States diverge on police reforms after George Floyd killing

DENVER (AP) — Maryland repealed its half-century-old Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights. Washington state reformed use-of-force policies and created a new agency to investigate when officers use deadly force. And California overcame objections from police unions to make sure officers fired in one jurisdiction couldn’t be hired in another.

Those are some of the far-reaching policing changes passed this year in response to the 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. But the first full year of state legislative sessions since his death sparked a summer of racial justice protests produced a far more mixed response in the rest of the country.

A number of states implemented incremental reforms, such as banning chokeholds or tightening rules around use of body cameras, while several Republican-led states responded by granting police even greater authority and passing laws that cracked down on protesters.

The state action on both sides of the debate came as Congress failed to implement policing reforms aimed at boosting officer accountability. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the U.S. House without a single Republican vote and then collapsed in the evenly divided Senate.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents more than 356,000 law enforcement officers, said he thinks it’s still possible for Congress to pass police reform, but perhaps only after another deadly case captures the nation’s attention.

“Sadly, the only thing we know for sure, it will be a tragedy that will precipitate change,” Pasco said.

He said the trend of states passing their own policing measures depending on their politics is creating more divisions in an already fractured country.

Partisan leanings were in play in Maryland, which 50 years ago became the first state to pass an officers’ bill of rights that provided job protections in the police disciplinary process, measures that eventually spread to about 20 other states. This year, it became the first to repeal those rights after lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly overrode the veto of Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.

They replaced the bill of rights with new procedures that give civilians a role in police discipline. Democratic lawmakers also united to pass other reforms over Hogan’s objections or without his signature, including expanding public access to police disciplinary records and creating a unit in the state attorney general’s office to investigate police-involved deaths.

“Other states can use this legislation as a blueprint for creating meaningful police reform,” said Rashawn Ray, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institute.

In Washington state, an ambitious series of reforms will ban police from using chokeholds and no-knock warrants, create a new state agency to investigate police use of deadly force and change the threshold for when officers can use force. Some law enforcement officials have said they are not clear about what they’re required to do, which has led to discrepancies about how to respond to certain situations.

California created a statewide certification system for officers, in part to prevent police fired in one jurisdiction from getting a job somewhere else. The bill stalled in the legislature last year and struggled to gain support again this year in the face of opposition from police unions. It passed after it was amended to allow for the option of an officer’s license being suspended as a lesser punishment and to include other safeguards.

“This is not an anti-police bill. This is an accountability bill,” said Democratic state Assemblywoman Akilah Weber, who carried the legislation in that chamber. “Without any accountability, we lose the integrity of the badge, and the bond with the community is broken.”

California also required the state attorney general’s office to investigate all fatal shootings by police of unarmed civilians, specified when officers have a duty to intervene to prevent or report excessive force, and increased the minimum age to become a police officer from 18 to 21.

The state reform bills passed in 2021 are important because they help promote accountability for police, which can shift officer behavior as long as the changes are enforced, said Puneet Cheema, manager of the Justice in Public Safety Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

To try to prevent violent encounters with the police in the first place, she said governments need to limit what police are asked to do — such as whether or not they should respond to people experiencing a mental health crisis or make certain traffic stops.

“That is a longer-term shift that will lead to the broadest changes in police violence and the role that police play in people’s lives,” Cheema said.

Even some states with divided governments were able to agree on certain reforms.

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed a partial ban on no-knock warrants approved by the Legislature, where Republicans hold veto-proof supermajorities. The bill was passed after months of demonstrations over the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home during a botched police raid last year. It permits no-knock warrants if there is “clear and convincing evidence” that the crime being investigated “would qualify a person, if convicted, as a violent offender.”

Many protesters and some Democratic lawmakers had sought a full ban, but the law does prevent cities and towns from banning the warrants completely.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed a bill passed by the Republican-led legislature that creates a public database where anyone can check whether an officer’s certification has been suspended or revoked. It also creates another confidential database showing cases in which an officer kills or seriously injures someone that is only accessible to law enforcement agencies.

In Louisiana, the Democratic governor and lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Legislature placed new restrictions on the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants, required detailed policies for body camera and dash camera use, boosted law enforcement agencies’ minority recruitment efforts and required anti-bias training. They also agreed to require suspension or revocation of a police officer’s state certification if the officer committed misconduct.

Some states controlled fully by Republicans moved in the opposition direction and expanded the rights of police officers or cracked down on protesters.

In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds introduced measures at the start of this year’s legislative session to ban racial profiling by police and establish a system to track racial data for police stops. But lawmakers dropped those sections of her proposal and instead passed the Back the Blue Act, which Reynolds signed in June. The law makes it harder to sue and win monetary damages from police accused of misconduct, made rioting a felony and provides legal protection from lawsuits for the driver of a vehicle who might strike a protester.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill that increased penalties for blocking roadways and granting immunity to drivers who kill or injure rioters. It was prompted by an incident in Tulsa last year in which the driver of a pickup truck drove through a crowd gathered on an interstate as part of a protest against Floyd’s killing.

In Ohio, people attending a rally who are accused of violating an anti-riot law could be targeted with a provision normally used against terrorist activity under proposed GOP legislation. Florida also passed a law cracking down on violent protests that had been championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, but a federal judge has blocked it from taking effect, calling the law “vague and overbroad.”

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By COLLEEN SLEVIN Associated Press

Associated Press writers Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Steve Karnowski in St. Paul, Minnesota; Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City; Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina; Don Thompson in Sacramento, California; and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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Vaccine mandates

Read the order here.

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US capital punishment continued to decline this year, report finds

(CN) — Capital punishment is waning in the U.S. with executions, death sentences and public support hitting historic lows in 2021. But racial inequities persist as Black men made up the majority of those put to death, according to an annual report by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Calling it the “right thing to do, the moral thing to do,” Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, signed a bill in March abolishing the death penalty in Old Dominion.

“With Virginia’s abolition, a majority of U.S. states have now abolished the death penalty (23) or have a formal moratorium on its use (3). An additional ten states have not carried out an execution in at least ten years,” according to DPIC’s 2021 year-end report.

Just as in 2020, only five states, most of them in the South, and the federal government executed people in 2021, continuing a trend of geographic isolation in the use of the death penalty.

“Texas and the U.S. government each executed three people, Oklahoma executed two, and three additional states—Alabama, Mississippi and Missouri—each executed one person,” the report states.

Former President Donald Trump’s administration made policy changes that led to the execution of 13 federal prisoners in 2020 and 2021, including six between the Nov. 3, 2020, election and President Joe Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20, the most ever in the U.S. during a presidential transition period, according to the report.

The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court enabled the federal government’s run of executions by lifting lower court injunctions or stays and denying stay requests in other cases.

After the high court authorized the Jan. 16 execution of federal prisoner Dustin Higg, a 48-year-old Black man convicted of murdering three women – the last in Trump’s tenure – Justice Sonia Sotomayor called out her conservative colleagues for a pattern of ruling in favor of the Trump administration in death penalty cases via emergency orders without oral argument.

“Over the past six months, this court has repeatedly sidestepped its usual deliberative processes, often at the government’s request, allowing it to push forward with an unprecedented, breakneck timetable of executions,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“Throughout this expedited spree of executions, this court has consistently rejected inmates’ credible claims for relief,” she continued.

The federal prisoners executed in January included Lisa Montgomery, 67, whose attorneys said in motions for competency hearings was experiencing a “deteriorating mental condition” leaving her unable to “to understand she will be executed, why she will be executed, or even where she is.”

Montgomery, the first woman to be executed by the federal government in 67 years, had a tragic childhood in which her mother’s boyfriend sexually abused her and her mother sexually trafficked her to plumbers and electricians as payment for home repairs.

The government has not executed anyone since Biden took office, and Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on June 1 a moratorium on federal executions pending a review of policy changes made by the Trump administration.

The spate of federal executions underscored the gulf between the United States and Europe.

Forty-seven European countries, including Russia, bar capital punishment in accordance with the European Convention on Human Rights. The United Kingdom and France have not executed anyone since 1964 and 1977, respectively.

But the DPIC report shows a marked decline in American juries and prosecutors doling out and seeking the death penalty.

“As of December 13, 18 people had been sentenced to death in 2021, matching the record low since the beginning of the modern era of the death penalty in 1972… The 11 executions carried out this year were the fewest since 1988,” the group said in a press release.

“The pandemic contributed to these historically low numbers, but the long-term trend remained consistent: 2021 marked the seventh consecutive year where there were fewer than 50 death sentences and 30 executions,” it added.

The national trend is perhaps best reflected in Harris County, Texas, home of Houston.

Since 1982, 130 prisoners convicted in Harris County have been executed, more than any state in the country other than Texas, according to a new report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

The executions earned Harris County the nickname “death penalty capital of the world.” But the coalition’s report noted just one of the three Texas prisoners put to death this year, Rick Rhoades, was sentenced in Harris County.

The coalition’s executive director, Kristin Houlé Cuellar, told Houston’s NPR affiliate that Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat who took office in January 2017, has sought the death penalty much less often than her predecessors.

“Ogg has pursued the death penalty in two cases since she was first elected (in 2016) … This is part of a trend that started a bit before her but has certainly been reflected during her time in office,” Houlé Cuellar said.

Racial disparities persist in U.S. capital punishment, the DPIC report found.

“Sentences and executions disproportionately involved victims who were white and female. Once again, only defendants of color were executed for cross-racial murders and no white defendant was sentenced to death in a trial that did not involve at least one white victim,” the nonprofit says in its 45-page report.

It also notes of the 18 people sentenced to death in 2021, the majority are Black (six) and Latino (four).

“More than three quarters of the cases (14, 77.8%) involved at least one white victim and thirteen (72.2%) involved only white victims. Five of the six death sentences imposed on Black defendants (83.3%) were for interracial murders, four involving only white victims,” the report states.

It continues, “Three of the four death sentences imposed on Latinx defendants (75%) involved interracial killings. No white defendant was sentenced to death for any murder that did not involve at least one white victim.”

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House passes funding plan as threat of a government shutdown looms

WASHINGTON (CN) — Just over 24 hours away from the deadline to avoid triggering a government shutdown, House lawmakers approved a short-term government funding plan that would keep the lights on through mid-February, but whether it succeeds is up to the Senate where a vote is expected Thursday night.

The spending plan, which passed the House by a near party-line vote of  221-212,  provides a last-minute and temporary way for the federal government to avoid a shutdown, which would be triggered at midnight on Friday. 

Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger was the only Republican who voted to keep the government open.

Both chambers have to agree to the same plan before that time, the likelihood of which remains uncertain as some Senate Republicans threaten to force a shutdown in protest of federal Covid-19 vaccine and testing mandates and have lobbied for an amendment to the spending plan which would defund federal vaccine mandates on businesses.

“The only thing I want to shut down is enforcement of an immoral, unconstitutional vaccine mandate,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, said on the Senate floor Thursday.

To avoid a dragged out debate process that could run out the clock on Friday, Senate Republican support of the plan is needed and all 100 members of the Senate have to agree to hold a vote in the first place with the filibuster and ideological divides providing added obstacles to the plan’s passage.

“It is yet again a double sense of irresponsibility. First of all, they shut down government and then they shut down science,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said of the threats by Republicans.

The proposed bill funds the federal government through Feb. 18, potentially staving off a federal shutdown but adding yet another agenda item to an already heavy plate for lawmakers in the new year.

If the new plan does pass the fiercely divided Senate, Congress will have to either pass another short-term spending plan or resolve the political arguments that have prevented lawmakers from passing a long-term appropriations plan, known as an omnibus, for the rest of the fiscal year in February.

The plan approved by the House continues previously agreed upon levels of funding, but adds $7 billion of support to Afghan refugees.

Regardless of whether the short-term measure is approved or the country enters a government shutdown, which could jeopardize federal efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic as a new variant of the virus spreads, lawmakers will have to agree to a long-term spending measure  in order to avoid repeated risks of shutdowns.

Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, said she is eager to pass a larger and more long-term spending package.

“While I wish the Feb. 18 end date were earlier, this agreement allows the appropriations process to move forward toward a final funding agreement which addresses the needs of the American people,”DeLauro said in a statement.

But Republicans take issue with many of the proposals Democrats have for a long-term spending package. 

While Democrats are eager to increase spending on education, Republicans have said a new plan needs to include lower domestic spending, more money allocated to defense initiatives and, a major point of contention this year, the Hyde Amendment, a provision that is historically included to prevent federal funds from going to abortions and one that Democrats have talked about cutting.

These sharp political divides have kept lawmakers from compromising on a long-term spending bill, relying instead on short-term resolutions. Congress passed a stop-gap resolution back in September to give more time for lawmakers to come together on a funding bill that would last through the end of the fiscal year, but each party continues to blame the other for failures to meet at the negotiating table.

“Today’s resolution is the second continuing resolution we’ve had to pass to cover fiscal year 2022, sadly, I expect it will not be the last,” said Representative Tom Cole, a Republican from Oklahoma, warning lawmakers will continue to fail at reaching a consensus.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, said Congress’ failure to pass a long-term spending plan, one of the only pieces of legislation required to pass each year, is shameful.

“This bill is a demonstration of the failure of 535 adults elected by their fellow citizens to act responsibly. Obviously, of those 535, a number have acted responsibly, have worked to get the job done,” Hoyer said. “We know these bills have to pass, but notwithstanding we come to this place year after year after year.”

The Senate now has until midnight Friday to pass the short-term plan or bring on a shutdown, something President Joe Biden said he does not believe will happen. A vote is expected to occur Thursday evening.

“There is a plan in place unless somebody decides to be totally erratic,” Biden said ahead of the House vote Thursday.

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