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The Crazy Story of the Professor Who Came to Stay—and Wouldn’t Leave

by ElsieClore Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Abel walked up to the front door of her house for the first time in four months and rang the bell. She’d just flown halfway around the world to drop in, unannounced, on the man who’d taken over her home.

When he came to the door, Abel says, the man didn’t seem surprised to see her—or the police officer standing beside her. “Oh, hi,” he said.

Abel peered behind him into her living room, which was practically empty. Most of her furniture was gone: a dining table and four chairs, two easy chairs, an antique piece. Her books and rugs were nowhere to be seen. Even the artwork had been taken off the walls.

As Abel walked around the place she’d called home for three decades, she had the distinct feeling that her life had been erased. In the family room, a small sofa, a table, and a television had been removed. Out on the back deck, the wooden table and benches were missing. The bedrooms were emptied out, her mattresses crammed into the office. Closets were sealed with blue painter’s tape. She turned to the man, who had been renting her place for the past several months—without paying. “What is going on here?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”

In October 2015, as she was planning a semester-long research trip to Paris, Abel logged on to SabbaticalHomes.com to find someone to rent her house. The site bills itself as a sort of Airbnb for academics; its motto is “A place for minds on the move.” Abel, an English professor at the University of California-Berkeley, quickly received a bunch of responses, the first of which came from a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence College named David Peritz.

Peritz visited Abel’s cozy two-bedroom Spanish Revival in Kensington, a pocket of suburban affluence just north of Berkeley. He’d grown up in nearby Sonoma County, and he said he and his wife and their teenage son were spending some time on the West Coast to be close to family and friends. Peritz liked what he saw—the view of the Golden Gate, the office in the detached garage. There was one small thing, however: His wife had severe allergies, Peritz told Abel; could he store the small rug in the bedroom elsewhere for the duration of the rental? She was hesitant at first but agreed when he later suggested a storage facility.

Abel, now 71, didn’t feel much of a connection with Peritz, two decades her junior. Still, she thought to herself, “Oh, come on. He’s a professor.” She found him polite and gracious, and she didn’t bother asking for references, let alone do a background check. She didn’t notice until much later that his personal checks lacked a home address. Why would she? That was precisely the point of Sabbatical Homes; unlike Craigslist or Airbnb, it was opening your home not to random people, but to colleagues. (As the site’s founder put it in a press release, “There is an implicit degree of trust amongst academics.”) When Abel discussed her would-be renter with her husband, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology who spends most of the year at the University of Texas-Austin, she didn’t mention any misgivings.

So in January 2016, Abel headed to the Latin Quarter to work on a new book on Virginia Woolf, and Peritz moved into her home.

In early February, Abel noticed that Peritz hadn’t paid the rent by the first of the month, as they’d agreed upon. After a week’s delay and several apologies, the money appeared in Abel’s account. “Okay,” she thought, “he’s a little disorganized.”

In March, Peritz again failed to pay on time. He said his wife had an emergency dental procedure that they’d had to pay for out of pocket, and he once again profusely apologized for the inconvenience. Getting worried, Abel gave him a chance to break the lease, but he declined, promising to catch up on his payments.

By the time April 1 came and went without a rent check, Abel had had enough. She wrote Peritz to tell him she was taking him to small-claims court. Around the same time, Abel’s neighbors began writing her increasingly concerned emails. One of them had even seen Peritz taking her furniture down the driveway to the office in the garage late at night. They rarely, if ever, saw his wife or son.

Abel got in touch with the Kensington Police Department, which sent an officer by the house to talk with Peritz. The officer emailed Abel to tell her that he thought Peritz was “trying to establish squatters rights or lock you out,” and that she should have a cop accompany her when she eventually came back home. Someone from the police department would tell her she should start the eviction process as soon as possible. It might take weeks, even months, to get Peritz out of her house.

It’s not easy to evict someone in California. Generally that’s a good thing—especially in the Bay Area, one of the nation’s most expensive places to live. In a region where it’s not uncommon for one-bedroom apartments to rent for more than $3,000 a month, there’s an obvious incentive for landlords to find excuses to force out tenants and jack up the rent.

When a tenant stops paying rent, the eviction process goes like this: First, he or she must be served a three-day notice of what he owes. Once that notice has expired without payment, the landlord has to file what’s known as an unlawful detainer complaint, which must then be served to the renter along with a court summons. The renter has five days to respond, and either party can request a court date within the next 20 days. Along the way, the case can get delayed for any number of reasons, stretching out the process to a couple of months. In the meantime, the tenant stays put, rent-free.

This process was set up in part to protect tenants from predatory landlords. But in some instances it has provided cover for people looking to score a few months of free housing. In 2008, SF Weekly reported that there were between 20 and 100 serial evictees operating in San Francisco—bouncing from home to home without ever paying a dime.

The sharing economy has provided new opportunities for grifters to game the system. So-called Airbnb squatters—like the pair of brothers who refused to leave a Palm Springs condo in the summer of 2014 after paying one month’s rent—have become more common. It’s enough of an issue that Airbnb has a page devoted to the topic; it warns that local laws may allow long-term guests to establish tenants’ rights.

“I’m always amazed at how many risks people take with their home,” says Leah Simon-Weisberg, the legal director at a Bay Area tenants’ rights organization and a commissioner on Berkeley’s rent board. “You let these total strangers in, you know nothing about their credit, you’ve never met them before, and you let them into your home with your stuff. I mean, it kind of blows my mind.”

A day after Abel cut her sabbatical short and flew home to confront Peritz in person, she sent him an email to confirm that she wanted him out so she could move back in on May 1.

Peritz responded several days later. He wrote that he wasn’t “presently in a position to vacate the premises.” He also told her he’d been in touch with an attorney, and said if Abel tried to evict him, they’d end up in court, which “could be expensive, time consuming and draining for both of us.”

Peritz also blamed Abel for his inability to find a new place to stay, claiming that she had “submitted a false feedback report” on SabbaticalHomes.com. The lawyer, he said, had called it a “textbook case of libel.” “I realize that your intentions in making that report were good,” Peritz wrote, “but it remains the case that what you reported was false and that we have been damaged by it.” He said if she was willing to negotiate or arbitrate a settlement, he was “amenable to releasing you from all potential liability that could result from your false report.”

Abel was stunned. Not only had a tenured professor who lists “social contract theory” among his research interests exploited her trust, but now he was digging in and dragging things out. How much time, effort, and money would it take to get back into the home where she’d raised her son, written a couple of books, and lived for the better part of her adult life?

In early May, Abel moved into a neighbor’s house right across the street from her home. There, in an upstairs bedroom, she set up what she semi-jokingly refers to as “command central.” “I became,” she says, “relatively obsessed with all this.”

The room had two windows, one facing Abel’s home. She would often sit in the comfortable chair she’d placed next to the front window—alongside a stack of folders full of correspondence with her lawyer and various state and local agencies. Every day, she looked out and saw Peritz’s red pickup truck parked on the street.

With the help of a private investigator, Abel began to learn about Peritz’s erratic rental history. For starters, she discovered that when he first reached out to her—assuring her in an email, “We have sublet and house-sat several times before, and have references to say that we are responsible, considerate, quiet, clean and reasonably easy going”—he was in the middle of being evicted from another rental home in Berkeley. (The case was eventually settled out of court.) The PI also turned up at least one eviction attempt in New York City, as well as multiple federal and New York state tax liens.

There was more. After Abel had complained to SabbaticalHomes.com, the site’s founder, Nadege Conger, alerted several other users whom Peritz had been in touch with and blocked his account. When he created a new account with a different email address, that was blocked, too. Conger also connected Abel with a New York City couple, both professors, who’d threatened Peritz with a lawsuit when he stopped paying rent while subletting their apartment in 2015. When the couple returned from a six-month trip, they claimed Peritz owed them approximately $5,375. Photos show that their apartment was a mess: Furniture was broken, paintings had gone missing, and the floors had been stripped from what looked like repeated scrubbing. (Peritz had told them in an email that he’d been mopping frequently to keep down the dust from construction next door.) The couple didn’t write a negative review of Peritz because they didn’t think it would make much of a difference, and they didn’t contact his supervisors at Sarah Lawrence—a small liberal arts college in nearby Westchester County—because they feared a lawsuit.

Armed with this information, Abel reached out to people who knew Peritz—colleagues at UC-Berkeley, old classmates, anyone who might have some insight into his motivations. Some of his longtime friends agreed to try to convince him to leave her house, and soon.

As May stretched on, an anonymous blog called David Peritz—Unlawful Detainer popped up. “Do Not Rent Your Home to David Peritz,” the site blares; Peritz’s official headshot is stamped “Serial Evictee.” It’s not clear who made it; Abel says she had nothing to do with it. (“I wouldn’t know how to, first of all,” she told me.)

Abel eventually reached out to Sarah Lawrence to see if it might investigate Peritz’s behavior. In a brief, apologetic response, Dean of the College Kanwal Singh wrote that the school “cannot take any action in this case as it has nothing to do with the College.”

Abel’s colleagues at UC-Berkeley, on the other hand, weren’t shy about getting involved. She had seen that Peritz had a copy of a book by political scientist Wendy Brown; figuring that he might admire Brown’s work, Abel asked her and her longtime partner, renowned gender theorist Judith Butler, if they’d mind contacting him. They agreed.

Butler sent Peritz two epic, eviscerating emails. The first began, “I have recently become aware of your scurrilous behavior—effectively squatting in the home of my colleague, Elizabeth Abel. If you are not out of that apartment within five days time, I will write to every colleague in your field explaining the horrible scam you have committed.” The second, written less than a week later, bore the subject line “your miscalculation” and included this withering coup de grâce:

…please accept the fact that you have painted yourself into a corner, and that you have to leave promptly, and with an apology and a payment plan, in order to avoid any further destruction to your professional and personal world. Your itinerary of self-destruction is a stellar one.

Brown’s email was equally harsh. “It’s past time for you to leave. And in case you are wondering whether there are any future possibilities of teaching at Berkeley, the answer is an emphatic no,” she wrote. “The game is up.”

I’ve reached out multiple times to Peritz to get his side of the story. In his response to my initial email, he denied “the veracity of most of what is said about me” on the blog about him. He said he would meet with me, if only to correct the record. He then stopped responding to my emails and phone calls. After a later exchange of messages to set up a meeting, Peritz said his lawyer had “strongly advised” him against commenting further. He ultimately responded to just one of the many questions I emailed him and his attorney.

Without hearing from Peritz, it’s impossible to know why he’s jumped from one messy rental fight to another. Some of his old friends shake their heads at his situation but will not speculate on the record about his motivations. One longtime acquaintance declined an interview request, writing in an email, “David Peritz was once a friend of mine, and I am reluctant to play a part in a story that would make his life more difficult.”

As news of his run-in with Abel has spread among the academic community, it has trickled into his professional life. While Peritz was in California over the summer (and part time in the fall), he gave lectures in a number of continuing-education institutes and at area senior centers. A group of students pushed to cancel his continuing-education classes at UC-Berkeley and other Bay Area universities. Acknowledging the buzz about Peritz’s rental history, the director of San Francisco’s Fromm Institute, a nonprofit offering classes to retirees, told a group of colleagues in an email that he’d written Peritz to assure him that “attempts to besmirch your reputation will have no bearing on our mutually rewarding relationship.” (The director, Robert Fordham, responded to a request for comment by writing, “Prof. David Peritz continues to be a teacher at the Fromm Institute who is highly evaluated by his students for his work in the classroom with them.”)

Peritz returned to Sarah Lawrence to teach this past fall; a college spokeswoman declined to comment for this story. But it appears that he will continue to live at least part time in the Bay Area through the spring. He told me in an email that he was making frequent trips between New York and California to help care for his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. “I will continue to do so so long as I am able to,” he wrote. “I have done some teaching in the Bay Area to help offset the costs of my trips.”

According to the course registry for San Francisco State University’s continuing-education program, he’ll be teaching a class there starting in January. The name of the course: “Ethics and Politics of New Technology.”

In late May, a superior court judge ruled in Abel’s favor: Peritz had to vacate her house by 4 p.m. on Memorial Day and pay what he still owed her starting in the fall.

When the day came, she gathered across the street with a few friends and neighbors, watching Peritz slowly load his truck. At four o’clock, Abel crossed the street, walked up to Peritz, and asked for the keys. He handed them over, and, after a testy back-and-forth about his belongings that were still inside the house, Abel’s friends hauled them out to the curb.

When Peritz drove off, Abel popped open some champagne and her friends toasted his departure. He was finally gone.

Moving back into her house, though, wasn’t without incident. First of all, Abel had to move all her furniture back into her house from her office and basement, where Peritz had stored it. And when she went to put her pictures back on the walls, Abel realized she couldn’t figure out where exactly they’d previously hung: The nails had been removed, the holes had been spackled over, and the walls had been repainted.

Abel holds out hope that her experience could lead to a change in California’s eviction laws, or at least keep someone else from being duped. And while her trust in people was “radically challenged” by her encounter with Peritz, she says she has felt that soften as time has gone by. “I still feel that most people are trustworthy,” she says. “It’s something about my temperament and inclination to believe what people say.”

According to the terms of their settlement, Peritz was scheduled to begin paying Abel his back rent at the end of September, though she resigned herself to never seeing that money. But one night, Abel returned home to find an envelope containing an $800 money order—his first settlement payment. It had been slipped through the mail slot in her front door. “He does manage,” Abel told me the next day, “to keep one off-guard.”

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The Crazy Story of the Professor Who Came to Stay—and Wouldn’t Leave

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Here Is the Worst Anti-Science BS of 2016

by MerissaHague8 Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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2016 was a year of remarkable scientific breakthroughs. A century after Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity, researchers proved him right when, for the first time ever, they were able to observe gravitational waves produced by two black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago. Astronomers discovered a potentially habitable planet just 4.3 light-years from Earth. And scientists even came up with a good reason to put a bunch of adorable dogs in an MRI machine.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of anti-science nonsense this year, too—much of it from our political leaders. On issues ranging from climate change to criminal justice, our president-elect was a notable offender. But some of his rivals joined in as well. So did his nominees. And Congress. And members of the media. Here, in no particular order, are some of the most appalling examples. You can let us know in the comments which one you think is the worst.

Hurricane Matthew Truthers

In early October, as Hurricane Matthew approached the southeastern United States and officials ordered mass evacuations, a group of right-wing commentators alleged that the Obama administration was conspiring to exaggerate hurricane forecasts in order to scare the public about climate change. On October 5, Rush Limbaugh said hurricane forecasting often involved “politics” because “the National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service, which is part of the Commerce Department, which is part of the Obama administration, which by definition has been tainted.” He added, however, that Matthew itself was “a serious bad storm” and hadn’t been politicized.

The next day, Matt Drudge took the theory a step further, tweeting, “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate.” He added, “Hurricane center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims.” Drudge’s tweets were widely condemned as dangerous and irresponsible. They also caught the attention of conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones:

.@DRUDGE This is exactly why they want to eradicate free speech… so you can’t question official #globalwarming narrative. #altright #Trump https://t.co/udznluuBQO

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones)

October 6, 2016

A day later, Limbaugh also went full Matthew Truther, declaring it “inarguable” that the government is “hyping Hurricane Matthew to sell climate change.” Matthew would ultimately kill more than 40 people in the United States and hundreds in Haiti. It caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Congress Won’t Lift the Gun Research Ban

Gun violence is a public health crisis that kills 33,000 people in the United States each year, injures another 80,000, and, according to an award-winning Mother Jones investigation, costs $229 billion annually. But as the Annals of Internal Medicine explained in a 2015 editorial, Congress—under pressure from the National Rifle Association—has for years essentially banned federal dollars from being used to study the causes of, and possible solutions to, this epidemic:

Two years ago, we called on physicians to focus on the public health threat of guns. The profession’s relative silence was disturbing but in part explicable by our inability to study the problem. Political forces had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies from funding research on gun-related injury and death. The ban worked: A recent systematic review of studies evaluating access to guns and its association with suicide and homicide identified no relevant studies published since 2005.

Following the June 12 terrorist shootings that killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Democrats tried once again to lift the research ban. But as the Hill reported, “Republicans blocked two amendments that would have allowed the CDC to study gun-related deaths. Neither had a recorded vote.”

Officials Face Charges in Flint Water Crisis

Perhaps the biggest scientific scandal in recent memory was the revelation that residents of Flint, Michigan—an impoverished, majority-black city—were exposed to dangerous levels of lead after government officials switched their drinking water source. Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities and behavioral problems, along with a variety of other serious health issues. Officials ignored—and then publicly disputed—repeated warnings that Flint’s water was unsafe to drink. According to one study, the percentage of Flint children with elevated lead levels doubled following the switchover. The water crisis may also be to blame for a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.

Since April 2016, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed charges against 13 current and former government officials for their alleged role in the crisis. On December 19, Schuette accused two former emergency managers—officials who had been appointed by the governor to oversee Flint’s finances with minimal input from local elected officials—of moving forward with the switchover despite knowing the situation was unsafe. According to the charging document, Darnell Earley conspired with Gerald Ambrose and others to “enter into a contract based upon false pretenses that required Flint to utilize the Flint River as its drinking water source knowing that the Flint Water Treatment Plant…was unable to produce safe water.” The document says that Earley and Ambrose were “advised to switch back to treated water” from Detroit’s water department (which had previously supplied Flint’s water) but that they failed to do so, “which caused the Flint citizens’ prolonged exposure to lead and Legionella bacteria.” The attorney general also alleged that Ambrose “breached his duties by obstructing and hindering” a health department investigation into the Legionnaires’ outbreak. Earley and Ambrose have pleaded not guilty.

Trump’s Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Zika Research

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), Donald Trump’s choice to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, isn’t just a global warming denier. As Mother Jones reported, he recently questioned whether the government should even fund scientific research. In September, Mulvaney took to Facebook to discuss the congressional showdown over urgently needed funding for the Zika epidemic—money that would pay for mosquito control, vaccine studies, and research into the effects of the virus. (Among other disputes, Republicans sought to prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving Zika funds.)

“Do we need government-funded research at all?” wrote Mulvaney in his since-deleted post. Even more remarkably, he went on to raise doubts about whether Zika really causes microcephaly in babies. As Slate’s Phil Plait noted, “There is wide scientific consensus that zika and microcephaly are linked, and had been for some time before Mulvaney wrote that.”

The House “Science” Committee

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is quickly becoming one of the most inaccurately named entities in Washington. For the past several years, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) has used his position as chairman of the committee to harass scientists through congressional investigations. He’s even accused researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of having “altered historic climate data to get politically correct results” about global warming. As we explained in February, “Smith is determined to get to the bottom of what he sees as an insidious plot by NOAA to falsify research. His original subpoena for internal communications, issued last October, has been followed by a series of letters to Obama administration officials in NOAA and other agencies demanding information and expressing frustration that NOAA has not been sufficiently forthcoming.”

Fast-forward to December 2016, when someone working for Smith decided to use the committee Twitter account to promote an article from Breitbart News titled “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” (Breitbart is the far-right website that was formerly run by chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon. In addition to climate denial, Bannon has said the site is “the platform for the alt-right,” a movement that is closely tied to white nationalism.)

.@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists https://t.co/uLUPW4o93V

— Sci,Space,&Tech Cmte (@HouseScience)

December 1, 2016

Unsurprisingly, actual scientists weren’t pleased.

GOP Platform Declares Coal Is “Clean”

Republicans’ devotion to coal was one of the defining environmental issues of the 2016 campaign. Trump promised to revive the struggling industry and put miners back to work by repealing “all the job-destroying Obama executive actions.” Those commitments were reflected in an early version of the GOP platform, which listed coal’s many wonderful qualities and said that Republicans would dismantle Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which limits emissions from coal-fired power plants. That didn’t go far enough for GOP activist David Barton, who convinced delegates at the party’s convention to add one additional word to the text. “I would insert the adjective ‘clean,'” said Barton. “So: ‘The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.'” Barton’s wording change was approved unanimously. As Grist noted at the time, “For years the coal industry—and at one point, even President Obama—promoted the idea of ‘clean coal,’ that expensive and imperfect carbon-capture-and-storage technology could someday make coal less terrible. But there’s no way it is clean.”

Global Warming Deniers in the GOP Primaries

As 2016 kicked off, there were still 12 candidates competing for the Republican presidential nomination. Nearly all of them rejected the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are the main cause of global warming. (The GOP contenders who spoke most forcefully in favor of the science—Lindsey Graham and George Pataki—both dropped out of the race in late 2015.)

As recently as December 2015, Trump declared that “a lot of” the global warming issue is “a hoax.” His chief rival, Ted Cruz, said in February that climate change is “the perfect pseudoscientific theory” to justify liberal politicians’ efforts to expand “government power over the American citizenry.” In a debate in March, Marco Rubio drew loud applause when he said, “Well, sure, the climate is changing, and one of the reasons why the climate is changing is the climate has always been changing…But as far as a law that we can pass in Washington to change the weather: There’s no such thing.” Moments later, John Kasich said, “I do believe we contribute to climate change.” But he added, “We don’t know how much humans actually contribute.”

In 2015, Ben Carson told the San Francisco Chronicle, “There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.” A few months earlier, Jeb Bush said, “The climate is changing. I don’t think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural…For the people to say the science is decided on this is just really arrogant.” In one 2014 interview, Rand Paul seemed to accept that carbon pollution is warming the planet; in a different interview, he said he’s “not sure anybody exactly knows why” the climate changes. Mike Huckabee claimed in 2015 that “a volcano in one blast will contribute more to climate change than a hundred years of human activity.” (That’s completely wrong.) In 2011, Rick Santorum called climate change “junk science.” In 2008, Jim Gilmore said, “We know the climate is changing, but we do not know for sure how much is caused by man and how much is part of a natural cycle change.”

Two other GOP candidates, Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, seemed to largely accept the science behind climate change, but neither of them had much of a plan to deal with the problem.

Trump’s (Other) Wars on Science

Trump’s rejection of science goes well beyond basic climate research. Here are some of his more outlandish claims from the past year:

Despite DNA evidence, Trump still thinks the Central Park Five are guilty. In 1989, five black and Hispanic teenagers were charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park. Trump proceeded to pay for inflammatory ads in the city’s newspapers decrying the “permissive atmosphere which allows criminals of every age to beat and rape a helpless woman.” He called on lawmakers to “bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!” The defendants, most of whom had confessed to involvement in the rape, were convicted. They were eventually exonerated by DNA evidence and a confession from the actual rapist. But Trump still isn’t persuaded by the scientific evidence. “They admitted they were guilty,” he told CNN in October. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous.” As Sarah Burns, who made a documentary about the case, noted in the New York Times, “False confessions are surprisingly common in criminal cases. In the hundreds of post-conviction DNA exonerations that the Innocence Project has studied, at least one in four of the wrongly convicted had given a confession.”

Trump mocks football players for worrying about brain damage from concussions. In October, Trump praised a woman who returned to his Florida rally shortly after she had fainted from the heat. “That woman was out cold, and now she’s coming back,” he said. Trump, who once owned a USFL football team, added, “See, we don’t go by these new, and very much softer, NFL rules. Concussions—’Uh oh, got a little ding on the head? No, no, you can’t play for the rest of the season’—our people are tough.” As the Washington Post pointed out, “Recent MRI scans of 40 NFL players found that 30 percent had signs of nerve cell damage. Florida State University College of Medicine’s Francis X. Conidi, a physician and author of the study, said in a statement that the rates of brain trauma were ‘significantly higher in the players’ than in the general population. In the spring, the NFL acknowledged a link between football and degenerative brain diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is associated with symptoms such as depression and memory loss.”

Trump meets with anti-vaxxers. Trump has long been a proponent of the discredited—and dangerous—theory that vaccines cause autism. “I’m not against vaccinations for your children, I’m against them in 1 massive dose,” Trump tweeted in 2014. “Spread them out over a period of time & autism will drop!” He made the same argument at a 2015 GOP debate, causing a spike in Google searches for information about the supposed vaccine-autism connection. Since then, Trump hasn’t said much more about the issue in public. But according to Science magazine, he met privately with a group of leading anti-vaccine activists at a fundraiser in August. The group reportedly included Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher behind the seminal study (since retracted) of the vaccine-autism connection. Science reported that “Trump chatted with a group of donors that included four antivaccine activists for 45 minutes, according to accounts of the meeting, and promised to watch Vaxxed, an antivaccine documentary produced by Wakefield…Trump also expressed an interest in holding future meetings with the activists, according to participants.”

Trump says there is no drought. During a May campaign stop in Fresno, California, Trump offered a bizarre take on the state’s “insane” water problems, implying that there wasn’t actually a drought. (There was and still is.) He suggested that the state had “plenty of water” but that “they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea” in order to “protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.” As FactCheck.org explained, “California is in its fifth year of a severe ‘hot’ drought,” and “officials release fresh water from reservoirs primarily to prevent salt water from contaminating agricultural and urban water supplies.” (A much smaller proportion of water is released from reservoirs to preserve habitat for Chinook salmon, the “three-inch” delta smelt, and other fish.)

Trump wants to use hairspray. Trump has repeatedly complained that efforts to protect the ozone layer are interfering with his hair routine. “You’re not allowed to use hairspray anymore because it affects the ozone,” he said in May, arguing that more environmentally friendly hair products are only “good for 12 minutes.” He added, “So if I take hairspray and I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?…I say no way, folks. No way. No way.” FactCheck.org actually went through the trouble of asking scientists whether Trump’s strategy of using hairspray indoors would help contain the ozone-destroying chemicals. “It makes absolutely no difference!” said Steve Montzka, a NOAA chemist. “It will eventually make it outside.”

Jill Stein (Yep, She Deserves Her Very Own Category)

Vaccines. Of course, science denial isn’t confined to the political right. During the 2008 presidential campaign, both Obama and Hillary Clinton flirted with the notion that vaccines could be causing autism and that more research was needed on the issue—long after that theory had been discredited. Obama and Clinton have abandoned these misguided views, but Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is apparently still concerned. In July, she told the Washington Post that vaccines are “invaluable” medications but that the pharmaceutical industry has too much influence over safety determinations from the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC. “As a medical doctor, there was a time when I looked very closely at those issues, and not all those issues were completely resolved,” she said. “There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don’t know if all of them have been addressed.”

GMOs. There are plenty of reasonable debates surrounding the use of genetically modified crops. But when it comes to their impact on human health, scientists are pretty much in agreement: GMOs are safe to eat. Once again, Stein isn’t convinced. During the 2016 campaign, Stein called for a moratorium on the introduction of new genetically modified organisms and a “phaseout” of current genetically modified crops “unless independent research shows decisively that GMOs are not harmful to human health or ecosystems.” Stein’s website promised that her administration would “mandate GMO food labeling so you can be sure that what you’re choosing at the store is healthy and GMO-free! YOU CAN FINALLY FEEL SECURE THAT YOUR FAMILY IS EATING SAFELY WITH NO GMO FOODS ON YOUR TABLE!” That page also featured a 2013 video of Stein saying, “This is about what we are eating. This is about whether we are going to have a food system at all. This is about whether our food system is built out of poison and frankenfood.”

The Climate-Denying Cabinet

Trump has loaded up his incoming administration with officials who, to varying extents, share his views on climate change. Vice President-elect Mike Pence once called global warming a “myth,” though he now acknowledges that humans have “some impact on climate.” Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in May that “scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.” Energy secretary nominee Rick Perry once alleged that “a substantial number” of climate scientists had “manipulated data.” Trump’s interior secretary nominee, Ryan Zinke, believes that climate change is “not a hoax, but it’s not proven science either.” Ben Carson (see above) is slated to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, an agency facing serious challenges from global warming. Mulvaney, the incoming White House budget director, has said we shouldn’t abandon domestic fossil fuels “because of baseless claims regarding global warming.” Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions claimed in 2015 that predictions of warming “aren’t coming true.”

Interfering with government scientists?

Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but already there are troubling signs that his administration may attempt to interfere with the work of government scientists and experts.

Energy Department questionnaire. The president-elect’s transition team submitted a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking for a list of employees and contractors who had worked on the Obama administration’s efforts to calculate the “social cost of carbon”—that is, the dollar value of the health and environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. The transition team also asked for a list of staffers who attended UN climate negotiations. As the Washington Post explained, the questionnaire “has raised concern that the Trump transition team is trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama.” (The department didn’t comply with the request, and the Trump team ultimately disavowed the questionnaire after facing criticism.)
Earth science at NASA. One of Trump’s space advisers, Bob Walker, has repeatedly floated the idea that the administration should begin to remove Earth science from NASA’s portfolio. NASA’s Earth science program is well known for producing some of the world’s most important climate change research, and Walker’s proposal has sparked an outcry among many in the scientific community. (Walker has suggested shifting the work to NOAA, but the incoming administration hasn’t proposed giving NOAA additional funding, and Walker’s critics have called the plan unworkable.) Trump hasn’t actually adopted Walker’s idea, and scientists such as David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist who receives NASA funding, are optimistic that he won’t. But if Trump does attempt to gut NASA’s research efforts, the backlash could be intense. “We’re not going to stand for that,” said Grinspoon on our Inquiring Minds podcast. “We’re going to keep doing Earth science and make the case for it. We’ll get scientists to march on Washington if we have to. There’s going to be a lot of resistance.”

Abortion and Breast Cancer

For years, abortion rights opponents have insisted that abortion can cause breast cancer. That claim was based on a handful of flawed studies and has since been repeatedly debunked by the scientific community. According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “More rigorous recent studies demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk.” Influential anti-abortion groups have frequently emphasized a more nuanced but still misleading version of the breast cancer claim: that having an abortion deprives women of the health benefits they would otherwise receive by giving birth. That argument has found its way into an official booklet that the state of Texas provides to women seeking abortions. According to the latest version of the booklet, released in early December:

Your pregnancy history affects your chances of getting breast cancer. If you give birth to your baby, you are less likely to develop breast cancer in the future. Research indicates that having an abortion will not provide you this increased protection against breast cancer.

“The wording in the Texas booklet gets very cute,” said Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer, in an interview with the Washington Post. “It’s technically correct, but it is deceiving.” Here’s the problem, as explained by the Post:

Women who deliver their first baby to full-term at 30 years or younger face a decreased long-term risk of breast cancer than women who have their first baby at older than 30 or 35, or who never deliver a baby at all…Having a baby does provide increased protection against breast cancer, but it doesn’t mean that having an abortion affects your risk one way or another. For example, women who deliver a child before 30, but then have an abortion after their first child, still have a decreased risk of breast cancer, said Brawley, who described himself as “pro-life and pro-truth.”

Pence Denies the Existence of Implicit Bias in Police Shootings

During her first debate with Trump, Clinton supported efforts to retrain police officers to counter so-called “implicit bias.” She noted that people in general—not just police officers—tend to engage in subconscious racism. But she added that in the case of law enforcement, these biases “can have literally fatal consequences.” During the vice presidential debate a few days later, Pence blasted Clinton and other advocates of police reform for “bad-mouthing” cops. He criticized people who “seize upon tragedy in the wake of police action shootings…âto use a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of implicit bias or institutional racism.” That, he said, “really has got to stop.”

Pence’s comments were a gross misrepresentation of a key scientific issue in the national debate over police killings of African Americans. Implicit bias does not, as he implied, refer to intentional, overt bigotry or to systematic efforts by law enforcement to target minorities (though there are plenty of examples of those, too). Rather, implicit bias refers to subconscious prejudices that affect people’s split-second decisions—for example, whether or not a cop shoots an unarmed civilian. As Chris Mooney explained in a 2014 Mother Jones story:

This phenomenon has been directly studied in the lab, particularly through first-person shooter tests, where subjects must rapidly decide whether to shoot individuals holding either guns or harmless objects like wallets and soda cans. Research suggests that police officers (those studied were mostly white) are much more accurate at the general task (not shooting unarmed people) than civilians, thanks to their training. But like civilians, police are considerably slower to press the “don’t shoot” button for an unarmed black man than they are for an unarmed white man—and faster to shoot an armed black man than an armed white man.

And as Mooney noted, acknowledging that implicit biases are common—something Pence refused to do—allows scientists and law enforcement to devise trainings that seek to counter the problem.

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Here Is the Worst Anti-Science BS of 2016

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California Set a Bunch of Drug Offenders Free—and Then Left Them Hanging

by BurtonBrookshir Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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California’s experiment with releasing thousands of drug offenders from its prisons—a major step in the fight against mass incarceration—has run up against a big problem: Once they’re out, there aren’t enough social service programs to help these offenders overcome addictions and restart their lives.

At least 13,500 inmates have been freed in California since 2014, when voters passed a measure called Proposition 47 that reclassified simple drug possession as a misdemeanor rather than a felony. But the state has not yet invested enough money in treatment programs, according to a seven-month investigation by journalists at the Desert Sun, the Ventura County Star, the Record Searchlight, and the Salinas Californian. The end result: Thousands of addicts and mentally ill people have gone from incarceration to the streets, without a safety net to help them deal with substance abuse.

“Prop 47 was not a cure-all. It’s not a panacea,” Michael Romano, a Stanford law expert who helped draft the proposition, told the reporters. It succeeded in getting drug offenders out of overcrowded prisons and jails, he says, but that’s just “one piece in an extraordinarily complicated puzzle.”

It costs about $20,000 to send someone through inpatient drug treatment, which typically lasts six months to a year. It costs three times more to keep him in jail or prison for a year. Under Prop 47, the millions of dollars saved in prison costs were supposed to be earmarked for rehabilitation programs to help inmates restart their lives. The reporters—who filed 65 records requests, pored over thousands of pages of public documents, and interviewed dozens of policymakers, police officers, and former felons for their investigation—found that not a single cent had been spent yet on these programs. An agency has been working to allocate the money for a year and a half, but it just started accepting bids last month to give out its grants. During this fiscal year, which started in October, the state plans to spend $34 million of its $67 million Prop 47 fund on programs to help the mentally ill, addicts, and youth offenders.

In the meantime, drug treatment programs are struggling with long waiting lists. “People die waiting to get treatment,” David Ramage, an administrator at Impact Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in Pasadena, which has a 90-day wait list, told the reporters.

At the same time, when new offenders land in drug court, where they have a choice of either going through probation or rehab, fewer choose rehab now—because a misdemeanor offense may be a quicker ordeal and less restrictive. The longest-running drug court program in Los Angeles has seen its enrollment drop from 80 people to just 4, the reporters found. For more, check out the full investigation here.

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California Set a Bunch of Drug Offenders Free—and Then Left Them Hanging

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A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

by LeighFrayne Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, a federal judge approved a $4.7 million settlement with nearly 2,000 people who were thrown in jail illegally in a St. Louis suburb, a practice legal advocates had likened to a “modern debtors’ prison.”

The plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit alleged that the city of Jennings, Missouri, had jailed people who were unable to pay municipal fines and fees, keeping them in overcrowded, unsanitary cells where they were routinely taunted by jail guards and staff. The settlement, preliminarily approved in July, comes more than a year after the Jennings municipal court signed a separate agreement to eliminate cash bail for nonviolent offenses, dismiss “failure to appear” charges and forgive fees in cases before March 12, 2011, and establish a way to assess a person’s ability to pay. It also agreed to use civil debt collectors to obtain payments from fines instead of issuing warrants and immediately release people on first arrest on bond.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs claimed that Jennings “built a municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish, and to profit.” According to the complaint, the city issued more than 2.1 arrest warrants per household in 2014 and nearly 1.4 for every adult, adding that if the rest of the St. Louis area generated revenue at the same rate as Jennings, cities would have made more than $670 million in five years.

In recent years, civil rights groups have taken cities to court to compel changes to their operation of so-called debtors’ prisons, where those who cannot afford to pay fines are jailed until their debts are paid off. The practice was first barred under federal law in 1833. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that the act of imprisoning someone unable to settle their debt unconstitutional. Yet lawsuits and a federal investigation into policing and court practices in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown shed light on how municipal courts locked up poor residents who couldn’t pay off their debts as a way to generate revenue. Beyond Jennings, federal lawsuits are under way against Ferguson and 13 other cities in the St. Louis area over the alleged operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons.

“One thing that has been revealed over and over again in the Ferguson investigation and these lawsuits is that the worst practices tend to arise when courts and other officials perceive a financial necessity in funding their operation through fees and fines,” says Larry Schwartztol, executive director of Harvard University’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. “That creates conflicts of interest and distorts the justice system.” William Maurer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Mother Jones in July that small towns around urban areas “have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning.”

Here’s a look at some similar recent cases across the country:

Biloxi, Mississippi: In a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in last October, attorneys alleged that poor residents in Biloxi who couldn’t take care of their debt were “routinely” arrested and tossed in jail without receiving a court hearing to determine whether they would be able to pay such penalties. The lawsuit alleged that the city relied on the fines and fees for a substantial portion of its budget and enlisted the help of for-profit probation companies to collect the money. In March, the two sides agreed on a settlement and adjusted it in September. The city agreed to stop using private probation companies to collect payments, to adopt a “bench card” for judges as a reminder of how to not send people to jail who are unable to pay, and to provide alternatives to debt repayment, such as payment plans, job training programs, mental-health counseling, and community service. The city, its police chief, and a district judge named in the complaint also admitted no wrongdoing as part of the resolution.

Colorado Springs, Colorado: Hundreds of impoverished people in Colorado Springs who were fined for a minor infringement of the city’s ordinance had a choice: Pay the debt in full, or settle it for time in jail at $50 a day. Last October, the ACLU of Colorado sent a letter to the city’s attorney and a municipal court judge, alleging that the court had ordered the “pay or serve” sentence in more than 800 cases since January 2014. In May, the city agreed to pay $103,000 to 66 impoverished residents, or $125 for each day they were behind bars. Municipal judges and city-contracted attorneys also underwent training on the rights of indigent citizens.

Jackson, Mississippi: For impoverished Jackson residents, the Colorado Springs case sounds familiar. Those arrested for misdemeanor cases were forced to navigate Jackson’s “pay or stay” system, according to complaint filed last October. If someone failed to pay all or a large portion of their debt at the time of their hearing, they were sent to jail in Hinds County. Once behind bars, they “were told they could ‘work off’ their fines at the rate of $58 per day,” according to the complaint. Those who couldn’t work were left to “sit out” their fines at $25 a day. In June, the city of Jackson settled and created an alternative monthly payment of $25 or an hourly credit for community service. The city also eliminated a requirement for people to post a money bail when arrested for a misdemeanor and to instead be released on the condition they appear for a future court appearance.

Benton County, Washington: A woman named Jayne Fuentes was sent to county jail for more than three months to work off $3,229 in “legal financial obligations” from 2010 and 2011. A complaint filed last October by the ACLU alleged that people like Fuentes who couldn’t pay off their debt were either sent to jail or forced to work on the county’s work crew as part of “partial confinement.” In June, the county and ACLU reached a resolution. The county agreed to stop issuing warrants to arrest those who didn’t pay off their debts. Beyond that, district court judges were also required to ask about a person’s ability to pay at hearings, and county public defenders and prosecutors would receive training on the assessment and collection of court-imposed fines.

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A St. Louis Suburb Jailed Nearly 2,000 People for Not Paying Fines

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Hate Crimes Against Muslims Spiked 67 Percent Last Year

by SimonHkx5134 Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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There were 5,850 hate crimes in the US last year—a 7 percent increase over the year before—according to new data released by the FBI last week. The main reason for the increase was a massive 67 percent spike in crimes targeting Muslims.

The numbers landed amid an apparent spike in attacks on ethnic and religious minorities in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. This news comes as no surprise to anti-extremism groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Anti-Defamation League, which have documented a rise in hate crimes for more than a year.

But as stunning as this new data is, it’s probably incomplete: Even by estimates from other federal agencies, the FBI’s figures don’t actually count the vast majority of US hate crimes. Here’s a quick guide to what the new numbers mean—and why they don’t tell the whole story.

Which groups are most likely to be the victims of hate crimes?

According to the FBI data, nearly 60 percent of reported hate crimes were motivated by racial bias, with anti-black crimes leading, followed by anti-white crimes and crimes against Hispanics. More than 20 percent of hate crimes were motivated by religious bias. Anti-Semitic crimes were the most common, while crimes against Muslims followed behind. Incredibly, crimes against Muslims spiked 67 percent over 2014. Anti-gay crimes composed about 18 percent of all hate crimes, with gay men being the most likely target, while hate crimes based on gender identity composed less than 2 percent of all crimes. (However, transgender people—especially trans women of color—are victims of violence at much higher rates than other segments of the population.) Intimidation and assault led among hate crimes against people, while vandalism and destruction were the most common crimes against property. Just over a third of reported hate crimes were violent crimes against people.

But that’s not the whole story.

The FBI has collected data on hate crimes since Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990. The agency traditionally defined hate crimes as those committed because of a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, but the Obama administration has since expanded the definition to include gender and gender identity and mental and physical disabilities.

Yet despite the FBI’s annual tally, it’s still unclear how many hate crimes happen every year. The FBI generally reports between 5,000 and 7,000 hate crimes a year, according to an AP investigation of national hate crime data. But in a 2013 report, the Department of Justice estimated the average annual total count at more like 260,000. That’s more than 44 times more hate crimes than the FBI data suggests. The DOJ’s report was based on anonymous responses to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts every year.

Comparisons between earlier FBI hate-crime stats and other data sets from the federal government also reveal discrepancies. In 2013, for example, the FBI reported that there were 100 hate crimes on college campuses—but the Department of Education counted 781.

Why is the FBI’s data so incomplete?

The FBI relies on local, county, and state law enforcement agencies to tell it about hate crimes happening in their jurisdictions. But reporting hate crimes to the FBI is voluntary. More than 3,000 of the nation’s nearly 18,500 law enforcement agencies did not provide information to the FBI last year—almost 500 fewer than in 2014.

It’s likely that even the agencies that did participate underreported hate crimes. About 88 percent of the nearly 15,000 departments that participated last year tallied zero hate crimes—including departments in cities with storied histories of racial violence like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mobile, Alabama; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana—according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League. Departments in many sizable cities reported just one, two, or three hate crimes. Participation in the FBI’s program is consistently limited among many departments across Southern states.

But the vast majority of hate crimes don’t get reported to law enforcement in the first place, says Jack Levin, a hate-crimes expert at Northeastern University in Ohio. Victims usually keep quiet.

Why don’t police departments cooperate?

Many police officers don’t understand how hate crimes are defined, or why it’s important to report them, explained Anti-Defamation League’s Allison Padilla-Goodman in a Mother Jones in an interview in May.

Hate crimes against African Americans are particularly underreported in the South, notes Levin. Five state—Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming—don’t have hate-crime laws on the books at all, and only 23 states and DC require police departments to keep data on hate crimes in their jurisdictions. But even some departments that do track hate crimes—and report them to state officials—don’t ultimately report them to the FBI, sometimes because of the burdensome paperwork involved, says Michael Lieberman, who serves as legal counsel to the national ADL.

In California—which consistently reports more hate crimes than any other state—officers receive instruction on hate crimes in the training academy, and police departments are required by state law to report details on all hate crimes to the state attorney general. Many large departments in California—like in San Francisco and San Jose—also have designated units that investigate hate crimes. But smaller departments—like most around the country—don’t have the resources for that kind of specialization, Lieberman says.

In any case, what drove the increase in hate crimes last year?

It could be a number of things. Retaliatory hate crimes against Muslims in response to devastating terror attacks in France, Brussels, and San Bernadino, California likely played a role, says Mark Potok, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He noted the sharp spike in crimes against Muslims that followed 9/11. Pushback against the global refugee crisis—and calls for resettling Arab and Muslim immigrants in the states—may also be at play, Levin said. And the xenophobic rhetoric of Donald Trump—who dominated the news cycle for half the year after declaring his candidacy in June, Potok noted—could also be a factor.

How can we make sure hate crimes don’t continue to rise?

In the wake of the new FBI stats, the ADL has urged more vigorous efforts by law enforcement to collect hate-crime data nationwide. Levin, too, says that now is the time to send a message to would-be hate offenders. “The perpetrator was sending a message when he commits the hate crime,” he said. “We need to send a message back that we as a society will not tolerate this kind of intolerance. That we don’t encourage and support the perpetrator. That we are not hate-filled people.”

Hate Crimes Against Muslims Spiked 67 Percent Last Year

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A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

by VivianLahey Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

On May 20, 2015, the Nebraska state Legislature voted to repeal the state’s death penalty. When the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, vetoed the legislation six days later, the Legislature overrode his veto. It was an extraordinary move, making Nebraska the first solidly conservative state in more than 40 years to end the death penalty.

But the victory for death penalty opponents was short-lived. Having failed in his role as governor to protect the death penalty, Ricketts worked to reinstate it in a different capacity: As a man of deep pockets. Ricketts and his billionaire father, Republican megadonor Joe Ricketts, spent $300,000 on an effort to collect enough signatures to put the death penalty question to voters, in the form of a referendum on November 8. The governor donated another $100,000 this fall to fund a campaign to sway voters to reinstate the death penalty.

“It’s pretty unusual to have a governor who would lose an initiative through the process then try to reverse that process outside of the role of the governor with his own money,” says state Sen. Colby Coash, a conservative Republican and a leader of the anti-death-penalty effort. “Pretty unprecedented.”

Ricketts’ personal funding of the pro-death-penalty campaign has raised questions about the separation of powers in the state, but also about his political motives. The death penalty is an odd issue for Ricketts to stake so much on because, at least in Nebraska, it’s largely symbolic. The state has not carried out an execution in nearly two decades—and critics believe it will not execute anyone in the foreseeable future because the state is unable to obtain the necessary drugs. (Ricketts’ administration even tried, but failed, to obtain execution drugs illegally from India.)

It’s possible that the governor simply feels passionately about the death penalty, which he has long supported. But Ricketts’ critics think he’s using the death penalty to achieve a different objective: consolidating his own power. Ricketts, they say, wanted the death penalty on the ballot in November as a wedge issue to unseat lawmakers who have defied him over the past year. If Ricketts plays his cards right, he could enter the last two years of his first term as a much more powerful governor. From there, he could run for the US Senate—for which he ran unsuccessfully in 2006—or even the White House. “Certainly he sees himself with a future,” says Paul Landow, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who specializes in state-level politics. “A national future.”

Within a few months of becoming governor in January 2015, Ricketts was clashing with the Legislature—and losing. The first showdown came over a bill to raise the gas tax to pay for repairs to roads and bridges. Ricketts vetoed the 6-cent-per-gallon hike, and the Legislature overrode his veto. Less than two weeks later, the Legislature overrode another veto, this time over the death penalty. The very next day brought a third override, over a bill to allow driver’s licenses for young immigrants who were granted temporary legal status under President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive action to help children of undocumented immigrants. A year later, the Legislature would override Ricketts’ veto of a bill permitting these same immigrants to obtain professional and commercial licenses.

Ricketts has made no secret of his anger at the legislators who voted against him on those measures. At the state Republican Party convention this spring, he read aloud the names of more than a dozen GOP senators who had crossed him and called for electing Republican senators who do not stray from the party’s platform. (The Legislature is unicameral, but its members are known as senators.) This is a faux pas in Nebraska, where the Legislature is ostensibly nonpartisan, although it’s no secret which members are Republicans and which are Democrats. Thirteen senators, including five Republicans, chastised Ricketts in an open letter for attacking “respected conservatives elected by the people to obey their own convictions and principles, not the governor’s.”

But Ricketts was doing more than lecturing the Legislature. By the time he gave that speech, he had already endorsed a challenger to one of the Republicans who had clashed with him on those vetoes. Later in the summer, he gave his support to another challenger of an incumbent Republican. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity and Trees of Liberty, two groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, used a direct-mail campaign to target incumbent Republicans who had defied Ricketts on the vetoes. (The groups are not required to disclose their donors.) After a May primary—Nebraska employs a jungle primary system in which the top two vote-earners face off in the general election—three sitting Republicans are confronting GOP challengers on November 8.

With the death penalty question on the ballot, these challengers are making it a central campaign issue as they try to oust sitting Republicans who voted to repeal it. They’re “trying to ride it to election,” says state Sen. Mike Gloor, a Republican who voted to repeal the death penalty. Vincent Powers, the head of the state Democratic Party, puts it more bluntly. “Ricketts just wants to impose his will on the Legislature, and so he’s using this emotional issue as a club,” he says. “It’s very troubling if you are like me and you think democracy is a good thing.”

The fact that the repeal effort succeeded at all was something of a miracle. For decades, state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a liberal independent who has served in the Legislature since the 1970s, has unsuccessfully introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. But in 2015, with a large freshman class open to arguments against the death penalty, a few conservatives in the Legislature took up the cause as well.

By all accounts, Nebraska’s death penalty is a failure. The last execution in the state took place in 1997, but the state continues to spend $14.6 million a year on costs related to maintaining the death penalty, according to a study commissioned by the state’s anti-death penalty coalition. The legislators who voted to repeal it had come to believe that the death penalty was not just a financial loser but also bad policy that was unfairly applied, used to coerce suspects into pleading guilty, and capable of putting innocent people to death.

As the death penalty fight moved from the Legislature to the ballot initiative, a coalition of conservatives, liberals, and the Catholic Church came together to fight to retain the repeal. The coalition has spent more than $2.5 million on voter education efforts, canvassing, and TV ads—far more than its pro-death-penalty counterpart has spent.

Even with the active backing of the Nebraska Catholic Conference in the heavily Catholic state, the consensus is that a popular referendum on the death penalty in a deep-red state is a heavy lift. But there are a few wild cards that could help the anti-death penalty side in a close contest. The first is the language on the ballot itself, which could confuse some death penalty supporters, who need to vote “repeal” to reverse the existing death penalty ban. When the ballot language was finalized, the coalition opposing the death penalty quickly changed its name to Retain a Just Nebraska so that death penalty opponents would know to vote “retain” to keep the ban.

The second big question is turnout. Nebraska does not have a governor’s race or a US Senate race this year, leaving the presidential race as the main draw for voters to get to the polls. But Nebraska, though deeply conservative, is not exactly Trump territory. Ricketts endorsed Trump after his first choice, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the primary, but he has not donated to Trump’s campaign; his wife, meanwhile, registered as a Democrat and is supporting Hillary Clinton. Both of the state’s Republican US senators have spoken out against Trump: Ben Sasse is perhaps the most prominent Never Trump Republican in the country, while Deb Fischer unendorsed him after the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood video was leaked in early October. (She later re-endorsed him.) “I think there’s a legitimate chance that the Legislature will be held up,” Coash says hopefully. “It all comes down to turnout.”

Most politicians and analysts predict the repeal will be overturned because Nebraska is such a conservative state. “I would be absolutely shocked if the voters basically supported to keep the repeal of the death penalty,” says Aaron Trost, a Republican operative who ran Fischer’s campaign in 2012. In August, the pro-death-penalty group released a poll showing that 2 out of 3 Nebraskans support the death penalty. Dan Parsons, the spokesman for the anti-death-penalty group, has argued that the poll was “flawed.” Unlike the poll, the referendum states that if the death penalty repeal stands, defendants who would otherwise have received a death sentence would instead get life in prison. Previous polling has shown that when life without parole is mentioned as the alternative to the death penalty, some Americans switch from death penalty support to opposition.

“We’ve outworked them and outmaneuvered them for over a year now,” Parsons says. As of early October, according to campaign finance disclosures, the anti-death-penalty group had raised $2.7 million to the pro-death-penalty group’s $1.2 million—and most of the latter funds were spent gathering signatures to put the issue on the ballot.

The anti-death penalty group received big donations from liberal philanthropic organizations. Major contributors to the pro-death penalty group include Pete and Joe Ricketts and billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer, as well as two national dark-money groups. One of those groups, Citizens for a Sound Government, spent money on Ricketts’ behalf during his 2014 primary. It’s unclear who is behind the groups’ money or why outside groups see fit to invest in the death penalty in Nebraska. One possibility is that they’re investing in something else: Ricketts’ broader conservative agenda and his career, perhaps on the national stage.

“Should the ballot initiative lose, that would be a big blow to him,” says Landow, the political scientist. “So it’s a gamble. And he took it, I think, because he calculated that it was worth it in terms of his future national standing.”

Continued –

A Billionaire Governor Is Using His Own Money to Reinstate the Death Penalty

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Even More Proof That Gun Laws Work

by MonroeW02xi Posted on October 12, 2016

Mother Jones

The rates of gun violence in the 10 states with the weakest gun laws are more than 3 times higher than those in the 10 states with the strongest gun laws. That’s one of the major findings of a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) that analyzes 10 indicators of firearm violence—including suicide, murder, fatal gun accidents, and mass shootings—in all 50 states and finds a “strong” correlation between gun violence and weak gun laws.

The states with the highest levels of gun violence include Louisiana, Alaska, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama, which also have some of the weakest gun laws in the nation, according to CAP. States with relatively strict gun laws, such as Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, experience significantly lower levels of gun violence. While the report does not assess the impact of specific laws, it does note previous examples of how specific laws have affected gun crime. For example, when Connecticut implemented laws requiring a permit to purchase a gun and mandated background checks, gun-related homicides dropped 40 percent. In contrast, when Missouri eliminated the same requirements, its gun homicide rate increased by 25 percent.

Center for American Progress

“If you have good gun laws, the people in your state will in fact be safer, and if you have bad gun laws, people in your state—and people in other states—will be at risk,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said in a press call about the study. “In many of the cases where violence plays out in Connecticut, we discover that the gun was purchased in a state that had loopholes that we don’t have in our own state.” Since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Connecticut has mandated background checks for all gun sales, required safer gun storage, limited the types of guns that can be sold, and required that all guns in the state be licensed. “In the two completed years that have been analyzed since we passed our updated gun laws, Connecticut has seen the sharpest drop in violent crime of any of the 50 states,” Malloy, a Democrat, said.

Meanwhile, “Florida has taken the exact opposite approach to dealing with gun violence,” said Mayor Andrew Gillum of Tallahassee, Florida. In the same call with reporters, Gillum noted that in response to an attempted mass shooting at a Florida University in 2015, the state legislature introduced a proposal to allow concealed carry on college campuses. He added that the legislature and governor “have taken affirmative steps to prevent local governments like mine from trying to take action” to address gun violence.

Under Florida law, local governments cannot regulate the use of weapons. “In my very own city, we have a gun law that says you can’t fire off weapons in city parks where kids play and our families picnic,” Gillum explained. In response, Tallahassee was sued by pro-gun groups including the Second Amendment Foundation and the National Rifle Association, as well as the state’s attorney general. “It’s extremely frustrating to try to work to keep our communities safe in a state when the legislature is actively working against you, and is beholden unfortunately to the powerful gun lobby,” Gillum said.

The new study builds on a growing body of research that has reached the same conclusion: Stricter gun laws are linked to lower rates of gun violence. The NRA has long rejected these findings. Speaking to the New York Times about the new report and those with similar findings that came before it, an NRA spokeswoman claimed that the research “cherry picked” evidence. As a counterpoint, she cited the work of the controversial researcher John Lott, whose widely discredited theory is summed up in the title of his best-known book: More Guns, Less Crime.

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Even More Proof That Gun Laws Work

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged crime and justice, guns, jersey, lai, major, mayor, national, pur, second, university | Comments Off

Obama Just Signed a Bill of Rights for Sexual-Assault Survivors

by AngelSwanzedehs Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that guarantees specific rights for people who have been victimized by a sexual assault.

The measure focuses on collecting and preserving rape kits, the forensic evidence collected in a medical examination after a suspected sexual assault. Police enter the DNA collected from rape kits into state and national databases, sometimes identifying and solving other crimes in addition to the initial rape case. Rape kits—more than 100,000 of them, as of 2014—have often languished for years in police warehouses and crime labs, going untested due to a lack of funds and, some argue, contempt for victims. The new law is the first at the federal level to address these problems, protecting survivors’ access to the initial forensic medical examination and instituting measures to ensure evidence of rape is appropriately preserved and tested.

Survivors can no longer be charged fees or prevented from getting a rape kit examination, even if they have not yet decided to file a police report. Once the medical examination is completed, the kits must be preserved, at no cost to the survivor, until the applicable statute of limitations runs out. Survivors will now be able to request that authorities notify them before destroying their rape kits, and they have the right to request that the evidence be preserved. Once the kit is tested, they’ll also have the right to be notified of important results —including a DNA profile match and toxicology report.

Survivors must also be informed of these rights, regardless of whether they decide to pursue legal action against an assailant. The law also creates a task force to examine how well the new regulations work.

The act was spearheaded by Rise, a nonprofit led by Amanda Nguyen, who became an advocate after her rape almost three years ago when she learned that her rape kit would be destroyed by the state of Massachusetts within six months unless she filed repeated “extension requests.”

“The system essentially makes me live my life by date of rape,” Nguyen told the Guardian in February.

Nguyen then contacted Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who began working with her to craft the bill, eventually introducing it in February. “Beginning today, our nation’s laws stand firmly on the side of survivors of sexual assault,” Shaheen said in a statement Friday. “I hope that these basic rights will encourage more survivors to come forward and pursue justice.”

The act passed unanimously in the House last month and by voice vote in the Senate last week. Obama signed the bill on Friday, two weeks after the White House launched a new effort to combat sexual assault for the youngest survivors—those in K-12 schools.

.@POTUS just signed the sexual assault survivor bill of rights. Congrats @risenowus & all who work to end sexual assault every day! #ItsOnUs

— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44)

October 7, 2016

This story has been updated.

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Obama Just Signed a Bill of Rights for Sexual-Assault Survivors

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged crime and justice, dna, g & f, house, legislation, massachusetts, medical, obama, Ona, right, sexual, white | Comments Off

This Girl Just Delivered One of the Most Powerful Messages on Police Shootings You Will Ever Hear

by MAQReginavpus Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

On Monday night, nine-year-old Zianna Oliphant took the stand at a city council meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina following the fatal police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, to talk about growing up in the city. Her testimony says everything.

Please watch it.

“We are black people and we shouldn’t have to feel like this,” young black girl tells Charlotte City Council. pic.twitter.com/M1l2FdTYx3

— Broderick Greer (@BroderickGreer)

September 28, 2016

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This Girl Just Delivered One of the Most Powerful Messages on Police Shootings You Will Ever Hear

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged broderick, crime and justice, north, politics, september, Stand, took-the-stand, venta, zianna-oliphant | Comments Off

3 Key Facts About the Charlotte Police Shooting

by LilyCurrie Posted on September 21, 2016

Mother Jones

Violent protests erupted in Charlotte late Tuesday night after a police officer fatally shot Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man, in the parking lot of an apartment complex earlier in the day. Sixteen police officers were injured during the protests, which included demonstrators blockading a busy highway and looting tractor trailers and a Walmart.

At a Wednesday news conference, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said they’d been searching for a person with an outstanding warrant when they noticed Scott leaving his car with a gun in hand. After officers approached and gave him verbal warnings, police said that Scott left the car and posed “an imminent deadly threat.” He was then shot by a black officer named Brentley Vinson, who was not wearing a body camera at the time. In a video later posted on social media, a woman claiming to be Scott’s daughter said that he was unarmed and was instead holding a book. Putney rejected that claim, saying that officers recovered a gun at the scene, not a book. (Meanwhile, Vinson has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates.)

The mood was quiet on Wednesday afternoon, though officials anticipated another tense evening. Scott’s shooting came just four days after Terrence Crutcher, a 40-year-old unarmed black man, was fatally shot outside his vehicle by a Tulsa police officer. The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Crutcher’s death, and on Wednesday, US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch said in remarks at the International Bar Association annual conference that the department was “assessing” the incident surrounding Scott’s death.

Here are three things to know about the Scott shooting and the fallout on Wednesday:

Body cam footage: Last September, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police announced it would issue body cameras to all patrol officers in an attempt to increase transparency during confrontations. The directive granted exceptions for officers on the SWAT team and those in tactical units who apprehend violent criminals, citing cost and safety concerns. The Charlotte Observer reported that Charlotte-Mecklenburg officers had fatally shot four people between September 2015 and May 2016, yet only one of those incidents was caught on camera.

Putney told reporters at Wednesday’s press conference that dashcam footage was under review and had recorded parts of the police confrontation with Scott. Because it was part of the investigation, he said, the department wouldn’t release the footage at this time.

In July, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law a bill that made it more difficult to get public access to such footage. Local police departments can decide to release recordings if they want, but if they decline to do so a judge’s order is required. The American Civil Liberties Union’s North Carolina chapter has called on Charlotte police to release the footage from the scene, arguing that the new law doesn’t go into effect until October 1.

Charlotte police’s recent history: In September 2013, a white Charlotte police officer named Randall Kerrick shot and killed Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old unarmed black man and former college football player, while he was looking for help after a car accident. Kerrick was charged with voluntary manslaughter. Last August, a North Carolina judge declared a mistrial after four days of jury deliberation, and authorities opted not to pursue a retrial.

Meanwhile, as my former colleague Jaeah Lee wrote in our May/June 2016 issue, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD has been part of a University of Chicago experiment that uses data to identify troublesome cops—those who are likely to abuse their power or break the law—and anticipate future police misconduct.

Calls for an economic boycott: At a press conference on Wednesday, a group of civil rights activists questioned the police’s narrative of events. B.J. Murphy, a representative of the Nation of Islam and longtime Charlotte resident, called on black Charlotte residents to boycott local businesses to “let everybody feel the pain economically of what we feel physically when you kill us.”

“Since black lives do not matter for this city, then our black dollars shouldn’t matter,” Murphy said. “We’re watching a modern-day lynching on social media, on television, and it is affecting the psyche of black people. That’s what you saw last night.”

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3 Key Facts About the Charlotte Police Shooting

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged carolina, chief, crime and justice, general, international, mecklenburg, nation, pur, race and ethnicity, radius, venta | Comments Off

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