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

As Roe v Wade faces a direct challenge, criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, local judges and cops begin to lay out what it would look like to criminalize abortion.

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

“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 changes the calculus when it comes to what it would mean to go back to pre-Roe times,” said Lewis.

Criminal charges could come from specific abortion laws, but also from criminal codes that penalize attempted crimes, conspiracies and accomplices to crime, all relics laws developed during the US’s so-called war on drugs. Those laws “could subject a wide range of individuals to criminal penalties if Roe is overturned”, the NACDL report outlines, including prosecuting people from states where the procedure is illegal who attempt to seek abortions in states where it remains legal.

As Lewis and her co-authors laid out, there are thousands of laws like Louisiana’s across the country. What’s more, recent prosecutions of pregnant people also show how digital evidence can be used as powerful prosecutorial tools.

Source: The Guardian

Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in federal custody in 2019. His most notorious alleged accomplice now says her jailers are using it as an excuse to keep her under torturous conditions. What if she has a point?

The allegedly torturous conditions she’s been subjected to have not elicited much sympathy for Maxwell, and the Metropolitan Detention Center has faced little scrutiny over the conflict. “The media treats it as the whining of some privileged person,” the federal defense attorney Joshua Dratel said in an interview, approximating the general tone of news coverage: “‘She doesn’t like it because she can’t get a manicure.’”

In interviews, several defense lawyers with experience dealing with the Bureau of Prisons emphasized the agency’s ability to avoid oversight. “Because it’s a federal prison, it’s very protected from lawsuits,” the attorney Katie Rosenfeld said. “It’s very hard to sue the federal government and federal prison system.” Rosenfeld represents the family of Jamel Floyd, a 35-year-old who died of a heart attack in custody at the Metropolitan Detention Center after correctional officers pepper-sprayed him in his cell last year. Dratel, the federal defense lawyer, said the Bureau of Prisons lurches from “one crisis to the next with outrage and very little action,” describing it as “among the least accountable agencies you could find.”

The alleged severity of Maxwell’s treatment is no anomaly, defense attorneys say. “For her or any other defendant,” Dratel said, “it is that bad.” Over the last 16 months, reports have detailed how COVID-19 public health guidelines either haven’t been followed in jails or have exacerbated isolation. McMahon, the federal judge who recently criticized conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center and Metropolitan Correctional Center, made her remarks after Tiffany Days, who has been held at both, gave a harrowing account of her detention. “The cell that they put me in MCC, the ventilation was totally broke,” Days said at her April sentencing for drug conspiracy. “I would cry myself to sleep, teeth chattering, thinking at times I would die.”

Source: Vanity Fair