“Nicholas Chappelle spent almost a year in an Oregon prison after he was wrongfully convicted of driving with a suspended license. The reason for his incarceration? A shoddy DMV database. And the worst part is he’s not alone.
While it’s unclear just how many Oregonians have been wrongfully arrested or convicted due to errors in the database, at least 3,000 licenses have been mislabeled as indefinitely suspended. At least five wrongful arrests or convictions have been identified.”
“Manhattan prosecutors allege that Trump concealed hush money payments by falsely labeling related transactions as legal expenses and by arranging for a tabloid publisher to bottle up the story of a woman who said she had a sexual relationship with Trump.
In doing so, the prosecutors say, Trump repeatedly violated a New York corporate record-keeping law and agreed to break campaign finance laws.”
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“The charge at the heart of the case — falsifying business records — can amount to only a misdemeanor, but it becomes a felony if the defendant falsified the records to obscure a separate crime.
The most obvious candidate for that aggravating element is the admission from Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that he arranged a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in consultation with Trump and to aid Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“The defendant Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” the statement of facts says.
“The participants [in the scheme] violated election laws,” the statement continues, though it does not explicitly cite which ones. The statement also mentions Cohen’s guilty plea in 2018 to two federal campaign finance crimes. And in a press release, Bragg said Trump and others sought to conceal “attempts to violate state and federal election laws.”
The references to federal election violations are virtually certain to be the focus of pre-trial motions from Trump’s attorneys, who have contended publicly that this state-law offense cannot be piggybacked on a federal-law crime.
If defense attorneys prevail on such motions, it would not necessarily wipe out the criminal case against Trump. Instead, the case could remain as 34 misdemeanor charges. That would amount to a legal, public relations and political victory for Trump.
Such a result would further diminish the chances of Trump being jailed if found guilty. The maximum sentence on a second-degree falsifying business records charge is up to one year in prison on each count. A downgrading of the case to a misdemeanor might also aid Trump’s efforts to delay a trial.”
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“For Trump to be convicted of falsifying business records, the records at issue have to be, well, business records.
The New York law at issue requires that the falsification involve the records of “an enterprise,” and each count of the indictment claims that Trump falsified records “kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.”
The facts are more complicated. It’s true that the checks sent to Cohen, which labeled the payments as legal expenses, were issued by employees working for Trump’s business empire. But they were not charged to Trump’s businesses. Instead, the payments were made from one of Trump’s personal accounts or from a Trump family trust.
The key question, and one that is sure to feature in efforts by Trump’s lawyers to derail the case, is whether documents that happened to pass through the Trump Organization or handled by Trump Organization personnel are automatically classified as business records, even if the source of the funds was Trump’s personal accounts.”
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“Legal experts said they expect Trump’s lawyers to argue to the judge and, if necessary, a jury that wholly personal expenses that are simply handled by an accountant or other clerical personnel don’t become the “records of an enterprise” just by virtue of that process.”
“Four more members of the Oath Keepers were convicted..of conspiracy to obstruct Congress’ Jan. 6 proceedings, bringing the number of members of the group found guilty by juries of felonies related to the Capitol attack to more than a dozen.”
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“The four were also found guilty of several other charges they faced, including destruction of government property.
The convictions add to a growing roster of Oath Keepers who are facing lengthy prison terms for their role in the events on Jan. 6. Stewart Rhodes, the group’s national leader was convicted in November of seditious conspiracy, along with Kelly Meggs — husband of Connie Meggs. In a second trial, four other Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy”
“he is poised to pursue a criminal indictment of the former president in a case centered on a hush-money payment made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Reimbursement for the payment was falsely recorded as legal expenses, according to federal prosecutors who first examined the case, and Bragg’s office is considering bringing a felony charge based on the falsification of business records. The charge carries a possible prison term of up to four years.”
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“Bragg has received some criticism for pursuing a matter that some say amounts to an accounting error tied to a years-old episode. But Roiphe, now a New York Law School professor of legal ethics, said she considers a falsification of business records charge to be an important tool that has been used frequently to hold Wall Street accountable. “I don’t think it’s a minor crime,” she said. “I don’t think it’s trivial.”
“At the same time,” she said, “I think there is a cost to indicting a former president.
“I don’t know whether, when you weigh the benefits of deterrence and sending a message that, ‘No man is above the law,’ [the value of the prosecution] is potentially outweighed by the civic cost.””
“”The misuse of forfeiture funds is shockingly common because civil forfeiture is inherently abusive and non-transparent,” said I.J. Senior Legislative Counsel Lee McGrath. “In just the past few years, we’ve seen a Pennsylvania deputy steal $200,000 from a safe, a Michigan prosecutor embezzle $600,000 in funds, and widespread problems with forfeiture reports in states like Kansas and Oklahoma.”
Notably, Cox’s personal redirection of forfeited assets was discovered in the course of a U.S. Justice Department audit of money acquired through civil asset forfeiture by the Albany County Sheriff’s Department and the Albany County District Attorney. That is, the feds suspected that the departments as a whole were misusing seized property and cash and accidentally discovered the business office manager’s personal pilfering in the process.”
“While Mills’ claims and the video she recorded are chilling, she faces an uphill battle in receiving restitution due to the specter of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil liability even when their actions are unconstitutional.”
“Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, had a history of citizen complaints and was thought to be “tightly wound,” not a trait ideal for someone patrolling the streets with a deadly weapon. But under the police union’s collective bargaining agreement, the police commissioner lacked the authority to dismiss Chauvin, or even reassign him. The lack of supervisory authority resulted in harms that continue to reverberate in American society.”
“Units like these don’t just suffer from a lack of transparency and use tactics likely to spawn violence. Their rhetoric attracts “police officers who enjoy being feared,” Balko notes, and it positions these officers as both elite and beyond the normal rules. There are all sorts of horror stories about similar units, such as Detroit’s STRESS unit (“Over a two-year period, the units killed at least 22 people, almost all of them Black”) or Los Angeles’ CRASH unit (“More than 70 officers were implicated in planting guns and drug evidence, selling narcotics themselves and shooting and beating people without provocation”).
Memphis has now disbanded the SCORPION squad.”
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“This is far from the first time that police have drastically misrepresented the way things went down before surveillance footage or body camera videos showed that they weren’t telling the truth. To distill this to its essence: Police lie. They lie to protect themselves. They like to give their activities a more noble sheen. They lie to dehumanize those they arrest or aggress against. And yet members of the media often take cops at their word and move on.”
“Almost half of Louisiana’s sheriffs’ offices are breaking state public records law, according to a new investigation from ProPublica and Verite, a New Orleans–based nonprofit newsroom. Lacking formal document retention policies, as required by state law, Louisiana sheriff’s offices have been accused of destroying public records, including documents showing evidence of police misconduct.”
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“When sheriffs’ offices fail to create a public document retention policy—and follow it—the consequences can be devastating. “Comprehensive and accurate records are critical if patterns and causes of harm are going to be identified and corrected, for example when looking at staff deployment or employee discipline,” Elizabeth Cumming, an attorney representing inmates held at the Orleans Justice Center, told ProPublica. “Without a robust practice of record generation, maintenance, review and assessment, our clients will continue to experience preventable violations of their rights.””