Timothy Williams

The man, Jarrod W. Ramos, had previously pleaded not guilty on 23 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder, after what is considered the deadliest attack against journalists in the United States. A circuit court judge in Maryland, Laura Ripken, accepted Ramos’ plea and found him guilty after a lengthy hearing Monday.

Editors, reporters and a sales assistant were killed in the June 2018 shooting at The Capital, a daily newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. Ramos had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, the community newspaper chain that publishes The Capital.

A trial to determine whether he is criminally responsible is expected to start Nov. 4. If he is found not criminally responsible, he could be sent to a state psychiatric facility instead of prison.

Prosecutors said they had assembled overwhelming evidence proving that Ramos had carried out the attack. In court filings, prosecutors said they planned to show the jury surveillance videotape of the shooting, in which a gunman is seen firing shotgun blasts through the newspaper office’s glass doors and then continuing to fire once inside.

Anne Colt Leitess, the Anne Arundel County state’s attorney, told the court Monday that Ramos had barricaded shut the back door of the newsroom and an insurance business across the hall before opening fire.

Wendi Winters, a reporter at the newspaper, tried to stop Ramos by wielding a recycling bin, prosecutors said. Winters, 65, was killed in the attack.

Once authorities got inside the building, Leitess said, police officers found Ramos under a desk, hiding silently. Prosecutors said an officer’s body-worn video camera recorded Ramos saying: “I surrender. I surrender. I’m your shooter.”

When authorities first asked Ramos his name, Leitess said, he responded, “You don’t know my name?” Ramos then told them to talk to the leaders of the newspaper.

This article originally appeared in

Suspect Shifts to Guilty Plea in Newsroom Mass Killing

A man charged with killing five people in a Maryland newsroom last year changed his plea to guilty Monday but will still pursue an insanity defense, arguing he should not be held criminally responsible, authorities said.

A trial to determine whether he is criminally responsible is expected to start Nov. 4.

If Ramos is found not criminally responsible, he could be sent to a state psychiatric facility instead of prison.

Ramos had filed a defamation lawsuit against Capital Gazette Communications and several of its employees in July 2012, about a year after it published an article about his guilty plea in a previous harassment case. In that case, he was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation and ordered to attend counseling.

A judge dismissed the lawsuit when Ramos could not identify anything that had been falsely reported or that he had been harmed by the article.

Suspect in Capital Gazette Shooting Pleads Guilty

A man charged with killing five people in a Maryland newsroom last year changed his plea to guilty Monday but will still pursue an insanity defense that argues he should not be held criminally responsible, authorities said.

She has grown tired of people’s moral qualms about what she does for a living, of police harassment, and of the dangers of the work. But she is doing more than stewing about it.

Instead, Spellman is one of the architects of a bill before Washington’s City Council that would make it the first American city to decriminalize prostitution, placing the nation’s capital at the forefront of a growing movement that seeks to permit the activities of prostitutes, as well as pimps and johns, and to allow bordellos. An initial hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Spellman, a transgender woman and activist, has worked for more than two years with David Grosso, a City Council member, and advocacy groups in the city to try to marshal support for the legislation.

The proposal is dividing the city’s progressive community, pitting some women’s groups against advocates for sex workers. Some prostitutes who have been sex trafficked find themselves on the other side from sex workers who have not been. But all sides agree that prostitution practiced openly would reverberate well beyond the city’s thriving but shadowy sex industry of street prostitution, massage parlors, strip clubs and high-end call girls.

Prostitutes would most likely work openly out of homes in neighborhoods across the city. Certain blocks could become de facto red-light districts. And policing strategy would have to change so officers could distinguish pimps from sex traffickers.

Prostitution in the United States is legal only in a few counties in Nevada. In all, there are about 20 legal brothels in the state.

Four of the council’s 13 members have signed on as co-sponsors. Supporters say the bill — versions of which have recently made little headway in New York state, San Francisco, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and elsewhere — is the only effective way to combat sex trafficking. They say that only when every aspect of prostitution among consenting adults is made legal will prostitutes feel secure enough to report criminal activity, including coercion and abuse by pimps or sex buyers, without fear of arrest.

“It is an outdated law based on moral outrage,” Spellman, 52, a longtime advocate for sex workers, said about existing prohibitions on prostitution. “Why are they arresting people for having casual sex? I understand the need to protect people, and there are people being exploited, but not in the numbers that people think.”

Critics counter that the initiative is promoting a narrative that is dangerously false. They say decriminalization would exacerbate the sex trade’s worst abuses because it would increase demand for prostitution. That, they say, would force ever younger girls into prostitution and make it difficult for law enforcement to detect sex trafficking cases because citizens might call 911 less frequently if prostitution is legal.

Opponents have also spoken darkly about the nation’s capital becoming a destination for sex tourism.

“This bill is a sex trafficker’s dream,” said Yasmin Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, a Washington-based human rights organization that seeks to end violence against girls and young women. “This will cause more harm and more exploitation of our most marginalized people. Girls have told us they heard about the bill for the first time from their pimps, who were excited about it. If pimps and sex buyers are on the same side of this legislative proposal, doesn’t that say something to the other supporters?”

Groups supporting decriminalization include the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, Amnesty International and the World Health Organization. Opponents include the National Organization for Women and World Without Exploitation, a coalition of groups dedicated to ending sexual trafficking and exploitation.

The two sides speak about prostitution in very different terms.

For supporters, sex work for adults can be a viable, well-compensated profession that is generally free of exploitation. Pimps are referred to as managers and violence is uncommon. They argue that laws forbidding bordellos mean that prostitutes are unable to have consensual sex with clients in the safety of their own homes.

Spellman, who says she does not have a pimp and handles her own business affairs, said pimps and managers serve a vital role — from providing security and transportation to arranging appointments and dealing with child care.

“If the issue people have about pimps is that they are benefiting from other people’s labor, don’t they have managers who do that at McDonald’s?” she asked.

For opponents, however, prostitution cannot be separated from exploitation.

“This is an incredibly violent industry and a harmful industry,” said Lauren Hersh, national director of World Without Exploitation.

Many of the organizations that oppose decriminalizing pimps and johns support variations of what is known as the Nordic model, in which sex workers do not face criminal charges, and are instead offered social services, including housing.

Tina Frundt, a sex trafficking survivor and executive director of Courtney’s House in Washington, which provides services to children and young adults who have been trafficked, said 30% of the people who come to the center had been trafficked by relatives. Most are between 11 and 19 years old.

“I do not believe sex workers should be arrested — that’s a no-brainer,” she said. “But this bill legalizes pimping. This bill is horrible.”

In many ways, the disagreement is a sign of how quickly the decriminalization movement has become mainstream, an unexpected outgrowth of successful efforts during the past decade to call attention to racial disparities in mass incarceration and the mistreatment of women as part of the #MeToo movement. Prostitutes in many American cities are disproportionately African American, Native American and Latina women and transgender people, advocates say.

The murders of transgender women in recent years, some of whom were sex workers, have also fueled the movement. Advocates believe that decriminalizing sex work would specifically help protect transgender people because they often face discrimination when seeking jobs and decent housing.

Several cities have curtailed their arrests for prostitution in recent years, although buying sex is still prosecuted and pimping continues to be treated as a serious crime. Law enforcement officials say pimps are often also sex traffickers who force women and girls into prostitution through intimidation and violence, including kidnapping. Street gangs have increasingly become involved in organizing prostitution networks.

The experience of New Zealand, which decriminalized prostitution in 2003, is used by both sides to try to bolster their position.

Decriminalization advocates point to a 2012 study that found that “the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off” in New Zealand, while opponents call attention to the National Council of Women of New Zealand’s finding that some prostitutes continue to be as young as 13.

In Washington on an overcast autumn day this week, motorists could be observed pulling over and engaging in brief conversations with women who lingered on a sidewalk along a stretch of K Street, a few miles from the White House. The women would sometimes climb inside the vehicles and the driver would merge back into traffic.

The sex industry has grown as the city has gentrified, according to prostitutes and police. There have been numerous arrests on 14th Street and K Street in recent months, and prostitution in the K Street area has led to an FBI investigation into sex trafficking.

In 2017, police in Washington made 216 prostitution-related arrests, which includes crimes committed by prostitutes and pimps, according to police data. That figure increased to 519 in 2018, and there have already been nearly 800 prostitution-related arrests this year. The increase probably reflects changes in both police enforcement and in the prostitution market.

The K Street corridor is an illustration of why the legislation is needed, said Tiara Moten, an organizer with No Justice No Pride, a Washington-based group that works with the LGBT community.

“Decriminalizing sex work will make life easier not only for the people that complain about K Street, but also for the girls who are getting turned away from jobs, housing, health care and more,” she said. “Everyone needs to survive and everyone needs to make money.”

In addition to decriminalizing the entire sex industry, the legislation calls for the creation of a task force to study the law’s potential impact and then decide what changes might be necessary.

Despite the dire warnings of advocates about sex trafficking, Spellman said decriminalization cannot come soon enough for her and other transgender sex workers.

“People who have not walked in my shoes are telling me what’s best for me,” she said. People look at legalizing prostitution and see something nefarious, she said. “But what we’ve asked for is exactly what we need.”

In Washington, a Fight to Decriminalize Prostitution Divides Allies

WASHINGTON — Tamika Spellman, who is in her 50s, has worked as a prostitute since she was 14. The job, she said, is the most stable work she has had and helped put her son through college.

Brown Sr. asked the prosecuting attorney to reopen the case at a news conference Friday morning. Both state and federal prosecutors declined to charge Darren Wilson, the police officer, who resigned after the shooting.

“As a father, I vowed to protect my children,” Brown said. “I could not protect him that day and it breaks my heart.”

“We’re not stopping until we get justice,” he added.

The death of 18-year-old Brown Jr. — one of roughly 1,000 people killed by police each year — set into motion profound changes in policing, race relations and society that continue to reverberate.

Ferguson is a dramatically different city today than the one that erupted in violence five years ago after Brown’s death. The City Council, which had only one African-American member in 2014, now has six. The police department, which had only three African Americans on its 53-member force, is now about half black. Its chief, Jason Armstrong, is African American.

But Ferguson, its residents say, has also stubbornly remained the same place. Black people are still stopped by the police at disproportionate levels. The poverty rate remains above 20 percent. The Police Department lacks a neighborhood policing plan and has failed to collect data on police use of force.

At a memorial service Friday for Brown, mourners stood in silence for 4 1/2 minutes to represent the 4 1/2 hours his body was left lying in the street. The silence was followed by chants of “Mike Brown” and pledges to continue to seek justice.

“We haven’t achieved what we set out to accomplish, and we won’t stop until the police admit to what really happened that day,” said Jonathan Thomas, 31, from St. Louis. “You look around and nothing has changed. Same old, same old.”

The crowd of about 200 people, a mix of African Americans and whites, was made up largely of people who had been engaged in protests and for whom Brown remains an illustration of unfinished justice.

Afterward, they marched up Canfield Drive chanting, “Whose street? Our street.” It was on Canfield Drive that Brown was shot by a police officer.

This time, officers escorted them.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/ferguson-michael-brown.html" id="2b2d30a3-2377-3208-a51a-5f87bfd025b9">The New York Times</a>.

Five Years After Michael Brown's Death, His Father Wants a New Investigation

FERGUSON, Mo. — Five years to the day after the death of Michael Brown Jr., who was fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer, Michael Brown Sr. called Friday for a new investigation of his son’s death.

Local news stations aired images of agents from the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service carrying out box after box of documents and other items seized from at least six locations, including Pugh’s second-floor office in City Hall and her two homes in northwestern Baltimore. The coordinated raids sought financial records related to the children’s books.

Hours later, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, called for the mayor, a Democrat, to resign, saying she could no longer govern effectively. “Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust,” Hogan said in a statement. “She is clearly not fit to lead.”

The governor’s demand for Pugh’s resignation comes a little more than two weeks after the Baltimore City Council urged Pugh to step down, and three weeks after Hogan ordered a state investigation into the business relationship between Pugh and a health care system with extensive financial ties to the city.

In addition to the searches at City Hall and at Pugh’s homes, agents executed search warrants at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program that was once led by Pugh; the officer of her lawyer, Steven D. Silverman; and the home of Gary Brown Jr., a former mayoral aide.

Pugh, who has denied wrongdoing, has been embroiled for weeks in a scandal over hundreds of thousands of dollars she received for the books before and after she became mayor in 2016.

On April 1, Hogan asked state prosecutors to investigate $500,000 that Pugh received from the University of Maryland Medical System, a nonprofit health care company that operates hospitals and other health care facilities in Baltimore and around the state.

The payment was for 100,000 copies of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, which promote healthy children’s eating and exercise. The books, which she began writing in 2011, were to be distributed to schools in the city.

At the time the arrangement with the organization began, Pugh was a state senator and sat on the organization’s board of directors. She resigned from the board after news of the payments became public in March, apologized for oversights she had made on financial disclosure forms, and returned $100,000.

Pugh also received more than $100,000 over three years starting in 2015 from Kaiser Permanente, the health care company, for 20,000 copies of the books, Kaiser Permanente said.

As embarrassing new details continued to emerge, including that the vast majority of the books never reached school children and could not be located, a growing number of elected officials called for her resignation.

In the midst of the uproar, Pugh took an open-ended leave of absence earlier this month after contracting pneumonia and being hospitalized. Her aides have said that she plans to return once she recovers. In her absence, the City Council president, Bernard C. Young, has led the city.

Silverman, Pugh’s lawyer, said in a statement Thursday that federal agents had arrived at his office with a subpoena and had taken what he described as financial records related to the “Healthy Holly” books.

“We will continue to vigorously defend the mayor, who is entitled the presumption of innocence,” Silverman said in the statement.

Rep, Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat and an ally of Pugh who represents parts of Baltimore in Congress, issued a statement Thursday that stopped just short of calling for her to resign.

“Baltimore needs and deserves leadership that is above reproach and which can lead the city forward in ways that engender the trust and confidence of all essential stakeholders,” Cummings said.

He added that Pugh must “now focus on these very grave matters that have everything to do with her personal business endeavors and nothing to do with the priorities of the city of Baltimore.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/catherine-pugh-fbi-raid.html" id="6dfa7eaf-b31c-3275-a5a3-82f8c78b0693">The New York Times</a>.

FBI Raids Baltimore City Hall and Mayor Catherine Pugh's Homes

What began with questions about bulk sales of an obscure children’s book series erupted Thursday into a full-blown political scandal in Baltimore, where federal agents raided City Hall and two houses belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh, the author of the books. Critics of the mayor renewed calls for her to resign.

“Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust,” Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement. “She is clearly not fit to lead.”

The governor’s demand for Pugh’s resignation comes a little more than two weeks after the Baltimore City Council urged Pugh to step down and three weeks after Hogan ordered a state investigation into the business relationship between Pugh and a company with extensive financial ties to the city. Pugh is a Democrat. Hogan is a Republican.

Federal authorities did not disclose Thursday what they were looking for in the morning searches at City Hall and two of Pugh’s homes in Baltimore as well as at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program.

The agents, from the FBI and the IRS, also executed a search warrant at the law office of Steven D. Silverman, Pugh’s attorney.

Pugh, who has denied wrongdoing, has been embroiled for weeks in a scandal over hundreds of thousands of dollars she received for a series of children’s books she began writing in 2011.

On April 1, Hogan asked state prosecutors to investigate a $500,000 payment that Pugh received from the University of Maryland Medical System, a nonprofit health care company that operates hospitals and other health care facilities in Baltimore and around the state.

The payment was for 100,000 copies of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, which promote healthy children’s eating and exercise. The books were to be distributed to schools in the city.

At the time of the arrangement, Pugh was a state senator and sat on the nonprofit organization’s board of directors. She resigned from the board after news of the payments became public in March, apologized for oversights she had made on financial disclosure forms and returned $100,000.

Pugh also received more than $100,000 from Kaiser Permanente, the health care company, for 20,000 copies of the books, Kaiser Permanente said.

The vast majority of the books involved never reached schoolchildren and could not be located.

Silverman, Pugh’s lawyer, said federal agents had taken what he described as financial records related to the “Healthy Holly” books.

FBI Raids Baltimore City Hall and Mayor's Homes

Hours after federal agents searched Baltimore City Hall and homes belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh on Thursday morning as part of a series of coordinated raids, the governor of Maryland called for the mayor to resign, saying she could no longer govern effectively.

Federal authorities did not disclose Thursday what they were looking for in the early morning searches at City Hall and two of Pugh’s homes in Baltimore as well as at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program.

The agents, from the FBI and the IRS, also executed a search warrant at the law office of Steven D. Silverman, Pugh’s attorney, said an FBI spokesman, Dave Fitz.

As embarrassing new details continued to emerge, including that the vast majority of the books involved never reached schoolchildren and could not be located, a growing number of elected officials called for her resignation.

Pugh took a leave of absence this month after contracting pneumonia and being hospitalized, but she has said she planned to return once she recovers. In her absence, the City Council president, Bernard C. Young, has led the city.

Silverman, Pugh’s lawyer, said in a statement Thursday that the federal agents had arrived at his office with a subpoena and had taken what he described as financial records related to the “Healthy Holly” books.

The governor’s demand for Pugh’s resignation comes a little more than two weeks after the Baltimore City Council urged Pugh to step down and three weeks after Hogan ordered a state investigation into the business relationship between Pugh and a company with extensive financial ties to the city.

Agents from the FBI and the IRS executed the search warrants, said an FBI spokesman, Dave Fitz.

The payment was for copies of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, which promote healthy children’s eating and exercise. The books were to be distributed to schools in the city.

At the time of the arrangement, Pugh, a Democrat, was a state senator and sat on the nonprofit organization’s board of directors. She resigned from the board after news of the payments became public in March, apologized for oversights she had made on financial disclosure forms and returned $100,000.

But as embarrassing new details emerged, including that the vast majority of the books never reached schoolchildren and could not be located, a growing number of elected officials called for her resignation.

Pugh took a leave of absence this month after contracting pneumonia, but she has said she planned to return once she recovers. In her absence, the City Council president, Bernard C. Young, has led the city.

James Bentley, a spokesman for Pugh, did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday morning.

Hours after federal agents searched Baltimore City Hall and homes belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh on Thursday morning as part of a series of coordinated raids, the governor of Maryland called for the mayor to resign, saying she had lost the ability to govern.

Authorities did not disclose what they were looking for in the searches, although Pugh has for weeks been embroiled in a scandal over hundreds of thousands of dollars she received from a series of children’s books she has written over the years.

Agents from the FBI and the IRS executed search warrants at City Hall, at Pugh’s homes and at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program, an FBI spokesman, Dave Fitz, said.

Earlier this month, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland asked state prosecutors to investigate a $500,000 payment that Pugh received from a nonprofit health care company with ties to the state and city governments for her “Healthy Holly” books, which promoted healthy children’s eating and exercise.

At the time of the arrangement, Pugh, a Democrat, was a state senator and sat on the nonprofit’s board of directors. She resigned from that position after news of the payments became public in March, apologized for oversights she had made on financial disclosure forms and returned $100,000.

As the payments became public and officials called for her resignation, Pugh took a leave of absence this month after suffering from a bout of pneumonia. She has denied wrongdoing.

A spokesman for the mayor did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday morning.

Federal agents raided Baltimore City Hall and two homes belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh on Thursday morning.

FBI Raids Baltimore Mayor's Homes and City Hall Amid Book Sales Scandal

When Cariker says “gambling put us on the map,” it is only modest overstatement.

But in recent years, the Tunica area’s aging casinos have struggled to fend off competition from local rivals and failed to attract young people. Casinos have closed. Residents have moved away.

Then last year, town leaders got new hope when Mississippi became one of the first states to allow sports betting after the Supreme Court struck down a law that had effectively banned it in most states.

The vast majority of states have shied away from permitting such gambling and tapping into the nation’s illegal sports gambling market, estimated to be worth $150 billion. But in places like Tunica, where people began legally betting on sports in August, the results, so far, have been underwhelming.

The reluctance of state lawmakers, gambling analysts say, is based on a growing consensus that legal sports betting may not bring the windfall that economic forecasters predicted only a few months ago.

“There were a lot of people who didn’t know what they were talking about,” said Allen Godfrey, executive director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission, which oversees the sports betting ventures around Tunica.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision last May, which raised the prospect of hundreds of millions in new tax revenue, just six states have given final approval to allow legal sports betting. In a seventh state, New Mexico, Native American tribes have begun offering sports betting with federal approval.

In all, about a dozen states are considering sports gambling bills. But lawmakers and gambling analysts say only two or three of those states are likely to approve sports betting this legislative session, in part because of disappointing experiences in states where betting was recently made legal.

West Virginia, for instance, has collected only one-fourth of the monthly tax revenue it projected. Pennsylvania and Mississippi have received only about half of the tax revenue they had anticipated, according to data from those states.

Rhode Island has done even worse: State budget officials had assumed that sports betting would bring in nearly $1 million a month, but only about $50,000 is coming in each month.

New Jersey, however, has been a bright spot. The state has brought in more than $2 billion since sports betting was legalized about 10 months ago. The vast majority of the bets there have come from smartphones or online, not allowed in most of the other states that have recently approved sports betting.

The nation’s three most populous states — California, Florida and Texas — have dropped plans to legalize sports betting for many reasons, including worries about undercutting Native American tribes that operate casinos.

Tribal officials say legal sports betting will cut into their gambling profits, and ultimately reduce the money their casinos send to state governments each year. Those funds have become crucial revenue sources for states including California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan and Minnesota.

A year after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the disappointing results of sports betting have perhaps been felt nowhere more profoundly than in Tunica, a Mississippi Delta town of about 900 residents that had once been among the poorest places in the nation in terms of per capita income.

The area’s seven casinos sit just outside town limits, but they play an outsize role in nearly every aspect of daily life in Tunica, including providing two-thirds of the town’s annual revenue. As part of a complex formula worked out between the casinos and the state, the town receives a percentage of revenue earned by the casinos.

Along Tunica’s Main Street, there is a bank, a grocery and an antique shop alongside a few empty storefronts. The residential sections include well-tended homes shaded by oak trees, but also tiny shotgun shacks.

Before casinos arrived in 1993, the unemployment rate in Tunica County was more than 26%. And when the town of Tunica was known by outsiders, it was for an embarrassing relic of its past — an open sewer called Sugar Ditch, which ran through town. “60 Minutes” once documented the poverty.

But legalized gambling brought change.

Cotton and rice fields were transformed into casinos. Raw sewage stopped flowing into Sugar Ditch. The town began to modernize.

Early on, tourists waited for up to four hours outside casinos. Highway 61 from Memphis had to be widened to four lanes. Charter jets began arriving at the airport, and the runways were lengthened.

At the time, Mississippi trailed only Nevada and New Jersey as a gambling destination, and the Tunica area’s shiny new casinos were the big draw. As recently as 2006, Tunica’s casinos took in more than $1.2 billion in revenue.

But within a few years, people began to stay away. The largest casino, Harrah’s Tunica, closed in 2014. Nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs. Retail stores in the area soon closed, too.

As the revenue stream from casinos shrunk, so did the town’s budget. The annual budget for the town of Tunica was about $5 million in 2009. This year, it was $3.5 million.

The effect has been devastating: The county’s poverty rate — particularly among African Americans — has crept up. Over the past decade, the number of workers employed by the town has decreased to 34 from 65.

Some residents have long been skeptical about the morality of gambling. Some pastors tell parishioners that the gamblers helping to save the town are committing a sin.

Cariker, who said he does not gamble, said Tunica has long held a dual nature — rural, religious and conservative, but also inexorably tied to gambling.

“It’s strange being mayor of a town where people are dead set against it, but we’re dependent on gambling, in the middle of the Bible Belt,” he said. “The casinos brought something to Tunica to get us out of a hole.”

Sports betting, which Mississippi began to allow in August, fueled new optimism in Tunica.

But in January, only months into Tunica’s foray into sports betting, the casino at the Tunica Roadhouse, owned by Caesars Entertainment, closed because of a lack of business. Four hundred more jobs vanished.

So far, sports betting revenue has brought in only half of what Tunica officials had expected. State tax revenue from Tunica’s casinos, about $630 million annually, is just a fraction of what it once was.

In all, some 14,000 people worked in the area’s casinos in 2001 compared with 4,300 now. Competition has cropped up from a gambling complex in Arkansas.

“A lot of things happened at the same time, and unfortunately, Tunica got caught in the middle,” Godfrey said.

On a recent weekday afternoon, only a trickle of people came to bet on the games at the Horseshoe Tunica, where employees recording sports wagers were dressed in referee uniforms. There were offerings for baseball, hockey, NASCAR, boxing, Major League Soccer, the Bundesliga, and the Masters Golf Tournament. Most people were making small bets of $10 or so.

Pete Polkowski, 68 and from Iowa, came to bet on the NCAA basketball tournament and decided to stay a few extra days in the casino’s hotel to try his luck at other sports. He was fixated on a television set showing an early season game between the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays. No one else was watching.

“I come in the morning, look at the betting lines, go back to my hotel room and study for a couple of hours,” he said. His strategy, he said, had paid off, though he declined to say how much he had won.

R. Scott Barber, regional president of Caesars Mid-South and chairman of the Tunica Tourism Commission, acknowledged that the crowds the casinos had hoped for had not materialized. But he said it was premature to judge whether sports betting had been a failure. Barber said there had been some positive signs, including a group that had driven five hours from St. Louis to bet on a St. Louis Cardinals game.

“We’re fairly pleased early on,” he said. “It takes time. We’re starting to see some growth for the first time in 10 years, so I think the market has bottomed out and sports betting will help drive that growth.”

Many gamblers never make it to Tunica’s downtown shops, and Cariker says he is still devising ways to get them to visit and spend money.

“My job is to bring them 10 minutes south to see what we have in town,” he said. He sighed, and for a moment, his optimism dissolved. “That’s a real challenge.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/sports-gambling-tunica-mississippi.html" id="838e57a9-ea03-38f2-ae27-50839cc67923">The New York Times</a>.

A Small Town Bet on Sports Gambling. It's Still Waiting.

TUNICA, Miss. — As he drove through town in his black Crown Victoria, Chuck Cariker, the mayor of Tunica, pointed out the gifts that he said gambling had bestowed upon his town. The town hall. The recreation center. The post office. The police station. The roads. Even the car.

But within a few years, people began to stay away. The largest casino, Harrah’s Tunica, closed in 2011. Nearly 1,000 people lost their jobs. Retail stores in the area soon closed, too.

Former felons are often barred from obtaining professional licenses and an opportunity to be a barber at a friend’s shop fell through for the same reason. A nonprofit program he started ran into trouble when a school sought to prevent him from meeting with students because of his criminal past — a history that began when he stole a car at18, almost 15 years ago.

Under a bill now making its way through the California state Legislature, millions of people who have misdemeanor or lower-level felony records could be spared those problems: their criminal records would automatically be sealed from public view once they completed prison or jail sentences. The legislation would not apply to people convicted of committing the most serious crimes, like murder or rape.

“There are so many of us who just want to be better, but are constantly turned down, turned away,” said Jordan, who is now project director for Time Done, an Oakland nonprofit that works with people who have criminal records, and supports the California legislation.

In the United States, a record showing a criminal conviction or even an arrest that does not lead to a conviction can make it nearly impossible for someone to find jobs or apartments or to obtain professional licenses like those required in many states for barbers or real estate agents.

One in three Americans has a criminal record, according to the Justice Department, and a National Institute of Justice study found that having a criminal record reduced the chance of getting a job offer or a callback by 50 percent.

The legislation, introduced last week in the state Assembly, would make California — where an estimated 8 million people have criminal records — the first state in the nation to automatically scrub the rap sheets of people whose records qualify. The law would apply retroactively, meaning that people arrested or convicted of various crimes dating back decades would have their records automatically sealed. The records would still be accessible to law enforcement agencies, but not to members of the general public, including potential landlords and employers.

The legislation is part of a larger push to overhaul elements of the nation’s criminal justice system by people who say it incarcerates too many people, wasting money and lives.

In recent years, dozens of states and municipalities have prohibited employers from asking job candidates about prior arrests, prosecutors have moved to clear convictions for marijuana possession and police chiefs have instructed officers to stop arresting people for low-level crimes.

A law approved in Pennsylvania last year automatically clears the records of people with misdemeanor offenses if, after 10 years, they have not been convicted of any other crime.

So far, the California proposal has raised few public objections, largely because it does not expand the range of crimes that can be sealed. Under current law, people in California can seek to have records of misdemeanors and low-level felonies sealed by making a formal request to a court. Under the new legislation, sealing would happen automatically.

Under the current rules, it is rare that people pursue sealing their records and most do not even know it is an option, according to George Gascón, San Francisco’s district attorney. Only about 20 percent of those eligible to get their records sealed in California actually do so. (Jordan said he was among people who did nOt know, at first, that sealing his record was an option.)

In an interview, Gascón, a Democrat, acknowledged that the legal system, including his own office, was partly responsible for the low rate. Gascón said he decided that it was critical to shift the burden away from individuals and onto the judicial system.

“People don’t understand how it works, or they don’t have the capacity to get it done,” he said. “We cannot keep people caged in a paper prison for the rest of their lives.”

Offenses that would qualify to be automatically sealed under the new legislation are identical to those that people are permitted to seek to have sealed now, said Phil Ting, the State Assembly member, a Democrat, who introduced the bill.

Those crimes include certain felonies, like burglary and otherproperty crimes and drug offenses, and all misdemeanors.

For felonies, eligibility would depend, in part, on how severe the punishment for them was; crimes that earned a jail sentence, rather than a term in state prison, would generally qualify.

The California Justice Department would decide which cases would be eligible for sealing; county prosecutors could contest the state’s decisions in specific cases if they feared that public safety was at risk.

Still uncertain, the bill’s backers say, is exactly how many people the legislation would affect, but they estimate that the number will be in the millions.

The legislation is expected to be approved by both chambers of the State Legislature, which are dominated by Democrats, in the current session.

Joseph Kinzel, a deputy district attorney in Kern County, said the automatic sealing of records might overwhelm local courts and prosecutors’ offices. He said that the current system — in which people with records must petition courts — is hardly onerous.

“It’s not a steep burden and it’s not too much to ask,” he said.

But former inmates say the process can be intimidating, time-consuming and expensive.

According to the state’s website, the process includes as many as a dozen steps and can involve paying a fee of up to $150.

Some advocates for overhauling the criminal justice system say California’s legislation could go further.

Margaret Colgate Love, executive director of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center, a nonprofit group focused on eliminating legal hurdles facing former inmates, said that other states have enacted more expansive protections for people who have been arrested but not convicted of crimes. One of those states is Colorado, which enacted a law in 2016 authorizing courts to automatically seal the records of people who have been acquitted at trial or whose charges have been dismissed.

Love said the California bill does not make clear how people will be able to know whether their records are sealed, or whether a district attorney has challenged the sealing.

“That said, the bill is an important step,” she said. “A good deal depends on how much data the California Department of Justice has, how accurate it is, and how efficient their procedures are.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/california-criminal-records-bill.html" id="727e01ad-3f7c-35f6-a1eb-c69cae93f971">The New York Times</a>.

Rap Sheets Haunt Former Convicts. California May Change That.

After spending more than seven years in prison for robbery and auto theft, Jay Jordan tried to get work selling insurance, real estate and used cars, but was repeatedly turned away, he said.

Now Mangels, 52, has a little more than a month to find a new place in the city’s supercharged rental housing market, where median rents have risen 30 percent since 2011, adjusted for inflation, and the sight of people living out of cars or in tents pitched alongside highways has become common.

In an effort to halt runaway housing costs and curtail evictions, Oregon is expected this week to become the first state in the nation to cap how much landlords can raise rents. As early as Monday, the state House of Representatives is likely to pass rent control legislation that has already been approved by the state Senate. Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, has said she would sign it.

The legislation comes as states and cities around the nation search desperately for answers to a growing crisis in which rising rents have outstripped wages. Nationwide, median rents have risen more than $1,000 since 2006. In states with capitals controlled by Democrats, like Oregon, leaders are pushing laws that would limit rent increases, over the objections of landlords who say the rules would threaten their livelihoods.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has called for $1 billion in tax credits and new home construction to aid middle-class home buyers, and the state Legislature is mulling its own plans to stabilize the state’s overheated rental housing market.

Illinois is contemplating ending a statewide ban on local rent control laws, and in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has said he intends to strengthen existing rent regulations to keep apartment prices stable.

Three-quarters of the nation’s mayors say that a lack of affordable housing is a significant concern in their cities. Boston is proposing steep taxes on developers. Denver is studying proposals to allow more carriage houses — detached separate living units on the same lot as a house — which are far cheaper to build than typical single-family residences.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many states began banning cities from setting local limits on rent increases, encouraged in part by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which advocates for laws that limit government and boost free markets. Oregon would become the first state to impose a statewide rent control policy, but such rules have been common for decades in large U.S. cities including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Andy Mangels had been living in his modest apartment near downtown Portland, Oregon, for three decades when the news arrived a few days before Christmas: His rent was being raised by 113 percent.

Timothy Williams

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