• “They never had anything on me,” says writer Alex O’Keefe, who was detained on a New York train last month for alleged disorderly conduct.
• A New York City administrative judge dismissed a civil summons against O’Keefe on Tuesday.

Writer Alex O’Keefe, whom police detained last month in a viral seating dispute on a New York City train, is off the hook for alleged disorderly conduct.

A New York City administrative judge dismissed a civil summons against former “The Bear” writer O’Keefe on Tuesday, ending its case against him. O’Keefe informed his Instagram followers that “the charges against me were dismissed” and “deemed by the judge facially insufficient.”

“That’s legal-ese for [‘BS’],” O’Keefe says in the video as he stands outside the courthouse. “They never had anything on me … they were trying to make an example of me.”

O’Keefe attorney Lindsay Lewis said in a Wednesday statement that the writer’s legal team “commends the Court for reaching the only just and correct result based on the law — a complete dismissal of the case.”

Last month, O’Keefe uploaded videos of the Sept. 18 incident to Instagram. He documented MTA police in New York placing him in handcuffs for alleged disorderly conduct. In the caption of his post, the speechwriter — who is Black — alleged that officials detained him on a train after an “old white woman” complained about how he was sitting. He claimed the woman took issue with the “one Black person on the train.”

The MTA Police Department confirmed it responded to a “report of a disorderly passenger” at the Fordham Metro-North station in the Bronx. A conductor reported that a 31-year-old passenger occupied two seats and “refused to remove his feet from one of the seats.”

Police accused O’Keefe of placing both his legs across an adjacent seat, violating the rail line’s rules. They also accused him of refusing police directions to exit the train onto the platform and to board a following train. O’Keefe delayed service “for several hundred other riders for six minutes,” police alleged, and was handcuffed and removed from the train.

In his Instagram post about the incident, O’Keefe alleged that a friend of the woman who scolded his manner of sitting told him, “You’re not the minority anymore.” He added that police “arrested” him without “even talking to the Karen who reported the one Black person on the train” and that only other Black passengers recorded the dispute.

Police refuted that and said O’Keefe “was not placed under arrest at any time” during the incident.

O’Keefe doubled down on his previous denials of wrongdoing in a statement shared Tuesday, writing, “I was harassed and detained for sitting while Black.

“Today, the court made a clear judgement: I did nothing illegal on September 18. Like millions of New Yorkers, I was going to work to earn a living and support my family,” he added. “Even though this absurd case was dismissed today, I will continue to defend the civil rights of every New Yorker. Every worker has a right to a safe commute.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: LA Times

Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, acknowledges having represented a wide variety of public officials — including senior Justice Department officials and Cabinet members — as they transitioned to jobs in the private sector, according to testimony in an arbitration hearing to resolve a lawsuit filed by an ex-colleague against her former legal recruiting business.

The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, accuses the chief justice of failing to acknowledge the full extent of his wife’s work in his ethical disclosures, presenting her as a salaried employee of her firm rather than one who receives commissions from law firms, some of which have cases before the Supreme Court.

A sworn affidavit backing the complaint was submitted by Kendal B. Price, a Massachusetts attorney and former colleague of Jane Roberts at the legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa, where Price was a managing director in the partner practice group.

A New York attorney who submitted the complaint on Price’s behalf, Joshua Dratel, said his client acted in part out of frustration that there is no official mechanism for raising ethics issues at the Supreme Court and due to previous reporting in POLITICO and elsewhere about ethics concerns at the high court. In September, POLITICO reported that gaps in ethical disclosures enabled justices, including Roberts, to shield their spouses’ clients who may have business before the court.

“The importance of this issue and the unavailability of any viable means of addressing this is what led to us sending it to the places that we sent it to,” Dratel said Tuesday. “This is a gap in transparency that’s only become more critical in the past year in terms of the impact that it has on the integrity of our institutions.”

Dratel, Price’s attorney, rejected the notion that Price leveled the complaint against the Robertses out of lingering spite over his firing or the failure of his legal action against the firm.

“We’re well down the road from that,” Dratel said. “This is about the nation and the integrity of the court and knowing something that contributes to that. … He didn’t publish this. He sent it to Congress.”

Source: Politico

Source: The New York Times

Source: The New Yorker

As former president Donald Trump prepares for trial on charges that he repeatedly violated government rules for handling classified information, his legal team may get a tactical timing advantage from an unlikely source: government rules for handling such secrets.

Trump’s indictment on dozens of charges, including mishandling classified documents and trying to obstruct investigators’ efforts to recover that material, means his case will be tried under the rules of the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA — a law that could, in theory, delay any trial until after the 2024 presidential election.

Joshua L. Dratel, a criminal defense attorney who handles national security cases, said the discovery process in cases involving classified materials typically takes much longer than in other types of criminal cases.

During discovery, Trump’s legal team would review the evidence that the government collected during its investigation, including the classified materials. But those classified materials can only be accessed in secure areas called sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs. For defense lawyers, that typically means a secure facility inside the federal courthouse, where they are prohibited from taking the materials out of the room. If they want to discuss classified material with potential witnesses, that too must be done in a SCIF.

“The preparation of those materials takes an inordinate amount of time. And it may be that the only way you can review the discovery materials is in there,” Dratel said. “You can’t put it on a laptop or read it on a train. There are a lot of limitations on access that extend the process of review.”

Defense lawyers in national security cases have long argued that this part of the CIPA law is unfair to defendants, because it gives prosecutors a detailed road map to the trial defense strategy well before the trial begins, and because so many of the legal debates are kept secret under seal, out of public view.

Source: The Washington Post

The latest — and grimmest — news in the weeks-long search for Noel Rodriguez-Alvarez came Tuesday, when investigators said they believe human remains were once contained in a shed on the Everman property where the missing 6-year-old lived.

Just days after Noel was reported missing last month, his mother, 37-year-old Cindy Rodriguez-Singh, and stepfather, Arshdeep Singh, fled the country with four of Noel’s biological siblings and two half-siblings.

Their flight was a one-way trip to India with a layover in Turkey. Noel was not listed as a passenger, and officials now believe he is dead.

Everman police Chief Craig Spencer said the department obtained arrest warrants for Rodriguez-Singh and Singh on charges of abandoning or endangering a child. The second-degree felony is punishable by no less than two years in prison.

Police are working with federal authorities to extradite them back to the U.S. from India, Singh’s native country, according to Spencer.

The U.S. has a treaty with India, which was signed in 1997. It states an offense is extraditable in either nation if it is punishable by “deprivation of liberty, including imprisonment,” for at least one year.

If the offense is determined to be extraditable, prosecutors work with the Department of Justice to prepare an extradition request.

“This is really a technically diplomatic and not a law-enforcement process,” said Joshua Dratel, a New York-based criminal defense attorney with experience in international extradition cases.

Dratel noted that federal offenses or offenses that affect the relationship between the two countries tend to receive more consideration than other requests. Additionally, he said, as a matter of “practicality,” both nations might divert more resources to cases with more severe charges, such as murder, over charges of abandoning or endangering a child.

Source: The Dallas Morning News

A return to illegal abortion will be a horror show in the U.S., the country already with the world’s largest law enforcement apparatus and largest incarcerated population. The new reality will cement the U.S.’ status as the country with the largest number of imprisoned women.

A national organization for defense attorneys has published a report that lays out a future in which the U.S. could undertake “rampant criminalization” and “mass incarceration on an unprecedented scale” in the name of “defense of the unborn.”

“States are laying the groundwork now, and have been laying the groundwork for criminal penalties that are completely different,” than the pre-Roe era, says Lindsay A. Lewis, a New York criminal defense attorney who co-authored a report on abortion for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys (NACDL).

“They are so much more advanced, and so much harsher than what existed before Roe was enacted.”

State legislatures have spent recent decades “modifying their criminal codes” in ways that “completely change the calculus when it comes to what it would mean to go back to pre-Roe times,” according to Lewis.

The lawyers warn that the states where the procedure is illegal are laying the groundwork to go after even those women who travel to other states where it is legal in order to get abortions denied in their home states.

Source: People's World