On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Against the backdrop of this, allegations of violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh are doing the rounds on social media. In one such post, an image of a house on fire is being widely shared with the claim that ‘Islamists’ in Bangladesh had set fire to the house of Bangladeshi cricketer Liton Das, who is a Hindu by faith.

X handle Hindutva Knight (@HPhobiaWatch) shared the above-mentioned image on August 5 with the caption: “Bangladeshi Hindu cricketer Liton Das house has been set on fire”. The tweet has received over 10.4 Lakh views and has been retweeted over 7,100 times. (Archive)

Bangladeshi Hindu cricketer Liton Das house has been set on fire pic.twitter.com/0so4MS1Chp

— Hindutva Knight (@HPhobiaWatch) August 5, 2024

Premium subscribed X user Sunanda Roy (@SaffronSunanda) also shared the same image with the following caption: “He is Liton Das, a Bangladeshi cricketer. He is a national Hero of Bangladesh. His house was set on fire by Islamists. This is the condition of an elite Hindu of Bangladesh. Just imagine the condition of common Hindus. #SaveBangladeshiHindus”. The tweet has received more than 4.35 Lakh views and has been retweeted over 7,600 times. (Archive)

Readers should note that @SaffronSunanda has been found peddling misinformation, especially those of communal nature, on several occasions.

He is Liton Das, a Bangladeshi cricketer.

He is a national Hero of Bangladesh.

His house was set on fire by Islamists.

This is the condition of an elite Hindu of Bangladesh. Just imagine the condition of common Hindus.#SaveBangladeshiHindus pic.twitter.com/lGS1bOrpzU

— Sunanda Roy (@SaffronSunanda) August 5, 2024

Several other users such as @randomsena, @visegrad24, propaganda outlet Sudarshan News, @ChandanSharmaG also amplified the claim that Bangladeshi cricketer Liton Das’ house had been set ablaze.

Fact Check

To verify the claim, we ran a reverse image search on the viral image which is claimed to be of Liton Das’ residence and came across several news reports from Bangladesh that carried the same image. All the reports said it was the house was former cricketer Mashrafe Mortaza.

A report from The Business Standard titled “Mashrafe’s Narail home vandalised, torched”, said that some individuals had vandalised and set fire to the the house of Mashrafe Bin Mortaza, a lawmaker from the Narail-2 constituency, along with the houses of district parishad chairman Adv. Subhash Chandra Bose and district Awami League general secretary Nizam Uddin Khan Nilu. The district Awami League office was also set on fire.

Here is a report from Dhaka Tribune which carried a photo of the same bulding and identified it as Mashrafe Mortaza’s house.

We found several other reports in Bengali and English which too mentioned that the house on fire in the viral belonged to Mashrafe Bin Mortaza. The same had been reported by several Indian News outlets as well.

Mortaza is a former cricketer who also captained Bangladesh’s national cricket team. He joined the Awami League in 2018 and served as a member of parliament from Narail-2 district until August 5.

The Awami League was the leading political party in Bangladesh, led by ex-PM Sheikh Hasina. The party was founded by her late father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman.

Therefore, the claim that Liton Das’ house has been set on fire and that the viral image showed Das’ house is false. The viral image showed the house of former cricketer and Awami League MP Mashrafe Bin Mortaza’s house.

The post Cricketer Liton Das’ house set afire in Bangladesh? No, viral image shows Narail residence of Mashrafe Mortaza appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

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This article is a partnership between ProPublica, where Pamela Colloff is a senior reporter, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a staff writer.

Sunny Eaton never imagined herself working at the district attorney’s office. A former public defender, she once represented Nashville, Tennessee’s least powerful people, and she liked being the only person in a room willing to stand by someone when no one else would. She spent a decade building her own private practice, but in 2020, she took an unusual job as the director of the conviction-review unit in the Nashville DA’s office. Her assignment was to investigate past cases her office had prosecuted and identify convictions for which there was new evidence of innocence.

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The enormousness of the task struck her on her first day on the job, when she stood in the unit’s storage room and took in the view: Three-ring binders, each holding a case flagged for evaluation, stretched from floor to ceiling. The sheer number of cases reflected how much the world had changed over the previous 30 years. DNA analysis and scientific research had exposed the deficiencies of evidence that had, for decades, helped prosecutors win convictions. Many forensic disciplines — from hair and fiber comparison to the analysis of blood spatter, bite marks, burn patterns, shoe and tire impressions and handwriting — were revealed to lack a strong scientific foundation, with some amounting to quackery. Eyewitness identification turned out to be unreliable. Confessions could be elicited from innocent people.

Puzzling out which cases to pursue was not easy, but Eaton did her best work when she treaded into uncertain territory. Early in her career, as she learned her way around the courthouse, she felt, she says, like “an outsider in every way — a queer Puerto Rican woman with no name and no connections.” That outsider sensibility never completely left her, and it served her well at the DA’s office, where she was armed with a mandate that required her to be independent of any institutional loyalties. She saw her job as a chance to change the system from within. Beneath the water-stained ceiling of her new office, she hung a framed Toni Morrison quote on the wall: “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

If Eaton concluded that a conviction was no longer supported by the evidence, she was expected to go back to court and try to undo that conviction. The advent of DNA analysis, and the revelations that followed, did not automatically free people who were convicted on debunked evidence or discredited forensics. Many remain locked up, stuck in a system that gives them limited grounds for appeal. In the absence of any broad, national effort to rectify these convictions, the work of unwinding them has fallen to a patchwork of law-school clinics, innocence projects and, increasingly, conviction-review units in reform-minded offices like Nashville’s. Working with only one other full-time attorney, Anna Hamilton, Eaton proceeded at a ferocious pace, recruiting law students and cajoling a rotating cast of colleagues to help her.

By early 2023, her team had persuaded local judges to overturn five murder convictions. Still, each case they took on was a gamble; a full reinvestigation of a single innocence claim could span years, with no guarantee of clarity at the end — or any certainty, even if she found exculpatory evidence, that she could spur the courts to act. One afternoon, as she weighed the risks of delving into a case she had spent months poring over, State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze, she reached for a document that Hamilton wanted her to read: a copy of the journal that the defendant’s wife, Kaye Maze, wrote about the events at the heart of the case.

The journal began a quarter-century earlier with Kaye’s unexpected but much wanted pregnancy in the fall of 1998. Then 34 and the manager of the jewelry department at a local Walmart, Kaye had been unable to conceive in a previous marriage, and she was elated to be pregnant. Her husband, who shared in her excitement, accompanied her to every prenatal visit. But early on, there were signs of trouble, and Kaye was told she might miscarry. “I found out at four weeks that I was pregnant,” she wrote. “I was in the hospital two days later with cramping and bleeding.” The bleeding continued intermittently throughout her pregnancy, and she suffered from intense, at times unrelenting nausea and vomiting. She was put on bed rest, and Russell cared for her while also working the overnight shift at a trucking company. For the next six months, they hoped and waited, while Kaye remained in a state of suspended animation.

Eaton noted dates and details as she read. “After developing gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension and having low amniotic fluid, it was decided to induce labor at 34 weeks,” Kaye wrote. When she gave birth to her son, Alex, on March 25, 1999, he weighed 3 pounds, 12 ounces.

Alex spent the first 13 days of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit. Kaye and Russell roomed with him before he was discharged, taking classes on preemie care and infant CPR. Because he had been diagnosed with supraventricular tachycardia, or an unusually rapid heart rhythm, they were provided a heart monitor and taught to count his heart rate. The Mazes were attentive parents, Eaton could see. In the three weeks that followed his release from the hospital, they took him to doctors and medical facilities seven different times. When they took him to an after-hours clinic on April 18 to report that he was grunting and seemed to be struggling to breathe, a physician dismissed their concerns. “We were told that as long as we were able to console Alex, there was nothing wrong with him, except he was spoiled,” Kaye wrote. The doctor advised them, she continued, “that we, as new and anxious parents, needed to learn what was normal.”

It was the admonition — that they were too vigilant — that discouraged them from seeking medical attention when a bruise emerged on their son’s left temple and then his right temple. Another bruise appeared on his stomach. Russell worried that the tummy massage he had given his son to relieve a bout of painful constipation was to blame. “We are concerned,” Kaye wrote, “but trying not to jump at shadows.”

On May 3, Kaye left their apartment to buy formula. Half an hour later, Russell placed a frantic phone call to 911 to report that Alex had stopped breathing. He performed CPR until paramedics arrived. The baby was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered he had a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging; blood had collected under the membrane that encased his brain and behind his eyes. Preliminary medical tests turned up no obvious signs of infection or illness. With bruising visible on both his forehead and his abdomen, suspicion quickly fell on the Mazes. “We were told Alex had injuries that you only see with shaken baby syndrome,” Kaye wrote. A doctor who was called in to examine the 5-week-old for signs of abuse “told me she thought Russell hurt Alex.”

Eaton read the journal knowing that in the years since the infant was taken to the emergency room, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the triad of symptoms doctors traditionally used to diagnose the syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes — are not necessarily produced by shaking; a range of natural and accidental causes can generate the same symptoms. Nevertheless, shaken baby syndrome and its presumption of abuse have served, and continue to serve, as the rationale for separating children from their parents and for sending mothers, fathers and caretakers to prison. It’s impossible to quantify the total number of Americans convicted on the basis of the diagnosis — only the slim fraction of cases that meet the legal bar to appeal and lead to a published appellate decision. Still, an analysis of these rulings from 2008 to 2018 found 1,431 such criminal convictions.

When Alex was discharged from the hospital three weeks later, he had been removed from his parents’ custody and placed in special-needs foster care. The DA’s office charged Russell with aggravated child abuse. He was jailed that June and found guilty by a jury the following February.

Alex’s health continued to deteriorate, and on Oct. 25, 2000, over the Mazes’ emphatic objections, he was taken off life support. When Russell’s conviction was later vacated on a technicality, prosecutors charged him again, this time with murder. He was found guilty in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison. By the time Eaton examined the case, he had been behind bars for nearly a quarter-century.

She turned to the journal’s final entry. “My beautiful baby took 20 minutes to leave us,” Kaye wrote about the day of Alex’s death, when she was permitted to cradle him in the presence of his foster parents. “I held him in my arms, rocked him and sang him into Heaven. This is the most horrific thing for any mother to have to endure. The agony that my husband felt at not being allowed to be there is an agony no father should have to endure. What the state of Tennessee has taken from us can never be replaced or forgiven.”

Eaton understood that if she decided to take on the Maze case and concluded that Russell did not abuse his son, she was still looking at long odds. She would have to go before the original trial judge — a defendant with an innocence claim typically starts with the court where the case was first heard — to argue that the police, prosecutors and jurors got it wrong. That judge, Steve Dozier, was a no-nonsense former prosecutor and the son of a veteran police officer, who might be disinclined to disturb the jury’s verdict. But it was still early in Eaton’s investigation, and she did not know what she would find — only that she needed to first understand what persuaded jurors of Russell’s guilt.

That evidence included testimony from the diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, who told jurors that the bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Russell’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.” Eaton also needed to make sense of a set of X-rays suggesting that Alex’s left clavicle had been fractured and a recording of an interrogation that prosecutors characterized as an admission of guilt.

When Eaton listened to the scratchy audio of Russell’s interrogation, she could hear the insistent voice of a police detective, Ron Carter, posing a series of increasingly combative questions. The investigator’s confrontational style had been considered good police work, Eaton recognized, but she observed that Carter would not take no for an answer when Russell denied hurting his child. Carter was mirroring what Starling told investigators; informed that the baby had been shaken, Carter predicated his questions on that seemingly incontrovertible fact. “You had to have shaken the child,” he told Russell. “That’s the only way it could’ve happened.” The detective repeated this idea more than a dozen times. Russell was already in a state of distress; he had just withstood four previous rounds of questioning at the hospital — from the treating physicians, Starling, another detective and a child welfare investigator — and he did not know if his son was going to live or die.

As Eaton studied the interview, she could see that Russell consistently denied harming his son. But he never asked for an attorney, and in unguarded comments, he sought to help the detective fill in the blanks of a situation that he himself did not seem to understand. He agreed that it was “possible” that while picking up Alex or putting Alex in a car seat, he had accidentally jostled the baby. “But as far as physically shaking him to the point of causing injury, no,” he said. Carter warned him that he was getting “deeper and deeper and deeper in trouble” and that his baby boy was “lying up there, and it’s for something that you caused.” The detective continued to insist that Russell was not telling the truth and that only he or Kaye could be to blame because they were Alex’s sole caretakers. Worn down, Russell finally hypothesized that he might have jostled, or even shaken, his son to try to revive him after finding him unresponsive. “I guess I could,” Russell said, sounding bewildered. “It’s possible.”

To Eaton’s ears, this did not amount to a confession. As she understood it, Russell was pressured to either accept blame or point the finger at his wife. He had remained steadfast that he did nothing to cause Alex to become unresponsive but found the baby that way.

The case did not look like the abuse cases she saw as a public defender; rather than hiding their son away, the Mazes put him in front of doctors again and again. But Eaton knew that once investigators and then prosecutors settle on the theory of a case, the state’s narrative calcifies, and DAs will go to great lengths to defend it. DA’s offices often reflexively reject innocence claims and even block defendants’ efforts to have the courts consider potentially exonerating evidence. Their faith in the underlying police work, and their certainty about a defendant’s guilt, can make prosecutors resist acknowledging a mistake. So, too, can the political pressure to protect the office’s record and to appear tough on crime. “It’s ingrained in some prosecutors to fight for the sake of fighting,” says Jason Gichner, the Tennessee Innocence Project’s deputy director, who now represents Russell Maze.

When Nashville created a conviction-review unit to try to disrupt this prosecutorial mindset, it was following the earlier lead of another reform-minded DA’s office. In 2007, Dallas’ newly elected district attorney, Craig Watkins, established what he called the conviction-integrity unit. The office he inherited had a long and ugly history of tipping the scales of justice against Black citizens, and Watkins wanted to harness the power of an innovative technology, DNA analysis, to see if he could undo some of the harms of that legacy. The unit reviewed hundreds of convictions in which defendants’ requests for testing had been denied. “When a plane crashes, we investigate,” Watkins told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2012 when he testified about wrongful convictions. “We do not pretend that it did not happen; we do not falsely promise that it will not happen again; but we learn from it, and we make necessary adjustments so it won’t happen again.” By the time he left office in 2015, his conviction-integrity unit had exonerated 24 people, nearly all of them Black men. Since then the office has secured nine more exonerations.

Watkins’ vision for changing the system from inside inspired prosecutors in cities across the country to form their own conviction-review units. But because unraveling complex, long-ago criminal cases is labor-intensive, conviction-review units are unheard-of in the smaller, resource-strapped DA’s offices that dot rural America. Of some 2,300 prosecutors’ offices nationwide, just around 100 have them. In jurisdictions that have the funding and the political will for them — and where they are staffed not with career prosecutors but with attorneys who have defense experience — they can be powerful tools. According to data collected by the National Registry of Exonerations, these units have helped clear more than 750 people. Last year, they played a role in nearly 40% of the nation’s exonerations.

In the years that followed Russell’s murder conviction, doctors who challenged the notion that shaken baby syndrome’s symptoms were always evidence of abuse faced resistance from prosecutors. Brian Holmgren, who led the Nashville DA office’s child-abuse unit until 2015, and who tried the Maze case, built a national profile as one of the most strident critics. While a prosecutor, he served on the international advisory board for the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, a nonprofit advocacy group, and he lectured around the country about how to conduct shaken baby prosecutions. He also was a co-author of two 2013 law-review articles, which lambasted doctors who testified for the defense in such cases as unethical and mercenary, suggesting that they were willing to offer unscientific testimony for the right price.

Holmgren made no secret of his disdain for these doctors when he delivered a keynote presentation at a National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome conference in Atlanta in 2010. Standing before an image of Pinocchio, he read from the testimony of physicians who had refuted shaken baby diagnoses, the puppet’s nose growing longer with each quote. He concluded his talk by inviting a guitar-playing pediatrician to lead the audience in a sing-along to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz”:

I will say there is no basis for the claims in shaking cases,

My opinion’s in demand.

Though my theories are outrageous, I’ll work hard to earn my wages

If I only get 10 grand.

Holmgren’s impassioned advocacy on behalf of child victims made him a polarizing figure in Nashville. In 2015, The Tennessean ran a front-page article revealing that he told a public defender he would not offer a plea deal in a child-neglect case unless her client, who was mentally ill (she had stabbed herself in the stomach during one pregnancy), agreed to be sterilized.

His dismissal soon after was part of a sea change at the DA’s office that began in 2014, when voters elected Glenn Funk, a longtime defense lawyer, to be the city’s top prosecutor. As a sign of his commitment to reform, Funk created the conviction-review unit in late 2016, when CRUs were virtually nonexistent in the South. But for the first three years, it was by all measures a failure. Hamstrung by its own bureaucratic rules — a panel of seven prosecutors had to agree before any formal investigation could occur — the unit had yet to reopen a case. In 2020, Funk persuaded Eaton to come run the unit with assurances that she would not have to contend with the panel of prosecutors and that she would answer only to him.

Eaton needed qualified medical experts to evaluate the evidence in the Maze case, but she thought the public vilification of doctors might still give pause to one she wanted to talk to: Dr. Michael Laposata, who previously served as chief pathologist at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville.

Laposata had spent much of his career recommending that physicians rigorously search for underlying diseases when evaluating children who are bruised or bleeding internally, rather than leaping to a determination of abuse. His body of work has shown that the symptoms of certain blood disorders can mimic — and be almost indistinguishable from — those of trauma. In 2005, he and a co-author wrote a seminal paper for The American Journal of Clinical Pathology, which acknowledged at the outset that child abuse too often goes undetected. But the fear among clinicians that they might inadvertently overlook a child’s suffering “has produced a high zeal for identifying cases of child abuse,” and that zeal, the paper argued, combined with a lack of expertise in blood disorders, had led to catastrophic mistakes. “It is very easy for a health care worker to presume that bruising and bleeding is associated with trauma because the coagulopathies” — disorders of blood coagulation — “that may explain the findings are often poorly understood.” Such a misinterpretation, the paper cautioned, could result in the false conclusion that a child had been abused.

Now the chief of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Laposata was initially guarded when the conviction-review unit asked if he would assess the Maze case, explaining that he was already overcommitted. He agreed to look at Alex’s lab reports and Kaye’s prenatal and birth records, but he made no promises that he could do more. His hesitance fell away after he reviewed the material. One fact leapt out at him immediately: Alex’s blood work was not normal. The infant’s hematocrit, or concentration of red blood cells, was not only extremely low; the size and shape of those cells were also atypical. This suggested a problem with red blood cell production that would have taken time to evolve, making it inconsistent with acute trauma. He put this into simpler language when he spoke with Eaton and her team, and she wrote down and underlined his words: “Abnormal red blood cells are not created from child abuse.” These abnormalities raised the suspicion of an undiagnosed blood disorder.

The pathologist also zeroed in on Kaye’s prenatal history. In addition to the health issues she enumerated in her journal, Laposata noticed a positive result for an antinuclear antibody test, commonly associated with an autoimmune disorder. Pregnant women with such disorders often develop antibodies and can pass them to the fetus, he explained. Those antibodies can remain in their infants’ systems for months and may lead to the formation of blood clots. He could see that the treating physicians did not conduct all the necessary tests to determine if Alex carried antibodies that would have predisposed him to clotting abnormalities. “It is surprising that these tests were never performed on the child given the extreme circumstances and the clinical implications of having a clot in the brain,” Laposata later wrote.

The likelihood that Alex suffered from an undiagnosed health condition raised serious questions about the prosecution’s case, and from that point on, Eaton did not look back; this was the conviction on which her team would focus. That there was a plausible medical explanation for Alex’s bruises also had profound implications for Kaye. Prosecutors had pointed to them as evidence that Kaye should have known her husband was abusing their son, and for failing to protect him, they charged her in June 1999 with aggravated assault. After she was told that having an open criminal case would make it harder to regain custody, Kaye took an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence. She received a two-year suspended sentence and never regained her parental rights.

Eaton often thought about Kaye as she sifted through the case file. If Kaye had been willing to testify against her husband, she might have won back custody of her son, and in return for her cooperation, her criminal charge could have been reduced or dropped. Yet she always stood by Russell. She was unequivocal when she testified at his murder trial, insisting that he was not capable of hurting their child. She moved to rural East Tennessee after he was incarcerated there, so she could visit him as often as possible. She never abandoned their marriage. Eaton knew that such loyalty was rare; long prison sentences often lead to divorce, and the more time a person remains locked up, the more likely the marriage is to fall apart. Kaye’s resolute belief in her husband was not the kind of hard evidence Eaton was seeking, but she filed it away, another data point to consider.

Eaton had noticed a detail in the trial transcripts that she found telling: A police officer named Robert Anderson testified that when he arrived at the apartment as paramedics worked to revive Alex, he saw Russell looking on, impassive. He was acting “rather calmly, just kind of watching,” Anderson told the jury. “He didn’t appear upset, no, not from the outside.” The inference was that Russell was callous, even cold-blooded.

Eaton, having followed the emerging research on trauma, saw something different in his emotionlessness. The encounter with police came just after Russell struggled to resuscitate his son, who had turned blue and gone into cardiac arrest. She was struck by how little the investigators who first interacted with the Mazes understood acute stress and how much that lack of knowledge shaped the investigation that followed.

Eaton had educated herself about the effects of trauma because it had altered not only the lives of her defense clients but also her own. She arrived in Nashville during a tumultuous adolescence, after running away from home in Clarksville, Tennessee, at the age of 16. “I’d experienced a significant trauma, and I didn’t know how to ask for help,” she told me. She was from a peripatetic military family that was not equipped to give her the intensive support she needed. In a Nashville phone booth, Eaton spotted a sticker that read, IF YOU ARE A TEENAGER AND YOU NEED HELP, CALL THIS NUMBER. She dialed the number and, weeping into the receiver, said she had nowhere else to turn.

That phone call, Eaton believes, saved her life. It led her to an emergency shelter for teenagers, where she found counselors who were trained in crisis intervention, and after receiving daily therapy, she returned to Clarksville to finish high school. From that point forward, she knew she wanted to go into a helping profession — a journey that led her first to psychology and then to the law. She was drawn to representing defendants, whom she saw as survivors of trauma too. “No 5-year-old dreams of growing up to become a felon,” she told me. She joined the public defender’s office in 2007, and squaring off against the DA’s office day after day, she proved to be both quick on her feet and tenacious. Three years later, she started her own private practice.

Funk, the district attorney, had always regarded her as one of the brightest stars in Nashville’s criminal defense bar, and as his conviction-review unit foundered, he began talking to her in 2019 about taking the helm. He knew that if he wanted to make the unit effective, he had to put someone with her singular focus and defense experience in charge. Nashville’s CRU was not the only one to fall short of expectations; many conviction-review units have not produced an exoneration. Some are simply overburdened and underfunded, while others have met resistance from local judges. But underperforming conviction-review units have also given rise to suspicion, among defense attorneys, that there is a more cynical calculus at work; they see DAs who want to signal their commitment to justice reform without actually doing the hard work of challenging fellow prosecutors and local police officers.

“The C.R.U., as presently constituted, is a complete and utter sham,” the defense lawyer Daniel Horwitz wrote in 2018, when the Nashville DA’s office declined to act on new information that his client, convicted of murder, was the wrong man.

In Funk’s willingness to try to do better, Eaton saw an opportunity to give defendants with credible innocence claims a fair hearing, while using the resources of the state to investigate. The first case she took on, in the summer of 2020, was Horwitz’s client, Joseph Webster. Tennessee law does not give prosecutors any clear mechanism to get back into court if they uncover a potential wrongful conviction. Eaton coordinated with Horwitz, who had already obtained DNA testing of the murder weapon and tracked down eyewitnesses to the killing whom the police had ignored. After conducting her own independent investigation, which built on two years of work by her predecessor, she went to court to jointly argue with the defense that Webster should walk free. His conviction was vacated, and he was released, having served nearly 15 years of a life sentence.

This became the template for how Eaton worked. Conducting her own parallel investigations alongside the Tennessee Innocence Project, she probed more troubled cases. Of the five convictions she helped undo, three relied on forensic findings that are now seen as flawed.

One of those defendants, Claude Garrett, had already spent nearly 28 years in prison when Eaton began looking at his case in 2020. He survived a 1992 house fire only to be charged with murder after fire investigators determined that the blaze, which claimed the life of his fiancée, was intentionally set. He was locked up when his daughter was 5 years old. In the intervening years, many once-accepted tenets of arson science were debunked. The “pour patterns,” or burn marks, that arson investigators saw as proof that someone poured an accelerant around the house had come to be understood as a natural byproduct of fast-burning fires. Several nationally recognized fire experts who reviewed the case testified that there was no evidence the fire was intentionally set. “When stripped of demonstrably unreliable testimony, faulty investigative methods and baseless speculation,” Eaton wrote to the court, “the case against Garrett is nonexistent.”

Garrett’s conviction was vacated, and he was released in May 2022 at the age of 65. He died suddenly, five months later, of heart failure. “When we have advancements in science, why don’t we look at every single case in which that science convicted someone and see whether the evidence still stands up?” his daughter, Deana Watson, says. “People are going to die in prison who don’t belong there — human beings who literally have no reason to be there, who are stuck there based on what we thought was true 30 years ago.”

Claude Garrett’s death would always hang over Eaton — a nagging reminder, as she worked on the Maze case, that there was no time to spare. She and Hamilton, who was a former federal defender, threw themselves into their reinvestigation. The lawyers learned about blood disorders and genetic diseases, poring over medical journals and buttonholing doctors. They spoke to experts about police interrogation techniques and the effects of emotional trauma on suspects. They visited the Mazes’ former apartment complex to visualize the sequence of events. They conferred with lawyers at the Tennessee Innocence Project, who were talking to other medical experts around the country. Still, the question remained: What had happened to Alex?

Eaton wanted to stay focused on the specifics of Alex’s case and not get lost in the controversy over shaken baby syndrome. While there is no disagreement that the violent shaking of an infant causes harm, there is fierce dissent over whether the symptoms associated with the diagnosis can be taken as proof that abuse has occurred. (“Few pediatric diagnoses have engendered as much debate,” the American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledged in a 2020 policy statement.) This has left both doctors and the courts divided. Over the past four years, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, nine people whose convictions rested on the diagnosis — five parents and four caregivers — have been exonerated. Last year, a New Jersey appellate court backed a lower-court judge who pronounced the diagnosis “akin to junk science.” But appellate judges in recent years have also upheld shaken baby convictions, including that of a man on death row in Texas, Robert Roberson, whose execution date is set for October.

Eaton reached out to experts in the fields of pathology, radiology, neonatology, genetics and ophthalmology, and over the spring and summer and then fall of 2023, physicians who looked at the medical records independently of one another came to the same conclusion: Alex’s symptoms were not consistent with abuse. They observed that the bleeding in his brain and around his eyes continued to progress during his hospitalization. Such ongoing hemorrhaging “suggests a mechanism other than abusive trauma,” explained Dr. Franco Recchia, an ophthalmology specialist. So, too, did the increased bleeding around Alex’s brain. The doctors were in agreement: This progression of symptoms pointed to an undiagnosed, underlying condition — like a metabolic disease or blood disorder — which most likely resulted in a stroke. After reviewing the autopsy slides and other medical records, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, determined that Alex “had a systemic disorder that was never properly worked up due to the early fixation on the alleged nonaccidental head trauma.”

The doctors noted the absence of obvious evidence of violence; Alex had no neck injuries, broken ribs, limb fractures or skull trauma. They also zeroed in on what Eaton and Hamilton found noteworthy in Alex’s hospital records: Starling rendered her diagnosis within hours of Alex’s arrival at the ER, before receiving all the results of blood work and other testing. And she did not consult his pediatrician’s records, which documented a sudden increase in his head circumference weeks before he arrived at the emergency room. (Starling did not respond to requests for comment.)

But it was the analysis of one last piece of evidence, a set of X-rays known as a skeletal survey, that helped Eaton understand something that she had been trying to make sense of, but that had remained stubbornly perplexing: the clavicle fracture. A close examination of the medical records showed that chest X-rays, performed when Alex was first admitted to the emergency room, did not detect any breaks. Only after he was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome was a fracture identified on the skeletal survey, on his second day in the hospital.

Interpreting radiological images like a skeletal survey can be subjective, and when evaluating a curved bone like the clavicle, radiologists may disagree about whether a tiny abnormality is a fracture or not. When Dr. Julie Mack, a Harvard-trained radiologist, reviewed the images last fall for the Tennessee Innocence Project, she said she saw no evidence of a bone break. She left open the possibility that a slender hairline fracture was present, which she could not detect in her copy of the original images. But, she explained, “He underwent CPR, which, if a clavicle fracture was present, is a sufficient explanation for such a fracture.” Mack’s review of the records, which included several CT scans and an MRI of Alex’s brain, led her to conclude that the infant had suffered not from abuse but rather from “an ongoing, abnormal, natural disease process.”

In coordination with the conviction-review unit, Russell’s attorneys filed a motion in state court in December, seeking to reopen State of Tennessee v. Russell Lee Maze. “Physicians who suspect abusive head trauma can no longer stop their analysis with the identification of the shaken baby syndrome triad,” it read. “Instead, they must seriously consider all other etiologies that may plausibly explain the constellation of symptoms and eliminate them as causes.” Horwitz — the attorney who once called the CRU a sham — and one of his law partners, Melissa Dix, also filed a motion on behalf of Kaye, petitioning the court to vacate her felony conviction. The decision about whether to reopen the case was in the hands of the judge, Dozier; he had been on the bench since 1997, having won reelection or run unopposed in every election since his appointment.

Eaton walked over to the courthouse that day with Hamilton to file the unit’s 71-page report, which detailed their investigation. Eaton and her team wrote a report each time they went before a judge to ask that a conviction be overturned. It was imperative, she believed, to establish trust with judges before asking them to take the weighty, and sometimes politically perilous, step of tossing out a jury’s verdict, and to signal that they had the full backing of the DA’s office. “While it was reasonable for the treating doctors to consider abuse,” the report read, “every other medical possibility was either overlooked or completely ignored. Law-enforcement officers blindly followed the course set out by Dr. Starling and failed to consider any other explanation for Alex’s condition. After an investigation comprised of a hasty medical determination, an interrogation of traumatized parents and little else, the case was considered closed.”

The lawyers recommended that the court vacate Russell’s and Kaye’s convictions. “The tragedies in this case cannot be overstated,” they concluded. “What every single expert the C.R.U. consulted with agrees upon is that Alex Maze did not die from abuse.”

Shortly after they filed their report, Dozier agreed to set a hearing so that he could evaluate the findings from the state’s and defense’s expert witnesses.

When Russell was led in handcuffs into the courtroom on a drizzly morning this past March, he bore little resemblance to the ruddy-cheeked new father paramedics found in 1999, struggling to revive his infant son. At 58, his careworn face was framed by thick, prison-issued glasses. He walked with a cane, which he had to maneuver with both hands manacled together, and as he took his seat at the defense table, he winced. Beside him sat Kaye, her expression guarded, her shoulder-length hair shot through with gray. The husband and wife, who last lived together when Bill Clinton was president, were instructed not to have physical contact. Wordlessly, they gazed out at the courtroom and waited for the hearing to begin.

Eaton had not slept well. She knew that the experts who were slated to testify would be good witnesses, but she worried that their testimony would not be enough to satisfy Dozier. It was Dozier who signed off on Kaye’s plea deal and Dozier who presided over not only Russell’s trials but also his appeals and postconviction proceedings. It was Dozier who sentenced Russell to life in prison.

She studied him as he sat on the dais before them, quietly conferring with his clerk, and tried to read his mood. Eaton appeared before him when she was a public defender, and she was well aware of how tough he could be. But some of her biggest victories came in his courtroom, including the Joseph Webster case, her first exoneration. That case had included the persuasive power of DNA evidence, something she was painfully aware, at that moment, that the Maze case lacked.

The state’s opening statement would be delivered by Funk. District attorneys seldom appear in court to throw their weight behind their prosecutors, but both Funk and Eaton thought it would send the right message to Dozier. Funk struck a note of deference as he underscored his support of the CRU’s findings, playing not to the local TV news cameras in the courtroom but to an audience of one. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” he told the judge. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.”

But Dozier appeared unreceptive from the start. When Russell’s lead attorney, Jason Gichner, gave his opening statement outlining the defense experts’ findings, Dozier grew impatient, interjecting, “Do they factor in that there’s a history of a statement that the child was jostled?” When it was time for the physicians to testify, he remained obstinate. He grilled them about granular aspects of their testimony, repeatedly breaking in to interrogate them and questioning whether their opinions were grounded in any kind of new scientific thinking. He wondered aloud if different experts, evaluating the same evidence, might reach a completely different conclusion. Even when he said nothing, he radiated disapproval; he arched his eyebrows, pursed his lips and shot exasperated glares at whoever was sitting in the witness box. He grew more skeptical as the hearing went on, accusing Russell’s attorneys of only presenting experts who had been “picked and chosen” to best suit the defense’s narrative.

During breaks, the lawyers conferred with one another, unsure how to interpret the judge’s intransigence. Dozier was always prickly, and in the absence of an adversarial party, he seemed to have decided to take on the role of adversary himself. Perhaps the judge was just putting them through their paces, pushing back on them to elicit answers that would only strengthen their arguments. Or maybe, Eaton feared, they had lost him. For months, her team worried that Dozier would balk at the fact that their experts had not coalesced around a single diagnosis that could explain all of Alex’s symptoms, and yet without new blood and tissue samples to test, it was all but impossible to agree upon a definitive cause of death. When she called Dr. Carla Sandler-Wilson, a neonatologist, to the stand on the second day of the hearing, she had the doctor inform the court that newborn screening tests — which can identify genetic, blood and metabolic abnormalities — were so limited at the time of Alex’s birth that he was screened for just four disorders. “There are over 50 tests on the Tennessee State Newborn Screen now,” Sandler-Wilson explained.

The Mazes remained composed throughout hours of graphic testimony about the condition of their son’s body and the details of his autopsy. All told, seven experts from around the country took the stand to attest to the fact that Alex’s symptoms resulted from natural causes, not trauma.

In the weeks leading up to the hearing, Eaton had written and rewritten her closing argument. She paced her house for hours, practicing until she could recite it from memory. She rehearsed it in the shower, and in her car, and in the quiet of her home office. She delivered it for friends and colleagues so she could gauge whether the most important lines were resonating, and she recited it to her therapist. Her closing argument was a very different narrative from the one prosecutors presented at trial. “If Alex Maze could speak to us,” the argument she had prepared began, “he would tell us his parents loved him, cared for him and, to his last breath, did not give up on him.”

As Eaton watched Gichner deliver his closing argument, which Dozier cut into with rapid-fire questions, she realized that she needed to change course. An emotional plea was not going to win the judge over. She set aside the speech she knew by heart. She would have to improvise.

When her turn came to speak, Eaton rose and walked across the courtroom to face the judge. Gripping the lectern, her face rigid with concentration, she tried to find the right words. “Our office receives hundreds of applications for review per year,” she began. “Out of those hundreds, we take on less than 5%. And of that 5%, sometimes we have to ask experts to review the information in the case.” She continued: “We’ve had experts look at cases and tell us, ‘No, you got this right — this was trauma, this was abuse.’ And we turn down those cases. But sometimes, your honor, a case is different.”

She spoke quickly, as if by racing forward, she could prevent the judge from interrupting her. “Over the last two years, this unit has analyzed every detail of this case,” she said. “We’ve read every record. Every line of testimony. We’ve consulted expert after expert. And we did not just rely on the petitioner’s experts. We got baby Alex his own independent experts, including the chief medical examiner for Knox and Anderson county, who more typically testifies for the state. Including a local practitioner trained at Vanderbilt, who we trust with our babies every single day. Including the former chief pathologist for Vanderbilt University. And one by one, expert after expert, told us this was not abuse —”

Dozier leaned forward in his high-backed chair. He wanted to know about the doctor who had diagnosed Alex with shaken baby syndrome, Starling, and whether she had been consulted. “But she wasn’t?” he asked sharply.

Eaton was startled by the question because it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the work that the conviction-review unit did. Her duty was not to double-down on the state’s original trial theory but rather to investigate whether there was new evidence to consider, and whether that evidence was consequential enough that it should change the outcome of the case. Just as she did not ask the original prosecutors to evaluate the soundness of the conviction, so she did not ask Starling to review the accuracy of her diagnosis. Eaton had sought out physicians who did not have a record to defend.

“No, she was not,” Eaton said. “But we consulted experts in every possible field that could be relevant to this case. And one by one, they told us that the science presented to this court was outdated. One by one, they told us that our understanding of things has changed. And one by one, they told us that Russell and Kaye Maze did not abuse their son, and they did not cause his death.” She looked directly at the Mazes as she spoke. Then she turned to the judge and raised her voice to signal the importance of the point she wanted to make, drawing out each word: “The state got this wrong.”

When she finished, Dozier offered no reaction as he looked down from the dais. “All right,” he said flatly. “I will take this under advisement.” Court was adjourned for an indeterminate period of time — as long as it took for him to make his ruling. There was nothing more to do but wait.

A few days after the conclusion of the hearing, the two prosecutors who originally tried the case wrote to the court voicing their opposition to the effort to clear Russell Maze. Brian Holmgren and Katrin Miller expressed outrage that they had learned of the hearing only from local media coverage, and they pushed back against the notion that the science behind shaken baby syndrome had grown weaker in recent years. That idea had been promulgated, they asserted, by a “small cadre of medical witnesses” and shaken baby “denialists.” They went on to suggest that the push to exonerate Russell was part of a concerted, nationwide campaign to discredit the diagnosis. The hearing, they wrote, had given “denialist medical witnesses another opportunity to publicize their false scientific claims.”

Dozier informed the two lawyers that they could not insert themselves into the proceeding, and he denied them the opportunity to file a brief with the court that would have formalized their opposition. He did not, however, hand down his ruling. One week passed, then two. A third week came and went without any word. As the days dragged on, Eaton had trouble focusing. Briefly, she entertained a bit of magical thinking; maybe the judge was drafting such a sweeping ruling in the Mazes’ favor that it was just taking him a little extra time. She stared at her phone, checking her messages again and again. “I’m worried,” she told me on April 23. “I’m worried for Russell. I’m worried for Kaye. I’m worried for the morale of my team and worried that if we lose this case, it will make it a million times more difficult to help anyone else.”

Two days later, Eaton was working on her laptop when she spotted an email from the court. She could see that it landed in her inbox a half-hour earlier. The silence of her phone — no calls, no texts — signaled bad news.

The decision leaned heavily on the findings at Russell’s preceding trials. “Substantial evidence presented at two trials is not sufficiently overridden by the new scientific evidence,” it read. Dozier did not give the witnesses’ testimony at the hearing any more weight than the original testimony of witnesses like Starling. The present-day testimony did not represent a new scientific consensus; in the judge’s estimation, it was nothing more than “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the experts.’” He went on to find fault with the hearing itself, which he criticized for lacking “the adversarial role of the prosecutor” — a weakness, in his eyes, that rendered experts’ testimony less credible. With no opposing counsel to cross-examine the witnesses, he argued, “fresh opinions were offered but not probed.” Ultimately, Dozier wrote, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.”

Bewildered, Eaton tried to grasp what she had just read: The judge was penalizing them because everyone — the state, the defense, the witnesses — agreed that the Mazes committed no crime. As she wrestled with the implications of the ruling over the days that followed, she began to ask herself increasingly absurd questions. By the judge’s logic, should she have been performatively combative with the defense’s witnesses? Would Russell have stood a better chance if the DA’s office had fought the defense’s efforts to prove his innocence? Did the “adversarial role of the prosecutor” leave no room for the state to right a wrong — or worse, did it require prosecutors to uphold a bad conviction? Dozier’s ruling went to the heart of what a conviction-review unit is supposed to do, and it seemed to eviscerate it.

Never had there been a day, since taking on the Maze case, when Eaton did not know that losing was a possibility. But the implications of Dozier’s ruling made her worry for the future — both for the chilling effect it might have on other judges at the courthouse and, more broadly, for the system as a whole. Her own office filed the original criminal charges against the Mazes, but the same office could not undo them. If the DA’s office could not fix this, who could?

Russell remains one of many defendants who have been behind bars for decades based on the testimony of expert witnesses who believed in the inviolability of shaken baby syndrome. In April, Starling — who, by her own account, has testified in court more than 100 times — was a state witness at a hearing for a case in Atlanta that was similar to Russell’s. Danyel Smith, who was convicted in 2003 of the shaking death of his 2-month-old son, was asking for a new trial, asserting that the infant died from trauma sustained during childbirth. Starling, who was not involved in the original prosecution, testified that the only explanation for the baby’s symptoms was abuse. During cross-examination, Starling was asked about Tennessee v. Maze. “I’m not familiar with this case,” she told Smith’s attorney. The lawyer then produced hundreds of pages of testimony bearing her name. “That does prove that I was there,” she allowed. But the facts of the case had escaped her, she said. “If you say he was convicted, then I will take you at your word.”

“He has served 25 years in prison?” the lawyer pressed.

“Again, not in my personal knowledge,” she replied.

Russell’s case is currently before the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, which must decide whether to grant him permission to appeal the ruling. “The Tennessee Innocence Project fully believes in Russell’s innocence, and we will not stop fighting until he is released from prison,” Gichner told me. (Kaye’s appeal to vacate her felony conviction will proceed separately.) The case now faces a new challenge: Lawyers working for Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee, a conservative Republican, are handling the appeal. That office is often at odds with Funk’s; in late June, it called on the appellate court to deny Russell permission to appeal.

Russell is now back at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, a notoriously rough private prison northeast of Nashville, where five men were stabbed in the course of three weeks earlier this year. Kaye has returned to her home in the mountains of East Tennessee, where she moved when Russell was incarcerated nearby, before his transfer to Trousdale. She lives alone, her brief time with her son preserved in photos that stand alongside her collection of framed family portraits. Her, beaming, with Alex in her arms; him, wearing tiny overalls, his gaze unfocused.

Eaton’s powerlessness, as an assistant DA, to rectify what she sees as a wrongful conviction felt more crushing than any failure, as a public defender, to prevent a client from facing an unjust punishment. “The weight is heavier because we did this,” she says. She wakes up in the night thinking about the Mazes — of how Kaye stepped out one afternoon to buy baby formula and returned home to find her life irrevocably broken. Of how Russell, as of this June, has endured 25 years of imprisonment. Of how the Mazes lost their son and then each other. And she agonizes over whether her decision to take on the case caused them harm. “We gave them a whole fresh set of trauma, and I’m haunted by that,” she says. “Before we got involved, I imagine Russell was trying to make peace with his situation and live the best life he could behind bars. He and Kaye had their visits together. And then we came along and disrupted all that. Teams of lawyers! Doctors! The elected DA! More than losing, what is weighing on me is that we gave them hope.”

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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Pamela Colloff, photography by Stacy Kranitz.

Four elected prosecutors filed suit against the state of Georgia on Wednesday to stop a new law that gives appointees of the state’s Republican governor the power to remove elected district attorneys from office. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in May.

“This is a trend that we’re seeing across the country of state governments that don’t like how local communities want to address concerns about public safety,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director at Public Rights Project, which is working on the suit. “When local communities are making choices that these conservative state governments don’t like, state governments aren’t respecting the will of the voters. They’re taking that power away from local communities.”

“When local communities are making choices that these conservative state governments don’t like, state governments aren’t respecting the will of the voters.”

The Georgia bill is one of at least 37 preemption measures — proposals that seek to limit the power of elected prosecutors — introduced in recent years across 17 states. Such bills have multiplied since 2017 after reform prosecutors started winning elections in greater numbers.

The laws work in different ways, sometimes prohibiting constituents in certain jurisdictions from electing their own prosecutors, restricting a prosecutor’s authority over certain crimes, or creating new pathways to remove them from office altogether.

In Georgia, the law puts discipline and removal of prosecutors in the hands of a commission made up of political appointees. The measure allows the commission to discipline prosecutors for decisions based on any policy, written or otherwise, to not prosecute certain offenses, like low-level drug possession or sex work. Prosecutors removed by the commission are disqualified from running again for 10 years.

Several of the laws have targeted jurisdictions that recently elected reform-minded prosecutors, including in Missouri, Texas, and Mississippi.

The lawsuit in Georgia is attempting to restore power to prosecutors who were elected by constituents by having the new law declared to be against the state’s constitution. The prosecutors on the suit are Sherry Boston, Jonathan Adams, Jared Williams, and Flynn Broady, who represent seven counties in Georgia with a total population of more than 1.8 million people.

Kemp’s Ideological War

Republican state officials including Kemp have claimed without evidence that prosecutors to their left are causing themoral decline of cities and driving crime. In December, two weeks before the start of the 2023 legislative session that saw the bill passed, Kemp had publicly criticized what he described as “far-left local prosecutors [who] are failing their constituents and making our communities less safe.”

Efforts to undercut the power of reform prosecutors, though, frequently center on ideological disagreements. Key issues of disagreement between state-level officials and local prosecutors have included Republican efforts to eliminate the right to abortion and overturn the 2020 election, and the future of the movement for criminal justice reform.

The pattern has played out in other states with centrist or right-wing government administrations. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren, the prosecutor in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa Bay, last year after Warren said he wouldn’t charge people who sought abortions.

“These are not things you would expect to see in the United States. This is what authoritarians do.”

“These are not things you would expect to see in the United States,” Warren told The Intercept. “This is what authoritarians do. They use the power of prosecution to protect their allies and to punish their enemies. This is a very slippery slope to go down.”

Hot-button culture war issues like the prosecution of abortion and gender-affirming care were also at play in the passage of Georgia’s law. The state had passed an aggressive abortion ban in 2019. Several prosecutors have pledged not to enforce criminal abortion bans, the same kind of affirmation that exposed Warren to removal in Florida. Also in Georgia, Fulton County attorney Fani Willis has been preparing to charge former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. (The governor’s office said it would not comment on pending litigation.)

The movement to subvert elected prosecutors gained steam as reform-minded candidates have gained ground in elections since the mid-2010s, including in Georgia. The state, in that time, has also been confronting issues of racial and ideological diversity among district attorneys. Prior to the 2020 election in Georgia, only five elected prosecutors were people of color. Now there are at least 14, several of whom campaigned on criminal justice reform and represent districts where people of color are the majority.

The Georgia bill has also drawn criticisms from prosecutors who don’t identify as reformers.

“Although I may disagree with some DAs’ decisions in other communities, I believe it is their right to make those decisions,” said Adams, who joined the lawsuit and represents a conservative community. 

Crimes like adultery, fornication, and sodomy are still on the books in Georgia, but many prosecutors decline to prosecute them. Adams had a situation in September where a woman filed an application for a warrant to arrest her husband for adultery. “If I didn’t have that policy against prosecuting that crime, her husband would have had an arrest, would have had to be booked into the jail, may have lost his job or had some other impact,” he said. “Every unmarried person in the entire state of Georgia having sexual activities is committing a criminal offense.”

Conservative lawmakers could be setting a precedent that could come back to bite them, Adams said, potentially facing edicts in the future by a more liberal governor or legislature. He said, “Down the road, we’re gonna have to face this on the other side.”

Undermining Democracy

The new Georgia law’s critics are concerned about its poorly explained grounds for discipline of prosecutors.

Georgia’s state constitution allows for prosecutorial discretion and a right to free speech, Rosenthal, the legal director, said. The state already has several mechanisms that provide oversight of prosecutors, including the state bar, rules of professional conduct enforced by the state Supreme Court, the power of impeachment by the general assembly, and prosecutors’ own elections.

“Because the grounds for discipline are so vaguely written, it’s really handing a blank check to this new commission — which is appointed entirely by the governor and his political allies — to discipline essentially whomever they want,” Rosenthal said. “That kind of blank check is an opportunity for political shenanigans instead of expecting the will of the voters in each of these communities.”

Georgia lawmakers have also found other ways to limit the jurisdiction of reform-minded attorneys. Williams, one of the prosecutors on the lawsuit, was elected as the first Black prosecutor in the Augusta Judicial Circuit in 2020. Shortly thereafter, Republicanscarved out the whitest county from Williams’s jurisdiction and created the state’s first new judicial circuit in four decades.

Williams had run as a reformer following the high-profile murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the latter hailing from a county in Williams’s circuit. 

“The community made a very intentional choice in moving away from the traditional style of prosecution that had dominated my circuit for 150 years,” Williams told The Intercept. 

That message won bipartisan support across three counties. For opponents of the move to cut his district, people in Williams’s jurisdiction spent hours knocking doors and fundraising in the Augusta heat, only to have the Legislature turn around and strip them of their choice before he was even sworn in.

“What’s different?” Williams asked. “What’s changed such that now it’s a good idea to have this political commission that has the authority to Monday-morning quarterback the very tough choices that prosecutors have to make every day?” 

The answer lies in politics, Williams said: Running on punitive policies is unpopular at the ballot box, so conservative lawmakers have turned to a political game. Prosecutors should be able to concentrate on violent crimes like murder and not divert limited resources to low-level offenses like nonviolent marijuana possession. 

“It is the same thing that we’re seeing across the nation,” Williams said. “There are people who are resistant to the change and those people are in the minority, but they often have a good deal of authority, and they wield it in ways that are unconstitutional.”

Update: August 2, 2023, 11:00 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from Gov. Brian Kemp’s office that was received after publication.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

An Erdoğan defeat could have profound implications for journalists in Turkey, long one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. Kılıçdaroğlu promises to bring freedom and democracy to Turkey after an era that has seen Turkey’s independent media decimated by government shutdowns, takeovers, and the forcing of scores of journalists into exile or out of the profession.  

CPJ spoke to Cuma Daş, general-secretary of the Diyarbakır-based Dicle Fırat Journalists’ Association (DFG), Kenan Şener, general-secretary of the Ankara-based Journalists’ Association (GC), Barış Altıntaş, director of the Istanbul-based Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), Gökhan Durmuş, chair of the Istanbul-based Journalists’ Union of Turkey (TGS), and Andrew Finkel, a founding member and executive board member of the Istanbul-based Platform for Independent Journalism (P24), about how the elections would affect the press freedom environment in Turkey and what the next administration could do to improve it.

Briefly explain the importance of these upcoming elections in Turkey for a global audience.

“The upcoming elections in Turkey are of utmost importance due to the incumbent government’s 20-year tenure, during which the country has experienced a gradual loss of freedoms, erosion of rule of law, media capture, and increased corruption,” said Altıntaş. “These elections could potentially change the course of Turkey and direct it to become a westward-looking nation again.”

For Finkel, Turkey’s future direction is at stake. “Democracy and full human rights will not blossom overnight if the current government is booted out of power, but at least it will be a first step on the road to reform. If they cling on, it will be by their fingertips, which will be [an] incentive to close all channels of dissent and tighten their grip on power.”

For Şener, “This election has turned into sort of a referendum in which ‘democracy or autocracy’ will be voted on.”

For Daş, these elections are “historically important” in a country that has witnessed the “rapid collapse of the law, education, economy, ecology, health, and media especially in the last 10 years.” He believes the vote could reestablish these areas and improve the country’s rights and freedoms.

If the current administration wins the elections, do you believe the status of press freedom in Turkey will a) improve b) worsen c) won’t change. Why?

All of the interviewed journalists expect the situation to worsen if Erdoğan stays in power, saying they believe the AKP will increase the already overwhelming pressure on critical media and freedom of speech in Turkey.

Altıntaş said it may depend on the margins: “If the current administration wins, press freedom might slightly improve if the government feels more secure in its newly strengthened position. However, if they win by a slim margin, they might lose some of their perceived legitimacy, feel cornered, and become more repressive towards free speech and media freedoms.”

“It would mean the electorate has approved all of the [AKP’s] antidemocratic practices done until today,” said Şener, adding that the AKP “would fortify its antidemocratic rule to avoid having to experience such an unsettling period ever again.” 

If the opposition alliance wins the elections, do you believe the state of press freedom in Turkey will a) improve b) worsen c) won’t change. Why?

All of the interviewed journalists believe a new opposition-led alliance would improve press freedom.   However, they were also cautious in their optimism and do not expect miracles.

Things couldn’t get worse, but vigilance will still be required,” said Finkel. Durmuş noted that Turkey would definitely be in a better place because – while he doesn’t expect “enormous improvements” from a possible Kılıçdaroğlu administration – he also believes “the current situation cannot get worse.” 

“Longstanding issues such as the rights of the Kurdish minority might not improve, given the traditional rigidity of the Kemalist state,” according to Altıntaş. The majority of the journalists imprisoned in Turkey as of CPJ’s prison census last December are members of the Kurdish media and the arrests continued in 2023.

“We still would have a press freedom problem if the opposition takes power,” said Şener. “However, I believe it’s certain that we will be in a better spot than this.”

What changes would you like to see under the new administration?

All interviewees agreed on the need for judicial reform and independent judges that would, in Altıntaş’ view, “prevent the judiciary from being a government-wielded weapon against journalists.” A fair and independent Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), the regulatory body that oversees the appointment, promotion and dismissal of judges and public prosecutors, would bring significant changes, she said.

For Daş, the priorities are freedom for all imprisoned journalists and the scrapping of the so-called “disinformation law,” mandating prison terms for those deemed to be spreading disinformation.

Durmuş and Şener both believe Turkey’s Press Law should be rewritten from scratch and that provisions limiting freedom of the press and enabling imprisonment of journalists should be dropped from the country’s Penal Law. All of the journalists called for reform of governmental bodies such as the media regulator RTÜK and the Press Ad Agency BİK.

Finkel described it as essential to send “a strong message to judiciary that freedom of expression and media independence are sacred and to be upheld through high-level statements by government officials” and also called for an end to “arbitrary restrictions” on internet access.

What would be the easiest moves the next administration could take to improve press freedom?

Daş and Şener called for the release of journalists imprisoned for their work, with Daş also noting that the next government should facilitate the return of those forced into exile and Şener calling for the abolition of the Press Law.

Durmuş feels that the next government’s first step should be to meet with journalist organizations about reestablishing press freedom. “All regulations that were made without consulting the journalists made it worse,” he said.

Finkel believes that political messages underlining the government’s commitment to the independence of judiciary and freedom of expression “would be very easy to deliver [and] could be done overnight.” These would go a long way in sending the message to the judiciary that the time of going after people for expressing even the slightest political dissent is over and that no judge should fear for their future should they decide not to convict a critic of the government, he said.

 Altıntaş supports legal reform “favoring freedom of expression, as defined in the constitution and Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights.”

What would be the hardest but most crucial moves the next administration should make to improve press freedom?

Interviewees again agreed on the importance of judicial reform, along with improving the professional rights of journalists by measures such as depoliticizing the issuing of press cards and using anti-terror laws to jail journalists.

For Altıntaş, the hardest move would be creating a climate of cultural change to educate citizens on democratic principles and ensuring the equal application of laws to those with differing opinions. “This would involve addressing long-standing issues, such as those faced by the Kurdish media, which predate the current administration,” he said.

Finkel believes that establishing self-regulatory mechanisms for press, broadcasting, and online media would be hard but crucial, as would decoupling the press from dependence on state funding and advertising and enabling local media to be funded by “neutral sources.”  

What moves should the next administration avoid for the sake of not worsening press freedom?

Finkel: “If there is a change of government, not to recreate the dependency of media on state partisanship.”
Daş: It would be sufficient if the next government didn’t “bother the journalists for practicing journalism.”
Altıntaş: “The next administration should avoid any actions that might harm the balance between the judiciary, legislature, and the executive.” 
Şener: “Journalists being tried and imprisoned in Turkey is a problem of practice rather than one of legislation. While the new government should put effort into making the laws more democratic, it should also not allow the current laws to be practiced in an antidemocratic manner.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Özgür Öğret.

On the heels of former President Donald Trump's historic indictment, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office on Friday told three top Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House that their "attempted interference with an ongoing state criminal investigation—and now prosecution—is an unprecedented and illegitimate incursion on New York's sovereign interests."

U.S. Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), James Comer (R-Ky.), and Bryan Steil (R-Wis.)—who chair the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Administration committees, respectively—initially wrote to Bragg last week demanding documents and testimony. In response, the general counsel for Bragg's office, Leslie Dubeck, called their requests an "unlawful incursion" into state sovereignty.

A second letter from Jordan, Comer, and Steil—public allies of Trump—prompted the six-page response from Bragg's office on Friday, less than 24 hours after the New York grand jury convened by Bragg over a hush money payment to a porn star voted to indict the former president and 2024 GOP candidate, who is expected to be arraigned Tuesday.

"You and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump's efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations."

"Your first letter made an unprecedented request to the district attorney for confidential information about the status of the state grand jury investigation—now indictment—of Mr. Trump," Dubeck wrote to the lawmakers. "Your second letter asserts that, by failing to provide it, the district attorney somehow failed to dispute your baseless and inflammatory allegations that our investigation is politically motivated. That conclusion is misleading and meritless."

"We did not engage in a point-by-point rebuttal of your letter because our office is legally constrained in how it publicly discusses pending criminal proceedings, as prosecutorial offices are across the country and as you well know," the general counsel continued. "That secrecy is critical to protecting the privacy of the target of any criminal investigation as well as the integrity of the independent grand jury's proceedings."

The letter lays out why the congressmen's committees "lack jurisdiction to oversee a state criminal prosecution," and declares that "based on your reportedly close collaboration with Mr. Trump in attacking this office and the grand jury process, it appears you are acting more like criminal defense counsel trying to gather evidence for a client than a legislative body seeking to achieve a legitimate legislative objective."

Dubeck also took aim at their "vague and shifting legislative purpose." Only noting it in the second letter suggests "your proposal to 'insulate current and former presidents' from state criminal investigations is a baseless pretext to interfere with our office's work," she wrote. "Even if you were seriously considering such legislation and had the constitutional authority to enact it (which you do not), your request for information from the district attorney and his former attorneys concerning an ongoing criminal probe is unnecessary and unjustified."

After highlighting that the lawmakers' initial rationale for the inquiry related to the use of federal funding, the letter notes that over the past 15 years, the DA's office has helped the federal government secure over $1 billion from asset forfeiture and the office itself "receives only a small fraction of those forfeited funds."

Dubeck disclosed that from October 2019 to August 2021, approximately $5,000 of the federal forfeiture money was spent investigating the former president or the Trump Organization; most of those costs were related to a case that led to the conviction of Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg and two Trump business entities, and "no expenses incurred relating to this matter have been paid from funds that the office receives through federal grant programs."

The letter explains the DA office's current participation in federal grant programs, then forcefully calls out the congressmen:

Finally, as you are no doubt aware, former President Trump has directed harsh invective against District Attorney Bragg and threatened on social media that his arrest or indictment in New York may unleash "death and destruction." As committee chairmen, you could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury. Instead, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump's efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations that the office's investigation, conducted via an independent grand jury of average citizens serving New York state, is politically motivated. We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference.

Dubeck asked that if the lawmakers won't withdraw their request, they agree to a meeting and provide a list of questions for Bragg as well as a description of documents they believe could be turned over to Congress "without violating New York grand jury secrecy rules or interfering with the criminal case now before a court."

"We trust you will make a good-faith effort to reach a negotiated resolution," she concluded, "before taking the unprecedented and unconstitutional step of serving a subpoena on a district attorney for information related to an ongoing state criminal prosecution."

The latest letter from the DA's office "is really a work of art," independent journalist Marcy Wheeler said in a series of tweets on Friday. "It was a joy to read. Bragg is not fucking around and... well, Jimmy Jordan is."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

On March 15, police assaulted at least nine journalists on the court’s premises in the capital city of Dhaka after clashes broke out between lawyers supporting the ruling Awami League party and the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and police charged into the crowd swinging their batons, according to multiple news reports and five of those journalists, who spoke with CPJ.

The deputy commissioner of the Dhaka police’s Ramna division told news website Bdnews24.com later on March 15 that “journalists got caught up in the turmoil” when officers attempted to break up the unrest, and police were investigating the attacks.

On March 16, Dhaka police officials expressed regret over the incident in a meeting with local journalists but, as of March 29, have not held any of the officers involved in the attacks to account, the journalists told CPJ. 

“The recent apology by the Dhaka police over officers’ attacks on at least nine Bangladeshi journalists is a welcome but insufficient response,” said Carlos Martinez de la Serna, CPJ’s program director. “Bangladeshi authorities must hold the officers who attacked journalists to account, return any equipment confiscated from reporters, and ensure that police are thoroughly trained so they can help, rather than imperil, members of the press covering newsworthy events.”

Two officers with the police Public Order Management Division slapped Zabed Akhter, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster ATN News, shoved him to the ground, and kicked him as he repeatedly identified himself as a journalist and told them he suffered from a nerve condition, Akhter told CPJ by phone.

Police also pushed Jannatul Ferdous Tanvi, a senior reporter for the privately owned broadcaster Independent Television, as she tried to help him, Akhter said.

Later that day, Akhter received medical treatment for internal injuries to his waist and back at a hospital, where the two officers apologized to the journalist, Akhter said, adding that those officers had not been held to account for the incident as of March 29.

A group of 10 to 15 officers kicked and used a bamboo stick to beat Md. Humaun Kabir, a senior camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster ATN Bangla who was filming the unrest, knocking him to the ground, Kabir told CPJ by phone. Officers continued to slap him as he ran away, according to a video of the incident reviewed by CPJ. Kabir sustained a head injury for which he took painkillers. 

Five or six officers beat Maruf Hasan, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Manab Zamin, in the head and back while he identified himself as a journalist, he told CPJ via messaging app.  Officers also insulted him with vulgar language and confiscated his microphone, which they had not returned as of March 29, Hasan said.

He told CPJ that he sustained painful injuries to the areas that were beaten.

About five police officers also beat Mohammad Fazlul Haque, a senior reporter for the privately owned news website Jago News, according to Haque, who told CPJ via messaging app that he had been beaten but then did not respond to additional questions seeking details.  

According to those news reports and the journalists who spoke with CPJ, police also attacked Nur Mohammad, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Ajker Patrika; Ibrahim Hossain, a camera operator for the privately owned broadcaster Boishakhi Television; Kabir Hossain, a reporter for the privately owned newspaper Kalbela; and Mehedi Hassan Dalim, a reporter for the privately owned news website The Dhaka Post.

CPJ contacted those journalists via messaging app seeking additional details but did not receive any replies.

Suvra Kanti Das, a senior photojournalist for the privately owned newspaper Prothom Alo, told CPJ by phone that he was also covering the elections when an officer grabbed him by the shirt, demanded to see his media identification card, insulted him with vulgar language, and ordered him to leave the premises, which he did.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Roy Niyati, a spokesperson for the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, did not receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

A week after she was sworn in as San Francisco’s interim district attorney, Brooke Jenkins fired 15 people, many of them hired by her predecessor, Chesa Boudin. Jenkins quit her job in the DA’s office in 2021 to become the liberal face of the recall movement that ousted Boudin.

When critics pointed out that the campaign was spearheaded by Republican millionaires and billionaires, Jenkins stood out as a self-professed progressive, and a woman of color, who claimed that Boudin had gone too far: coddling criminals, failing victims, and mismanaging the DA’s office.

Boudin’s critics were elated when Jenkins was nominated. “SF’s radical DA replaced with a great moderate,” former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles wrote. The San Francisco Police Officers Association described Jenkins as “a qualified, competent, and compassionate prosecutor who will allow San Francisco to turn the page from the previous criminal defense attorney masquerading as the DA.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed presents 2021 crime statistics at the headquarters of the San Francisco Police Department on Jan. 26, 2022.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin speaks at a press conference in protest of the mayor’s plan for more policing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood on Dec. 20, 2021.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Tana Ganeva.

In the early afternoon of May 16, journalist Alexandre Megale said he was assaulted and hit with rocks by Paulo Luiz de Cantuária, a council member for the city of Ouro Fino in the southeast Brazilian state of Minas Gerais,  according to several news reports, a statement from the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji), and Megale, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview. Megale said the attack injured his shoulder, left hand, and head.

Megale, who founded the YouTube news channel Canal Sul das Gerais in April 2020, told CPJ he believes Cantuária assaulted him in retaliation for the journalist mentioning the council member’s 16-year jail sentence for child rape during a broadcast report about another rape case. Megale had previously reported the court’s decision on Cantuária’s case on September 8, 2021.

“Luckily, journalist Alexandre Megale was not seriously injured, but this was an unacceptable violent assault against a journalist, and Minas Gerais state authorities must ensure a timely and thorough investigation of the incident and bring the responsible party to justice,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in New York. “Local journalists should be able to report safely without fear of violence or reprisal from public officials.”

Megale told CPJ he went to the Pinhalzinho dos Góes neighborhood in Ouro Fino on May 16 to investigate alleged irregularities in a construction site. He said he was on his motorcycle asking a man for directions when Cantuária arrived in his car.  

As Megale tried to ride away from the area, he fell from his motorcycle but kept walking as Cantuária picked up rocks and ran towards him, yelling “get out of here,” and “I’ll teach you.” Megale told CPJ that Cantuária hit him with rocks in his shoulder, head, and hand as he was trying to protect his face, adding that his helmet saved him from major injuries.

According to Megale, after being hit several times he passed out on the ground for a brief period and woke up surrounded by residents who had called an ambulance. He was taken to Santa Casa, a local hospital, where he was examined and treated for his injuries, and left the hospital the same day.   

“These assaults cause fear and insecurity, not only to the person who suffered the aggression but to other journalists as well,” Megale told CPJ. In its statement, Abraji said “the journalist was assaulted for exercising his role to inform” and that “an attack of this nature cannot remain unpunished nor be treated as a simple disagreement.”

Megale told CPJ that a military police officer came to the Santa Casa hospital to hear the journalist’s account and register the incident. On Wednesday, May 18, Megale said he went to the Ouro Fino Civil Police station, the unit responsible for investigating the case, to make a statement and on Thursday he was examined at the Medical Forensic Institute in the neighboring city of Pouso Alegre.

The Ouro Fino City Council, in a statement they sent CPJ via email, said they could not locate Cantuária and are looking into the case. CPJ emailed the Minas Gerais state press office for comment but did not receive any replies. CPJ called the Ouro Fino City Council and Paulo Araújo, the Council press officer, told CPJ that Cantuária was not there, that he hadn’t been there the past few days, and that the council member did not have an email.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Officials in at least two of Texas' largest counties have no plans to comply with Gov. Greg Abbott's order to investigate gender-affirming healthcare for transgender children, which the Republican state leader announced Tuesday.

"Among the many awful things about this is how it prevents families from speaking up because doing so could make them the target of an investigation."

In a letter to the state Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), Abbott ordered officials to "conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances" of gender-affirming treatment including surgeries and the prescription of puberty-blocking medication, citing an opinion issued last week by Attorney General Ken Paxton which claimed such treatment is "child abuse."

Abbott said the department has a duty to investigate the parents of children who have gender-affirming treatments and noted that doctors, nurses, teachers, and "members of the general public" who don't report the treatment to authorities when they know a child has had gender-affirming care could be hit with "criminal penalties."

A DFPS spokesperson told the Dallas Morning News that officials will follow Paxton and Abbott's guidance, but Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee made clear in a statement Tuesday that his office "will not participate in these bad faith political games" and will not be prosecuting any healthcare professionals or families referred by the DFPS.

"Governor Abbott and General Paxton are ignoring medical professionals and intentionally misrepresenting the law to the detriment of transgender children and their families," Menefee said. "We'll continue to follow the laws on the books—not General Paxton's politically motivated and legally incorrect 'opinion.'"

Delia Garza, county attorney for Travis County, which includes Austin, told the Morning News that "Republican leadership of this state is trying to turn loving and supportive parents into criminals, and this office will play no part in it."

Abbott's latest attempt to criminalize support for transgender children in Texas comes six months after the governor originally told the DFPS that surgeries rarely used for minors—orchiectomies, hysterectomies, and mastectomies—constitute child abuse.

The governor's focus on gender-affirming treatment amounts to "a political attack and political stunt as a way to attack transgender kids" and stigmatize them, Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the Texas division of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Texas Tribune in August.

The American Academy of Pediatrics supports the use of gender-affirming care for children, citing a study in its first policy statement on the issue showing that transgender adolescents with unsupportive parents had suicide attempt rates as high as 60%, compared with 4% for young people with supportive families. The American Medical Association and American Psychological Association have also supported gender-affirming treatment.

Advocates for LGBTQ rights called Paxton and Abbott's guidance "unconscionable" and "ghoulish."

"The GOP needed a new group to demonize for culture war clout," said John Scott-Railton, a researcher with Citizen Lab. "Of course, they decided to aim for vulnerable kids."

Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.), whose daughter is transgender, accused Abbott of staging a "political ploy to terrorize children and their parents."

"Trans children are not political props," she said.

In October, Abbott signed into law a bill banning transgender student athletes from playing on teams that correspond with their gender identity. The Republican-led state legislature attempted last year to pass a bill that would have made providing gender-affirming care a felony in the state.

Gillian Branstetter, press secretary for the National Women's Law Center, tweeted that the DFPS's plan to adhere to Paxton's opinion—which the attorney general partially based on research by the anti-trans Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine—could have dangerous implications for families across Texas who find themselves in any number of scenarios.

"Among the many awful things about this is how it prevents families from speaking up because doing so could make them the target of an investigation," Branstetter said.

"Transphobia is a powerful force in American politics, but young voters are leading a cultural shift towards inclusion."

A poll released by progressive think tank Data for Progress on Wednesday showed that while 48% of respondents believed laws preventing transgender children from participating in sports and getting gender-affirming healthcare, young Americans and Democratic voters were more likely to view such legislation as unfair and discriminatory.

Fifty-nine percent of Democrats disagreed with the legislation and guidance like those recently introduced in Texas and other states, and 56% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 opposed such restrictions.

Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters of Republicans supported blocking transgender children from getting the care that medical experts say they need.

"Transphobia is a powerful force in American politics, but young voters are leading a cultural shift towards inclusion," wrote Erin Thomas of Data for Progress.

"The deluge of anti-transgender legislation making its way through state legislatures reveals an undeniable truth—transphobic politics are a key political strategy guiding the American right," Thomas added. "Democrats must be resolute and unwavering in our defense of transgender rights. If we fail to do so, we risk the unneeded suffering of an entire generation of transgender children."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.