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08 July 21
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The supreme court’s conservative wing considerably weakened section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and Kagan didn’t hold back
here may have been no supreme court decision this year more important this year than the one in Brnovich v Democratic National Committee.
In a 6-3 ruling that broke down along ideological lines, the court’s conservative justices upheld two Arizona voting restrictions and considerably weakened section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law.
It was an opinion that arrived at a moment of crisis in American democracy. Republicans have proposed hundreds of measures across the country that would make it harder to vote. Nonetheless, Samuel Alito, the conservative justice writing on behalf of the majority, set an extremely high bar to challenge voting law under the Voting Rights Act in the future, writing that challengers must prove, among other things, that a restriction went beyond the “usual burdens” of voting.
In a scorching dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan bluntly criticized the majority’s attack on the Voting Rights Act and the irreparable damage the court was doing to the foundation of American democracy.
Here are a few key takeaways from Kagan’s opinion:
‘A perilous moment’
While the court’s decision deals with two Arizona restrictions passed several years ago, Kagan contextualizes the case by raising alarm about ongoing voter suppression efforts. She decries new laws that shorten voting hours, impose new requirements to vote by mail, and even ban food and water to voters standing in line.
“The court decides this Voting Rights Act case at a perilous moment for the nation’s commitment to equal citizenship,” she writes. “It decides this case in an era of voting-rights retrenchment – when too many states and localities are restricting access to voting in ways that will predictably deprive members of minority groups of equal access to the ballot box.”
The supreme court has destroyed the Voting Rights Act
Kagan spends a considerable portion of her opinion describing the history that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the importance of the law.
Then she accuses her colleagues of damaging it.
“What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she writes.
She also is unsparing in her criticism of Shelby County v Holder, the 2013 supreme court ruling that gutted another critical part of the Voting Rights Act.
“Maybe some think that vote suppression is a relic of history – and so the need for a potent section 2 has come and gone,” she writes. The remark is a thinly-veiled retort to Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Shelby County opinion and said “things have changed in the south.”
“Efforts to suppress the minority vote continue,” she writes. “No one would know this from reading the majority opinion.”
The supreme court does not understand voting discrimination
A pivotal part of the majority’s opinion is its finding that the Arizona laws in question do not impose a big enough burden on minority voters to constitute a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
But Kagan points out that what may seem like mere inconvenience to some voters may actually be a severe burden on others. A ban on handing out water to people standing in line to vote may be just an inconvenience in neighborhoods where lines at the polls are short, but a more severe burden in places where there are long lines (Black and Hispanic voters are more likely than whites to face longer waits to vote).
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The court’s majority also misses a larger point, Kagan writes. One of the most effective forms of voter suppression is death by a thousand paper cuts, piling voting inconvenience on top of voting inconvenience. By ignoring these inconveniences, the supreme court is enabling this kind of voter suppression, Kagan argues.
“In countenancing such an election system, the majority departs from Congress’s vision, set down in text, of ensuring equal voting opportunity. It chooses equality-lite.”
Fuzzy math
One of the challenged Arizona provisions in the case was a law that required officials to reject ballots from voters who were qualified to vote, but showed up in the wrong precinct. A key piece of evidence in the case was data showing that people of color were about twice as likely to have their ballots rejected as white voters. Arizona rejected more than 38,000 ballots between 2008 and 2016, far more than any other state.
Nonetheless, the court’s conservative majority rejected that evidence, noting it affected just 1% of Hispanic, Black and Native American voters, leaving the majority of Arizona voters unaffected.
That thinking drew a blistering response from Kagan. “Suppose a State decided to throw out 1% of the Hispanic vote each election. Presumably, the majority would not approve the action just because 99% of the Hispanic vote is unaffected,” she wrote.
“A rule that throws out, each and every election, thousands of votes cast by minority citizens is a rule that can affect election outcomes,” Kagan added. “If you were a minority vote suppressor in Arizona or elsewhere, you would want that rule in your bag of tricks. You would not think it remotely irrelevant.”
Kagan also rips the majority for failing to consider the full impact of one of the Arizona laws on Native American voters.
“Except in a pair of footnotes responding to this dissent, the term ‘Native American’ appears once (count it, once) in the majority’s five-page discussion of Arizona’s ballot-collection ban,” Kagan writes. “So of course that community’s strikingly limited access to mail service is not addressed. In the majority’s alternate world, the collection ban is just a ‘usual burden[] of voting’ for everyone.”
The voter fraud myth
One of the most important parts of the majority opinion asserts that concerns over voter fraud can be used to justify voting restrictions.
Kagan pushes back on this, noting that America has a long history of using claims of voter fraud as a pretext to suppress votes.
“Throughout American history, election officials have asserted anti-fraud interests in using voter suppression laws. Poll taxes, the classic mechanism to keep black people from voting, were often justified as ‘preserv[ing] the purity of the ballot box [and] facilitat[ing] honest elections,’” she writes.
‘Mostly made up’
Writing for the court’s majority, Alito says the ruling is based on “careful consideration” of the text of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
But Kagan doesn’t buy that at all. She notes that the text of section 2 categorically prohibits any voting law that denies equal access to the ballot box based on race.
“The majority’s opinion mostly inhabits a law-free zone. It congratulates itself in advance for giving section 2’s text ‘careful consideration’. And then it leaves that language almost wholly behind. (Every once in a while, when its lawmaking threatens to leap off the page, it thinks to sprinkle in a few random statutory words),” she writes. “The majority instead founds its decision on a list of mostly made-up factors, at odds with section 2 itself.”
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards leaving federal court in New York City in 2019. (photo: Frank Franklin Il/AP)
In a bright blue sheath dress, she appeared calm and resolute. Her family had come to watch the hearing, and so had the BuzzFeed reporter, Jason Leopold, to whom she had leaked more than 2,000 sensitive government documents that, combined, are more than 14 times the length of "Moby-Dick."
"Your Honor, I'm an Indigenous matriarch warrior whose spirit cannot be broken," she said.
She explained how her upbringing as a member of an Algonquian tribe — where clan mothers were like the Supreme Court and chiefs like the presidents — gave her a unique understanding of the ideals of the U.S. government.
She explained how she had tried to go through proper whistleblower channels when she witnessed corruption within the Treasury Department and did not hide that she had also gone to the press. “I could not stand by aimlessly,” she said, “as this would have been a violation of my oath of office, which is also a federal crime.”
After she was sentenced to six months in federal prison, she and her family had lunch with Leopold, and she posed for a photo with the journalist at a Lower Manhattan bus stop. Leopold, 51, had a Mona Lisa-like expression. Edwards, 43, held her face in something between a faint smile and a grimace.
She is one of the most important whistleblowers of our era, and yet hardly anyone remembers her name.
Despite recent noises from the Biden administration that it will stop pursuing the phone records and emails of journalists who publish unauthorized government information, there has been no apparent change from the previous administration's hard-line stance on the civil servants who reveal those secrets.
Official whistleblower status remains narrowly defined and maddeningly difficult to achieve. Retaliation and alienation are practically fated for most who decide to speak out.
Meanwhile, some whistleblowers just seem to get more love than others. And some of that love seems to take time. Daniel Ellsberg, reviled when he was first revealed as the source of the Pentagon Papers, is being hailed as a folk hero upon the 50th anniversary of their publication. Edward Snowden is a household name, the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary and best-selling book. Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner became causes célèbres, while Jeffrey Wigand and Karen Silkwood became Hollywood heroes.
But Edwards — known to her friends as “May” — is largely unknown and mostly forgotten. She is scheduled to report to the Bureau of Prisons in August, and no celebrities are clamoring about the injustice on Twitter.
Or perhaps she just hasn’t had her moment yet.
On Oct. 29, 2017, BuzzFeed published the first in a series of scoops by Leopold, based on leaks from Edwards — then a senior official in the Treasury Department's division of financial crimes, known as FinCEN.
The story revealed the existence of 13 suspicious wire transfers involving offshore companies connected to Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, totaling more than $3 million.
It was a red-hot story — for almost exactly one day.
And then the news cycle rushed up over it like a tidal wave. On Oct. 30, Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel probing possible collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and the Russian government, announced that Manafort had been charged with conspiracy to launder money, making false statements and other offenses stemming from his work advising a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
It took nearly a year for federal agents to show up at Edwards’s home outside Richmond, led by their high-tech analysis of activity on government computers.
By then, Leopold had published a stream of Russia-related stories based on the confidential “suspicious activity reports” that banks are required to file with the Treasury Department whenever they spot a seemingly irregular transaction — one story on payments the Russian government sent its embassies with a label of “to finance election campaign of 2016” (Russia said it was just helping its overseas citizens cast absentee ballots for its own parliamentary elections); another outlining payments Russian operative Maria Butina used to ease her entry into GOP political circles.
But these, too, had largely been forgotten by the time Edwards was arrested, stories that only sizzled briefly in a season consumed by nonstop Trump scandals, uproars and investigations. Even some of Leopold’s other work — notably an investigative scoop about the Trump team’s secret negotiations during the 2016 campaign to erect a Trump Tower in Moscow — upstaged the stories generated that past year by Edwards’s leaks.
Prosecutors say that at first she denied to investigators that she had communicated with the media, but she quickly confessed that same day. And soon enough, they had her emails.
“I’m writing a story on Butina,” Leopold wrote to her one day in 2018, according to messages prosecutors later presented in court. “This will really [annoy] the senate because it’s based on [stuff] they could have had.”
The government alleged that this was Leopold’s warm-up banter before asking Edwards for more confidential files.
“Hummm let me see if I can search and find the folder,” she responded, promising to send them over. “Sorry if you asked me in the past for them.”
In many ways, Edwards had the kind of inspiring backstory that might have ennobled her image as a whistleblower. Her father, a veteran of the Air Force; her mother, the product of a Virginia Chickahominy family that lived off the land until the late 1970s, selling pine cones for money to buy sugar and flour.
After her older sister was killed in a car accident, Edwards set about to heal the family’s wounds by becoming the “perfect daughter,” as her lawyers described in court, winning a partial softball scholarship to North Carolina Wesleyan College, then teaching high school science, among other jobs, while working toward a PhD.
The terrorist attacks of 2001 inspired her to join the federal workforce, and she served in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and later the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, before moving to the Treasury Department.
In its initial story about her 2018 arrest, the New York Times hinted that Edwards may have been “ideologically motivated” to leak suspicious-activity reports that were damaging to a Trump ally like Manafort: When she downloaded the reports, prosecutors said, she labeled the file “Debacle.”
But while conservatives were quick to label her as a “Deep State” traitor, her own politics guaranteed she would not be taken up as a lefty cause.
Until her arrest, she regularly shared posts on social media that mocked liberals. She publicly scoffed at the sexual misconduct allegations lodged against Brett M. Kavanaugh. And she posted supportive messages about Trump’s false claims of election fraud. (Edwards told The Post that some of those posts were made from a parody account and hinted that she may not have been their actual author.)
Another factor complicating her heroine narrative was the nature of her interactions with Leopold.
The two-time Pulitzer finalist and Emmy nominee is one of the most adept and prolific investigative reporters when it comes to deploying the Freedom of Information Act to pry data from the government; he has likened the feeling he gets when he extracts such tidbits to “a score.” (Sober for two decades and a mentor to other journalists in recovery, Leopold described his vanquished cocaine addiction in a memoir entitled “News Junkie.”)
Some missteps have made him a controversial figure in journalism: In 2019, he and a colleague reported that Trump ordered lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to investigators, a story that was ultimately not explicitly supported by Cohen’s own testimony.
Prosecutors leaned heavily on exchanges between Leopold and Edwards, excerpting from messages that suggested the relationship overstepped the traditional bounds of reporter and source.
“Can additional files from the list be sent so I can push the story forward a bit more?” Leopold wrote to her in January 2018, while at work on a follow-up story about Manafort. “I realize this is a big ask. No worries if too much. But I wanted to ask. The story needs to be that explosive to make the right amount of noise.”
In another email, he promised Edwards that “the reckoning is beginning” and that “it will result in the accountability you have sought. You and everyone else will be protected.”
In court filings, prosecutors alleged that Leopold sent Edwards his stories before publication, which he denies: “I never share drafts with sources,” he told The Post, noting that he merely outlined for her key facts a forthcoming story would reveal, under a principle of “no surprises.”
He also denied prosecutors’ claims that he set up meetings for her with members of Congress.
“She asked me for contact information for some staffers she wanted to speak with about waste, fraud and abuse,” he said, “and I gave it to her.”
Columbia Journalism Review reviewed the emails between Leopold and Edwards and raised questions about “how much reporters should expect from vulnerable sources” and whether journalists do enough “to make sure that these people are aware of the jeopardy they face when they disgorge massive volumes of confidential material.” (At one point, Edwards’s teenage daughter raised concerns about a big box of Treasury documents in their living room.)
But Mark Schoofs, BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, defends Leopold’s approach. “Reporting requires more than just hoping that a huge pile of secret government documents lands in your inbox,” he said in a written statement to The Post. “Jason is a world-class journalist, and he dug for information that was vital to the public interest. We have never been prouder to work with him.”
Leopold was not on trial, of course. But investigative reporter James Risen, himself the longtime target of the government over his national security stories for the New York Times, suspects there’s a reason for prosecutors to selectively air these kinds of discussions, tinged as they are with flattery, cajoling and overpromising.
“Embarrass enough investigative reporters,” Risen wrote in April, “and maybe they will stop embarrassing the government.”
Since she pleaded guilty in early 2020 — and began a long wait for sentencing delayed in part by the coronavirus pandemic — Edwards has suffered from the financial demands of her legal case and her loss of employment. Her husband retired from the Richmond police force, and they have lost their home, their car and their health insurance; her daughter had to give up her horse.
“We saw 14 months of a family’s life destroyed for telling the truth,” Edwards’s sister-in-law wrote to the judge.
And in perhaps the greatest cosmic indignity: Edwards wasn’t even charged in connection with her most important leak.
It wasn’t just another incremental update on Russiagate. It was the one that really mattered.
For that one, the justice system hasn’t even acknowledged her contribution.
"I'm getting sick of my stuff not coming out," Edwards wrote to Leopold in March 2018, according to court documents.
Fifteen months later, at a journalism conference in the summer of 2019, a BuzzFeed journalist would approach a reporter from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about how to handle massive data leaks, such as the ones that fueled ICIJ’s groundbreaking Paradise Papers and Panama Papers exposing scandal in the world of offshore banking.
Their conversation would launch a team effort that would come to fruition in September 2020, with the publication of hundreds of stories involving 400 journalists in 88 countries.
Branded “The FinCEN Files,” they would tell the tale of how some of the world’s biggest banks facilitate international money laundering and corruption around the world — and how the U.S. government stood back and watched it happened.
By then, Edwards had been under arrest for nearly a year for her role in leaking information for what would prove to be much smaller stories. But “The FinCEN Files” was also based on documents she handed off to Leopold.
These stories forced greater scrutiny into international money laundering in Britain, Brussels and the United States, where lawmakers passed a measure banning anonymous shhttps://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/buzzfeed-news-and-international-consortium-investigative-journalists-washington-dcell companies. President Biden hailed the bill as a significant tool in his administration’s effort to fight international corruption.
Why wasn’t Edwards charged in connection with that story? It’s tempting to speculate that the government found the FinCEN leaks to be nobler, more benign, or of greater public benefit than the Mueller investigation scoops.
But “the Justice Department seldom looks at the difference between nefarious leaker and whistleblower,” explained Matthew Miller, a former public affairs official at the Justice Department. Leaking is leaking, in other words.
Some supporters of Edwards, though, are hoping to prove a distinction — and make sure she finally gets some credit for the story that mattered.
At her sentencing, Judge Woods described Edwards’s leaks as “intentional” and “reckless.” But Schoofs, of BuzzFeed, recently called upon Biden to pardon Edwards, who “did more to bring transparency to the global financial system than almost anyone else in recent memory,” he wrote in the New York Times.
“FinCEN itself just announced that it’s making corruption a priority in its anti-money-laundering fight. I think it proves the power of our findings,” Leopold told The Post. “Locking up the person whose actions made all these changes possible is so wrong. . . . She deserves to be celebrated, not incarcerated.”
No one yet appears to be making the documentary or best-selling book about Edwards. But there’s some evidence her case is beginning to resonate. Roxanne Houman, a PhD student at Columbia University, recently read Schoofs’s opinion piece and went in search of a petition to sign in support of Edwards.
Houman didn’t find one, so she started her own. It recently collected its 500th signature.
Clinician Kiea Riddick (L) prepares a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for the coronavirus disease. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Delta Variant Said to Be Far More Widespread Than Federal Estimates
Around 93% of COVID-19 cases have occurred in counties with vaccination rates of less than 40%, said U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky.
Nearly all deaths and hospitalizations nationwide are among unvaccinated people, said Jeff Zients, who leads the White House's COVID-19 response team.
"Simply put: in areas of low vaccination coverage, cases and hospitalizations are up," Walensky said.
The CDC earlier this week said that the Delta variant of COVID-19 has already become the dominant strain in the United States. The variant, which is highly contagious, has also become dominant in other countries around the world. read more
Cases of COVID-19 are surging in counties representing 9 million people, Walensky said.
The White House plans to concentrate federal assistance for vaccinating against and treating COVID-19 in states including Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada and Illinois, Zients said.
The White House last week said it would send out special teams to hot spots around the United States to combat the Delta variant amid rising case counts in parts of the country. read more
The White House is also working to make COVID-19 vaccines available at doctors' offices around the country, Zients added.
He said the spread of the Delta variant is particularly dangerous to young people. Research suggests it may cause more severe disease among younger people than other variants of the coronavirus.
Walensky added that the United States is seeing outbreaks of COVID-19 at summer camps and other community events.
Search and Rescue teams look for possible survivors and to recover remains on Tuesday at the site of the 12-story oceanfront Champlain Towers South Condo. (photo: Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
‘I don’t think the state’s ever going to quite be the same,’ governor says
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Mr DeSantis wouldn’t say if he supported having older buildings around the state be recertified to reassure residents that they are safe following the deadly collapse of the 12-story tower in Surfside north of Miami Beach, The Miami Herald reported.
The building was in the process of its recertification when it collapsed at 1.20am on 24 June. The process takes place every 40 years, but it’s only required in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
Experts argue the collapse shows inadequacies in the certification process and state legislators, structural engineers, and insurance agents have indicated that the state laws that apply to high rises in coastal areas are due for an update.
“We obviously want to be able to identify why did this happen,’‘ Mr DeSantis said. “Is this something that was unique to this building? Is it something that was unique to the person that maybe developed it – because obviously there are sister properties? Is it something that buildings of that age, that would have implications beyond that whether southern Florida or the entire state of Florida? I think we need to get those definitive answers.”
Mr DeSantis was then asked about the impact that the collapse may have on the condo market as those interested in buying a condo may now hesitate.
“I can just say, just having talked with people who’ve been on the scene — people who’ve done stuff — I think this building had problems from the start, let’s just put it that way,’‘ he said.
“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about it but, at the same time, if there is something identified that would have implications broader than Champlain Towers, then obviously we’re going to take that and act as appropriate,” he added.
Several coastal cities have launched their own reviews of older buildings following the collapse. The city of North Miami Beach issued an evacuation order on Friday for one building not considered to be safe. Firefighters ordered residents to leave a low-rise condo building in Miami Beach on Saturday after a building inspector noted a flooring system failure and damage to outside walls.
Democratic state Senator Jason Pizzo said re-inspections should include more aspects, in particular for buildings close to the shore and in flood zones. The scrutiny of coastal condominiums should be increased, he argued.
Mr DeSantis said on Wednesday that the collapse would be “a deep wound for a long time”.
“But as tragic as it’s been, I think the outpouring of support has shown a lot of great parts of our community,” he added.
“I don’t think the state’s ever going to quite be the same. But I’ll tell you, you never want to go through the tragedies but those folks there, you know, they are leaving a very impressive legacy,” he said of the rescue teams.
“And for those who are missing, who have been identified as being deceased, the impact that they’ve had, not just on Florida but through folks all across the country and the world, has really been profound,” Mr DeSantis concluded.
NYPD officers cordon off a scene in Lower Manhattan on Aug. 21, 2015, in New York. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty)
ominic Caprario lay handcuffed on the asphalt as the punches came down. The first officer hit him repeatedly in the back of the head, Caprario recalled, leading him to shield his face against the rubber tire of the squad car. A second officer walked over and stomped Caprario’s face with the heel of a steel-toed Timberland boot.
According to interviews with Caprario, along with medical records and documents from a subsequent civil rights lawsuit, the 2011 incident began when two Staten Island police officers pulled Caprario from his double-parked car and accused him of buying drugs. It was Officer Anthony J. Egan who initiated the violence, Caprario recalled, attempting to shut the trunk on Caprario’s fingers, throwing him against the hood of his car, and punching the 24-year-old as he lay restrained. “Egan went nuts,” Caprario said.
Egan denied the allegations in court and did not respond to requests for comment.
Across a 10-year career at the New York Police Department, Egan cost New York City over $437,000 in seven separate civil rights lawsuits, including the one filed by Caprario, accusing the officer of excessive force, false arrests, and false testimony.
In 2018, Egan was decertified under a New York regulation designed to strip police training credentials from officers who have been fired for cause or resign while under a disciplinary investigation.
But within months, Egan was working again — first for a high-end private security company and then for the City University of New York’s Hunter College, where he worked as a campus peace officer authorized to make arrests. Today, he is employed as a correctional officer at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Brooklyn.
Documents obtained by The Intercept and New York Focus under New York’s Freedom of Information Law show that Egan is one of 27 former law enforcement officers to be decertified by state regulators and then rehired by another police department or public safety agency. In some instances, new employers were unaware that the officer they were hiring had previously been decertified. These rehires point to the lack of oversight of so-called wandering officers and the limitations of the current decertification system in New York.
“It fits into a broader pattern that we’ve seen in police getting away with misconduct,” said Michael Sisitzky, who leads the New York Civil Liberties Union police accountability campaign. “The fact that they may not have violated any laws or rules by going through this process is another example of police departments not taking rules violations by officers on the job — that led to the loss of their jobs and loss of certification — all that seriously.”
An Inadequate System
In 2016, two years after the police killing of Eric Garner, administrators at New York’s Division of Criminal Justice Services enacted regulations to revoke the training certificates of problematic police officers. Under the regulation, officers who are fired for cause by police departments or resign during disciplinary processes must be reported to the DCJS, which then invalidates those officers’ training certificates.
But the law does not prevent decertified officers from being rehired; officers can undergo retraining by new employers and become recertified to resume police work. Because New York does not decertify officers permanently, and because regulators don’t track police decertifications as closely or transparently as they do for doctors or lawyers, experts call the state’s current system a half-measure.
“It’s better than nothing. But it’s still inadequate,” said Roger Goldman, a professor emeritus at Saint Louis University School of Law and a leading expert on police licensing.
Forty-five other states have adopted statutes that allow officers to be decertified. Many of those statutes are far stricter than New York’s, Goldman said, and make it more difficult for an officer with a problematic record to be rehired. In Arizona and Connecticut, for example, regulators publish the names and offenses of decertified officers publicly. In Kansas, officers are required to petition a state board to be reinstated, allowing regulators rather than police departments to decide whether a cop returns to work. In Oregon, police decertifications are final.
But in New York, DCJS regulators function largely as record keepers. They cannot investigate or fire officers themselves; instead, they decertify officers whose names police departments give them, leaving most regulatory responsibilities in the hands of local police chiefs. Police chiefs can set their own thresholds for what constitutes a fireable offense and rehire officers fired for misconduct if the officer retrains.
In January 2018, the NYPD fired James D. Secreto, a 22-year veteran lieutenant who failed to answer questions after being accused of stealing from the 9th Precinct in Lower Manhattan. Secreto had a disciplinary history, including a record of making false entries as well as fighting with a fellow officer, according to NYPD trial documents.
Secreto was decertified. But shortly afterward, he retrained as an officer for the Saugerties Police Department in upstate New York. He then moved to the nearby Ellenville Village Police Department.
In an interview, the Ellenville police chief, Philip Mattracion, said he hadn’t seen Secreto’s disciplinary trial documents before hiring him. Mattracion said he thought Secreto had retired from the NYPD and had hired him based on “sterling” recommendations from a police chief at Saugerties.
“It’s a shame they don’t make that kind of stuff public,” Mattracion said, referring to internal NYPD disciplinary documents. “It’s a whole other world down there, they don’t cooperate with you.”
In April, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law policing reforms tucked into the state’s 2021-2022 budget that will confer investigatory powers to the DCJS, allow for permanent certificate revocations, and mandate that police chiefs report disciplinary investigations up the chain. In a statement, a spokesperson for the DCJS said that the new laws provide clearer guidelines than New York’s original regulatory process, which “relied solely on local decisions.”
The reforms will come into effect in October. But they still leave wiggle room for officers looking to get rehired. They do not ban recertification, and they do not shed light on the decertification process by requiring the release of officers’ names and transgressions. In June, after completing The Intercept and New York Focus’s FOIL request, DCJS quietly published a copy of the same document on its website, which includes the names of decertified officers but not the reasons for their decertification.
Some say Cuomo’s legislation is far from enough.
“There is nothing in here that compels any police chief or any agency to permanently decertify an officer,” said Sisitzky, the NYCLU lawyer. “There’s a lot of permissive language.”
State Sen. Brian Benjamin, whose district includes Harlem, East Harlem, and the Upper West Side, also criticized the reforms. “It doesn’t make decertifications a requirement, it makes them a possibility,” Benjamin told The Intercept and New York Focus. “That to me is not acceptable.”
Benjamin recently introduced his own police oversight bill, the Wandering Officers Act, which would make it illegal for police departments to hire officers who were fired for cause or resigned while under investigation. The bill is carried in the state Assembly by Member Phil Ramos, a former police officer. The legislation did not make it to a vote in this year’s session.
Egan, the NYPD officer who allegedly assaulted Caprario on Staten Island, resigned under investigation, triggering the revocation of his training certificate. But just a month later, he was licensed as a security guard by New York’s Division of Licensing Services, which certifies the nearly 170,000 private security workers in the state.
A spokesperson for the Department of State, which oversees licensing, said former police officers require a letter of good standing from a prior employer as well as a criminal background check to become licensed guards.
The spokesperson, Mercedes Padilla, declined to say whether the department considered misconduct records but said the licensing division’s role was to provide jobs rather than to regulate the private security industry. “We call it the department of opportunity,” Padilla said.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Egan now works, told The Intercept and New York Focus that it conducts background investigations into all new staff hires. The bureau would not comment on Egan’s case beyond confirming his employment.
The Intercept and New York Focus have not found evidence of recertified officers committing wrongdoing at their new jobs. But in 2020, a study of thousands of Florida police officers found that officers who were fired for misconduct or resigned while under investigation were three times more likely to be fired for misconduct at their next job within three years. Roughly 3 percent of Florida’s working police force were wandering cops, the study found.
“Those officers in Florida had not been decertified, they’ve been terminated, which is different,” Goldman said. “But it points to what my work has illustrated over the past, which is that these officers who are decertified and resurface again are more likely to reoffend.”
A High Bar
Since 2016, the DCJS has decertified over 1,000 police officers, correctional officers, and security guards. But these decertifications occur only when an officer is fired or quits, allowing officers with patterns of misconduct to evade state regulators.
New York has an unusually high standard for decertifications, Goldman said. “What you really need in New York is what most other states have, which is [to] decertify not just because you’ve been fired for cause, but because you’ve committed serious misconduct.”
The Intercept and New York Focus identified 21 former NYPD officers who moved to new police, public safety, or private security positions after being accused of wrongdoing substantiated by New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, and 50 more who moved to new positions after being named in lawsuits alleging excessive use of force, false testimony, or false arrest.
Forty-eight moved to other police departments, 16 to public security roles, and seven to private security.
To conduct the analysis, The Intercept and New York Focus reviewed data on CCRB complaints substantiated by investigators, as well as a database of more than 1,000 federal civil rights lawsuits filed against NYPD officers between 2015 and 2018, which was compiled by the Legal Aid Society. These lists were compared with state and city payroll data and other public records.
The New York State Police has hired at least six former NYPD officers accused of misconduct, including Richard Caster, one of the officers named in the $4 million settlement for Thabo Sefolosha, an NBA player who was assaulted and injured by NYPD officers outside a Manhattan nightclub in 2015.
In a statement, a State Police spokesperson described the agency’s hiring process as one of the most selective and thorough in the country. But the department said it has only recently begun to review CCRB records and internal NYPD disciplinary records, which were made partially public in March.
The New York City Administration for Children’s Services has hired at least 10 former NYPD officers accused of misconduct to investigate sensitive cases of child abuse. An ACS spokesperson declined to say whether the agency considered misconduct records when hiring former NYPD officers. The agency does send a verification form to the NYPD, the spokesperson said, on which the “NYPD will report whether a candidate was disciplined during their employment.”
In 2018, ACS briefly employed Dwayne Chandler, a former NYPD officer with two substantiated CCRB complaints, including a 2003 incident in which Chandler pistol-whipped a suspect on the back of the head. Chandler was also one of two NYPD officers whose stray bullet fire killed a Yemeni deli worker in 1994. Police supervisors deemed the shooting justified, according to a report by the Daily News.
In the summer of 2020, Chandler, now a licensed security guard, was arrested on assault charges for firing a pistol into the back of a fellow diner during a restaurant brawl in Howard Beach. His case is still pending.
The ACS also hired Dennis Carmody, a former officer who was suspended by the NYPD in 1987 for pulling his gun on a doctor at Harlem Hospital who had been objecting to Carmody’s treatment of a concussed suspect. Carmody was hired at the ACS in 2018 and works there today, according to payroll records.
Private employers also face difficulty backgrounding former NYPD officers. The private security company G4S said they get little information about job candidates when they check with the NYPD. “They don’t give us very much,” a company representative said.
The company has hired at least two former NYPD officers with substantiated misconduct records, including one Brooklyn cop named in over 100 civilian complaint allegations in the 1980s and 1990s, two of which were substantiated by investigators. A G4S representative attributed the high number of civilian complaints about the officer to an era in which Brooklyn “was fraught with murders, homicides, robberies, and drugs.”
Jennvine Wong, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project, said she was not surprised that officers accused of misconduct could move into private security industries.
“These are mostly industries that are going to be highly deferential to the police,” she said. “How much credit are they going to give to something that they’ve just viewed as part of the job?”
Over a five-year period, the Nassau County Police Department hired 17 former NYPD officers who were the subject of substantiated CCRB complaints or named as defendants in federal civil rights lawsuits. Among them was Matthew Castellano, a Staten Island NYPD officer who joined the force in 2011.
In 2015, Castellano was one of two officers to stop Sheena Stewart, a Black social worker who was seven months pregnant, on her commute to work. Castellano pulled her from the driver’s seat, threw her to the ground, and called her a “fat bastard,” according to a lawsuit filed by Stewart, who sued the officers and the department for abusive policing and racial discrimination. Stewart was suspended from her job at a residential rehabilitation center after being charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and obstructing governmental administration; the charges against her were later dropped.
“[This was] a decent person who was hurt in a very bad way,” said Brett Klein, Stewart’s lawyer.
Castellano missed a court appearance for the lawsuit. City payroll records show that he resigned in 2015, while the lawsuit was ongoing.
Stewart settled her case with the city for $75,000, agreeing to a common clause in police settlements in which the plaintiff agrees that the settlement does not indicate the guilt of the defending officer.
Two years later, Castellano was hired by the Nassau County Police Department, where he works today for a higher salary than he had with the NYPD.
The Nassau County Police Department did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the hiring of Castellano or the 16 other former NYPD officers accused of misconduct.
“That’s classic. Making more money,” Klein said about Castellano’s rehiring. “It interfered with her job, but it didn’t seem to have any impact on this guy.”
Police stand near a mural featuring Haitian president Jovenel Moise, near the leader's residence where he was killed by gunmen in the early morning hours in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, July 7, 2021. (photo: Joseph Odelyn/AP)
ALSO SEE: Haiti in Chaos After President's Assassination, US Activists Urge Biden to Stop Deportations
Police kill four suspected ‘mercenaries’ and capture two others as President Jovenel Moise’s assassination threatens more chaos.
Police General Director Leon Charles described the four people killed as “mercenaries” and said that security forces were locked in a fierce gun battle with the men who assassinated the president at his home overnight.
“We blocked them en route as they left the scene of the crime,” Charles said in televised comments. “Since then, we have been battling with them.”
“They will be killed or apprehended.”
Moise, a 53-year-old former businessman who took office in 2017, was shot dead and his wife, Martine Moise, was seriously wounded when heavily armed assassins stormed the couple’s home in the hills above Port-au-Prince at around 1am local time on Wednesday (05:00 GMT).
Bocchit Edmond, the Haitian ambassador to the United States, said the gunmen were well-trained “foreign mercenaries” and said they had masqueraded as US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents as they entered Moise’s guarded home under cover of darkness.
The DEA has an office in the Haitian capital to assist the government in counternarcotics programs, according to the US Embassy.
Moise’s wife, Martine, was in a stable but critical condition and had been evacuated to Miami for treatment, the ambassador added.
‘Barbaric act’
The assassination, which drew condemnation from Washington and neighbouring Latin American countries, came amid political unrest, a surge in gang violence, and a growing humanitarian crisis in the poorest nation in the Americas.
Joseph Claude, the interim prime minister who has assumed leadership of the country, said the assassins spoke English and Spanish – the majority in Haiti either speak French and Haitian Creole.
“I am calling for calm. Everything is under control,” Joseph said on television alongside Charles. “This barbaric act will not remain unpunished.”
The Haitian government has declared a two-week state of emergency to help it find the assassins.
In an earlier interview with The Associated Press news agency, Joseph called for an international investigation into the assassination and said elections scheduled for later this year should be held. He also pledged to work with Moise’s allies and opponents alike.
“We need every single one to move the country forward,” Joseph said, describing the president as “a man of courage” who had opposed “some oligarchs in the country”. “We believe those things are not without consequences,” he added.
Haiti, a country of about 11 million people, has struggled to achieve stability since the fall of the Duvalier dynastic dictatorship in 1986, and has grappled with a series of coups and foreign interventions. During the past year, Moise had been governing by decree after failing to hold elections, and in recent months, the opposition demanded he step down, saying he was leading it toward yet another grim period of authoritarianism.
Ever since he took over in 2017, Moise has faced calls to resign and mass protests – first for corruption allegations and his management of the economy, then for his increasing grip on power.
Lately, he presided over a worsening state of gang violence that rights activists said is linked to politics and business leaders using armed groups for their own ends.
Global concern
In the US, President Joe Biden condemned Moise’s killing as “heinous” and called the situation in Haiti – which lies some 700 miles (1,125km) off the Florida coast – worrisome. “We stand ready to assist as we continue to work for a safe and secure Haiti,” he said.
The Dominican Republic said it was closing the border and reinforcing security in the area, but described the frontier as ″completely calm”.
“This crime is an attack against the democratic order of Haiti and the region,” Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader said.
Antonio Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, also condemned the assassination and stressed that “the perpetrators of this crime must be brought to justice,” according to a spokesman.
The UN Security Council meanwhile expressed deep shock and sympathy over Moise’s death before a closed-door meeting on Thursday, requested by the US and Mexico, to evaluate the situation.
According to Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting New York, the session will also be used to discuss whether “Haiti, given its current security situation, has the capacity to investigate the crime or if there should be an international investigation”.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) expressed concern on Wednesday that the violence could deal a setback to efforts to fight COVID-19 in Haiti – one of only a handful of countries worldwide that has yet to administer a single shot of coronavirus vaccine.
Power vacuum
In Port-au-Prince, the usually bustling streets were mostly deserted on Wednesday and the airport was closed although gunshots rang through the air.
A caravan of vehicles including the ambulance carrying Moise’s corpse to the morgue had to change route because of gunfire and roadblocks, according to local reports.
With Haiti politically polarised and facing growing hunger, fears of a breakdown in order are spreading – particularly as Moise’s murder took place amid a power vacuum.
Just this week, he nominated a prime minister to replace Joseph – who was only meant to be an interim leader – but the official, Ariel Henry, has yet to be sworn in. And the Supreme Court’s chief justice, who might be expected to help provide stability in a crisis, died recently of COVID-19.
In the AP interview, Joseph said he had spoken three times with Henry and that there was agreement that he was in charge for now.
“He was actually designated but never took office,” Joseph said of Henry. “I was the one who was a prime minister, who was in office. This is what the law and the constitution says.”
However, in a separate AP interview, Henry appeared to contradict Joseph. “It’s an exceptional situation. There is a bit of confusion,” he said. “I am the prime minister in office.”
Late on Wednesday, an extraordinary issue of the official gazette said the prime minister and his cabinet – meaning Joseph’s government – would assume executive powers until a new president could be elected, as per Haiti’s constitution.
Presidential, legislative and local elections are due to be held in September, alongside a controversial referendum on a new constitution that Moise had said would help finally bring political stability to the country.
Alex Dupuy, a Haiti-born sociologist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, said the best scenario would be for the acting prime minister and opposition parties to come together and hold elections.
“But, in Haiti, nothing can be taken for granted. It depends how the current balance of forces in Haiti plays out,” he said, describing the situation as dangerous and volatile.
The main opposition parties said they were greatly dismayed about the killing.
“In this painful circumstance, the political forces of the opposition condemn with utmost rigor this heinous crime that is at odds with democratic principles,” their statement said.
The parties added that they hope the National Police will take all necessary measures to protect lives and property, and they called on Haitians to be “extremely vigilant.”
On March 16, 2021, community members in Memphis, Tennessee, gathered to protest the Byhalia Connection pipeline. Former vice president Al Gore joined then. (photo: Atmos)
After months and months of organizing by community activists and landowners, Byhalia Connection LLC announced it is scrapping plans to build a 49-mile crude oil pipeline through Tennessee and Mississippi.
t’s Wednesday, July 7, and an oil pipeline in the Southeast got canceled.
After months and months of organizing by community activists and landowners, Byhalia Connection LLC announced it is scrapping plans to build a 49-mile crude oil pipeline through Tennessee and Mississippi. The line would have connected two existing pipelines: the Diamond and Capline pipelines.
Byhalia, a joint company owned by subsidiaries of Plains All American Pipeline and Valero, said the cancellation is due to “lower US oil production resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.”
But protests against the pipeline, which began in earnest last year, quickly gained momentum and national attention. In southwest Memphis, predominantly Black neighborhoods along the proposed route organized against its development, arguing that the project jeopardized the vitality of their communities and city water supplies. The pipeline would have run through Memphis neighborhoods where the risk of cancer is already four times the national average due to heavy industry. Byhalia’s permit for the project was fast-tracked by the Army Corps of Engineers, which meant it didn’t have to conduct a full environmental impact statement.
Memphis activists see the cancellation as the beginning of a larger battle for environmental justice for the city’s Black communities. “It’s time to make sure we’ll never have to fight this fight again,” Justin J. Pearson, founder of the grassroots Memphis Community Against the Pipeline organization, said at a gathering last week, according to nonprofit news site MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism. “And when we pass those laws, it will be an even bigger celebration.”
THE SMOG
Need-to-know basis
Despite its recent climate pledges, the Canadian government has spent at least $23 billion supporting three potentially high-emitting pipeline projects since 2018, according to a report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. It has supported the Trans Mountain expansion, Coastal GasLink pipeline, and the now-defunct Keystone XL extension through direct money transfers, loans, and loan guarantees.
Hawaii, known for being one of the wettest places on the planet, has fallen victim to wildfires in recent years. More than 75,000 acres across the island chain were lost to wildfires from 2018 to 2020, propelled by the uncontrolled growth of invasive species, increasingly hot summers, and a growing homelessness crisis on the islands that results in people starting accidental fires while cooking or doing other things for survival.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, is planning to incentivize natural gas, coal, and nuclear electricity over the use of renewable energy following the state’s power grid collapse after a winter storm in February. Clean energy advocates are accusing Abbott of pushing a false narrative that renewables were entirely to blame for the deadly blackouts.
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