Richard A. Oppel Jr.

Rodney Reed, who came within days of execution in Texas before an appeals court suspended his death sentence Friday, has been the most high-profile recent example, receiving support from Texas lawmakers of both parties and celebrities like Rihanna and Kim Kardashian West, who urged a new examination of the evidence.

Reed has long maintained that he did not commit the 1996 murder for which he was convicted. And in recent months, new witnesses came forward pointing toward another possible suspect: the dead woman’s fiancé, a former police officer who spent a decade in prison for kidnapping and sexual assault. (He denies committing the murder.)

Since the Supreme Court temporarily halted executions in 1972, at least 166 condemned inmates have been exonerated before their death sentences could be carried out. (Executions resumed in 1977 after states began revising their laws to comply with the high court ruling.) Advocates believe some most likely innocent men have also been executed since then, including Cameron Todd Willingham, whom Texas put to death in 2004.

Lawyers for death row prisoners frequently argue that their clients did not receive a fair trial, or file appeals on other procedural grounds. Yet researchers say there now are a striking number of cases where significant doubts have been raised about the condemned man’s guilt.

“This year has had an extraordinarily high percentage of cases in which there is very serious evidence that people who did not commit the killing are being subjected to death warrants,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group that tracks executions.

In at least one case, lawyers and family members have continued to push for new evidence long after an execution took place. On Monday, a Tennessee judge declined to allow DNA testing requested by the daughter of Sedley Alley, who was put to death in 2006 but claimed his confession was coerced. The daughter, April Alley, will continue to appeal and ask the state Supreme Court to grant permission.

Bryce Benjet, Reed’s lawyer, said he doubted that there were a higher proportion of innocent people on death row than in the past. But efforts to vigorously contest death sentences now reveal dubious convictions more frequently, he said, bringing to the fore examples of bad forensic science and other prosecution evidence that wilts under close examination.

“I don’t think the nature of the cases have changed,” said Benjet, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project who has represented dozens of death row inmates. “The nature of representation has changed.”

Here are other current cases where significant new evidence has surfaced. In each of them, prosecutors continue to argue that the accused was rightly convicted.

— Larry Swearingen

Swearingen was convicted of the 1998 rape and strangulation of Melissa Trotter, a 19-year-old first-year student at a community college north of Houston.

Evidence at trial

Authorities immediately suspected Swearingen, who was seen talking to Trotter on Dec. 8, the day that she disappeared. He was arrested three days later on unrelated warrants and charged with murder after her body was found on Jan. 2, 1999.

There were no witnesses to the abduction or killing. But prosecutors amassed circumstantial evidence that they said pointed to his guilt, including an anonymous letter he later admitted to have written from jail that contained information they said only the killer could have known. (Swearingen later said he had obtained the information from an autopsy report.)

The prosecution’s key evidence was one half of a pair of pantyhose recovered from Swearingen’s property. The state said it was a perfect match for another portion of hose that was used to strangle Trotter.

New for the defense

Blood was found under Trotter’s fingernails, raising the possibility that she and the killer had engaged in a violent struggle. DNA tests determined that the blood was not Swearingen’s and had come from another man who could not be identified. But a prosecution witness explained that away during trial testimony, saying contamination had probably muddied the results. This year, though, a state crime lab director questioned that explanation.

The timing of the death established at trial has also been called into question. The medical examiner testified that Trotter had been killed about 25 days before her body was found, placing the murder date on roughly the same day she disappeared. Since then, other experts have said the body was found within two weeks of death. The medical examiner also later said after reviewing additional evidence that she believed Trotter’s body had been dumped in the woods within two weeks of its discovery. Swearingen had already been in jail for 22 days when the body was discovered.

Doubts emerged, too, about the pantyhose. Other experts determined that the hose recovered from Swearingen’s property — found only after police had already searched twice, and after Trotter’s body was discovered — did not match the hose used to kill her.

Status of the case

Texas executed Swearingen on Aug. 21. His final statement was: “Lord forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”

— James Milton Dailey

Dailey was convicted and sentenced to death for the killing of Shelly Boggio, 14, whose body was found floating in the water near St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1985. She had been repeatedly stabbed, strangled and drowned.

No witnesses or physical evidence tied Dailey to the killing. His co-defendant, Jack Pearcy, told police that Dailey had committed the murder. Pearcy is serving a life sentence for his role in Shelly’s death. The case against Dailey, now 73, leaned heavily on the testimony of jailhouse informants who said Dailey had incriminated himself.

In 2017, Pearcy stated in an affidavit that he had killed Shelly alone. “James Dailey was not present when Shelly Boggio was killed,” Pearcy wrote.

At a later hearing, Pearcy admitted that he had signed the affidavit, but said some of it was untrue. He refused to testify about its specific contents, invoking the Fifth Amendment.

An inmate who was once incarcerated with Dailey also stated that he had heard two of the jailhouse informants who had testified against Dailey plotting to provide prosecutors with false information about him so that they would get reduced sentences.

A third jailhouse informant, Paul Skalnik, is a former police officer whose credibility has been called into question. The Tampa Bay Times characterized him as a “prolific informer” who had been used to help send four men to death row even though he had racked up more than 20 convictions, including for grand larceny by fraud.

Dailey was set to be executed on Nov. 7 in Florida, but last month a federal district judge granted a stay until Dec. 30, to allow newly appointed federal public defenders to research the case and file petitions.

— Richard Glossip

Glossip was convicted of arranging the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of a rundown motel in Oklahoma City that Glossip managed.

Prosecutors said Glossip had been stealing from the motel till and was afraid that he was about to be fired. They said he had enlisted Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old drifter doing maintenance work at the motel, to murder Van Treese in return for money.

The state’s case hinged on Sneed’s testimony against Glossip, in return for which Sneed, who admitted that he had committed the murder with a baseball bat, received a life sentence.

Prosecutors also highlighted Glossip’s behavior after the murder: In his first interview with police, for example, Glossip did not mention that Sneed had awakened him and told him about the killing. Glossip later said that he did not believe Sneed at the time.

No physical evidence tied Glossip to the murder, and his lawyers noted that Sneed had repeatedly changed his story before implicating Glossip. The lawyers later presented evidence that they said demolished Sneed’s credibility.

For example, Sneed’s cellmate before trial said Sneed talked extensively about the murder but never mentioned Glossip. Another inmate said that he had heard Sneed say he set Glossip up, and that he was “happy and proud of himself” for doing so.

Richard Leo, an expert on false confessions, also reviewed the case and stated that investigators had fed Sneed the theory that Glossip had masterminded the killing and that Sneed would be the scapegoat for the crime if he did not confess.

The state dismissed the statements by inmates who knew Sneed, saying “no one should believe the sworn word of ‘an admitted liar, drug abuser, and thief.’ ” Defense lawyers said it was hypocrisy to cite that rationale when so much of Glossip’s prosecution hinged on an admitted murderer testifying to avoid death row.

Shortly before Glossip’s scheduled execution in 2015, an Oklahoma appeals court voted 3-2 to deny a hearing to examine new evidence. One of the dissenting judges said that Glossip’s original trial was “deeply flawed.”

Glossip was about to be executed days later when Oklahoma’s governor granted a last-minute stay because the state had the wrong execution drugs. Oklahoma hasn’t executed anyone since then as the state revamps its procedures.

This article originally appeared in

Innocent on Death Row? New Evidence Casts Doubt on Convictions

The number of executions in the United States remains close to nearly a three-decade low. And yet the decline has not prevented what those who closely track the death penalty see as a disturbing trend: A significant number of cases in which prisoners are being put to death, or whose execution dates are near, despite questions about their guilt.

After all, no one has claimed that the woman did anything more threatening than “spook” Noor and his partner when she approached their squad car in a darkened alley. The woman — a yoga instructor named Justine Ruszczyk Damond — was unarmed and wearing pajamas at the time. And it was her 911 call, reporting that a woman might be under attack in the alley behind her house, that had brought police to the scene in the first place.

Even so, legal experts say that prosecutors may have a tough battle on their hands to convince a jury that when Noor leaned over his partner and shot Damond in the abdomen, he was committing a murder. Here is why.

The Supreme Court says an officer’s actions can’t be judged with hindsight.

Every case of a police officer accused of using unreasonable force on the job, including Noor’s, is subject to a 1989 ruling by the Supreme Court in a case known as Graham v. Connor.

The court said that an officer’s actions “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” And that evaluation, the court added, must allow “for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”

That ruling flowed from another case four years earlier, Tennessee v. Garner, in which the court ruled that officers could use deadly force to prevent an escape only when they had probable cause to think that a suspect posed a significant threat of death or serious injury to them or others.

Taken together, the rulings mean that to get a conviction, prosecutors must prove that an accused officer did not legitimately feel threatened and that other officers would not reasonably have used the same force in the same situation.

In the Minneapolis case, Noor did not speak to investigators. But his partner has said that he had also unholstered his service weapon and perceived that his life was in danger after hearing a voice and a “thump” behind him on their squad car, and glimpsing a person’s head and shoulders about 2 feet outside his window. “We both got spooked,” he said.

Noor’s lawyers contended in their opening arguments that he had acted reasonably.

Murder prosecutions of officers are rare, and convictions are even rarer.

In part because of those court rulings, the overwhelming majority of police shootings are judged by prosecutors to have been legally justified under the circumstances, even if they seemed egregious to the public. And of the 98 U.S. police officers who have been charged since 2005 with murder or manslaughter for an on-duty shooting, according to Philip Stinson, a professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, prosecutors have secured convictions or guilty pleas of only 35, mostly for lesser manslaughter charges. Just three convictions were for intentional murder.

In Minnesota, at least 164 people died in confrontations with the police between 2000 and 2017, according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune, but only two officers have been charged in those deaths: Jeronimo Yanez, acquitted of second-degree manslaughter in the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile outside Minneapolis, and Noor.

Juries “take the position of, ‘Would an ordinary police officer who was not negligent and who was in the same or similar situation react the way this policeman did?’” said Joe Friedberg, a prominent criminal defense lawyer in Minneapolis. “That’s why, for the most part, policemen are acquitted.”

Judges and juries may give officers even more leeway than the Supreme Court did.

Stinson, a former police officer and lawyer, said that juries and judges often seem to take the Graham v. Connor ruling too far, forgetting that the standard is supposed to be what a reasonable officer would do, not what the accused officer said he felt was reasonable.

And defense lawyers, who ordinarily avoid putting their clients on the witness stand, often do the opposite in police shooting cases.

“Juries are very reluctant to convict officers who testify in their own defense that they perceived an imminent threat, whether their actions were objectively reasonable or not,” Stinson said. “As soon as the officer takes the stand, it seems that all the work the prosecutors have done is disregarded or given less weight by the trier of fact than the officer’s own testimony.”

Friedberg said he expects Noor to take the stand in the trial: “He’s going to have to testify that his state of mind was similar to his partner’s.”

Police officers have grown accustomed to that leeway.

Civil rights advocates say the Graham v. Connor ruling has not only made it harder to prosecute officers for using deadly force, but it has also made it more likely that officers will use deadly force in the first place. They say a generation of officers, trained to follow policies that reflect the ruling, have been inculcated with a very permissive approach to what is reasonable.

But the thinking behind those policies may be changing.

“There has been a fair amount of reflection, though much more is needed, around these issues, and in placing the sanctity of life at the center of use-of-force policies,” said Vanita Gupta, a former head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division who is now president of an advocacy group, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

A case in point: An influential group, the Police Executive Research Forum, has been urging departments to adopt policies that go well beyond those tailored to fit Supreme Court precedent. Police forces in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have already done so.

The group’s executive director, Chuck Wexler, said there was a growing awareness that the Supreme Court ruling had helped spawn many “lawful but awful” shootings that were legally defensible but “morally unacceptable.”

“Today, there is a recognition that Graham v. Connor is the floor, and not the ceiling,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/minneapolis-police-shooting-mohamed-noor.html" id="f22094ea-c8c8-38c0-ab67-7096654b540f">The New York Times</a>.

When opening arguments began Tuesday in the murder trial of Mohamed Noor, a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot a 40-year-old Australian woman while on duty in 2017, the prosecutors may have to hold most of the cards.

A Police Officer Shot a Woman in Pajamas. Here's Why It May Be Hard to Convict Him

After all, no one has claimed that the woman did anything more threatening than “spook” Noor and his partner when she approached their squad car in a darkened alley. The woman — a yoga instructor named Justine Ruszczyk Damond — was unarmed and wearing pajamas at the time. And it was her 911 call, reporting that a woman might be under attack in the alley behind her house, that had brought the police to the scene in the first place.

Even so, legal experts say that prosecutors may have a tough battle on their hands to convince a jury that when Noor leaned over his partner and shot her in the abdomen, he was committing a crime. Here is why.

Taken together, the rulings mean that to get a conviction, prosecutors must prove that an accused officer did not genuinely feel threatened and that other officers would not reasonably have used the same force in the same situation.

In the Minneapolis case, Noor did not speak to investigators. But his partner has said that he had also unholstered his service weapon and perceived that his life was in danger after hearing a voice and a “thump” behind him on their squad car, and glimpsing a person’s head and shoulders about two feet outside his window.

“We both got spooked,” he said.

With opening arguments expected Tuesday in the murder trial of Mohamed Noor, a former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot a 40-year-old Australian woman while on duty in 2017, the prosecutors might seem to hold most of the cards.

A Police Officer Shot a Woman in Pajamas. Here's Why It May Be Hard to Convict Him.

Now the man charged in his death, Eric Holder, is being represented by another Los Angeles figure: Christopher Darden, who became a household name when he helped prosecute — unsuccessfully — O.J. Simpson in 1995 for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

Here’s a look at Darden, the man who famously asked Simpson to try on the bloody glove.

What has Darden been doing since the Simpson trial?

After leaving the district attorney’s office, Darden worked as a law professor, and was a co-writer on several legal thrillers as well as “In Contempt,” a behind-the-scenes account of the Simpson case that The New York Times called “powerful and affecting.”

The Times’ review noted the personal consequences that Darden said he suffered as Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., manipulated the issue of race during the trial: “The defense lawyer’s suggestion that Mr. Darden was a token black recruited by the prosecution team for the color of his skin led to accusations, on the street, that he was ‘an Uncle Tom, a sellout, a house Negro,’ Darden says. He writes that he received death threats and was spat upon, and that his family, too, was harassed.”

Darden also became a defense lawyer and worked as a commentator on legal cases for a number of television networks.

Is it common for prosecutors to become defense lawyers?

Yes. Many law school graduates favor starting their careers as prosecutors. It pays less than some of them could make in private practice, but it provides invaluable court experience early in their careers, while their more highly paid law school classmates who take private jobs spend their time on legal research and helping more seasoned lawyers prepare cases.

Prosecution work also teaches them the ins-and-outs of plea bargaining and negotiations between lawyers, which is how the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved. So when they hang a shingle to become a defense lawyer, they can immediately draw on years of experience as prosecutors.

Many of the criminal defense lawyers in any county seat are typically former prosecutors, while the best private lawyers who handle white-collar litigation and other expensive specialties often were once federal prosecutors. (Earlier in his career, Cochran had been a prosecutor in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.)

Did he miscalculate by asking Simpson to try on the bloody glove?

It’s the most remembered moment of the Simpson trial, which prompted Cochran’s famous exhortation: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Darden addressed the impact of that pivotal moment, and his decision to ask Simpson to try on the glove, during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in 2017.

“Quite honestly, I did not appreciate at the time the impact that little ditty had on the jurors,” Darden wrote. “I thought it was a kids’ rhyme for idiots, to be honest, but it was effective.”

He added, “I take responsibility for the glove issues, so if there is any blame or fault to be assessed, it fell on me. And it should be assessed to me, because I’m the only one strong enough to carry that burden.”

He said he felt it was clear that Simpson did what he could to avoid making the glove fit. “I hoped the jury would recognize that, but they couldn’t see it, because they didn’t want to see it,” he said.

What has been the reaction to Darden representing Holder?

Some have been critical of Darden, 62, for taking on the defense of a man charged with killing a beloved figure in his community. But as Darden made plain in his book, he has endured such criticism before, including being called a traitor for helping to prosecute Simpson.

Yet many lawyers hold strongly to the concept that everyone is entitled to a defense. In fact, Darden has said that if he had been a criminal defense lawyer at the time, he would not have had a problem defending Simpson.

Darden has said that, as a young man, he grew interested in becoming a lawyer from watching trials involving civil rights leaders.

“I knew how important the law was to the black community, and I admired those lawyers who took those cases, and I wanted to be one of them,” he said on Reddit.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/us/chris-darden-nipsey-hussle-public-defender.html" id="ebd70cfc-44af-3b90-a178-722890c7a51b">The New York Times</a>.

The killing this week of Nipsey Hussle, a rapper and advocate for the communities of South Los Angeles, sent a painful tremor throughout those neighborhoods and the music industry.

Chris Darden, O.J. Simpson Prosecutor, Is Now Defending the Suspect in Nipsey Hussle's Killing

Her body was found soon after in a motel room in Rockford, Illinois, after an apparent suicide.

She left a note saying her son, Timmothy, was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.” And no one has.

That’s when a boy who said his name was Timmothy Pitzen, and that he was 14, sprinted across a bridge from Cincinnati into Newport, Kentucky.

Bystanders initially thought he might be trying to steal a car. But when they approached, they saw bruises and abrasions on his face. The boy asked for help, saying he had been held against his will and traded among people for years, and that he just wanted to go home.

Police have not yet said whether the boy really is Timmothy Pitzen, and federal investigators were scrambling to use DNA tests and other methods to try to determine his identity Thursday.

But the boy told them that he had fled from a Red Roof Inn in Ohio, and, according to a police report, “had just escaped from two kidnappers that have been holding him for seven years.”

He described his captors as two white men in a Ford SUV with Wisconsin plates, both of them built like bodybuilders. One had curly black hair and a tattoo of a spider web on his neck; the other man was short and had a snake tattoo on his arms.

A spokesman for the Police Department in Aurora, Sgt. Bill Rowley, also told the station that police have “probably had thousands of tips of him popping up in different areas” over the years, and they did not yet have any idea of whether the boy’s story was true.

“It could be Pitzen,” he said. “It could be a hoax.”

As of Thursday morning, authorities had not determined the identity of the boy who had been found but said they believed they were getting closer to an answer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/us/timmothy-pitzen-missing.html" id="fa1f2b52-d064-3017-a93f-a14d128ea431">The New York Times</a>.

Almost eight years ago, Amy Fry-Pitzen took her 6-year-old boy out of an elementary school in Aurora, Illinois, and drove him to Wisconsin, where they were last seen together at a water park.

Timmothy Pitzen Vanished in 2011. A Teenager in Kentucky Says He's the Missing Boy.

As of Thursday morning, authorities still had not determined the boy’s identity but said that they believed they were getting closer to an answer.

She left a note saying that her son, Timmothy, was now in safe hands with someone who loved him and that “You will never find him.” And no one has.

A woman who said she was present when police arrived to take the boy to a hospital said that he appeared agitated, and it looked like he had been struck in his face.

“All of this was red, and this was red, like he’d been punched,” the woman, Fray Knight, said, pointing to both of her cheeks, near her eyes.

“He just was real antsy,” she said. “He wouldn’t stand still. The police had to get him up to the car because he wouldn’t stand still.”

Another witness told a police dispatcher that the boy had approached and pleaded for help.

“He walked up to my car and he went, ‘Can you help me? I just want to get home. Please help me,’ ” the 911 caller said. “I asked him what’s going on, and he tells me he’s been kidnapped and he’s been traded through all these people and he just wanted to go home.”

A Newport resident, Sharon Hall, told a local television station that she had initially spotted the boy out of her window, wandering around like he might have been planning to steal a car.

“There was a young man standing by my neighbor’s car,” Hall said. “The way he was acting, he was fidgety, he was moving around, he was looking in her car.”

“We still have no confirmation of the identity of the person located, but hope to have something later this afternoon or early this evening,” the Aurora police said in a statement posted on Facebook.

“Our primary focus here is in assisting the FBI in their investigation, and provide information from our missing person case involving Timmothy Pitzen, should this prove to be him. Unless or until his identity is confirmed, we have no official statement at this time.”

The FBI has confirmed only that it is working with local police and sheriff’s departments on the case, adding, “There will be no further statement made on this matter until we have additional information.”

But the response by prosecutors was widely criticized as brazen overreach: the arrests of 177 people, nearly everyone who had been at the scene that day. Serious criminal charges were later filed against almost all of them, and many were jailed on $1 million bond.

The end result came this week: None of those 177 people, or anyone else, will be held accountable for the biggest motorcycle-gang shootout in U.S. history. The case is ending after almost four years without a single conviction.

The last 24 pending indictments, involving lesser charges than the defendants initially faced, are being dismissed, the McLennan County district attorney, Barry Johnson, said Tuesday.

Johnson, recently elected to the post, cited what he described as a real possibility that conviction on even those lesser charges would be overturned on appeal. He also said that statutes of limitations made it impossible to pursue charges against anyone else.

And he expressed frustration with the course of the case, saying that there could have been real accountability for the shootout if his predecessor, Abel Reyna, had done a better job. But he said Reyna had failed to focus on the people most responsible for the carnage and bring them to trial with charges tailored to fit their individual culpability.

Johnson said Reyna should have used the available time and resources “to charge only those offenses where the admissible evidence would support a verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” And he added, “In my opinion, had this action been taken in a timely manner, it would have, and should have, resulted in numerous convictions and prison sentences.”

Only one defendant was tried: Jacob Carrizal, the president of the Bandidos chapter in Dallas. The case was declared a mistrial in 2017 after a majority of jurors voted to acquit him.

Johnson defeated Reyna in a Republican primary last year after sharply criticizing Reyna for the conduct of the shootout prosecution.

In a statement to the local newspaper — which had described the case as “a four-year prosecutorial fiasco” — Reyna suggested that his successor wasn’t being honest.

“I absolutely disagree with the overall result, as well as several statements and accusations within Mr. Johnson’s press release,” Reyna said. “However, it is solely his decision on how to proceed with any case in the district attorney’s office. I respect the fact that the voters of McLennan County chose Mr. Johnson to make these types of decisions.”

Another top prosecutor in Waco, Tom Needham, said that proving who, precisely, was culpable was very difficult because the shootout had been “a battlefield situation.”

“There were dozens of guns and hundreds of weapons collected after a five-minute brawl,” Needham said, according to the Austin American-Statesman. “With the video evidence and the forensic evidence that’s available, it’s simply not possible to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt who fired the shots that killed people.”

The Houston Chronicle reported that tests later indicated that four of the people who died that day were actually shot with weapons fired by Waco police officers, not by motorcycle gang members.

Johnny Holmes, the famously tough prosecutor and longtime district attorney in Houston, told the newspaper last year that the initial dragnet of arrests appeared to be an overreach, given how many of the cases were later dismissed.

“If you can prove that 177 people committed crimes, you don’t dismiss them because of the numbers,” Holmes said. “Or at least, I wouldn’t. The truth is, they probably didn’t commit a crime.”

While the criminal case is now over, the legal battle is not.

McLennan County, the City of Waco, Reyna and others are defendants in lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court by more than 100 bikers, who say that their civil rights were violated because they were arrested without probable cause. A judge in Waco ruled in November that the lawsuits could proceed.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/waco-motorcycle-gang-shootout.html" id="7942d00d-2d48-3526-a2e4-ea728f08eac3">The New York Times</a>.

A Texas Biker Shootout Left 9 Dead, but No One Will Be Held Accountable

The crime scene was one of the most shocking that Texas had witnessed in years: Nine people killed and 20 wounded in a lunchtime shootout among members of the Bandidos and Cossacks motorcycle gangs in a restaurant parking lot in Waco in May 2015.

Federal law bars gun ownership by felons, fugitives, drug abusers, people adjudicated to be mentally ill, those dishonorably discharged from the military or living in the country illegally, and by convicted domestic abusers or others subject to domestic violence restraining orders. But experts say the number of people who are barred from owning guns but have them anyway may reach into the millions.

Only eight states have laws that provide an explicit mechanism so people suspected of having guns in violation of those prohibitions are actually required to give them up. And some of those states merely allow — but do not require — police to seek a court order to confiscate such guns.

That was the case in Illinois, where authorities knew for more than four years that Gary Martin was a violent felon but apparently did nothing to ensure he surrendered the laser-sighted Smith &amp; Wesson handgun that he used to kill five co-workers Friday.

Only a single state — California — has a database dedicated to tracking firearm owners who have lost their right to possess a gun.

Aside from California, only Connecticut and Nevada expressly require felons to provide proof to courts or to law enforcement they have turned over guns after conviction, according to the Giffords Law Center. Illinois and four other states — Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania — also provide statutory mechanisms for felons to turn over illegally possessed weapons, though the procedures are not as stringent.

But when Illinois lawmakers sought to tighten state law so police would be mandated to confiscate guns owned by people barred from possessing them, or at least verify the guns had been transferred to legal owners, concerns about manpower helped doom the proposal.

Martin was issued a state firearm owner’s card in January 2014 — and five weeks later he passed a background check to buy his handgun — even though he had been convicted of aggravated assault for stabbing a former girlfriend with a knife and hitting her with a baseball bat in Mississippi in 1995.

Illinois State Police said Martin lied on his firearm owner’s card application about whether he had any felony convictions.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/gun-seizures-felons-abusers.html" id="f2d35961-e056-3a43-a873-d9bcd82382c1">The New York Times</a>.

The workplace shooting in a Chicago suburb last week that left five people dead exposed the failings of the system designed to keep guns away from felons and others deemed too dangerous to handle firearms.

How So Many Violent Felons Are Allowed to Keep Their Illegal Guns

In reality, she spent much of her professional life wearing body armor and toting an M4 rifle, a Sig Sauer pistol strapped to her thigh, on operations with Navy SEALs and other elite forces — until a suicide bombing took her life last month in northeastern Syria.

She was, in all but name, part of the military’s top-tier Special Operations forces. Officially a chief petty officer in the Navy, she actually worked closely with the nation’s most secretive intelligence outfit, the National Security Agency, to target leaders of the Islamic State.

The last few years have seen a profound shift in attitudes toward women in combat roles. Since 2016, combat jobs have been open to female service members, and they have been permitted to try out for Special Operations units. More than a dozen have completed the Army’s Ranger school, one of the most challenging in the military. Some have graduated from infantry officer courses, and even command combat units. And in November, a woman completed the Army’s grueling Special Forces Assessment and Selection course, the initial step to becoming a Green Beret.

Yet Kent illustrates an unspoken truth: that for many years women have been doing military jobs as dangerous, secretive and specialized as anything men do.

She would sometimes muse that conversation — even with people who had top security clearances — would be simpler if she could just join a Special Operations unit.

“She’d tell me, ‘You can say what you do in two words, but I have to explain over and over to people what I do, and half of them don’t believe me’,” said her husband, Joe Kent, who recently retired after a 20-year career in the special forces. “As the years went on, she wished she could just say, ‘Hey, I’m Joe, and I’m a Green Beret.'”

“In many ways, she did way more than any of us who have a funny green hat.”

Only in death can friends and family talk about a life that showed just how far women had quietly advanced into the nucleus of the nation’s most elite forces.

“Her job was to go out and blend her knowledge of cryptology and sigint and humint to help the task force find the right guys to paint the ‘X’ on for a strike or a raid,” Joe Kent said.

Cryptology is code breaking; sigint is signals intelligence, like intercepting and interpreting phone calls and other communications; humint is human intelligence, the art of persuading people, against their instincts, to provide information.

At 35, Shannon Kent was expert in all three. Her husband credits a knack for gleaning information picked up from her father, a lifelong police officer.

“She understood how all the pieces came together,” he said. “She wasn’t just relying on local informants. She knew how to fill in the gaps through her knowledge of different intelligence capabilities. She was kind of a one-stop-shop for finding bad guys.”

Kent spoke a half-dozen Arabic dialects and four other languages. She was one of the first women to complete the rigorous course required for other troops to accompany Navy SEALs on raids. She could run a 3:30 marathon, do a dozen full-arm-hang pull-ups and march for miles with a 50-pound rucksack.

She did this while raising two boys, now ages 3 and 18 months, and, for a time, battling cancer.

She used her five overseas combat deployments to master the collection of human intelligence, gaining the trust of tribal leaders, merchants, and local government officials who confided in her, often at great risk to themselves.

That is the kind of mission she had been on Jan. 16, when a bomber killed her and three other Americans at a restaurant in Manbij, Syria. The Islamic State claimed credit for the attack. She became the first female service member to die in Syria since U.S. forces arrived in 2015.

More than 1,000 people attended Kent’s memorial service Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis, Maryland, where she was posthumously promoted to senior chief petty officer and awarded five medals and citations. The awards described her Special Operations work and also said she had been the noncommissioned officer in charge at the NSA’s operations directorate for four years.

By the time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were reaching their highest pitch, women had been trained as intelligence collectors, linguists, interrogators and other specialties that put them on the front lines.

That Kent’s last assignment was in northeastern Syria, where American forces work with the Kurdish militia was fitting: There are many female fighters and commanders in the Kurdish forces.

“Women have been on the front lines with special operators for 16 years,” said Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, author of a book about female troops working with elite forces in the combat zones of Afghanistan. “But because that community is unseen and so rarely talks about their work, it’s been hard to know how much women have done.”

Kent developed skills that have become critical over the last two decades, including the immediate exploitation of documents, hard drives and other intelligence found during raids, and sophisticated methods of targeting that combined eavesdropping, human intelligence and relationship mapping.

In her first combat rotation, in 2007, she worked with the Joint Special Operations Command in Balad, Iraq. She did two more rotations in Iraq before a long stint at a remote outpost in Zabul province, Afghanistan, in 2012, where she won awards for being a top human intelligence collector and linguist.

Early in her career her language skills and easy manner had made her good at “tactical questioning” of people during missions. “That was her foot in the door,” Joe Kent said.

“Back then I don’t think SEALs were enthusiastic about talking to locals, and Shannon found a place where she could be of value, and she poured her heart and soul into it,” he said.

The Kents first met during intelligence targeting training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where Joe Kent had been assigned to an Army Special Operations command after seven deployments to Iraq. They were married Christmas Eve 2014.

“We got set up by another girl who does the same stuff,” Joe Kent said. “It’s a pretty insular type of community, and we had similar life experiences.”

But for a cancer diagnosis — and the Pentagon bureaucracy — Shannon Kent would not even have been in Syria.

After so many hard missions and becoming a mother, she had decided to become a clinical psychologist and treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

That meant becoming a Navy officer and spending six years studying and training. She was scheduled to go to the Navy’s Officer Development School in Rhode Island last June, and to begin her classes for her Ph.D. in the fall.

But she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2016. She told her husband, then on a deployment, only after the surgery was successful.

“She just sent me a picture of her throat scar and said, ‘I had a little cancer, but I got it cut out. I didn’t want to bug you,'” Joe Kent said.

Even though she was considered cancer-free, the military’s rules blocked her from becoming a commissioned officer. But the rules still allowed her to deploy to the most hard-fought combat zones.

She pressed her case with congressional representatives, and her husband followed up with the Navy after her death. This week, the Navy modified its rules to make it easier for enlisted service members who wish to become officers to petition for medical waivers.

“The Navy fixed everything that kind of screwed Shannon,” Joe Kent said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/us/shannon-kent-woman-warrior-spy.html" id="e82e74d4-6e47-36cf-abd5-a3a19a1caaa2">The New York Times</a>.

Given who she really was, the military had little choice in how it described Shannon Kent. They said only that she was a “cryptologic technician,” which anyone might assume meant that her most breakneck work was behind a desk.

Her Title: Cryptologic Technician. Her Occupation: Warrior.

Kent, whose memorial service will be Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, enlisted for the same reasons and around the same time as many of her female peers, after the Sept. 11 attacks. (Her father, a New York State Police commander, and her uncle, a firefighter, both responded on 9/11.)

While other founders favored the bald eagle as a national symbol for its strength and majestic beauty, Franklin condemned the bird’s habit of scavenging and stealing food from other animals, calling it lazy and “often very lousy.”

A generation ago, that was rarely a problem. Between hunting, habitat destruction and the pesticide DDT (which led to fragile eggshells that meant many offspring died in incubation), the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Only about 500 nesting pairs were left in the contiguous United States in the 1960s.

Thankfully, the species has mounted a comeback to 10,000 nesting pairs and is no longer classified as threatened, much less endangered — a striking success story of conservation and federal protection for the bird of prey that graces the nation’s Great Seal.

That rebound, however, has not come without issue: It turns out bald eagles are a real pain in the neck around trash dumps. They can grip all manner of waste, some of it rather vile, and fly away with it from the landfill, only to let it slip over the surrounding neighborhoods.

Richard A. Oppel Jr.

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