Dear Commons Community,

There has been a lot of mention in the past two days of the criminal pardoning process in Georgia in light of Donald Trump’s indictment on criminal charges.

Trump and 18 other people were charged Monday in a sweeping indictment under Georgia’s racketeering, or RICO, law for alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

The indictment, which follows a yearslong probe by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, alleges that Trump, who faces 13 charges, made 13 false statements in his effort to overturn the election results.

Because RICO is a state charge, it cannot be pardoned by any president.

ABC News legal contributor Dan Abrams called the Fulton County indictment “more dangerous” for Trump compared to the federal charges he’s facing.

“It’s effectively pardon-proof, in the sense that with a federal case, if he wins the election, he can kind of make it go away,” Abrams said on “Good Morning America” yesterday. “This case, he can’t do that.”

Georgia’s RICO charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison if convicted.

In Georgia, a pardon is an “order of official forgiveness” only granted to those who have completed their sentence, according to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ website.

A pardon “does not expunge, remove or erase the crime from your record,” the website states. “It may serve as a means for a petitioner to advance in employment or education.”

A pardon will also restore civil and political rights.

In Georgia, pardon power does not rest with the governor (aka Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican) but with the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, a board within the state’s executive branch.

The State Board of Pardons and Paroles is made up of five members who are appointed by the governor and then confirmed by the state Senate for a seven-year term.

“Once confirmed, members would be insulated from political pressures by the fact that no one official could remove them from office until they completed their terms,” the State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ website states.

To qualify for a pardon in Georgia, according to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles’ website, you must have completed your sentence at least five years before applying. You must not have committed any crimes in those five years or have any pending charges, among other qualifications.

After the Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump, the former president announced he will hold a press briefing on Monday to present a “Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT” on alleged election fraud that took place in Georgia.

In response, Kemp refuted Trump’s claims of election fraud.

“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen,” he said on social media. “For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor.”

Of all of his indictments, Trump should be most concerned about the Georgia case.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Six white former Mississippi law officers pleaded guilty on Monday to state charges for torturing two Black men in a racist assault. All six had recently admitted their guilt in a connected federal civil rights case.

In the gruesome crimes committed by six men who had been tasked with enforcing the law, federal prosecutors saw echoes of violence some Mississippi police officers inflicted on civil rights activists decades ago. Locally, the sheriff whose deputies committed the crimes called it the worst case of police brutality he had ever seen.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Prosecutors say some of the officers nicknamed themselves the “Goon Squad” because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover up attacks including the assault that ended with a deputy shooting one victim in the mouth.

In January, the officers entered a house without a warrant and handcuffed and assaulted the two men with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects. The officers mocked them with racial slurs throughout a 90-minute torture session, then devised a cover-up that included planting drugs and a gun, leading to false charges that stood against the victims for months.

Their conspiracy unraveled after one of the officers told the sheriff he had lied, leading to confessions from the others. The charges against the victims weren’t dropped until June, after federal and state investigators got involved, according to their attorney.

The men include five former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies — Brett McAlpin, Hunter Elward, Christian Dedmon, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke — and a former police officer from the city of Richland, Joshua Hartfield. Each appeared Monday in jump suits with the names of jails covered by tape.

Each agreed to sentences recommended by state prosecutors ranging from five to 30 years, although the judge isn’t bound by that. Time served for the state convictions will run concurrently with the potentially longer federal sentences they’ll receive in November.

The victims — Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker — arrived together to Monday’s hearing and sat in the front row, just feet from their attackers’ families. They were embraced by Monica Lee, the mother of Damien Cameron, a Black man who died in Elward’s custody in 2021.

“I enjoyed the view of seeing the walk of shame. Head down, the disgust everybody felt for them and that they feel for themselves,” Parker said after the officers were led away in shackles. “I hope this is a lesson to everybody out there: Justice will be served.”

The charges followed an Associated Press investigation in March that linked some of the officers to at least four violent encounters since 2019 that left two Black men dead. In addition to Jenkins’ lasting injuries, another Black man also accused them of shoving a gun inside his mouth. The Justice Department launched a civil rights probe in February. The fallout has continued ever since.

All six of the former officers pleaded guilty to state charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to hinder prosecution. Dedmon and Elward, who kicked in a door, also admitted to home invasion, and Elward pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for shoving a gun into the mouth of one of the victims and pulling the trigger, in what authorities called a “mock execution.”

After details of the case became public, some residents pointed to a police culture they said gives officers carte blanche to abuse their power.

Rankin County’s majority-white suburbs have been a destination for white flight out of the capital, Jackson, which is home to one of the highest percentages of Black residents of any major U.S. city.

The officers warned Jenkins and Parker to “go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River,” the federal charging documents say.

Jenkins and Parker were targeted because a white neighbor complained that two Black men were staying at the home with a white woman, court documents show.

Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley, who was at the hospital at the time. She’s been paralyzed since she was 15, and Parker was helping care for her.

“He’s a blessing. Every time I’ve needed him he’s been here,” Walley said in a February interview. “There were times I’ve been living here by myself and I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

Parker and Jenkins have left Mississippi and aren’t sure they will ever return for a long stay.

Jenkins still has difficulty speaking because of his injuries. The gunshot lacerated his tongue and broke his jaw before exiting his neck. He can only eat soft foods easily and has recurrent nightmares.

“As far as justice, I knew we were going to get it,” Jenkins said. “But I thought it was maybe going to take longer.”

Other consequences remain to be determined.

Lee claims Elward and a current deputy not linked to the Jenkins assault killed her son. A grand jury declined to indict Elward after he punched Cameron and shocked him with a stun gun, but a Rankin County judge ruled Wednesday that Lee’s claims of excessive force could move forward against him, and Lee said the FBI told her they are reviewing the case.

Separately, Carvis Johnson, the Black man who said another deputy pointed a gun into his mouth, filed a federal lawsuit from behind bars alleging that McAlpin beat him during an arrest and told him to stay out of Rankin County.

Jenkins and Parker, meanwhile, are seeking $400 million in damages in their federal civil rights lawsuit against Rankin County.

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey applauded the investigations that led to the guilty pleas.

“I believe today’s guilty pleas show the community that our system of checks and balances is effective,” Bailey said in a statement after the hearing. “An unbiased and impartial investigation into these former officers uncovered their criminal actions.”

Bailey had acknowledged his lax body camera policy failed. After the officers pleaded guilty, he promised to change it.

Court documents unsealed by federal prosecutors suggest only some members of the Goon Squad participated in the illegal raid. There are other Rankin County deputies “known to the United States Attorney,” the documents say.

“We would certainly hope that they continue to investigate the Goon Squad and other outstanding claims that may exist against these officers, as well as other officers,” said Trent Walker, an attorney for Jenkins and Parker.

Justice is being served!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the fourth academic year since Covid-19 upended the campus experience, hybrid work has found a permanent place in higher education. That much is clear from a recent survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Most respondents said their work force was operating on a hybrid basis, and more than three-quarters of those working in a hybrid setting didn’t want to go back to a fully in-person work environment. As reported by The Chronicle.

But while many administrators and faculty members who completed the survey, which was conducted in July, supported their institutions offering a hybrid-work option, they also expressed ambivalence (see graph above) about whether such an arrangement was best for their teams or students.

Nearly two-thirds of academic and administrative leaders said their campuses were working on a hybrid basis, with 36 percent operating fully in person. For faculty members, it was more evenly split: 51 percent reported an expectation that their role be hybrid, and 46 percent said they were expected to work fully in person. Among those whose institutions are fully in person, faculty members were less likely than administrators to want to work in a hybrid manner. The same concerns about hybrid work that first emerged during the pandemic — about the difficulty of making genuine connections with students or co-workers over Zoom, maintaining morale and a sense of equity when some employees enjoy more flexibility than others, and ensuring productivity in a liminal workspace — surfaced in open-ended survey responses.

For further reading, I posted on the “blended university” in 2021.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd had a provocative column yesterday analyzing three men making the news for all the wrong reasons. She asks where is the outrage among the American public in the behavior of Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump and Hunter Biden.  She attributes each of them with some combination of: “Fatal flaws. Mythic obsessions. Greed. Revenge. Daddy issues. Maybe a touch of Cain and Abel.”  It’s all there, part of a murky cloud reaching from the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House to the Supreme Court to the Justice Department to the White House.

Her conclusion: “Hunter is staining his father’s campaign, as Thomas is smearing the Roberts court, as Trump is dragging down the G.O.P.”

The entire column is below.  Read it!

Tony

—————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Where’s the Vicuña Outrage?

Three men walk into a courtroom, as August heats up.

Aug. 12, 2023

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — For a quiet summer Friday, there was quite a cacophony. Donald Trump crashing around. Clarence Thomas cashing in. Hunter Biden spinning out.

News about these men rocked the capital. Yet there is something inevitable, even ancient, about the chaos enveloping them. Fatal flaws. Mythic obsessions. Greed. Revenge. Daddy issues. Maybe a touch of Cain and Abel.

It’s all there, part of a murky cloud reaching from the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House to the Supreme Court to the Justice Department to the White House.

On Thursday, ProPublica dropped a scalding piece about the abominable behavior of Clarence Thomas, following up on its revelations about Harlan Crow paying for Thomas’s luxury trips, his mother’s house in Georgia and private school tuition for his grandnephew. This one is headlined: “The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel.”

In the old days, there was shame attached to selling your office. There was a single word that encapsulated such an outrage: vicuña. President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government. He lost his job and scarred his reputation.

Now Thomas sneers at the law by failing to disclose gifts from billionaires eager to gain influence. (The gifts also benefited his wife, Ginni Thomas, who tried to help Trump overthrow the government.)

ProPublica told the ka-ching: “At least 38 destination vacations … 26 private jet flights … a dozen V.I.P. passes to professional and college sporting events … two stays at luxury resorts … and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.”

Thomas is abiding by the adage that living well is the best revenge. He never got over the humiliation of the Anita Hill hearings, even though his allies smeared Hill as he lied his way to Senate confirmation. (Thanks, Joe Biden!) He came out of it feeling angry and vindictive. He got on the court, muscling past questions about his legal abilities and ethical compass by pushing the story that he was a guy who worked his way up from poverty.

The justice polished that just-folks image over the years by going on R.V. vacations with his wife to escape the “meanness” of Washington. But as The Times reported last weekend, the $267,230 Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon R.V., which Thomas told friends he had scrimped and saved to afford, was actually underwritten by Anthony Welters, a friend who made a bundle in health care.

Thomas is ruining the court’s image and, with the help of other uber-conservatives, he’s undoing our social constructs, causing many Americans to rebel.

At a hearing Friday, the federal judge overseeing the case against Trump for conspiring to purloin Biden’s election victory made a brisk start. “The fact that he is running a political campaign has to yield to the administration of justice,” Judge Tanya Chutkan informed Trump’s lawyers. “And if that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say in a political speech, that is just how it’s going to have to be.”

This will be tough for Trump because, as David Axelrod says, “the sense that he is being tried for political reasons is the essence of his campaign.”

The judge warned Trump’s lawyers, “To the extent your client wants to make statements on the internet, they have to always yield to witness security and witness safety,” adding, “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”

Trump was warped by a father who told him, You’re either a killer or a loser. He couldn’t tolerate losing in 2020 so he concocted a scheme to become a killer — of democracy.

Trump reminds me of fairy-tale figures — like Midas or the ballerina in “The Red Shoes,” a movie drawn from a fairy tale — who crave something so badly, they follow it down a destructive path. Trump refused to let go of the spotlight. He wanted all the attention and now it’s going to crush him.

Like Thomas, Trump is driven by revenge. We shouldn’t hand power to people whose main motive is doing bad stuff to other people.

A few blocks from Judge Chutkan’s courthouse, Merrick Garland emerged Friday with an announcement that surprised the White House — he was elevating the Hunter Biden prosecutor to a special counsel.

This ratchets up the White House family drama. Beau was the ballast for the Bidens. Now he is his father’s hero, which is bound to make the troubled Hunter feel like a zero.

Joe Biden should have reined in Hunter when he began living off his dad’s positions and connections. But the president, who lost two kids and nearly lost this one, is clearly paralyzed when it comes to Hunter.

With Hunter likely going on trial, and the 2024 race underway, it will be harder for the president to argue that Trump is the one with all the legal and ethical albatrosses.

Hunter is staining his father’s campaign, as Thomas is smearing the Roberts court, as Trump is dragging down the G.O.P.

Dear Commons Community,

The decision to fire librarians and effectively close libraries in some of the city’s poorest schools has been the most contentious yet made by a new set of Houston public school leaders who were imposed on the district and its 187,000 mostly Black and Hispanic students this year by the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott. In many schools, libraries will be turned into discipline rooms.

The state of Texas this spring took over the Houston Independent School District, one of the nation’s largest school systems, and replaced its elected school board and the superintendent. The move had been years in the making, following chronic poor performance at some schools, past allegations of misconduct by school trustees and changes in state law — backed by a moderate Black Democrat from Houston — that made it easier for the state to take over school districts.

Since then, the new superintendent — a former Army Ranger, State Department diplomat and founder of a charter school network who has no official certification for the Houston job — has moved swiftly to adopt a new plan for educating the district’s children, focusing on rapidly improving reading and math scores in dozens of elementary and middle schools.  As reported by The New York Times.

“The future is here, and we’re behind,” the superintendent, Mike Miles, said at a community meeting this month, describing persistent achievement gaps between Houston students and others around the state, and between the district’s Black and Hispanic students and their white classmates. “It means we have to do bold things now.”

State takeovers of troubled local school systems — a common occurrence around the country — have a mixed record of success, said Beth Schueler, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Education who has studied them. Those that succeeded were generally carried out in districts that were already among the nation’s lowest performing, she said, and on average they have had a neutral to negative effect.

“This is one of the largest takeovers we’ve had,” she said of Houston, and could provide a pathway for others to follow, or to avoid.

As the takeover began this year, many parents and teachers in Houston, a strongly Democratic city, complained about the loss of input into their schools, and worried that the ultimate goal of state Republican leaders was to undermine support for public education and drive Houston parents to charter or private schools.

But others, including parents and several of the replaced board members, said the district had not done enough to educate students in its struggling schools and urged patience with the new leadership.

The takeover started in the spring, as Mr. Abbott, a Republican and charter school supporter, was crisscrossing Texas to promote the use of state money for private school vouchers. The governor said his push for “parental empowerment” was separate from the Houston takeover, which he has called for since at least 2019. The Texas education commissioner, Mike Morath, has said the takeover was necessary to quickly address needed changes at the poorest-performing schools, despite improvements made even before the takeover. The district last year earned a “B” grade from the state.

With the first day of school approaching on Aug. 28, critics of the takeover have grown louder. This month, more than 200 people gathered in protest outside the district’s headquarters. “Houston Occupied School District,” read one sign. “Even prisons have libraries,” read another.

“It doesn’t feel right,” said Jessica Campos, 41, a parent at Pugh Elementary, a Spanish dual-language school slated for immediate changes. “I lose sleep over this. It’s a serious thing. These are our children and we’re not having a say in our children’s education, and that is not OK.”

The new state-run administration said it hoped to create a “new education system” in elementary and middle schools that feed into poor-performing high schools. The new approach includes a focus on reading and math, paying teachers more when their students score higher on standardized tests and shifting time-consuming tasks, such as making copies or grading work or writing lesson plans, from teachers to other staff members. Schools will also hire community members to teach elective courses like photography and spin classes.

Under the plan, libraries in some schools would become “team rooms,” which may be a bit of a misnomer, a department spokesman acknowledged: Though some students could work in teams, those sent there for disrupting class would be expected to spend their time at individual desks, watching their classes on laptops.

Mr. Miles has said that given limited space and resources, the decision was a trade-off and that students in schools where libraries have been converted into team rooms would still be able to borrow books before or after school.

Still, Sylvester Turner, Houston’s mayor, said the effort risked creating two systems.

“He’s gone too far, and he’s dismantling the largest educational district in the state of Texas,” Mr. Turner said of Mr. Miles during a City Council hearing last month. “You cannot have a situation where you are closing libraries for some schools in certain neighborhoods, and there are other neighborhoods where there are libraries, fully equipped. What the hell are you doing?”

It sounds like “Houston we have a problem!”

Tony

Will Hurd

Dear Commons Community,

Republican presidential candidate Will Hurd called Donald Trump a “liar,” a “loser” and a “national security threat” in a new round of jabs directed at his GOP rival.

Hurd went after the former president in an interview with PBS’ “Firing Line” that aired Friday, roughly two weeks after he claimed that Trump was running for the White House to “stay out of prison.”

“Donald Trump is a liar, Donald Trump is a loser and Donald Trump is a national security threat to the United States of America, and we need to be honest about that,” Hurd told host Margaret Hoover.

“If the GOP nominates him, then we’re giving Joe Biden and Kamala Harris four more years,” he added, referring to the current Democratic president and vice president.

Elsewhere in the interview, the former Texas congressman outlined his plans to “invigorate” moderate voters who have been demoralized by Trump’s grip on the GOP base.

“The way you invigorate all those people that are frustrated, and the way you inspire the independents and the center-left Dems who are sick and tired of the direction the Democratic Party is going, is by being honest,” Hurd said, noting that he’s had an aversion to bullies since childhood.

“I was recently in Iowa and spoke at a group that had a lot of Donald Trump supporters, and I had to break the news to them that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.”

The PBS program flashed back to a “prison” related dig that Hurd had made about Trump in the state — comments leading the former president to sail into a rant on his Truth Social platform.

Hurd noted that some folks in the booing and jeering crowd weren’t happy with him “being honest.”

“But guess what? It had to be said,” noted Hurd, who last month called out his fellow GOP candidates for being afraid to talk about Trump.

He added: “If we can’t have these honest debates within the Republican Party, then we’re not going to be able to ensure that this trend that has been happening for the last 20 years — where a Republican has lost the national vote for 20 years — that shouldn’t be the case, and it’s going to require us to be honest and look at ourselves.”

Don’t hold back, Will!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Rosetta Stone is to the British Museum what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre. Every day, throngs of visitors to the London museum take smartphone snaps of the etched black slab that was seized from Egypt over 200 years ago and never went back. Except that, in the next month, the Rosetta Stone is returning home — in a manner of speaking.

At Fort Qaitbay in Rashid, along Egypt’s northern coast, visitors will soon be able to stand where the Rosetta Stone is thought to have been found, point their smartphones (see photo below) at a QR barcode and watch the stone pop out of their screens in an augmented-reality installation.  The stone is being “digitally repatriated” by Looty, a collective of London-based designers who, as they put it, virtually reclaim artifacts in Western museums that were plundered during colonial times. As reported by The New York Times.

Looty’s installation returns the Rosetta Stone to Rashid, Egypt, as an augmented reality.  Credit…NZZ Format

Chidirim Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor founded Looty in 2021, naming it after Queen  Victoria’s Pekingese dog, which was picked up in a ransacked Chinese palace. The collective seeks to give people from former colonies who are unable to travel to the West three-dimensional replicas and knowledge of their stolen treasures. Their aim is to end Western museums’ monopoly over the narrative and give the public a more complete picture.

On a recent afternoon, Nwaubani, just back from the fort in Rashid, stood before the 2,200-year-old Rosetta Stone in London.

“I don’t like being here,” he said, motioning at the slab and surrounding statues and sarcophagi in the British Museum’s Egyptian sculpture gallery. “These are reminders of the spoils of war, reminders of defeat, reminders of colonialism.”

He said the museum gave an incomplete description of the antiquities exhibited in its galleries, not representing them as they were meant to be shown; these were often royal, religious or ritual objects, which were never intended for display in a vitrine. For young people of African descent such as himself, he said, “not having the power to tell your own story is wrong.”

“What I’ve been able to do is actually take some of that power,” he added.

The augmented reality installation in Rashid will offer visitors a high-definition image of the stone, with detailed descriptions in Arabic and English, a translation of the stone’s inscriptions and an account of how the artifact left Egypt.

By making virtual replicas of looted treasures, he was shifting some of the attention to the digital space — a “new landscape,” he said, where “laws have not caught up. No one is colonizing

“The restitution conversation is all about what happens next,” said Dan Hicks, a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford University, “and there is a new generation, it seems, who are not willing simply to wait for the cogs to turn at the glacial pace at which museums often operate.”

Restitution is “fundamentally about agency,” Hicks said, and so is Looty. The collective has challenged Western museums’ control over treasures and the narrative about them, and is using digital media to show that artifacts are “not dead,” Hicks added. “They are continuing to be a living part of culture.”

Tony

A Waymo self-driving car parked on a street in San Francisco on May 1, 2023.

Dear Commons Community,

San Francisco is the first city in the world where two separate self-driving taxi companies can offer paid rides after a historic vote by the California Public Utilities Commission Thursday.

The vote means Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and Cruise, owned by General Motors, can now open up the entire city to paid ridership in their fleets of robot cars.  As reported by USA Today.

“Today’s permit marks the true beginning of our commercial operations in San Francisco,” Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, said in a statement.

“Offering a commercial, 24/7 driverless ride-hail service across San Francisco is a historic industry milestone –– putting Cruise in a position to compete with traditional ride-hail,” Prashanthi Raman, Cruise vice president of global government affairs, said in a statement.

Autonomous vehicle taxis also are operating in other cities, though in some areas only for testers, not paying customers. In Phoenix, Waymo offers ride-hailing in its cars across a 40-square mile area in downtown Phoenix and a 50-square mile area in Chandler, Arizona, though not on freeways. Earlier this month it announced plans to offer rides in Austin as well and has plans for Los Angeles.

Cruise offers rides in Austin and Phoenix and plans to expand into Houston and Dallas, Raman said.

In San Francisco, self-driving electric vehicles already are a common sight in many parts of the city. Waymo has been doing driverless test drives since 2018; Cruise began in 2022. Approximately 500 self-driving cars are on the streets of San Francisco each day.

Until the vote, Cruise was allowed to offer paid rides in portions of the city between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., while Waymo offered free trips to about 1,000 people who had signed up for the service. Now both companies will be able to offer paid trips 24 hours a day. Freeways are still off-limits.

The 3-to-1 vote came after seven hours of public testimony and despite protests by San Francisco city officials, who have said the self-driving cars pose safety hazards when they become confused in emergency situations such as fires or downed power lines.

Supporters say the self-driving cars are safer than human drivers.

Most of the self-driving cars seen on the streets of San Francisco at this point are empty, as the cars do a seemingly endless series of test drives – to the amusement, annoyance and sometimes anger of local residents.

Congratulations to San Francisco for giving self-driving taxis a chance although some believe their future is uncertain!

Tony