Innocence question cuts at Glossip’s death penalty appeal
The Supreme Court will consider if evidence that could prove Richard Glossip’s innocence is enough to prevent his execution.
(Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP)
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“Writing is easy,” Mark Twain said. “All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” But if you don’t even know what a word means, how can you tell if it’s wrong?
WASHINGTON (CN) — In 2015, Justice Stephen Breyer penned a dissent that would shape his legacy. The death penalty, Breyer wrote, “is the antithesis of the rule of law” because there is convincing evidence that innocent people have been executed.
The man at the center of that case was Richard Glossip — whose 1998 conviction is again before the Supreme Court, leaving the justices with a question that could shape the future of the death penalty in this country.
“The Richard Glossip case is a case that could push the death penalty over the edge,” Robert Dunham, an adjunct professor of death penalty law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law, said in a phone call. “If the entire country sees a man who objectively appears to be innocent and the court system that says we don’t care.”
Glossip’s case stands as both analogous to other innocence claims and as an anomaly. Many people on death row maintain their innocence but struggle to prove it in court. Glossip’s case for exoneration is supported, however, by an almost 400-page independent report. The Oklahoma attorney general believes Glossip’s conviction cannot be upheld. Even proponents of the death penalty have come to Glossip’s aid, claiming their position on the issue will shift if his execution moves forward.
Cases before the Supreme Court focus on legal questions, but Glossip has brought the justices an unusual case. He has a mountain of evidence that has the potential to overturn his conviction but that might not matter if his legal questions do not meet the high court’s bar.
“This is now up before the Supreme Court on a bare innocence issue,” Richard Dieter, executive director at the Death Penalty Information Center, said in a phone call. “There’s also legal issues of evidence not turned over, but it presents the court with a problem of what to do if there’s a lot of evidence about someone’s innocence, but the legal challenges have now expired.”
There is no dispute over who murdered motel owner Barry Van Treese. When he was 19, Justin Sneed bludgeoned Van Treese in a room at the Best Budget Inn property in Oklahoma City. Sneed, who was addicted to methamphetamine, then stole thousands of dollars from Van Treese’s car.
Sneed was arrested a week after the murder. Investigators said they knew he killed Van Treese but that he had help. Glossip, the hotel’s manager at the time, was also arrested.
During the first 20 minutes of Sneed’s interview with police, officers brought up Glossip six times. Detectives repeatedly attempted to get Sneed to adopt the theory that Glossip was the mastermind of the case. At one point, an officer told Sneed: “So he’s the one” — referring to Glossip — and continued, “Rich is trying to save himself by saying that you’re in this by yourself.”
When Sneed finally implicated Glossip in the murder, his story changed during the interview with detectives. He first claimed Glossip told him to rob Van Treese, but not kill him. Then Sneed said Glossip actually asked him to kill Van Treese.
The state originally arrested Glossip on accessory charges for allegedly attempting to cover up the murder. Those charges were dropped, however, after Sneed was arrested and Glossip was then charged as Sneed’s co-defendant.
Glossip maintained his innocence, declining an opportunity to get the state to drop the death penalty. Meanwhile Sneed took up the state’s offer and agreed to testify against Glossip. Oklahoma dropped the death penalty against Sneed.
There is no physical or forensic evidence connecting Glossip to Van Treese’s murder. Oklahoma also had no other witnesses connecting Glossip to the crime. Sneed’s testimony was the only factor linking Glossip to the crime.
A jury convicted Glossip of murder-for-hire in 1998, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in a 3-2 vote.
In his 25 years on death row, Glossip has never wavered in his claims of innocence, despite coming within hours of execution not once but three times. He was successful in proving that his first attorney failed to provide him with a minimal defense in 2000. But before his second trial could begin, Glossip’s case was being undermined by the police department.
An independent investigation into Glossip’s case found that the district attorney’s office directed the police department to destroy key pieces of evidence, including potentially exculpatory financial documents. The investigation found the destruction of the evidence by a 28-year veteran on the force was deliberate.
Sneed testified at Glossip’s second trial, resulting in another death penalty conviction. Decades would pass before a memo would be disclosed to Glossip’s attorneys suggesting Sneed’s testimony was altered by prosecutors because it contradicted the facts of the state’s case against Glossip. The evidence turned over to Glossip’s defense team also included a statement indicating Sneed wanted to recant his testimony.
In recent months, Glossip’s attorneys were given a final box of evidence from the state containing a memo that proved Sneed was being treated for a serious psychiatric disorder when he testified against Glossip. He was prescribed lithium at the time. This directly contradicts Sneed’s statements that he was not seeing a psychiatrist at the time.
In April Oklahoma’s attorney general filed a motion to vacate Glossip’s conviction in light of the independent investigation into his case. Attorney General Gentner Drummond said he could no longer stand behind the conviction. Members of the state Legislature have also come out against Glossip’s conviction.
“It’s incredibly rare that two out of three branches of government say that there has been a wrong here that needs to be righted,” John Mills, an attorney with Phillips Black representing Glossip, said in a phone call.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals nevertheless upheld Glossip’s conviction. The state pardon and parole board then rejected his clemency request.
“The one branch tasked with actually righting the wrong is refusing to do it,” Mills said. “That’s just not the way accountability generally works. If the parties are in agreement about there being a wrong, courts will enforce those agreements. That’s the way our judicial system works, but it’s not happening.”
Death penalty experts say the courts’ rulings against Glossip are, in part, a function of how the U.S. legal system operates.
“It goes back to the very structure of our justice system, and that is that innocence and guilt are determined as a kind of a factual matter by the jury who vote unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt that the facts say the person’s guilty,” Dieter said. “What you bring up on appeal are legal issues.”
Glossip has in the past and is currently bringing legal issues on appeal, but they can be rejected as not sufficient to overturn a conviction.
In the time between when a death sentence is handed down and carried out, however, a lot can happen. New evidence can be uncovered, possibly with evolving technological innovations. Witnesses can recant testimony. These factors complicate death penalty appeals that may have already exhausted presentable legal issues when the new evidence is uncovered.
“So many things now can require that a case be looked at, not just for legal problems but for the actual factual case of innocence,” Dieter said.
Dieter contends that this problem extends past just Glossip’s case and has never been resolved by the courts.
“It’s a fundamental problem for the death penalty system, and it’s come up occasionally before but never been completely resolved,” Dieter said.
In some ways, Glossip represents one of the lucky innocence appeals. The independent review of his case involved a team of more than 30 attorneys, three investigators and two paralegals. They spent over 3,000 hours pouring over tens of thousands of documents and interviewing 36 witnesses. And even with that advantage, it’s still not clear Glossip’s conviction can be overturned.
“The courts typically don’t give defendants access to this evidence,” Dunham said. “That’s one of the reasons the courts are so ineffective at protecting people who are innocent.”
Just last term, the Supreme Court said when, considering ineffective-assistance claims, federal courts cannot consider new evidence outside of what is presented in state courts.
“The only place to get the evidence presented and your claims heard is federal court, but last year, the U.S. Supreme Court in Shinn vs. Ramirez said that you’re stuck if you’re a state court prisoner with the evidence that was presented in state court,” Dunham said. “If you’ve been given incompetent lawyers, how on earth can you prevail in federal court if you’re stuck with the evidence that they never investigated or never presented? So what we really have are words saying that there are heightened procedural safeguards, but the Supreme Court has closed the courthouse door.”
Glossip is scheduled to be executed on May 18. He has asked the Supreme Court in a rare unopposed emergency application to block his execution. He is also asking the Supreme Court to review the merits of his legal claims in the hopes that his convictions can be reconsidered in light of the evidence supporting his innocence claims.
OKLAHOMA CITY (CN) — The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board rejected clemency Wednesday for high-profile death row inmate Richard Glossip, ignoring extraordinary pleas by the state attorney general that he did not receive a fair trial due to evidence suppression.
The five-member board deadlocked 2-2 after the nearly four-hour hearing. Former prosecutor Richard Smothermon recused himself due to a relative being previously involved in Glossip’s case, making the three-vote majority needed for clemency more difficult.
Glossip, 60, is convicted of masterminding the 1997 murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese, 54, at the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City. He is scheduled to die on May 18. It is the ninth execution date set for Glossip, who has come within hours of execution three previous times.
His conviction largely rests on the confession of Justin Sneed, a co-worker who beat Van Treese to death with a bat. Sneed received a life sentence after testifying he was hired by Glossip for the killing.
Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the board the Glossip should not face execution due to the hiding of a box of evidence by either the prosecution or police during his trial. He said it did not matter which entity kept the evidence from Glossip’s defense, but that it was done by the state either way.
“I believe it would be a grave injustice to execute an individual whose trial conviction was beset by a litany of errors,” Drummond said. “My heart truly hurts for the Van Treese family and what they have experienced over the past 26 years.”
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals originally threw out Glossip’s 1998 conviction based on ineffective counsel, resulting in a retrial in 2004 and death sentence.
Drummond told the board that he spoke to Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna the night before and said she concluded Glossip would no longer qualify as a death penalty case under her office’s current guidelines. Behenna was elected in 2022 and is a Democrat.
Widow Donna Van Treese urged the board to deny clemency. She said the family remains “shattered” by the death of the father of five.
“Now we have 13 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren that have missed his love and devotion and the silly songs he sang to all of us,” she said. “Family was greatly important to Barry, and we have missed his presence in all of our lives.”
The board’s rejection comes one week after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Glossip’s conviction, concluding his case “has been thoroughly investigated and reviewed” and that he has been granted “unprecedented access” to prosecutors’ files.
Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, alleges the evidence shows Sneed lied on the stand and wants to recant his testimony.
“The public support for Mr. Glossip is diverse, widespread, and growing, including at least 45 death penalty supporting Republicans in the [Oklahoma] Legislature who also reached the conclusion that there is too much doubt to execute Mr. Glossip,” Knight said in a statement after the hearing. “It would be a travesty for Oklahoma to move forward with the execution of an innocent man.”
One of Glossip’s earlier executions was halted in September 2015 when it was discovered prison officials received an incorrect drug in the state’s three-drug execution protocol. Potassium acetate was provided instead of the usual potassium chloride. All executions in the state were soon after halted for several years in the fallout of the gruesome, bloody execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014.
Glossip’s supporters are now expected to ask Republican Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt to unilaterally grant a reprieve in the case.
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans pushed their debt ceiling package to a vote as soon as Wednesday as Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his leadership team huddled with key holdouts late into Tuesday evening, working to ensure they would have majority support for passage.
Prospects for the sweeping package were buoyed by a nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis showing the Republican plan would reduce federal deficits by $4.8 trillion over the decade if the proposed changes were enacted into law. The House Republican plan would lift the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion into 2024 in exchange for steep budget cuts Democrats and even some Republicans oppose. President Joe Biden has threatened to veto the bill.
McCarthy declined to say late Tuesday whether he had the 218 votes needed from his slim majority in the face of Democratic opposition.
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The Republican speaker’s office at the U.S. Capitol became a revolving door of lawmakers coming and going, including a contingent of Iowa lawmakers believed to have concerns over gutting clean energy tax breaks for biofuels. With 222 Republicans in the majority, and absences expected this week, McCarthy has almost no votes to spare.
“There’s been a lot of fruitful conversations and we’re confident we’re going to get it passed,” said Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., the vice chairman of the House Republican conference.
While the 320-page package has almost no chance of becoming law, McCarthy is using it as a strategy to shake up the debate. Biden has so far refused to engage with the House Republicans on what the White House calls “hostage taking” over the debt ceiling. McCarthy hopes passage will kickstart talks with Democrats.
From the White House, the administration said the president would veto the bill. Biden dismissed the Republican ideas as the “same old trickle down” economics down “dressed up in MAGA clothing,” a reference to the Trump-era ”Make America Great Again” slogan that has come to represent the more extreme elements in the Republican Party.
”To default would be totally irresponsible,” Biden said at an event Tuesday after announcing his reelection campaign.
It’s a first big test for the president and the Republican speaker, coming at a time of increased political anxiety about the need to raise the federal debt limit, now at $31 trillion, to keep paying the country’s already accrued debts.
The Treasury Department is taking “extraordinary measures” to pay the bills, but funding is expected to run out this summer. Economists and experts warn that even the threat of a federal debt default would send shockwaves through the economy.
“This economic catastrophe is preventable,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a speech Tuesday. “The solution is simple: Congress must vote to raise or suspend the debt limit. It should do so without conditions. And it should not wait until the last minute.”
To push the bill to passage Wednesday or later this week, McCarthy was working to unite the “five families” — the often warring factions of the House Freedom Caucus and others that make up the House Republican majority.
In exchange for raising the debt limit by $1.5 trillion into 2024, the bill would rollback federal spending to fiscal 2022 levels and cap future spending at 1% a year for the next decade.
The package would also impose tougher work requirements on recipients of food stamps and government aid, halt Biden’s plans to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans and end the landmark renewable energy tax breaks Biden signed into law last year. It would tack on a sweeping Republican bill to boost oil, gas and coal production.
Lawmakers were negotiating late into the evening Tuesday on last-minute changes. Lawmakers for Iowa and other Midwestern states had concerns about rescinding new tax breaks on biofuels, while a member of the Freedom Caucus wanted more changes to bolster work requirements.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said he was waiting to see the final product..
“There’s a lot of questions,” said Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the chairman of the powerful Republican Study Committee.
But Hern said McCarthy let the caucus leaders know, “He’s not changing the bill.”
Senators have been bystanders in the debate, but are awaiting next steps.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the Republican bill “a wish-list straight out of the Freedom Caucus playbook. It might as well be called the Default On America Act because that’s exactly what it is: DOA.”
But Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “It’s time for President Biden to stop the partisan stubbornness, join Speaker McCarthy at the grown-ups’ table, and get talking.”
On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said if the changes proposed in the bill were carried out it would shave $4.8 trillion off the deficit over the next decade, with large chunks coming from ending the student loan forgiveness and green energy tax breaks.
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By LISA MASCARO and STEPHEN GROVES Associated Press
Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Colleen Long and Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.
(AP) — Inside the Florida statehouse, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Republican allies say they’re working “at warp speed” to finish their legislative business.
In South Carolina and Nevada, early voting states that are critical in a presidential primary, his operatives are moving quickly to build out a political team that is essentially a campaign in waiting. And in Washington, his most vocal supporters are urging him to announce his White House intentions now.
Just six months after a dominant reelection sent his national stock soaring, a palpable sense of urgency is growing among DeSantis’ allies as increasingly emboldened critics within his own party — particularly former President Donald Trump — work to undermine his presidential campaign before it begins.
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Questions about DeSantis’ apparent slide followed him to Japan on Monday as he launched a multi-country international trade mission.
“I’m not a candidate, so we’ll see if and when that changes,” the Florida governor told reporters in Tokyo.
The answer, a consistent refrain from DeSantis for much of the year, is frustrating some allies who worry that it’s time to move even faster.
“I would prefer him to be in the race right now. In fact, I encouraged him to get in the race right now,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who hosted a visit by DeSantis to Washington last week that was overshadowed by Trump’s efforts to pick off support among Florida’s congressional delegation.
In an interview, Massie, who is one of just three members of Congress who has endorsed DeSantis for 2024, acknowledged the governor is losing some political strength.
Many GOP voters have rallied behind Trump in the wake of his recent criminal indictment in New York. Some DeSantis donors are pausing their donations, citing concerns about his readiness for the national stage. Other would-be supporters have begun to worry that the policy victories he celebrates in Florida — including the six-week abortion ban he signed earlier in the month and an ongoing crackdown on Disney, the state’s largest employer — may ultimately become political liabilities.
“If there is any urgency, it’s to make sure no third-place candidate emerges. Right now, it’s a heads-up race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis,” Massie said. “The urgency I feel is, the more cats and dogs that get in the race, the more they could siphon from Ron DeSantis.”
The Republican Party won’t formally choose its next presidential nominee until August of next year at its national convention. But with the first presidential debate little more than three months away, several Republicans have launched campaigns already. More are expected to join in the coming weeks.
DeSantis, who has operated for much of the year with a quiet confidence that he could enter the race on his terms, isn’t likely to make any announcements until after the state legislature concludes its business in early May. Some allies initially believed he might wait until as late as early summer to enter the race, but with the political landscape shifting, they now expect him to announce as early as the week of May 8, but more likely around the end of the month.
Technically, DeSantis couldn’t enter the 2024 presidential contest now even if he wanted to because the Republican-controlled state legislature has yet to overturn Florida’s so-called “resign to run” law, which bars officials from seeking one office while holding another. Republican House Speaker Paul Renner said last week that he’s confident the change would make it through the Legislature in the coming weeks.
As DeSantis prepares to launch, the Republican statehouse supermajority has worked at a rapid pace to carry out the governor’s conservative cultural agenda. In a sign of their ongoing compliance, lawmakers last week began to move legislation that would further solidify DeSantis’ control of Disney World’s governing body, the latest spat in the Republican governor’s extraordinary feud with the private business.
Florida state Rep. Spencer Roach, a Trump critic allied with DeSantis, noted that the state Legislature has been conducting its business “at warp speed” this spring. The accelerated pace, he said, is likely to allow DeSantis to shift his attention to the 2024 contest as soon as possible.
Roach downplayed any sense of urgency around DeSantis’s announcement, but acknowledged Trump’s merciless attacks against the Florida governor may be taking a toll. Indeed, Trump has been almost singularly focused on tearing down DeSantis, whom he calls “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron.” The kitchen-sink assault on social media, in speeches and in paid ads covers everything from DeSantis’ past policies on Social Security to his character and even his sexuality.
Trump’s jabs on Social Security and Medicare have been particularly effective, Roach conceded.
“I have had elderly constituents and even members of my family say, ‘Hey, I’m a little worried,’” Roach said. “Those attacks are landing.”
To that end, the DeSantis-sanctioned super PAC, Never Back Down, is taking aggressive steps to build out what appears to be a campaign in waiting across several key states. The super PAC, which has reported $30 million in the bank so far, is based in an Atlanta office with roughly two dozen paid staff.
As of Friday, the group said it had installed at least six paid staffers on the payroll in each of the first four states on the Republican presidential primary calendar: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. Each state features a director, political director and a field director, among others.
The super PAC has also established 28 Students for DeSantis chapters across 18 states, including the first four on the calendar and others in subsequent primary states like Alabama, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. Several more are already in the works.
Most of the announced candidates don’t have that much manpower on the ground so far.
“This really is based on people who are excited and in these states craving action now,” said Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer. “We want to give them a vehicle and infrastructure to convert their enthusiasm into action.”
Davidson pushed back against the negative narrative developing around DeSantis, who isn’t even an announced candidate. “Some of the D.C. headlines are just disconnected from the reality of what we’re seeing on the ground,” she said.
As DeSantis wraps up his business in Florida, the super PAC has begun to give him protection from Trump’s attacks on the airwaves.
The group’s first paid ad, which ran earlier this month on Fox News, knocked Trump for attacking fellow Republicans: “Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Gov. DeSantis,” the narrator says.
But the group invested much more in a positive ad highlighting DeSantis’ background and record in Florida, which ran on broadcast television in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina last week. The super PAC believes that DeSantis’ name is well known among primary voters, but most don’t know about his origins.
To that end, the group distributed its first mailer last week to likely primary voters in the same four states noting the DeSantis family’s “humble beginnings” in Pennsylvania and Ohio, his participation in the Little League World Series, his military service and his political victories in Florida.
“Ron DeSantis: A blue-collar backbone forged with steel,” reads the main headline on the mailer, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
And while the super PAC is spending millions to ensure DeSantis has momentum when he gets into the race, DeSantis himself has only just begun to introduce himself to voters beyond Florida.
He made one trip to Iowa last month, but he hasn’t returned since, even as his rivals flock to the first-in-the-nation primary voting state. DeSantis was notably absent this weekend as Iowa’s religious conservatives gathered for the state’s Faith and Freedom Coalition spring meeting.
Steve Scheffler, the Republican National Committee member who leads the group, described DeSantis as “a pretty appealing” potential candidate. He said the Florida governor paid to help sponsor the event and had representatives on site, but he still encouraged DeSantis to spend more time with Iowa voters — especially in the rural parts of the state.
“It’s going to need to happen sooner than later,” Scheffler said.
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By STEVE PEOPLES AP National Political Writer
Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma appeals court on Thursday upheld the murder conviction of death row inmate Richard Glossip, paving the way for Glossip to be executed on May 18, despite the state attorney general’s concerns about some testimony and evidence.
Glossip can still plead his case for clemency to the five-member Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, which could recommend that the governor spare the prisoner’s life by commuting his sentence to life in prison without parole.
Glossip has been scheduled for execution before and three separate times came within hours of being put to death.
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The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals’ ruling said his case “has been thoroughly investigated and reviewed,” with Glossip given “unprecedented access” to prosecutors’ files.
“Yet he has not provided this court with sufficient information that would convince this court to overturn the jury’s determination that he is guilty of first-degree murder and should be sentenced to death,” according to the ruling written by Judge David Lewis.
Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, said he will continue to seek a new trial.
“It is unconscionable for the court to attempt to force the State to move forward with his execution,” Knight said. “We cannot permit this longstanding injustice to go unchallenged and will be filing for review of this manifestly unjust ruling in the United States Supreme Court.”
Now 60, Glossip has long maintained his innocence in the 1997 murder-for-hire killing of his former boss, Barry Van Treese, who owned the Best Budget Inn where Glossip worked as the manager. The motel’s handyman, Justin Sneed, admitted robbing Van Treese and beating him to death with a baseball bat, but claimed he did so only after Glossip promised to pay him $10,000 to do it.
Sneed, who ended up getting life in prison, was the key witness in two separate murder trials for Glossip, both of which ended in a conviction and death sentence.
Earlier this month, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond urged the court to throw out Glossip’s conviction because he says Sneed lied to the jury about his mental health and drug use. Drummond said in his filing that Sneed’s misstatements, when combined with other problems in the case including the destruction of evidence, warrant a new trial.
The court’s ruling noted that Drummond, in a statement at the time, said he was not suggesting Glossip is innocent, but only that justice would not be served by executing him “based on the testimony of a compromised witness.”
“The attorney general’s ‘concession’ does not directly provide statutory or legal grounds for relief in this case,” according to the ruling,
Drummond said he respects the court’s opinion, but will still look into other ways to stop Glossip’s execution from taking place as scheduled.
“Ensuring the integrity of the death penalty demands complete certainty,” he said in a statement. “I will thoroughly review the ruling and consider what steps should be taken to ensure justice.”
One of Glossip’s scheduled executions was halted in September 2015 when prison officials realized they had received the wrong lethal drug, a mix-up that helped prompt a nearly seven-year moratorium on the death penalty in Oklahoma.
Glossip’s case attracted international attention after actress Susan Sarandon — who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean in the 1995 movie “Dead Man Walking” — took up his cause in real life. Prejean herself has served as Glossip’s spiritual adviser and frequently visited him in prison. His case also was featured in the 2017 documentary movie “Killing Richard Glossip.”
AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — A bill banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Texas public universities was passed by the state Senate on Wednesday night, sending the controversial legislation to the House for final approval.
Senate Bill 17 would prohibit mandatory diversity training for university employees, as well as eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion – often shortened to DEI – offices and officers. The bill would also require universities to hire employees “through the use of color-blind and sex-neutral hiring processes,” though it does say they must adhere to federal and state non-discrimination statutes like Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The bill imposes a high level of monitoring from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, the state agency that oversees public universities in the state, as well as the Legislature and state auditors. Institutions would be required to prove they are in compliance with the law each year before spending state funds. Additionally, universities could lose funding for an entire fiscal year if they are found to have spent state dollars on DEI programs.
DEI initiatives promote the inclusion of people from diverse backgrounds including minority racial groups, people who identify as LGBTQ, religious groups, veterans and people with disabilities. Many of these programs acknowledge historical discrimination that kept these groups out of places of higher learning and seek to provide resources to create greater access to opportunities.
Senator Brandon Creighton, a Republican from Conroe, authored SB 17. After over six hours of impassioned debate and consideration of the bill into Wednesday evening, Creighton urged his colleagues to pass the bill. He said diversity is a key feature that makes the state strong but argued DEI practices harm the goal of removing barriers for persons of color and women to have equal opportunities.
SB 17 would also prohibit universities from compelling current faculty or job candidates to provide diversity statements, which are often requested during the hiring process. Job applicants describe their experiences interacting with diverse populations as well as how they would create a diverse learning environment.
The bill’s author believes that such statements amount to a litmus test of candidates.
“We cannot support policies that exclude other Texans, or quite frankly, some of the best and brightest applicants to our universities from all over the world,” Creighton said. “In prohibiting those diversity statements we will end the practice of compelling speech, rather, fostering an environment of supporting free speech.”
Creighton claimed several times during the debate that DEI programs work against their stated goals and have not increased diversity on college campuses. The senator pointed to an incident involving Texas Tech University’s biology department rating job applicants on their knowledge and interest in DEI, marking it as a weakness if they did not know or showed little interest in ways to promote diversity.
Rising to speak in opposition to SB 17, Senator Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat from Laredo, said the bill would restrict universities’ ability to offer a truly diverse environment on their campuses.
“DEI offices on campus create an academic equalizer in society by attracting a diverse academic team to empower, through higher education, students of all backgrounds,” Zaffirini said. “What I believe is definitely clear is that the passage of Senate Bill 17 will be a giant step backward in our quest for equal opportunity and equal worth for all.”
Democratic Senator Royce West of Dallas also challenged Republicans on the bill, saying that neither he nor other members of color were included in helping craft the legislation.
“If we are doing this in order to increase diversity, why not bring us into the tent to get it done?” asked West. “All of your colleagues that are ethnic minorities in this chamber are saying the same thing to you – ‘it’s wrong’ – but you are not listening.”
The fight over DEI at public universities began earlier this year when Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office sent a letter to state agencies and public university leaders calling upon them to stop using such practices in the hiring process. Since the governor’s letter was received, several institutions have begun rolling back DEI policies.
Texas is one of the first states to advance an anti-DEI bill of this size and scope, but is not the only one considering such prohibitions. Republican-led states including Florida, Oklahoma and Iowa have proposed similar legislation.
SB 17 is just one of three bills in the Texas Senate that seek to overhaul how public colleges and universities operate and the decisions they are allowed to make. Senate Bills 16 and 18 are also aimed at culture wars issue in higher education.
Last week, Senate Republicans passed SB 16, which would prohibit faculty from compelling “a student enrolled at the institution to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.”
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican and staunch supporter of the bill, said in a statement that SB 16 would ban critical race theory from state universities. CRT is a framework or lens often used in college classrooms to examine how inequalities persist through laws and institutions.
“This session, there was no question that we would ban the teaching of CRT in Texas universities,” Patrick said. “Liberal professors, determined to indoctrinate our students with their woke brand of revisionist history, have gone too far.”
Finally, SB 18 would prohibit universities from offering future tenure appointments. Banning tenure at public universities in Texas has been a goal of Patrick’s after professors at the University of Texas at Austin adopted a resolution affirming their commitment to academic freedom and the right to teach topics related to race and gender.
Patrick called the professors “looney Marxists” in a March 2022 tweet and vowed to ban both CRT and tenure on college campuses.
The American Association of University Professors has come out in strong opposition to all three bills, saying that if signed into law, they would have a chilling effect on academic freedom and free expression on college campuses. Additionally, the AAUP and professors who testified against the bills while they were in committee believe that Texas Universities would be left out of federal grant programs and be less attractive to educators seeking to teach and conduct research in the state, costing state institutions both money and talent.
SB 17 now follows SB 16 to the Texas House. SB 18 awaits final approval from the full Senate, which it may receive as early as Thursday.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A county commissioner in far southeast Oklahoma who was identified by a local newspaper as one of several officials caught on tape discussing killing reporters and lynching Black people has resigned from office, Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office confirmed Wednesday.
Stitt spokesperson Carly Atchison said the office received a handwritten resignation letter from McCurtain County Commissioner Mark Jennings. In it, Jennings says he is resigning immediately and that he plans to release a formal statement “in the near future regarding the recent events in our county.”
The threatening comments by Jennings and officials with the McCurtain County Sheriff’s Office were obtained following a March 6 meeting and reported by the McCurtain Gazette-News earlier this week in its weekend edition. They have sparked outrage and protests in the city of Idabel, the county seat.
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Also on Wednesday, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation confirmed it has launched an investigation into the matter at the request of the governor.
The recorded conversation included Sheriff Kevin Clardy, sheriff’s Capt. Alicia Manning, Jennings and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix. During that conversation, Clardy, Manning and Jennings appear to discuss Bruce Willingham — the longtime publisher of the Gazette-News — and his son Chris Willingham, a reporter.
Jennings tells Clardy and Manning “I know where two deep holes are dug if you ever need them,” and the sheriff responds, “I’ve got an excavator.”
Jennings also says he’s known “two or three hit men” in Louisiana, adding “they’re very quiet guys.”
In the recording, Jennings also appears to complain about not being able to hang Black people, saying: “They got more rights than we got.”
The Associated Press is working to verify the authenticity of the recording. None of the four officials returned telephone calls or emails from The Associated Press seeking comment.
Bruce Willingham told the AP the recording was made when he left a voice-activated recorder inside the room after a county commissioner’s meeting because he suspected the group was continuing to conduct county business after the meeting had ended, in violation of the state’s Open Meeting Act.
Willingham said he twice spoke with his attorneys to be sure he was doing nothing illegal.
Joey Senat, a journalism professor at Oklahoma State University, said under Oklahoma law, the recording would be legal if it were obtained in a place where the officials being recorded did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Bruce Willingham said he believes the local officials were upset about “stories we’ve run that cast the sheriff’s office in an unfavorable light,” including the death of Bobby Barrick — a Broken Bow, Oklahoma, man who died at a hospital in March 2022 after McCurtain County deputies shot him with a stun gun. The newspaper has filed a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office seeking body camera footage and other records connected to Barrick’s death.
Separately, Chris Willingham has filed a federal lawsuit against the sheriff’s office, Clardy, Manning and the Board of County Commissioners alleging Manning slandered him after he wrote an eight-part series of articles detailing problems inside the sheriff’s office. The lawsuit claims after the first few articles were published, Clardy and Manning began investigating which office employees were speaking to the newspaper and were attempting to get a search warrant for Willingham’s phone.
The lawsuit, which was filed on the same day the recording was made, alleges that after the series was published, Manning told a third party during a teleconference that Chris Willingham exchanged marijuana for sexually explicit images of children from a man who had been arrested on child sex abuse image charges.
“Manning made these (and other) false statements about Willingham in retaliation for articles he wrote about the (sheriff’s office) as a reporter for the McCurtain Gazette and to destroy his credibility as a reporter and journalist,” the lawsuit states.
More than 100 people gathered outside the McCurtain County Courthouse in Idabel earlier this week, with many of them calling for the sheriff and other county officials to resign.
On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Association, a voluntary membership organization and not a regulatory agency, held an emergency meeting of its board. It voted unanimously to suspend Clardy, Manning and Hendrix from the association.
DENVER (AP) — Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday signed a set of health care bills enshrining access to abortion and gender-affirming procedures and medications, as the Democrat-led state tries to make itself a safe haven for its neighbors, whose Republican leaders are restricting care.
The goal of the legislation is to ensure people in surrounding states and beyond can go to Colorado to have an abortion, begin puberty blockers or receive gender-affirming surgery without fear of prosecution. Bordering states of Wyoming and Oklahoma have passed abortion bans and Utah has severely restricted transgender care for minors.
Many states with abortion or transgender care bans are also criminalizing traveling to states for the purpose of accessing legal health care.
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The contradicting laws are setting the stage for interstate disputes comparable to the patchwork of same-sex marriage laws that existed until 2015, or the 19th-century legal conflict over whether fugitive enslaved people in free states remained the property of slaveholders when they escaped.
The governor’s office was packed with lawmakers and advocates for a ceremony that resembled a rally at times with loud applause and call-and-response chants.
“We see you and in Colorado, we’ve got your back,” Democratic Sen. Julie Gonzalez during the ceremony.
With the new laws, Colorado joins Illinois as a progressive peninsula offering reproductive rights to residents of conservative states on three sides. Illinois abortion clinics now serve people living in a 1,800-mile (2,900-kilometer) stretch of 11 Southern states that have largely banned abortion.
California and New York are considering similar bills after the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down Roe. v. Wade, putting abortion laws in the hands of state legislatures.
Colorado’s southern neighbor, New Mexico, is also controlled by Democrats and signed a similar abortion protection bill earlier this year. It legally shields those who seek abortions or gender-affirming care, and those who provide the treatments, from interstate investigations.
Gov. Polis added the first layer of abortion protection a year ago, signing an executive order that bars state agencies from cooperating with out-of-state investigations regarding reproductive healthcare. One of the bills he’s signing Friday codifies that order into law. Like the New Mexico law, it blocks court summons, subpoenas and search warrants from states that decide to prosecute someone for having an abortion.
Colorado’s abortion law extends the protections to transgender patients dodging restrictions in their own states. Gender-affirming health care has been available for decades, but some states have recently barred minors from accessing it, even with parental consent. Hospitals in some of those states say gender-affirming surgeries are rarely recommended for minors anyway. Puberty blockers are more common.
Conservative states are pushing back. Idaho passed a bill that outlaws providing a minor with abortion pills and helping them leave the state to terminate a pregnancy without their parents’ consent.
The Colorado law comes as medication abortions are in limbo across the U.S. and mail-order prescriptions of a crucial abortion drug are virtually banned pending the outcome of a federal court case.
Also on Friday, Polis signed a measure that outlaws “deceptive practices” by anti-abortion centers, which are known to market themselves as abortion clinics but don’t actually offer the procedure. Instead, they attempt to convince patients to not terminate their pregnancies. The bill also prohibits sites from offering to reverse a medical abortion.
A third bill signed Friday requires large employers to offer coverage for the total cost of an abortion, with an exception for those who object on religious grounds. It exempts public employees because Colorado’s constitution forbids the use of public funds for abortions.
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By JESSE BEDAYN and COLLEEN SLEVIN Associated Press/Report for America
Jesse Bedayn contributed to this report. Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
(AP) — A forensic anthropologist believes investigators are a step closer to identifying victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with the discovery of 19 surnames possibly connected to remains excavated from a Tulsa cemetery.
Although the six bodies associated with the names are not confirmed massacre victims, nor do they show signs of trauma such as gunshot wounds, identifying them would provide a possible roadmap to the most likely areas of the cemetery to search for victims, according to Phoebe Stubblefield.
Identifying the remains would help lead to death certificates that contain the date of death, indicating when the person was buried, said Stubblefield, a member of the team that conducted excavations in the cemetery the past three years.
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“We get closer to figuring out who was buried in that cemetery and when,” Stubblefield said.
Investigators could “maybe get the pattern of how people were buried in that cemetery. By that I mean burials for January, burials for February, burials for March, and we’re moving toward June” when massacre victims were buried, said Stubblefield. “We can find a greater concentration of probable victims.”
The massacre occurred May 31 and June 1, 1921, when a white mob descended on Greenwood — the Black section of Tulsa. More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds more were looted and destroyed and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was decimated.
Most historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Historians say many of the victims were buried in unmarked graves, their locations never recorded and rumors have persisted for decades of mass graves in the area.
Two of the 66 sets of remains found thus far have gunshot wounds, officials have said, and those remains are among 10 sets still being analyzed.
Those with gunshot wounds or trauma would indicate the remains were more likely to have been victims of the violence, according to Stubblefield.
City officials and Intermountain Forensics have sought DNA from people who believe they may be a relative or descendant of a massacre victim and others with a historical connection to Tulsa.
That DNA was being compared to samples from the excavated bodies in the effort to identify the remains.
None of the remains have yet been confirmed as massacre victims.
Identifying the surnames helps “move the needle on a more than century-old event,” Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a statement. “We are still in the beginning stages of this process. There is a lot more investigative work that is happening.”
Investigators have tracked the surnames associated with the six bodies, four male and two female, to at least seven states: North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama.
(AP) — Abortion is banned in Idaho at all stages of pregnancy, but the governor on Wednesday signed another law making it illegal to provide help within the state’s boundaries to minors seeking an abortion without parental consent.
The new law is obviously aimed at abortions obtained in other states, but it’s written to criminalize in-state behavior leading to the out-of-state procedure – a clear nod to the uncertainty surrounding efforts by lawmakers in at least half a dozen states to extend their influence outside their borders when it comes to abortion law.
At the same time, Democrat-controlled states are advancing and adopting laws and executive orders intended to shield their residents against civil lawsuits and criminal investigations related to providing abortions for women from states where there are bans.
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But there is no legal precedent giving good guidance about whether states can influence their residents getting abortions outside their borders.
“If red states pass laws saying, ‘We can go after people for X, Y and Z,’ and blue states say, ‘You can’t,’ we’re in uncharted territory,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at the University of California, Davis School of Law.
Arguments about the laws could be rooted in key clauses of the U.S. Constitution that could contradict each other in this case. One clause requires states to respect the laws of other states while another recognizes the right to travel among states and a third restricts the ability of states to impair interstate commerce.
Legal experts say that no prior cases are exactly comparable, though state laws have conflicted in weighty ways in the past.
In the 1840s and 1850s, it was with questions over whether fugitive enslaved people in free states remained the property of slaveholders. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, frequently cited as the worst ruling in U.S. history, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they did.
More recently, before the nation’s top court recognized a right to same-sex marriage in 2015, state marriage laws were a patchwork. Some states did not recognize marriages that were legal elsewhere, and all the protections that go with them, including hospital visitation rights and even the ability to divorce. The federal ruling largely resolved those legal conflicts.
The effort to restrict abortion in far-reaching ways is an outgrowth of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended a nationwide right to abortion.
Each state now makes its own rules. Abortion is banned in all stages of pregnancy in 13 states. Another five have similar bans on the books but are not being enforced under judge’s orders as legal challenges to them are sorted out.
Texas took a step toward state-border restrictions even before Roe was overturned with a 2021 law that allows civil lawsuits against a person who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of abortion.” It does not specify whether the aid would have to happen within Texas. Oklahoma has a similar law.
But using them to block out-of-state abortions has not been tried yet — or tested in court.
Other states are pursuing different approaches.
Idaho’s measure bans transporting a minor for an abortion without parental consent — but bars only the part of the journey that takes place in Idaho.
Tennessee’s GOP-dominated legislature last week approved a measure that would prohibit cities and counties from using their funds to help someone obtain an abortion outside the state — including banning coverage of out-of-state abortions under government employee health insurance plans.
In his concurring opinion in last year’s ruling overturning Roe, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh contemplated whether states could restrict their residents from getting abortions in other states: “In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel,” he wrote.
Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, which supports abortion rights, said the validity of interstate laws is unclear.
”The hope would be this would be seen as an extreme overreach,” she said, “but one would have thought that overturning Roe v. Wade would have been an extreme overreach too.”
Elisabeth Smith, state policy director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the measures have impacts even if they don’t hold up in court.
“Will anti-abortion activists continue to try to use these techniques and use these avenues?” he asked. ”Absolutely. Their goal in doing so is to try to chill activity and make those of us who support abortion rights too frightened to help people.”
One possible test of the out-of-state applicability of abortion laws is just getting started in Texas.
The former husband of a Galveston-area woman who terminated a pregnancy last year with medication sued three women who helped her obtain pills, claiming wrongful death. The lawsuit says the woman terminated the pregnancy in July 2022 and the couple divorced in February.
A lawyer representing the ex-husband is Jonathan Mitchell, a former Texas solicitor general who is the architect of the law that uses civil penalties to enforce an abortion ban. As part of the suit, Mitchell sent a letter to the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice in New York City, demanding that it preserve documents. The letter said one of the women helping the ex-wife obtain abortion pills worked for the group and the organization would face questions about whether she was acting as part of her job.
“If anyone out-of-state helps one of their employees break Texas laws, then you better believe that there can be action taken against that, against that company or organization,” said Mark Lee Dickson, a Texas anti-abortion activist who has pushed successfully for local governments to bar abortion clinics. “If an individual assists Texans in breaking the laws of Texas, then that’s a problem, too.”
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By GEOFF MULVIHILL and JOHN HANNA Associated Press
Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey and Hanna from Topeka, Kansas. Associated Press writers Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas; David Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, contributed to this report.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) — When I read that the late country music legend Merle Haggard grew up in a boxcar house, I perhaps took it a little too literally. As I wandered the grounds of the Kern County Museum on an early spring morning looking for Merle’s childhood home, I expected to see an actual boxcar, maybe with some furniture inside. Instead, I found a little white wood paneled house across the way from a massive Southern Pacific train engine and Santa Fe caboose.
At first glance, the house looks like any other, so perfectly is the boxcar worked into the design. It’s a testament to the carpentry skills of Haggard’s father James, who added a front bedroom and a screened-in back porch that was later converted to another bedroom and breakfast nook. The boxcar comprises the bulk of the little house, including the kitchen, living room and bathroom.
This quaint little white house may not look like much, but it was the childhood home of country music legend and Bakersfield Sound pioneer Merle Haggard. The long section in the back is the original boxcar, a 1911 Santa Fe ice boxcar Haggard’s father purchased in 1935 for $500. (Rebekah Kearn/Courthouse News)
A railroad man himself, James Haggard and his wife Flossie bought the old wooden Santa Fe ice boxcar in 1935 for $500 after relocating their family of four to Bakersfield from Oklahoma. They intended the boxcar to be a temporary home until they could build a larger one on their lot in Oildale, then a small, unincorporated town just north of Bakersfield, according to a 2017 article about the boxcar by The Bakersfield Californian.
Two years later, Merle Ronald Haggard was born on April 6, 1937. He grew up in the boxcar house with his parents, older brother James Lowell, and older sister Lillian, who caught young Merle keeping time to the radio while he was still in his bassinet.
When James Haggard died of a stroke in 1945, Merle’s happy childhood came crashing down around him and his troubled youth began. At the tender age of 11, he hopped his first freight train and was escorted home by police. Undeterred, he kept skipping school to ride the trains, so his brother gave him his first guitar at age 12 as a distraction. Immediately entranced, young Merle taught himself to play the old Sears, Roebuck & Co. model by listening to records — and came to idolize Bob Wills.
His budding obsession with music didn’t keep him on the right side of the law, though. After a stint in juvenile hall intended to straighten him out, he made a habit of running away from home with buddy Bob Teague, mixing up honest blue-collar work with petty crime and, on a notable occasion in 1953, singing on stage with another of his idols, Lefty Frizzell.
Losing his freedom forced him to take a long, hard look at his life, and he decided to turn it around. He got a job at the prison textile plant, played in a country music band and even got the equivalent of a high school diploma. After he was released on parole in 1960 he got a job working at The Lucky Spot, where he met his future manager Charles “Fuzzy” Owen.
Haggard saw moderate success with his initial releases on Tally Records, but got his first break in 1963 covering Wynn Stewart’s “Sing A Sad Song,” which climbed to #19 on the country charts. His breakthrough song “All My Friends Are Gonna Be Strangers” came a year later, not only hitting the Top 10 but convincing Capitol Records’ Ken Nelson to sign him to the label.
A letter written to Johnny Cuviello by Bill Woods about Merle Haggard, who’s name and address are on the back. (Rebekah Kearn/Courthouse News)
He got his first #1 hit in 1966 with “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” and they kept pouring in from there. Johnny Cash, the Man in Black himself, convinced Haggard to face his past in verse, and many of his songs from the 1960s and early 1970s drew on his experiences in prison, including hits “Sing Me Back Home” and “Momma Tried.”
Between 1966 and 1987, Haggard and his band The Strangers recorded 38 #1 singles and another 33 that hit the Top 10 on the country charts. His biggest hits would be his political songs, particularly “Okie from Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me.” Released during the ripe climate of the late 1960s culture wars, “Fightin’ Side” snagged the Hag Entertainer of the Year in 1970 and went gold — a distinction few country albums had at that time, according to Robert Price’s book “The Bakersfield Sound.”
Though a talented musician in his own right, Haggard truly shined as a songwriter. Country star Dwight Yoakum (who famously convinced Buck Owens, another Bakersfield Sound pioneer, to come out of his self-imposed retirement), said of Haggard: “Merle was the guiding light to my adult writing. Buck kept the dancefloor full. But Merle Made you sit down [and feel].”
Both Haggard and Owens were known for playing Fender Telecaster electric guitars. But in contrast to Buck’s signature “freight train” sound, Merle’s was more laid back and leisurely, with what Price describes as a “jazzy sensibility.” He loved both styles of music, and referred to his own sound as “country jazz.”
A display featuring one of Merle Haggard’s stage suits, as well as a pair of boots by Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors with “HAG” emblazoned on the sides. The suit was designed by Los Angeles tailor Nathan Turk. (Rebekah Kearn/Courthouse News)
After Merle and third wife Leona Williams divorced in 1983, he spent the next decade mired in drug and alcohol problems, as well as financial woes due to steep competition from rising stars like George Strait and Randy Travis. In 2000 he bounced back with “If I Could Only Fly,” released on independent label Anti, and the album “Roots” in 2001, a tribute album featuring covers of Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams as well as three new original songs.
The accolades started stacking up in the late 2000s, including a lifetime achievement award from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2010 and CMT’s Artist of a Lifetime award in 2014.
But perhaps the one that meant the most was the push by Bakersfield sisters Glenda Rankin and Di Sharman to commemorate his childhood home by moving it onto the grounds of the Pioneer Village at the Kern County Museum.
In July 2015, the boxcar house was loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken from the plot in Oildale to the museum while Merle followed in his tour bus. That spot across from the train engine? Merle chose it himself.
That summer day marked his final appearance in his hometown. It also inspired his final song, “The Kern River Blues,” a ditty about leaving Bakersfield in the 1970s that contains the line “kiss an old boxcar goodbye.”
He recorded the song on Feb. 9, 2016, with his son Ben on guitar. Less than two months later, he died on his 79th birthday at his home in Palo Cedro in Shasta County due to complications from pneumonia.
The boxcar home officially opened for tours on April 9, 2017, almost a year to the day after his passing.
Los Angeles architect George Taylor Louden headed the project, using old black and white photos and as much of the original construction material as possible to faithfully recreate the home. Philanthropist Cynthia Lake funded the project.
This guitar belonged to Norman Hamlet, band leader for Merle Haggard and the Strangers. Hamlet originally played with The Maddox Brothers and Rose as well as Johnny Cash before playing with The Strangers from 1965 to 1987. (Rebekah Kearn/Courthouse News)
A 12-by-23 walkway runs through the center of the home, with the rooms protected by and visible through glass partitions. Visitors are able to see the living room, front bedroom and kitchen. Only the back bedroom isn’t visible from the walkway, but nosy visitors can pop around the back of the house and peek in through the window.
“Jim and Flossie did a Herculean effort to build this boxcar into a family residence and live there for decades,” Louden told the Californian. “That’s the real success story here, is what Jim and Flossie were able to do as a family with very limited means, and the boxcar itself.”
Founded in 1941, the Kern County Museum preserves and presents historical objects from the county’s history as well the region’s unique importance in the history of California. Pioneer Village, a 16-acre outdoor complex, contains over 50 historical structures from different eras of the county’s history, including the Havilah courthouse and jail, a joss house, a 100-year-old schoolhouse and worker housing units from 1930s farm laborer camps in nearby Shafter during the Dust Bowl.
The Bakersfield Sound exhibit is one of the newest additions to the museum, and was made possible by financial support from several donors, including The California Department of Natural Resources, The Bakersfield Country Music Museum, Citizens Preserving History and The Ellen Baker Tracy Guild.
The Bakersfield Sound The Bakersfield Sound exhibit at the Kern County Museum. Its grand opening was held in March 2022. The 1,600-square-foot exhibit displays hundreds of artifacts from the glory days of the Bakersfield Sound, including the artists’ guitars, fiddles, suits and more. The red, white, and blue guitar is a nod to the same guitar famously played by Buck Owens. (Rebekah Kearn/Courthouse News)
GLEN ALLEN, Mo. (AP) — A large tornado ripped through southeastern Missouri before dawn on Wednesday, killing at least five people and causing widespread destruction as the third in a series of deadly massive storms over the past two weeks struck the nation’s heartland.
Forecasters kept a wary eye out for more possible tornadoes, hail and extreme weather as this year’s early storm season continued. It has spawned dozens of tornadoes, mainly in the South and Midwest, that have killed at least 63 people. Just last weekend, confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states laid waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country.
Midwest tornadoes have typically occurred later in the spring, but this year’s early spate of severe weather continues a trend seen over the past few years, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
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The Missouri tornado touched down around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday and moved through a rural area of Bollinger County, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of St. Louis, said Sgt. Clark Parrott of the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Trees were uprooted and homes turned into piles of splinters. One building was flipped on its side. Drone footage showed emergency crews peering into the wreckage with flashlights.
More than 20 agencies were part of the search for survivors and victims, with the damage so bad that they sometimes were forced to use chainsaws to cut back trees and brush to reach homes, Parrott said.
“It’s just heartbreaking to see it,” Parrott said.
The damage was concentrated around the small rural communities of Glen Allen and Grassy, which are separated by a hunting area, said Bollinger County Sheriff Casey Graham in a Facebook post announcing the five deaths. He didn’t immediately release the victims’ names.
Charles Collier, 61, said he saw the coroner’s van drive by with its lights on in Glen Allen, where he owns a storage facility.
“That was a sad, sad sight — knowing there was bodies in there,” said Collier, who wasn’t entirely relieved when he saw his facility was spared. “I was just numb, thinking about all these other people, what they’re going through.”
Josh Wells said that the tornado tore half of the roof off his Glen Allen home and pushed in his bedroom wall. Luckily, he fled beforehand with his son to his sister’s home because it has a basement.
“We all ran down and huddled against the wall and my brother-in-law made it down just seconds before we heard the roaring sound of the wind and debris crashing around us,” he said.
While his sister’s home held up, the area reeked of gas because a propane unit was damaged.
Justin Gibbs, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Paducah, Kentucky, said the tornado remained on the ground for roughly 15 minutes, traveling an estimated 15-20 miles (24-32 kilometers).
Based on early data, the tornado received a preliminary EF-2 rating, packing wind speeds of 130 mph (228 kph).
Gibbs noted that tornadoes are especially dangerous when they touch down late at night or early in the morning, as this one did.
“It’s definitely a nightmare from a warning standpoint,” Gibbs said. “It’s bad anytime, but it’s especially bad at 3:30 in the morning.”
A phone weather alert awakened Bobby Masters, who said debris was slamming his Glen Allen home as he took shelter in his basement with his family. He recalled hearing a roar as the tornado passed.
“I had never heard a tornado before. They say it sounds like a freight train and that is exactly what it sounds like,” he said, adding: “The good Lord spared us, our family and our house.”
Keith Lincoln, 56, who also was awakened by a phone alert, huddled in a bathtub with his wife and 18-year-old daughter and prayed: “Just save us and the house.” He spent the afternoon patching his roof but was thankful his prayer was mostly answered.
Chris Green, 35, found a small black dog dead in the debris. “I can’t just leave it here,” he said as he and his father buried the animal.
The area is rural, with residents mostly farming, cutting timber or working construction jobs, said Larry Welker, Bollinger County’s public administrator. The entire county’s population only totals around 10,500. The battered communities are tiny, little more than a few scattered homes and businesses.
Gov. Mike Parson said he would join emergency personnel on the ground to assess damage and determine what resources are needed. They planned a news conference in the afternoon.
Missouri’s U.S. Sens. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley, meanwhile, said they’re in touch with local leaders and ready to help. Schmitt also warned Missouri residents in a statement to stay alert “as there’s more severe weather on the horizon.”
The storms moving through the Midwest and South on Wednesday threaten some areas still reeling from the deadly bout of bad weather last weekend. The Storm Prediction Center said up to 40 million people in an area that includes major cities including Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit and Memphis, Tennessee, were at risk from the storms later Wednesday.
Schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, canceled Wednesday classes because the storms were expected to move through the area during the morning rush, KFVS-TV reported.
In central Illinois, authorities said five people were hurt and about 300 homes were without power due to a tornado that struck in Fulton County on Tuesday evening. Chris Helle, who directs the county’s Emergency Services Disaster Agency, said one of the people injured was in critical condition.
Helle said the damage was concentrated near the town of Bryant, about 200 mile (322 kilometers) southwest of Chicago. Fire departments and other first responders were still cataloguing the damage there, but Helle said numerous homes had been destroyed. He credited people for listening to advance warnings and taking shelter.
Officials said another tornado touched down Tuesday morning in the western Illinois community of Colona. Local news reports showed wind damage to some businesses there.
Winds of up to 90 mph (145 kph) and baseball-sized hail also caused damage in the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois.
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By JIM SALTER and SCOTT McFETRIDGE Associated Press
McFetridge reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writers Margaret Stafford in Liberty, Missouri, Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas, and Trisha Ahmed in Minneapolis contributed to this report.
