Des sénateurs ont formulé 25 propositions après l'épisode des émeutes de l'été 2023. La mission d'information a notamment listé quelques stratégies pour les réseaux sociaux et les messageries. Des pistes radicales, préoccupantes, qui soulèvent des difficultés d'ordre juridique et technique.

« Concernant les autres types atteintes, insultes, menaces, dégradations de biens et éventuellement des violences, c'est la voie pénale que l'on peut actionner en déposant plainte ».

Cet article Face à la criminalisation des associations environnementales, FNE dépose deux plaintes à l’ONU est apparu en premier sur La Relève et La Peste .

Patients, infertility doctors, and advocates of IVF attend a rally outside the Alabama State House on Feb. 28, 2024, in Montgomery, Ala. Photo: Stew Milne/AP

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S.

The ruling , on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos in an accident at a fertility clinic, heightened the conflict between ideology and electability, already about as high as it could get after June 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization freed the states to snub overwhelming public opinion, enact radical abortion bans — and then lose badly in the midterms.

But now the ideologues have more than a political problem. They have a moral one too.

When most of Alabama’s fertility clinics suspended operations in fear that dropping a vial might be prosecuted as manslaughter and patients were left anguished in the middle of time-sensitive treatments, the GOP faced the present, palpable harms inflicted on real people by its abstract religious pieties. And these harmed parties were not baby killers. They were among the 1 in 7 women afflicted by infertility, and they were desperate to have babies.

The predicament landed hard. As the national press closed in on the Alabama Legislature, its panicked Republican supermajority hurried through a bill giving full legal and criminal immunity to IVF providers for the death or destruction of embryos. The bill passed the House by a vote of 94 to 6, including most of the chamber’s 27 Democrats, and unanimously in the Senate. Some Democrats objected that the blanket immunity exposed patients to malpractice without recourse, while Republican opponents still wanted protection for the embryos. The GOP’s state PAC defended supporters as casting “a pro-life vote.”

The more radical elements of Alabama’s “pro-life” community did not agree. The American Action Fund posted a petition on Facebook attacking Republican lawmakers who “voted to give immunity to any IVF provider who ‘intentionally causes the death of an unborn child,’” putting quotation marks around a phrase that is not in the statute and pressing for repeal. D.J. Parten, founder of a group that crafted legislation to prosecute self-managed abortion as murder, called the IVF legislation the “immunity for murder” bill. Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition and author of the state’s abortion ban, told AL.com that he’d contacted the Senate pro tempore to work out the next steps, which sounded like a reversal. “If [embryos] are destroyed,” Johnston said, “there needs to be some repercussions for that.” Then what for IVF? He didn’t say.

And while the Republicans were busy biting each other’s backs, Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands walked away with a special election for a vacant state House seat. Having focused her campaign on abortion rights, she added the threat to IVF. On March 26, she beat her opponent 2 to 1.

The battle moved north to Capitol Hill. Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth introduced a bill to protect “access to assisted reproductive technology, and all medical care surrounding such technology.” A Republican senator blocked the bill because it imperiled embryos, and it died on the floor.

House Republicans released a 2025 budget containing the Life at Conception Act, which would grant full legal rights “from the moment of fertilization.” It had 120 sponsors. The Senate version made an exception for IVF, but the senators couldn’t sway the lower chamber. The Republican National Committee urged candidates to come out strongly for fertility care.

Conflict churned, not just between religious morality and political reality, but also between Republicans crusading to deregulate everything public — from greenhouse gas emissions to payday lenders — and Republicans pouring their hearts and political capital into regulating everything personal, particularly what people do with their bodies.

At least one prominent player tried to split the difference. The fiercely anti-regulation Heritage Foundation released a position paper titled “Why the IVF Industry Must Be Regulated.”

“You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood. … You are not fooling anyone.”

Unsurprisingly, it is a weird document. “The well-being of children, not profit margins, should be the top priority when it comes to IVF and embryonic cryopreservation,” proclaims the writer, senior research associate Emma Waters, sounding like a perfect socialist-feminist. She goes on to decry preimplantation testing for heritable conditions, which disability justice advocates also oppose, and preselection for sex or eye or skin color, which many feminists of color and critics of human genetic engineering condemn. Waters refers to these practices, provided by the majority of U.S. fertility clinics, as “eugenics,” which they are.

The paper proposes regulations including “true informed consent,” based on full explication of the risks and success rates of the treatment, and the prohibition of embryonic genetic testing and sex selection “in pursuit of the ‘perfect’ child” — regulations common throughout the EU and the U.K.

But if Europe promulgates rules to protect patients and children born through reproductive technologies, the children whose well-being most concerns the Heritage Foundation are the unborn ones. The paper’s first recommendation not-so-obliquely endorses embryonic personhood: “Impose a standard of care in IVF clinics sufficient to prevent the wanton or careless destruction of embryonic human beings.” Waters praises the Alabama judge, whose ruling “reassures parents who rely on IVF that their children will receive the same legal protections as everyone else’s.”

Alas, even a pro-regulation encyclical from the mother church of deregulation did not resolve the GOP’s dilemma. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., put it succinctly: “You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood laws. They are fundamentally incompatible!” she said . “You are not fooling anyone.”

Aside from the Heritage Foundation, there is another group of pro-lifers who believe they can have it both ways. That is, the practitioners of embryo adoption, a small but growing niche occupying the space where the fertility and adoption industries meet, inside a community populated almost entirely by evangelical Christians. The embryo adoption communities both condone IVF out of compassion for the infertile and are working to liberate, one by one, the treatments’ leftover embryos, which Catholic bioethicist Kent Lasnoski describes as the “frozen generation” and Baptist preacher John Piper calls the “orphaned unborn.”

These agencies match donors who’ve been through IVF and have unused fertilized embryos with would-be parents, most of whom have already tried and failed in multiple rounds of IVF, fostering, and/or traditional child adoption. The agents interview and screen both sides, suggest propitious pairings, and facilitate the delivery and implantation — called transfer — of the thawed frozen embryos. Some programs are all-inclusive, with their own clinics and home study experts; others offer services a la carte and recommend outside providers. Donors are not paid, yet the exchange promises them the satisfaction and security, and perhaps the relief from guilt, of giving their “children” a good home. Recipients get a bespoke baby, selected for genetic health, sex, race, and other characteristics, plus the experience of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and “early bonding.”

But the agents do not view themselves only as individual adoption brokers. They are missionaries: rescue teams searching out “snowflake babies” shivering in cryostorage and bringing them into the warmth and shelter of womb, family, and church. “Just as each snowflake is frozen, unique and a gift from heaven, so are each of our Snowflakes Babies,” explains the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, founded in 1997 by the Christian adoption nonprofit Nightline. “We hope to help each donated embryo grow, develop, and live a full life. In the intricate design of each flake of snow, we find the Creator reflecting the individual human heart.”

And if it doesn’t work, if an embryo dies while thawing or a pregnancy ends in miscarriage — even if a couple never ends up with a child — all is understood as God’s plan. “If God puts it on our heart to adopt a child, we know that one doesn’t always come home,” one would-be mother told the anthropologist Risa Cromer.

In “Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics,” Cromer calls this “embryo saviorism,” whose ultimate aim is to build the material and spiritual infrastructure “to leverage a niche family-making process for realizing the potential for a conservative Christian country.” And not just Christian. The website photo galleries feature healthy, unambiguously gendered children surrounding coupled, unambiguously heterosexual parents (at the National Embryo Donation Center, adopters must be “a genetic male and a genetic female married for at least three years”). And although women of color suffer far higher rates of infertility than their white counterparts, these families are almost all as white as Easter lilies.

Christian embryo adoption appears to be the embodiment of the anti-abortion slogan “ Love them both ,” mother and child. But the interests of parents and children, or parents and fetuses or embryos, are not always identical — they are sometimes in mortal battle. Nor can the born and the “unborn” have equal rights. “There is no way to add fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses to the Constitution without subtracting women,” says reproductive justice attorney and advocate Lynn Paltrow in the film “Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America.”

The IVF-embryonic personhood debate has taught Republicans that you sometimes have to choose a side.

Embryo adoption grew out of the anti-abortion movement. It found a fortuitous place where the adult’s needs and desires and the embryo’s survival are not at odds. But that does not mean it is neutral when it comes to adult needs and desires that clash with the embryo’s. In the 1990s, embryo adopters joined the National Right to Life Committee in lobbying against stem-cell research because it could result in the destruction of fertilized embryos. They continued to push throughout the 2000 elections and beyond, even as public opinion shifted toward valuing potential cures over potential life. In 2006, a group of “snowflake families” stood beside President George W. Bush when he vetoed a bipartisan bill to restore federal funding to the research. Prominent among the families were John and Marlene Strege and their child Hannah, the first “ snowflake baby ,” born on New Year’s Eve, 1998.

The Streges are still taking sides. In 2021, the family — identified as Hannah S., “a former IVF frozen embryo,” and John and Marlene S., “adoptive parents of the first ‘adopted’ frozen embryo in America” — filed an amicus brief in Dobbs supporting Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban . Faster than anyone expected, the Supreme Court’s ruling set the U.S. moving toward a time when cells in petri dishes have more rights than the people whose bodies give them life. And when we get there, not even the hand of God will be able to unlock access to the medical procedures and products that allow millions to exercise their human right to have a baby — or not.

The post Pro-Lifers Are Up Against a Real-Life Crisis appeared first on The Intercept .

Last June, New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke to graduates at Rikers Island who received their high-school-equivalence diplomas while serving in jail.

“When you get your diplomas today,” Adams told the graduates, “I want you to stand up, lean back, be firm and strong and say, ‘I got this. When does the hard part start? I’m finished with the hard part. Now I’m moving forward to my destiny on what I want to accomplish.’”

The group represented the successful fruits of a law that guarantees access to education to people incarcerated in city jails. The success stories, however, are only part of the picture.

Other young people incarcerated in New York jails said in court filings that they’ve been repeatedly denied their legal right to education and that the city has failed to comply with a 2016 court order requiring education access for people between 18 and 21 held in in Department of Correction custody. In filings Wednesday, the plaintiffs in a decadeslong class-action suit against the city called for the appointment of a new court monitor to oversee implementation of the order.

“Not only is this a legal failing, but it’s a moral failing.”

“Not only is this a legal failing, but it’s a moral failing,” said Lauren Stephens-Davidowitz, a staff attorney with the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization, which made the Wednesday filings. “You have these young people who are begging to get their high school education while they’re incarcerated, and are just trying so hard, and are being denied it.”

The original 1996 suit claimed that the city Department of Correction and the Department of Education failed to provide education to young people entitled to public schooling. Plaintiffs are now alleging that the city has failed to comply with a 2016 federal court order requiring that incarcerated young people be given access to a minimum of three hours of educational services each day. The order also required provision of special education services to people who needed them.

Class members include 29 people in New York City custody between the ages of 18 and 21 who don’t currently have a high school diploma. Declarations from class members provided to The Intercept document alleged violations of the 2016 court order, including claims that they’ve been told they can only receive education if they’re housed in certain programmatic facilities. (The Department of Education referred questions to the Department of Correction. The mayor’s office did not provide a comment.)

By keeping people from accessing legally required educational services, the Department of Correction is working against its professed goal of rehabilitation, said Stefen Short, a supervising attorney with the Prisoner’s Rights Project.

“It’s proven that when an individual attains their high school diploma or the equivalent in custody, their prospects for success improve on the outside,” Short said. “DOC is essentially letting folks sit idle rather than provide them with access to educational services to which they have a right. That renders everyone in the jail setting less safe. It’s a strange state of affairs. It doesn’t serve anyone’s interests.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Correction referred questions about the legal filing to the city’s Law Department, which represents the mayor and city agencies, and has not responded.

“The department has just received additional funding for programming for people in custody,” said the Correction spokesperson, Annais Morales, said, adding that the funds would allow for programs including general education diploma preparation and “tutoring for all people in custody.”

Last Chance for a Diploma

The court appointed a monitor in 2016 to oversee the city’s implementation of the order. In his third report in 2018, as his two-year term was winding down, the monitor found that the order was working for younger detainees, who were being phased out of the adult criminal system under a 2018 city law and were no longer part of the class, but not for people over the age of 18.

“While the education program at Rikers has shown marked improvements during the past two years, access to education for inmates age 18 to 21 is a persistent problem,” the report said.

Only people incarcerated in special Department of Correction program housing have access to education services. Detainees don’t have a choice in where they’re housed, and people in non-program housing have said they’ve requested access to education and been denied.

At a November meeting of the city’s Board of Correction, a nine-member oversight body, Correction Department Deputy Commissioner Francis Torres said the department provided educational services at only two facilities: the Robert N. Davoren Complex and the Rose M. Singer Center. “For this year, we have targeted our educational efforts, meaning granting access to educational services at RNDC and Rose M. Singer,” Torres said.

One incarcerated person, who needs special education services and submitted a declaration as part of the new filing Wednesday, said he had lost nearly a year of progress toward his diploma during the Covid-19 pandemic and was still being denied access to education.

“I need my special education services in order to make educational progress,” the incarcerated man said. “I am not getting the three hours of education per day that I am entitled to.”

The man, who said he was interested in vocational training in carpentry, computers, or cybersecurity, added, “I want to seize every opportunity I can to prepare for a better future.”

An incarcerated 19-year-old who received special education services prior to being in jail custody said Department of Correction staff told him he had to wait to receive education services until he was transferred to a different complex. When he got there, he said staff told him he couldn’t enroll in education services because he wasn’t in a school dorm.

“I was worried that I would not be safe in another housing area,” he said. “I did not think it was fair that I had to choose between school and safety.”

When an incarcerated person turns 22, they age out of the right to get education while in jail. “This is the last chance they have to get a high school education,” said Stephens-Davidowitz, the Legal Aid attorney. “This is a critical juncture in their lives. They have a right to do it, and they’re trying.”

Update: April 4, 2024, 2:30 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from the New York City Department of Correction received after publication.

The post NYC Jails Flagrantly Deny Young People’s Legal Right to Education appeared first on The Intercept .

What is now a multimillion-dollar campaign to recall the elected prosecutor in Alameda County, California, began just six months after she took office.

When Pamela Price won office in 2022, she became the first district attorney in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, in decades who hadn’t risen through the ranks of the DA’s office. Instead, Price was a former defense and civil rights attorney focused on reforming the criminal justice system and holding police accountable for misconduct.

Now, with the recall effort against her gaining steam, Price is calling out the double standard against her office, denouncing the focus on crime as the perpetuation of a racist tropes.

“There is obviously no place where racism has been so accepted than in the criminal justice system,” she said. “When we talk about crime in America — for decades, if not centuries — crime has been a euphemism for race. And to be afraid of crime is synonymous often for many people with being afraid of Black people or being afraid of brown people.”

Police unions spent heavily against Price in 2018, when she first took on her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley, who had held office for a decade without facing a challenger. In June, a grand jury found that O’Malley violated county policies during the 2018 election by soliciting campaign funds from police unions.

Price lost to O’Malley in 2018 but beat one of her deputies in 2022 to become the first Black woman to serve as Alameda County’s district attorney.

It was under O’Malley’s tenure that homicides in Oakland first spiked , but Price’s opponents say they want to recall her because her reform policies have driven crime in the city, one of the 14 cities in the county. Price told The Intercept that those behind the recall campaign did not take the same tack against O’Malley when crime rose during her time in office — and that some of the cases she is being blamed for were handled by O’Malley.

Price acknowledged that violence remains an issue that she wants to tackle in office and said her policies are designed to allocate more resources toward the most serious crimes. She said, however, she has a problem with the way O’Malley never received the same scrutiny, criticism, or vitriol about crime during her tenure.

“If you did not hold Nancy O’Malley accountable, it is not fair for you to now be in the public eye suggesting to the public that I’m doing something wrong,” Price said. (O’Malley did not respond to a request for comment.)

O’Malley had been repeatedly accused of misconduct by defense lawyers. In one case, a judge knocked down the objections, but in another, charges were dismissed because of misconduct by O’Malley’s office. In 2021, a report from the ACLU of Northern California and Urban Peace Movement took the DA’s office to task for policies that resulted in “over-incarceration and criminalization” — particularly of Black and brown communities. O’Malley was also criticized for going easy on police and not investigating deaths of people in police custody.

Police and real estate investors bankrolling the recall push against Price have been among the reform DA’s most vocal and powerful opponents. That opposition has been long in the making, since Price’s 2018 campaign against O’Malley.

Things kicked into high gear after Price took office last year. The Oakland Police Officers’ Association has blamed her for crime and attacked her for charging police with misconduct. In April, Price charged an Oakland Police officer with perjury and threatening a witness in a wrongful conviction case. The union said the case was an attempt to undermine the credibility of police “and facilitate the release of convicted murderers.”

“My predecessor was the district attorney for 13 years. I haven’t seen anyone make a correlation between her policies and the rise and fall of crime.”

Under O’Malley, homicides in Oakland first climbed in 2012 . Homicides fell and rose throughout O’Malley’s tenure and began to rise again in 2019 , followed by another spike in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic that affected cities and rural areas around the country. O’Malley announced her retirement in 2021 and left office in 2022, just before Price took office. Oakland homicides stayed level during Price’s first year on the job.

“My predecessor was the district attorney for 13 years,” Price said. “I haven’t seen anyone make a correlation between her policies and the rise and fall of crime.”

Oakland Real Estate Interests

O’Malley had also faced a recall effort, but not because of rising homicides in Oakland. The push, which received little attention and did not go to a vote, started after O’Malley declined to prosecute one public transit officer who knelt on 22-year-old Oscar Grant’s neck before another officer shot and killed him in 2009. For her part, O’Malley is supporting the current recall effort against Price and gave $5,000 to the effort.

Supporters of the recall effort against Price, including several wearing Make America Great Again hats , rallied at the county courthouse earlier this month on the deadline to submit petition signatures to get the recall on the ballot. County election officials are still manually counting the signatures and expect a result by April 15. Price and her supporters have accused recall leaders of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to gather signatures and recruiting people who don’t live in the county to canvass for signatures.

Two committees are leading the recall push. The first, Save Alameda for Everyone, was launched in July by Oakland residents Brenda Grisham, whose son was killed in a shooting in 2010, and Carl Chan , who is the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. The recall committee has also paid thousands of dollars to Grisham’s own security company. (Grisham told the press the payment was a reimbursement for security costs.)

Grisham told The Intercept that she has never blamed Price for her son’s case. Her reasons for wanting to recall the DA stem from Price ignoring victims and releasing murderers. Grisham denied allegations that signatures had been improperly collected and said there was no rule that canvassers had to be from the county. She said she was confident the committee had enough valid signatures to get the recall on the ballot.

Grisham said she started planning the recall effort in June or July and that it shouldn’t matter who is funding the effort because they’re citizens of the county.

Among those backers was hedge fund partner and Oakland resident Philip Dreyfuss, who worked with Grisham and Chan before launching a second separate committee in September, Supporters of Recall of Pamela Price. He is one of the biggest individual donors to the committee and has given $390,000 so far, more than half of the money it raised last year. Dreyfuss also gave $10,000 to support the recall of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin in 2022. (Dreyfuss did not respond to a request for comment.)

National media outlets have framed the push to recall Price as part of a dispute over approaches to criminal justice reform. Price acknowledged that was true, but also said the fight in Alameda County is being driven by other motives, including wealthy investors who want to protect real estate interests in downtown Oakland.

Mass incarceration in California has been a failed strategy, Price said. Prosecutors in the reform movement are opposed to racism and racist policies in the criminal justice system, including mass incarceration and injustices imposed on both survivors of crime and defendants.

“Unfortunately,” Price said, “there are many in this arena who are not opposed to the racial inequities that have infected this system.”

Price pointed to her duty to the whole county, not just Oakland. “I’m the district attorney of Alameda County,” she said. “And any policies or practices that we implement are implemented and practiced across the county.”

“Unfortunately, there are many in this arena who are not opposed to the racial inequities that have infected this system.”

Price has lived in Oakland since 1978, during which time she said the city has always been portrayed in a negative light compared to others in the Bay Area. At the same time, she said, Oakland has been traumatized by gun violence that mass incarceration has not solved.

“People have always denigrated Oakland,” she said. “Now I think there’s the racism associated with putting my face as the Black face of Oakland, when in fact I’m not the mayor of Oakland, I’m not the police chief of Oakland. But it serves a purpose.”

Price added that if the people leading the recall truly cared about victims, they’d use their money to support victims in Alameda County.

“The primary backers and funders of the recall are, in fact, real estate developers and investors that have no real interest in the manner in which justice is administered to the majority of people who live, work, and play in Alameda County,” Price said. “They are a handful of wealthy folks that have as their agenda to control the way that the district attorney’s office operates. They could care less about the victims that we deal with every day.”

“The amount of money that they are prepared to spend to recall me could easily replenish the trauma recovery fund that the state is having to shut down because we don’t have any more funding.”

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin speaks to supporters during an election night event on June 7, 2022, just ahead of results that showed him being recalled as the as city’s top prosecutor. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The San Fran Playbook

Opponents of the recall push have also pointed to overlaps in donors and messaging between the campaign against Price and the campaign to recall Boudin in San Francisco in 2022. Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, has also come under fire for not disclosing payments she received from groups linked to the SF recall campaign prior to her appointment. Violent crime has increased under Jenkins, but the reaction from Boudin’s critics has been muted.

Jenkins’s current term ends in 2025. She already has a challenger, Ryan Khojasteh, an alum of Boudin’s office who Jenkins fired shortly after she was appointed . After being let go, Khojasteh went to work for Price as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. He’s currently working for Price part-time and launched his campaign against Jenkins in January.

Khojasteh is hammering Jenkins for overseeing a rise in crime after promising that getting rid of Boudin would solve San Francisco’s problems. Jenkins has now turned her fire on judges , a strategy that has largely backfired so far. Efforts to oust two San Francisco judges failed in elections earlier this month.

“Now the mayor, the DA, the police chief, who are all aligned, don’t have anyone else to blame.”

“Now the mayor, the DA, the police chief, who are all aligned, don’t have anyone else to blame,” Khojasteh told The Intercept. “So they decided to shift that to judges, and that failed.”

Even the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which was critical of Boudin, has raised alarms about crime in San Francisco under Jenkins. The chamber’s annual City Beat poll , released in February, showed that 72 percent of residents feel San Francisco is on the “wrong track” and 69 percent feel that crime worsened in 2023, during Jenkins’s tenure.

Although Jenkins has now fallen victim to the panic she stoked, her rhetoric has eroded faith in the entire system and made it harder for prosecutors and judges to do their jobs, Khojasteh said. Some victims have refused to cooperate because they’ve heard that DAs won’t prosecute or that judges will release people.

“That’s rhetoric coming from Brooke Jenkins making my job harder,” he said. “I’m the one begging the victim to come to court just to do the basics of my job.”

While Price pointed to similarities between her predicament and the San Francisco recall, she noted that what’s happening in Alameda County is very different.

“It’s the same false narrative used: the ‘soft-on-crime’ trope that comes from the 1980s, from Ronald Reagan.”

“We know that some of the major donors for the Alameda County effort were involved in funding the recall of Chesa Boudin,” Price said. “So it’s the same false narrative used: the ‘soft-on-crime’ trope that comes from the 1980s, from Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Alameda County is not one city.”

Alameda is a diverse county made up of many residents who rent, including those who may not be as accepting of the status quo as voters in San Francisco.

The linking of race and crime has been deeply embedded in how the criminal justice system functions, how it’s perceived, and the conversation that has proceeded, Price said.

“It’s a conversation about race and criminality that led to mass incarceration,” she said. “And so it’s that same conversation that we have to be willing to engage in, if we’re going to unravel mass incarceration.”

The post “Crime Has Been a Euphemism for Race”: Alameda County’s Reform DA Rejects Recall Narrative appeared first on The Intercept .

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a news conference on March 20, 2024, where he signed a state law addressing homelessness. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In the nearly two years since the Supreme Court sent abortion rights back to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, state courts have become a hotbed of battles to criminalize, legalize, or expand access to abortion care.

States like Michigan prevented decades-old draconian bans from taking effect, while Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, and others have challenges pending in state court to their criminal bans. Judges in Florida, Missouri, and Ohio have also become referees for when voters get to weigh in on abortion rights through ballot measures.

Beyond abortion, the Supreme Court’s supermajority conservative bloc has made the entire federal judiciary generally hostile to civil rights. State courts have therefore increasingly assumed center stage on a wide variety of issues: LGBTQ+ rights and gender-affirming care, criminal justice reform and police accountability, voting rights, and more. As state courts and the cases they handle continue to grow in importance, so have various efforts to rig who sits on those courts and who has power in the legal system.

If in the past legislative gerrymandering — or redrawing legislative districts in artificial ways — was used to entrench corporate and partisan power, we now see another branch of government being manipulated to rig the system toward the same aims: judicial gerrymandering.

Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

Judicial gerrymandering is the process of manipulating the rules for selecting, retaining, or replacing judges, prosecutors, and other judicial actors to evade voter accountability. It can look like state legislatures redrawing judicial districts to favor certain voters; judges evading the prescribed retirement process to prevent elections for open seats; or state officials creating new “tools” to remove elected judges and prosecutors as an end run around voters’ choices.

Like its legislative counterpart, judicial gerrymandering threatens our democracy.

In states where gerrymandering has already created severely partisan legislatures, the rigging of judicial positions — which are typically voted on at the local level — threatens to cut entire swaths of the population out of the political process.

Take Georgia, where conservatives have devised a scheme to prevent voters in more progressive parts of the state from exercising their power to elect their judges. As judges approach reelection, several have strategically retired before they would have to face voters, and the state has canceled elections for their seats, sending power to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to appoint their replacements and depriving voters of the opportunity to select new jurists according to state law.

The Georgia state legislature has also created a partisan oversight commission with the power to suspend and remove locally elected prosecutors, part of a national campaign of attacking the independence of district attorneys. The commission has been given broad authority to disqualify prosecutors for 10 years based on their charging decisions — often decisions aimed at reducing mass incarceration by not prosecuting low-level offenses like drug charges, or standing up for reproductive rights by taking public stances against criminal bans.

In Mississippi, state officials have executed a judicial takeover of majority-Black Jackson, depriving its mayor, also Black, and its residents of local control over police, prosecutors, and the courts. One attempt to dilute voting power over elected county judges failed, but the state has created a two-tiered system in which a Capitol district controlled by white conservatives has power to govern Jackson instead of the city’s own residents.

And in Florida , state officials considered judicial redistricting to attempt to kick out reform prosecutors, who are elected based on the district “circuit” lines for state courts. The Florida Supreme Court demurred last year, but that doesn’t stop the legislature from taking it up in 2024. These redistricting efforts come in tandem with moves by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to suspend prosecutors in both Orlando and Tampa , due to his disagreement with their approaches to prosecution.

These efforts come in various shapes and sizes, but they all add up to an end run around the democratic process, depriving voters of an opportunity to elect officials based on their priorities, and depriving officials of the ability to do the jobs they were elected to do.

The trend will continue to intensify in the coming years. The Supreme Court has made it clear it won’t get involved in issues of state and local power consolidation, no matter how egregious.

Across states, legislators and governors often follow one another, proposing “new ideas” to consolidate power along partisan lines. These attempts start not as bald-faced power grabs, but something more insidious. Early, small pushes set the precedent for actions that are bolder and more problematic — and often harder to reverse. It is up to all of us to stay vigilant and pay close attention to this new brand of subtle attempts to dilute community power.

There is also, however, a growing resistance. There’s a new playbook taking shape: a movement by elected officials, community organizations, nonprofit lawyers, and civil rights groups who are executing a range of legal and electoral strategies to fight back against judicial gerrymandering. In Georgia, for instance, we have worked with a bipartisan coalition of prosecutors to file litigation challenging their oversight commission .

The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights.

This pushback also includes efforts to let voters weigh in on changes regarding judicial authority and redistricting. When people understand what’s at stake and are given a voice, they can make it harder for state officials to interfere with and take over local power.

Supporting government officials who push back is critical to resist those trying to rig the rules of democracy. The same system that can be rigged for political advantage can also be used for good, to protect civil rights. The effort for reform has won victories too, in even purple and red states like Wisconsin , Georgia , and Mississippi . The future of our democracy may depend on more of these wins.

The post How the Right Is Taking Over State Courts With Judicial Gerrymandering appeared first on The Intercept .

Sam Bankman-Fried vient d'être condamné à 25 ans de prison. L'homme derrière l'une des grosses fraudes financières de l'histoire a l'intention de faire appel.

Apple accuse Andrew Aude, un de ses ingénieurs en charge de l'optimisation des batteries, d'être à l'origine d'une série de fuites sur ses futurs produits. Plusieurs captures d'écran suggèrent qu'il s'est entretenu avec des leakers et des journalistes.

People gather to protest the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters at Columbia University on Nov. 20, 2023, in New York City. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Two weeks ago, the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized an email leaked by an anonymous student at the university’s social work school. In the email, a professor, who was also not named in the screenshot, raised the issue of a Palestinian flag emoji that the student had placed next to her name during Zoom meetings.

“On an unrelated matter,” the professor wrote, “it has recently been brought to my attention that geopolitical emojis” — the Palestinian flag — “used at the end of name info has caused trauma reactions, making it difficult for some to remain present and not dissociate during class session.”

The professor asked for the student’s “continued partnership in ensuring our class space remains a safe one for all.” In an excruciatingly polite response, the student asked for permission to discuss the issue collectively, with the class.

It’s the stuff of far-right parody: an absurd example of “woke” culture. An Ivy League professor, invoking the language of “trauma response” and safety, in an email that refers to class members as “folx,” suggesting the removal of an emoji.

Yet the professor’s email speaks to a broader problem of student safety being flattened into a question of whether students feel safe. And these aren’t the reactionary tropes of left-wing “snowflakes”: “Safety” is being invoked by pro-Israel students, many conservative and center-right, who believe that protests targeting the nation state constitute inherent attacks on them as Jews.

The same dynamic played out in the fall at the same university. Last November, Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, as The Intercept reported , because an “unauthorized event” put on by the groups “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” When challenged to name the threat, Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg said only, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the student groups, that “accusations that Israel was ‘a racist state committing genocide’ and ‘is an apartheid state’ could upset some people and ‘seem … like an incitement of violence.’”

New York City’s Upper West Side isn’t the only setting for such thin complaints. A staggeringly imbalanced feature in The Atlantic this week, written by Stanford sophomore Theo Baker, offered up a supposedly neutral narrative that treats the “conflict” on his college campus as a battle between imperiled Jewish students and unreasoned pro-Palestine zealots.

Right-wing GOP culture warriors and conservative Zionist groups are using similar claims about campus incidents nationwide. “Safety” is the latest weapon in the culture war, being deployed now to deal a blow to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and to silence criticism of Israel.

“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe.”

The result has brought us to our intolerable status quo, with students and faculty risking grave consequences for protesting a war in which Israeli forces have slaughtered over 31,000 people. Israel’s U.S.-backed assault has razed to rubble every single university in Gaza , but the concern as relates to intellectual life in this country focuses instead on the inoculation of Israel’s young supporters from bad feeling.

“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe,” said Layla, a Palestinian American graduate student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name for fear of harassment. “As a Palestinian student, I’ve lost family in Gaza. Frankly, I get uncomfortable when Zionist students are chanting ‘no ceasefire’ on campus. That makes me feel uncomfortable. That makes me feel unsafe. But I know that it is not a physical threat to my safety. That is free speech.”

Feeling Safe vs. Being Safe

The need to distinguish between feeling safe and being safe is both urgent and undeniably fraught. Antisemitism is rising. There have been instances, including on campuses, of Jewish students harassed and targeted solely for wearing a kippah or being otherwise identified as Jewish. Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian violence is surging . And a American-supported genocide is being carried out halfway around the world in the purported name of Jewish safety. Yet this is no time for cowardice.

Writing as a professor and a Jew, with a profound commitment to my students’ safety and well-being, I see an imperative for them to learn to distinguish between genuine threat and paranoia — that their judgments of the world be grounded and attentive to the workings of power, propaganda, and ideology.

Instead, a perfect political storm, driven in large part by sustained campaigning from pro-Israel groups, has produced structures of feeling — a map of collective emotions at historical junctures — that are resistant to challenge. The elements include the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, pushed evermore fervently by Zionist groups in the last decade ; the equation of feeling unsafe with being unsafe that has been normalized in the oversimplified liberal discourse; and the weight of intergenerational Jewish trauma combined with very real antisemitism in the present.

I have no doubt that the students’ feelings of fear are real, but educational institutions should not be validating a psychic block that precludes seeing support for Palestine as anything other than a threat.

One way universities are validating these feelings as proof of real danger may be out of their hands: through Title VI complaints and, in some cases, official investigations. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. By statute, universities are duty-bound to take these complaints seriously, but that doesn’t mean they’re always serious.

In the post-October 7 campus battles, the complaints in question consistently center on claims of campus antisemitism — referring to Title VI’s protection from discrimination based on national origin.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has 80 open Title VI investigations that have arisen since October 7 that fall under the category of “shared ancestry” discrimination, which also covers incidents of Islamophobia and other religious discrimination. And just one man , Zachary Marschall, the editor of the right-wing site Campus Reform , is responsible for 10 of them, according to a database of the complaints and investigations put together from public data by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

To file a complaint, a person need have no affiliation with the institution in question. Marschall, an outspoken critic of DEI, has no connection with any of the universities against which he is the Title VI complainant, but claims to be filing the complaints on behalf of campus figures who are often not publicly named.

While details of the federal investigations are not public, Campus Reform’s coverage of reported antisemitism on campus offers clues about Marschall’s approach. His posts on the site consist largely of alarmed responses to Palestinian solidarity slogans , calls for ceasefire , and vocal anti-Zionism on the part of left-wing Jewish student groups.

Consider, by way of example, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, against which Marschall filed a Title VI complaint. Campus Reform wrote about the school too. A November post cited as evidence of anti-Jewish animus the fact that a faculty open letter in support of a Gaza ceasefire was commended by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Campus Reform alleged is connected to Hamas — a common attack against CAIR that the group has denied as a “ smear .”

Marschall may well think the discrimination he is alleging is very real, but it hangs on a thin reed. To have the desired impact, though, the Title VI complaints don’t necessarily need to be sustained. The Department of Education might rule that Marschall’s complaints fail to show civil rights violations, but the investigations themselves can still have a chilling effect, forcing universities to act out of fear of losing federal funding.

The investigations can and have drummed up publicity, putting other university funding in the crosshairs. The effects of similar pressure campaigns are already being felt: Elite universities have appeased wealthy pro-Israel donors, who have since October 7 threatened to withhold their money if anti-Israel speech is tolerated on campus.

Pro-Israel protesters argue with pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration near Columbia University on Feb. 2, 2024, in New York City. Getty Images

Antisemitism as Cudgel

Using antisemitism for political ends is not a new tack. Efforts like Marschall’s play into a pattern of reporting on antisemitism that obfuscates rather than clarifies material antisemitic threats. Frightening statistics, leading to sensationalized headlines, about soaring campus antisemitism are compiled by conservative, agenda-driven watchdogs that conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism as policy.

They assert without compunction that calls for Palestinian liberation are a threat to Jews. The statistics then take on the imprimatur of official narrative, stoke further fear, and resist dispute — any such challenge is open to charges of antisemitism denialism.

Meanwhile, three Palestinian students wearing Keffiyehs were shot last November in Vermont, leaving one paralyzed from the waist down. An Arab Muslim student at Stanford was hospitalized in a hit-and-run in November that authorities are investigating as a hate crime. (The latter incident went notably unmentioned in Baker’s viral Atlantic story detailing threats at Stanford.)

And there have been physical dangers at Columbia, too — for pro-Palestine students. Those attending an on-campus Palestine solidarity rally in January were sprayed with a noxious chemical by two veterans of the Israeli military, also Columbia students. Numerous students — including Layla, the Palestinian social work student — were hit with the foul-smelling spray, believed to be Israeli-developed chemical weapon knowns as “skunk.”

Fifteen students had to seek hospital care for nausea, burning eyes, and irritated skin. While the NYPD is investigating the incident and the assailants are currently banned from campus, the university’s initial response was to chide the injured students for holding the protest in the first place.

Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students at Columbia and elsewhere have seen their faces and names projected on “ doxxing trucks ” circling campus. A vocally pro-Zionist business school professor, Shai Davidai, has faced complaints that he used his X account to target individual Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students by linking them to Hamas. (Davidai has denied going after particular students, though in January he promoted a form letter that singled out a student by name and, in March, accused a student of being “pro-Hamas” while linking to a tweet that identified her.)

In response to dozens of student complaints, the university launched an investigation into Davidai’s behavior; he has decried the probe as “retaliation.” His outrage make sense, I suppose, in a universe that gives credence to a Palestinian flag emoji as a potential trigger for a “trauma response.”

“The Absence of Any Real Threat”

The disparity of the stakes — felt safety and its material counterpart — become ever starker when one’s gaze is turned to where it really belongs: Palestine itself. Students speaking out for Palestine are not doing so to shore up campus safety for Palestinian students — which the Palestinian students, of course, deserve — but because they are desperate to see an end to Israeli assault on Gaza.

“I question why our focus is on the elite college campuses and their use of language over the horrific injustices being committed against the Palestinian people,” wrote Maryam Iqbal, a freshman at Barnard College and among the students hospitalized after the Columbia chemical attack, in the college newspaper. “There is absolutely no reason to be centering the feelings of privileged college students over the victims of an actual genocide.”

Iqbal told me that she hoped that following the chemical attack, the university administration’s attitude towards what constitutes threat and safety, and where risks lie, would change. “Nothing has shifted,” she said.

Instead, attacks on expression continue. Last month, Barnard banned students from displaying any decorations on dorm room doors, to avoid “the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs.”

There are, without question, students who feel hurt and unwelcome when faced with protests and speech condemning Israel as a genocidal apartheid state. Many Jewish people struggle to square such realities with the idealized notion of Israel we were raised with: that it is a noble and necessary state for Jewish safety.

I know, too, that there are Jewish students who fear that antisemitic groups and individuals are simply using opposition to Israel as a guise for anti-Jewish hate — there’s certainly historic precedent. And there are, as I noted, examples of genuine heightened antisemitism on campus. When Jewish people are targeted for being Jewish, we need to act with severity. Fear, however, does not make a protest against Israel, even a protest against its maintenance as a Jewish ethnostate, a protest against Jews.

“Treating feelings of fear and discomfort seriously does not mean reifying them.”

Institutions of higher education should be in the business of demystification, even when it involves challenging certain sensitive received wisdoms. We fail as educators if we permit the false lesson of all too many Zionist upbringings — that Palestinian freedom is a threat to Jewish safety — to persist for our students.

As Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia who has been perturbed by the treatment of pro-Palestine protest on campus, told me, “Treating feelings of fear and discomfort seriously does not mean reifying them.”

Howley, who is also Jewish, noted that, by the same logic, we would not want to validate the fear felt by a white student, conditioned under racist assumptions, who called the police because they felt afraid in the presence of a Black student.

“Capitulation to this sort of language of fear and unsafety in the absence of any real threat,” he said, “is a real betrayal of our actual responsibilities as teachers to the social emotional development of our students.”

Students and activists protest Columbia University’s decision to suspend the student group chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace for holding pro-Palestine events on campus, in Manhattan, N.Y., on Nov. 15, 2023. NY Daily News via Getty Images

More Than a Feeling

We might be tempted to hand it to the anti-woke right, who warned against the proliferation of “safe space” language and “therapy speak” as organizing forces at American universities. Such criticisms, though, rely on bad faith framings of anti-racist and diversity work — only the worst liberal iterations, although too common, exemplify the right-wing caricature of colleges privileging “snowflake” student feelings.

It is a different, more rigorous exercise entirely when students and professors proffer materially grounded, historically informed opposition to oppressive speech and discriminatory treatment on campus.

When the Hillel student group at the New School in New York City, where I teach, invited a lieutenant from the Israeli military to come speak on campus in early March, I was among several colleagues who signed a letter to our administration, requesting the planned event be canceled.

Among the reasons listed was that many students, above all Palestinians, would feel “utterly unsafe” to have an active-duty Israeli soldier on campus. This, I thought, was true, but a weak argument; the students might feel unsafe, but they would not be unsafe.

The letter’s far stronger claim was that, as a university founded on antiwar ideals and a purported commitment to liberatory principles, the school should not offer “a platform for an army that continues to violate international law and is actively engaged in perpetrating human rights abuses and the murder of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.” It is, I believe, valid to oppose a university hosting an active ranking officer of an army that has obliterated every single institution of higher education in Gaza.

Citing the importance of free speech, the university permitted the talk to proceed .

I’ve long argued against an absolutist approach to free speech on campuses and beyond; some oppressive speech, even if constitutionally protected, should not be platformed. Decisions about canceling speakers and banning certain speech, however, should not be a question of privileging certain peoples’ feelings and fears over others, however visceral the feelings might be.

Rather, we must — without presuming answers in advance — interrogate whether structures of oppression and violence are normalized and upheld in our educational institutions through these choices. The decisions will be imperfect and contested, but at least they will be based on more than feelings.

The post Pro-Israel Advocates Are Weaponizing “Safety” on College Campuses appeared first on The Intercept .