Patricia Mazzei

“I have to admit that that could happen,” Pierluisi said with a chuckle. “But that’s the situation.”

That was on Friday. By Sunday afternoon, Pierluisi had appeared to reverse himself, arguing that the Senate had no say and that the courts would settle the issue. Then a few hours later, he was sued.

Puerto Rico remained Monday where it has been for weeks: in a state of protracted political paralysis that appears not to have been resolved by the installation of Pierluisi, who took over after former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló’s resignation became effective Friday. The territory’s Supreme Court agreed to take up a legal action filed against Pierluisi’s appointment.

Public furor fueled huge demonstrations against Rosselló after leaked private messages showed him and his closest aides insulting Puerto Ricans. Questions over Pierluisi’s legitimacy as governor left open the possibility that protesters would again take to the streets, if they see his installation as evidence of the unpopular political establishment unconstitutionally attempting to perpetuate itself in power.

“This isn’t about whether Mr. Pierluisi is a good candidate, as some people have argued,” said Julio E. Fontanet Maldonado, a constitutional scholar and the dean of the law school at the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico. “It’s about defending the rule of law.”

Late Sunday, the Senate president, Thomas Rivera Schatz, asked a lower court in San Juan, the capital, to grant a preliminary injunction ordering Pierluisi to cease functions as governor because he had not previously been confirmed as secretary of state by both chambers of the Legislative Assembly.

The secretary of state is next in line to succeed the governor. The House of Representatives confirmed Pierluisi as secretary of state Friday, but the Senate did not hold a hearing. Even in the case of the House vote, new questions arose Monday as to whether Pierluisi had submitted all the required paperwork before the vote.

“Puerto Rico is living a situation without historical precedent,” wrote Rivera Schatz, who leads the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, which Pierluisi and Rosselló also represent.

The Supreme Court said it would take up the Senate’s complaint and asked for written arguments by Tuesday afternoon.

Originally, the Senate had scheduled a confirmation hearing for Pierluisi for Monday morning. But Pierluisi said that as governor, he could no longer be subject to confirmation as secretary of state. The hearing was canceled.

Pierluisi had argued during a news conference Friday that the Senate could “ratify” him as governor. But no legal framework for such a vote appears to exist in Puerto Rican law.

Still, the Senate planned to meet in special session Monday afternoon and possibly vote anyway. Despite his earlier waffling, Pierluisi said Monday that he would abide by the Senate’s decision.

“If the Puerto Rico Senate decides to hold any sort of vote over my incumbency, I will respect the result,” Pierluisi said in a statement. “All I ask of senators before they make their decision is that they listen to the people, to whom we are all indebted.”

A campaign to ask legislators to back Pierluisi has been carried out by his supporters for several days. One local television station sent a crew to interview Puerto Ricans on the street about Pierluisi; the host of the program seemed surprised that most people seemed content with his installation.

A second lawsuit against Pierluisi was filed early Monday by Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan, who asked the Supreme Court to declare Pierluisi’s swearing-in illegitimate. Cruz is a 2020 candidate for governor for the opposition Popular Democratic Party, which supports keeping Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth.

She told reporters over the weekend that while she does not support the next New Progressive official in line to be governor — Wanda Vázquez, the secretary of justice — the court must clarify existing law over the constitutional succession.

Outside the Supreme Court on Monday, Frank Torres Viada, a lawyer for the city of San Juan, described the island as being in the middle of a “judicial vacuum.”

“Right now, Puerto Ricans are in a state of uncertainty, unrest and restlessness of spirit,” he said, “because we don’t really know who is governor of Puerto Rico.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/us/puerto-rico-governor.html" id="a81ca505-006b-338b-a136-f704877b9efc">The New York Times</a>.

Puerto Rico Got a New Governor 3 Days Ago. But His Future Is Already in Doubt.

Moments after being sworn in as Puerto Rico’s new governor, Pedro R. Pierluisi pledged in no uncertain terms that he would willingly step down in the coming days if the island’s Senate voted against confirming him — even if that made him one of the shortest-serving governors ever to take office.

But Pierluisi’s path to the governor’s seat is hardly an easy one. He faces serious opposition from some lawmakers, especially in Puerto Rico’s Senate, which could block his confirmation. That would leave the next in line — Wanda Vázquez, secretary of justice — to become governor.

With the vote still uncertain, here is a look at the man who could take charge of the island’s troubled government.

Who is Pedro Pierluisi?

Pierluisi, a 60-year-old lawyer, served as secretary of justice for three years under Rosselló’s father, former Gov. Pedro J. Rosselló. He was elected to represent Puerto Rico in Congress as its nonvoting resident commissioner and served there from 2009 to 2017.

Pierluisi was reelected after his first term even though the governor at the time, Luis G. Fortuño, who was also on the ballot for the New Progressive Party, was not. That popularity made Pierluisi, who comes from a political family, an attractive candidate for governor in 2016.

But he lost the primary that year to the younger Rosselló by about 2 percentage points, or about 10,000 votes. Pierluisi then backed Rosselló, who like him is a Democrat when it comes to national politics, though Puerto Rico’s political parties do not neatly match up with those on the mainland. The New Progressive Party supports statehood for Puerto Rico.

In 1994, while Pierluisi was secretary of justice, his younger brother, José Jaime Pierluisi, a 28-year-old aide to the governor, was fatally shot in a carjacking in San Juan, the capital.

What is Pierluisi’s political standing in Puerto Rico?

Pierluisi is seen as competent and experienced. As resident commissioner, he ensured that Puerto Rico received federal stimulus funds and was covered by the Affordable Care Act. Both were considered important achievements.

But he also faces a serious potential conflict of interest: After leaving office, Pierluisi went to work for O’Neill &amp; Borges, a law firm that does external legal consulting for the federal oversight board appointed by Congress to oversee Puerto Rico’s troubled finances.

Pierluisi took a leave of absence from the firm Tuesday. Yet any connection to the unpopular board — which is led by Pierluisi’s brother-in-law, José B. Carrión III — is problematic in the minds of some lawmakers who will decide whether to confirm him.

In a statement accepting his nomination Wednesday, Pierluisi cast his Washington connections as an advantage.

“It is also crucial to restore the trust of federal authorities and Congress, where I have earned respect,” he said, “and to reestablish a productive relationship with the oversight board, based only on what is good for Puerto Rico and facilitates the end of its mandate.”

Has there been any other controversy?

In 2016, The New York Times found that Pierluisi introduced legislation as resident commissioner that would benefit at least two Wall Street companies that had hired his wife, María Elena Carrión, to advise them. The family’s net worth rose in part thanks to Carrión’s work helping the firms find bargains on distressed financial assets in Puerto Rico.

Both Pierluisi and Carrión, an experienced investment banker, said at the time that nothing he had done was intended to help her financial advisory firm, which she set up 20 days after he was elected in 2008.

Pierluisi and Carrión are now in the process of divorcing, according to the Puerto Rican news media.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/puerto-rico-governor-pedro-pierluisi.html" id="d9ac386e-154a-3a8c-a5f3-cbcc95f1a605">The New York Times</a>.

Who Is Pedro Pierluisi, Who Could Be Puerto Rico's Next Governor?

A week after announcing his imminent resignation, Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló of Puerto Rico nominated a new secretary of state who could succeed him. Pedro R. Pierluisi faces a confirmation hearing in the Legislative Assembly.

At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, it was Riley Howell, 21. At the STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, it was Kendrick Castillo, 18. The two young men were hailed as heroes for assuming the unimaginable role of emergency responder to a school shooting.

Their actions, credited by the authorities with saving the lives of classmates, suggest that some members of America’s mass-shooting generation have learned — by instinct or intention — to act as professionals would in the face of deadly tragedy.

“I think everybody has this idea, ‘What if somebody comes in with a gun? What do I do?’” said Brendan Bialy, 18, who said he helped disarm the Colorado shooting suspect, a fellow student, after Castillo charged him. “I didn’t think consciously, ‘I’d do this and then this.’ It just happened.”

Drills for what to do during a shooting have become routine in schools across the nation, in some cases for children as young as in kindergarten. Most students have not been taught to directly confront shooting suspects, but rather to focus on what they must do to remain safe. Some young people, however, appear to have closely followed past massacres and concluded that they cannot wait for a teacher or security officer to protect them.

“The idea of ‘run, hide, fight’ is what they teach,” said Don Gilmore, whose son Spencer escaped unharmed from the shooting at STEM School on Tuesday and was friends with some of the students who tried to subdue one of the attackers. “Run if you can. Hide if you need to. And fight if you must. Some people are just wired to react to that situation.”

Spencer’s mother, Sarah, said she had spent part of the evening after the shooting thinking about how, had her son been in a different classroom that afternoon, Spencer might have been one of the students charging into gunfire. “They saved it from being much worse,” she said.

Even younger children were prepared to take action. Nate Holley, a sixth grader at the school, recounted to CNN how his teacher moved the class into a closet during the shooting. Standing in the corner, Nate got ready.

“I had my hand on a metal baseball bat, just in case,” said Nate, 12. “Cause I was going to go down fighting if I was going to go down.”

The thought of a child formulating a plan to attack a gunman with nothing more than a baseball bat may seem horrifying. But people like Greg Crane, whose company trains law enforcement on how to handle active shooters, say that when escape is not an option, confrontation might make sense.

“We do conduct training about taking back control,” said Crane, who created a training program called “Alice,” or Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. “Often it gets called ‘fighting back.’ There’s no fighting strategies taught; it’s ‘How do you control this out-of-control person?’”

He frequently cites as inspiration Jacob Ryker, who tackled a gunman at his Oregon high school in 1998, despite getting shot himself.

“It’s never been a question of whether kids can do it,” Crane said. “It’s just I think with predominantly more training on responses to violent events going on all over, yes, we would expect to see hopefully more of this.”

But not all training methods promote similar action — some endorse more running and hiding than fighting — and drills vary widely among school districts. What academics who study school violence have learned from their research is that what matters most is that the drills do not traumatize children, said Beverly Kingston, the director of the Center for the Study and the Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“It matters the way the training is done and how it’s done,” Kingston said. “It can either add to the trauma or reduce the trauma. We always want to do it in ways that reduce the trauma.”

Even more important is focusing on ways to prevent violence, she added, deploying threat assessment teams with multiple approaches to help people who are troubled. One way to identify those potential threats is to give communities — especially students, parents and teachers — the ability to anonymously report concerns that do not rise to the level of, say, calling 911.

“It’s not only this mass violence — it’s also increases in suicide,” Kingston said. “How are we working together as a nation to put into place programs that we know are proven to work when someone is suffering? That’s the harder question, but we really have to ask ourselves that hard question.”

Susan Payne, who after the Columbine shooting founded Safe2Tell, a youth violence prevention initiative in Colorado, lamented that, 20 years later, schools have still not adopted a consistent approach to try to prevent mass shootings.

“We can do a better job in this country, and I think we’ve seen a lot of movement in the aftermath of the Parkland tragedy,” said Payne, who worked in law enforcement for 28 years. “We need to get in earlier, and we need to realize that the culture and climate in a school is so important.”

She attributed some students’ instinct to confront an armed attacker to depictions of heroism in popular culture.

“Young people today are more informed than we even realize, and it’s through their own social norms and information they see in television, movies and online,” she said. “And I think kids are having that conversation at lunchroom tables, talking of what they might do.”

Bialy, the STEM School senior, described the takedown of the gunman as an effort among Castillo, himself and a third boy he declined to name, citing the boy’s wishes. Castillo was closest to the shooting suspect, about a foot away, when the suspect walked into their English class.

Once Castillo got up, so did Bialy and the other boy. They slammed the gunman against the wall. He fired his pistol once or twice in the skirmish, hitting Castillo. Students tried to tend to him, but he was unresponsive, Bialy said.

“Kendrick refused to be a victim,” Bialy said.

Castillo’s father, John Castillo, told The Denver Post through tears that he was not surprised by his son’s decision to go after the gunman, though he wished he had acted differently and perhaps survived.

“I wish he had gone and hid,” Castillo said, “but that’s not his character. His character is about protecting people, helping people.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/us/school-shooting-student-safety.html" id="2b07115d-3978-38df-a1d8-cfc9cd80678b">The New York Times</a>.

The two shootings were separated by seven days and more than 1,500 miles, but the details seemed eerily familiar: When a gunman charged into a classroom, a student went barreling toward him, preventing more bloodshed while sacrificing his life.

'Fight if You Must': Students Take a Front-Line Role in School Shootings

The local ballot measure did not quite legalize the mushrooms that contain psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. State and federal regulations would have to change to accomplish that.

But the measure made the possession, use or cultivation of the mushrooms by people aged 21 or older the lowest-priority crime for law enforcement in the city of Denver and Denver County. Arrests and prosecutions, already fairly rare, would all but disappear.

Results posted by the city as a “final unofficial” tally late Wednesday showed the “Yes” vote won by less than 2,000 ballots. The “No” vote had led throughout the day, until the last updated count by elections officials. Alton P. Dillard, the elections spokesman, said the passage appeared safe, but the final results would not be certified until May 16.

“We won!!!!” the group called Decriminalize Denver that had been pushing the measure, said in a jubilant post on Facebook.

Adoption of the measure, by a margin so close that the measure was initially thought to have been rejected, signaled fledgling public acceptance of a mind-altering drug — outlawed nationally for nearly 50 years — that recent research suggests could have beneficial medical uses. A similar effort failed to get on the ballot in California last year, but it could come up again in 2020; Oregon voters may also vote on a comparable measure next year.

“It’s surreal,” said Travis Tyler Fluck, a field organizer for the campaign to pass the measure, suggesting that Denver had a sizable population of “psychedelic constituents.”

“People just don’t see it as a threat,” he added. “Compared to the ‘sinister’ LSD, magic mushrooms are tame.”

Proponents of more lenient criminal enforcement of psilocybin cite studies indicating that the drug can be beneficial for treating depression and anxiety among cancer patients. Other studies have identified potential uses in therapy for alcoholics and people trying to quit smoking, and in treating depression in people who do not have cancer.

“Because psilocybin has such tremendous medical potential, there’s no reason individuals should be criminalized for using something that grows naturally,” said Kevin Matthews, the director of the pro-mushrooms campaign.

Matthews, 33, credits psilocybin mushrooms with helping pull him out of a major depression that forced him to withdraw from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was a cadet for three years in his 20s.

Dr. Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was one of the authors of a study last year recommending that the Food and Drug Administration reclassify the drug to acknowledge its potential medical uses and relatively low potential for abuse.

Psilocybin is not addictive, and “there’s no direct lethal overdose” of the drug on record, Johnson said.

Researchers who study psilocybin’s effects use a synthetic version of the drug in carefully controlled environments, he said, which is different from someone growing mushrooms and ingesting them at home.

The ballot measure, Initiated Ordinance 301, would also establish a panel to review the law’s impact on public health and safety.

In advance of the vote, Art Way, the Colorado state director for a pro-legalization advocacy group, the Drug Policy Alliance, praised the local effort in Denver to move psilocybin enforcement off the police’s radar. But he cautioned against tackling the issue piecemeal.

“Separating some drugs as good and some as bad will only stand to perpetuate the drug war,” he said.

Arrests in Denver for incidents involving psilocybin have not numbered more than 59 in any of the last three years, and only 11 cases were prosecuted in that time.

Beth McCann, the district attorney in Denver, opposed the ballot measure, according to a spokeswoman, Carolyn A. Tyler.

“We’re still in the very early stages of marijuana legalization, and we are still learning the impact of that substance on our city,” Tyler said. “And she is not in favor of Denver being the only city that doesn’t enforce the law.”

Mayor Michael Hancock was also against the proposal, his office said, without elaborating on his reasoning. The Denver Police Department declined to take a position.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/denver-mushrooms-psychedelic-vote.html" id="151750c5-a884-351b-abe0-8eaea21c85d9">The New York Times</a>.

Voters in Denver, a city at the forefront of the widening national debate over legalizing marijuana, have become the first in the nation to effectively decriminalize another recreational drug: hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Hallucinogenic Mushrooms Win Support From Denver Voters

The local ballot measure would not quite legalize “magic” mushrooms, the ones that contain psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound. State and federal regulations would have to change to accomplish that.

But if it passes, the measure would make the possession, use or cultivation of the mushrooms by people 21 or older the lowest-priority crime for law enforcement in the city of Denver and Denver County. Arrests and prosecutions, already fairly rare, could all but disappear.

Adoption of the measure could signal fledgling public acceptance of a mind-altering drug, outlawed nationally for nearly 50 years, that recent research suggests could have beneficial medical uses. A similar effort failed to get on the ballot in California last year but could come up again in 2020. Oregon voters may also vote on a comparable measure next year.

“Because psilocybin has such tremendous medical potential, there’s no reason individuals should be criminalized for using something that grows naturally,” said Kevin Matthews, director of the “Decriminalize Denver” campaign.

“It really helped me see outside the box of my own life,” Matthews said of the drug. “It brought me out of the depths of my own internal struggles and despair.”

Matthew Johnson, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was one of the authors of a study last year recommending that the Food and Drug Administration reclassify the drug to acknowledge its potential medical uses and relatively low potential for abuse.

“But someone can have a dose that’s psychologically challenging,” he warned. “They panic and they wander into traffic and they die. It’s an admittedly low scale, but if that’s your son or daughter who has gotten into a fatal accident, as rare as that it is, that’s very real.”

“Decriminalization in general is supported by public health science,” Johnson said about Denver’s psilocybin ballot measure. “But if this happens, I would hope that the city would be very clear that it’s not endorsing use and that there are very clear risks.”

The ballot measure, Initiated Ordinance 301, would also establish a panel to review the law’s impact on public health and safety. The polls are scheduled to close at 7 p.m. Mountain time.

Art Way, the Colorado state director for a pro-legalization advocacy group, the Drug Policy Alliance, praised the local effort in Denver to move psilocybin enforcement off the police’s radar. But he cautioned against tackling the issue piecemeal.

Arrests in Denver for incidents involving psilocybin have not numbered more than 59 in any of the past three years and only 11 cases were prosecuted in that time.

Beth McCann, district attorney in Denver, opposes the ballot measure, according to a spokeswoman, Carolyn A. Tyler.

“We’re still in the very early stages of marijuana legalization and we are still learning the impact of that substance on our city,” Tyler said. “And she is not in favor of Denver being the only city that doesn’t enforce the law.”

Mayor Michael Hancock, who is up for re-election in the municipal election Tuesday, is also against the proposal, his office said, without elaborating on his reasoning. The Denver Police Department declined to take a position.

Matthews, the leader of the decriminalization campaign, said the initiative had not met with any organized public opposition. His group collected the necessary signatures to get the proposal on Tuesday’s ballot and raised about $45,000, mostly for social media advertising. No polling has been conducted on the measure.

Jeff Hunt, director of the Centennial Institute, a policy research group at Colorado Christian University, said he thought the measure could pass, since no one systematically campaigned against it — but people might also be wary of deregulating too many drugs at the same time.

He noted that decriminalization was the first step toward legalizing marijuana and said that proponents of the psilocybin measure, which he opposes, might be trying to travel the same road.

“What we’re seeing is a kind of social libertarianism that is reacting against the war on drugs, and that’s led us to a position where people feel like drugs like marijuana and even psilocybin could be harmless,” Hunt said. “And that’s deeply harmful.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/us/denver-mushroom-psilocybin-vote.html" id="f02132eb-c3e6-308c-addf-9a3a9cefbf1b">The New York Times</a>.

Voters in Denver, a city at the forefront of the widening national debate over legalizing marijuana, will decide Tuesday whether to be the first in the nation to effectively decriminalize another recreational drug: hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Denver Votes on Whether to Decriminalize 'Magic Mushrooms'

Lights zoomed by the window. Then came the jolt.

“It was just the biggest impact I’ve ever felt in my life,” Silva said Saturday. “Like an explosion, almost.”

Seconds later, Silva felt water. “Up to my ankles,” he said. “And there was water coming in from above the roof of the plane.”

The Boeing 737 had slid off the runway of the naval air station in Jacksonville and into the shallow waters of the St. Johns River. All 136 passengers and seven crew members would be rescued, 21 of them with non-life-threatening injuries. But all Silva knew at the time was that the flight, which had taken off from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had landed in water — and that someone was yelling something about smelling jet fuel.

Silva, 35, a civilian safety manager for a roofing company, grabbed his backpack, which was hanging from an overhead bin that had popped open. He opened the exit door and found himself on a wing of the plane.

Others began filing onto the wing, amid the darkness, rain and lightning. Eventually, the passengers made it onto an evacuation raft, children and women first, and emergency workers used a cable to guide them ashore.

Pets traveling in the plane’s cargo hold were presumed dead, said Kaylee LaRocque, a spokeswoman for the naval air station. Navy personnel had not been able to reach the cargo hold, which took on water, LaRocque said.

“We can’t get them out because the aircraft is not safe right now,” she said. Four pets were listed on the flight manifest, though more could have been taken aboard at the last minute, LaRocque said.

A team of 16 investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Jacksonville on Saturday to begin to figure out what went wrong, said Bruce Landsberg, the board’s vice chairman. By Saturday afternoon, investigators had recovered the flight data recorder, according to a post on the NTSB’s Twitter account.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/jacksonville-737-plane-crash.html" id="7f4e3b87-bb67-3282-a5f6-e5b296746768">The New York Times</a>.

MIAMI — For Darwing Silva, the first sign that something was amiss when his flight landed in Jacksonville, Florida, during a thunderstorm late Friday was that it seemed the jet did not brake after hitting the runway.

Jacksonville Passengers Recount Harrowing Plane Landing That Felt 'Like an Explosion'

Lights zoomed by the window. He traded worried glances with other passengers.

He lurched forward in his seat — 14B, the middle seat in an exit row — and hit his head on the seatback in front of him.

“I just kind of snapped” into action, said Silva, 35, a civilian safety manager for a roofing company.

He grabbed his backpack, which was hanging from an overhead bin that had popped open during the accident. He slipped past the female passenger in the window seat, who was bracing her head between her knees, opened the exit door, and found himself on a wing of the plane.

Others began filing onto the wing, amid the darkness, rain and lightning. Silva called his father to let him know he was OK. Eventually, the passengers made it onto an evacuation raft, children and women first, and emergency workers used a cable to guide them ashore.

“I’ve gone over so many of those safety instructions preflight,” Silva said. “You never really think you’re going to be the one to have to open the door.”

His trip seemed cursed from the start. The charter plane, operated by Miami Air International, had arrived four hours late. The flight had been unbearably hot, said Cheryl Bormann, 59, one of the Jacksonville passengers, and people had to fan themselves because the air conditioning was not working properly. Silva had taken off his polo shirt and was sweltering in his undershirt.

As the flight neared Jacksonville, the plane flew into a storm. There was some turbulence, but the crew gave no warnings about potential landing trouble.

It felt as if the front part of the plane had hit the ground hard before the rest of it had, Bormann said.

“It bounces and it swirls and it tilts and it tips, and you can tell the pilot is trying to control it and is not having much success,” she said. “It’s literally bouncing up and down, from side to side. Things are falling down from the overhead bins. People are holding onto their small children.”

Miami Air International regularly transports military service members and their families from the base in Guantánamo Bay to naval air stations in Jacksonville and Norfolk, Virginia. Officials for the carrier did not return phone calls Saturday about the accident.

The mishap stranded about 125 passengers at Guantánamo on Saturday morning. They were awaiting the return of the Miami Air plane for a flight to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

The stranded group included a military judge who announced this week that he would no longer preside over the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Also among them were two brigadier generals, prosecutors, defense lawyers and journalists who had arrived a week earlier for a pretrial hearing in the case.

Silva said he had driven straight from the naval station to his home in Miami, arriving about 5:30 a.m.

“I feel my neck sore. My right eye is sore,” he said. “I am going to get checked out just to make sure everything is OK, but at that moment, I didn’t feel much. The adrenaline, I guess.”

Bormann, a civilian criminal defense attorney in the 9/11 trial, spent the day scrambling to get a change of clothes, a new phone and enough forms of ID to get on a flight home to Chicago. Her few remaining belongings were in a reusable grocery bag that she was now using as a purse.

“I’m a criminal defense lawyer who handles capital cases — trauma is something I’m pretty accustomed to,” she said. “But you don’t realize it until it hits you. I sat on my bed and cried this morning in my hotel room.

“I have to get on a plane tomorrow,” she added. “And I’m not looking forward to it.”

In a move that critics say undermines the spirit of what voters intended, thousands of people with serious criminal histories will be required to fully pay back fines and fees to the courts before they could vote. The new limits would require potential new voters to settle what may be tens of thousands of dollars in financial obligations to the courts, effectively pricing some people out of the ballot box.

“Basically, they’re telling you, ‘If you have money, you can vote. If you don’t have money, you can’t,’” said Patrick Penn, 42, who spent 15 years in prison for strong-arm robbery and a violent burglary. He said he does not know whether he owes money to the court, but worries it could now prove a complication when he gets ready to cast a ballot. “That’s not what the people voted for.”

With the House voting 67-42 along party lines Friday to endorse the new restrictions, the legislation goes next to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had called on the Legislature to set additional standards for registering ex-felons to vote.

The vast majority of criminal defendants are poor when they are arrested and even poorer after they are released from prison.

The new restrictions have been attacked by civil rights groups and some of the initiative’s backers as an exercise in Republican power politics, driven by fears that people with felony convictions are mostly liberals who could reshape the electorate ahead of presidential elections in 2020 and beyond. Republicans have dominated Florida’s state government for more than two decades, but elections are often decided by a fraction of a percentage point.

Republicans said the restrictions are needed to clarify how the ballot measure, known as Amendment 4, should be put into practice. They cited the text of the amendment itself as requiring a rigorous interpretation of what constitutes a completed felony sentence and said politics was not their concern.

“Some have taken the position that this amendment will have some massive political impact one way or the other,” Rep. James W. Grant, a Tampa Republican who sponsored the House legislation, said Friday. “The outcomes will be what they may.”

Restoring voting rights to those who have completed felony sentences has become a national issue, with most states over time loosening or lifting barriers that limited access to the polls — so much so that, at a recent town hall, the Democratic candidates for president were asked whether even prisoners, not just former ones, should be allowed to vote.

But Florida had the highest number of people disenfranchised because of their criminal records. When nearly 65 percent of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, the momentous result was greeted as a historic civil rights victory in a state where African Americans were disproportionately disenfranchised. The measure left just two other states, Iowa and Kentucky, with laws that prohibit anyone with a felony record from voting.

Pressed for time as they near the end of the annual session, senators on Thursday afternoon tacked the new repayment requirements onto a previously unrelated bill that addressed some of the elections problems that surfaced during last year’s recount. The surprise legislative maneuver forced Democrats who might have otherwise favored the elections bill to oppose it. The state House had earlier endorsed a bill that included the strict repayment provisions.

But as part of a compromise late Thursday between House and Senate Republicans, people with felony convictions would have ways to become eligible to vote other than just full repayment of fines and fees. They could ask a judge to waive financial obligations or convert them to community service. The Senate had initially hoped to be more lenient, and it appeared that the compromise in any case would leave a large number of potential voters unable to register.

“My heart is in a different place, and I would love to go farther,” Sen. Jeff Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican who sponsored the bill in the Senate, said before the vote Thursday, invoking his Christian faith. “It should be our place to always try to seek mercy over sacrifice. So we will continue to work toward that goal.”

The final debate on the House floor Friday lasted more than two hours, with black Democrats emphasizing that felons had been barred from voting in the first place in Florida as part of racist Jim Crow laws enacted during Reconstruction. Present in the House gallery was Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, who has won national acclaim for his work.

Political scientists who study voter registration in Florida have said that re-engaging previously disenfranchised felons into the democratic process takes time and effort, and that any increase in the state’s voter rolls would be gradual and would probably follow existing trends in which most new voters in the state register without party affiliation.

Penn, the ex-prisoner, said he registered to vote as a Democrat this year. When he got out in 2017, a return to normal life proved elusive. Employers hired him, only to let him go soon after learning more about his criminal history. He could not afford to move out of his parents’ house. He had hoped at least for a chance to help choose the nation’s leaders and have a say in how his city is run.

“The voting thing is the most important,” Penn said. “That’s what creates that voice for people like ex-felons.”

DeSantis said while campaigning last year that he hoped lawmakers would better define which felony convictions would prevent someone from voting, though he has not publicly weighed in on the compromise reached in the Legislature. Amendment 4 did not apply to people convicted of murder or sexual offenses.

Lawmakers did that and then went further, also delving into the financial obligations attached to criminal cases. Without their guidance, legislators said, local court clerks and the state’s corrections department and elections division would struggle to maintain uniform standards for restoring voting rights.

Republican lawmakers say they want as many people as possible to be eligible to vote. They noted that the proponents of Amendment 4 said in court testimony and campaign websites ahead of the election that court fines and fees would be repaid.

“They’ve tried to walk this back,” Brandes said in an interview.

Civil rights organizations, however, counter that legislators went too far, and that the more than 5 million Floridians who voted for the ballot measure did not intend for court debts to become an exception to the right to vote. The text of Amendment 4 said voting rights would be automatically restored for felons “after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation.”

“This is a great big slap in the face to the voters and a way to discourage people from participating in the process,” said Micah W. Kubic, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s a stark disconnect between the joy and jubilation in November compared to folks now trying to do things in Tallahassee when no one is paying attention.”

“On the national stage, they’re debating should we allow people who are in prison to vote, but not us — we’re kicking and screaming,” Sen. Perry E. Thurston Jr., a Fort Lauderdale Democrat, said in an impassioned floor speech Thursday opposing the bill.

Some former felons in Florida have already cast ballots in local elections. The legislation grants any of those people who might now be made ineligible to vote immunity from prosecution.

Legislators long resisted calls to expand voting rights for Florida felons, choosing to act only after voters approved Amendment 4, which received more votes than any single candidate in November.

The new restrictions will almost certainly be met with legal challenges already being prepared by civil rights groups. DeSantis, a Republican who took office in January, has appointed three new justices to the state’s high court, shifting its balance toward conservatives. A federal lawsuit also appears likely.

Restitution, fines and fees are often turned into a lien, which records the debt but converts it from a criminal to a civil matter. The legislation adopted Thursday specifies that conversion to a civil lien is not enough to make someone with a felony conviction eligible to vote. The law would allow former felons to go before a judge — no matter how long ago their case was closed — and ask for the lien to be waived or converted to community service, or the victim could forgive repayment of the restitution.

The requirement to repay restitution in full would leave people like Coral Nichols, who was ordered to pay $190,000 when she was convicted of grand theft and wrongful misuse of identity in 2005, unable to register to vote “unless I won the lottery,” she said.

Nichols served four years and seven months in state prison, followed by nearly 10 years of probation that ended just last week. She has paid $100 toward her restitution every month, she said, mailing checks to a post office box for the former employer she stole money from, even after the company closed down. She said she still owes $180,000.

“I’m a contributing member of society,” said Nichols, 41, who co-founded a nonprofit in Seminole, Florida, to help other people after they are released from incarceration. “I pay taxes. I work in the community. I am a redeemed, reformed, rehabilitated individual, but yet I’m not going to be allowed to vote because I don’t have the money.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/us/florida-felon-voting-amendment-4.html" id="0a2e4b08-dde7-32fd-a9d9-7551b0649523">The New York Times</a>.

Floridians Gave Ex-Felons the Right to Vote. Lawmakers Just Put a Big Obstacle in Their Way.

NORTH MIAMI, Fla. — In November, Florida voters approved a groundbreaking ballot measure that would restore voting rights for up to 1.5 million people with felony convictions. But the Republican-led Legislature voted Friday to impose a series of sharp restrictions that could prevent tens of thousands of them from ever reaching the ballot box.

In 2014, lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Legislature gave children who were in the country without authorization in-state tuition at public colleges. A year earlier, the conservative state House voted to grant driver’s licenses to immigrants in the country illegally, although the governor ultimately rejected that policy.

But as the national political pendulum swings, so does the country’s largest presidential battleground state.

Florida is set to adopt one of the strictest laws in the nation against so-called sanctuary cities and counties. The legislation, expected to be approved by the state Senate as early as Friday, would require local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities and penalize officials who fail to do so.

At play in Florida are Republican base politics under President Donald Trump and the state’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, who ran as a Trump ally and staunch opponent of sanctuary cities even though most analysts agree Florida does not have any.

The law would require local governments to use their “best efforts” to support federal immigration law, including complying with requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to jail immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally until ICE is able to pick them up. Any officials who violated the law could be suspended or removed from office — or, in the House version of the bill, fined up to $5,000 a day.

“This is about public safety,” said Sen. Joe Gruters of Sarasota, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate and the chairman of the state Republican Party.

At stake, opponents say, are not just the civil liberties of immigrants but also Florida’s thriving economy and its identity as a melting pot that welcomes outsiders. About 20 percent of Florida’s population is foreign-born, although that share is far higher, 53 percent, in Miami and Orlando.

The Florida bill appears based on a Texas law passed two years ago.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/florida-immigration-sanctuary.html" id="a4ed0446-0970-3161-a735-1c7cf84827f8">The New York Times</a>.

MIAMI — In Florida, immigrants make up more than a fifth of the population, coming from places as diverse as Cuba, Haiti, Mexico and parts of South America. The Republicans who dominate state government have usually kept that in mind.

Florida, Where 1 in 5 Residents Is an Immigrant, Is Poised to Ban Sanctuary Cities

They watched not as journalism groupies, but as award contenders.

In an unusual move, the staff had submitted an entry to the most prestigious of journalism prizes for coverage of the mass shooting at their school, including a special memorial issue devoted entirely to 17 detailed obituaries honoring the classmates, teachers and coaches they lost on Feb. 14, 2018.

“We knew it was a long shot,” said Hannah Kapoor, 18, one of the newspaper’s co-editors-in-chief.

As it happened, when Dana Canedy, the Pulitzer awards’ administrator, began to announce the winners, The Eagle Eye was the first publication she named.

“I want to break with tradition and offer my sincere admiration for an entry that did not win, but that should give us all hope for the future of journalism in this great democracy,” Canedy said. Then she cited The Eagle Eye’s submission, which described how Parkland’s 44 student reporters and editors had to “put aside our grief and recognize our role as both survivors, journalists and loved ones of the deceased.”

“These budding journalists remind us of the media’s unwavering commitment to bearing witness, even in the most wrenching of circumstances, in service to a nation whose very existence depends on a free and dedicated press,” Canedy said. “There is hope in their example.”

The recognition was momentous for scholastic journalism, an important training ground for young reporters, who often feel that their achievements in the field get little attention from professional organizations.

“Sometimes, I don’t think that adults — and publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post — they don’t get to see that amazing work,” said Rebecca Schneid, 17, The Eagle Eye’s other co-editor, who has considered joining the student newspaper when she attends Duke University this fall. “And a lot of times, student journalists underestimate the power of their words or their ability to make a difference.”

In an interview Tuesday, Canedy said student entries are always her favorites, but the quality of The Eagle Eye’s reporting stood out. “It was actually a very competitive entry,” she said. “I was so inspired by what they did.”

Canedy said she plans to reach out in the coming days to invite some of The Eagle Eye staff to the Pulitzer luncheon in New York next month as her guests.

“They’re the future,” she said. “We’re in good hands with young people like this.”

As the winners were announced Monday, the half-dozen student editors who gathered around the computer screen with their faculty adviser, Melissa Falkowski, realized with a bit of disappointment that they had missed out on an award. Yet they had been honored in front of a national audience nonetheless.

“They don’t usually mention the losers,” said Falkowski, 36.

MIAMI — As 3 p.m. approached Monday, the editors of The Eagle Eye student newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, huddled around their adviser’s desk for the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.

Patricia Mazzei

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