Faced with eroding federal protections, some states have tried to shore up voting rights. They have passed their own voting rights acts, banned partisan gerrymandering, and expanded the franchise. But their efforts are facing legal challenges as well, this time from the right, raising fresh questions as to what strategies can most effectively strengthen democracy.

Heading into this new political era, Bolts has identified eight legal battles that are likely to shape voting rights in 2025.

These cases will affect election rules locally, from redistricting in Florida and Louisiana to the future of mail ballots in Mississippi and the fate of new protections in New York. But their effects will also ripple nationwide, as other states eye how they may further buttress or cut down on voting.

1. Will a redistricting case out of Louisiana weaken the VRA?

Conservatives are pursuing a multi-pronged attack to eliminate what is left of the Voting Rights Act. Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, conservatives have objected with renewed vigor to the longstanding approach of considering race in redistricting to create minority-majority districts, arguing that race-based districting is unconstitutional.

Their effort is coming to a head this year in a blockbuster Supreme Court case that is centered around Louisiana’s congressional map.

After the 2020 census, Louisiana legislators approved a new congressional map that included only one Black-majority district, stretching from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. A lawsuit countered that this map diluted the power of Black voters, and that the Voting Rights Act required two Black-majority districts. After lengthy proceedings, the Fifth Circuit of Appeals sided with plaintiffs in late 2023 and ordered that a new map be drawn by January 2024. 

The legislature abided by the ruling, creating a second majority-Black district that goes from Baton Rouge in central Louisiana to Shreveport in the far northwest corner. The district elected Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat, in November.

But a group of mostly white voters, who describe themselves as “non-African American,” now wants to throw the new map out. They claim the legislature impermissibly relied on race to draw the districts, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Two Trump-appointed judges ruled last year that the map was likely unconstitutional and struck it down, though the Supreme Court stepped in and allowed it to be used in the 2024 election. 

The Supreme Court will hold hearings on this case in the spring of 2025. The justices will decide whether Louisiana’s new map survives by the end of their session in late June.

Complicating matters: The state of Louisiana is ostensibly defending the new map, but voting rights advocates have accused the state of deliberately undermining its own case. Louisiana officials already raised eyebrows last year when they chose to draw a new majority-Black district that bore a striking resemblance to a district that was struck down in the 1990s. Civil rights groups had pushed for a more compact design they deemed legally safer, and they suspected Republicans had different intentions. 

If the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs, it could gut Section 2 of the VRA, which shields minority-majority districts. Or, the court may introduce new restrictions on factoring in race in redistricting. Even if it doesn’t strike down Section 2, this would raise a host of new questions about its implementation and the viability of minority-majority districts nationwide. In either case, it would spell major trouble for Cleo Fields’s future in Congress.

2. How will courts treat new state-level Voting Rights Acts?

As the U.S. Supreme Court has trimmed the federal VRA, some states have stepped in to pass VRAs of their own. Though details vary depending on the state, they frequently go much further than federal law in safeguarding fairness in redistricting and access to the ballot. 

But these laws have sparked conservative challenges of their own. Last fall, a superior court judge in New York struck down the state’s VRA, concluding that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The case is now working its way through New York’s appeals process, an important test of the viability of state VRAs as an alternative to the federal law. Other VRAs have fared better in their own state’s courts so far, but still more states have adopted these laws in recent years (including New Mexico in 2023 and Minnesota last year), creating new battlegrounds to watch. 

3. Will mail ballots still be afforded a grace period to arrive?

In 18 states, mail ballots can trickle into election offices after Election Day, as long as they’ve been postmarked by Election Day. The approach helps people vote by mail without needing to worry about possible delays in delivery, but it also lengthens election counts, and Republicans have accused it without evidence of facilitating voter fraud. 

In a bombshell ruling in October, a panel of conservative federal judges threw this longstanding practice into question. The case will continue in 2025 and possibly create new obstacles to mail voting.

The Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party last year challenged Mississippi’s rule, which allows ballots to arrive up to five days after Election Day, arguing that it conflicts with a federal law that sets the date of the election. Three Trump-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit agreed. They ruled that “ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials” by the “day of the election,” though they did not apply their holding to the 2024 elections. Several voter groups have asked the full Fifth Circuit to hear the case; their appeal may end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, which could swat away the ruling. 

But the Supreme Court could also apply the rule nationwide, affecting all of the states that allow ballots to arrive after Election Day. This would risk disenfranchising thousands of voters. Administrative delays and errors in sending ballots out are common enough, and a requirement that ballots be received by Election Day would put voters at the mercy of how quickly the U.S. Postal Service operates. Trump has evoked the prospect of privatizing USPS, which could add further complications.

4. Will GOP states succeed at criminalizing voter assistance?

GOP-run states have passed new bans in recent years on civic organizations helping people vote. They’ve made it harder to provide assistance with registration, to fill out requests for mail ballots, and to collect filled-out ballots.

Just last year, Alabama adopted a law that imposes lengthy prison sentences on paid organizers who help people vote by mail. A new Missouri law similarly restricts assisting people with absentee ballots and with voter registration. And Florida barred non-citizens from assisting with voter registration efforts.

These bans on voter assistance now all face legal tests. All three suffered early defeats in 2024; the Florida and Alabama laws were suspended or struck down by a federal district court, and a state court judge blocked Missouri’s. But proponents of the bans have appealed to salvage the laws. These cases in 2025 will shape how similar restrictions evolve around the country.

5. Will lifetime disenfranchisement survive two lawsuits in Virginia?

Youngkin has made Virginia one of the harshest states in the nation when it comes to restoring the voting rights of people with criminal convictions. Two years ago, he rescinded policies put in place by his predecessors and brought back a lifetime ban on voting for anyone convicted of a felony. 

The ACLU of Virginia and other groups have filed an unusual lawsuit in response: They claim that Youngkin’s decision violates the Virginia Readmission Act, the Reconstruction-era federal law that allowed Virginia to rejoin the United States. In an effort to limit schemes to exclude Black residents, Congress in 1870 restricted the range of felonies that Virginia can use to strip people of the right to vote. Yet, Virginia today disenfranchises people who’ve been convicted of any felony whatsoever; the practice disproportionately affects Black Virginians.

The case is now poised to go to trial in federal court, after the Fourth Circuit greenlit the lawsuit in December. Jared Davidson, a co-counsel for the plaintiff, has said the case is a “milestone in terms of ensuring that the promises and guarantees of the Reconstruction Congress are finally fulfilled and honored by the state of Virginia.”

Virginia’s felony disenfranchisement rules are also the target of a separate lawsuit, this one brought by George Hawkins, a Virginian profiled by Bolts in 2023 who expected to regain his voting rights until Youngkin cut down his hopes. The lawsuit alleges that Virginia’s new rules violate the First Amendment. A district court ruled in favor of the state last year, and this case currently sits with the Fourth Circuit.

If courts strike down Virginia’s approach in either case this year, it may expand the franchise just in time for the state’s elections that will decide, among other offices, Youngkin’s successor. 

6. How will eligible voters be affected by measures targeting noncitizens?

Donald Trump and his allies have relentlessly spread the false claim that non-citizens are illegally voting in significant numbers in U.S. elections, and Republican state officials have taken a range of actions in response. Arizona and New Hampshire have passed laws requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship at the time of registration; the rule is tripping up many people who are citizens but lack the proper documentation. And in the final stretch of the 2024 election, several GOP-led states purged their voter rolls, claiming they were getting rid of alleged non-citizens. But the purges affected U.S. citizens who were eligible to vote. 

This issue is sure to keep grabbing legal headlines in 2025. 

Voting rights advocates have battled Arizona’s law for years, pointing out that the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, shields voters from needing to prove their citizenship. The Supreme Court last summer allowed parts of the law to be enforced in the 2024 elections, but the case remains alive in the Ninth Circuit. In September, voting rights advocates also filed a similar suit against the New Hampshire law. Should federal courts end up ruling that the NVRA authorizes proof-of-citizenship requirements, it may open the floodgate to similar laws in other states. Republicans in Congress have also signaled this will be a priority for them at the federal level.

And Virginia’s upcoming elections will be fought in the shadow of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s decision to order a big voter purge last summer. Youngkin issued his order 90 days before the presidential race, even though the NVRA bars “systematically” purging voters within 90 days of a federal election. A lawsuit to block his order saw some early success but, in a shock order, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened and allowed the purges to continue with no explanation. 

The case will still be heard in lower court to determine the legality of Youngkin’s purge. The result may set important precedent, not just for purges in other parts of the country, but also for how Youngkin himself acts in the lead-up to Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November.

7. Will courts allow noncitizens to vote in New York’s local elections?

Across the country, even as nativist rhetoric has amped up, some municipalities have gone in the opposite direction: They’ve allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, with the idea of giving them a voice in the decisions closest to them. 

But conservatives have sued to stop these laws, arguing that they dilute the political power of citizens. Federal law does not prohibit allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, so these lawsuits are usually playing out in state court. San Francisco, Washington, D.C, and multiple towns in Vermont have managed to implement this reform in recent years despite litigation to stop them. 

But with just months to go before New York City’s municipal elections this summer, this reform remains stuck in the country’s most populous city. The city council passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens to vote in its local elections in late 2021, but a local judge struck it down in the spring of 2022 and an appeals court affirmed that ruling last year. The city council has since appealed the decision to the state’s highest court, but there’s been no development since.

8. Will Florida judges destroy protections against gerrymandering?

Floridians in 2010 embraced redistricting reform. They approved two constitutional amendments that barred partisan and racial gerrymandering and set up other measures to force lawmakers to draw fair maps. After GOP lawmakers largely ignored those requirements, the state supreme court in 2015 struck down their maps for violating the 2010 measures. Significantly, this produced a new Black-majority congressional district that connected Tallahassee to Jacksonville in north Florida, which elected Democrat Al Lawson in 2016.

Urged on by Governor Ron DeSantis, Republicans in 2022 adopted new aggressive gerrymanders and eliminated Lawson’s seat. And this decade, the voting rights groups that are challenging the maps are faced with a judiciary that has veered sharply to the right during DeSantis’ tenure. This has left the Fair District Amendments on the brink of irrelevance.

The Florida Supreme Court heard a lawsuit against the state’s new congressional map in September. The plaintiffs argued that the state diluted Black political representation by eliminating the Black-majority district in North Florida, in violation of the 2010 amendments. “Under Florida precedent from last decade, this is an open and shut case,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR at the time.

Instead, Chief Justice Carlos Muniz, a DeSantis appointee, raised the prospect that the 2010 Fair Districts Amendments might be unconstitutional altogether—and that the court might strike it down. 

While this court always appeared unlikely to strike down the legislature’s map, striking down the fair districting requirements entirely would be another matter. There would be no more protection against partisan gerrymandering in the Florida Constitution, allowing Republicans going forward to freely gerrymander without even the feeble threat of state court intervention.

Honorable mentions

There can be no exhaustive list of the challenges that await democracy in 2025, and there are plenty of other state-specific legal battles that are already brewing.

In the final days of 2024, North Carolina Republicans passed legislation that upended election administration, stripping the Democratic governor of his authority over election boards and transferring that power to an office held by a Republican; Democrats have signaled they will sue over these changes. Wisconsin awaits a supreme court decision on the fate of Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election administrator whom Republicans hope to fire. And today, Pennsylvania’s supreme court said it will decide whether mail ballots that have not been dated should count; the state has a complex legal landscape when it comes to mail voting.

And the upcoming legislative sessions may create new sources of litigation if states pass laws that affect voting rights. For instance, an Idaho lawmaker just introduced legislation to make it harder to pass ballot instance; the state supreme court struck down a prior round of restrictions on direct democracy at the beginning of this decade.

The post On Voting Rights, Eight Legal Battles to Watch in 2025  appeared first on Bolts.

Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

The findings come at a time when the police department’s targeting of Black neighborhoods with thousands of traffic stops has come under increased scrutiny, following the March killing of Dexter Reed, who was shot 13 times by five plainclothes officers just seconds after being pulled over for a seatbelt violation. The officers said Reed fired at them first.

While many police departments across the country have moved away from the use of traffic stops as a crime-fighting strategy, Chicago remains a stark outlier, with more stops per capita than most major cities, according to a recent analysis by the New York Times.

Pulling over drivers for minor traffic infractions like a broken tail light, or turning without a signal has been a central part of Chicago’s policing tactics for nearly a decade. Officers have used targeted enforcement of minor traffic issues in Black and Latinx neighborhoods as a way to find and remove illegal guns from the streets. The goal, former top police officials have said, is to deter drivers from carrying guns and drugs. Critics say the practice is, at best, an ineffective waste of city resources, and, at worst, an illegal violation of people’s rights that puts drivers and officers in harm’s way.

Snelling has pledged to change course, and earlier this year launched a process to bring traffic enforcement under the oversight of the federal consent decree CPD has been under since 2019. Community groups and advocates pushed back on this effort, arguing the slow-moving consent decree process would delay real traffic stop reform. The sweeping set of court-ordered reforms was designed to address patterns of discriminatory misconduct, excessive force, and rights abuses found to be prevalent in the department, but so far the department has fully met just seven percent of its obligations under the decree. 

The significant number of undocumented traffic stops threatens to undermine any reform efforts and obscures the true impact of the police encounters from oversight groups, preventing them from fully understanding which drivers are stopped, and where in the city they are concentrated.

As Snelling moves to bring traffic stops under federal oversight, the lack of transparency also calls into question whether the department will make a good faith effort to curb the problematic police conduct, or if leaders will instead just sweep those patterns out of view from the public.

“It is quite concerning, especially if CPD is intentionally not recording traffic stops so they can claim they’re fixing the problem, when all they’re doing is hiding it behind an absence of data,” said Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal System & Policing Project at the ACLU of Illinois. 

Snelling declined to be interviewed for this report. A spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment.

When asked about the unreported stops, the police department’s public relations staff stood by the publicly-reported numbers.

“The Chicago Police Department is committed to implementing substantive and lasting reforms rooted in constitutional policing as we work to build trust in our communities. Superintendent Snelling is committed to ensuring traffic stops are being used effectively,” a Snelling spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

200,000 traffic stops missing from reports to state last year

Traffic stops have grown increasingly central to the reform goals of civil rights and police accountability groups in Chicago since the department began to reel in the use of pedestrian stops nearly a decade ago. Police moved away from the controversial tactic known as stop-and-frisk after a wave of scrutiny launched by the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, as well as the botched investigation and coverup by police, prosecutors, and the mayor. The following year, the ACLU of Illinois released a report finding officers regularly targeted Black Chicagoans and violated their Fourth Amendment rights using stop-and-frisk; the city eventually agreed to a legal settlement to begin to reduce the practice.

But as footstops plunged, traffic enforcement in Black neighborhoods soared. Many dubbed this pattern the new stop-and-frisk; police were still initiating millions of encounters with civilians to fish for guns and evidence of other crimes, but by stopping cars rather than pedestrians.

Watchdogs were able to sound the alarm on the massive increase in traffic stops in Black neighborhoods thanks to the Illinois Traffic Stop Study, a 2003 law that requires law enforcement agencies to report the details of every traffic stop to the Illinois Department of Transportation, including a car’s make and model, the driver’s race, and the justification for the stop. With this granular level of data, the state’s racial profiling oversight board is supposed to identify troubling disparities and advise police departments to make changes.

The study has repeatedly shown clear disparities in how often officers pulled over Black drivers. In 2020, Chicago police stopped Black drivers at seven times the rate of white drivers and searched Black drivers or their cars more than three times as often. The ACLU of Illinois sued the city in 2023 on behalf of five drivers who alleged they were racially profiled and had their rights violated in dozens of traffic stops, many of which were not reported.

But the board has never had an accurate picture of the full scope of traffic stops, because the numbers Chicago police reported to the state didn’t match their own internal records.

Our analysis of the radio dispatch data found nearly 200,000 traffic stops last year that were not properly documented or reported to the state.

Traffic stops have, in fact, been falling since early 2023, but not by as much as the state data appears to show. According to the publicly reported data, Chicago police made about 74,000 fewer stops from January through April, a 35 percent drop from the same period last year. But the police dispatch data shows the true reduction in stops was less than 59,000.

“It presents issues for effective oversight and accountability. If you don't know what's happening on the ground, it is hard to make accurate judgments about it. But the data that does exist does paint a pretty clear picture,” said Amy Thompson, an attorney for Impact for Equity who also sits on the state racial profiling oversight board.

She said the board is developing a survey to uncover why some police departments are not in compliance with the law, but it is only an advisory panel that doesn’t have the authority to make sure police are accurately reporting stops.

Data reported to the state in the first half of this year show the gap between stops of Black and white drivers narrowing to three times as many, according to an analysis by WBEZ Chicago.

But with so many stops happening off-the-books, those reports are a misleading portrayal of the purported improvements. Since the radio communications data doesn’t track details like the race of the driver and whether officers did a search, watchdogs groups can’t calculate the extent of the disparities in the off-the-books stops.

"It raises the concern that potentially the stops that are missing are ones where there are harms that are not being surfaced, or where there are particularly egregious incidents that are happening,” Thompson said.

CPD did not answer questions about why there are so many traffic stops logged in the radio system with no paper trail. But two former Chicago Police commanders said in interviews that a small amount of the discrepancy could be due to dispatchers mistakenly logging other kinds of officer activity like a footstop as a traffic stop, or by backlogs of paper traffic stop documents that are delayed from being entered into the record-keeping system or lost altogether.

Jacquez Beasley, one of the drivers suing the city over the traffic stops, suspects his experience of being searched without consent during a traffic stop is far more common for Black drivers than police report to the public.

When he and his brother were pulled over for plate violation in 2021 by a plainclothes officer in an unmarked SUV, the situation quickly spiraled out of control, Beasley said in an interview. After asking Beasley and his brother for identification, the officer called for backup, he said. Within minutes, a large group of undercover cops swarmed the car, ordered them to get out of their car, and detained them.

"The way they flooded the scene, the way they pulled up like that, it escalated so quick. They went from asking my name to putting my brother in cuffs in just minutes,” Beasley said. 

When they asked to search Beasley’s car, he felt he didn’t really have much of a choice. "There was no cause to even search the car. But I knew there wasn't any saying no. I just wanted to get it over with,” he said.

The search turned up nothing, and Beasley was never ticketed for the traffic infraction, he said. The officers still should have made a detailed account of the encounter, under the state law, but there is no record in the traffic stop data that the officers stopped and searched Beasley and his brother, according to the lawsuit. Beasley said he believes officers didn’t bother to report the traffic stop because they didn’t find any drugs or weapons to justify the unnecessary search.

“They didn't find anything. If they found something, they would’ve put the report in. But when they screw up, they want to make themselves look good,” Beasley said.

A previous investigation by Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch found Chicago Police use traffic stops in Black neighborhoods to target illegal gun possession, though officers had to make over 150 stops for each gun found. And even when officers did make a gun arrest, they often failed to report that the arrest began with a traffic stop.

Missing Chicago police data hinders oversight efforts

In the aftermath of the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and the scathing Department of Justice investigation that followed, a constellation of police oversight agencies were created in Chicago to address the department’s history of unconstitutional and discriminatory policing.

All of those bodies have been stymied by the department’s inconsistent record-keeping and lack of transparency.

The independent monitors assigned to oversee the city’s reform of stop-and-frisk under the settlement with the ACLU of Illinois noted in a series of reports the “unknown quantity” of missing stop-and-frisk documents made it difficult to assess whether officers were complying with the new standards. The monitoring team made recommendations to improve transparency, but unreported stops persisted.

An inquiry last year by Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg into how long it takes for Chicago Police to respond to 911 calls for help was similarly limited by missing data in up to half of all 911 calls. This prevented any analysis of disparities in 911 response times across the city and the factors that contribute to delayed responses, according to the report. 

A separate OIG investigation into use-of-force incidents found Black Chicagoans are far more likely to be stopped, searched, and have an encounter with police escalate into a physical altercation. But the Inspector General’s findings were again limited by unreliable data marked by undocumented encounters.

In the course of investigating patterns in use-of-force incidents, Witzburg’s team examined data on the encounters where such complaints often emerge, including traffic stops. Police provided investigators with data only from traffic stops where officers filled out the required documents—but not those tracked through radio communication records.

"There's a reason that CPD members are required to collect that data on every traffic stop. It is so that oversight entities and the department itself and community stakeholders can get a complete view of the department's traffic stop activity. That only works if they are, in fact, collecting all the data,” Witzburg told Bolts and Injustice Watch.

Although this investigation confirms CPD leadership internally tracks undocumented traffic stops using radio communications data, the Inspector General’s report notes that the police department “was not able to provide OIG with any empirical estimate of rates of unreported or improperly reported stops or uses of force.”

Of the various oversight bodies meant to check CPD’s authority, only the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) can investigate misconduct allegations and punish individual officers. It, too, has dealt with incomplete data in completing its investigations.

The most common complaints the office receives involve claims an officer stopped or searched someone in violation of their rights. During the course of those investigations, the agency regularly disciplines officers for failing to report the stop that resulted in the complaint, COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten said in an interview. In those situations, COPA must use other means, such as GPS and bodycam footage, to gather details about the misconduct incident.

"We're not necessarily limited in our ability to hold officers accountable and find information and evidence about those traffic stops. But we are limited by who complains about them,” Kersten said. “If there is no documentation about these stops, or we don't receive a citizen complaint, then we are not going to have any knowledge that it happened.”

Since 2022, COPA has expanded its capacity to follow patterns across misconduct incidents that point to an underlying issue in police procedures that the agency can advise to fix, Kersten said. The agency's Policy Research and Analysis Division is currently laying the groundwork for a study of the trends around the undocumented stops that COPA's investigators regularly flag, Kersten said. 

"The fatal shooting of Dexter Reed, and the nature of that stop, it shines an unfortunate light on the fact that we as a city need to better understand why this is a police tool that is being used, and what harms it may be causing,” Kersten said. "We are looking at trends across districts. We are looking at trends across different types of officers, to identify if there are unique patterns.”

Community advocates push for new traffic stop policies

Even before the police killing of Dexter Reed, a large coalition of community groups and advocates have called for police to adopt a formal policy to conduct fewer traffic stops. 

In April, Snelling asked U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees the federal consent decree, to bring traffic stops under the court’s supervision. 

Many advocates would prefer that traffic stops come under the purview of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, an oversight body created in 2021 which has the power to set police policy and call for the removal of a superintendent. The commission has asked Pallmeyer to avoid overtaking the community oversight’s role in monitoring traffic stops, since the panel has no authority to set policy on issues under federal supervision.

Advocacy groups have presented the commission with a policy agenda that has three main components: banning officers from using traffic enforcement to fish for unrelated crime, limiting traffic stops for non-safety violations, and restricting officers from asking drivers for consent to search them without suspicion of criminal activity. The commission will have a public hearing on Aug. 27 to gather input on how communities want the commission to intervene, and what a policy would look like. 

A number of U.S. cities have begun to phase out some traffic stops as a primary crime deterrent strategy, saying the risk for racially-biased harm outweighs potential public safety benefits. Philadelphia was the first major city to ban low-level traffic stops as a way to prevent racial profiling in 2021, and since then, a wave of cities including San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Minneapolis have implemented similar policies.

“A number of cities have policies that refocus police away from making minor stops to prioritize activities that actually affect traffic safety, like dangerous driving,” said Daniella Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national policy group. 

Some jurisdictions that have limited officers from making non-safety traffic stops have been able to focus resources on moving violations and drunk driving, resulting in safer roads and lower racial disparities, studies show.

“There are benefits to road safety itself, in addition to mitigating the erosion of trust and disparate impact that these kinds of stops result in,” Gilbert said. 

Prosecutors in Ramsey County, Minnesota, home to St. Paul, said in 2021 that they would stop charging arrests stemming solely from non-public-safety traffic stops, five years after a police officer in a nearby suburb killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop for a broken taillight. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recently said her office would follow suit, but with just a few months left in office, it’s unclear if Foxx’s proposal will be implemented or maintained by her successor.

In the meantime, advocates are continuing to press for a stronger CPD policy to reduce the number of unnecessary stops, but any such efforts will be hampered as long as CPD continues to underreport traffic stops.

As the federal court mulls bringing traffic stops under the consent decree, there’s skepticism among residents and civil rights groups that anything will change soon. They’re disillusioned by Chicago Police’s already extremely low compliance with the consent decree reforms and the department’s track record of misleading oversight agencies to avoid accountability, said C.M.D. Chiimeh, an organizer for Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, at the consent decree hearing.

“It is evident the current approach is ineffective and inefficient. The issues surrounding pretextual traffic stops need to be addressed now. And it has been proven the consent decree is incapable of doing that," Chiimeh said. "Putting this issue in the consent decree … would only continue to perpetuate overpolicing, degrade community trust, perpetuate racial disparities, and squander valuable resources associated with CPD's handling of traffic stops.”

The post Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year appeared first on Bolts.

In the capital city of Richmond, 96 percent of people who agreed to waive their Fourth Amendment rights in 2020 were people of color, data obtained by Bolts show. The city’s population was 45 percent Black and eight percent Hispanic. That same year in Lynchburg, Virginia, the second largest city, Black people accounted for 78 percent of all plea waivers signed, while they only made up 28 percent of the population. 

The practice, known as a Fourth Amendment waiver, permits police to search a person, their home, or vehicle for a specified number of years after a conviction, even if they’ve completed their sentence of incarceration or parole, and regardless of proof they committed a crime. People living under the waiver cannot challenge the legality of anything police find during a search. Lengths of the waivers can stretch long beyond probationary periods—prosecutors have ordered some people to waive their Fourth Amendment rights for as long as 20 years, according to data obtained by Virginia advocacy group Justice Forward through public records requests and shared with Bolts. 

Prosecutors say the waivers improve public safety. Colette McEachin, the commonwealth attorney for the city of Richmond since 2019, told Bolts the waivers are “very effective” in resolving cases and put people “on notice” once they’re released from incarceration. She also said the waivers prevent people from reacting violently to otherwise unlawful police searches. “They are aware that they’ve given up that right, because they had to sign an agreement that says that. Hopefully there will not be a dangerous situation where they are upset that law enforcement is searching them.” 

Defense attorneys, however, say the policy protects police who violate the constitution. 

“It encourages bad policing,” Lauren Whitley, chief public defender for the city of Fredericksburg and the counties of Spotsylvania, King George, and Stafford counties, told Bolts. “Fourth Amendment waivers give [police] free rein to do whatever they want. So there’s no consequence for them acting inappropriately or unprofessionally. I think that’s a real problem.”

Across the country, roughly 95 percent of cases in state courts are resolved through plea bargains. Prosecutors in some Virginia counties make the waiver a mandatory condition of a plea bargain, and people who choose not to accept them face the threat of a longer sentence after a trial.

That presents defendants with an “impossible choice,” Whitley says. “Your choice is either to go to trial or to accept the plea deal with the Fourth waiver.” She said the waivers are a standard condition of most plea deals in the localities where she works. 

Prosecutors can ask people to waive protections such as the right to a jury trial, the right to see evidence against them, or the right to erase their record later as a condition of a plea deal. Fourth Amendment waivers also happen across the U.S., in states including California, Georgia, and Idaho. 

Virginia was slated to abolish the practice earlier this year, when legislators passed a bill along party lines that would have prohibited plea deals and court orders that “waive, release, or extinguish” defendants’ Fourth Amendment rights. State Senator Saddam Azlan Salim, a Democrat who has backed criminal justice reform legislation in the past, was the sponsor. 

Supporters of the legislation cited concerns about prosecutors disproportionately leveraging the waivers against people of color. Governor Glenn Youngkin, however, killed the legislation in March, vetoing it along with 21 other criminal justice-related bills, stating they “undermine public safety.” (His office did not return a request for comment from Bolts on why he specifically vetoed the Fourth Amendment waiver bill.) 

Aaron Boone, the chief public defender in Lynchburg, says Fourth Amendment protections shouldn’t be up for discussion. “I think the specter of somebody losing a right, particularly a right of that kind of importance, should quite frankly, just be taken off the table. When your rights become negotiable they become cheap. I mean that’s the bottom line.”

Defense attorneys also worry that Fourth Amendment waivers exacerbate racial disparities in policing. Richmond police have already been found to stop Black people at a rate of five times higher than white people. Between July 2020 and December 2020, 77 percent of drivers stopped by Richmond police were Black while just 15 percent were white, according to a federal lawsuit alleging that city police discriminated against Black people. 

Typically, police must have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime to stop and search them. But once a person signs away their Fourth Amendment rights, police are allowed to stop them at random. There’s no way to track the full scope of how often police stop people with Fourth Amendment waivers because the searches typically aren’t logged unless police find something. 

While Virginians on supervised release already agree to allow probation officers to randomly search their homes and vehicles, the Fourth Amendment waivers take these searches to the extreme; the search privileges outlined under the waivers go beyond what probation officers may search.

“You can be walking down the street, and a uniformed law enforcement officer can stop you, recognize you, and know that you have a waiver and then proceed to just search you without any cause,” said Rob Poggenklass, executive director of Justice Forward Virginia.

Police also stop people without knowing they have a waiver. For example, officers who find something during a search can go back to their database and see whether that person signed away their rights. If they have, police can then use the evidence they found during the search in court even if they didn’t have probable cause to stop the person in the first place. 

Ashley Shapiro, a public defender in Richmond who says her clients are often made to choose between accepting a waiver or a tougher sentence, argues that the waivers have provided a shield for police to illegally stop people. “Usually it’s that they stop people on the street for no reason and then get lucky that they happen to have a Fourth Amendment waiver,” she said. 

The waivers are often wide-reaching. A copy of a Richmond plea agreement including a waiver states a person waiving their rights “shall submit to search and seizure of his person, property, place of residence, vehicle and personal effects, at any time of day or night by any law enforcement officer with or without a search warrant, warrant of arrest or reasonable cause for a period of 3 years from the date of his release from active incarceration.” 

As the founder of Nolef Turns, a Richmond advocacy group for people entangled in the criminal justice system, Sheba Williams hosts workshops teaching attendees about how to stand up for their rights. But it’s not uncommon for Williams to hear from people who already waived their ability to assert their Fourth Amendment rights. The decision to forfeit, she said, is often made under duress. 

“Most people who are like, ‘Okay, well, I’m going to sign this agreement and I want to be free earlier or get sentenced to probation,’ aren’t thinking about how long this can actually go on,” said Williams. “So a person will say, ‘Well, look, I just want to be free. I just want it to be three years versus 30.’ And a lot of people are signing this right away.”

McEachin, the Richmond commonwealth attorney, said she looks at the facts of each case before deciding whether to ask for a waiver as part of a plea deal. In drug and gun cases, she said, asking a person to give up their Fourth Amendment protections is particularly important. “Those are the individuals who we want to be able to search in the future, if you’ve developed information that they have resumed criminal behavior,” she said. 

When asked about the data showing that roughly 96 out of every 100 people with waivers in Richmond are people of color, McEachin insisted her office’s use of them is not racially discriminatory. 

“I think that probably most of the people who have been charged are African American, or brown or Latino,” she conceded, but continued, “I think that everybody who’s an adult always has difficult choices, and this probably is a difficult choice. But it is a difficult choice that that person has arrived at through their own actions.” 

Use of the waivers often comes down to the discretion of individual prosecutors, and it varies across Virginia. Vikram Kapil, the head public defender for the southern counties of Halifax, Mecklenburg, and Lunenburg, said that only prosecutors in Lunenburg County try to include them in plea deals, especially for drug offenses. “We’re pushing back on it,” he said. “We generally say, ‘No, you shouldn’t do this.’ It’s tough telling someone who’s sitting in jail who isn’t able to go see their family and see their loved ones.” 

In Lynchburg, prosecutors previously used the threat of harsher sentences typically handed down by juries to convince people to take plea deals with the waivers. But after the passage of sentencing reforms in 2020 that provided protections against unfair sentences, prosecutors no longer had this tool to force the deals.

 “A lot of their leverage disappeared,” said Boone. “Also we made a concerted effort as a public defender’s office here to highly discourage people from taking these kinds of plea offers that include these things.” There’s no publicly available updated data on the application of the waivers but Boone said they are now used sparingly. 

Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, the commonwealth attorney for Arlington County, doesn’t use the waivers at all. Dehghani-Tafti, a former public defender who won on a reform platform, said their use makes it harder for people to successfully re-enter society. “We shouldn’t be trying to make it easy to convict them again, we should be instead trying to give them the support and the tools that they need to not get in trouble again,” she told Bolts. 

There was little opposition to the bill to abolish the waivers. The powerful Virginia Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys was the only organization to come out against the legislation. “Fourth amendment waivers are a tool prosecutors may use for a few reasons, including for the benefit of the defendant and public safety,” Amanda Howie, administrator of the association, wrote in an email to Bolts. (Prosecutors in leadership of the organization did not respond to requests for comment).

While the governor’s veto allows prosecutors across the state to continue imposing the waivers, the Virginia Court of Appeals limited their reach last month, ruling that they do not extend to body cavity searches. The appeal centered on Lynchburg police attempting to reach inside a man’s buttocks on the side of the road following a 2020 traffic stop. The officers said they smelled marijuana and searched him because he had a waiver. 

The court reversed the conviction that resulted from the search, finding that even though the man consented to waive his rights against illegal searches, “consent to warrantless searches of a person in general, even when provided pursuant to plea agreement, does not include consent to intrusive searches of private areas in or on the body.”

The post “An Impossible Choice”: Virginians Asked to Waive Constitutional Rights to Get a Plea Deal appeared first on Bolts.

“The court didn’t make it any easier to win voting rights cases,” redistricting expert Justin Levitt told Bolts at the time. “It just declined to make it much, much, much, much, much, much harder.”

But the reprieve may have been temporary, and winning voting rights cases may still get much harder this year. A series of cases are working their way through federal courts that represent grave threats to Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits denying the right to vote “on account or race or color,” language that extends into protection against racial gerrymandering. 

In these cases, conservatives are trying out a suite of new legal arguments, each of which would dramatically narrow the scope of the VRA. The cases are still making their way through district and appellate courts, with some early rulings favoring conservatives, at times authored by judges nominated by Donald Trump. Many are expected to end up at the Supreme Court, where members of the conservative majority have already expressed skepticism at various aspects of the VRA. 

Judges will decide if critical protections afforded by Section 2 of the VRA remain applicable to the present, whether the law applies to statewide races and coalition districts, and even whether voting rights groups can ever bring a lawsuit under Section 2—a sleeper case that already detonated in an appeals court last fall. The most acute stakes concern the rules of redistricting, with officials in GOP-run states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas proposing new interpretations that would fuel gerrymandering and undercut the voting power of communities of color. 

Here is your roadmap to four major legal threats that may further unravel the VRA in 2024, and what cases you should be watching.

1. What if private plaintiffs can no longer sue?

What is the threat to the VRA?

For decades, ordinary citizens and voting-rights organizations have brought lawsuits alleging VRA violations. These lawsuits, and the mountain of legal work and research that goes into them, have been critical to getting courts to strike down discriminatory legislation and create districts that allow communities of color to be represented by candidates of their choice.

In what’s undoubtedly the biggest threat facing the VRA, federal courts might invalidate that entire approach. Conservatives have made the case that only the U.S. Attorney General has the power to sue over violations of Section 2 of the VRA, and they landed a startling ruling by a district court judge last year. If the ruling stands, it would ban private parties from bringing these lawsuits, massively shrinking enforcement; when the Department of Justice is controlled by politicians hostile to civil rights, it may eliminate these VRA lawsuits altogether. 

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, the challenge to Arkansas’s state legislative districts. 

After Arkansas Republicans drew new legislative maps in 2021, the state NAACP sued in federal court, arguing that Black Arkansans were underrepresented, and that this violated Section 2 of the VRA. But the district court judge who heard the case, Trump-appointee Lee Rudofsky, questioned whether the NAACP was even allowed to bring suit at all. 

It’s been a long-established practice for private parties to sue over Section 2 allegations. But Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas encouraged that question to be revisited in a 2021 concurrence, stating that courts have “assumed” that this is appropriate without ever deciding it. Walking into that breach, with an explicit appeal to Gorsuch, Rudofsky ended up dismissing the suit with a bombshell finding: “Only the Attorney General of the United States can bring a case like this one.” 

In November, a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, one of the most conservative appellate courts in the country, affirmed that ruling in a decision authored by Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras.

If the ruling holds—the NAACP has asked the full Eighth Circuit to reconsider the decision, and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely regardless—it would be sure to sideline a great many VRA cases. Besides the Arkansas litigation, high-profile cases last year that led to new maps in Alabama and Louisiana were brought by private plaintiffs, and would have been dismissed outright under Stras’ ruling.

The GOP has rushed to defend the holding and use it in other contexts. In December, the Republican attorneys general of twelve states (including Idaho’s Raul Labrador, Kansas’ Kris Kobach, and Texas’ Ken Paxton, all prominent far-right figures) signed on to an amicus brief asking the Fifth Circuit to take on the Eighth Circuit’s interpretation and rule against voting rights groups in the ongoing litigation around Alabama’s congressional map.

And in North Dakota, a state that falls within the Eighth Circuit, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe successfully challenged legislative districts in 2023 for diminishing the voting power of Native voters. State officials have agreed to use a replacement map for the 2024 election but have appealed the use of the map beyond that point. And in pushing back against the ruling last month, North Dakota’s Republican Secretary of State, Michael Howe, has already invoked the same argument that private parties cannot bring suits under Section 2 of the VRA, an argument that would outright silence the legal power of the two tribes that challenged the state.

2. The conservative case that times have changed

What is the threat to the VRA?

When the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down Section 5 of the VRA, which required certain jurisdictions to seek D.O.J. approval before changing their voting procedures, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “things have changed dramatically” in the South since 1965.

Some conservatives want federal courts to go even further, and dramatically re-interpret Section 2 on that same basis. And Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year gave them a reason to keep trying, doing so in the very same Alabama case in which he sided with the liberal justices to otherwise save the VRA. He noted that Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion in the case argued that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” But Kavanaugh wrote that “Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.” The time may now be coming that’ll test Kavanaugh: Despite the massive barriers that people of color continue to face in exercising the franchise, multiple cases are working their way through the legal system in which defendants are renewing the argument that “things have changed” too much to keep enforcing Section 2.

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Milligan v. Allen, the continued litigation over Alabama’s congressional map, and Robinson v. Landry, the challenge to Louisiana’s congressional map 

Alabama this year will vote under a new congressional map that a federal court drew in late 2023 to create an additional district likely to elect a Black candidate. State officials have objected to the new map, and in so doing they’ve picked up on Kavanaugh’s argument: Alabama is asking courts to decide whether “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting extends to the present day,” regardless of its original justification. 

Louisiana officials have made a similar claim in their effort to fight court rulings that have struck down the state’s congressional maps as violating the VRA. (Louisiana adopted a new map creating a new majority-Black district this month due to a court-ordered deadline, but the litigation over that order continues.) 

Alabama has called the litigation against its original map “affirmative action in redistricting.” In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 struck down affirmative action in university admissions, and even though that case did not touch on voting rights, GOP officials in several states have weaponized the case to argue that the VRA is no longer applicable to the present.

In July, Louisiana officials filed a brief arguing that the affirmative action decision shows that “statutes requiring race-based classification” will “necessarily become obsolete.” They ask courts to settle “whether the facts on the ground here similarly warrant a rejection of Section 2 of the VRA, as applied, because it is no longer necessary.”

If the Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court take the bait and say the established interpretation of Section 2 as no longer permissible, it would greatly narrow the legal space for racial discrimination claims.

It would amount to a judicial carte blanche for states to double down on discriminatory practices, except now shielded by the argument that the country is too enlightened to allow such practices.

3. Courts may shut the door to sue over statewide elections

What is the threat to the VRA?

Legal challenges often focus on how politicians have drawn districts: Have they respected the VRA in how they’ve separated or combined a state’s communities? But civil rights litigants have also contested the use of “at-large” elections, which are elections that elect the members of a body (say, a city council) throughout the jurisdiction, without the use of districts. Using this “at-large” structure for local races can prevent minority groups from electing a candidate of their choice; in some contexts, lawsuits have successfully forced counties and cities to convert their electoral system to use districts, allowing different communities to be better represented.

A case that’s percolating through the federal court system may decide whether similar lawsuits can ever be brought in the context of statewide elections. If that door is shut, it would put many government bodies whose members are elected at-large—most commonly, public utility commissions, boards of university regents, or boards of education—beyond the reach of VRA litigation.

What is the case to watch?

Keep an eye on Rose v. Raffensperger, the challenge to Georgia’s public service commission elections. 

In 2020, several Georgia voters sued over the use of statewide (“at-large”) elections for the five members of the state’s Public Service Commission, the body that regulates public utilities. They argued that a compact, Black-majority district could be created to elect a member of the Commission; a district court agreed after a trial, and ordered the state legislature to draw districts to that effect. But the state’s decision to appeal dragged out the process, leading to canceled elections. And in November, in a ruling authored by Judge Elizabeth Branch, another Trump appointee, a three-judge panel on the Eleventh Circuit reversed that decision. The panel held that the plaintiffs had not made out a sufficient claim under the VRA because their proposed remedy would “upset Georgia’s policy interests,” specifically, its “interest in maintaining its form of government.” In other words, because the Georgia legislature decided to make the Public Service Commission elected statewide, the court was obligated to respect that decision.

The ultimate resolution of this case will shape the viability of a lot of prospective litigation. This is believed to be the first case challenging the use of a statewide electoral system, so the district court’s decision had opened the door to similar challenges popping up elsewhere. If lawsuits like this can be brought against the use of statewide elections to pick members of state boards, voters may be able to target other elected state institutions whose “at large” membership is largely or all-white—Alabama’s Public Service Commission and Texas’s Railroad Commission come to mind—with the demand that they replace statewide elections with a system that providing communities of color a better opportunity to elect a member. 

If these challenges can’t be brought, however, communities of color may keep being systematically shut out with impunity.

4. The use of “coalition districts” is under threat

What is the threat to the VRA?

The VRA may compel states or localities to create districts that give voters in a racial group the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. In deciding whether such a district is required, federal courts assess whether a specific group’s size and voting behavior warrant such an opportunity district. But what happens when no single racial group is large enough to reach that threshold, but several do so when combined? 

In that context, some federal courts have required the creation of “coalition” districts, a practice that has boosted representation for people of color. For instance, they may consider Black and Latinx residents together to force the creation of a district in which voters would have a better shot at electing a nonwhite candidate. A case out of Texas is now threatening this practice, however. 

What are the cases to watch?

Keep an eye on Petteway v. Galveston County, the challenge to county commission districts in Galveston County, Texas. 

Following the 2020 census, Galveston County commissioners drew a new set of districts for their county commission; their map eliminated the county’s only “majority-minority” district—a coalition district in which Black and Latino voters make up a majority. Backed by conservative legal groups, the county argued during a trial last year that the VRA should not be used to protect multiracial coalitions; but a federal court sided with plaintiffs in restoring the district. Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was nominated by Trump, even wrote that the “circumstances and effect of the enacted plan were mean-spirited and egregious.”

But the conservative Fifth Circuit chose to suspend the decision until it could decide the county’s appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court blessed that move in December over the objections of liberal justices. The appeals court made clear that it wanted to revisit its past decisions that have endorsed the use of coalition districts.

The case may hand conservative justices another shot at upending the redistricting norms, if they choose to weigh in for the first time on the permissibility of coalition districts. If coalition districts are no longer used as a remedy to racial discrimination, it may further cut the number of districts drawn to elect people of color; in racially diverse regions like Texas, it would make it harder to challenge maps that are resulting in a disproportionate number of white officials.

Some of these questions are playing out in Georgia. A federal court last year struck down the state’s congressional map, ordering an additional Black opportunity district. The legislature responded by carving up an existing coalition district and turning it into a Black majority district. The challengers have argued, unsuccessfully so far, that this is impermissible: that fixing a VRA violation cannot involve eliminating an existing coalition district.

The post Your Guide to Four Emerging Threats to the Voting Rights Act appeared first on Bolts.

Evans captured national attention when, in 2019, he drew an unusually scathing condemnation from the U.S. Supreme Court for engaging in racial discrimination during jury selection at Flowers’ many trials. Flowers was set free after nearly 23 years behind bars and awarded $500,000 by the state of Mississippi for his wrongful imprisonment. Yet Evans faced no consequences.

He continued to run his DA’s office without additional oversight, dodging bar discipline and a civil rights lawsuit, and cruising to re-election unopposed. In an apparent response to the Supreme Court ruling, a lawmaker introduced bills to reform jury selection, but those went nowhere in the legislature. Now Evans exits his office as he ran it, on his own terms, having set the stage for one of his deputies to take up his mantle. 

Evans, now 70, submitted his resignation letter to a state agency in late May, but made no public announcement regarding his departure to his constituents. A local judge revealed Evans’ plans in a court filing on Wednesday. Both documents were reviewed by Bolts.

I first came across Evans in 2017 when I began reporting on the Flowers case for In the Dark, a podcast that investigated Flowers’ ordeal at the hands of Evans.

At the time, Flowers was on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman. He’d been convicted in 2010, at his sixth trial, for the 1996 murders of four people at Tardy Furniture store in a town called Winona. Flowers’ first three trials had resulted in convictions that were later overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court due to prosecutorial misconduct; his fourth and fifth trials ended in hung juries.

We found that Evans had used unreliable and faulty evidence in his repeated prosecutions of Flowers, and our analysis of Evans’ discriminatory jury selection practices—in the Flowers case and beyond—revealed his troubling legacy as a prosecutor.

Montgomery County, Mississippi, where the Tardy Furniture murders took place, is nearly half Black. And yet, the juries that convicted Flowers never had more than one Black member; two were all white. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1986 that it’s unconstitutional to dismiss people from juries because of their race in a landmark decision known as Batson, Evans seemed to be doing just that. 

In Flowers’ second trial, Evans removed a Black juror who he claimed was in a gang and sleeping in the courtroom. Neither claim turned out to be true, and the judge ordered the man back on to the jury, ruling that Evans had violated Batson. In Flowers’ third trial, Evans used all 15 of his discretionary strikes to remove Black people from the jury. When the Mississippi Supreme Court reversed Flowers’ conviction from that trial, the court called Evans’ actions “as strong a prima facie case of racial discrimination as we have ever seen.”

Evans’ behavior in Flowers’ trials was part of a broader pattern at his office. In the Dark’s team spent months collecting trial records—over 115,000 pages of them—deciphering notes scrawled on jury lists, and analyzing transcripts of juror questioning. We found that, over a period of 26 years, Evans and his assistants had struck Black prospective jurors more than four times as often as they struck white ones. 

Evans’ alarming history gave the U.S. Supreme Court cause to throw out yet another of Flowers’ convictions in June 2019. The high court condemned Evans’ prosecution in stark terms. “The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Evans was undaunted. “It was a ridiculous ruling,” he told a local newspaper shortly after the decision. “They basically said there was nothing wrong with the case and reversed it anyway.”

For a brief time that year, it looked as if Evans might face consequences for his misconduct. He’d become an exception to the rule that prosecutors elude scrutiny, with multiple judges saying his practices for selecting juries violated the constitution.

An In the Dark listener had filed a complaint against Evans with the Mississippi Bar Association, which can reprimand, suspend or disbar attorneys who violate professional standards. And four of Evans’ Black constituents filed a lawsuit, alongside a local branch of the NAACP, seeking court-mandated oversight to force Evans to clean up his act. They asked a federal judge to “hold [Evans] accountable for the policy, custom, and usage of racially discriminatory jury selection” and to grant “an injunction to end this odious practice.” 

But the lawsuit was thrown out on procedural grounds, and the bar complaint has resulted in no known discipline. 

One state lawmaker, Derrick Simmons, authored a bill in 2021 that would have made it easier for defendants like Flowers to stop Evans, or any other prosecutor, in his tracks, if he looked to be discriminating against prospective jurors on the basis of race. But the bill died in a legislative committee. Simmons, a Black Democrat, tried two more times, filing the bill again in the 2022 and 2023 sessions, and twice more it died without ever making it to the floor for a vote. 

Progress on this issue has been slow-moving throughout the country, but in recent years, some states have made strides by limiting the ways lawyers can use peremptory challenges, the discretionary strikes that allow them to remove jurors without having to state a cause. Washington and California have both adopted rules aimed at preventing unconscious or implicit bias in their use. California’s 2020 law, for instance, makes it easier to argue that the removal of a prospective juror violates Batson, barring the attorney that asked for the removal from defending it with reasons that are essentially proxies for racial discrimination, like having a relative who’s been stopped by police or having a general distrust of law enforcement.

The Arizona Supreme Court went a step further in 2021, eliminating peremptory strikes altogether. Now jurors in Arizona can be dismissed only when a judge has determined they are unable to serve.

Peter Swann, former chief judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals, filed the petition to Arizona’s Supreme Court that resulted in the change. He says he was inspired to take action after an especially egregious Batson case came before him on the bench. “I usually find that when a tool is being used unfairly, taking it away is often the only way to achieve fairness,” he told me. “It’s very hard to have a view that discrimination will happen in jury selection if you take away peremptories.”

Data collected by the court system in Maricopa County, where more than half of Arizonians live, shows that this change has made juries more diverse. The share of jurors identifying as Hispanic increased by 15 percent in criminal trials between 2019, the last full year before the reform when jury trials were unperturbed by the pandemic, and 2022, the year the change took effect. On civil juries, the share of jurors of color saw an uptick of roughly 15 percent over the same period.

“A successful Arizona experiment, which we now have, is going to add fuel to the fire,” Swann said. “Arizona was the first domino. Eventually they’re going to start falling.”

It seems unlikely that Mississippi will be next.

“Legislators in Mississippi aren’t interested in strengthening Batson,” said Tucker Carrington, who heads the Mississippi Innocence Project and was one of Flowers’ lawyers. “Legislators know that race affects peoples’ lived experiences, and many of them are also lawyers who don’t want to make it harder to control which lived experiences end up on their juries.”

Carrington says eliminating peremptories is a step in the right direction, but he also thinks that Batson needs a more ambitious overhaul in order for juries to truly become fair.

“Doug Evans is an egregious example, but the criminal justice system is full of prosecutors like him. Under the Batson paradigm, nothing much happens to them. They get a slap on the wrist and then it’s back to business as usual,” Carrington said. 

Indeed, Evans was allowed to try Flowers again and again, even after he was caught discriminating in Flowers’ trials. Just months after the Supreme Court’s rebuke made him a national figurehead of misconduct, Evans was elected to a sixth term as DA of Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court District; no one even ran against him. Last fall, he was bold enough to throw his hat into the ring for a local judgeship. It was there that he finally suffered a setback, losing to a popular local attorney in a runoff. 

Not long after, with his job as DA back in play in the 2023 election cycle, Evans let a February filing deadline pass without entering the DA’s race, forgoing a reelection bid.

He then told his staff he would leave office early, on June 30, in the middle of the contest to fill his seat. He sent his resignation letter to the state of Mississippi in May, which I learned through a public records request to the governor’s office. But he made no statement to the public that had kept him in his post for decades. I called Evans to ask about his imminent exit, but he hung up on me once I identified myself and did not respond to a later text message.

Circuit Judge Joey Loper, who presided over two of Flowers’ trials and ordered his release from jail in 2019, on Wednesday appointed Mike Howie, an assistant prosecutor in Evans’ office, to serve as interim DA upon Evans’ departure.

Evans’ long-term successor will also come from within his office. Only two candidates are running to replace him in the upcoming election, and both are his assistant DAs.

The winner will be decided in the Aug. 8 GOP primary in the state’s Fifth District, which covers Attala, Carroll, Choctaw, Grenada, Montgomery, Webster, and Winston counties. 

One of the candidates, Adam Hopper, is the long-time staffer who did Evans’ bidding in the final days of the prosecution of Curtis Flowers. It was Hopper who appeared in court in late 2019 to say his office still had a strong case against Flowers and to oppose his release from jail, even after his conviction had been overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hopper didn’t respond to requests for comment.

His opponent, Rosalind Jordan, is one of Evans’ newer assistant DAs. Jordan, a former public defender, told me that “it’s important that you go the extra mile in making sure that you do your jury selection properly, and that you don’t discriminate based on sex or race or anything like that.” But she also said she thought no change was needed at the DA’s office.

“What I’ve witnessed since I’ve been here since 2021, I’ve found to be completely in compliance with our ethical code and the rules of criminal procedure,” Jordan said.

“I would just encourage continuing to follow that.”

On Friday, the same day Evans leaves office, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by Tony Terrell Clark, a Black man sitting on death row in Mississippi, who alleged that his conviction was marred by Batson violations. (The case was not prosecuted by Evans’ office.) The state Supreme Court rejected Clark’s challenges last year. In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an excoriating dissent warning that Mississippi courts seem to be “[carrying] on with business as usual,” rather than heeding her court’s 2019 decision in Flowers’ favor. 

“Because this Court refuses to intervene, a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race,” Sotomayor wrote in reference to Clark, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “That is a tragedy, and it is exactly the tragedy that Batson and Flowers were supposed to prevent.”

“The result is that Flowers will be toothless in the very State where it appears to be still so needed.” 

The article was updated on June 30 with a response from the governor’s office, and with a new order by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Tony Terrell Clark.

The post Mississippi DA, Exposed for Striking Black Jurors, Leaves His Office On His Own Terms appeared first on Bolts.

The 51-year-old has a felony on his record, like all of the people DeSantis had arrested. He wondered if the governor would come after him next, because he had just voted in the August primary.

Johnson was convicted of drug trafficking and released in 2002 after serving 22 months in prison. For years after his release, he was barred from voting due to Florida’s draconian rules. In 2018, voters passed Amendment 4, a landmark ballot initiative that overrode the 19th century policy barring anyone with a felony conviction from voting for life. Amendment 4 allowed people convicted of most felonies to vote once they complete their sentence.

Johnson’s first time voting was in 2020 and he’s been engaged with electoral politics ever since. 

But a series of arrests this year have rocked the reform’s promise. Earlier this year, county prosecutors charged people for voting despite owing court debt, due to a law signed by DeSantis in 2019 that rolled back Amendment 4 by imposing financial payments. The people who were then charged in August had been convicted of murder and sexual assault, offenses carved out by Amendment 4. But several said that they thought the amendment allowed them to legally vote, especially because they had been provided with voter IDs by local election officials—with the approval of the DeSantis administration. 

Now, leading up to the November 8 general election, Johnson is wondering what legal stunt DeSantis might pull next. 

 “It makes you think twice before going to vote,” he said.

A new report by the Sentencing Project estimates that over 1.1 million Floridians are barred from voting this fall due to a past felony conviction in Florida. Others may have regained their right to vote but shy away from the polls over the uncertainty caused by the recent events. And given the vast racial disparities in Florida’s criminal legal system, the predicament disproportionately affects African Americans.

More than one in five Black adults in the state were disenfranchised in 2016. Amendment 4 cut down that number, but 13 percent of Black adults are still barred from voting in the state, which compares to 7 percent of the rest of state’s population.

Of the 19 people whose August arrests for voter fraud were reviewed by The Palm Beach Post, 15 are Black.

“DeSantis’ arrests have built upon a culture of fear that already existed around voting, but he has added new consequences, especially for Black people in particular,” said Kevin Anderson, a defense attorney who represents Leo Grant Jr., one of the people who were arrested in August.

Backed by law enforcement from his Election Crimes and Security Office at a press conference on Aug.18, DeSantis said the voters had committed fraud, which would require that they had knowingly and willfully violated the law so they could cast their votes.

“The state of Florida has charged and is in the process of arresting 20 individuals across the state for voter fraud,” DeSantis said to a round of cheering and applause. “They did not go through any process. They did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyways. That is against the law, and now they’re going to pay the price for it.”

At another press conference 12 days later, DeSantis then put the blame on local voting jurisdictions. “Some local jurisdictions don’t care about election laws. We do, and we think it’s important. If you’re not able to run an election right, we want to hold people accountable,” DeSantis said.

But DeSantis’ claims have since come under scrutiny. He failed to mention during his press conferences that government officials had told the people who were arrested that they were allowed to vote. And DeSantis’ own election investigation chief had sent an email to local jurisdictions telling them that they did nothing wrong when the returning citizens voted in August.

Last week, one of the arrests was thrown out by a South Florida judge, who said that the state did not have jurisdiction to charge Robert Lee Wood. The DeSantis administration said that it intends to appeal that decision.

“The DeSantis story about the arrests after the primary has already started to fall apart, but who knows what he’s capable of next,” Johnson said.

DeSantis created a new police force to investigate election crimes in April, spending an estimated $3.7 million in startup costs. It employs agents tasked with investigating election-related crimes, which are very uncommon in Florida. 

The DeSantis administration has not responded to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Some of those who were arrested have come forward to explain that they thought their rights had been restored when Amendment 4 passed, and that the state had given them every indication that they were eligible to vote.

Leo Grant Jr. had thought he was just fulfilling his civic duty, until law enforcement arrived at his door in August. His defense attorney, Anderson, says that the DeSantis administration used people’s lives to advance his political agenda and create an environment for rumors to spread in Florida about rampant voter fraud.

“This process was weaponized to make it appear that you have all of these people out in the community casting votes that they ought not cast, when really what has happened is that they’ve been lured,” Anderson said. “So it’s like a game that’s being played with their lives.”

Anderson—who has 20 years of experience and has handled hundreds of state and federal criminal and police liability cases—said that DeSantis has created “an environment of intimidation,” which will affect potential voters who may now be worried about going to cast their vote after the arrests. 

“Intimidation is one tactic that has been used in the past against Black people for voting, and it is being used now,” he said.

Fear tactics have been wielded to mute Black people’s voices and suppress their votes throughout American history. The Ku Klux Klan did this, often through violence, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This year, in Florida and in other states, intimidation and election-related threats of violence have made securing polling locations more difficult leading up to elections.  

But legislation has also functioned as a means of voter suppression. Prior to Amendment 4 being passed, Florida’s constitution had disenfranchised all citizens who had been convicted of any felony offense dating back to Florida’s first constitution in 1838. It said, “all persons convicted of bribery, perjury, forgery, or other high crime, or misdemeanor” should be barred from voting. This was amended in 1868 to remove the language about misdemeanors. In 1968, the language was amended again, to name felonies as the specific reason that people should not be able to vote.

In an analysis of Florida’s disenfranchisement rules in 2015, Allison Riggs wrote in The Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development about the “enormous burden that these rules place on people of color seeking to participate in the political process.”  Even after passage of Amendment 4 in 2018, many Floridians are barred from voting, including if they are in prison, on probation, and on parole—outcomes that are far likelier to affect Black Floridians.

Shortly after Amendment 4 was adopted, DeSantis signed Senate Bill 7066 into law, which prohibited returning citizens from voting unless they paid off legal fines and fees imposed by a court pursu­ant to a felony convic­tion.

This caused anger and confusion among those who had struggled for the right to vote, and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the governor of creating a “pay-to-vote” system. The chaos created by this rule, in addition to the more recent voter arrests, led several civil rights groups to create a legal guide for returning citizens who wish to vote.

This month, body camera footage of one of the arrests was published by The Tampa Bay Times. It showed Tony Patterson, another of the voters charged, in a state of shock that he was being arrested. 

“What is wrong with this state, man?” Patterson asked the police as they arrested him. “Voter fraud? Y’all said anybody with a felony could vote, man.” 

This isn’t DeSantis’ first attempt at influencing voting procedures in Florida with an aim of impacting outcomes. Earlier this year, his administration pushed a redistricting plan before the legislature, which a Florida circuit court judge found to be unconstitutional for its attempt to dilute the Black vote. The legislature approved the plan, and now the DeSantis administration is refusing to release documents related to its creation, after the League of Women Voters and individual voters filed a lawsuit against the redistricting in April. 

Neither has DeSantis shied away from overruling the will of voters once they’ve already spoken. In August he removed a democratically-elected state attorney from office based on the prosecutor’s statements that he would not charge cases dealing with abortion or anti-transgender legislation, and claims to have “reviewed” several more. It’s created uncertainty among candidates that they could be plucked from their positions even after winning. 

“In the end, he just wants to win,” said Robin Lockett, regional director of the non-profit activist group Florida Rising. “He’ll use any tactic he can, no matter how undemocratic, to try to get his way.”

Lockett works to register voters in Florida, along with fighting for racial and social justice causes. She doesn’t have a felony conviction, but talks to people who do regularly through her work. She says that DeSantis has reached a new level of electoral desperation.

“You don’t see him out there arresting people who are most likely going to vote for him,” Lockett said. “He’s targeting people who he wants to suppress. He wants returning citizens, and especially Black people, to go back to the shed, to go underground.”

Rodney Johnson says that even though DeSantis’s actions make him think twice about voting, he’ll still be heading to the ballot box in November. 

“When you make the effort to turn your life around, you want to be able to have your voice heard, just like any other citizen.”

He won’t let a political agenda based in fear stop him from moving forward, he says, although he’s unsure if that will be the case with everyone who has been convicted of a felony. 

“A lot of us have been through so much here in Florida, rents are going up and we’re just trying to survive,” Rodney said. “People have kids and families to think about. There are plenty of voters who might not take the risk, in case DeSantis decides to pull something shady again. But I have to do what I know is right.”

The post Arrests Over Voting Escalate a “Culture of Fear” in Florida appeared first on Bolts.

In a ruling issued earlier this month, a federal court left a Black man on death row despite the emergence of new documents that suggest prosecutors sought to eliminate Black people from the jury pool. 

The decision reveals the length to which judges will go to permit prosecutors’ maneuvers,  and underscores the urgency of political solutions that could create meaningful constraints on prosecutors.

It’s well-established that the rule barring race discrimination in jury selection is inadequate, bordering on useless. The rule, established in the 1986 Supreme Court case Batson v. Kentucky, is so narrow and its burden of proof so high that prosecutors have had little trouble devising ways around it. Finding a Batson violation—that prosecutors struck a potential juror because of race—ultimately requires finding that prosecutors intentionally discriminated and that any acceptable reason they gave for removing a juror was a lie, knowingly offered to conceal the racism driving their conduct. 

Part of Batson’s deficiency is that it leaves judges, a great many of whom are former prosecutors themselves, wide leeway to defer to prosecutors. In most cases, a judge simply taking the prosecutor at their word is all it takes to kill a Batson claim. And prosecutors have developed training manuals on how to get all-white juries while going through the hollow motions of legal compliance. 

The ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals this month, along with the 2019 district court ruling it affirms, exemplifies judges’ extraordinary deference to prosecutors, and the contorted reasoning they use to avoid holding prosecutors accountable for even the most obvious racism. 

The Fifth Circuit denied relief to James Garfield Broadnax, in a decision written by Edith Jones, a conservative judge who once complained that a last-minute appeal in a death penalty case made her miss a birthday party. Broadnax was sentenced to death in 2009 in a case where prosecutors tried to exclude every Black person from the jury pool. Prosecutors even highlighted each potential Black juror on written documents that they then withheld and that only recently surfaced. The Dallas district attorney’s office, where they worked, has a long history of racial discrimination; it had “for decades, followed a specific policy of systematically excluding blacks from juries,” the Supreme Court found in 2005.

But rather than face the discrimination staring at them, the district court and the Fifth Circuit panel recast much of this evidence as the prosecution’s good-faith efforts to comply with Batson. 

At Broadnax’s murder trial, prosecutors used their peremptory strikes—which allow lawyers to remove potential jurors for virtually any reason or no reason at all—against all seven Black potential jurors and one Latinx potential juror. They pointed to factors that disproportionately affect Black people in the United States, for instance striking one potential juror because she had relatives in jail. The trial judge initially permitted this tactic before reseating the last Black juror, offering a make up of sorts for the racism he had allowed before then: “I’m going to grant the Batson challenge and I’m going to do so because of the fact that there are no African-American jurors on this jury and there was a disproportionate number of African-Americans who were struck,” he said. 

That ruling gave Broadnax 11 white jurors and one Black juror whom the prosecution had tried to remove.

In addition, prosecutors had marked the names of each Black juror—and only the Black jurors—in bold font on a spreadsheet. Prosecutors had withheld this document for years, until after Broadnax had finished his state court appeals and filed his habeas petition in federal court. 

This spreadsheet was the focus of the Fifth Circuit’s opinion. The court had to decide whether the rules governing federal claims of unlawful imprisonment would allow Broadnax to submit the spreadsheet as new evidence of race discrimination, or if, as the federal district court had decided, the document must be excluded, effectively dooming Broadnax’s claim. 

In other cases, prosecutors have tried to spin such evidence into a positive, claiming they marked the Black jurors they eventually struck from the jury pool as part of their efforts to avoid discrimination. 

In Foster v. Chatman, this drew the rare wrath of the U.S. Supreme Court. In that 2016 case, prosecutors in Butts County, Georgia, had a list of potential jurors with the names of all four Black jurors highlighted in bright green (a legend indicated that the highlighting “represents Blacks”), and then struck them from the jury. The state of Georgia later argued that, while this may look bad, it reflects how the prosecution was “thoughtful and non-discriminatory in [its] consideration of black prospective jurors,” and worked “to develop and maintain detailed information on those prospective jurors in order to properly defend against any suggestion that decisions regarding [its] selections were pretextual.” 

The Supreme Court didn’t buy it. “The focus on race in the prosecution’s file plainly demonstrates a concerted effort to keep black prospective jurors off the jury,” the Court wrote, and any suggestion to the contrary “reeks of afterthought.” 

But in Broadnax’s case, both the federal district court and the Fifth Circuit declined to follow the Foster ruling’s lead. They announced that marking Black jurors on a list and then trying to strike all of them could have indicated benevolent race-consciousness intended to comply with Batson. 

They reasoned that the DA’s office’s history of racist jury selection may actually count in its favor. Since prosecutors have been caught discriminating before, the courts explained, they should be tracking the race of potential jurors to better protect people of color, and judges could assume that was their intent with the spreadsheet.

The district court said “it would have been professionally irresponsible for the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office (in 2009) to have failed to identify the members of the remaining jury venire who were members of a protected class and against whom it might have been preparing to exercise a peremptory challenge.” The Fifth Circuit echoed this, explaining that, given its history, the “office would have had considerable motivation to identify which jury venire members belonged to a protected class when preparing to defend its use of peremptory challenges.” 

Absent from this analysis is the fact that prosecutors attempted to strike every single juror they were supposedly trying to protect. 

Looking at the evidence this way, the Fifth Circuit found that the spreadsheet was, at best, unimportant—certainly “no smoking gun,” it wrote—and affirmed the district court’s decision not to consider it. In a system that routinely holds people’s history of misconduct against them, prosecutors got a free pass, and James Broadnax remains sentenced to die.

There is some chance that the Supreme Court will intervene, as it did in the high-profile case of Curtis Flowers, decided in 2019. But that would only underscore how slow and nearly random securing justice under Batson can be. Flowers sat on death row for decades and was tried six times for murders he almost certainly didn’t commit. Over that time, 61 of the 72 jurors who decided his fate were white. And although Flowers won, the Supreme Court declined the opportunity to use his case to strengthen Batson, instead emphasizing that its ruling was limited “to the extraordinary facts of this case.” Moreover, the prosecutor in Flowers’s case, Doug Evans, has so far evaded accountability, and a civil lawsuit against him was dismissed last year. 

But elected lawmakers don’t have to wait for judges to battle discrimination. Last year, California passed legislation that targets how implicit bias and racial stereotypes often influence jury selection, accounting for racism that is hard to detect and can infect jury selection even when prosecutors do not intend it. This can allow relief without defendants having to prove that prosecutors were intentionally discriminating against potential jurors of color. Among other things, the law presumptively bars an enumerated list of reasons that prosecutors have often used to exclude Black jurors, including “having a negative experience with law enforcement” and “expressing a belief that law enforcement officers engage in racial profiling or that criminal laws have been enforced in a discriminatory manner.” The Washington Supreme Court adopted a similar rule in 2018. 

Such a law may have helped Broadnax, had it been in place in Texas at the time. It certainly would have made it harder for prosecutors to get away with striking one juror because she had relatives in jail, and another because she had children but no employment and “desperately wanted to sound intelligent” — both “race neutral” explanations that prosecutors used to defeat Batson challenges in his case. 

When he authorized most of prosecutors’ requests to exclude jurors of color, the trial judge in part blamed  Batson’s exacting standard of intentional discrimination. “The problem … is that if you grant a Batson challenge it implies some sort of nefarious intent on the part of prosecutors … you’re essentially saying that the prosecutors are lying,” he said. While Broadnax argued at trial and throughout his appeals that he proved Batson violations, a law like California’s would have also enabled the judge to grant the defense team’s objections without finding “nefarious intent.”

But reforms to jury selection require courts to enforce them, and they will not be enough as long as judges excuse even overt, documented discrimination, giving prosecutors every benefit of the doubt. That’s why there’s a growing chorus to abolish peremptory strikes altogether, and allow lawyers to strike only those jurors who are not qualified to serve. That’s what Justice Thurgood Marshall argued when he concurred in Batson itself. The “inherent potential of peremptory challenges to distort the jury process by permitting the exclusion of jurors on racial grounds,” he wrote, “should ideally lead the Court to ban them entirely from the criminal justice system.” 

In the meantime, Broadnax remains on Texas’s death row, his legal challenges nearly exhausted. Now only the U.S. Supreme Court can vindicate his right to jury of his peers, selected without the taint of racial discrimination.

The post Prosecutors Excluded Black Jurors in a Death Penalty Case. They’re Getting Away With It. appeared first on Bolts.