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Predicting elections is a fools errand, but the errand becomes much simpler when a candidate has little to no opposition.

In elections for the Texas House of Representatives this year, 47 candidates nearly a third of the chamber are running without any opposition on the ballot. Seven more have no opponent from the other major party, but face a third-party opponent.

While the vast majority of those are current representatives, five are sure to be new faces on the House floor in the next legislative session.

Heres a quick look at each.

House District 10: Jake Ellzey (R)

With Rep. John Wray (R-Waxahachie) not seeking reelection in the solidly Republican district south of Dallas, three Republicans vied for the seat in the primary.

Jake Ellzey, a retired Navy pilot, won the primary outright in March with 65 percent of the vote.

In 2018, Ellzey ran for Texas 6th Congressional District after the incumbent, Rep. Joe Barton, decided against seeking reelection amidst a sexting scandal.

Ellzey secured enough votes for a primary runoff election in 2018, but lost the race to Rep. Ron Wright (R-TX-06) by four points.

Of the five new candidates expected to serve in the next legislature, Ellzey is the only one with an opponent on the November ballot.

Libertarian Matt Savino is also in the running.

House District 59: Shelby Slawson (R)

In one of the few primary races this year that resulted in an incumbent losing a reelection bid, Rep. J.D. Sheffield (R-Gatesville) lost to Shelby Slawson by a wide margin of 23 points.

Slawson graduated with a law degree from the University of Texas in 2003 and practices law in Stephensville.

During her primary campaign, Slawson was endorsed by a number of conservative organizations in the state, including Texas Right to Life, Young Conservatives of Texas, Texas Values Action, and Gun Owners of America.

She was also endorsed by state Sen. Pat Fallon (R-Prosper) and has returned the favor by supporting Fallon in his bid for Texas 4th Congressional District.

House District 60: Glenn Rogers (R)

An analysis of the partisan leanings of each state House district found that HD 60 is currently the most Republican-leaning district in the state.

With Rep. Mike Lang (R-Granbury) not seeking reelection, the primary race for his seat became one of the most contentious in the state.

Jon Francis led in the primary race with 46 percent of the vote, while Glenn Rogers trailed behind at 44 points.

Throughout the primary runoff race, Francis backed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rogers backed by Gov. Greg Abbott poured over a million dollars into the race.

At the end of the heated race, Rogers came out on top by fewer than a thousand votes.

House District 76: Claudia Ordaz Perez (D)

With Rep. Csar Blanco (D-El Paso) resigning to run for the open seat of Texas Senate District 29, his House seat was open for a new member to succeed him.

El Paso City Council member Claudia Ordaz Perez won the Democratic primary nomination outright against Elisa Tamayo with 56.4 percent of the vote.

Policy priorities listed by Ordaz Perez on her campaign website include parental leave reform, stronger animal welfare policies, improving public schools, and expanding Medicaid.

House District 100: Jasmine Crockett (D)

After then-Rep. Eric Johnson resigned from the district to run for Dallas mayor last year, Rep. Lorraine Birabil (D-Dallas) won the special election in January.

But while Birabil won the election to finish Johnsons unexpired term, she lost the election to serve in the upcoming legislative session.

Jasmine Crockett, a civil rights attorney, won the Democratic primary runoff election in July by a narrow margin just under 100 votes.

Crockett has emphasized her focus on criminal justice reform.

As I enter my first session in the midst of a pandemic, budget shortfall, and redistricting year, my top priority is going to be a balanced budget that includes our greatest necessities, Crockett told The Texan in a statement.

She said those necessities include, reforming our outdated and inefficient criminal justice system into one that is effective in delivering justice and doesnt waste taxpayer money on approaches that dont improve public safety, and, reducing the burden of property taxes for homeowners in my district.

Crockett says that she intends to file legislation to legalize the use of marijuana in order to increase our tax revenue, removing frivolous regulations hindering small businesses, and protecting our Fourth Amendment right.

I look forward to working with members from both parties to advance an economically-centered, Texas-style, legislative agenda, said Crockett. With my experience as an attorney, and my business background, I hope to be placed on committees which will benefit from my business acumen as a small business owner, my ability to be fiscally astute, and my litigation skill set and knowledge obtained over the last 14 years.

Disclosure: Unlike almost every other media outlet, The Texan is not beholden to any special interests, does not apply for any type of state or federal funding, and relies exclusively on its readers for financial support. If youd like to become one of the people were financially accountable to, click here to subscribe.

A free bi-weekly commentary on current events by Konni Burton.

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Five New Texas House Candidates Who Won't Be Waiting on Election Results - The Texan

On the night of July 6, 1988, Mexico was on the verge of the unthinkable. After six decades in power, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) appeared to be going down to a crushing electoral defeat. Cuauhtmoc Crdenas, leader of the left-wing opposition, had taken a strong lead in early returns over the PRIs candidate, the colorless technocrat Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

As vote totals flowed in from around the country to the Ministry of the Interior in Mexico City, the leaders of the PRI began to panic. The electoral upset was a political earthquake for us, PRIs incumbent President, Miguel de la Madrid, later recalled. As in any emergency, we had to act because the problems were rising fast.

The screens at the Ministry of Interior suddenly went blank. The electoral authorities would variously blame a crash of the computer system tabulating the ballots and an overload of the telephone lines. In any event, they said, it was a total breakdown of the system. For hours, no further results were reported across the country.

As midnight approached, with no satisfactory numbers yet concocted, the ruling authorities simply cut to the chase: they declared Salinas the winner. You have to proclaim the triumph of the PRI, President de la Madrid later recalled being told by his partys leader. It is a tradition that we cannot break without causing great alarm among the citizens. Several days later, the compliant vote totals were finally announced: Salinas had won 50.3% of the vote, the lowest percentage ever achieved by a PRI candidate, but still 3.6 million votes ahead of Crdenas, his nearest challenger.

The PRIs fraud was transparent at the time, and would be frankly acknowledged by the perpetrators in the years to come. Crdenas and his supporters held months of public protests, but beyond that there was little could do to challenge the official results. The PRI controlled every significant lever of power in the country. To cover their tracks, Salinas and the PRI would later order the burning of the ballots from the 1988 election. The glimmer of hope for multiparty democracy in Mexico seemed to have been snuffed out with them.

As Election Day turns into Election Night, do you worry about a similar scenario playing out in the United States?

If so, I have good news. You can scratch this particular horror from your inventory of nightmares. While there is no shortage of things that can go wrong with Americas complex electoral system, this isnt one of them.

Its not because the Republican Party is less addicted to power than the PRI. And its certainly not because Donald Trump is any more reluctant to defraud the public than his Mexican counterparts were, or that he lacks compliant minions to help him do it.

Its simply because Donald Trump doesnt get to count the votes. And neither does any part of the federal government that answers to him. For better and for worse, the U.S. Constitution has always entrusted the administration of our electionseven for federal officesto the states. As a result, there is no central computer system to crash, no national vote tally to manipulate. Instead, we have 51 distinct elections, in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, each of which counts and reports its own votes. So Donald Trump could yank the power cord on every computer and disconnect every telephone owned by the federal government on Election Night and it wouldnt slow the count by even a minute. The results of the election are simply out of his hands.

Lets not kid ourselves, though. A decentralized election system like ours has massive costs. The various state election laws are confusing, inconsistent and constantly changing. This year has already seen over 300 election-related lawsuits in 44 states, a number than can be expected to substantially increase before the results are final.

Throughout our history, the states have not exactly covered themselves in glory when it comes to voting rights. If they had, it would not have been necessary to amend the U.S. Constitution so many times to prevent states from denying the right to votewhether on the basis of race (the Fifteenth Amendment), sex (the Nineteenth Amendment), ability to pay a poll tax (the Twenty-Fourth Amendment), or age (for those over 18, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment). It took almost a hundred years, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, before the federal government finally began pushing states to live up to the Fifteenth Amendment. Many states still engage in shameful voter suppression tactics, a trend encouraged by the U.S. Supreme Courts lamentable decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).

Even when states manage their elections properly, they feed their results into an Electoral College system that is arbitrary and convoluted at bestand an anti-democratic monstrosity at worst.

All these flaws were evident in the epic election meltdown of 2000, which came down to a disputed margin of 537 votes separating Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore in Florida. The recount struggle revealed long-standing problems in state election administration that most Americans had previously taken little note of: partisan election officials, arbitrary purges of voter rolls, inequitable lines at polling places, poor ballot designs, a mishmash of often unreliable technologies for voting and tabulating results, and a lack of clear standards for determining voter intent on disputed ballots, to name but a few. A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court seized upon the last of these problems as an excuse to halt the recount in Florida while Bush was ahead, on the grounds of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, in effect handing him the presidency. (The majority preemptively disavowed any interest in the equal protection of voting rights in any other context.)

The U.S. electoral system, as revealed by the 2000 election, was hardly exemplary. How could it be explained to a visitor from Mars, or even France? Why, when Gore had won a clear plurality of a half-million votes nationwide, did the outcome depend on a few hundred disputed ballots in Florida? How did that single states three-ring political circus manage to hold the fate of the entire nation in suspense for over a month? The U.S. Supreme Courts 11th-hour intervention, as poorly reasoned and cynical as it surely was, at least put a decision of national importance in the hands of a national authority, instead of the overworked clerks of obscure county courthouses. After Bush v. Gore, it was as hard to defend state control of federal elections as it was to defend the Courts arbitrary intervention in a matter of state election law.

All this was true in 2000 and remains true today. The American system of decentralized elections is a ramshackle contraption inherited from our ancestors, to which we have added the security vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines and computer networks. Any election could have a Florida, or many Floridas. It is not just an accident waiting to happen. It is an accident that has happened to us, repeatedly, for years.

With that background, it might seem difficult to imagine a worse way to run our elections.

But you can. Close your eyes. Think of an efficient, centralized national election administration, with full power to set uniform election rules for all federal offices, collect the votes, determine the results, and announce them to the world.

Then think of that administration in the hands of Donald J. Trump.

President Trump has made no secret of his beliefs that voter fraud is rampant (though always on behalf of his adversaries), that no one should vote by mail (except his supporters), that the election should be postponable at his will, that ballot counting should stop on Election Night (as long as he is ahead), and that theres no way he can lose his re-election (unless it is rigged by his opponents).

For anyone committed to democracy, these are deeply alarming statements. But consider how much more terrifying they would be if Trump actually had the power to carry them out. Imagine if Trump were the person primarily entrusted to faithfully execute the electoral laws for the entire nation. Imagine if his hand-picked appointees were responsible for culling the voter rolls, deciding who could vote how and when, determining the location and staffing of polling places, selecting the voting software and hardware, and (most ominously) securing and counting the ballots.

The resulting fraud might be subtle, or it might be as obvious as in 1988 in Mexico. But either way, there would be little that Trumps opponents could do to stop theft of a centrally administered election, short of a general insurrection.

In contrast to this scenario, the Founders decision to leave federal election administration in the hands of the states begins to seem less archaicand more inspired. The framers of the Constitution did not foresee hanging chads or hacked voting machines, but they did spend a lot of time thinking about the damage a would-be despot could do in the office of the presidency. By giving the president no role whatsoever in running the election or counting the votes, they took away some of the most dangerous powers an incumbent could use to stay in power.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor and appointee, began taking steps to hobble the U.S. Postal Service over the summer of 2020: cutting overtime pay, raising rates for ballot delivery, and removing mail-sorting machines from postal facilities around the country. The apparent goal: to create delivery backlogs and to sow doubt about the reliability of mail-in voting. To some extent, the campaign succeededpiles of mail began to accumulate, and public anxiety increased. However, the moves also triggered a strong backlash. The Postal Service is a popular institution, whose degradation was an appalling price to pay to give Trump a fleeting, marginal advantage in one election. Journalists cast sunlight on DeJoys nefarious moves, and lawyers secured court orders to limit their damage. Many states increased the number of official drop-off boxes available for mail-in ballots, reducing dependence on the USPS. Voters adjusted their habits to get ballots returned sooner. Others took the opportunity to cast early in-person votes instead.

The sabotage of the Post Office demonstrates Trumps willingness to use any available tool, no matter how destructive, to keep his grip on power. But it is also a sign of how little power he has over the voting process. If Trump had a more direct way to block mail-in voting, he would have used it. It is the states, however, that set those rules. Trumps bluster could do little to dissuade them from expanding mail-in voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Besides the Post Office, Trump has abused other tools of federal power under his control. Trump was impeached for attempting to leverage aid to Ukraine into an investigation of his prospective opponent, Joe Biden. Despite this experience, he has continued to push the Justice Department to launch bogus prosecutions of Bidens family and other political enemies, while using his pardon powers to protect his allies (and co-conspirators). He has unlawfully used federal properties for campaign purposes, starting with the White House. He has encouraged his appointees to engage in repeated violations of the Hatch Act while on the government payroll. And, of course, Trump has used the authority of his office to direct a firehose of misinformation and outright lies into the public ear. Yet none of these abuses of power, however serious, comes close to the ability to stop or manipulate the vote count itself.

What about Trumps vaunted 6-3 conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court? After all, Trumps appointment of Amy Coney Barrett was rushed through the Senate for the express purpose of putting her on the Court in time to rule on election disputes, presumably in Trumps favor. Wont a stacked SCOTUS simply intervene to stop the vote count (or otherwise manipulate the results) as it did in Bush v. Gore?

Its a legitimate concern. Bush v. Gore remains a dangerous weapon that can be deployed against the autonomy of states to process their own election results. Justice Brett Kavanaughs concurring opinion in last weeks Democratic National Committee vs. Wisconsin State Legislature case took the dusty gun out of the drawer and loaded it. Kavanaugh, who worked on the Bush legal team in 2000 alongside his future SCOTUS colleagues Roberts and Barrett, approvingly cited some of the more extreme statements in Chief Justice Rehnquists Bush v. Gore concurrence. He also seemed to channel Trumpian rhetoric in warning of the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensure if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election. (As Justice Kagan retorted in her dissent, [T]here are no results to flip until all valid votes are counted.)

Even the most mercenary and unprincipled U.S. Supreme Court would not find it easy to flip the election in Trumps favor, however. Here the Electoral College offers at least one unalloyed virtue among its many flaws: manipulating the results in one state cannot affect the outcome in any other state. That is no help in an election that comes down to the electoral votes of a single state (like Florida in 2000). But if the margin of victory is built on the results in several states, it will be harder for the Supreme Court to intervene decisively.

But what if instead of one Florida-style dispute in this election, there are five or six? Even this scenario, as horrible as it sounds, would be better than a single central electoral commission under Trumps control and answerable only to the U.S. Supreme Court. Each state-level dispute would necessarily entangle the states particular laws, its courts, election officials, legislature, and citizens, before the Supreme Court could attempt to pluck control away. This process leaves a heavy trail of evidence. The state stakeholders will reach their own judgments about who won and who lost. The likelihood that the Supreme Court could deploy consistent reasoning to nudge the results to one side or the other across a multitude of state cases is doubtful. But what if the Court doesnt care about consistent reasoning, and only seeks results?

Well, the Supreme Court may have gotten away with such an intervention in Bush v. Gore, but as a constitutional matter it does not have the final word in election disputes. Per the Twelfth Amendment, Congress is responsible for counting the votes of the Electoral College and determining whether a president has qualified. In the presidential election of 1876, Congress used this power to sort out disputed results in state elections and determine the Electoral College winner. No one even asked the Supreme Court for its opinion. Congress later codified this power in the Electoral Count Act of 1877. So any attempt by the Supreme Court to flip the election will have to seem credible to the new Congress that will be sworn in on Jan. 2, 2021. If it is not, we could be in for a serious and prolonged constitutional crisis before our teetering institutions are able to settle on the next President. But one thing is clear: the decision wont be Donald Trumpsand thats something to be grateful for.

A decentralized electoral system is not the only way that the federal structure of the United States has frustrated Donald Trumps attempts to consolidate his power.

In an era when many of our institutions have failed to restrain President Trump, the states stand in a class by themselves. State autonomyin fact as much as in theoryhas been one of the biggest bulwarks against Trumps brand of creeping authoritarianism, perhaps second only to public opinion itself.

State officials have refused to assist Trump in carrying out federal policies that they consider illegal or inhumane. The same 1998 Supreme Court decision (Prinz v. U.S.) that delighted conservatives by finding that state governments could not be commandeered to enforce federal gun regulations in U.S. is now regularly deployed to defend sanctuary cities and non-cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Most of the government that Americans regularly interact with remains in state and local hands. State governments retain the police power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizensa fundamental power that the federal government simply doesnt have.

After the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last May, President Trump was visibly itching to send heavily armed federal agents (and even troops) to put down protests in Democrat cities. Fortunately, he largely lacked the power to do so. Art. IV, Sec. 4 of the Constitution says that the federal government must protect each of the states against invasion. It may also assist the states against domestic violence but only upon application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened). In other words, the President cannot use federal forces to quell domestic dissent, even when it tips into disorder and riots, unless the state itself asks for help. When the states made clear that they had no interest in ceding management of the protests to Trump, there was little he could do to keep stoking the fires. The President could and did use federal law enforcement to protect federal property and prosecute violations of federal law. But if his goal was to militarize the streets of Americas cities in the runup to the election, he did not succeed.

The states have also provided some impressive lawyering in resistance to Trumps rule. State attorneys general have been notably active in challenging the administrations policies, from the initial Muslim ban to rollbacks of the Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations. State prosecutors have also pressed challenges to Trump closer to home. Unlike Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. Justice Department, Trump has not been able to intimidate state AGs into keeping his finances off-limits. The New York State Attorney General shut down the Trump Foundation for tax fraud and is currently pressing an investigation deep into the Presidents dodgy dealings. The Manhattan District Attorney won a U.S. Supreme Court decision to obtain Trumps tax returns on the same day that Congress essentially lost in its attempt to do the same.

The continued existence of the states as living, sovereign entities has also provided some spiritual breathing room in the suffocating Trump-dominated atmosphere of the last four years. Even in the worst days of Trumps rule, it has been a comfort for many to live in states that have not yet bowed to his domination, or even to know that such states exist. The presence within our federation of large, indigestible mega-states like California, New York, and Texas, each with the resources and weight to chart its own course in many matters, deserves more appreciation.

For a century, liberals and progressives have been skeptical of the claims of federalism. The rhetoric of states rights was often a thin cloak for racism. Even when sincere about the merits of decentralization, its advocates seemed to have a stunted and retrograde view of the powers of the national government to address national problems. But the experience of the Trump years should provoke a reappraisal. The autonomy of the states has been a significant barrier to many of the authoritarian projects Trump has advanced or mused about. That same autonomy should, with any luck, prevent him from manipulating the election results decisively in his own favor. If so, the survival of American democracy will owe no small debt to its venerable and resilient federalism.

Read this article:
States of Anxiety: Will Federalism Save Democracy in America? - Justia Verdict

by Jordan Green and Brian Clarey

Rev. Greg Drumwright leads a march through residential neighborhoods of Graham. (photo by Carolyn DeBerry)

Three days after volleys of police pepper spray disrupted a peaceful procession of mostly Black activists to the polls here, ending in mass arrests, injuries, and trauma to children caught in the mayhem, marchers returned in force.

Under the direction of Rev. Greg Drumwright, upwards of 650 people retraced the steps of the original march, a trip that took them from Wayman Chapel AME Church, to two polling places, and then to a Confederate monument, where a few-dozen counter-protesters met them.

The chaos that unfolded days earlier saw a disabled woman fall out of a motorized wheelchair after experiencing a seizure, and protesters including at least three children left vomiting, while others cried out in agony after becoming overcome by the chemical irritant.

This time around, the protest in Alamance County, a Republican-leaning area where Trump needs to run up a sizable electoral margin to carry the crucial swing state of North Carolina largely went off without incident. Ann Jones, one plaintiff in a lawsuit filed Monday over the violence at the last march, successfully cast her ballot Tuesday afternoon.

I want you to give the beloved community a hand because we are here to stand with the citizens of Alamance County to run hate out of this county and to welcome love into it, Drumwright said, addressing the crowd gathered at Wayman Chapel AME Church.

Most of you have already voted in your hometowns and your respective districts, he continued. But youre here to stand as a symbolic witness to celebrate the rights of all people, all people here to be able to cast their vote.

Three police units idled in the parking lot of the polling place at the Graham Recreation Center. John Coleman, a Democratic candidate for the Alamance-Burlington Board of Education who was at the march Tuesday, noted of police:, They can claim theyre here for parking, but everyone knows theyre here for voter intimidation.

When poll observers asked them what theyre here for, they wouldnt answer, he continued. And theyre within 50 feet of a polling site.

During the previous march, law enforcements insistence on keeping the streets clear around the Historic Courthouse was the point of friction they used to justify an attack on the marchers with pepper spray.

They were under the same understanding that we were, we thought, when the event started that they were not authorized to keep the road closed for an extended period of time, Graham Police Lt. Daniel Sisk said during a press conference on Sunday. That the road closure was temporary just to accommodate the march, which we led by from the chapel, had road closures up to the courthouse, and when the order was given to clear the road, when it was clear to our officers that the people had no intent of clearing the road, thats when we deployed the pepper-fogger measures to get them out of the roadway.

After police and sheriffs deputies deployed pepper spray for a third time during the Oct. 31 gathering, marchers fled north on Main Street and broke up, with few if any making it to the polling place a block west of the Confederate monument. It was the final day of early voting in North Carolina, during which voters may register and vote on the same day, but may only vote on Election Day if theyre already registered.

There were folks that did not make it to vote, Drumwright told Triad City Beat. There are people who wont get to vote, unfortunately, because they didnt get to register on the last day of early voting. Were sad because the police action resulted in voter obstruction.

During the Election Day march, marchers scrupulously stayed on sidewalks or marched in ones and twos along one side of streets without sidewalks. The march wound through residential neighborhoods to pick up the two polling places. A brass band enlivened the march, and children ran to windows in houses along the route to greet the marchers.

Danielle Cattouse and her son, Kamren, filmed the march on their phones as they waited to exit a parking lot onto the street.

This is amazing, Danielle Cattouse said. Youve got to fight for something democracy. Its crazy how this nation is divided because of the man who is president.

When the marchers reached the Historic Courthouse where the monument is located, protest marshals ushered them across the street to the courthouse steps, while a couple dozen counter-protesters waved Confederate flags, jeered, and chanted, Four more years. One man waving a Trump flag urged motorists to keep driving around the traffic circle to prevent marchers from getting across the street and bottle-neck them in the area where the counter-protesters were. He tried to start several fights and shoved a man. A parade marshal and a pastor approached him to de-escalate.

Alamance County, a semi-rural former textile hub tucked between Greensboro and Durham, has a long history of racism, going back to the lynching of Wyatt Outlaw, a Black town commissioner and constable, by the Ku Klux Klan in 1870. The Confederate monument, erected near the site of Outlaws lynching, has become a focal point of bitter conflict between antiracists and far-right pro-Confederate groups. Terry Johnson, the current sheriff, was sued by US Justice Department for racial profiling. A federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush ultimately dismissed the governments case while condemning ethnic slurs used at the Alamance County jail as reprehensible. The government lawsuit cited Johnson for calling Latinx people taco eaters, and as recently as 2019, he told county commissioners that criminal immigrants were raping our citizens.

Antiracists have repeatedly called out what they see as a friendly relationship between Johnson and the monument supporters during repeated protests over the summer. In July, a federal judge ordered the city of Graham and the sheriffs office to lift a ban on protest that had been in place at the monument off and on since protests erupted in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. On Monday evening, Drumwright filed a federal lawsuit against Sheriff Johnson and Graham police Chief Kristy Cole, claiming violations of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, along with the violations of the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

Drumwright said protesters will continue to pressure local officials for police reform in Alamance County, and is calling on state and federal authorities to investigate.

People in Alamance County dont feel safe, he said. If youre Black in Alamance County, if youre Hispanic, you dont feel safe calling the police. Every demonstration weve done throughout this entire summer Ive been told by people I look up to not to do it, he said. We need the organizers of yesterday to know the organizers of today are not going to stop until we see justice for the next generation.

This story was produced in partnership with the Daily Beast.

See the original post here:
Graham redux: 650 march for voting rights and police reform - Triad City Beat

John Jeffrey Sipos and his wife Susanne bought their home in October 2003 on Cobbler Road in North Whitehall Township, property records show..

And they lived there for the next 17 years without brushing up against the law until Pennsylvania State Police came knocking on Oct. 24 with an arrest warrant from a judge in San Diego.

The 75-year-old John Sipos, San Diego police would later announce, was a suspect in the late November 1969 killing of Mary Scott.

Cold case units from the San Diego Police Department and the California countys district attorneys office evaluated the case and were able to use forensic genealogy to identify a possible suspect, according to a brief news release from police on Tuesday. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported Scotts younger sister, having read stories about how DNA and genealogy had led to the arrest of killers, had around the 50th anniversary of her sisters death ... reached out to a law enforcement friend to help get her sisters folder to the top of the cold-case pile.

Parabon NanoLabs and its Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore werent involved in this investigation, but they are pioneers in the field.

The science -- which Moore says is properly called investigative genetic genealogy -- is about 10 years old and was initially developed to help adoptees learn about their roots.

Its an extremely powerful tool for any type of human identification, Moore, who heads Parabons Genetic Genealogical Services for law enforcement, said in an interview with lehighvalleylive.com from her home in California.

About two and a half years ago, that unit of Parabon entered the world of criminal investigations and has an unparalleled record of over 130 successful identifications in criminal cases, according to background Moore provided.

Her work led to the first conviction, the first conviction through jury verdict, and the first exoneration in criminal cases where the suspect was identified through investigative genetic genealogy.

Raymond "DJ Freez" Rowe pleaded guilty to killing Christy Mirack many years after the 1992 crime in Lancaster.Pennsylvania Department of Corrections

Moore said her first case was the December 1992 murder of school teacher Christy Mirack in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the DNA and genealogical work in the spring of 2018 would lead to suspect Raymond DJ Freez Rowe, who wasnt on police radar, according to a published report. There was a significant amount of DNA left at the scene after the sexual assault, beating and strangulation. A DNA profile earlier uploaded by Rowes half-sister to a public database would be the key to solving the crime, a published report said.

An arrest would be made in June 2018 and Rowe would admit his guilt to charges of first-degree murder, rape, forced deviate intercourse and burglary. Rowe, now 52, is serving his life sentence in a Pennsylvania state prison.

It was a seminar through the DNA Doe Project that would led Lehigh County Coroner Eric Minnich to the Mirack case and the ongoing efforts to use DNA and genealogy to solve cold cases. In addition to determining the cause and manner of deaths, the coroners office tells families their loved ones have died. Sometimes thats difficult or nearly impossible due to a lack of information about the person who died. The county has one long unidentified body -- a John Doe case -- and Minnich wonders if this is a route to a resolution.

Lehigh County Coroner Eric Minnich.

Its something weve talked about, he said about using genetic genealogy. Its not something weve done anything about yet. ... As new things become available, its good to apply current standards to old cases. Identification is huge. Currently we use DNA to identify people by comparison from potential family members, but we have to know something. When we dont know anything, theres no simple way to compare DNA.

Investigative genetic genealogy is new to me, he said. Im learning about it too.

But to not consider the evolving science, you might miss an opportunity for identification, Minnich said.

So what changed from the days of the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) that is the most commonly known DNA repository for crime cases -- but is limited to criminals -- and the development of Parabons work?

The first thing Moore points out is the field is more about genealogy than DNA.

The goal, either way, is to bring answers to people, at first, years back, in family mystery cases and later in such groundbreaking efforts as the Golden State Killer case, which was not a Parabon case but an early and well publicized example of proof of concept. Parabon, based in Reston, Virginia, at that point was in the business of making facial sketches from crime-scene DNA, wired.com reported.

When that case went public, law enforcement really sat up and took notice, Moore said.

CODIS, for example, works with a small portion of a persons genome -- 20 genetic markers, Moore said.

Were looking at hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, she said about the companys work in 2020.

It allows us to detect and predict much more distant relatives, she said. We can predict third, fourth cousins and we can re-engineer the family tree. Were looking at piecing the common ancestors back together that points to one family or one person.

The challenge at first was the DNA pool.

And years ago scientists such as Moore would have to become promoters.

You already know some of the names of commercial applications. 23 and Me. Ancestry. My Heritage. Family Tree DNA.

You send off your DNA to learn more about your roots. Of those four, Family Tree DNA was the only one that made the information public, Moore said. GEDmatch, which caught the publics attention during the Golden State Killer case, is the other major public database. So, working with citizen scientists," the effort began to get people who were already sending DNA to the retail companies to also send the results to GEDmatch, Moore said.

We had to promote this idea of using DNA in order to resolve family mysteries, she said. It was part of my job to get the word out. It took years to build those databases.

Thousand and thousands of volunteer hours later and the pool was much deeper. Family Tree DNA, where people have to actively opt out or results of the free upload become public, has about a million results, Moore said. The investigative industry saw a setback more than a year ago when GEDmatch, which had about 1 million results public, suddenly changed its default from opt in to opt out of DNA results being made public and thus accessible to law enforcement investigations, Moore said. But its back up to about 300,000, she said.

The issues are Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and company transparency worries, news reports say.

The scope of the new science has limits. Most of the people who have the disposable income and interest to pay to send their DNA to the retail firms tend to have ancestry from northwestern Europe, Moore said.

If someone has deep routes in the United States, its easier to identify them, Moore said. With recent immigrants its harder.

And then theres what may be the tougher reality. Moores oldest case dates to 1967. The Scott case is from 1969.

Nobody in a police uniform was worried about DNA preservation in the late 1960s. Or the 1970s. Even into the 1980s. And remember, the jury didnt buy DNA evidence in the mid-1990s when O.J. Simpson was on trial in the killing of his wife.

Thereve been fires, floods, extreme temperatures and contamination over the decades in police evidence storage areas, she said.

Parabon needs about 60% of a persons DNA to work with.

Some of its been thrown out or ordered by judges to be destroyed, she said.

But if the evidence was kept in paper bags or cardboard boxes in a temperature-controlled space -- the key is to avoid extremes -- the DNA can remain viable over many years, she said. It could just be a matter of luck and benign oversight.

Surprisingly, many have worked out to be usable, Moore said.

The truly crushing part for families is now that the science exists, they learn that the crime-scene DNA no longer does, she said.

Her job begins once the DNA has been determined viable, there is a large enough sample and a raw DNA file has been created, she said.

That file is compared against all the people in the public databases, she said.

If as little as 1% of the DNA matches, we can detect these distant relationships, she said. The search is for a common ancestor.

Perhaps it leads to great-grandparents.

You hope you have enough data to narrow it down, Moore said. Optimal cases have matches for all four grandparents. Somehow all these people fit to make this one person related to all these matches. ... The amount of DNA shared helps us predict the relationship.

And thats when the even more detailed and truly difficult part of the effort begins.

Were using the DNA as a guide, she said. From there on its all genealogy.

Anyone who has ever fooled around with ancestry.com knows what comes next.

Birth records. Death records. Any record that might feed a family tree. But in reverse.

Most people learn their lineage from themselves on back. From what you know to what you dont know.

But Moore has to start deep in a familys history and work forward, building a reverse genealogy, she said.

You have to determine the descendants, she said. How did their children and grandchildren marry?

Family tree after family tree is constructed and considered. Paths are followed until they end. Several groups go one way, but how do they relate to other groups of possible distant relatives?

And then?

With lots of crimes, theres one person who fits, said Moore, who has been a full-time genetic genealogist on the PBS series Finding Your Roots with Louis Gates Jr. and has other television credits as well. Its also pretty common that its a set of brothers. You cant tell. You have to go out and get the DNA.

Because thats the positive match. You determine whose DNA is a probable match and then police get the real thing, either through the suspects willingness to cooperate or investigators' efforts to find abandoned DNA on a cup or a cigarette or in the trash, she said.

Sometimes if there are brothers who dont look the same, DNA can predict eye color or hair color and be used to rule someone out, she said.

But, in the end, the genetic genealogists work is a guidepost in the investigation. While San Diego police said genetic genealogy was used to develop Sipos as a suspect, there must be other factors that point to his potential guilt, Moore said.

Her work is not evidence for court, she said.

This is a tool to point them in the right direction, she said.

The ensuing DNA test would be the evidence, she said.

So, whats all this cost? Sounds expensive.

I guess it depends on perspective, she replied in a followup email. It is extremely inexpensive if it helps solve a case that has been worked for years or decades, using a huge amount of public resources.

Then again, for underfunded departments ... it can be expensive. For this reason, we started JusticeDrive.org to help agencies crowd fund, she said.

The cost varies, Moore continued. It is about $1,500 for the DNA processing and about $3,500 for the genetic genealogy research on most of our cases, so a total of approximately $5,000.

Law enforcement agencies who collect DNA evidence would only have to pay a lab for the DNA analysis and processing, she noted. Man-hours can easily add up to more than $3,500, however, if officers have to trace the genealogy.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting lehighvalleylive.com with a subscription.

Tony Rhodin can be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com.

Original post:
It led police to John Sipos 51 years after Mary Scotts killing. So, what is investigative genetic genealogy? - lehighvalleylive.com

The Fourth Amendment right to be free from "unreasonableseizure" includes the right to be free from unreasonable arrest or detainment. Does it also include the right to be free from what we might call unreasonable attempts or efforts at arrest or detainment? The late Justice Antonin Scalia thought that it did. "The mere grasping or application of physical force with lawful authority, whether or not it succeeded in subduing the arrestee," Scalia wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court in California v. Hodari D. (1991), qualifies as a seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes.

Earlier this month, however, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a new Fourth Amendment that asks whether Scalia might have got it wrong.

In Torres v. Madrid (2019), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit held that no seizure occurred when officers with the New Mexico State Police shot Roxanne Torres twice in the back, because their bullets did not actually stop her from getting away. According to that court, "an officer's intentional shooting of a suspect does not effect a seizure unless the 'gunshotterminate[s] [the suspect's] movement or otherwise cause[s] the government to have physical control over him.'"

Torres was sitting in her car in her apartment building's parking lot when it went down. The officers were there to arrest somebody else. They claimed they approached her because she was acting suspiciously. According to Torres, she thought she was about to be carjacked, later testifying that the officers never identified themselves as they crowded her vehicle. Fearing for her safety, she drove away. The officers then shot her twice as she fled. She only learned that it was the police who pulled the trigger when she was arrested a day later at the hospital.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Torres v. Madrid on October 14. "Roxanne Torres was not seized by either [Officer] Janice Madrid or [Officer] Richard Williamson," New Mexico lawyer Mark Standridge told the justices. "At no time did the officers acquire possession, custody, or control over her. Indeed, [Torres] never stopped in response to the police action. As the officers did not seize [Torres], they cannot be held liable to her for excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment."

Unsurprisingly, the Court's most hawkish Fourth Amendment advocate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, did not seem to find that position particularly palatable. "Counsel, there is an element to the Fourth Amendment that all of our cases, including Hodari, recognized by Justice Scalia," she said, "that has to do with the Fourth Amendment's protection of bodily integrity. It is why we call putting a needle in someone's arm a seizure that requires either probable cause or exigent circumstances, et cetera."

And that conception of bodily integrity, Sotomayor continued, includes "the seizure of the person with respect to the touching of that person because even a touch stops you. It may be for a split second, but it impedes yourmovement and offends your integrity."

What you are asking the Court to do, Sotomayor told Standridge, is "reject the clear line drawn by Hodari and say that Justice Scalia was wrong about what the common law showed." Sotomayor left little doubt that she was with Scalia on that one.

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Invoking Scalia, Sotomayor Presses for Broad Fourth Amendment Protections - Reason