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Tag: U.S. Supreme Court

  • Federal judge halts key parts of New York’s new gun law

    Federal judge halts key parts of New York’s new gun law

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    ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York’s latest attempt to restrict who can carry a handgun in public and where firearms can be brought was picked apart Thursday by a federal judge, who ruled that multiple provisions in a state law passed this year are unconstitutional.

    In a ruling that doesn’t take effect immediately, U.S. District Judge Glenn Suddaby struck down key elements of the state’s hurried attempt to rewrite its handgun laws after the old ones were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.

    The state can’t ban people from carrying guns in New York City’s subway system or Times Square, the judge ruled, though he said it did have a right to exclude guns from certain other locations, including schools.

    Several of the state’s new licensing rules went too far, he wrote, including one that required applicants to be of “good moral character,” and another that made applicants turn over information about their social media accounts.

    The end result was a licensing scheme that prohibited people from carrying a handgun for self-defense unless the applicant could persuade licensing officials that they wouldn’t use it to hurt themselves or others, the judge wrote.

    “Simply stated, instead of moving toward becoming a shall-issue jurisdiction, New York State has further entrenched itself as a shall-not-issue jurisdiction. And, by doing so, it has further reduced a first-class constitutional right to bear arms in public for self defense … into a mere request,” wrote Suddaby, who sits in Syracuse.

    Suddaby, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, put his decision on hold for three days to allow the state to challenge it in a higher court.

    New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office filed an appeal later Thursday.

    “Today’s decision comes in the wake of mass shootings and rampant gun violence hurting communities here in New York and across the country. While the decision preserves portions of the law, we believe the entire law must be preserved as enacted,” said James, a Democrat.

    Legislators rewrote the state’s handgun laws this summer after a Supreme Court ruling invalidated New York’s old system for granting permits to carry handguns outside the home. The high court struck down the state’s longstanding requirement that people demonstrate an unusual threat to their safety to qualify for such a license.

    The new law, which went into effect Sept. 1, broadly expanded who could get a handgun license, but it increased training requirements for applicants and required them to turn over more private information, including a list of everyone living in their home. The state also created a long list of places where firearms would be banned.

    Suddaby’s ruling upheld the state’s right to exclude guns from certain “sensitive locations,” but only in instances where there were “historical analogues” for such rules, meaning guns have been banned from such places in the past.

    Rules prohibiting most people from carrying guns into schools, government buildings, polling places and places of worship were OK, the judge wrote. But the state couldn’t put new bans on people from carrying handguns on public transportation systems, in summer camps or places where alcohol is consumed.

    Suddaby also dealt a blow to a provision prohibiting people from bringing guns onto someone else’s property unless the owners give permission — by posting a sign in a shop window, for instance.

    Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, defended the state’s laws as “common-sense restrictions.”

    “While this decision leaves aspects of the law in place, it is deeply disappointing that the Judge wants to limit my ability to keep New Yorkers safe and to prevent more senseless gun violence,” Hochul said.

    There have been several federal challenges to the new law from gun rights advocates who argue the legislation violates the Second Amendment and free speech rights.

    This lawsuit was bought by six gun owners from upstate New York who claim the law infringes on their constitutional rights. Most of the plaintiffs have licenses to carry and argue the law keeps them from holding a weapon in designated sensitive places like state parks or church.

    One plaintiff intends to apply for a carry permit but is unwilling to share social media posts or character references with investigators, according to the federal complaint.

    Suddaby telegraphed his ruling five weeks ago when he threw out a previous challenge to the law on technical grounds. The plaintiff in that case then teamed up with five other gun owners and sued again, expanding the list of defendants to include state district attorneys and sheriffs who were charged with enforcing the law.

    New York is among a half-dozen states that had provisions of their gun laws invalidated by the Supreme Court.

    ___

    Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak and David B. Caruso contributed from New York City.

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  • Black representation in Alabama tested before Supreme Court

    Black representation in Alabama tested before Supreme Court

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    MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The invisible line dividing two of Alabama’s congressional districts slices through Montgomery, near iconic sites from the civil rights movement as well as ones more personal to Evan Milligan.

    There’s the house where his grandfather loaded people into his station wagon and drove them to their jobs during the Montgomery Bus Boycott as Black residents spurned city buses to protest segregation. It’s the same home where his mother lived as a child, just yards from a whites-only park and zoo she was not allowed to enter.

    The spot downtown where Rosa Parks was arrested, igniting the boycott, sits on one side of the dividing line while the church pastored by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the protests, sits on the other.

    The lines are at the center of a high-stakes redistricting case bearing Milligan’s name that will go before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, setting up a new test of the Voting Rights Act and the role of race in drawing congressional boundaries.

    At the center of the case is a challenge by various groups arguing that the state violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black voters when it failed to create a second district in which they make up a majority, or close to it. African Americans account for about 27% of the state’s population but are the majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

    “Our congressional map is not reflective of the population that lives in Alabama,” said Milligan, 41, one of several voters who joined interest groups in filing the lawsuit.

    The case the Supreme Court will take up Tuesday centers on whether congressional districts in Alabama were drawn to reduce the political influence of Black voters, but it’s also part of a much broader problem that undermines representative government in the U.S. Both major political parties have practiced gerrymandering — drawing congressional and state legislative boundaries to cement their hold on power — but Republicans have been in control of the process in far more states since after the 2010 elections. That has allowed them to win an outsized share of statehouse and U.S. House seats and means GOP policies — including on abortion restrictions — often don’t reflect the will of most voters.

    An Associated Press analysis from 2017 showed that Alabama had one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country.

    Republicans dominate elected office in Alabama and are in charge of redistricting. They have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority that could send another Democrat to Congress.

    A three-judge panel that included two appointees of President Donald Trump ruled unanimously in January that the Alabama Legislature likely violated the Voting Rights Act with the map. “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel said.

    The judges ordered state lawmakers to draw new lines for this year’s election and create a second district where Black voters either made up a majority or near majority of the population. But on a 5-4 vote in February, the Supreme Court sided with Alabama to allow this year’s congressional elections to take place without adding a second predominantly Black district. Two justices suggested it was too close to spring primaries to make a change.

    The lawsuit claims the Alabama congressional map dilutes the voting strength of Black residents by packing a large number of them into a single district — the 7th, where 55% of voters are Black — while fragmenting other communities. That includes the state’s Black Belt region and the city of Montgomery.

    The current districts leave the vast majority of Black voters with no realistic chance to elect their preferred congressional candidates anywhere outside the 7th district, the lawsuit contends.

    “This is just about getting Black voters, finally, in Alabama the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice. It’s not necessarily guaranteeing that they will have their candidate elected,” said Deuel Ross, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing the plaintiffs.

    The groups contend that the state’s Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district. Milligan, who is six generations removed from enslaved ancestors who lived in the Black Belt, ticked off the consequences for Black residents who are not able to have representation that aligns with their needs: addressing generational poverty, the lack of adequate internet service, Medicaid expansion and the desire for a broader array of health care services.

    “In choosing not to do that, you’re denying the people of the Black Belt the opportunity to elect an additional person that can really go to the mat on their interests,” said Ross, who is one of the attorneys who will argue the case in a challenge backed by the Biden administration.

    ___

    African Americans served in Alabama’s congressional delegation following the Civil War in the period known as Reconstruction. They did not return until 1993, a year after the courts ordered the state to reconfigure the 7th Congressional District into a majority-Black one, which has since been held by a succession of Black Democrats. That 1992 map remains the basis for the one in use today.

    “Under numerous court challenges, the courts have approved this basic plan. All we did is adjust it for population deviation,” said state Rep. Chris Pringle, a Republican and chairman of the legislative committee that drew the new lines.

    Alabama argued in court filings that the state’s Black population is too spread out to be able to create a second majority district without abandoning core redistricting principles such as keeping districts compact and keeping communities of interest together. Drawing such a district, the state argued, would require mapping acrobatics, such as connecting coastal areas in southwest Alabama to peanut farms in the east.

    In a statement to The Associated Press, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the map is “based on race-neutral redistricting principles that were approved by a bipartisan group of legislators.” He said it looks similar to three prior maps, including one cleared by the Justice Department and another enacted in the 2000s by “the Democrat-controlled Legislature.”

    “The Voting Rights Act does not force states to sort voters based on race,” Marshall said in a statement. “The VRA is meant to prohibit racial gerrymanders, not require them.”

    Standing in a meeting room at the Alabama Statehouse and pointing to a poster-size version of the map, Pringle said lawmakers prioritized a race-neutral approach. The lawsuit alleges the Republican lawmakers packed Black voters into certain areas, but Pringle said when they were drawing lines they “turned race off” as an option on the computer. Only later did they apply the racial data points.

    “I think the Supreme Court is going to back us up that we complied with existing law,” Pringle said.

    ___

    Alabama’s 7th Congressional District snakes a winding path from the western neighborhoods of Birmingham through the state’s Black Belt — a swath of land named for the rich soil that once gave rise to antebellum plantations — to sections of Montgomery.

    Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, who has represented the district, has been the lone Democrat among the state’s seven House members since she took office in 2011. The state’s other six districts have reliably elected white Republicans for the last decade.

    Sewell was the only member of Alabama’s delegation to support restoring the most effective anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted in a 2013 Supreme Court decision that also arose from an Alabama case. The provision, referred to as preclearance, forced Alabama, other states and some counties with a history of voting discrimination to get Justice Department or federal court approval before making any election-related changes.

    Some Black voters outside Sewell’s district say they feel their concerns are overlooked because there is no motivation for Republican officeholders in districts that favor the GOP to pay attention to their issues.

    “Fair representation and full representation of the voters in the state of Alabama would mean that a third of the population should get a third of the representation in Congress, and that at least includes one additional seat,” Sewell said. “Look, I think that I would welcome the opportunity to have another seat where I have a colleague that will fight for, you know, voting rights and civil rights, that that will understand that this country has gotten far when it comes to diversity. But we have a long ways to go.”

    Alabama’s congressional delegation voted unanimously for the CARES Act, which provided federal aid to state and local governments during the Trump administration as the COVID-19 outbreak was erupting across the country. But that unity vanished when President Joe Biden took office.

    Sewell was alone in the delegation in supporting the American Rescue Plan, legislation passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed by Biden. Among other things, she said, the bill benefited community health centers and the health care response at historically Black colleges.

    One of them, Alabama State University, was founded two years after the Civil War and in an area where the districts divide. Sewell also was alone in supporting other significant legislation since Biden took office — including the $1 trillion infrastructure bill and the recent Inflation Reduction Act, which, among other provisions, capped out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare recipients and helped millions of Americans afford health insurance by extending coverage subsidies.

    Those types of priorities speak to the Rev. Murphy Green, a local political activist who is supporting the long shot bid by the Democratic candidate in the race for the 2nd Congressional District, where the Republican incumbent won with 65% of the vote two years ago.

    He particularly pointed to the health care price controls enacted by Democrats, including for insulin. While diabetes also is a problem for white residents, it is especially systemic among Black people and the cost of drugs to combat it is a priority, Green said in an interview.

    “I am a diabetic,” he said. “My congressman voted against price controls on the cost of insulin.”

    ___

    Montgomery, which is split into two congressional districts, is a municipal version of the state when it comes to redistricting.

    From customers at a well-known barbershop to shoppers at a convenience store, from groups sitting in empty lots and residents in some of the neighborhoods that are being shifted, the question of who represents them in Congress and who will be on the ballot in November brings a range of answers.

    The 2nd Congressional District seat has been held by white Republicans for decades, except for two years when a conservative white Democrat got a bounce from turnout related to Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.

    Of dozens of people approached, the majority are aware there is an Alabama case going to the Supreme Court, but they don’t know details of the racial gerrymandering behind the case. Some are unaware of who their congressional representative has been.

    In Heritage Barber and Style Shop, a local Black barbershop that rides the line between the 2nd and 7th congressional districts and sits across from Alabama State, Stephen Myers, 77, talks about the state’s maps and attempts to minimize Black voting strength.

    “What’s different?” he said.

    In the decades he has lived in his home, Myers said he has never had the opportunity to cast a “meaningful” vote for a Democrat. Keeping people motivated under those conditions is a challenge, he said.

    The operator of a civil rights site tour, Myers said he passed along the significance of voting to his children and grandchildren, but motivating the current generation? “That’s a good question,” he said.

    The frustration is shared by the Rev. Benjamin Jones, who heads the St. James Missionary Baptist Church, a congregation of about 300 tucked into the former farmlands of east Montgomery County.

    He recalled the sacrifices of older generations during the civil rights movement. His father, for example, would attend protests and marches that sometimes ended with him going to jail, while his mother would stay home so she could bail him out.

    “So it is frustrating to know that people went through those type things, but seemingly in 2022 there hasn’t been that much progress in the voting arena in terms of being able to elect people,” he said. “It’s not about someone who shares your same skin tone, but someone who at least cares enough about your politics to be concerned about your issues.”

    ___

    The strategy to challenge a map with a safe majority-Black district comes with risks. As the case goes before the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, advocates fear an adverse ruling could affect future redistricting cases.

    Five conservative justices were in the majority in the February vote blocking the use of the map during this year’s elections. A sixth, Chief Justice John Roberts, objected to the procedure his colleagues used to prevent the districts from being redrawn.

    But Roberts has a long history of opposition to the Voting Rights Act and wrote the opinion in the 2013 Supreme Court decision that dismantled part of the law.

    The February decision by the court is “a troubling sign of what may be to come,” said Michael Li, senior counsel in the Democracy Center for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

    He said there is a real chance the Supreme Court could further gut the Voting Rights Act and “make it all but impossible to use.”

    “If the VRA doesn’t apply in the Black Belt of Alabama, it is hard to see it applying in many places,” Li said.

    The effects of a decision in favor of Alabama could be widespread, potentially allowing states to dismantle or alter districts that have elected Black, Latino and other minority candidates.

    Standing by King’s former church in downtown Montgomery, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs acknowledges the risk.

    “I am nervous and I’m not afraid to say that,” said 26-year-old Khadidah Stone. “I think the nervous part is looking at what happened in the summer with Roe v. Wade. When I’m looking at that, I look at what else is up to possibly being attacked.”

    Even if the plaintiffs prevail, the Alabama Legislature could redraw the lines in a way that actually could jeopardize the one majority Black, Democratic-leaning district. Lowering the percentage of Black voters in Sewell’s district could take an overwhelmingly safe district to one that is less so.

    Hank Sanders, a Democrat and former longtime state senator who helped draw the congressional map Alabama put in place 20 years ago, said there is a risk that “you could end up losing both.”

    But he said the risks have always been there in pursuing civil and voting rights. That is especially true in Alabama and more specifically Montgomery, where memorials to those advances coexist within sight of statues and memorials honoring the Confederacy.

    “If we didn’t take risks and we didn’t take a chance, we’d still be in segregation now,” he said.

    ___

    Sherman reported from Washington. Associated Press data reporter Aaron Kessler contributed to this report.

    ___

    Associated Press coverage of democracy receives support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

    ___

    Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics

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  • Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes’ path: From Yale to jail

    Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes’ path: From Yale to jail

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    PHOENIX (AP) — Long before he assembled one of the largest far-right anti-government militia groups in U.S. history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising Yale Law School graduate.

    He secured a clerkship on the Arizona Supreme Court, in part thanks to his unusual life story: a stint as an Army paratrooper cut short by a training accident, followed by marriage, college and an Ivy League law degree.

    The clerkship was one more rung up from a hardscrabble beginning. But rather than fitting in, Rhodes came across as angry and aggrieved.

    He railed to colleagues about how the Patriot Act, which gave the government greater surveillance powers after the Sept. 11 attacks, would erase civil liberties. He referred to Vice President Dick Cheney as a fascist for supporting the Bush administration’s use of “enemy combatant” status to indefinitely detain prisoners.

    “He saw this titanic struggle between people like him who wanted individual liberty and the government that would try to take away that liberty,” said Matt Parry, who worked with Rhodes as a clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Mike Ryan.

    Rhodes alienated his moderate Republican boss and eventually left the steppingstone job. Since then he has ordered his life around a thirst for greatness and deep distrust of government.

    He turned to forming a group rooted in anti-government sentiment, and his message resonated. He gained followers as he went down an increasingly extremist path that would lead to armed standoffs, including with federal authorities at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch. It culminated last year, prosecutors say, with Rhodes engineering a plot to violently stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming president.

    Rhodes, 57, will be back in court Tuesday, but not as a lawyer. He and four others tied to the Oath Keepers are being tried on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most serious criminal allegation leveled by the Justice Department in its far-reaching prosecution of rioters who attacked the Capitol. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

    Rhodes, Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs are the first Jan. 6 defendants to stand trial under a rarely used, Civil War-era law against attempting to overthrow the government or, in this case, block the transfer of presidential power.

    The trial will put a spotlight on the secretive group Rhodes founded in 2009 that has grown to include thousands of claimed members and loosely organized chapters across the country, according to Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director of research with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

    For Rhodes, it will be a position at odds with the role of greatness that he has long envisioned for himself, said his estranged wife, Tasha Adams.

    “He was going to achieve something amazing,” Adams said. “He didn’t know what it was, but he was going to achieve something incredible and earth shattering.”

    Rhodes was born in Fresno, California. He shuttled between there and Nevada, sometimes living with his mother and other times with grandparents who were migrant farm workers, part of a multicultural extended family that included Mexican and Filipino relatives. His mother was a minister who had her own radio show in Las Vegas and went by the name Dusty Buckle, Adams said.

    Rhodes joined the Army fresh out of high school and served nearly three years before he was honorably discharged in January 1986 after breaking his back in a parachuting accident.

    He recovered and was working as a valet in Las Vegas when he met Adams in 1991. He was 25, she was 18.

    He had a sense of adventure that was attractive to a young woman brought up in a middle-class, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints family. A few months after the couple started dating, Rhodes accidentally dropped a gun and shot out his eye. He now wears an eye patch.

    Adams’ family had set aside money for her to go to college, but after their wedding Rhodes decided he should be the first to attend school. He told her she would need to quit her job teaching ballroom and country dancing and instead support them both by working full time as a stripper so he could focus on doing an excellent job in school, according to Adams. They married, but she found stripping degrading and it clashed with her conservative Mormon upbringing, she said.

    “Every night the drive was just so bad. I would just throw up every single night before I went in, it was just so awful,” Adams said. Rhodes would pressure her to go further, increase her exposure or contact with men to make more money, she said. “It was never enough … I felt like I had given up my soul.”

    She quit when she got pregnant with their first child, and the couple moved back in with her family. They worried about her but didn’t want to push too far for fear of losing her altogether. By then, Rhodes was the center of her orbit.

    Rhodes’ lawyer declined to make him available for an interview and Rhodes declined to answer a list of questions sent by The Associated Press.

    After finishing college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rhodes went to work in Washington as a staffer for Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican congressman, and later attended Yale, with stints in between as an artist and sculptor. Paul did not respond to a request for comment.

    Rhodes’ college transcripts earned him entry to several top schools, Adams said. While at Yale, Adams took care of their growing family in a small apartment while he distinguished himself with an award for a paper arguing that the George W. Bush administration’s use of enemy combatant status to hold people suspected of supporting terrorism indefinitely without charge was unconstitutional.

    After the Arizona clerkship, the family bounced to Montana and back to Nevada, where he worked on Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008. That’s when Rhodes also began to formulate his idea of starting the Oath Keepers. He put a short video and blog post on Blogspot and “it went viral overnight,” Adams said. Rhodes was interviewed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but also more mainstream media figures such as Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly.

    He formally launched the Oath Keepers in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 2009, where the first shot in the American Revolution was fired.

    “We know that if a day should come in this country when a full-blown dictatorship would come or tyranny, from the left or from the right, we know that it can only happen if those men, our brothers in arms, go along and comply with unconstitutional, unlawful orders,” Rhodes said in his Lexington speech, which didn’t garner any news coverage.

    The group’s stated goal was to get past and present members of the military, first responders and police officers to honor the promise they made to defend the Constitution against enemies. The Oath Keepers issued a list of orders that its members wouldn’t obey, such as disarming citizens, carrying out warrantless searches and detaining Americans as enemy combatants in violation of their right to jury trials.

    Rhodes was a compelling speaker and especially in the early years framed the group as “just a pro-Constitution group made up of patriots,” said Sam Jackson, author of the book “Oath Keepers” about the group.

    With that benign-sounding framing and his political connections, Rhodes harnessed the growing power of social media to fuel the Oath Keepers’ growth during the presidency of Barack Obama. Membership rolls leaked last year included some 38,000 names, though many people on the list have said they are no longer members or were never active participants. One expert last year estimated membership to be a few thousand.

    The internal dialogue was much darker and more violent about what members perceived as imminent threats, especially to the Second Amendment, and the idea that members should be prepared to fight back and recruit their neighbors to fight back, too.

    “Time and time again, Oath Keepers lays the groundwork for individuals to decide for themselves, violent or otherwise criminal activity is warranted,” said Jackson, an assistant professor at the University at Albany.

    A membership fee was a requirement to access the website, where people could join discussion forums, read Rhodes’ writing and hear pitches to join militaristic trainings. Members willing to go armed to a standoff numbered in the low dozens, though, said Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the group.

    Showdowns with the government began in 2011 in the small western Arizona desert town of Quartzsite, where local government was in turmoil as officials feuded among themselves, the police chief was accused of misconduct and several police employees had been suspended. A couple years later, Rhodes started calling on members to form “community preparedness teams,” which included military-style training.

    The Oath Keepers also showed up at a watershed event in anti-government circles: the standoff with federal agents at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch in 2014. Later that year, members stationed themselves along rooftops in Ferguson, Missouri, armed with AR-15-style weapons, to protect businesses from rioting after a grand jury declined to charge a police officer in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

    The following year Oath Keepers guarded a southern Oregon gold mine whose mining claim owners were in a dispute with the government. Still, Rhodes was never arrested.

    As the Oath Keepers escalated their public profile and confrontations with the government, Rhodes was leaving behind some of those he once championed. Jennifer Esposito hired him as her lawyer after the group’s early outing in Quartzsite, but he missed a hearing in her case because he was at the Bundy Ranch standoff. A judge kicked Rhodes off the case, and no lawyer would represent her.

    She has no hard feelings, but Michael Roth, also represented by Rhodes in Quartzsite lawsuits, is less forgiving. He compared Rhodes’s handling of his case to a doctor walking out of an operating room in the middle of surgery.

    “He clearly just used us for publicity to gain membership in the Oath Keepers,” Roth said.

    The neglect culminated in a disbarment case eventually brought against Rhodes. He ignored the allegations, missed a hearing and wasn’t even represented by a lawyer. The commission examining the case in 2015 found his conduct as an attorney wouldn’t normally get someone disbarred, but his refusal to cooperate did.

    Meanwhile, on the national stage, Donald Trump’s political star was taking off. His grievances about things such as the “deep state” aligned with the Oath Keeper’s anti-governmental stance. While Rhodes didn’t agree with Trump on everything, the group’s rhetoric began to shift.

    “With the election of Trump, now the Oath Keepers have an ally in the White House,” Jackson said.

    For much of the the Oath Keepers’ history, the federal government was the enemy, but gradually the enemy became left-leaning people in the United States and antifa, or anti-fascist groups, became the primary menace, he said.

    Rhodes wanted Oath Keepers to go to Cleveland to provide security for Trump — then set to be the GOP presidential nominee — at the 2016 Republican National Convention, even though no one had asked the group for protection, said Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who served on the Oath Keepers’ board for about six years.

    “I said, ‘Why are we going — so we can say we protected Trump? We are not going to get anywhere near Trump,’” Mack said. “I said, ‘This was crazy.’ All the other board members voted with me, and Stewart was mad.”

    That was a breaking point last straw for Mack.

    He wasn’t the only board member to walk away as they saw the direction of the group close up, Van Tatenhove said.

    “Once they saw where he was going, they were a lot less comfortable,” he said. But Rhodes always managed to weather the disagreements and hold onto power. “He was always going to be the start and finish of the Oath Keepers.”

    A voracious reader and charismatic speaker, Rhodes drew people in and had a talent for molding his message to his audience and holding onto power. He warmed to the “alt-right” movement as its profile rose. Van Tatenhove knew he had to leave when in 2017 he overheard a group of Oath Keepers, in a discussion in a grocery store, denying that the Holocaust happened.

    In 2018, Rhodes went too far for Jim Arroyo, a former Army Ranger who serves as president of an Oath Keepers chapter in Yavapai County, Arizona. He rejected a push to send group members to the U.S.-Mexico border for an armed operation to support the U.S. Border Patrol.

    Arroyo said that hadn’t been approved by any authority and argued that pointing a gun in the wrong direction along the border could stir an international problem. He refused to go.

    “That’s when he pretty much didn’t want anything to do with us,” said Arroyo, who eventually broke away from the national Oath Keepers and hasn’t had contact with Rhodes in over four years.

    When Biden won the 2020 election, prosecutors say, Rhodes started preparing for battle. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers spent weeks plotting to block the transfer of power, amassing weapons and setting up “quick reaction force” teams with weapons to be on standby outside the nation’s capital, prosecutors say.

    On Jan. 6, 2021, authorities say, two teams of Oath Keepers stormed the Capitol alongside hundreds of other angry Trump supporters.

    Rhodes is not accused of going inside, but he was seen gathered outside the Capitol after the riot with several members who did, prosecutors have said.

    Defense lawyers have accused prosecutors of twisting their clients’ words. They have argued that the militia group went to Washington only to provide security at events before the riot for right-wing figures such as Trump confidant Roger Stone and that there was never a plan to attack the Capitol.

    The case has dealt a major blow to the Oath Keepers, in part because many people associated with it want to be considered respectable in their communities, said Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Of the approximately 30 Capitol riot defendants affiliated with the Oath Keepers, nine have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the attack, including three who have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

    But that doesn’t mean the ideas that Rhodes promoted have faded away.

    “He came up with a blueprint that is going to be used in the future by people we don’t even know about,” Van Tatenhove said. “I think it’s very important for us to pay attention.”

    ___

    Whitehurst reported from Washington.

    ___

    Follow the AP’s coverage of the Capitol riot at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege.

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  • Judge: State must preserve evidence from halted execution

    Judge: State must preserve evidence from halted execution

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    ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — A federal judge on Friday ordered Alabama to preserve records and medical supplies associated with a lethal injection attempt after the prison system acknowledged multiple attempts to access the inmate’s veins before calling off the execution.

    U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. issued the order at the request of the inmate’s lawyers who are trying to gather more information about what happened during Alabama’s attempt to execute Alan Miller, 57. Miller was sentenced to death after being convicted of a 1999 workplace rampage in which he killed Terry Jarvis, Lee Holdbrooks and Scott Yancy.

    The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution shortly after 9 p.m. Thursday and state officials said they determined at about 11:30 p.m. that the could not start the execution by a midnight deadline.

    Huffaker ordered the Alabama Department of Corrections to locate and preserve all evidence related to the attempted execution, including notes, emails, texts, and used medical supplies such as syringes, swabs, scalpels, and IV-lines. He also granted a request from Miller’s attorney to visit him and photograph what they said are, “injuries from the attempted execution.”

    During a Friday morning hearing conducted by telephone conference, Huffaker asked the state what was going on in the almost 150 minutes that elapsed after the Supreme Court said the execution could proceed. An attorney for the state told the judge the execution team began preparations at about 10 p.m. and made multiple attempts to connect the IV line but she did not indicate exactly how long the state tried. They stopped trying to gain venous access at about 11:20 p.m, she said.

    Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm told reporters early Friday morning that “accessing the veins was taking a little bit longer than we anticipated” and the state did not have sufficient time to get the execution underway by a midnight deadline.

    “Due to time constraints resulting from the lateness of the court proceedings, the execution was called off once it was determined the condemned inmate’s veins could not be accessed in accordance with our protocol before the expiration of the death warrant,” Hamm said.

    This is at least the third time Alabama has acknowledged problems with venous access during a lethal injection. The state’s July execution of Joe Nathan James took more than three hours to get underway. Alabama called off the 2018 execution of Doyle Hamm after being unable to establish an intravenous line.

    “The Alabama Department of Corrections verges somewhere between malpractice and butchery,” said Bernard Harcourt, a lawyer who represented Doyle Hamm. “What it demonstrates is we really shouldn’t be given this incompetent bureaucrats the power over life and death.”

    Miller’s execution was called off after a legal fight on whether the state lost Miller’s paperwork requesting a different execution method. When Alabama authorized nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, state law gave inmates a brief window to request it.

    Miller testified at an earlier court hearing that he wanted nitrogen because he dislikes needles and medical staff often have trouble finding a blood vessel to draw blood.

    ___

    This story was corrected to show Alabama’s last execution was in July, and corrects the name of the prisoner from Arthur to Alan Miller.

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  • Abe assassination is a rare act of gun violence in Japan

    Abe assassination is a rare act of gun violence in Japan

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    Following the horrific mass shootings in the United States, social media is rife with discussions on gun laws and regulations. Friday morning’s news of the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by a gunman has brought the issue of strict laws on gun ownership to light. How could this happen in a country with only one firearm-related death in all of 2021? Since 2017, there have been 14 gun-related deaths in Japan, a remarkably low figure for a country of 125 million people. Compare that to the 45,222 people who died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. in just one year (2021).1

    Republican Congressional candidate Lavern Spicer has chimed in on this shocking assassination by tweeting, “How did Shinzo Abe get assassinated when guns are banned in Japan? Liberals, care to explain?” Her tweet was shared by thousands. We find this claim to be misleading and inaccurate.

    Firstly, guns are not banned in Japan but are regulated by very strict gun ownership laws. 

    This backgrounder by the Council on Foreign Relations explains how guns are regulated in Japan…

    Gun control advocates regularly cite Japan’s highly restrictive firearm regulations in tandem with its extraordinarily low gun death rate. Most years, fewer than one hundred Japanese die from gun violence in a country of 125 million people. Most guns are illegal in the country and ownership rates, which are quite low, reflect this.

    Under Japan’s firearm and sword law [PDF], the only guns permitted are shotguns, air guns, guns with specific research or industrial purposes, or those used for competitions. However, before access to these specialty weapons is granted, one must obtain formal instruction and pass a battery of written, mental, and drug tests and a rigorous background check. Furthermore, owners must inform the authorities of how their weapons and ammunition are stored and provide their firearms for annual inspection.

    Some analysts link Japan’s aversion to firearms with its demilitarization in the aftermath of World War II. Others say that because the overall crime rate in the country is so low, most Japanese see no need for firearms.

    Secondly, by asking “liberals” to explain, Spicer is suggesting that gun laws don’t prevent gun violence, since those who identify with “liberal” political beliefs tend to support stricter gun control measures. However, the simple fact that this act of violence is so rare in Japan supports the idea that gun control in Japan is working. Yes, culture is one reason for the low rate, but gun regulation is a major one, too. The result is a situation where citizens and police seldom use guns. The fact that the shooter of Shinzo Abe most likely used a “homemade gun”2 to get past laws restricting the sales of firearms and ammunition, proves that guns are harder to obtain in Japan. 

    According to a recently published article on Vox, gun regulations in other countries reflect a significant difference in recorded instances of gun violence. 

    No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more than 110 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 40,620 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 mass shootings, when defined as shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.

    The following excerpt published in The Guardian by reporters Cait Kelly and Justin McCurry compares gun violence in U.S. and Japan and other high-income countries.

    A 2022 report from the University of Washington revealed that, while the US had more than four firearm homicides per 100,000 people in 2019, Japan had almost zero. Comparing high-income countries in the World Bank with the rate of firearm homicide per 100,000 people, the US had 4.2, Australia had 0.18 and Japan 0.02, the report found.

    In 2013, the country hit a record high for gun crime, with 40 criminal cases of guns being fired, but it has followed a downward trend since.

    There are also strict laws about how many gun shops are allowed to open – in most of the countries’ 47 prefectures, a total of three gun shops can operate in each prefecture.

     

    1 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/

    2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/08/japan-shinzo-abe-shooting-gun-laws/

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