Frozen Embryos Are Now Children Under Alabama Law

“Frozen embryos are “children” under Alabama law, the state’s Supreme Court says. Its decision could have major implications for the future of fertility treatments in the state.
Frozen embryos are “unborn children” and “unborn children are ‘children,'” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in the court’s main opinion. Only two of nine justices dissented from the holding that an 1872 wrongful death statute applies to the destruction of frozen embryos.

The ruling seems to represent a turn toward judicial activism among members of Alabama’s Supreme Court, which for a long time held that the law’s text could not justify reading it to include “unborn children”—let alone frozen embryos.”

“In IVF, the process of preparing the body for ovulation and harvesting eggs can be extremely taxing on women’s bodies, as well as time-consuming and expensive. After this, not all of the eggs collected may be successfully fertilized. And when viable embryos are created, it may take multiple tries at transferring one into a woman’s body before implantation is successful. For all of these reasons, it makes sense for doctors to collect myriad eggs at one time, fertilize these eggs, and then freeze the viable embryos for later transfer, rather than harvesting eggs and creating a single new embryo for each transfer. (This also helps people who may want to create embryos when they are younger to use when they are somewhat older, or who may face illness that will impede their future fertility.) And to maximize the chances of success, doctors sometimes transfer two or more embryos at once.

Treating embryos as having the full legal rights of children could imperil all of these practices.”

https://reason.com/2024/02/21/frozen-embryos-are-now-children-under-alabama-law/

‘The Most Horrible Thing I’ve Ever Seen’: Alabama Executes Inmate With Experimental Method

“Witnesses reported that Smith was strapped to a gurney with a gas mask affixed to his face. Smith remained conscious for several minutes after nitrogen began flowing into the mask, and he appeared to be holding his breath for as long as possible. He “struggled against his restraints” and “shook and writhed on a gurney.” Witnesses additionally reported that Smith eventually began breathing deeply, before his breathing slowed and finally stopped. He was pronounced dead at 8:25—about 15 minutes after prison officials began the flow of nitrogen.
“There was some involuntary movement and some agonal breathing, so that was all expected and is in the side effects that we’ve seen and researched on nitrogen hypoxia,” John Hamm, the Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner, said in a press conference Thursday night. “So nothing was out of the ordinary of what we were expecting.”

While prison officials were cavalier about Smith’s execution, others who witnessed his death were not so relaxed about the apparently grisly process.

The execution was “the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” the Rev. Jeff Hood, Smith’s spiritual adviser, told CNN. “An unbelievable evil was unleashed tonight.””

“Smith’s first attempted execution was part of a series of botched executions carried out by Alabama, which led Gov. Kay Ivey to place a moratorium on executions in November 2022. However, she lifted the pause in February 2023, following an opaque internal investigation.”

https://reason.com/2024/01/26/the-most-horrible-thing-ive-ever-seen-alabama-executes-inmate-with-experimental-method/

Alabama’s Governor Calls for a Moratorium on Executions in the State

“Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) announced that she was seeking a moratorium on executions in the state, following the third botched lethal injection execution in recent months. While Ivey is still a stringent supporter of the state’s death penalty, this pause in executions will likely continue until an internal investigation into the state’s practices is concluded.”

Tough-on-Crime Cash Bail Initiatives Win in Ohio and Alabama

“Ohio’s new constitutional amendment will allow judges to set a dollar amount commensurate with a person’s criminal record, the seriousness of their alleged crime, and their odds of appearing at court following pretrial release. The Ohio Senate ushered the initiative forward in direct response to a ruling from the state’s highest court, which said in early January that bail could only be used to ensure a defendant’s presence at trial—the constitutionally prescribed reason for its use.

In Alabama, voters were tasked with deciding if the state should be able to deny bail for certain offenses if the government can convince a judge that the defendant poses a threat to the community or cannot be trusted to return to court. Those offenses include murder; first-degree kidnapping, rape, and sodomy; sexual torture; first-degree domestic violence, human trafficking, burglary, arson, and robbery; terrorism; and child abuse.”

“the debate has become increasingly politicized. Many reformers say that a dangerousness standard is racist, while law-and-order politicians are likely to present any bail reform as a driver of violent crime.
The answer is more nuanced than either major political party would want their base to believe.”

Local Law Prevented an Alabama Town From Firing Two Cops. So They Dissolved the Police Department Instead.

“When officials in one Alabama town realized local law prevented them from firing two police officers, they dissolved their entire police department instead.

Last Thursday, the small town of Vincent—a hamlet outside Birmingham, Alabama, with a population of just under 2,000—decided to abolish its police department. The department, which employed three officers in total, was disbanded following a June incident that uncovered the exchange of racist text messages sent by at least one Vincent police officer.

In the messages, one officer, who remains unidentified by Vincent officials, asked an unidentified respondent “What do y’all call a pregnant slave?” to which the respondent replied with a string of question marks. “BOGO Buy one, get one free” texted the officer in response.”

“he City Council was unable to simply fire the officers. According to Vincent city law, police officers cannot be fired unless they receive two formal complaints and a verbal warning. With little other recourse, the Vincent City Council passed a resolution which temporarily dissolved the town’s small police department.

This incident isn’t the first time a small town has dissolved its police department for bad behavior. In particular, several small towns found to be engaging in illegal “speed trap” schemes have voted to disband their police departments.”

“this story is the latest in a long string of incidents where cops have lost their jobs for bigoted text messages. While speech by government officials is generally protected by the First Amendment, it has a few important carve-outs. Speech by government employees is only protected when it is a matter of public concern, like an allegation of corruption, and when the public employee’s speech interests are more important than the employer’s ability to maintain order.

“There’s no bright line here,” Popehat’s Ken White notes. “But in general, an employee’s speech is most likely to be protected if it’s on the employee’s own time, on the employee’s own platform or a platform not run by the employer, involves policy issues rather than personal attacks on people in the government workplace, and the employer can’t show evidence of disruption of order or function.”

While it is unclear whether the officer’s text messages were sent while off-duty using their personal phones, Vincent officials regardless had interest in punishing the officers. In 2021, at least 85 criminal cases were thrown out after at least a dozen of Torrance, California, police officers were found to have exchanged racist, antisemitic, and homophobic text messages.

Even if public officials hadn’t been barred by a city statute from firing the two officers, it seems the First Amendment would have provided little protection for the officers’ racially charged jokes. In fact, their messages made them a legal liability.”

Police Chief of Alabama Town That Was Getting Fat on Fines Steps Down Amid Bipartisan Outrage

“Police being able to keep what they seize is one of the primary motivators for fine and forfeiture abuse, and it’s obvious to everybody except for the mayor and the police department that’s what was happening in Brookside. Without that incentive, the police would not be sniffing around every single car it comes across for a potential score.”

FTC Drills Alabama Licensing Board for Anti-Competitive Scheme Targeting Teledentistry

“As part of a consent agreement announced Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said the Board of Dental Examiners of Alabama would stop enforcing rules that limited “consumer choice and excluded new providers” offering braces and other teeth alignment services.

Those rules were crafted in 2017, after startups like SmileDirectClub began operating in Alabama. According to the FTC, the board took steps to stop the expansion of “firms providing clear aligners in Alabama through a teledentistry model” by amending its rules to ban dental hygienists and other medical professionals from performing the scans that are necessary to ensure proper fitting of the alignment devices. Previously, licensed dentists were allowed to supervise the scans from a remote location. Under the new rules, they would have to be on-site when the scans were done.

Over the next two years, the board delivered cease-and-desist letters to providers who offered those services without on-site licensed dentists.

“The actions of the Dental Board have deprived consumers in Alabama of low-price, convenient options for teeth alignment treatment without any legitimate justification or defense,” the FTC argued in a complaint against the board. Those actions, the commission says, “unreasonably restrained competition” and violated federal law.

The case is a sequel to the FTC’s 2015 victory at the U.S. Supreme Court in a case challenging anti-competitive behavior by a similar board in North Carolina. In that instance, the North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners sent cease-and-desist letters to kiosks offering teeth whitening services. The practice of whitening teeth, the board declared, could only be done by licensed dentists.

When that case ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices ruled that licensing boards controlled by a majority of “active market participants” could not make deliberately anti-competitive rules—unless those boards were “actively supervised” by some other element of state government. As a result of that ruling, licensing boards enforcing anticompetitive rules could be sued for violating federal antitrust laws.

The ruling opened up a new legal avenue for challenging overbearing licensing boards that limit economic opportunities by blocking competition in certain professional fields. It was a resounding defeat for overreaching state regulation and “the culmination of 15 years of effort” Maureen Ohlhausen, then-chair of the FTC, told Reason shortly after the ruling.

That case laid the groundwork for the more recent actions in Alabama, where six of the board’s seven members are required by law to be licensed, actively practicing dentists. And the board’s actions are not “reviewed or approved by any neutral state officials with the power to veto or modify” its decisions, the FTC found.

Under the terms of the consent agreement struck between the FTC and the Alabama dental board, the board does not admit to violating any laws or to engaging in the alleged anti-competitive behavior. But, going forward, the board has agreed to stop requiring on-site supervision by licensed dentists of the alignment scans necessary for teledentistry services.

That should give residents of Alabama—some 1.8 million of whom live in areas deemed to have a shortage of dental professionals and could clearly benefit from a greater supply of teledentistry services—something to smile about.”

Alabama’s Dumb Health Care Regulations Helped Create a Shortage of ICU Beds

“An insufficient supply of ICU beds is one of the acute crisis points of the pandemic. When hospitals run out of room to treat patients who need the most help, doctors and hospital administrators must make difficult triage decisions. This affects not just COVID patients but anyone else who might be in urgent need of medical care—car crash victims or those who’ve had heart attacks—and it almost certainly means that some people will die who otherwise may have survived.

It’s a crisis that has been made worse by outdated and ineffective government regulations—known as “Certificate of Need” (CON) laws—that actually reduce the number of available hospital beds by requiring that hospitals get permission from the state before adding capacity.

In Alabama, which is one of 27 states that subjects the supply of hospital beds to CON oversight by the state, we’re now seeing some of the consequences of these rarely thought-of policies. While the surging number of serious COVID cases there and elsewhere across the country is largely the result of unvaccinated Americans being hit by the highly contagious delta variant, a restricted supply of hospital beds is not helping.

Since March 2020, states that use CON laws to regulate the supply of hospital beds have seen an average of 14.99 days per month where ICU capacity has exceeded 70 percent, according to Matthew Mitchell, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center who crunched Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data and shared his findings with Reason. Meanwhile, states that do not have CON laws governing the supply of hospital beds have seen an average of just 8.65 days per month with ICU capacity exceeding 70 percent, according to Mitchell.”