Father, son get life for hate crime in Ahmaud Arbery’s death.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — The white father and son convicted of murder in Ahmaud Arbery's fatal shooting after they chased the 25-year-old Black man through a Georgia neighborhood were sentenced Monday to life in prison for committing a federal hate crime.

U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood sentenced Travis McMichael, 36, and his father Greg McMichael, 66, in Brunswick. Both were previously sentenced to life without parole in a state court for Arbery’s murder.

“A young man is dead. Ahmaud Arbery will be forever 25. And what happened a jury found happened because he’s Black,” Wood said.

In February, a federal jury convicted the McMichaels and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan of violating Arbery's civil rights, concluding they targeted him because of his race. All three were also found guilty of attempted kidnapping, and the McMichaels were convicted of using guns in the commission of a violent crime. The McMichaels armed themselves with guns and used a pickup truck to chase Arbery after he ran past their home on Feb. 23, 2020. Bryan joined the pursuit in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery with a shotgun. The McMichaels told police they suspected Arbery was a burglar, but investigators determined he was unarmed and had committed no crimes.

Greg McMichael addressed the Arbery family, saying their loss was “beyond description.”

“I’m sure my words mean very little to you but I want to assure you I never wanted any of this to happen,” he said. “There was no malice in my heart or my son’s heart that day.”

Outside the courtroom, Cooper-Jones responded to his statement.

“I think he realizes that he made some horrible decisions. Unfortunately, his apology doesn’t bring back my son,” she said.

Travis McMichael declined to address the court, but his attorney, Amy Lee Copeland, said her client had no convictions before Arbery’s slaying and had served in the U.S. Coast Guard. She said a lighter sentence would be more consistent with what similarly charged defendants have received in other cases, noting that the officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, got 21 years in prison for violating Floyd’s civil rights, though he was not charged with targeting Floyd because of his race.

Greg McMichael’s attorney, A.J. Balbo, also cited the Chauvin sentence as well as his client’s age and health problems, which he said include a stroke and depression.

Prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein said Chauvin at least had some legitimate authority to engage Floyd initially.

“Greg McMichael had absolutely no legitimate reason to run inside and get a gun and chase after a young man who was doing nothing other than running down the road,” Bernstein said.

Arbery’s killing became part of a larger national reckoning over racial injustice and killings of unarmed Black people including Floyd and Breonna Taylor and in Kentucky. Those two cases also resulted in the Justice Department bringing federal charges.

“The evidence we presented at trial proved ... what so many people felt in their hearts when they watched the video of Ahmaud’s tragic and unnecessary death: This would have never happened if he had been white,” Christopher Perras, another prosecutor, said Monday.

A state Superior Court judge imposed life sentences for the McMichaels and Bryan in January for Arbery’s murder, with both McMichaels denied any chance of parole. Bryan had a sentencing hearing scheduled later Monday in the federal case.

All three defendants have remained jailed in coastal Glynn County, in the custody of U.S. marshals, while awaiting sentencing after their federal convictions in January.

Because they were first charged and convicted of murder in a state court, protocol would have them turned them over to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve their life terms in a state prison.

In court filings last week, both Travis and Greg McMichael asked the judge to instead divert them to a federal prison, saying they won’t be safe in a Georgia prison system that’s the subject of a U.S. Justice Department investigation focused on violence between inmates.

Copeland said during Monday’s hearing for Travis McMichael that her client has received hundreds of threats that he will be killed as soon as he arrives at state prison and that his photo has been circulated there on illegal phones.

“I am concerned your honor that my client effectively faces a back door death penalty,” she said, adding that “retribution and revenge” were not sentencing factors, even for a defendant who is “publicly reviled.”

Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr., said Travis McMichael had shown his son no mercy and deserved to “rot” in state prison.

“You killed him because he was a Black man and you hate Black people,” he said. “You deserve no mercy.”

Wood said she didn’t have the authority to order the state to relinquish custody of Travis McMichael to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but also wasn’t inclined to do so in his case. She also declined to keep Greg McMichael in federal custody.

During the February hate crimes trial, prosecutors fortified their case that Arbery’s killing was motivated by racism by showing the jury roughly two dozen text messages and social media posts in which Travis McMichael and Bryan used racist slurs and made disparaging comments about Black people.

Defense attorneys for the three men argued the McMichaels and Bryan didn’t pursue Arbery because of his race but acted on an earnest — though erroneous — suspicion that Arbery had committed crimes in their neighborhood.

By RUSS BYNUM for AP News

Advocates struggle with how much they can help with self-managed abortions.

At a rally in Nashville, Planned Parenthood organizer Julie Edwards looked out at some of the "back alley abortion" imagery on signs, including bloody coat hangers. But, Edwards told the crowd, driven into the streets by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on abortion rights, it's not like the old days before Roe v. Wade.

Nearly a decade ago, Edwards was a teenager and got medication from some older friends. Edwards said that may be the new normal in abortion-ban states like Tennessee.

"I'm standing in front of you having had a self-managed abortion, having gotten abortion pills from people in my community. And I'm safe," Edwards said to cheers. "It's going to take all of us to keep each other's secrets, to hold each other's hands, to keep each other safe."

Medications are now available for first trimester abortions. And it's become the primary way abortions are induced.

The regimen involves two prescription drugs that hit the market since Roe was decided in 1973. Mifepristone is taken first. It's the abortion drug that's fairly expensive and highly regulated. A day or two later, the patient takes misoprostol, which is much more widely available and can work on its own to induce an abortion. The drug was developed for treating ulcers in the 1970s but has several other off-label uses aside from abortions, such as alleviating arthritis. It's even prescribed for animals, so veterinary supply stores carry the medication. Misoprostol is even sold over-the-counter in Mexico.

"It's really based on what somebody can get. And in the self-managed context, the only way to get mifepristone plus Misoprostol is through the internet, so it takes time to wait for the delivery," said Susan Yanow, spokesperson for Women Help Women, a nonprofit based across four continents that works to increase access to abortion.

The international organization ships both medications all over the world — but not to the U.S. because laws vary so much state to state. Social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram have already started pulling down posts offering to send these drugs by mail. Many states that now ban abortion have recently strengthens their laws on mail-order abortion drugs.

"We still have the right to share information," Yanow said. "People use the internet. People use their phones. People will find ways to obtain these pills."

But it's more than finding the medications, which is why Yanow's organization has a detailed guide on how to use them safely. And she provides training for local reproductive rights groups, as do others.

Lynsey Bourke of Self-Guided Abortion, based in Montana, began producing video tutorials late last year and publishing them on Youtube, explaining how to use Misoprostol alone and offering ways to make the process more sacred by building an altar, burning incense and lighting candles. She even provides post-abortion yoga instruction.

With Misoprostol alone, multiple rounds are needed. Nausea is common. And the medicine induces cramping and bleeding that can be alarming for those who aren't prepared.

Even some OB-GYNs are quietly supportive of self-managed abortion.

"I'm more worried about people who can't get to one of these sources and are just so desperate that they take matters into their own hands," said Dr. Nikki Zite, an OB-GYN at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville.

She said clinical counseling before taking the pill combo is ideal. For example, some patients are anemic and could bleed enough to need emergency care. And some just don't do well with pain and lots of blood.

"Not every patient is a good candidate to miscarry at home," she said.

But at this point, Zite can't afford to provide that consultation. In Tennessee, she would be risking a felony and prison time under a six-week ban now in effect, and an all-out abortion ban set to take effect in August. And it's unclear just how far law enforcement is willing to reach.

References to coat hangers have been used to protest the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights activists say "self-managed abortions" are much safer today because of medications — but women still need guidance.

Tennessee's laws specifically exempts the pregnant person from prosecution. But a motivated prosecutor could find ways to press charges related to a self-managed abortion, said criminal defense attorney David Raybin in Nashville.

"I mean, that is fraught with peril," Raybin said. "I would strongly recommend against a woman using such quote-unquote underground methods to get medication like that."

He said it's best to get a legal abortion in another state. But abortion rights activists in Tennessee say they know travel will be difficult for many. And even for those who can, a self-managed abortion may be more convenient. To a degree, reproductive rights groups are willing to help navigate the legal gray area.

Healthy and Free Tennessee, an organization working to promote sexual health and reproductive freedom, has organized several training sessions through Women Help Women in recent weeks. Policy director Nina Gurak said their biggest worry isn't health complications — it's the legal risk.

"We recommend that if someone is self-managing an abortion that they have a supporter or friend. That supporter or friend may be at a higher legal risk than the actual person who is self-managing an abortion," she said. "And then you have to decide for yourself — is that something I'm comfortable with? Is that something I'm not comfortable with?"

Organizations in states with abortion bans have their own risk to assess. They feel confident the First Amendment protects sharing medical information endorsed by the World Health Organization.

But abortion rights advocates are torn between raising awareness and becoming a target for anti-abortion lawmakers — who are no longer limited by Roe v. Wade.

"We definitely are concerned about increasing criminalization of abortion or self-managed abortion and abortion pills," Gurak said. "We also want to balance that with the need for communities to have the information that they need to make the decision for themselves."

Originally reported by NPR on July 05, 2022 11:36 ET

Supreme Court conservatives flex muscle in sweeping rulings.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s sweeping rulings on guns and abortion sent an unmistakable message. Conservative justices hold the power and they are not afraid to use it to make transformative changes in the law, none more so than taking away a woman’s right to abortion that had stood for nearly 50 years.

No more half measures, they declared Friday in overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to outlaw abortion. And the day before, in ruling for the first time that Americans the right to carry handguns in public for self-defense, they said the Constitution is clear.

“A restless and newly constituted Court,” is how Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of three liberals on the nine-member court, described her colleagues earlier in June.

The abortion case in particular was a repudiation of the more incremental approach favored by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The decisions in the blockbuster cases on consecutive days were the latest and perhaps clearest manifestation of how the court has evolved over the past six years — a product of historical accident and Republican political brute force — from an institution that leaned right, but produced some notable liberal victories  to one with an aggressive, 6-3 conservative majority.

Originally published by: By MARK SHERMAN and JESSICA GRESKO on June 25/2022

Two White Men Arrested After Viral Vids Capture Terrifying Attack on Black Teen.

Two white men were arrested in Florida this week and accused of racial profiling after allegedly hurling a massive stone at a Black teen who was driving in the same town where Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012.

“I was racially profiled while driving through my friends neighborhood,” the victim, who identified himself as JJ, wrote on his Instagram Wednesday. “They didn’t like the way I was driving, so they felt the need to hit my car with a cone, and throw a rock through my window. All I wanted to do was de-escalate until police came, because I wasn’t about to get charges pressed on me for no reason.”

According to Seminole County records, Donald Eugene Corsi, 52, and Howard Oral Hughes, 61, were arrested Wednesday. They were first identified by social media sleuth @ThatDaneshGuy. Corsi faces felony charges for damage to property and launching a weapon into a vehicle. Hughes has been charged with felony property damage and a misdemeanor for battery. Both men have since been released from the Seminole jail on bond.

In a video initially posted on Facebook Tuesday, a man who identified himself as JJ’s father, CJ Jones, said, “This is the video my son took while calling 911. …And as you can see they [admit] to having guns.”

In the video, one man in a blue shirt stands with his hands on his hips, watching the person holding the camera, presumed to be JJ. Another man in sunglasses walks around a white Mercedes sedan with his phone pointed toward the license plate

“Right here! Tell me what you’ve done!” the man in sunglasses shouts.

The camera pans to the car, which has a broken window in the seat behind the driver.

“Burning out and racing through my fucking neighborhood!” the man in sunglasses yells in JJ’s face. The man in the blue shirt joins him in front of the camera.

“I’m not in your face,” the man in the blue shirt says after JJ tells him to move. “Get out of my neighborhood, you fuckwad!”

JJ asks the men if they have a gun, and one of them says he has a permit to carry.

After the two men trail JJ on the residential street, other people in the neighborhood come out to inspect what’s going on.

A woman in the street with a striped towel wrapped around her waist and a cross hanging from her neck accuses JJ of possessing a gun.

“Get out of this neighborhood!” she shouts. “You don’t belong here!”

JJ walks back to his car and films glass shards all over the backseat and a dent on the car door.

In a follow-up Facebook Live video Jones posted Tuesday, he mentioned that the incident happened in the Forest Lake neighborhood of Sanford.

“Not too far where Trayvon Martin got killed,” he wrote.

The video shows police arriving on the scene as residents stood outside their homes. Jones said that he wanted to go live “just so we have evidence, in case something happens to me out here today.”

He then turned the camera toward the house where his son was supposed to visit a friend.

“Even when I was coming into this neighborhood, I had a couple yell at me,” Jones says. “Black people cannot stay around here.”

The Daily Beast was unable to reach Corsi and Hughes on Thursday.

Originally reported by Brooke Leigh Howard

Thu, June 16, 2022, 12:59 PM

Enough is enough... again!

MIAMI-DADE, FL - One of the most, or maybe THE most, cherished treasure a human being can have, is their offspring. It is a well-known fact that in the animal kingdom, when a mother of virtually any species, feels her offspring is being threatened in any way, “momma” gets really upset and she becomes very dangerous. In a very similar way, human mothers are the same.

We as “rational” beings can accept the fact that even fathers (males) get sometimes violent when his descendants are somehow threatened  in any way. Said this, it’s important to point out that our children, in general, are the most precious thing we have; not only that, they are, literally, the future of society and therefore the future of the world itself. That’s why any incident when children are hurt is so disturbing to all of us or at least the ones with a spine.

This time, it was one school shooting, unfortunately one more (so far in the year 2022 there have been 21 school shootings in the US) Uvalde, Texas was the unfortunate scenario of the latest one, where 19 of our precious descendants die in a very violent and unnecessary death.

Now, is it appropriate to start the conversation, again, of gun control? or are we going to fly with the right-wing narrative of “it’s not about guns, it’s about mental health”? It’s obvious that in order to go outside with the intention of killing a lot of innocent people, you have to be somehow mentally unstable, but take that as an excuse to not talk about gun regulations when in fact, a 2018 report of the FBI on the characteristics of active shooters found that only 25% of shooters from 2000-2013 had confirmed mental illness, is unacceptable.

At this point, let’s say the same old quote that has been repeated over and over again for quite a while now: enough is enough!

It’s clear to all of us that the NRA and the rest of the weaponry industry have been buying consciousness of politicians through lobbies forever, they fund and flood their campaigns with millions of dollars and therefore they don’t even care to consider legislate against them; which is not true, by the way, another talking-point from the right. Nobody wants to “get rid of your arms”, they want to regulate their acquisition, that’s it, make it a little harder so we won’t see another derailed teenager easily and legally buying two AR-15's or any other assault weapon or semi-automatic machine gun the moment he turns 18 in order to kill us all or our children.

Is it that hard to understand? Really that hard? Or, as many of us suspect, is it a matter of money? Unfortunately paid with the blood of our children, families or our own.

Written by Ricardo Martinez

In Wake of Massacres, the Supreme Court Is Poised to Expand Gun Rights

WASHINGTON — In the coming weeks, with the nation reeling from mass shootings in New York and Texas, the Supreme Court is set to issue a major decision on what states may do to limit carrying guns in public. Based on the justices’ questions when the case was argued in November, they are likely to strike down a New York law that requires people seeking a license to carry a handgun in public to show a “proper cause.”

The decision will be the court’s first significant statement on the scope of Second Amendment rights outside the home. In 2008, in ruling that the amendment protects an individual right untied to militia service, the court said only that law-abiding citizens have a constitutional right to keep guns in their homes for self-defense.

The new case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, is a test of constitutionality laws requiring licenses for carrying guns in public. California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have laws similar to the one in New York.

At the argument, several justices said the New York law imposes an intolerable burden on the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

“You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that, you know, your speech is particularly important,” Chief Justice John Roberts said. “So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?”

But several justices seemed open to allowing the state to exclude guns from crowded public settings or other sensitive places.

Indeed, the 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, indicated that the court would be prepared to sustain at least some gun control laws, including ones banning guns in schools.

“Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, wrote for the majority.

Reported by: Adam Liptak on Wed, May 25, 2022,

© 2022 The New York Times Company

The tragedy of being sick is not even the sickness

MIAMI-DADE, FL - When a family member or a dear friend gets sick is not an experience recommended for anybody. When that time arrives, it’s time to run, getting fewer hours of sleep, more stress than usual and of course, the money issue, which curiously is the source of many, if not all, the aforementioned consequences of having our loved one sick. Now comes the trip to the hospital and then the real stress kicks in, not necessarily at the beginning of the hospital journey but rather close to the discharge process. Why? You may ask, well, unfortunately in our country we don’t have what other developed countries have: “Free & Universal Health Care System” or translated for us who don’t speak “medicine”: Free Health Care for everybody. (Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, among many other developed and some underdeveloped countries, have Universal Health Care). Not only that, the cost of the health treatment of any kind in the United Sates is ridiculously high, not affordable for the majority of people and the network of businesses around that health system have flourished exponentially, precisely because of that fertile ground for money, money and more money. The fact that an insurance company is the one with the final answer in a situation where your health is in jeopardy and you don’t have the financial resources to take care of the most precious gift we all have, which is our health or our family’s, is disheartening given that we all know for a fact what is the most important factor in the decision, and that is money and its ramifications. Having the consciousness that a bunch of executives from a private company are the ones deciding the future of our health is terrifying; the ones responsible for my health or literally my death, in any case my well-being is at risk because of the policies of a private company. I don’t even want to visit the fact that they’ve been advised by a medical advisory board, who responds to the money interest of their bosses. Do you see the problem here?

This is common practice in the insurance realm.

10 Bad Faith Insurance Claim Practices:

1. Unjustified delay of settlement. Insurance companies may delay your claim for no valid reason. They do this in hopes that if they take too long, you will just forget about it.

2. Lack of communication. In some cases, the insurance company may not notify you of its decision in a timely manner or may fail to respond to correspondence.

3. Lack of proper investigative techniques. When investigating your claim, the insurance company may use illegal or unethical methods to obtain information regarding your claim. In some cases, the company may refuse to investigate your claim at all and simply deny it.

4. Unreasonable demands. In order to delay the process or find a way to deny the claim, the company may ask for an unreasonable amount of documents in order to start the process. It may ask for items unrelated to the case and deny your claim if you cannot provide them.

5. Lowball offers. In this case, the insurance company may offer an unreasonably low settlement. Do not accept any offer before consulting your attorney.

6. Use of threats. The company may threaten the victim by ordering him or her to do something or to not do something or else the company will refuse to pay the claim.

7. Changing the policy. A company may change the terms of the policy after a claim is filed, and use its new terms to deny the claim.

8. Cancelling the policy. The company may cancel the policy after a person makes a claim.

9. Not disclosing the policy limits. If the adjusters will not reveal aspects of the policy, you may be dealing with a bad faith insurance claim practice.

10. Conflict of interest. An insurance adjuster may attempt to handle your claim and the claim of the other party.

One thing of paramount importance to consider in this complex and entangled situation is empathy. How much empathy those executives have for us? Do they have the same conditions if they need some health care for them or their family than any regular person that their company insured? Or do they have special treatment and therefore they simply don’t care? Those are very interesting question that not only need to be answered in an honest way, but those answers should indicate many things, one of them would be: are the insurance companies treating the insured properly, compassionately, empathetically? If there’s a no in one of those answers, which I’m pretty sure is the case, it has to be changed, the system is flawed and even though it sounds like a typical cliché, we as a developed country can’t continue giving such a deficient though expensive health care, to a community with no resources not only to afford financially but to fight back for their rights. It’s not fair, it has to be changed and it has to be now, too many lives in danger, too many families in distress, too many human beings in suffering, because a bunch of executives think about their income and their company’s more than the happiness of the same people paying their premiums. The irony!

Written by Ricardo Martinez