Guns kill children again

More than 24 times as many Americans kill themselves with guns each year than are shot to death by police. This is not an excuse for police — it’s a sad fact.

More than 45,000 Americans were killed by guns in 2020. More than half of those gun deaths (54%) were suicides. In other words, more than twice as many Americans kill themselves with guns each year than die by homicide, according to FBI crime statistics. (All links in this article are to reliable, often multiple, sources.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 45,979 Americans killed themselves in 2020. That’s more than five suicides each hour around the clock for a year. And the rate keeps increasing. Suicide is the 12th-ranked cause of U.S. deaths. In 2020, 24,292 U.S. suicides were by guns, 12,495 by suffocation (mostly hanging), and 5,528 by poison.

Police officers kill about 1,000 people a year in the United States, and have done so for years. So are police the problem? Well, they are a problem. But of the roughly 45,000 people shot to death every year in the United States, police officers — our presumed protectors — account for about 2% of those killings.

When you break it down by race, though, it doesn’t look good. Of the roughly 1,000 people U.S. police kill each year, they kill Black folks at a rate of 38 per million; Latinos at a rate of 28 per million (of Latino population); and whites at a rate of 15 per million. So your chances of being killed by a cop are 2 1/2 times greater if you are Black than if you are white.

Of these 1,000 police killings, only about seven officers are charged with homicide each year.

Breaking it down further, women are four times more likely to be killed (4,000 a year) by an “intimate partner” than by police. Spousal or “intimate partner” homicides account for about 1 in 5 of U.S. killings, but account for more than half of female victims.

Oklahoma and Kentucky lead the nation in domestic violence per capita.

Most spousal and intimate partner violence comes when a woman attempts to leave a man, or after she has left him.

These depressing statistics indicate to me that guns are a far greater threat to public health than police.

Of the more than 400 million guns in the United States, 393 million are privately owned. Guns pose a far greater risk of violent death than all other factors combined.

Here’s a brief rundown of other sorts of violent deaths in the United States. Due to the multiplicity of sources, these numbers may be single-year, or averaged over varying numbers of years.

Rattlesnakes bite 7,000 to 8,000 people a year; five die.

Black widow spiders bite about 2,500 people year; seven die. Bites from other types of spiders bring the death toll to about 11 a year. Only four people died of scorpion bites in 11 years.

Dogs kill 34 people a year; farm animals kill 201.

Bees, wasps and hornets killed 62 people a year from 2000-2017; 80% of them were men and boys. Of those, bee stings accounted for about 53 people a year, wasps and hornets only nine.

About 200 people a year die of electrocution at home. Roughly 10% of those are caused by large appliances. About the same number die of injuries from power tools. However, “Faulty electrical equipment causes about 140,000 home and workplace fires each year. These fires claim, on average, an additional 400 lives and cause another 4,000 injuries,” according to a personal injury law firm.

In 2020, 4,764 people died of workplace injuries, down from 5,333 in 2019 — the lowest annual number since 2013. The decrease probably can be attributed to workplace shutdowns during the pandemic. Still, a worker died every two hours from a work-related injury in 2020. Transportation deaths were the most frequent, 1,778, or 37.3% of workplace deaths.

“The share of Hispanic or Latino workers fatally injured on the job continued to grow, increasing to 22.5% (1,072 fatalities) from 20.4% (1,088 fatalities) in 2019,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Add it all up and, despite the legitimate, sometimes shameful complaints about police shootings, shoddy workplace safety enforcement, and the brutality men inflict upon women, the greatest threat of violent death in the United States comes from those 393 million guns — overwhelmingly in the hands of men.

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As I was writing this column on Tuesday, a teenage boy shot to death 19 elementary schoolchildren and two teachers in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott said he was horrified by the mass murder. Sure you were, Greg. Sure you were. What are you going to do about it?
Texas Senator Ted Cruz called it “a dark day.” Cruz has taken at least $176,274 in campaign donations from the NRA. He is scheduled to speak at an NRA meeting Friday. What’re you going to tell them, Ted?
And why, in god’s name, New York Times, did you make this the second paragraph of a hot update on the massacre: “The city of about 15,200 people is in a region with a large Mexican American population, according to census data.”? Have you no shame? At long last, have you no shame at all?”
In a statement, the National Parents Union called for policy change and “more than thoughts and prayers,” citing more than 100 school shootings in Texas since 1970. “As a nation, our track record of putting children before politics, before special interests is shameful and leaves us with little hope,” the organization said. “Please prove us wrong.”

from Courthouse News

Indiana lawmakers override governor’s veto of transgender sports ban

(CN) — The GOP-dominated Indiana Legislature forced the passage of a bill targeting transgender student-athletes in a one-day technical session on Tuesday, overriding a March veto by Republican Governor Eric Holcomb.

The bill, known as HEA 1041, bars transgender girls – assigned male at birth but who identify as girls – from participating in K – 12 girls’ sports teams.

The Indiana House voted 67-28 to overturn the veto and the Senate confirmed 32-15 on Tuesday afternoon.

Besides banning transgender girls from playing on student sports teams, HEA 1041 also compels public and private schools in Indiana to create a “grievance procedure” by July 1 this year, when the new law takes effect.

Through the procedure, any school found to be allowing transgender girls to participate on girls’ sports teams can be hit with civil litigation and a fine of up to $1,000. Likewise, it shields schools that block transgender girls’ participation from civil rights suits.

Holcomb vetoed the bill in March after it passed through both houses of the Indiana General Assembly, partly over objections to the grievance procedure.

“First, as to process, the wide-open nature of the grievance provisions in HEA 1041 that apply to all K-12 schools in Indiana makes it unclear about how consistency and fairness will be maintained for parents and students across different counties and school districts…Meaning, student-athletes could be treated differently according to which school they attend and compete for,” the governor wrote in a letter accompanying his veto.

Holcomb also said that the bill was a solution looking for a problem. The bill’s proponents hold that when children who are born male play on girls’ teams, they give their teams an unfair advantage over those composed entirely of cisgender girls – those born biologically female. But while the state’s total youth population was north of 1.5 million in 2020, the Indiana Youth Institute found only about 3,350 Hoosiers aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender. An even smaller fraction identify as binary transgender girls, and only a fraction of that fraction would be enrolled in girls’ sports teams.

The National Library of Medicine also found in 2013 that less than 1% of K-12 student athletes of any gender identity go on to compete at any elite level.

“The presumption of the policy laid out in [the bill] is that there is an existing problem in K-12 sports in Indiana that requires further state government intervention. It implies that the goals of consistency and fairness in competitive female sports are not currently being met. After thorough review, I find no evidence to support either claim even if I support the overall goal,” Holcomb wrote in March.

Holcomb defended his opposition to the bill in a statement Tuesday.

“My position hasn’t changed. There remains zero cases and the process, which is managed by IHSAA, is working. I stand behind my decision to veto HB 1041,” he said.

Republican state Representatives Chris Jeter and Michelle Davis, the bill’s co-authors, are nevertheless ideologically committed to HEA 1041. Jeter pledged in March to whip the votes necessary to overturn Holcomb’s veto.

On Tuesday, Davis said the bill would “ensure the integrity” of girls’ sports.

“The purpose of this legislation is to ensure the integrity of girls’ sports, now and in the future,” she said. Besides her comments, no debate on the issue was held before the vote.

In the state Senate, where there was a floor debate, Republican Senator Stacey Donato also spoke in favor of the bill. She waved off Holcomb’s objections as irrelevant to the spirit of the bill.

“This bill is about protecting fair competition, whether there are one or 100 cases,” Donato said.

Several Democratic state senators, who like in the House are outnumbered by Republicans by more than 3 to 1, offered their own counter-arguments advocating for the rights of transgender students.

“Children just want to play sports with their friends,” Senate Minority Leader Greg Taylor said, echoing the governor’s concerns that HEA 1041 was just chasing shadows. He said barring students from playing sports on the teams where they feel most comfortable in their own skin would do them further harm in already uncertain times.

“Children right now, because of the pandemic, are already dealing with mental health issues we’ve never seen in this country’s history,” Taylor said.

Civil rights groups such as the Indiana ACLU also supported Holcomb’s veto, rejecting the logic that gender is the main determining factor of a student’s athletic performance.

“Trans youth vary in athletic ability, just like cisgender youth. Every kid has a range of different physical characteristics varying in size, strength and athletic ability,” the group said in March.

On Tuesday, the ACLU also called denying transgender girls the ability to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity a form of “blatant discrimination” and an attempt by conservative lawmakers to strip LGBTQ individuals of their rights.

“Banning transgender girls from participating in school sports is Indiana’s latest attempt to prevent transgender people from living full and equal public lives. [HEA] 1041 will single out trans girls for further exclusion by preventing them from participating in sports with their peers,” the group said.

Only hours after state lawmakers voted to overturn the veto, the ACLU announced it was filing a federal lawsuit against Indianapolis Public Schools on behalf of a 10-year-old transgender girl who wants to play on her school’s girls’ softball team.

“The new law, which would go into effect July 1, 2022, would deny A.M. the right to rejoin her team because she is a transgender girl…  Not allowing her to do so in the fall would be a painful, constant reminder that she is not accepted by the world as the girl that she is,” a release accompanying the suit said. 

HEA 1041 is one of a number of anti-LGBTQ bills that have passed through conservative state assemblies in the past several months, including in Oklahoma, Texas and Utah. A total of 17 states, now including Indiana, have laws on the books banning transgender students from participating in sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

It’s part of an even larger recent trend of reactionary emboldening across the country, from several states’ public school bans on books dealing with issues of sexuality and racism, to Florida’s Stop WOKE Act that bars instruction on racial and gender oppression in schools and workplaces, to multiple states’ plans to institute abortion bans once the U.S. Supreme Court hands down its now-presumptive reversal of Roe v. Wade.

The rightward shift even has some Republicans uneasy. Like Holcomb, Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox vetoed a bill banning transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams this March.

Indiana Democratic Senator J.D. Ford quoted Cox during Tuesday’s debate on the Senate floor to highlight this unease.

“Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids [in Utah] who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships,” Ford said, quoting Cox. “Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.”

from Courthouse News

No easy answers for US tornado trends

(CN) — It looks unreal, a Texas take on “The Wizard of Oz.” Instead of Dorothy spinning in her tornado-launched home, a twister topples Riley Leon’s 2.5-ton pickup, spins it in a circle, then blows it upright. Leon speeds away, out of the frame of a storm chaser’s camera phone.

Leon, 16, suffered a lower back fracture but thanks to his seatbelt he survived the cyclone’s 130 mph winds, which knocked his Chevy truck over on a rural highway near Austin in March.

Scientists have documented an increase over the last 20 years of the frequency of tornadoes in the Southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina.

And that’s troubling given the large number of manufactured homes in the region, lax codes that do not require them to be securely anchored to the ground, and the tendency of tornadoes to form at night when people are sleeping – fueled by warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico – rather than in the late afternoon or early evening, as they typically do in the Great Plains.

Against this backdrop, Leon’s experience is a lesson: driving through a tornado, bad idea; hunkering down in a manufactured home, even worse.

“A car is a little bit safer than a manufactured home, believe it or not. … You are strapped in. You have a seat belt, and you have safety precautions. You have airbags,” said Stephen Strader, a Villanova University professor focused on reducing risk from hazardous weather.

“When you don’t have a properly anchored manufactured home, the tornado comes along, picks up the entire structure and tosses it like a kite into the woods 100 yards away and you’re inside it,” he cautioned.

In the most harrowing experience of her life, Jennifer Henson-Collins turned to her faith.

Sheltering with her children in a hallway of her manufactured home in Cookeville, Tennessee, as an EF4 tornado spun into her backyard, she hollered prayers to God.

“The tornado picked us up with the hardwood floor and landed us 250 feet across the street! We lost everything! I could feel my guardian angel right behind us hovering over us to protect us. … We had minimum injuries. The scariest night of my life,” she wrote, in a “Tornado Survivor Stories” account she gave to the National Weather Service. 

That twister was among an outbreak of more than a dozen nocturnal tornadoes that ravaged west and middle Tennessee on March 2 and 3, 2020, killing 25 people, injuring another 309 and causing $1.6 billion in property damage.

For scientists struggling to link changes in U.S. tornado patterns to climate change, such outbreaks underscore the difficulty of understanding this most enigmatic of weather events.

Even America’s most learned researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration admit their ignorance.

“How do tornadoes form? The truth is that we don’t fully understand,” the agency states in a “Severe Weather 101” primer on its website.

And while tornado clusters, when six or more form within hours of each other, are becoming more common, there are now fewer days on average throughout a year with tornadoes, about 100, than the 1970s, when there were about 150, despite better tools for detecting relatively weak tornadoes.

“The why is one of the great unknowns that I wish I knew the answer to,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, who has been studying tornadoes since 1985.

Brooks described tornado formation as a balancing of ingredients. They are rotating thunderstorms. Thunderstorms develop when warm, moist air rises into cold, dry air, he explained.

“Now what makes that storm severe and likely to produce a tornado, it needs to form where the wind in the environment, the horizontal wind, increases with height over the lowest several miles,” Brooks continued.

A destroyed house and other structures are seen in rural Sedgwick County, Kan., on May 1, 2022, two days after a tornado was reported in the area. (Jaime Green/The Wichita Eagle via AP)

Wind gets the storm rotating.

“To get rotations down to the ground, what happens is that when the storm rains that cools the air as the rain falls and evaporates. And if the air is a little bit cool but not too cold we can get rotation down near the ground. If the air is too cold … it will essentially kill the storm because that kills the warm, moist air at low levels. So there’s real balancing act that goes in,” Brooks said.

The small-scale details make it hard to tell what’s going on in the storm, Brooks noted.

Another factor: Tornadoes are more likely if the storms that form are relatively isolated, Brooks advised, so there aren’t other storms around them to mess up the air flow.

He believes the changing patterns of U.S. tornadoes—more days with clusters of them but less days when any form—implies the structure of the jet stream has changed in ways that affect their development. But pinpointing how changes in air currents impact weather phenomenon that are very small in comparison has proven difficult, Brooks concedes.

“What we know about the structure of the jet stream is on spatial scales of a few thousand kilometers and time scales of a day or two. And when we’re trying to go from that down to something that’s a kilometer and minutes, there’s a huge mismatch in the scale,” he said.

As for climate change, experts say it is causing offsetting precursors. While it is increasing the prevalence of balmy, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico that seeds thunderstorms, it is decreasing the wind shear that spins them.

Vast differences in the temperature of air blowing down from the North Pole and up from the equator create winds that increase with height. But as climate change causes the poles to warm more than the equator, those winds diminish, which is less favorable for tornadoes.

Given all the variables and unknowns with tornadoes, Strader, the Villanova professor, concentrates on raising awareness about how building codes should be changed in the South to reduce injuries and deaths.

Of the 117 U.S. tornado deaths in 2019 and 2020, 113 were in Southern states and 60% occurred in manufactured homes, according to USA today.

Due to lax zoning rules in the Southeast, Strader said, manufactured homes – also informally called mobile homes – are often not located in mobile home parks.

“For instance, over 80% of mobile homes in Alabama are not located in mobile home parks. They are out on rural plots of land where there might be one or two homes and they’re family members. We call those family pods,” he said.

With residents so spread out in rural areas, emergency managers and county officials are faced with a dilemma: Where to put community shelters given many people will not have time to reach them? The average warning time for tornadoes is about 13 to 14 minutes, according to Strader.

One solution, he says, is more strict standards for anchoring manufactured homes.

In response to Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 hurricane that battered Florida with 165 mph winds in August 1992 and destroyed 63,500 homes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency established wind zones that dictate how much anchoring is required for houses.

“So if you live in Miami-Dade County, you have the highest requirements of any manufactured home in the United States in terms of the anchoring standard. … But once you get about 100 miles away from the coast, it goes away,” Strader said.

In some areas of the South, anchoring is not even required for manufactured homes if they weigh enough to meet the minimum in local building codes.

Due to these shortfalls, Strader advises people in Southern states to see themselves in Miami. But not flying in like Dorothy did to Oz in a tornado-blown home.

“If someone comes up to me from Alabama and says, ‘I’m going to buy a manufactured home. What can I do to make myself safer?’ I tell them to pretend their mobile home is going to be in Miami-Dade County. And strap it down as if you lived on the coast,” he said.

from Courthouse News

Hate crime initiatives launched in US after back-to-back racist shootings

WASHINGTON (CN) — Less than a week after mass shootings targeting the Black and Taiwanese communities, the Justice Department unveiled a plan Friday to combat hate crimes.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new guidelines for law enforcement officials and local leaders in conjunction with a slew of state grants focused on hate crime prevention programs and data gathering.

The department will dole out $10 million grants that will fund the creation of reporting hotlines and aid law enforcement in sending data on hate crimes to the federal government. Half of that money will also support community-based programs to prevent and address hate crimes.

Full-time language access coordinator Ana Paula Noguez Mercado will also join the Justice Department to improve language interpretation and hate-crime reporting among non-English speaking communities.

When he first came into office last year, Garland launched a review to develop new policies on hate crimes. On Friday, he acknowledged the weight of addressing that mission while the country remains reeling from the murder of 10 shoppers in a mass shooting carried out Saturday afternoon by a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York.

“Last weekend’s attack was a painful reminder of the singular impact that hate crimes have not only on individuals, but on entire communities,” Garland said. “They bring immediate devastation. They inflict lasting fear.”

Authorities are now studying an online diary that the 18-year-old shooter Payton Gendron kept for months ahead of the attack. They say he targeted the supermarket 200 miles away from his hometown because of its location in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

With the Justice Department and FBI are investigating the shooting as a hate crime, President Joe Biden called the attack “straightforward terrorism.” The shooting in Buffalo is the deadliest of the year, but bloodshed across the United States has been constant in the days. Not even 24 hours after the Buffalo shooting, there was a fatal shooting at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California, that police say was also racially motivated.

Garland had planned the policy announcement ahead of the Buffalo attack to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act and the Jabara-Heyer No Hate Act, legislation Congress passed in 2021 to fund anti-hate crime work.

“We now gather in the wake of a horrific and painful reminder of the urgency and importance of this task,” Garland told reporters Friday.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle rallied behind the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act last year in the wake of a shooting in Atlanta where eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, were killed by a gunman targeting massage parlors that had predominantly Asian employees. The legislation aimed to combat anti-Asian discrimination and violence, which spiked during the pandemic.

The Jabara-Heyer No Hate Act was named after two people killed in racially motivated hate crimes. Khalid Jabara, an immigrant from Lebanon and practicing Muslim, was killed in Oklahoma by his neighbor in 2016. A year later, Heather Heyer was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people protesting a rally for extreme right wingers in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Authorities counted 8,305 hate crimes in 2020, the highest number on record in almost two decades. But activists and community leaders say the number of crimes motivated by a prejudice based on race, gender, sexuality or religion is likely even higher than the FBI’s count.

The federal database relies on local law enforcement agencies reporting hate crimes in their jurisdictions, a factor that can lead to undercounting if officials aren’t trained on what constitutes a hate crime or if community members do not feel comfortable notifying the police of an incident.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said the department’s existing and new efforts focused on hate crimes are about both prevention and boosting reporting mechanisms.

“We also know it is not enough to wait until a hate crime occurs, we have to address hate well before it escalates into violence,” Gupta said.

In his speech, Garland harkened back to the creation of the Department of Justice during the reconstruction era as the government grappled with post-Civil War litigation and the enforcement of the 14th and 15th amendments.

“This department was founded in 1870 in the aftermath of the Civil War, with the first fundamental purpose to fight the white supremacist attacks on Black civil rights after the Civil War. One hundred and fifty two years later, the task to combat hate-fueled violence remains central to the department’s mission,” Garland said. “We do this because it is our legal obligation, and we do this because it is our moral obligation.”

from Courthouse News

… but some are more equal than others

“Russian students are turning in teachers who don’t back the war. The cases are part of a Soviet-style hunt for ‘traitors’ who oppose the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.” — Washington Post

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PEN America reported in April that 1,586 books have been banned in 86 U.S. public school districts in the past year, including, in Tennessee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, “Maus” —  allegedly because it contains swear words.

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In China, teachers are being fired and even sent to mental institutions for daring to step outside the Party line, according to reports in The New York Times, Washington Post and, most comprehensively, Peter Hessler in The New Yorker. Hessler, a fluent Chinese speaker and longtime teacher and correspondent there, was a victim of jubao, in which a student reports a teacher who comments even obliquely upon a Party diktat.

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In Texas, Granbury Independent School District has pulled 130 books from the shelves, for mentioning sex in some way. This came after School Superintendent Jeremy Glenn warned librarians that “I don’t want a kid picking up a book, whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality, and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries.” Glenn told his librarians that “’Here in this community, we’re going to be conservative.’ … And to any school employees who might have different political beliefs, Glenn said, ‘You better hide it.’”

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In Russia, a Committee for the Protection of National Interest maintains a website in which “we, the patriotic forces of Russia, publish a list of traitors and enemies, and we consider it more important than ever to expose and make public the names and faces of these criminals,” who have opposed the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. “They are traitors whom we will never forget or forgive. And we will do our best to make them answer for their actions,” the Committee says. They even have a cool feature through which we can search for “traitors” alphabetically — with mugshots and everything.

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In Oklahoma, Republican lawmakers have proposed a bill (SB 1142) that would allow any parent to request that a book be removed from a school library, and if it is not removed or the conflict resolved within 30 days, the school district would have to pay the complaining parent a bounty of $10,000 a day for every day it remains on the shelves. This allegedly is aimed at rooting out books that dwell upon or discuss sex, and virtually anything to do with sex, according to the language of the bill. Ah, yes, nothing a school district budget needs like another $10,000 out the window every time some bluenose discovers that James Baldwin was gay. Socrates too.

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Back in Russia, President Vladimir Putin has made it a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison for anyone to refer to his war in Ukraine as “war,” rather than a “special military operation.”

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And in Tennessee, the state House approved a bill requiring that every book in every school library (even charter schools) be approved by a state commission, whose members are appointed by the Republican Legislature and Republican governor. When a Democratic member of the state House asked a sponsor of the bill what the schools or state should do with the banned books, Rep. Jerry Sexton said: “I don’t have a clue, but I would burn them.” And what about “Huck Finn”? Should we ban it or rewrite it, to clear up that Huck’s friend Jim was never really a slave?

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Day by dreary day, Republican officials across the country, from Congress to state legislatures to school boards — members of the Republican Deep State — are acting more and more like Russian and Chinese Communists. Mini-men and -women and their cohorts are turning public education into snooping and indoctrination, and lawmaking into retaliation against political opponents.

Pardon me for comparing the United States in 2022 to the Soviet Union in 1932 — and for knowing anything about either of them — but today’s Republican Anschluss against public schools reminds me of poor old Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his parents in 1932 for making a joke about Stalin, for which his parents murdered him, for which Pavlik was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union.

I guess his parents should have home-schooled the little guy.

from Courthouse News

Abortion-friendly states prep for more patients if Roe falls

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Leaders of a Tennessee abortion clinic calculated driving distances and studied passenger rail routes as they scanned the map for another place to offer services if the Supreme Court lets states restrict or eliminate abortion rights.

They chose Carbondale in Illinois — a state that has easy abortion access but is surrounded by restrictive states in the South and Midwest. It will be the southernmost clinic in Illinois when it opens in August.

“I think at this point, we all know the stark reality that we’re facing in Tennessee. We are going to lose abortion access this year,” said Jennifer Pepper, chief executive officer of CHOICES: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health.

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to let states tightly limit or ban abortion, reproductive rights advocates are planning to open new clinics or expand existing ones in states where lawmakers are not clamping down on access.

Some Democrat-led states in the West and Northeast also are proposing public money for an expected influx of people traveling from other places to terminate pregnancies.

When it opened in 1974, a year after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion nationwide, CHOICES became the first abortion provider in Memphis, a commercial hub for rural Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and southern Missouri.

Cars drive past CHOICES: Memphis Center for Reproductive Health on Thursday, May 12, 2022, in Memphis, Tenn. The clinic is opening a new one in Carbondale, Ill., later this year. (AP Photo/Adrian Sainz)

Carbondale is a three-hour drive north of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee’s two largest cities. It’s also on a New Orleans-to-Chicago Amtrak route through areas where abortion access could disappear, including Mississippi, western Tennessee and western Kentucky.

“Its location and geography were the original reason that drew us to Carbondale, but the incredible heart of the Carbondale community is what led us to know we had found a second home for CHOICES,” Pepper said in announcing the plan last week.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule next month in a case directly challenging Roe. Justices heard arguments in December over a 2018 Mississippi law to ban most abortions after 15 weeks. The court has allowed states to regulate but not ban abortion before the point of viability, around 24 weeks.

A draft opinion leaked May 2 showed a majority of justices were ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. If the final ruling is similar, states would have wide latitude to restrict abortion. The Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, says 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion if the landmark ruling is weakened or overturned.

Join our hosts as they take you in and out of courtrooms in the U.S. and beyond.

Diane Derzis owns Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization. She told The Associated Press that the clinic, also known as the Pink House, will close if Roe is overturned because Mississippi has a “trigger” law to automatically prohibit abortion.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the nation, and women would face even steeper hurdles to have access to abortion — arranging time off work, finding ways to pay for travel and lodging and, in many cases, arranging for child care while they are gone.

“Mississippi is a prime example of what’s going to happen to the women of this country,” Derzis said. “Those who have the means will be able to fly to New York. The poor women and women of color will be desperately trying to find the closest clinic.”

Derzis said an abortion clinic she owns in Columbus, Georgia, also would quickly close if Roe disappears, and she thinks a clinic she owns in Richmond, Virginia, might remain open for about another year.

Derzis said she plans to open an abortion clinic soon in Las Cruces, New Mexico, about an hour’s drive north of El Paso, Texas. Since Texas enacted a law last year banning most abortions at about six weeks, women have traveled to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana and other states to end pregnancies.

“You can’t stop a woman who’s pregnant and doesn’t want to have a baby,” Derzis said.

An association of abortion providers, the National Abortion Federation, gives health and travel information as well as money to pregnant women who have to travel to obtain an abortion. The federation’s chief program officer, Melissa Fowler, said many lives will be disrupted.

“The reality for many people in the country is going to be days of travel, days off of work,” Fowler said. “Even if we fully fund someone’s travel, some people’s lives just don’t allow them to make the trip.”

Jennifer Allen, CEO of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, which covers Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky and Washington, said even in states like Washington, where there’s strong support for abortion rights, “it’s going to take a whole lot more to be ready for the future.”

Washington has more than 30 abortion clinics, though just five are east of the Cascade Mountains, in the more conservative part of the state. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed a measure this year authorizing physician assistants, advanced registered nurse practitioners and other providers acting within their scope of practice to do abortions. Abortion-rights supporters said that will help meet the demand from out-of-state patients.

Allen said it’s impossible to predict how many out-of-state residents will seek care in Washington, but the increase could be in the thousands. She said reproductive rights advocates are working to anticipate the needs.

“We are building this plane while we’re flying it,” Allen said.

In response to the leaked Supreme Court draft, Inslee promised Washington would provide sanctuary for those seeking abortions. His office said discussions are underway on a range of possibilities. But the Legislature is not likely to reconvene before its regular session begins in January.

Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed $57 million in abortion funding on top of $68 million proposed in January. The Democrat said the new proposals include $40 million to pay for abortions for women not covered by Medicaid or private insurance, $15 million for a public education campaign, $1 million for a website listing abortion services and $1 million for research into unmet needs for reproductive health care services.

Newsom has already signed a law to make abortions cheaper for people with private insurance and the Legislature is considering other bills to increase abortion access, including proposals to let more nurse practitioners perform them.

New York will make $35 million available for abortion services and security, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last week. She said some of that money could be spent on abortions for out-of-state residents traveling to New York.

In March, Oregon lawmakers approved $15 million to pay for abortions and support services such as travel and lodging for in-state or out-of-state patients who travel long distances, and to expand abortion availability. Details are still being discussed, including the possibility of mobile clinics or hiring more workers for existing clinics.

“We do know that, likely, Oregon will be a place that people will be forced to travel to get care,” said An Do, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Oregon.

The Guttmacher Institute reported Oregon could see a 234% increase in women coming from other states, many from Idaho, if the court overturns Roe v. Wade.

Overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Illinois General Assembly have been preparing for a Roe rollback for years, particularly because the state would be an island amid neighbors with restrictions.

In 2017, Illinois approved public funding for abortion and repealed a 1975 “trigger” law. The state’s Reproductive Health Act of 2019 established the fundamental right for people to make their own decisions about contraception and abortion. As of June 1, minors will no longer be required to notify a parent or guardian before getting an abortion, an action that abortion-rights proponents considered the last roadblock to unfettered access in Illinois.

“We have been preparing for the day Roe falls and we are ready,” said Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri.

Fowler, with the National Abortion Federation, said even though providers in states without restrictive abortion laws “are doing all they can to preserve and expand access, the current system just does not have the capacity to handle the number of patients who will be without care.”

“We need to be just as creative and robust in our solutions as our opponents have been in designing these terrible restrictions,” she said.

_____

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and RACHEL LA CORTE Associated Press

La Corte reported from Olympia, Washington. Adam Beam in Sacramento, California; Marina Villeneuve in Albany, New York; Sara Cline in Salem, Oregon, and John O’Connor in Springfield, Illinois, contributed.

from Courthouse News

With Roe in doubt, some fear tech surveillance of pregnancy

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — When Chandler Jones realized she was pregnant during her junior year of college, she turned to a trusted source for information and advice.

Her cellphone.

“I couldn’t imagine before the internet, trying to navigate this,” said Jones, 26, who graduated Tuesday from the University of Baltimore School of Law. “I didn’t know if hospitals did abortions. I knew Planned Parenthood did abortions, but there were none near me. So I kind of just Googled.”

But with each search, Jones was being surreptitiously followed — by the phone apps and browsers that track us as we click away, capturing even our most sensitive health data.

Online searches. Period apps. Fitness trackers. Advice helplines. GPS. The often obscure companies collecting our health history and geolocation data may know more about us than we know ourselves.

For now, the information is mostly used to sell us things, like baby products targeted to pregnant women. But in a post-Roe world — if the Supreme Court upends the 1973 decision that legalized abortion, as a draft opinion suggests it may in the coming weeks — the data would become more valuable, and women more vulnerable.

Join our hosts as they take you in and out of courtrooms in the U.S. and beyond.

Privacy experts fear that pregnancies could be surveilled and the data shared with police or sold to vigilantes.

“The value of these tools for law enforcement is for how they really get to peek into the soul,” said Cynthia Conti-Cook, a lawyer and technology fellow at the Ford Foundation. “It gives (them) the mental chatter inside our heads.”

___

HIPAA, HOTLINES, HEALTH HISTORIES

The digital trail only becomes clearer when we leave home, as location apps, security cameras, license plate readers and facial recognition software track our movements. The development of these tech tools has raced far ahead of the laws and regulations that might govern them.

And it’s not just women who should be concerned. The same tactics used to surveil pregnancies can be used by life insurance companies to set premiums, banks to approve loans and employers to weigh hiring decisions, experts said.

Or it could — and sometimes does — send women who experience miscarriages cheery ads on their would-be child’s birthday.

It’s all possible because HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, protects medical files at your doctor’s office but not the information that third-party apps and tech companies collect about you. Nor does HIPAA cover the health histories collected by non-medical “crisis pregnancy centers, ” which are run by anti-abortion groups. That means the information can be shared with, or sold to, almost anyone.

Jones contacted one such facility early in her Google search, before figuring out they did not offer abortions.

“The dangers of unfettered access to Americans’ personal data have never been more clear. Researching birth control online, updating a period-tracking app or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said last week.

For myriad reasons, both political and philosophical, data privacy laws in the U.S. have lagged far behind those adopted in Europe in 2018.

Until this month, anyone could buy a weekly trove of data on clients at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites around the country for as little as $160, according to a recent Vice investigation that led one data broker to remove family planning centers from the customer “pattern” data it sells. The files included approximate patient addresses (down to the census block, derived from where their cellphones “sleep” at night), income brackets, time spent at the clinic, and the top places people stopped before and after their visits.

While the data did not identify patients by name, experts say that can often be pieced together, or de-anonymized, with a little sleuthing.

In Arkansas, a new law will require women seeking an abortion to first call a state hotline and hear about abortion alternatives. The hotline, set to debut next year, will cost the state nearly $5 million a year to operate. Critics fear it will be another way to track pregnant women, either by name or through an identifier number. Other states are considering similar legislation.

The widespread surveillance capabilities alarm privacy experts who fear what’s to come if Roe v. Wade is overturned. The Supreme Court is expected to issue its opinion by early July.

“A lot of people, where abortion is criminalized — because they have nowhere to go — are going to go online, and every step that they take (could) … be surveilled,” Conti-Cook said.

___

PUNISH WOMEN, DOCTORS OR FRIENDS?

Women of color like Jones, along with poor women and immigrants, could face the most dire consequences if Roe falls since they typically have less power and money to cover their tracks. They also tend to have more abortions, proportionally, perhaps because they have less access to health care, birth control and, in conservative states, schools with good sex education programs.

Chandler Jones, 26, from Baltimore County, who will graduate this spring from the University of Baltimore School of Law, stands in Baltimore before a pro-choice rally, Saturday, May 14, 2022. Jones consulted the internet on her cellphone for information and advice before having an abortion during her junior year in college. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

The leaked draft suggests the Supreme Court could be ready to let states ban or severely restrict abortion through civil or criminal penalties. More than half are poised to do so. Abortion foes have largely promised not to punish women themselves, but instead target their providers or people who help them access services.

“The penalties are for the doctor, not for the woman,” Republican state Rep. Jim Olsen of Oklahoma said last month of a new law that makes performing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

But abortion advocates say that remains to be seen.

“When abortion is criminalized, pregnancy outcomes are investigated,” said Tara Murtha, the communications director at the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, who recently co-authored a report on digital surveillance in the abortion sphere.

She wonders where the scrutiny would end. Prosecutors have already taken aim at women who use drugs during pregnancy, an issue Justice Clarence Thomas raised during the Supreme Court arguments in the case in December.

“Any adverse pregnancy outcome can turn the person who was pregnant into a suspect,” Murtha said.

___

STATE LIMITS, TECH STEPS, PERSONAL TIPS

A few states are starting to push back, setting limits on tech tools as the fight over consumer privacy intensifies.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, through a legal settlement, stopped a Boston-based ad company from steering anti-abortion smartphone ads to women inside clinics there that offer abortion services, deeming it harassment. The firm had even proposed using the same “geofencing” tactics to send anti-abortion messages to high school students.

In Michigan, voters amended the state Constitution to prohibit police from searching someone’s data without a warrant. And in California, home to Silicon Valley, voters passed a sweeping digital privacy law that lets people see their data profiles and ask to have them deleted. The law took effect in 2020.

The concerns are mounting, and have forced Apple, Google and other tech giants to begin taking steps to rein in the sale of consumer data. That includes Apple’s launch last year of its App Tracking Transparency feature, which lets iPhone and iPad users block apps from tracking them.

Abortion rights activists, meanwhile, suggest women in conservative states leave their cellphones, smartwatches and other wearable devices at home when they seek reproductive health care, or at least turn off the location services. They should also closely examine the privacy policies of menstrual trackers and other health apps they use.

“There are things that people can do that can help mitigate their risk. Most people will not do them because they don’t know about it or it’s inconvenient,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “There are very, very few people who have the savvy to do everything.”

Digital privacy was the last thing on Jones’s mind when she found herself pregnant. She was in crisis. She and her partner had ambitious career goals. After several days of searching, she found an appointment for an abortion in nearby Delaware. Fortunately, he had a car.

“When I was going through this, it was just survival mode,” said Jones, who took part in a march Saturday in downtown Baltimore to support abortion rights.

Besides, she said, she’s grown up in the Internet age, a world in which “all of my information is being sold constantly.”

But news of the leaked Supreme Court draft sparked discussions at her law school this month about privacy, including digital privacy in the era of Big Data.

“Literally, because I have my cell phone in my pocket, if I go to a CVS, they know I went to a CVS,” the soon-to-be lawyer said. “I think the privacy right is such a deeper issue in America (and one) that is being violated all the time.”

__

By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated Press

from Courthouse News

Top 8 today

National

‘Straightforward terrorism,’ Biden says of Buffalo shooting

Grieving the loss of life in the aftermath of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, President Joe Biden delivered an emotional address on Tuesday in which he labeled the supermarket massacre a terrorist attack motivated by white supremacy.

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Feds accused of dragging feet on threatened whitetip shark review

The National Marine Fisheries Service has for years failed to complete its legally required consultation regarding the effects authorized fisheries in Hawaii and Samoa have on the threatened whitetip shark population, according to a new lawsuit.

(NOAA Fisheries via Courthouse News)

Armed bank robber asks panel to toss sentence in light of high court ruling

The 11th Circuit heard arguments Tuesday in an appeal seeking to vacate a sentence for conspiracy to rob a bank by force and using a firearm during a crime of violence.

(AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Regional

Michigan judge blocks enforcement of 1931 abortion ban if Roe is overturned

A Michigan judge on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction suspending enforcement of a state law from 1931 that would ban abortion, amid the build-up to a potential U.S. Supreme Court ruling that could wipe out the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

(Daniel Shular/The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

Legislative watchdog has qualms about $300 billion California budget

The revised $300 billion state budget announced by California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday is the largest spending plan in state history. And while it may look good on paper or sound nice in a speech talking about more public school funding, the state’s legislative analyst has concerns. 

(Screenshot via Courthouse News)

Exploration of sunken slave ship reveals charred timbers, other artifacts

The last ship to bring slaves to the United States from Africa in 1860 was set ablaze near the mouth of the Mobile River following the illegal voyage, and a recent archaeological assessment of the sunken vessel revealed the charred timber and other parts that remain.

(Daniel Fiore/Alabama Historical Commission via Courthouse News)

Seventh Circuit hears racketeering case against Illinois energy giant

A class action against Illinois energy corporation Commonwealth Edison came before the Seventh Circuit on Tuesday, with an attorney for the class arguing that the company owes a debt to potentially millions of state residents.

(Justin L. Fowler/The State Journal-Register via AP)

Oklahoma officer who shot nude teenager lobbies 10th Circuit for immunity

An Oklahoma police officer asked the 10th Circuit on Tuesday to reverse a federal judge’s denial of qualified immunity after he shot a nude mentally disturbed teenager who had broken into a stranger’s home while fleeing police.

(Nyttend via Wikipedia)

from Courthouse News

Oklahoma officer who shot nude teenager lobbies 10th Circuit for immunity

(CN) — An Oklahoma police officer asked the 10th Circuit on Tuesday to reverse a federal judge’s denial of qualified immunity after he shot a nude mentally disturbed teenager who had broken into a stranger’s home while fleeing police.

After consuming marijuana laced with PCP, 17-year-old Isaiah Lewis had an argument with his girlfriend over conspiracy theories at 10:30 a.m. on April 29, 2019. A food delivery driver suggested a neighbor call the police, and the neighbor falsely reported Lewis was beating up his girlfriend.

The first officers arrived around 1 p.m. to find Lewis nude and running through the woods. The officers continued to tail Lewis from a distance.

In another patrol car, traffic officer Denton Scherman was training with Sgt. Milo Box and decided to pursue Lewis. Seeing law enforcement approach, Lewis broke into the nearest home. The officers fired a Taser at Lewis three times, then backed him down a hall where Box fell and Scherman shot him four times.

Lewis was dead within 32 seconds of meeting Scherman.

Lewis’ parents sued the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, and the two officers. A federal judge granted qualified immunity to Box, but denied it to Scherman after finding a reasonable jury could conclude Lewis’ rights had been violated.

On appeal, Scherman’s attorney Kathryn Terry accepted the facts as laid out by U.S. District Judge David Russell but disputed the conclusion that Lewis didn’t pose a threat when he was shot.

“Isn’t it clearly established that you can’t use deadly force against someone who is clearly disabled and can’t physically pose a threat to you?” asked U.S. Circuit Judge Harris Hartz, a George W. Bush appointee.

Terry replied that Scherman saw Lewis as a threat.

“It wasn’t readily apparent that Mr. Lewis was subdued, there were confined quarters, he was still coming, windmilling, he was advancing as the court factually found,” Terry, of the Oklahoma City firm Phillips Murrah, said.

Even if a jury found Lewis’ rights had been violated, Terry argued Scherman couldn’t have known he was violating them since there weren’t any comparable cases.

Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Bobby Baldock, appointed by Ronald Regan, asked whether Scherman might be granted qualified immunity for the first shot, if Lewis was found to pose a threat.

Terry argued all of the shots were justified, while the Lewis family’s attorney Devi Rao argued none of them were.

“I think the best reading is that the district court denied qualified immunity for all of the shots,” said Rao, who practices with the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center. “The district court’s conclusion is that Scherman isn’t entitled to qualified immunity and doesn’t parse out the shots.”

After shooting Lewis once, Scherman claims the teen continued to advance, prompting three more shots. Rao however described Lewis’ movements as those of a mortally wounded man, trying to get help.

“The change between threat and no-threat changed very quickly in this case, but the question is for the jury,” Rao concluded. “The jury needs to look at the facts from both sides and to decide what they think happened that afternoon at Gray Fox Run.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Carolyn McHugh, a Barack Obama appointee, rounded out the panel via a video feed from Salt Lake City.

“I really wish all the counsel who appeared before us were as candid about the record as both of you have been, it’s very helpful to the court and we appreciate it,” Hartz said before calling the next case.

The panel did not indicate when or how they would decide the case.

from Courthouse News

Love it or hate it, Eurovision keeps pushing boundaries

(CN) — The contrasts are many when it comes to Eurovision.

Is it a musical competition or a superficial pop music show? An outdated concept or a modern party event? A cultural tradition or an extreme TV stunt?

One thing is sure — the numbers don’t lie. The show attracts close to 200 million viewers worldwide and has seen an increasing number of participating countries since it began in 1956.

Italy, the 2021 winner, has been hosting the 66th Eurovision Song Contest with two semifinals this week and the finale airing Saturday evening in Turin.

And according to Eurovision expert Lisanne Wilken, we can expect to hear several songs about timely topics that the individual countries wish to put on the collective European agenda.

“The contest is apolitical. Yet it is also a place where all countries in Europe must decide how they want to represent themselves,” Wilken said. “Some just send in a catchy pop song and hope to win, but many attempts to show a certain aspect of their culture. Or speak up for important values.”

She lectures on European studies at Aarhus University in Denmark and has researched the development of the song contest. Because, as she puts it, if one is interested in European culture, identity, and politics, then Eurovision is a prominent field.

This year, certain topics have already proven dominant in the lyrics on stage. Both Latvia and Norway strike a blow for vegetarianism, the latter through a catchy chorus with the lyrics “Before that wolf eats my grandma, give that wolf a banana,” a nod to the tale “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Another common thematic denominator is anxiety and depression. The Dutch contribution, ”De Diepte” (“The Depth”), talks about mental health issues, Switzerland´s song ”Boys Do Cry” deals with masculine vulnerability, and Serbia´s “Corpore Sano” (“Healthy Body”) takes on the contemporary obsession with health and perfection.

”Within the last two or three years, ethnic songs have had a revival in Eurovision,” Wilken said. “France, for example, sends a mysterious Celtic melody from Bretagne. And Ukraine, who is the absolute front-runner to win the competition, turns up with a mix of folk music and rap.”

Naturally, Russia´s invasion of Ukraine has affected the competition.

“Russia and Ukraine are both strong contestants, who traditionally do very well in the Eurovision. We have increasingly seen Ukraine choose songs about their unique culture to separate and demonstrate strong sovereignty. Now, Russia got expelled, and the Ukrainian contribution, which already had good odds, has gained extraordinary support,” Wilken said.

Currently, bookmakers give Ukraine´s song “Stefania” a 60% chance of winning.

However, there are always two major voting blocs. One is a national professional jury from each country while the general public makes up the other set, and the question to be answered is how determined both groups are to avoid letting the political situation affect their decision.

The paradox that a seemingly apolitical song contest is tightly interwoven with macropolitics has been present from day one. Wilken has studied two extended periods where the songs often skewed political — during the Cold War and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s.

“During the Cold War, Western countries knew that people in Eastern Europe were following the competition. So, they used Eurovision to communicate messages to the communist and Soviet republics. For example, the value of democratic voting, which half of the show is still dedicated to today,” Wilken said.

As more countries joined the show, Eurovision gradually developed into a yearly celebration of cultural, religious and sexual diversity. It is also a place for the different countries to greet, meet and stay updated, which is otherwise hard due to geographical spread. 

Wilken pointed to increased international interest for Eurovision. Australia was able to join in 2015, and viewer numbers keep going up.

The U.S. meanwhile launched its equivalent to Eurovision this year, hosted by pop superstar Kelly Clarkson and rap mogul Snoop Dogg. Representatives from all 50 states, five territories and the District of Columbia performed, and this past week Oklahoma’s K-pop star AleXa won with the competition with the song “Wonderland.”

And on Saturday, U.S. audiences can view the 66th Eurovision Song Contest on the Peacock streaming service.

Courthouse News correspondent Mia Olsen is based in Copenhagen, Denmark.

from Courthouse News

17 states sue EPA for restoring California’s authority to regulate vehicle emissions

(CN) — The Environmental Protection Agency is unlawfully letting California set its own vehicle emissions standards, 17 Republican state attorneys general claim in a lawsuit filed Friday.

Led by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, the attorneys general filed the action in the D.C. Circuit, challenging the EPA’s reinstatement, via a final rule announced in March, of a Clean Air Act waiver letting California regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles under its Advanced Clean Cars Program.

California established the first tailpipe emissions standards in the U.S. in 1966. And the Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the state to set its own stricter-than-federal vehicle emissions regulations to address air-quality issues mainly in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city by population, where the sky is often filled with smog due to exhaust from vehicles on its congested freeways and the area’s topography.

Over the years, the EPA renewed California’s waiver more than 100 times and more than a dozen states adopted its vehicle-emissions and fuel-efficiency standards instead of the federal government’s weaker standards.

The nation’s most populous state, California accounts for about 11% of all new car sales in the U.S., according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.

Given the state’s clout, automakers, which must design and engineer new models years in advance, make vehicles that can meet its stricter standards because making different versions for states with lower standards would be too costly.

But President Donald Trump’s administration revoked California’s waiver in 2019, claiming the move would allow automakers to produce far less expensive cars, while at the same time making them much safer.

Trump’s EPA also rolled back a national rule, set in 2012 during the tenure of President Barack Obama, which required automakers to produce vehicles that average 54 miles per gallon of gasoline by 2025, changing that benchmark to 40 miles per gallon.

Trump’s moves divided the auto industry with Ford, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen reaching a deal with California in July 2019 to adhere to its emissions standards, which led Trump’s Justice Department to open an antitrust probe of the companies.

General Motors, Toyota, Fiat and Chrysler, meanwhile, sided with Trump.

Joe Biden entered the Oval Office in January 2021 with the goal of setting climate policy that leads the country to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In line with that aim, Biden’s EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced March 9 the agency had reinstated California’s ability to set its own emissions standards.

“Today we proudly reaffirm California’s longstanding authority to lead in addressing pollution from cars and trucks,” Reagan said in a statement. “Our partnership with states to confront the climate crisis has never been more important. With today’s action, we reinstate an approach that for years has helped advance clean technologies and cut air pollution for people not just in California, but for the U.S. as a whole.” 

The 17 attorneys general claim EPA’s restoration of California’s waiver is an unlawful show of favoritism.

“The EPA cannot selectively waive the [Clean Air] Act’s preemption for California alone because that favoritism violates the states’ equal sovereignty,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement to The Hill.

The plaintiffs are Ohio, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

The California Air Resources Board oversees the state’s Advanced Clean Cars Program at issue in the litigation.

Responding to the lawsuit, it stressed the program is meant to protect Californians’ health.

“California has a right to protect the public health of our residents, and it’s appalling to see such a misguided attack on one of the most basic functions of effective government,” a CARB spokesman said in an email.

from Courthouse News

New York vies to expand abortion access for those in state and out

ALBANY, N.Y. (CN) — New York announced a bill Monday that would expand abortion access for people in and out of the state once the U.S. Supreme Court follows through with its vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“We know what happens when women are unable to control their own bodies and make their own choices and we will not go back to those dark times,” Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement this morning.

The bill dubbed the Reproductive Freedom and Equity Program comes amid an estimate from the Guttmacher Institute that, if Roe v. Wade is overturned, 32,000 women will be undergoing abortions in New York — whereas the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 7,000 such procedures here in 2019.

But lawmakers say health care providers don’t have the infrastructure to meet the expected demand when New York sees an influx of people crossing state lines for abortions. Their bill would provide more funding to health care providers and give more grants to nonprofit organization that would cover travel and lodging costs for those traveling.

New Yorkers who cannot afford to pay for the abortion would also benefit from such funding, regardless of their insurance status, the legislation’s sponsor, Senator Cordell Cleare, touted Monday.

“Health care is a fundamental human right and abortion is an essential aspect of women’s health care,” said Cleare. “I am proud to sponsor new legislation, The Reproductive Freedom and Equity Program, that will ensure that in New York we proactively protect, support, and fund all aspects of women’s health care including comprehensive abortion services. We will not be subject to the arbitrary whims of a politicized Supreme Court, nor can we fund health care services via private fundraising. Our women deserve better, and justice and equity demand it!”  

Andrea Miller, president at the National Institute for Reproductive Health, voiced support for the legislation.

“The Reproductive Freedom and Equity Fund would be a critically needed, proactive step to create real access to abortion care, at a time when we need it the most,” Miller said. “With half the states in the country poised to ban abortion, New York providers will face tremendous obstacles in providing the care that people need — both New Yorkers and all those who will travel to our state for care.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights has estimated that the overturning of Roe would trigger abortion bans in 24 states. Though a majority of Americans say abortion should be legal everywhere in all or most cases, many states have been crafting new restrictions on the practice in the expectation that the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority will throw out the 50-year precedent. 

Shortly after a draft opinion from the Supreme Court showing it would do just that leaked last week, Oklahoma passed a law that banning abortion at six weeks — a point at which a woman might only begin to suspect she is pregnant — with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

At least 10 other states including Mississippi, Missouri and Idaho all have “trigger laws” that would ban abortions immediately if Roe is overturned.

Abortion has been legal in New York since 1970, and neighboring states Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey all have laws protecting abortion access.

from Courthouse News

It’s not Halloween: post-Roe America could see rise of ‘zombie’ abortion bans

(CN) — In the aftermath of the leaked draft opinion signaling the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn Roe v. Wade, four states are confronting a legal landscape where century-old abortion bans could spring back to life.

Before the Supreme Court delineated the constitutional right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, abortion was illegal in more than half of the United States. Fifty years after Roe, eight states still have abortion bans from the pre-ˆ years on the books, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and four of those states have not passed any modern abortion bans.

“Zombie laws,” as such statutes are known, are not uncommon if rarely prosecuted. Among 50 zombie laws compiled in 2020, the website Businessinsider.com notes that trial by combat might technically be legal on a federal level.

The states with never-repealed abortion bans haven’t been able to enforce these statutes for nearly 50 years. If, however, the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade — as the draft opinion leaked by Politico indicates it will — Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and West Virginia will have to parse out what abortion laws look like in their states and whether previously dormant all-out bans on abortion crafted in the late 1800s and early 1900s have the power of law.

“If the law is still on the books and has never been repealed, then, presumably, the attorney general should be able to enforce that law, unless there’s some reason that law no longer applies,” Tara Grove, a law professor at the University of Alabama, said in an interview.

Some states have repealed their pre-Roe abortion bans for this very reason in recent years. Vermont repealed its mid-19th century abortion ban in 2014, citing fear that Roe would soon be overturned. Massachusetts did so as well four years later, nixing a 173-year-old abortion ban. But for Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wisconsin, these pre-Roe bans are still state law, though four of these states also have modern “trigger laws” banning abortion on the books.

“People haven’t had them on their radar for a long time,” Elizabeth Nash, associate director of state issues at the Guttmacher Institute, said about zombie laws during an interview. “We’ve been talking about states restricting abortion and the series of six-week abortion bans, but the pre-Roe bans are very important and could be devastating for abortion care if they are allowed to go into effect.”

These abortion bans would eliminate access to pregnancy termination, with the only exception being if a pregnant person’s life is in danger.

“Even with those exceptions, that often puts doctors in a really hard position where they have to decide at what point are you close enough to death to give a person an abortion. It’s really taking a health care decision and bringing in legal arguments,” Ashlea Phenicie, strategic communications manager for Planned Parenthood in Michigan, said in an interview.

Both West Virginia and Arizona have trigger laws on the books that would ban abortion after 15-weeks if Roe is overturned, but they also have pre-Roe abortion bans, giving government officials options about which law they may choose to enforce and creating a murky future for abortion providers who don’t know whether abortion access could be severely restricted or entirely eradicated in their state.

“It just feels like there’s a menu of options that could be picked up,” Nash said. “It’s very uncertain for providers. It’s very hard to plan. What do you tell patients? Because you don’t want to schedule appointments if you think that abortion ban is going into effect. If you do that and the ban goes into effect, that patient may not be able to get an appointment elsewhere.”

Local officials in Wisconsin and Michigan, states with Democratic governors and attorneys general, are fighting to prevent their pre-Roe bans from being resurrected.

In Michigan, where a 1931 ban modeled after an 1846 abortion policy could become law, Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer filed a lawsuit arguing the ban would violate the state constitution’s due process clause, which provides the right to privacy and equal protection. Whitmer’s suit calls for the state supreme court to take up the case and find that the Michigan Constitution protects the right to access an abortion.

The Michigan law at issue would make providing an abortion a felony and, if the pregnant person dies from an abortion, providers could face manslaughter charges.

“If Roe is overturned, abortion could become illegal in Michigan in nearly any circumstance — including in cases of rape and incest — and deprive Michigan women of the ability to make critical health care decisions for themselves. This is no longer theoretical: it is reality,” Whitmer said in a public statement about the lawsuit.

Several prosecuting attorneys in Michigan have said they would not enforce the ban if the Supreme Court overturns Roe in June, but there are also legal questions about whether Michigan’s law and other zombie laws could be enforceable in the first place.

Barbara McQuade, law professor at the University of Michigan and former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, noted that Michigan updated its state constitution in the 1960s, decades after the state’s abortion ban was updated.

“So when it was written in the 1930s, it wasn’t written with an eye toward complying with that new constitution,” McQuade said.

If states have updated their constitutions in the years since these abortion bans were put on the books, or the laws were never challenged under the state constitution, McQuade said there may be room for lawsuits against them to gain traction.

Similar to other pre-Roe laws, the 1931 Michigan law also talks about “intent to procure a miscarriage” rather than abortion itself, potentially raising questions about whether that terminology applies to all modern definitions of abortion.

“I think there’s some issue as to whether the language of these laws makes them applicable to the procedures that are done today, so that would be one basis for a challenge. The other is that they could still be unconstitutional for different reasons. They could be void for vagueness, for example, because of the language that was used at the time. It may be that they no longer match up with the reality [of abortion],” McQuade said.

Citizens in Michigan have also started a petition drive to explicitly add abortion protections to the state constitution, and Planned Parenthood of Michigan filed a lawsuit similar to Whitmer’s filing, asking for the 1931 ban to be overturned.

“Part of the reason we filed the lawsuit was in the hopes that we could have some clarity before the Supreme Court decision,” said Phenicie, the spokesperson for Planned Parenthood in the state. “We hope that it will be resolved before but we don’t know for sure. If Roe falls and there isn’t a clear decision on Michigan’s 1931 abortion ban, abortion access in Michigan will be in disarray. Providers will be unsure whether they could face criminal legal consequences for providing abortion and patients will be unclear on if they can still access abortion. Planned Parenthood follows all state and federal laws so we would be in the difficult position if the law was not clear.”

Abortion providers in Wisconsin have similar concerns about the lack of clarity regarding abortion access in a post-Roe world. Wisconsin has a 1849 law on the books that bans abortion except for an abortion needed to save a pregnant person’s life.

That ban carries felony charges for providers who can face up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Wisconsin also has a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, bringing up questions about what would take precedent as enforceable law in the absence of Roe.

“What you have now is sort of this tangle of various abortion-related provisions, and there’s a question about how they operate together,” Miriam Seifter, assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, said in an interview.

If Roe is overturned, litigation will have to parse out what abortion law looks like in Wisconsin. State lawmakers could pass new regulations, but the possibility of an all-out ban already has Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin saying they would stop all abortion care in the state immediately.

Attorney General Josh Kaul said he will not prosecute violations of the law if it takes effect, but that wouldn’t stop law enforcement officials at the county level from prosecuting abortion providers.

Lack of immediate clarity on the law for abortion providers and people seeking abortions is becoming a primary issue for states who don’t know what will become of their pre-Roe bans, as well as states where trigger laws are enjoined by courts.

“I imagine this will be the next battleground. States that have state laws, either zombie laws or trigger laws, this might be the next round of litigation: lawsuits within states challenging state laws under state constitutions. And they could end up with very different results,” McQuade said.

from Courthouse News