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"an individual perpetrator cannot be reliably identified through bite-mark comparison."

As a result, the case was reversed, rendered and remanded. Howard was released from Mississippi's death row in December, and he was exonerated on Friday, the Innocence Project said.

The United States has some of the highest incarceration rates in the world. By the end of 2019, more than 1.4 million people were incarcerated in the nation, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Black Americans are disproportionately affected, and in Mississippi more than half of the prison population is Black, according to a report by the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit criminal justice research organization.

We can see the videos and know what is obviously true, but it is also obviously true that police and the juries that support them obviously do not see what is obvious, or do not wish to see.

we cannot name all the black men and women whose lives are snuffed out all because a police officer perceives a threat, sees the threat in the person, sees the person as pure threat. Perceived as a threat even when unarmed or completely physically subdued, or lying in the ground, as Rodney King clearly was, or coming back home from a party on the train and having the audacity to say to a policeman that he was not doing anything wrong and should not be detained: Oscar Grant.

also a police system that more and more easily and often can take away a black life in a flash all because some officer perceives a threat.

The perception is then ratified as a public perception at which point we not only must insist on the dignity of black lives, but name the racism that has become ratified as public perception.

to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it. Achieving that universal, “all lives matter,” is a struggle

it is not just that black lives matter, though that must be said again and again. It is also that stand-your-ground and racist killings are becoming increasingly normalized, which is why intelligent forms of collective outrage have become obligatory.

At least in these cases that have galvanized the nation and the world in protest, we all see the twisted logic that results in the exoneration of the police who take away the lives of unarmed black men and women. And why is that the case? It is not because what the police and their lawyers present as their thinking in the midst of the situation is very reasonable. No, it is because that form of thinking is becoming more “reasonable” all the time. In other words, every time a grand jury or a police review board accepts this form of reasoning, they ratify the idea that blacks are a population against which society must be defended, and that the police defend themselves and (white) society, when they preemptively shoot unarmed black men in public space.

What has led us to this place? J.B.: Racism has complex origins, and it is important that we learn the history of racism to know what has led us to this terrible place. But racism is also reproduced in the present, in the prison system, new forms of population control, increasing economic inequality that affects people of color disproportionately.

I’ve heard that some white people have held signs that read “All Lives Matter.” J.B.: When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.

So the police see a threat when there is no gun to see, or someone is subdued and crying out for his life, when they are moving away or cannot move. These figures are perceived as threats even when they do not threaten, when they have no weapon, and the video footage that shows precisely this is taken to be a ratification of the police’s perception

we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.”

whiteness is figured as a young virgin whose future husband is white — this characterization ratifies the sentiments that oppose miscegenation and defend norms or racial purity. But whose sexuality is imperiled in this scene? After all, black women and girls were the ones who were raped, humiliated and disposed of under conditions of slavery, and it was black families who were forcibly destroyed: black kinship was not recognized as kinship that matters

women of color, and black feminists in particular, have struggled for years against being the sexual property of either white male power or black masculinity, against poverty, and against the prison industry, so there are many reasons it is necessary to define racism in ways that acknowledge the specific forms it takes against men, women, and transgendered people of color.

there are white people who may be very convinced that they are not racist, but that does not necessarily mean that they have examined, or worked though, how whiteness organizes their lives, values, the institutions they support, how they are implicated in ways of talking, seeing, and doing that constantly and tacitly discriminate. Undoing whiteness has to be difficult work, but it starts, I think, with humility, with learning history, with white people learning how the history of racism persists in the everyday vicissitudes of the present, even as some of us may think we are “beyond” such a history, or

It is difficult and ongoing work, calling on an ethical disposition and political solidarity that risks error in the practice of solidarity.

It is probably important and satisfying as well to let one’s whiteness recede by joining in acts of solidarity with all those who oppose racism.

Whiteness is not an abstraction; its claim to dominance is fortified through daily acts which may not seem racist at all precisely because they are considered “normal.”

it is probably an error, in my view, for white people to become paralyzed with guilt and self-scrutiny. The point is rather to consider those ways of valuing and devaluing life that govern our own thinking and acting, understanding the social and historical reach of those ways of valuing.

ut just as certain kinds of violence and inequality get established as “normal” through the proceedings that exonerate police of the lethal use of force against unarmed black people, so whiteness, or rather its claim to privilege, can be disestablished over time

There are many ways to do this, in the street, the office, the home, and in the media. Only through such an ever-growing cross-racial struggle against racism can we begin to achieve a sense of all the lives that really do matter.

This week’s conversation is with Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Abolishing the death penalty statute through Congress would prevent a future administration from restarting federal executions -- as former President Donald Trump did -- but members of Congress, former and current law enforcement as well as civil and human rights groups are urging Biden to use his executive pen to pause the federal death penalty.

Former Attorney General William Barr lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty in July 2019, setting off a cascade of lethal injection executions -- 13 in total -- at the Terre Haute, Indiana, federal prison.

The President only has the power to pause the federal death penalty, according to Daniel S. Medwed, a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.

Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland reaffirmed at his confirmation hearings in February that the new administration is committed to reversing Trump's approach. "The data is clear that it has been enormously disparate impact on Black Americans and members of communities of color, and exonerations also that something like half of the exonerations had to do with Black men. So all of this has given me pause," Garland said.

"I don't think citizens want the death penalty anymore or a moratorium. Now, it's a matter of dismantling the system so it cannot come back and function in a knee jerk reaction where 13 people can get executed like under Trump,"

"would come with great resistance." The CJLF is a nonprofit organization that advocates for equal justice for victims of crimes including pursuing the death penalty.

I don't want someone killed in my name," Mikey Bogart, a Boston Marathon bombing survivor, wrote in a statement after the Supreme Court decided in March to review whether to reinstate Tsarnaev's death sentence. "I hope the Biden Administration will reconsider pursuing a death sentence. Mr. Tsarnaev will spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what."

The Mal’ta people are not related to the Asians who live in the region today. But before they disappeared, they also passed down their DNA to Europeans. Later research revealed the route those genes took from Asia to Europe

Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues discovered Mal’ta-like DNA in Bronze Age nomads called the Yamnaya, who lived 4,300 to 5,500 years ago in what is now southwestern Russia. About 5,000 years ago, the Yamnaya expanded into Europe, where they added their DNA to the gene pool.

In 2010, he found a piece of hair collected in Australia in the 1920s at the University of Cambridge. He and his colleagues retrieved DNA from the hair and reconstructed the owner’s genome.Their analysis revealed that the ancestors of aboriginal Australians split off from other non-Africans about 70,000 years ago. That finding supports the idea that the first settlers in Australia were the ancestors of today’s aboriginals

“Aboriginal people feel exonerated in showing the broader community that they are by far the oldest continuous civilization in the world,” the council said in a statement.

The Kennewick Man genome, like the Anzick child’s, revealed an ancient continuity between living Native Americans and the earliest people in the New World. A

Since the Kennewick Man project, Dr. Willerslev has hosted visits from a number of Native American tribes to his laboratory in Copenhagen. His guests have helped him see how differently he, as a European, treats history than they do.

Dr. Willerslev once proudly showed off a collection of ancient Danish skulls to Native American visitors, only to find them upset by the sight.“‘How can you treat your ancestors like that, so disrespectfully?” he recalls them asking.

If the leader of these arrangements — the United States — now forsakes them, other countries will look to make new economic and security arrangements, with China and Russia as leading alternatives.

A changing world economic order will generate enormous uncertainty, as other countries rush to protect their markets from competitors. Companies may reduce investment spending, which is already weak. Slower economic growth, or outright recessions, will make it harder for governments and companies to service their high debts. This would further darken prospects for the global economy.

It’s patriotism on steroids: America’s economic problems are caused largely by foreigners, aided by footloose U.S. multinationals. They have taken our jobs, flooded the country with immigrants and cost us trillions of dollars in overseas military spending.

for decades, they and we have identified self-interest with collective commitments to global commerce and military cooperation.

In truth, most of our serious economic problems are homegrown.

Consider. Chicago’s high murder rate is not the result of Chinese imports. The often-dreary performance of our schools for minority students is not a consequence of a strong dollar on foreign exchange markets. The 2008-2009 financial crisis did not have foreign roots.

The United States’ budget deficits aren’t caused by Russia’s warmongering.

. It’s true that open trade, championed by the United States, created a framework conducive to other countries’ success, but mostly they created their own wealth.

. It’s a formula for America’s decline on the world stage and runs enormous risks of destabilizing the global economy. For the first time since World War II, an American president has made isolationism the political centerpiece of his administration.

this illuminates the dilemma Trump has created for himself. The full implications of what he’s proposed, if implemented, would be disastrous. But if he retreats significantly, he may alienate many of his fervent followers, who will feel rightly that they’ve been betrayed.

the definition of a racist — the textbook definition, as Paul Ryan might say — is someone who treats some people better than others because of their race. Trump fits that definition many times over:

Trump’s real-estate company was sued twice by the federal government in the 1970s for discouraging the renting of apartments to African-Americans and preferring white tenants, such as “Jews and executives.”

In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he continued to argue that they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.

He spent years claiming that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Africa, an outright lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.

He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.

He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.

He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville last August “very fine people.”

The hunger for revolutionary change, the fear that some people were being left behind in America and that no one in Washington cared, was an animating force at the boisterous rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Yet Obama, who had surfed a boisterous wave into the Oval, ignored the restiveness — here and around the world. He threw his weight behind the most status quo, elitist candidate.

“I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,” Rhodes writes about the “darkness” that enveloped him when he saw the electoral map turn red. “Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to change.”

Where were the next Barack Obamas? Obama had never been about party building. He was the man alone in the arena.

Obama did not like persuading people to do what they didn’t want to do. And that is the definition of politics. He wanted them simply to do what he had ascertained to be right.

President Obama could be deliberative, reticent and cautious to a fault, which spurred an appetite for a more impulsive, visceral, hurly-burly successor.

The only thing new Trump brings to the American nationalism of recent decades is a restoration of its old ethnic-chauvinist tradition. Conservative intellectuals cannot rescue nationalism from Trump, any more than they could rescue Goldwater from Jim Crow, because Trump’s explicit appeals to racial and religious traditionalism, and his authoritarian approach to enforcing those hierarchies, are the things that have bound conservative voters so closely to him.

Last week, the president told four Democratic congresswomen—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar—to “go back” to their countries, even though all of them are American citizens. This is literally textbook racism. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offers “Go back to where you came from” as its example of potentially unlawful harassment on the basis of national origin.

Trump’s demand is less a factual assertion than a moral one, an affirmation of the president’s belief that American citizenship is conditional for people of color, who should be grateful we are even allowed to be here

That Trump’s supporters believe Omar’s sins justify her banishment, and Trump’s similar transgressions justify his presence in the White House, helps illustrate exactly what is going on here.

Under Trumpism, no defense of the volk is a betrayal, even if it undermines the republic, and no attack on the volk’s hegemony can be legitimate, even if it is a defense of democracy.

Republicans turned to reporters to argue that his attacks are part of a clever political strategy, elevating four left-wing women of color into the faces of his opposition. I suspect these Republicans, and some political reporters, believe that this somehow exonerates Trump from the charge of bigotry, as though prejudice ceases to be prejudice if it becomes instrumental.

In fact, the admission that fomenting racism and division is central to Trump’s strategy is a stunning rebuke to those political reporters and pundits who, for four years, have insisted that the rise of Trump is about anything else.

It also speaks to the futility of trying to somehow rescue a Trumpian nationalism from Trump. Racism is at the core of Trumpism.

Trump is not a champion of the civic nationalism Hazony and others claim they want to see. He is a mortal threat to it.

I want to be very clear about what the country saw last night, as an American president incited a chant of “Send her back!” aimed at a Somali-born member of Congress: America has not been here before.

we have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits

Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.

She has emerged as an Emmanuel Goldstein for the Trumpist right because as a black woman, a Muslim, an immigrant, and a progressive member of Congress, she represents in vivid terms a threat to the nation Trumpists fear they are losing.

his attacks on Omar were carefully scripted, written out by his staff and then read off a teleprompter. To defend the remarks as politically shrewd is to confess that the president is deliberately campaigning on the claim that only white people can truly, irrevocably be American.

In the face of a corrupt authoritarian president who believes that he and his allies are above the law, the American people are represented by two parties equally incapable of discharging their constitutional responsibilities.

The Republican Party is incapable of fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities because it has become a cult of personality whose members cannot deviate from their sycophantic devotion to the president, lest they be ejected from office by Trump’s fanatically loyal base

The Democratic Party cannot fulfill its constitutional responsibilities because its leadership lives in abject terror of being ejected from office by alienating the voters to whom Trump’s nationalism appeals.

The leadership of the Democratic Party has shown more appetite for confronting and rebuking legislators representing the vulnerable communities Trump has targeted most often than it has for making the president mildly uncomfortable.

“It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that the said Donald John Trump be, and he is hereby, acquitted of the charges in said articles,” declared Chief Justice Roberts after the second article was defeated.

“The verdict of this kangaroo court will be meaningless,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said moments before the vote. “By refusing the facts — by refusing witnesses and documents — the Republican majority has placed a giant asterisk, the asterisk of a sham trial, next to the acquittal of President Trump, written in permanent ink.”

Like this one, the trials of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton also ended in acquittal — a reflection of the Constitution’s high burden for removing a chief executive.

“Today, the sham impeachment attempt concocted by Democrats ended in the full vindication and exoneration of President Donald J. Trump,” said Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary. “As we have said all along, he is not guilty.”

But most argued that the conduct was not sufficiently dangerous to warrant the Senate removing a president from office for the first time in history — and certainly not with an election so near. Others dismissed Democrats’ arguments altogether, insisting their case was merely an attempt to dress up hatred for Mr. Trump and his policies as a constitutional case.

“There will be so many who will simply look at what I am doing today and say it is a profile in courage,” Mr. Jones said before the vote. “It is not. It is simply a matter of right and wrong.”

The possibility of impeachment has hung over Mr. Trump’s presidency virtually since it began, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, initially resisted it. After Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russia’s election interference in 2016 and possible collaboration with the Trump campaign, found 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump, she said impeachment was too divisive a remedy to pursue.

Impeachment was seriously contemplated for a president only once in the first two centuries of the American republic; it now has been so three times since the 1970s, and two of the past four presidents have been impeached.

Memorializing Turner or other slave rebels has simply been a step too far in the US, at least until now. In a sense, this is hardly surprising. The South is covered with monuments to men who fought a war to preserve slavery. They are only now starting to come down. Most still stand.

The state of Virginia executed Turner. The state must still consider him a criminal. He hasn’t been pardoned or exonerated. Now it’s memorializing him. That is a sea change and I suspect still a highly controversial one

coming to the terms with the brutality of slave revolts brings the brutality and violence of slavery itself to the fore in a way America has seldom publicly faced

Honoring Turner means that his actions were laudatory and merit public memorialization. But his actions involved killing families and small children in their beds. If such actions, which are normally among the worst we can imagine, merit praise and public honor, the system they were meant to fight and destroy must have been barbaric and unconscionably violent beyond imagining. Very few of us would contest this description of slavery. But bringing Turner into the discussion of public commemoration will air these issues in a new (I think very positive) and jarring way.

Some advocates are calling for Kentucky's Republican-controlled legislature to pass "Breonna's Law," which would ban no-knock warrants statewide. The Kentucky Senate passed a bill late last month restricting such warrants in certain situations, which many activists and Democratic lawmakers say does not go far enough. They had introduced a similar bill in the House in August, called "Breonna's Law," but the House Judiciary Committee voted on Wednesday to move forward with the Republican-sponsored proposal, according to WFPL.

But many advocates believe justice has not been done, citing the lack of criminal charges and saying they want to see broader criminal justice reform. Demonstrators plan to gather in downtown Louisville on Saturday to mark the anniversary of Taylor's death, member station WFPL reported. Activists say they hope to keep her memory alive and renew calls for justice, after the winter dampened on-the-ground protests.

In September, the city of Louisville announced a $12 million settlement in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Taylor's family, which also included several police reforms.

Cameron, whose office took over as special prosecutor in the case in May, said at the press conference that both Mattingly and Cosgrove "were justified in their use of force."After the two officers forced their way into Taylor's apartment, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker fired on them. Walker, a licensed gun owner, has maintained that he did not hear the officers announce themselves before entering and mistook them for intruders. He fired a shot, which hit Mattingly in the leg.

Ju'Niyah Palmer, Taylor's sister, wrote on Instagram earlier this year that her heart was "heavy because we are only 2 months away from me not hearing, seeing or cuddling you for a whole year." Her mother, Tamika Palmer, recently filed complaints with the police department's professional standards unit against six officers for their role in the investigation that included the raid. In an Thursday interview with a Louisville CBS affiliate, Palmer expressed her frustration with the lack of accountability in the case and called on the community to continue demanding justice.

Last September, after months of protests in and around Louisville, the city was braced to hear whether a grand jury would hand down criminal indictments for LMPD officers Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove. At a press briefing Sept. 23, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced no charges directly tied to Taylor's death. The grand jury handed down three criminal counts of wanton endangerment to Hankison, over shooting through Taylor's apartment into a neighboring residence.

The grand jury did not charge Mattingly, who shot six times, and Cosgrove, who fired a total of 16 rounds, including what federal investigators determined to be the round that ultimately killed Taylor.

Louisville Democratic Rep. Attica Scott, the primary sponsor of Breonna's Law, told NPR's All Things Considered on Friday that committee officials have said they will consider proposed amendments that would bring the two bills further into alignment.She also said she had written a letter to newly-confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, asking him to fully investigate Taylor's killing.

Cameron, Kentucky's first Black attorney general, told reporters that "evidence shows that officers both knocked and announced their presence at the apartment." He cited the officers' statements and one additional witness as evidence, but also acknowledged there is no video or body camera footage of the officers executing the search warrant.

Cameron's announcement sparked fresh outrage and demonstrations in Louisville, Atlanta, Denver, and Portland, among other cities. It added fuel to an already tense period in American society, where national protests focusing on racial justice inequities became a near-daily occurrence following high-profile police incidents with Black Americans, including George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Jacob Blake, Daniel Prude and others who were killed or seriously injured.

Days after Cameron's press conference, Taylor's mother, Palmer, said she was "reassured ... of why I have no faith in the legal system, in the police, in the law. ... They are not made to protect us Black and brown people."

In that same press conference, Crump raised questions about what evidence Cameron presented on behalf of Taylor to the grand jury. He also publicly called for the release of the transcripts of the proceedings, something that is extremely rare in grand jury cases. The court did so several weeks later, after some jurors took issue with Cameron's explanation for why no officer was directly charged in Taylor's death.

Hankison was terminated from LMPD in June, after the department found he fired "wantonly and blindly" into Taylor's apartment. In January, some nine months after Taylor's killing, the department formally terminated Cosgrove and another officer connected to the incident.

Both Cosgrove and Detective Joshua Jaynes, who secured the warrant for the raid on Taylor's home, were found to have violated department protocols, according to the termination letters made public on Jan. 6.

LMPD officials said that for Jaynes, "the evidence in this case revealed a sustained untruthfulness violation based on information included in an affidavit completed by you and submitted to a judge."LMPD said Cosgrove violated the department's protocols on use of deadly force and failed to activate his officer-worn body camera.

In that same batch of documents, LMPD also said that Mattingly, who was shot during the raid, was exonerated on both counts of violating department procedures on use of deadly force and de-escalation. It added, "no disciplinary action taken and the complaint will be dismissed." The disciplinary documents were released the same day Fischer, the Louisville mayor, formally announced that Erika Shields would be the city's next permanent police chief.

Shields resigned her post as Atlanta's police chief in the immediate aftermath of the killing of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man who was shot in the back during an encounter with white officers in a Wendy's parking lot in June.

With Virginia’s ban this week, 23 states now prohibit the death penalty, and 11 more haven’t used it in at least a decade. It’s not a simple partisan issue, either. In several states, Republican lawmakers have joined Democrats in voting to ban capital punishment. In Virginia, some Democrats still supported the practice as recently as last year.

President Biden, who like most Democratic presidential candidates campaigned on ending the death penalty, can help break that cycle by imposing an immediate moratorium on federal executions, and commuting the sentences of the 50 or so inmates on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind. These inmates account for a small fraction of the more than 2,500 condemned people around the country, but a moratorium would still be an important step toward admitting what the country’s highest court began to acknowledge decades ago: The death penalty is cruel, ineffective and morally repugnant. America needs to join most of the rest of the world and eliminate it.

False confessions have played a role in about 30 percent of all wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence, and recent studies suggest that people under 18 are between two and three times more likely to falsely confess than adults, according to the Innocence Project.

Similar bills have been introduced in New York and Oregon, and supporters hope its passage in Illinois — by a vote of 114 to 0 in the House and 47 to 1 in the Senate — will lead to national movement on the issue.

“Our criminal justice system should not be guided by a conviction, but rather it should be guided by the advancement of the truth,” Mr. Durkin said in a statement. “Deception can never be utilized under any condition in our criminal justice system and particularly against juveniles.”

One of several cases cited by the bill’s supporters involved four men — Charles Johnson, Larod Styles, LaShawn Ezell and Troshawn McCoy — who had been arrested as teenagers and spent more than 20 years behind bars for a 1995 double murder in Chicago.

“The history of false confessions in Illinois can never be erased, but this legislation is a critical step to ensuring that history is never repeated,” Kimberly M. Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney, said in a statement.

“When a kid is in a stuffy interrogation room being grilled by adults, they’re scared and are more likely to say whatever it is they think the officer wants to hear to get themselves out of that situation, regardless of the truth,” Mr. Peters, the state senator, said in the statement.

“Police officers too often exploit this situation in an effort to elicit false information and statements from minors in order to help them with a case,” Mr. Peters said. “Real safety and justice can never be realized if we allow this practice to continue.”

It yielded a full DNA profile, and it’s not Cooper’s or any of the victims’ — but it hasn’t been matched to anyone else. Match that DNA, and we may quickly solve these murders.

Lee came to the attention of the authorities during the investigation after his girlfriend, Diana Roper, fingered him as the killer: She reported that he had returned home late on the night of the killings wearing bloody coveralls, in a car that resembled the Ryens’ station wagon

The DNA on the orange towel is not Lee’s, and he has denied to me that he was involved in the Ryen murders. It’s important not to try to free one innocent man by rushing to judgment about another. Still, the DNA testing and these witnesses add to the evidence that Cooper is an innocent man on death row.

The deans of four law schools and a former president of the American Bar Association have expressed concerns about the case. An excellent book, “Scapegoat,” has been written about it, and a documentary is in the works. Kim Kardashian visited Cooper in 2019 and has embraced his cause.

The D.A.’s office notes, for example, that Cooper’s blood was found on that tan T-shirt apparently worn by the murderer. That’s true: Testing years ago confirmed that it is Cooper’s blood — but also suggests that sheriff’s deputies spilled the blood on the shirt to frame him.

Cooper’s blood on that shirt had elevated EDTA in it; in other words, it seemed to have come not from his body directly, but from a test tube.

Relatives of the victims are convinced that Cooper is guilty, and San Bernardino authorities argue that there is plenty of forensic evidence against him — a bloodstain, shoe prints, cigarette butts, and so on. If you trust the sheriff’s office, it’s compelling.

So as he mounted this attack, Cooper was juggling three or four weapons? Pausing in midassault to change shirts? And how could a 155-pound man like Cooper enter the house, with the Ryens’ dogs presumably sounding an alarm, and then overpower both Doug Ryen, a former military policeman, and Peggy Ryen, strong and athletic — each of whom had a loaded gun by the side of the bed?

Yet California for almost 38 years has prepared to ignore all this and execute a Black man who is probably innocent. Democratic and Republican politicians alike have mostly averted their eyes, presumably in part for fear of offending voters who might be upset at the exoneration of a Black man convicted of a brutal crime against a white family.

Conservative law enforcement officials in San Bernardino County blocked comprehensive DNA testing for years, but so did Democratic politicians like Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris when they were attorneys general of California.

“We’ll pledge to rise above the petty factionalism and do justice for our institutions, for our states and for the nation,” McConnell said.

“The House’s hour is over. The Senate’s time is at hand.”

The White House released a statement on Wednesday that said “President Trump has done nothing wrong” and “expects to be fully exonerated”.

Following the vote on Wednesday, Pelosi signed the articles of impeachment, which were placed in folders and moved in a procession at sunset from the House to the Senate. The Senate invited House members to return to formally “exhibit” the articles on Thursday.

“Don’t talk to me about my timing,” she said. After months of resisting calls “from across the country” for Trump’s impeachment, she said, Trump ultimately “gave us no choice. He gave us no choice.”

I solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the constitution and laws: so help me God.

No US president has ever been removed through impeachment, though Richard Nixon resigned in the face of the prospect.

House Republicans responded vigorously to Trump’s demands that they defend him, offering worshipful assessments of Trump’s conduct, which they said was motivated by Trump’s desire to fight corruption in Ukraine.

House prosecutors are expected to present newly obtained evidence from Parnas over the course of the impeachment trial, which could unearth new evidence of misconduct by Trump.

To advance his "Build Back Better" agenda, Biden must look forward, not backward

No doubt Biden will hear demands from some elements of the Democratic base to "lock him up" and cries to unleash the full power of the US Department of Justice against his vanquished opponent, Donald Trump. And why not? After all, it's a fair turn of events given the numerous Trump campaign rallies where shameful chants of "lock her up," a reference to Hillary Clinton and her alleged misdeeds, were a regular refrain. There have been reports that Biden has expressed reluctance in pursuing investigations of Trump, concerned it would further divide the country.

Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for abuse of office and obstruction regarding his brazen attempt to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens in exchange for the release of promised military aid. Though Trump has denied any quid pro quo, impeachment will forever be a stain on Donald Trump's record, reputation and legacy. And it will hurt.

Mueller found no criminal conspiracy but did not exonerate the President on the question of obstruction.

Trump and his supporters would cry "witch hunt," which may pressure Republican lawmakers to push back against Biden's forward-looking agenda on Covid-19, infrastructure and other important issues.

Just as impeachment dominated the narrative and virtually every news cycle, so would a federal criminal prosecution that nearly half of Americans would label political.

none of this is to suggest that Trump has not violated norms, traditions and standards of conduct with alarming indifference to the damage he has brought upon the presidency itself; he most assuredly has swung a wrecking ball at the very institutions that undergird the American constitutional order.

For those who believe impeachment was not enough of a sanction, then the legal problems of Trump and his family under investigation by authorities in the State of New York could bring some satisfaction.

Not putting pressure on the US Department of Justice to prosecute Trump will be unpopular with much of the Democratic base, but it may be necessary to steer the ship of state from turbulent and dangerous waters. It won't be easy. The alternative will be more bitterness and the never-ending cycle of hostility that define today's American political debate.

Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center said the Trump Justice Department had behaved in ways that are "historically anomalous."

"In a normal presidency that followed the traditional norms of civility, you wouldn't see executions during a transition period," Dunham said. "The outgoing administration would defer to the incoming administration in matters like this."

Their legal teams say Bourgeois and Johnson suffer from intellectual disabilities and that Higgs didn't pull the trigger to kill the women. Instead, the man who admitted firing the weapon was tried separately and was sentenced to life in prison.

"The federal government has already presided over the executions of eight people so far this year," said Hannah Riley, a spokeswoman at the Southern Center for Human Rights. "The death penalty is always unconscionable, but it is especially egregious to carry out executions as hundreds of people are dying of COVID-19 in this country every day."

Dunham said the unusual moves by the Justice Department also extended to an announcement about a decision to seek capital punishment against a defendant who has not yet gone to trial.

The Biden transition team didn't comment directly on the Justice Department plan. But during the campaign, candidate Biden pledged to eliminate the death penalty, citing 160 people who were sentenced to capital punishment and were later exonerated.

Biden said he wanted to work with Congress to pass a law to eliminate federal capital punishment and "incentivize" states to follow that example.

Lawyers who follow federal capital punishment trends said they hoped that Biden, who supported expanding the death penalty 30 years ago, only to reverse course, had learned from hard experience that informal moratoriums don't solve the problem.