an element of the first-degree manslaughter charge — though the jury might struggle with whether she did so recklessly. The “culpable negligence,” or taking an unreasonable risk, is easier to prove, making second-degree manslaughter more likely, Brandt said.
In one of the best-known cases of grabbing a gun instead of a Taser, a transit officer in Oakland, California, killed 22-year-old Oscar Grant in 2009. Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter.
Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who won a $2.8 million settlement for Grant's family, said Taser mix-ups have dwindled since police across the country stepped up stun-gun training after Grant's death.
Burris said he thinks Potter had the right to use reasonable force and could get credit from the jury for intending to use her Taser. And if that happens, he said, the best the prosecution might get is a conviction on the lesser charge. But if the jury agrees she should not have used her Taser at all, he added, they might find it was first-degree manslaughter.
Still, if Potter comes across as remorseful, she'll get empathy that could result in an acquittal or hung jury, Burris said.
“These are tough cases,” he said. “A lot of emotion comes in a case like that. If an officer did not intend to kill someone, that officer is going to be highly emotional. That emotion is going to have an impact on jurors.”
Attorneys are expected to screen jurors closely for their attitudes on the sometimes destructive protests that occurred in Minneapolis after Floyd's death. Questionnaires sent to potential jurors asked about their views of those protests and others over the past two years, as well as whether they participated, had been injured or suffered property damage, or knew anyone who had.
Similar questionnaires were used in the Chauvin trial, where jury selection took 11 days, and his attorney repeatedly asked potential jurors whether they could set aside strong public opinion and deliver a fair verdict.
The trial timeline for Potter sets aside at least six days for jury selection, with opening statements no sooner than Dec. 8.
Zaynab Mohamed, community advocacy manager for the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was among the activists who repeatedly demonstrated outside the home of the county prosecutor who originally had Potter's case to demand murder charges be filed. That didn't work, but the prosecutor eventually handed the case over to Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office.
Mohamed said people are “more energized than they ever were." She said an acquittal for Potter would mean another outpouring.
“I think there will be a level of anger, and people will take to the streets like they did after the murder of George Floyd,” she said.
A rally in support of abortion rights and access. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
As Roe v Wade faces a direct challenge, criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, local judges and cops begin to lay out what it would look like to criminalize abortion
On a tip, police turned their attention to “Call Jane”, a feminist collective of young women who, since 1965, had provided safe but illegal abortions to roughly 3,000 Chicagoans per year. The collective was raided after two Catholic women told police their sister-in-law planned to have an abortion performed by the group.
A Chicago homicide detective was assigned to the case and traced “Jane” to the South Shore neighborhood, bordered by the blue waters of Lake Michigan. There, police raided an apartment, arrested nearly 50 people for questioning, and sent three women who were actively undergoing abortion treatment to the hospital.
Seven women were charged with 11 counts of performing an abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion. They would soon be dubbed the “Abortion Seven” by newspapers. But the Call Jane members protected people they served – they even ate index cards detailing patients’ contact information.
Then, in 1973, the Abortion Seven had a reprieve. Prosecutors abandoned the case when supreme court justices issued a landmark ruling in the case of Roe v Wade, effectively legalizing abortion across the US.
In Roe, the court affirmed that access to safe and legal abortion was a constitutional right. The court ruled that states could not ban abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb, roughly considered to be 24 weeks gestation (a full term pregnancy is considered to be 39 weeks).
Now, Roe faces a direct challenge. US supreme court justices have taken up the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, in which they will consider whether the state of Mississippi can ban nearly all abortion from 15 weeks. Abortion advocates believe the choice to take the case implies that at last four justices see it as a chance to reconsider the precedent set by Roe.
Oral arguments in the case are set to be heard on 1 December, with a ruling expected in June 2022. But already, pro-choice campaigners are warning of a future where abortion may no longer be legal in the majority of the US, and where prosecutions like that of the “Call Jane” collective could once again become a reality.
In court briefs and reports, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, international human rights experts and academics have begun to unpick what a return to illegal abortion might look like in a country with a vast law enforcement apparatus, with the world’s largest incarcerated population, and with women as America’s fastest growing imprisoned demographic.
“It’s like a thought experiment – to think about what ‘Call Jane’ would look like,” in the modern era, said Cynthia Conte-Cook, a technology fellow with the Ford Foundation. Her work in gender, racial and ethnic justice explores how law enforcement could use the data produced by digital infrastructure – phones, internet browsers, social media – to prosecute people who seek or aid abortions, should Roe v Wade be overturned, and the procedure become illegal in some states once again.
A single mobile phone could reveal the entire collective, Conte-Cook warned. Just one encounter with law enforcement – a traffic stop, a search, an arrest – could expose the entire network “through digital connections”.
‘So much harsher’
With the supreme court scheduled to hear oral arguments on the most consequential abortion rights case in nearly five decades this week, Conte-Cook is not the only person entertaining such thoughts.
If Roe v Wade were to be overturned, at least 26 states hostile to abortion would outlaw abortion either immediately or as quickly as possible, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organization. Abortion advocates believe this would likely result in desperate people (who have the resources) seeking abortions in more liberal states where the procedure remains legal, such as Illinois or New York. In just one example, Louisiana has passed a “trigger-law” designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. A person from Louisiana seeking an abortion would need to reach Kansas to obtain one legally.
However, most people are unlikely to make that long, expensive and arduous journey. Campaigners warn that poor, young and people of color are far more likely to turn to illegal methods, creating another layer of racism and classism in the criminal justice system, alongside the same preventable public health disaster seen before Roe.
Miriam Krinsky, the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a group that educates newly elected local prosecutors, said her group’s brief filed to the supreme court regarding the Mississippi case “reflects a growing recognition that overturning 50 years of precedent and potentially criminalizing personal healthcare decisions could have incredibly dire consequences”. The brief was co-signed by nearly 100 prosecutors, police and high-ranking former Department of Justice officials.
“This is not just blue, urban-area elected prosecutors and law enforcement leaders – these are leaders from New York and California and everywhere in between – urban, rural, red states, blue states. District attorneys in Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin,” said Krinsky, speaking about those who signed the brief. “It’s not just a voice that comes from so-called ‘liberal bastions’.”
The nation’s preeminent association for defense attorneys has also published a report ahead of the oral arguments that lays out a future in which the US could undertake “rampant criminalization” and “mass incarceration on an unprecedented scale” in the name of the unborn.
“States are laying the groundwork now, and have been laying the groundwork for criminal penalties that are completely different,” than the pre-Roe era, said Lindsay A Lewis, a criminal defense attorney in New York who co-authored a report on abortion for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys (NACDL), the first such report in the organization’s history.
“They are so much more advanced, and so much harsher than what existed before Roe was enacted.”
State legislatures have spent recent decades “modifying their criminal codes” in ways that “completely changes the calculus when it comes to what it would mean to go back to pre-Roe times,” said Lewis.
Criminal charges could come from specific abortion laws, but also from criminal codes that penalize attempted crimes, conspiracies and accomplices to crime, all relics laws developed during the US’s so-called war on drugs. Those laws “could subject a wide range of individuals to criminal penalties if Roe is overturned,” the NACDL report outlines, including prosecuting people from states where the procedure is illegal who attempt to seek abortions in states where it remains legal.
For example, Louisiana law defines an “accomplice” to a crime as anyone involved in its commission, even tangentially, whether “present or absent” if they aid, abet or even counsel someone. Experts say this could be deployed against a wide range of friends, loved ones or counselors, such as clergy or abortion fund networks which help shepherd people to clinics.
As Lewis and her co-authors laid out, there are thousands of laws like Louisiana’s across the country. What’s more, recent prosecutions of pregnant people also show how digital evidence can be used as powerful prosecutorial tools.
More than 2,000 police agencies across the US have already purchased “mass extraction” technology that allows them to download, organize and archive a phone’s entire contents. The technology is sometimes called a “window into the soul”. This digital evidence has then been used to identify search queries for abortion pills, including in the prosecution of Latice Fisher, a mother of three in Mississippi.
Fisher gave birth to a stillborn child. The child was pronounced dead at Fisher’s home by emergency responders. Prosecutors used Fisher’s cell phone records to show she had searched for abortion pills online before her child was stillborn, and brought charges against her twice.
Prosecutors dropped the first case amid criticism of an archaic test used to determine whether an infant is born alive. Prosecutors then tried to indict Fisher again, but a grand jury refused to indict her when presented with scientifically accurate information.
“There are many possibilities, and one way that I have tried to imagine what those possibilities could be is looking at the way surveillance technology is used today on investigating crimes related to sex work,” said Conte-Cook.
Conte-Cook said police may choose to set a “honey pot”, in which law enforcement sets up a fake website to entice people seeking abortion pills to provide their contact information. They could use “reverse geo-fencing” technology, to create a digital border around a location of interest – perhaps a clinic – and identify all phones that enter.
“The danger about a world where the states can criminalize abortion, again, is that the tools they have to investigate every crime have increased exponentially with surveillance technology,” said Conte-Cook.
‘Every single one of these is a human rights violation’
Other American historians, such as Leslie J Reagan, the author of When Abortion Was a Crime, have warned of Ceausescu-like regimes where prenatal care becomes about ensuring “all pregnancies are progressing to term”, and authorities monitor menstrual cycles. In Missouri, health department officials have admitted to monitoring periods to identify “failed medical abortions”, part of a bid to close the state’s last abortion clinic.
In a brief to the supreme court, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health warned that overturning Roe v Wade and banning or criminalizing abortion would be “irreconcilable” with international human rights laws. Even so, some states have already instituted bans, such as Texas which banned the vast majority of abortions.
Particularly in the south, prosecutions of pregnant people have already taken place recently, even when they have given birth to healthy babies. Advocates said these contested prosecutions, often dropped under public pressure or overturned on appeal, are evidence of the zeal some prosecutors have for criminalizing pregnancy.
Alabama has prosecuted nearly 500 women since 2006 for allegedly exposing a fetus to a “controlled substance” in the womb, even including prescription painkillers. The charge carries a potential 10-year prison sentence, if the child is born healthy (more if the baby is not), and the controlled substance was prescribed to the person under investigation.
“The Alabama supreme court in two decisions says we treat the unborn as persons,” said Lynne Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which has helped provide counsel to people charged under such statutes.
In South Carolina, courts have said the word “child” in state laws should be interpreted to include unborn fetuses, meaning people could be held liable for child abuse during pregnancy. Oklahoma recently sentenced 21-year-old Brittney Poolaw to four years in prison after miscarrying, following use of methamphetamine, though there is no evidence drug use caused the miscarriage.
“The most recent published figures cite 24 people since the year 2000 who have been criminally punished for ending a pregnancy or helping a loved one do so,” said Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director for If/When/How.
Diaz-Tello said her organization is now conducting research which will likely prove twice as many people per year have been prosecuted.
“Every single one of these is a human rights violation,” said Diaz-Tello. “Any non-zero number should be shocking, should be alarming.”
Israeli soldiers guarding Jewish settlers block the way of a group of Palestinians in Hebron in the West Bank on Nov. 24. (photo: Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
A United Nations agency has separately found that 115 Palestinians have been beaten or otherwise attacked by settlers since the start of the year, with four fatalities. More than 300 incidents of property destruction, including olive trees cut and burned during the autumn harvest, were documented over the same time period.
The wave of beatings, arson, vandalism and rock-throwing — most taking place where Palestinian farms and groves are adjacent to Jewish settlements established on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war — has prompted some leaders of the Israel’s governing coalition to call for a crackdown on settler violence.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz convened a meeting of security officials earlier this month and said the military would issue new orders against “standing by,” directing soldiers to do more to prevent the incidents and protect Palestinians, according to media reports. “Hate crimes are the root from which terrorism grows and we must uproot it,” Gantz said in a statement after the meeting.
The Israeli army is in charge of security in areas of the occupied West Bank where settlements are located, but videos compiled by Israeli human rights groups show soldiers frequently do little to intervene during the incidents. The groups say the soldiers are more likely to detain Palestinians than settlers and in some instances have even aided in the attacks. In other cases, however, settlers have clashed with Israeli soldiers.
In a statement, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman said, “Any claim that the IDF supports or permits violence by residents in the area is false.”
For their part, settlers protest that the complaints ignore violence and vandalism by Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel. Those incidents range from tire slashings and rocks thrown at vehicles to stabbings and car-ramming attacks against Israeli soldiers. In May, a 19-year-old Jewish student was killed in a drive-by shooting as he waited at a roadside bus stop. A Palestinian man was convicted in the case. Advocates say crimes by Palestinians are aggressively prosecuted while settler violence typically goes unpunished.
On Wednesday, a group of more than 300 retired Israeli military, security and intelligence officials delivered a letter to members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, decrying settler violence against Palestinians as a threat to the rule of law and the country’s international standing.
“Groups of settlers have been perpetrating deadly acts of violence against Palestinians — for the most part helpless villagers — in areas under our control,” they said. “This is completely unacceptable from an ethical and humanitarian perspective, and it stands in contradiction to Israel’s Jewish values.”
Confrontations in the fields
At the scene of one violent encounter earlier this year, Said Awad was recently straining to pry a boulder from the dry earth where he hoped to plant an olive tree. As he worked, an audience looked on.
A squad of Israeli soldiers watched from a hillside to his left, stationed at the entrance to a Jewish outpost outside the West Bank city of Hebron. To his right, a group of Jewish Israeli activists watched from the opposite hillside, ready to come to Awad’s aid at any sign of trouble.
The Palestinian farmer rested his pickax and shook his head. “I just want to do my work,” he said.
There had been no soldiers or activists present in March when Awad arrived to find a strange herd of goats grazing on his barley plants. He shouted to chase them away, but men he identified as settlers from Mitzpe Yair, a neighborhood of the nearby Susya settlement, began throwing rocks. They were soon joined by more men in masks and some of them hit him with an iron bar, knocking him unconscious and fracturing his jaw, according to an Israeli police report.
Police said they reviewed video of the incident but could not identify any suspects among the masked attackers and made no arrests. They closed the file earlier this month.
So on a recent Saturday, about a dozen Israeli activists from the group Ta’ayush boarded a van in Jerusalem for the hour-long drive to Awad’s field in the hopes that their presence would deter settler attacks, or at least spur soldiers to intervene if they did happen. Since the attack on Awad in March, soldiers have been stationed at the gate to Susya.
While some settlers milled about, none came close to Awad as he cleared rocks from the field. He knows from experience, though, that some of the stones he is stacking neatly will be scattered by his next visit.
“He’s marking his territory so they don’t take his land outright,” said Assaf Sharon, a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University who said he has been coming to the area as a witness, escort and occasional farmworker for almost 20 years.
Shmaya Berkowitz, a spokesperson for the Susya settlement, said he was unfamiliar with the attack on Awad and couldn’t comment on it. In general, he blamed the Jewish activists for creating tensions between the settlers and Palestinians in the area. He characterized the groups like Ta’ayush as European-funded “anarchist organizations” that provoke clashes so they can film and exploit them online for money. Their ultimate goal is to undermine Israeli claims to the West Bank, he said.
“We happen to be in the front of a battle to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel,” said Berkowitz. “People here are trying to bring up their children in peace. They don’t wake up and think, ‘How are we going to beat up an Arab today?’ ”
Part of a larger strategy
Not everyone in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition, which spans much of Israel’s political spectrum, has joined in denouncing the settler violence. Many declined to attend a parliamentary conference on the issue Monday, leading to complaints from their left-leaning partners.
“Their silence and lack of interest is tantamount to the endorsement and encouragement of continued violence,” said Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, who leads the leftist Meretz party, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
Opposition lawmakers, meanwhile, expressed outrage that government officials would blame Israeli settlers, asserting that Palestinian violence against Israelis is the more serious problem.
Itamar Ben Gvir, head of the far-right Religious Zionist party, disrupted the conference by noting that a Palestinian gunman had fatally shot a Jewish tour guide a day earlier in Jerusalem’s Old City. “A man was killed yesterday and you are holding a conference on settler violence, are you stupid?” he shouted before being escorted from the room, according to an account in the Jerusalem Post.
Jewish human rights groups have dismissed the prospect that government attention to the violence would have any lasting effect.
They say settler violence is part an overall strategy of expanding Israel’s presence in the Palestinian territories by making life difficult for those who have lived there for generations. This government-sanctioned approach, these groups say, includes designating swaths of land as military training grounds, routinely denying construction permits to Palestinians and demolishing their unapproved buildings, and restricting Palestinian access to water and power networks.
“This violence is not random; it serves Israel’s interest,” said Hagai El-Ad, head of the Israeli activist group B’Tselem. “Excuse me for being underwhelmed that the minister of defense is willing to convene a meeting.”
Vendors selling political party flags in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on Friday, ahead of Sunday's national elections, which may be the most significant in a decade. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
Hondurans head to the polls on Sunday, but widespread political violence during the campaign and questionable results from 2017 are looming large.
With issues like violent crime and poverty forcing an ever-increasing number of Hondurans to flee north, candidates are billing the race as a chance to alter the country’s destiny.
But with corruption seemingly ingrained in the highest levels of power, political analysts say the chances of truly transformative change are slim.
Wayne Hsiung poses for a photograph while feeding goats. (photo: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media/Intercept)
Wayne Hsiung faces felony charges — an escalation in the government’s war against those who would put the value of life ahead of property.
On Monday, the trial of attorney and animal liberation activist Wayne Hsiung begins in rural North Carolina. He faces felony charges of burglary and larceny, carrying potentially over three years in prison. All this for the act of removing a sick baby goat from a goat meat farm.
The action was filmed and broadcast on social media as an example of what the animal rights movement calls “open rescue” — a tactic by which activists publicly rescue animals from factory farms and bring them to animal shelters. Saving individual, typically ailing animals is an end in itself, but the broader aim is to bring attention to the brutalities of factory farming, especially farms that brand themselves as cruelty free. The suffering rescued animals, according to the activists, give the lie to the notion of benign meat farms.
The hefty charges Hsiung and others now face underline the activists’ point: that current legal standards elevate property over life to an extreme degree. The so-called Green Scare of the 1990s and 2000s, in which the government’s conjured notion of “eco-terrorism” led to the yearslong imprisonment of nonviolent animal rights activists, has evidently not ended.
Hsiung and other open rescuers have faced charges in the past, as The Intercept has reported; until now, his charges had been dropped by prosecutors. The North Carolina trial will be Hsiung’s first. It is part of a rash of other recent felony cases against open rescuers around the nation heading into court.
“The seriousness of these charges, and the amount of state resources going towards these cases, shows how this issue has clearly become a priority, and at a time when the animal farming industry is facing a reckoning in public opinion,” Hsiung, who co-founded the animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, which uses open rescue as its central tactic, told me. “More and more people are ready to conclude that animals, including farm animals, have lives worthy of protection.”
His hope — and it can be no more than hope when facing trial in an agricultural community in a deep-red jurisdiction — is that a jury will affirm the value of saving a suffering animal and thus create an aperture for legal precedents around further animal rights to be established. “We need a change in the paradigm of seeing animals as commodities,” he said. “I’m a believer in the possibility of evolving standards in law.”
Hsiung’s optimism is commendable from a man facing prison for taking one baby goat from a farm and filming it, standing in opposition to the mighty agriculture lobby. The prosecutor who brought the charges against Hsiung in 2018, District Attorney Greg Newman, was without sympathy. “I’m going to treat him like anyone else,” he said of the defendant. “The goat is property, and its health is irrelevant to North Carolina law.”
Newman has since been permanently removed from office after numerous victims of sexual assault accused him of willful and prejudicial misconduct for refusing to hear them in court and protecting powerful alleged abusers. The former DA had more than enough time, however, to bring outsize charges against a goat rescuer. Newman’s replacement, Andrew Murray, has stayed his predecessor’s course against the animal rights activist.
At the very least, Hsiung’s case presents an opportunity to make arguments in court that could bring to bear the tensions and inconsistencies surrounding animals’ legal standing.
“A trial is where rubber hits the road,” Hsiung’s attorney, Jon Frohnmayer, told me. “If we want a place to really examine what human beings are doing to nonhuman animals, this is it.”
Frohnmayer believes that these cases can highlight the “inherent contradictions in our system,” in which laws criminalize actions like open rescue. The laws themselves that pertain to animals, such as laws defining animals as “property” or livestock exemptions to animal cruelty laws, he argues, should be seen to lack democratic legitimacy for excluding the interests and perspectives of nonhuman life.
An array of animal cruelty laws have been on state books for over a century. In several states, however, animals who are to be killed for food are exempt from these cruelty protections. North Carolina is not such a state. Legal scholars have also argued that a so-called necessity defense, which in certain circumstances would allow for a person to break into a stranger’s car with legal justification to save a suffocating dog, could apply in open rescue cases; the logic is the same, and the only difference lies in the power of the agriculture industry.
Meanwhile, nonhuman animals in this country lack the designation of legal personhood, a category enjoyed by corporations and ships. A number of efforts by activists are underway to change this. Indigenous climate struggle leaders are also pushing to see legal personhood granted to environmental features such as rivers.
“A successful necessity defense would fashion limited personhood rights for animals,” Frohnmayer said. He explained that the aim is to establish a “right to rescue” in which “rescue” is “understood as a noun”; that is, not only would a person have a right to rescue an animal from a factory, but also the animal themself, understood as a sentient life, would be deserving of the right be rescued.
Lines of defense in open rescue cases are not necessarily paradigm-shifting. It’s an option, for example, that Hsiung could be found innocent of larceny if it can be proven that the sick goat was of no value to the farmer — an argument that might save Hsiung from prison but shores up the framing of animals as commodities. And there is a considerable risk of precedent being set: A loss in one jurisdiction that rejects arguments from a necessity defense could be used to deny the use of such a defense in other animal rights causes.
Those who undertake the tactic of open rescue would no doubt prefer that the law comes to recognize animals as lives worthy of saving. The movement opposes the meat industry, tout court. Through the rescues of individual, harmed animals, it seeks to also bring attention to what it sees as the impossibility of animal welfare within even supposedly ethical farms. And it is through the cases of these individual animals that precedents could be set around the legal standing of animals.
Whether or not one agrees with animal liberationist desires to end animal agriculture and testing, it remains extreme to suggest that Hsiung deserves prison time for his actions. Even some “victims” of open rescue disagree with such harsh prosecutions. Just a few days before Hsiung’s North Carolina court date, he met with a farmer in rural Utah to participate in a “pardon” for a sick turkey he had rescued from that very farmer’s property. Hsiung had faced felony charges over this rescue, too, but was able to reach a “dismissal by compromise” with the state and the farmer, specifically because the farmer understood the activist’s actions as “just saving lives.”
An uptick in prosecutions against open rescue activists signals a government interest in deterrence — discouraging actions that garner considerable online followings and support. The state’s interests remain aligned with the animal agriculture industry and pharmaceutical giants engaged in animal testing, for whom a sea change in public opinion on animal rights is a major threat.
“For two decades, corporate interests and state and federal government have undertaken substantial efforts to criminalize and prosecute animal rights activism,” said Lauren Gazzola, a longtime animal liberation activist who served 40 months in federal prison in the mid-2000s after being convicted of “animal enterprise terrorism” alongside other members of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty campaign. Gazzola and other members of the SHAC Seven, as she and her co-defendants were known, were persecuted for what should have been constitutionally protected speech.
As right-wing extremist groups grew in number and rank over the last three decades, the FBI in 2005 named animal and environmental liberationists as the No. 1 domestic terrorist threat facing the nation, despite the fact that these movements had killed no humans or animals.
Prosecutions and major convictions like that of the SHAC Seven had a chilling effect on animal rights activism. Yet as public opinion shifts in favor of animal welfare, networks like DxE believe that it will be harder and harder for the industry and government to criminalize animal rights activists without public backlash. That is not to say that the interests of animal agriculture don’t continue to hold major sway at every level of government, as evidenced in Hsiung’s case, among others in the last decade.
“Given that these defendants are exceedingly non-violent — indeed, they are working to stop massive violence against animals — one might wonder why their activism is deemed such a threat to those interests,” Gazzola told me via email. “Perhaps it is that animal rights and ending the related environmental devastation of animal agriculture are ideas whose time has come.”
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