China appoints tough-talking party official to oversee security law

A man is detained and searched by police during a rally against the national security law in Hong Kong Wednesday. On Friday Chinese officials confirmed that party hardliner Zheng Yanxiong had been appointed to oversee implementation of the new law. Photo by Jerome Favre/EPA-EFE
July 3 (UPI) -- Chinese government officials confirmed Friday that they have appointed hardline party official Zheng Yanxiong to lead its new security agency and implement a far-reaching national security law.

Yanxiong is best known in China for his role in dealing with a protest over a land dispute in Wukan, in the southern part of the country, in 2011.

The new law, overseen by an agency that reports directly to Beijing, targets secession, subversion and terrorism with harsh punishments that can include life in prison.

Critics say it erodes Hong Kong's freedoms, and some pro-democracy activists have resigned their roles in government and even fled the territory.

RELATED Senate passes bill to punish China over Hong Kong national security law

The law expands Beijing's oversight of Hong Kong, which had been subsumed by pro-democracy protests that erupted last summer as China attempted to pass legislation that would allow some fugitives in Hong Kong to be extradited to the mainland for trial before Chinese Communist Party Courts.

It went into effect earlier this week, and police made the first arrests under the new law Wednesday.

One of the individuals arrested Wednesday, a motorcyclist accused of riding into a group of police while carrying a flag calling for the liberation of Hong Kong, was charged Friday with inciting secession and terrorism.

RELATED CBP officers seize 13-tons of human hair products imported from China

Also on Friday, another senior Beijing official said China's top legislative body could draft more laws affecting Hong Kong in the near future.

"Based on Hong Kong's actual situation, the standing committee can continue to make more laws, and lay down penalties for acts that threaten national security," Deng Zhonghua, deputy chief of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, told CCTV.

AFL-CIO SUPPORTS BLACK LIVES MATTER!

BANNERS ON HQ UP THE STREET FROM WHITE HOUSE

AFTER BEING VANDALIZED AND SET ON FIRE 

THE NIGHT THE WHITE HOUSE CAUSED A POST PROTEST RIOT

Left to right, Clearance Thompson, Jendaya Heredia, and London Williams, pose for a photo at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House in Washington, DC on Thursday, June 25, 2020. Protests continue around the country over the deaths of African Americans while in police custody. Photo by Ken Cedeno/UPI - Permalink

People walk through and sit near tents at Black Lives Matter Plaza on Saturday, July 4, 2020 in Washington, DC. On the evening of July 3, activists set up tents and plan to occupy the Plaza. Photo by Leigh Vogel/UPI

Labor Leaders Call For Police Reform Even As Police Unions Face Growing Criticism

June 10, 2020 DON GONYEA NPR

Signs outside the boarded-up entrance to AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C., read "AFL-CIO Supports Black Lives Matter" and "Criminal Justice Reform Now!"Patrick Semansky/AP

A loud and longtime complaint of civil rights activists and police reform advocates is that police unions are part of the problem of police brutality. Unions are designed to protect their members, and when it comes to officers charged with wrongdoing or excessive force, that means police unions are too often protecting bad cops and saving their jobs.

Richard Trumka, who heads the nation's largest federation of labor organizations, announced Tuesday night that the board of the AFL-CIO has adopted a set of recommendations aimed at addressing "America's long history of racism and police violence against black people."

In a statement, the AFL-CIO called for the resignations of Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for their participation last week in a presidential photo-op in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. The park was cleared of peaceful protesters by the U.S. Park Police and other federal forces, including military, who used rubber projectiles and gas as well as riot shields, batons and horses.


The labor federation also said the local police union president in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, should be forced to resign. Further, the AFL-CIO said its own 2013 findings must be acted upon, which the statement said could allow for a crackdown on such brutality while protecting due process rights of all public service workers. Specifically, the statement called for banning chokeholds, expanding use of body cameras, ending racial profiling, demilitarizing police forces or limiting no-knock warrants, and creating a more community-centric policing culture.

Last week, the AFL-CIO headquarters — located on 16th Street NW at what is now known as Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington — suffered some fire damage and had sidewalk-level plate glass windows smashed during a night of massive protests near the White House.


The AFL-CIO building was damaged last week during protests in Washington.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Today, those windows are boarded up. And large black posters affixed to the building read "AFL-CIO Supports Black Lives Matter" in bold white letters on a black background. Someone, however, affixed smaller white signs next to such proclamations of support that say, "Hey AFL-CIO, The Posters Are Nice, But If You Believed It You Would Kick The Police Unions Out."

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Protesters added a sign on the AFL-CIO building wall saying, "Hey AFL-CIO, The Posters Are Nice, But If You Believed It You Would Kick The Police Unions Out."Don Gonyea/NPR

That sign singles out the International Union of Police Associations. In its statement, the AFL-CIO responded that it will not cut ties with that union, one of a dozen within the federation that counts law enforcement workers as members. The AFL-CIO said those members are officers of "every color, background and stripe in America." It went on to say that they deserve the right to collective bargaining, and that the best way to influence the issue of police brutality is to "engage unions rather than isolate them."

One of those unions that represents police officers is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. AFSCME President Lee Saunders wrote in an op-ed this week in USA Today, "No union contract is or should be construed as a shield for misconduct or criminal behavior." Saunders, who is African American, also condemned the actions of the Minneapolis police officers in the Floyd case as "heinous," saying there is no justification for what they did.


LIVE UPDATES: PROTESTS FOR RACIAL JUSTICE
The 'Concerned Citizen Who Happens To Be Armed' Is Showing Up At Protests

Police unions often wield considerable political clout in many communities. Their endorsements are much sought after by candidates for office up and down the ballot.

The Fraternal Order of Police is the largest single law enforcement organization in the United States. Its president, Patrick Yoes, told NPR's Morning Edition that he agrees that police reforms are needed.

"We welcome the opportunity to sit down and have some meaningful fact-based discussions on ways to improve the law enforcement community," Yoes said.

He said there are police departments across the U.S. that have fine records when it comes to community relations. According to Yoes, they can learn from them and by creating a national standard for all communities to follow. "The last thing we want to do is have bad cops on the street," he said. "We want to correct this."

Such statements from the national head of the Fraternal Order of Police don't necessarily reflect those of local police union leaders in any given community. In Buffalo, New York, this past week, two police officers on the site of a protest were charged with assault after an elderly protester they pushed suffered a head injury when he fell backward to the pavement. In response, more than 50 officers backed their suspended colleagues by resigning en masse from the department's emergency response team.

The head of the local union — the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association — praised the resignations and told local TV station WGRZ that the accused officers were simply executing orders. President Trump also weighed in on Twitter, posting a conspiracy theory that the injured activist was working for antifa and had set up the entire incident. The White House has stood by that tweet.

That episode underscores just how polarized and partisan the debate over police reforms has become. And that only increased the difficulty of what already promised to be a complicated process.

LA RAZA 2.0 

Lowriders fill the streets near City Hall to protest the criminalization of cruising, George Floyd's murder, Latin rights and police brutality and accountability in Los Angeles. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

Demonstrations and other activities continue across the nation, targeting systemic racism and police brutality. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

Green, left-wing Michèle Rubirola becomes Marseille’s first woman mayor
Issued on: 05/07/2020 -

Michèle Rubirola, head of the green-left coalition Printemps Marseillais, arrives at Marseille city hall on July 4, 2020. © Clement Mahoudeau, AFP
Text by:FRANCE 24Follow

Marseille became the latest French municipality to elect a Green mayor on Saturday, in a wave that has swept the country since local elections at the end of last month.

Michèle Rubirola, the first female leader of France’s second city, won the most votes from city councillors, ending almost a week of suspense after the June 28 poll that failed to give her slate an absolute majority.

Rubirola, of the left-wing Printemps coalition, will succeed Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin, who made the city a conservative stronghold in his 25 years in office.

FRANCE 24’s Yinka Oyetade reports.

JULY 4TH PROTESTS IN USA

UK historian quits Cambridge over slavery claim
"Slavery was not genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived," Starkey said.

Issued on: 05/07/2020

David Starkey (R) seen here in 2007 with Britain's Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, has resigned from his position at Cambridge University IAN JONES POOL/AFP/File

London (AFP)

A British royal historian who said slavery was not genocide has quit his honorary position at Cambridge University and been dropped by his publisher HarperCollins.

The comments from Professor David Starkey came during a period of soul searching in Britain over its colonial past.

The Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum after the death of George Floyd in US police custody in May saw the statue of a major slave trader dumped in an English harbour as protests hit cities across the UK.

Starkey is an expert on Britain's Tudor period -- a time in the 1500s when the slave trade was growing as European colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas expanded.

He said in a June 30 online interview with the right-wing UK commentator Darren Grimes that the BLM movement represented "the worst side of American black culture".

"Slavery was not genocide. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived," Starkey said.

"We had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. We don't go on about that because it's part of history, it's a question that's settled," he added.

The remarks prompted Sajid Javid -- a former finance and interior minister who has talked about how his Pakistani father faced discrimination after coming to Britain -- to call Starkey a racist.

"We are the most successful multi-racial democracy in the world and have much to be proud of," Javid tweeted on Thursday.

"But David Starkey's racist comments ('so many damn blacks') are a reminder of the appalling views that still exist."

Javid's tweet was picked up by British media, and Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam College accepted Starkey's resignation the next day.

- 'Not engaged enough' -

Canterbury Christ Church University in southeastern England also terminated Starkey's contract as a visiting professor.

"His comments are completely unacceptable and totally go against our university and community values," the university said in a tweet.

HarperCollins UK called Starkey's views "abhorrent".

"Our last book with the author was in 2010, and we will not be publishing further books with him," it said.

"We are reviewing his existing backlist in light of his comments and views."

Starkey could not be reached for comment and did not respond to other UK media interview requests.

But the right-wing commentator who conducted the historian's interview disassociated himself from Starkey's remarks.

"Hand on heart, I wasn't engaged enough in this interview as I should have been," Grimes said in a statement.

"I should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments."

© 2020 AFP

Amid reckoning on police racism, algorithm bias in focus

Issued on: 05/07/2020 -

Facial recognition technology is increasingly used in law enforcement, amid concerns that low accuracy for people of color could reinforce racial bias DAVID MCNEW AFP/File

Washington (AFP)

A wave of protests over law enforcement abuses has highlighted concerns over artificial intelligence programs like facial recognition which critics say may reinforce racial bias.

While the protests have focused on police misconduct, activists point out flaws that may ad to unfair applications of technologies for law enforcement, including facial recognition, predictive policing and "risk assessment" algorithms.

The issue came to the forefront recently with the wrongful arrest in Detroit of an African American man based on a flawed algorithm which identified him as a robbery suspect.

Critics of facial recognition use in law enforcement say the case underscores the pervasive impact of a flawed technology.

Mutale Nkonde, an AI researcher, said that even though the idea of bias and algorithms has been debated for years, the latest case and other incidents have driven home the message.

"What is different in this moment is we have explainability and people are really beginning to realize the way these algorithms are used for decision-making," said Nkonde, a fellow at Stanford University's Digital Society Lab and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard.

Amazon, IBM and Microsoft have said they would not sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement without rules to protect against unfair use. But many other vendors offer a range of technologies.

- Secret algorithms -

Nkonde said the technologies are only as good as the data they rely on.

"We know the criminal justice system is biased, so any model you create is going to have 'dirty data,'" she said.

Daniel Castro of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, said however it would be counterproductive to ban a technology which automates investigative tasks and enables police to be more productive.

"There are (facial recognition) systems that are accurate, so we need to have more testing and transparency," Castro said.

"Everyone is concerned about false identification, but that can happen whether it's a person or a computer."

Seda Gurses, a researcher at the Netherlands-based Delft University of Technology, said one problem with analyzing the systems is that they use proprietary, secret algorithms, sometimes from multiple vendors.

"This makes it very difficult to identify under what conditions the dataset was collected, what qualities these images had, how the algorithm was trained," Gurses said.

- Predictive limits -

The use of artificial intelligence in "predictive policing," which is growing in many cities, has also raised concerns over reinforcing bias.

The systems have been touted to help make better use of limited police budgets, but some research suggests it increases deployments to communities which have already been identified, rightly or wrongly, as high-crime zones.

These models "are susceptible to runaway feedback loops, where police are repeatedly sent back to the same neighborhoods regardless of the actual crime rate," said a 2019 report by the AI Now Institute at New York University, based a study of 13 cities using the technology.

These systems may be gamed by "biased police data," the report said.

In a related matter, an outcry from academics prompted the cancellation of a research paper which claimed facial recognition algorithms could predict with 80 percent accuracy if someone is likely to be a criminal.

- Robots vs humans -

Ironically, many artificial intelligence programs for law enforcement and criminal justice were designed with the hope of reducing bias in the system.

So-called risk assessment algorithms were designed to help judges and others in the system make unbiased recommendations on who is sent to jail, or released on bond or parole.

But the fairness of such a system was questioned in a 2019 report by the Partnership on AI, a consortium which includes tech giants including Google and Facebook, as well as organizations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"It is perhaps counterintuitive, but in complex settings like criminal justice, virtually all statistical predictions will be biased even if the data was accurate, and even if variables such as race are excluded, unless specific steps are taken to measure and mitigate bias," the report said.

Nkonde said recent research highlights the need to keep humans in the loop for important decisions.

"You cannot change the history of racism and sexism," she said. "But you can make sure the algorithm does not become the final decision maker."

Castro said algorithms are designed to carry out what public officials want, and the solution to unfair practices lies more with policy than technology.

"We can't always agree on fairness," he said. "When we use a computer to do something, the critique is leveled at the algorithm when it should be at the overall system."

© 2020 AFP

Big Oil confronts possibility of terminal demand decline
Issued on: 05/07/2020 -

Is this the sunset of the oil industry? Paul Ratje AFP

Paris (AFP)

Although crude prices have rebounded from coronavirus crisis lows, oil execs and experts are starting to ask if the industry has crossed the Rubicon of peak demand.

The plunge in the price of crude oil during the first wave of coronavirus lockdowns -- futures prices briefly turned negative -- was due to the drop in global demand as planes were parked on tarmacs and cars in garages.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast that average daily oil demand will drop by eight million barrels per day this year, a decline of around eight percent from last year.


While the agency expects an unprecedented rebound of 5.7 million barrels per day next year, it still forecasts overall demand will be lower than in 2019 owing to ongoing uncertainty in the airline sector.

Some are questioning whether demand will ever get back to 2019 levels.

"I don't think we know how this is going to play out. I certainly don't know," BP's new chief executive Bernard Looney said in May.

The COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing then with most planes grounded and white-collar workers giving up the commute to work from home.

"Could it be peak oil? Possibly. I would not write that off," Looney told the Financial Times.

- Summited? -

The concept of peak oil has long generated speculation.

Mostly, it has been focused on peak production, with experts forecasting that prices would reach astronomical levels as recoverable oil in the ground runs out.

But in recent months, the concept of peak demand has come into vogue, with the coronavirus landing an uppercut into fuel demand for the transportation sector followed by a knock-out punch from the transition to cleaner fuels.

Michael Bradshaw, professor at Warwick Business School, said environmental groups are already lobbying to prevent the Paris agreements becoming another casualty of the pandemic, stressing the need for a Green New Deal for the recovery.

"If they are successful, demand for oil might never return to the peak we saw prior to COVID-19," he said in comments to journalists.

The transport sector may never fully recover, Bradshaw posited.

"After the pandemic, we might have a different attitude to international air travel or physically going into work," he said.

- 'Science fiction' -

Other experts say we haven't reached the tipping point yet, and might not for a while.

"Many people have said, including some CEOs of some major companies, with the lifestyle changes now to teleworking and others we may well see oil demand has peaked, and oil demand will go down," IEA executive director Fatih Birol said recently.

"I don't agree with that. Teleconferencing alone will not help us to reach our energy and climate goals, they can only make a small dent," Firol added while unveiling a recent IEA report.

Moez Ajmi at consulting and auditing firm E&Y dismissed as "science fiction" the idea that a definitive drop in oil demand could suddenly emerge.

He expects a slow recovery in demand even if the coronavirus leaves the global economy weakened.

That weakness would also likely slow adoption of greener fuels.

"It will take time for fossil fuels, which today still account for some 80 percent of primary global consumption to face real competition" from rival energy sources, he said.

Meanwhile, the oil industry could face financing challenges.

Bronwen Tucker, an analyst at Oil Change International, says the industry is now under pressure from investors.

After "a pretty big wave of restrictions on coal and some restrictions on oil and gas, the risks to oil and gas investment right now feel a lot more salient," she said.

The industry is already writing down the value of assets to face up to the new market reality of lower demand and prices.

Royal Dutch Shell said this past week that it will take a $22 billion charge as it re-evaluates the value of its business in light of the coronavirus.

Last month, rival BP reduced the worth of its assets by $17.5 billion.

"This process has further to run, and we expect further large impairments to occur across the sector," said Angus Rodger of specialist energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

© 2020 AFP

Anti-racism protests contrast with official festivities on US Independence Day

VIDEO AT THE END 

The administration held a fireworks display over the National Mall as night fell after Trump’s speech, despite Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s warnings that the mass spectator event would defy health officials’ guidance during the pandemic.

Just steps from where Trump spoke, peaceful protesters marched down blocked-off streets around the White House, Black Lives Matter Plaza and the Lincoln Memorial. They were confronted by counter-protesters chanting, “USA! USA!” but there were no reports of violence.

Protests also took place Saturday in New York, Chicago, Nashville, Boston, Oakland and other cities. In Baltimore, protesters pulled down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the city’s Inner Harbor on Saturday night.

Protesters just took down the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore’s Little Italy. pic.twitter.com/ViPk5eKOtz— Louis Krauss (@louiskraussnews) July 5, 2020Millions of Americans have been demonstrating against police brutality and racial inequality since the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. In addition to achieving police reforms in some cities, some protesters have removed Confederate statues and other symbols of America’s legacy of slavery.

“There have always been those who seek to lie about the past in order to gain power in the present, those that are lying about our history, those who want us to be ashamed of who we are,” Trump said on Saturday. “Their goal is demolition.”

Trump’s Fourth of July remarks doubled down on his speech the previous evening at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota where he accused “angry mobs” of trying to erase history and painted himself as a bulwark against left-wing extremism.

Just months before November’s presidential election, opinion polls in key states show Trump trailing his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden wrote a Fourth of July opinion piece that struck a contrasting note with the Republican president and accused him of finding “new ways to tarnish and dismantle our democracy” every day.

In a separate letter to donors, Biden said: “We have a chance now to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed, a full share of the American dream.”

Trump, in his speech, also said the United States would have a vaccine or therapeutic solution to the virus “long before” the end of 2020. Such a success could help the US economy and Trump’s chances of re-election.

On Thursday, a top US health official said he was optimistic the Trump administration’s vaccine-acceleration program “Operation Warp Speed” will generate a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 by year-end.

Apart from fireworks spectators in Washington, activists of different stripes also appeared willing to disregard health warnings.

Roar of the Deplorables, a bikers group, said via social media that they planned to gather to protest against what they call “the anti-Trump regime” and celebrate the nation’s birthday.

Freedom Fighters DC, a new activist group which seeks to rally ethnically diverse supporters, especially the Black population of Washington, is one of the anti-racism groups ignoring the mayor’s heed to refrain from gathering.

“Black folks are not free from the chains of oppression, so we don’t get to truly celebrate Independence Day,” said Kerrigan Williams, 22, one of the founders of the group, which will host a march and an arts demonstration on Saturday afternoon.

“We’re marching today to showcase that Black folks are still fighting for the simple liberties that the constitution is said to provide.”

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS and AP)

The Trump Administration Is Set To Resume Executions In Two Weeks. There’s A Last-Ditch Effort To Stop It.

Federal death row inmates are asking a judge to intervene on new legal grounds after the US Supreme Court refused to get involved. The ACLU is also suing.

Handout / Getty Images
San Quentin State Prison's lethal injection facility, which was dismantled on March 13, 2019.
#ENDTHEDEATHPENALTY #ABOLISHTHEDEATHPENALTY
Zoe Tillman BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC July 2, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is set to execute Daniel Lewis Lee on July 13 by lethal injection. If it happens, it’ll be the first time in nearly two decades that the federal government has carried out an execution.

Death row inmates and death penalty opponents have less than two weeks to convince a judge to intervene before Lee’s execution, the first of four that the Trump administration has scheduled for men convicted of murdering children. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit raising a novel argument — that at least one of the executions should be delayed because the coronavirus pandemic puts everyone involved in the lethal injection process at risk of exposure.


Rev. Seigen Hartkemeyer, a Zen Buddhist priest who has served as a spiritual adviser to Wesley Purkey, a death row inmate scheduled for execution on July 15, wrote in a blog post published by the ACLU on Thursday that he has a religious duty to be with Purkey. But Hartkemeyer said that because he has a history of lung illness and is 68 years old, he was being “asked to make an impossible decision.”

“The federal government’s decision to proceed with Wes’s execution burdens my religious freedom by forcing me to choose between performing my religious duties as a priest, and protecting my own life,” Hartkemeyer wrote. “Although Trump officials have repeatedly claimed the mantle of guardians of religious liberty, too often their commitment wavers when it is inconvenient for their political agenda. This appears to be one of those times.”

Late Thursday, a federal appeals court stepped in to pause Purkey's execution, issuing a decision in a separate challenge that Purkey raised about his criminal conviction. The US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled against Purkey, finding that he wasn't entitled to raise issues now related to whether his trial counsel was ineffective. But the court agreed to stay Purkey's execution until he'd had a chance to exhaust all of his legal options — he could petition the full 7th Circuit to rehear the case for instance, or ask the US Supreme Court to take the case. If Purkey does end up losing, however, the new ACLU case would come back into play.

The ACLU lawsuit isn’t the only pending legal action challenging the Trump administration’s plan. Purkey and other death row inmates have been fighting in court since the Justice Department announced last July that Attorney General Bill Barr had ordered the Bureau of Prisons to resume lethal injections for the first time since 2003. The inmates are still waiting to see if a judge will step in before Lee’s scheduled execution on July 13.


Purkey, Lee, and the other two inmates whose executions are scheduled for July and August were all convicted of murder, among other serious crimes. The Justice Department has made clear that it chose these first four inmates to execute based on the fact that their cases involved the murder of children.


“The American people, acting through Congress and Presidents of both political parties, have long instructed that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death,” Barr said in a statement released by DOJ last month. “The four murderers whose executions are scheduled today have received full and fair proceedings under our Constitution and laws. We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

Lee was found guilty in the murder of a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl. His legal team released a video of the girl’s grandmother, Earlene Peterson, explaining that she was opposed to Lee being executed instead of serving a life sentence, which is what Lee’s codefendant received after he was found guilty.

“Yes, I believe you have to pay for what you do, but that don’t mean death,” Peterson says in the video.

Lee and the other death row inmates who went to court won an injunction in the fall from a federal judge in Washington, DC, putting a pause on their executions. But the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit reversed that decision in April, giving the Trump administration the green light to set a new schedule.


The inmates asked the US Supreme Court to order a delay and review the DC Circuit’s decision, but on June 29 a majority of the justices rejected that request; Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have delayed the executions and taken up the case, according to the order released by the court.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to get involved didn’t end the inmates’ legal fight, however. In mid-June, the inmates filed a new motion for a preliminary injunction, this time pressing different legal arguments than they did the first round. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set a fast briefing schedule, ordering the government to respond within a week. She has yet to rule.

The first injunction was about whether the single-drug injection protocol adopted by the Trump administration violated the Federal Death Penalty Act because it didn’t match execution protocols adopted by states where the federal death row inmates were set to be executed. Chutkan ruled that the inmates were likely to win on this argument. The DC Circuit disagreed in a 2–1 decision in April.

Trump’s two appointees to the DC Circuit, judges Greg Katsas and Neomi Rao, sided with the administration in that decision. The Trump administration has made clear that it views the confirmation of conservative federal judges, especially in the appeals courts, as a central part of its policy strategy, politicizing these nominations despite protests from judges, and Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., that they are nonpolitical actors.

The DC Circuit ruling noted that the inmates still had other unresolved legal claims, however, and that’s what the inmates are pressing now before Chutkan. They’re arguing that the administration’s lethal injection plan violates other federal laws, such as the Administrative Procedure Act; the inmates contend the administration failed to consider various risks associated with its lethal injection drug of choice, sodium pentobarbital, and that it represents the type of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.


Purkey, who was convicted in 2003 of raping and killing a 16-year-old girl, has a separate lawsuit pending seeking to block his July 15 execution. His lawyers filed a request for an injunction in late June arguing that he has schizophrenia, dementia, and other mental illnesses that make him incompetent to be executed under the Eighth Amendment. That case is also assigned to Chutkan, and she set a similarly fast schedule for briefing.

“Wes Purkey is a severely brain-damaged and mentally ill man who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease,” Rebecca Woodman, one of Purkey’s attorneys, said in a statement. “He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row, but as his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him. He believes his execution is part of a large-scale conspiracy against him by the federal government in retaliation for his frequent challenges to prison conditions, and he believes his own lawyers are working against him within this conspiracy."

Purkey, Lee, and the two other inmates set for execution — Keith Nelson and Dustin Lee Honken — are held at the Terre Haute high-security federal prison facility in Indiana. In the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Indiana by Hartkemeyer, the Buddhist priest, the ACLU lawyers noted that the Terre Haute facility had documented cases of COVID-19; state and federal jails and prisons across the US have been hot spots for coronavirus cases.

“The Federal Government’s extensive and large-scale plans for the executions amplify the risk posed by the executions. Each execution will require the travel, movement, and congregation of hundreds of individuals, including the families of the victims and the death row prisoners, scores of correctional officers, members of local and national media, as well as large numbers of witnesses and legal counsel from around the country,” the complaint states.


According to the lawsuit, there has been only one execution nationwide since March, carried out by state officials in Missouri.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 25 states still permit the death penalty. Among those states, nine haven’t carried out an execution in the past decade, and another five haven’t executed someone in the past five years, per the center’s data.


Federal executions have been even rarer. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, three federal executions took place in the early 2000s, with the last one taking place in 2003. There were a total of 37 federal executions between 1927 and 2003, with none occurring in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.

Since 2003, the federal government’s authority to execute inmates has been tied up in court. Federal death row inmates who had execution dates on the calendar filed a lawsuit to stop any future lethal injections in 2005, and a judge delayed those executions while the case was being litigated. As the George W. Bush administration and, later, the Obama administration set additional execution dates, those inmates joined the case and their executions were also put on hold.

The litigation had been inactive since 2011, when the Obama administration began exploring changes to the lethal injection protocol, which in practice put the entire system on hold. It picked back up when the Justice Department announced last summer that it had adopted the new protocol and initially set five execution dates.


The fifth inmate who originally had an execution date, Lezmond Mitchell, is involved in the lethal injection protocol case, but he also has a separate legal challenge to his conviction pending before the 9th Circuit. A three-judge panel in April rejected Mitchell’s argument that he should be allowed to interview jurors to probe whether there was racial bias; Mitchell is Native American. He filed a request for the full court to reconsider the case on June 15.

In ruling against Mitchell, two of the judges wrote separately to express concerns they had that the Justice Department chose to pursue the death penalty against Mitchell when the Navajo Nation, as well as the victims’ family, opposed capital punishment. Mitchell was found guilty in the murder of a 63-year-old woman and her 9-year-old granddaughter; the crime took place on a Navajo reservation.

“The imposition of the death penalty in this case is a betrayal of a promise made to the Navajo Nation, and it demonstrates a deep disrespect for tribal sovereignty,” Judge Morgan Christen wrote. “People can disagree about whether the death penalty should ever be imposed, but our history shows that the United States gave tribes the option to decide for themselves.”

UPDATE
July 2, 2020, at 6:49 p.m.


Updated with information about a new 7th Circuit ruling in Wesley Purkey's case.


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Zoe Tillman is a senior legal reporter with BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

Contact Zoe Tillman at zoe.tillman@buzzfeed.com.

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