Pop-up covid test sites have ballooned as demand surges. Officials warn consumers to be cautious.
CCC founder and CEO Aleya Siyaj, and all others like him, should be prosecuted criminally; nobody should get away with ripping off folks because of their fear.
Excerpts from the Article:
First, there were bootleg hand sanitizer, counterfeit KN95 masks and vaccine cards. Now, nearly two years into the pandemic, the scam variant of concern involves testing.
Attorneys general in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Oregon have issued consumer alert warnings in recent days about questionable coronavirus tests and pop-up sites. Complaints include markups on at-home test kits and sites in New York that wrongfully billed patients for tests that are free; fake at-home tests being sold in Michigan; and testing centers in Illinois that return dubious results — or none at all.
The surging demand for tests recalls the shortages seen in the summer of 2020 and is a stark reminder that the United States continues to struggle with its coronavirus testing strategy. Even before the omicron variant surfaced, tests were in high demand as students returned to classrooms, workers to offices and many to leisure activities like concerts and cruises requiring proof of a negative test.
Now the current omicron spike has pushed the rate of new infections in the United States to record numbers: On Friday, the seven-day average for new cases was 794,202, close to triple the previous peak from a year ago. Several large school districts are requiring a negative test to return to class. Long lines have formed outside testing sites. And health experts are pushing Americans to test whenever faced with a potentially risky situation.
Americans will be able to order free rapid coronavirus tests Wednesday on new federal website.
As officials struggle to meet demand at government-run sites, many are turning to privately run pop-up sites. Consumer advocates are warning the public to be cautious about these sites operating in mobile units, shipping containers and sometimes outdoors in tents.
Consumers confuse such pop-up sites for health-care clinics, said Steve Bernas, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) of Chicago and Northern Illinois. “They don’t realize they’re just a business that’s unlicensed and unregulated,” he told The Washington Post on Friday.
Authorities probing testing sites say one of the companies they’ve received several complaints about is the Center for Covid Control (CCC), an Illinois-based company that runs more than 300 pop-up testing locations nationwide.
The company has not been charged, but customers have complained of dubious testing protocols, paying for expedited test results that never arrive and being asked for personal identifying information, according to complaints filed with Better Business Bureau locations and attorney general offices in Illinois and Oregon.
This week, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s (D) office issued a blanket warning about pop-up testing sites; by Thursday, the office confirmed to The Post that it had opened a probe into the CCC after receiving at least 10 complaints.
“As a result of complaints from residents as well as reported problems at pop-up testing locations connected to the Center for COVID Control, we have opened an investigation,” spokesperson Annie Thompson said in an email.
Kristina Edmunson, a spokesperson for Oregon Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum, said the office this week opened a civil investigation into the CCCfor possible violations of Oregon Unfair Trade Practices Act, which helps consumers hold businesses accountable for deceptive business practices.
According to two complaints shared by Rosenblum’s office, one customer at a Portland-based site reported receiving a rapid test that had already expired, according to the packaging. Another customer at a Portland site went to a CCC drive-through and never received her test results — but was asked to upload a picture of her driver’s license and provide her insurance information.
On Thursday, the CCC announced that it was suspending operations for a week. The Rolling Meadows, Ill.-based company bills itself as the nation’s largest coronavirus testing operator that promises no-appointment rapid tests to those with and without insurance.
In a statement, CCC founder and CEO Aleya Siyaj blamed rapid company growth and the surge in testing demand as the reason “we haven’t been able to meet all our commitments.” Siyaj said many of the testing sites in the network saw a tenfold increase in patients with sites across the country cumulatively collecting as many as 80,000 tests a day.
In addition to the investigation by the Illinois attorney general’s office, the CCC is also being probed by the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Low ratings and complaints have flooded BBB chapters in other states; the BBB of Chicago and Northern Illinois said it is “actively looking into this company as they have recently received numerous complaints both locally and from across the country,” adding that the CCC has been “unresponsive” to complaints.
The problems with pop-up sites point to the need for better regulation, Bernas said. The biggest concern that has emerged from consumers is that dubious pop-up operations — or bad actors who infiltrate them — are after personal information for potential insurance fraud and identity theft purposes. Anecdotally, Bernas said, there are concerns individuals are joining long, chaotic lines and posing as clinic employees to extract personal info from waiting customers.
“And when people think they’re dealing with health-care providers, they don’t think twice about the info being asked of them,” Bernas said.
Lee Fleisher, the chief medical officer and director of the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the federal agency was aware of several allegations against the CCC.
“To be clear – the Center for COVID Control is not a federal agency,” he said. “CMS is actively investigating numerous complaints about multiple laboratories and testing sites associated with this private company.”
Health and law enforcement officials said that testing sites run by major hospital systems or state and local health departments are the most reliable, and that consumers should ask questions when visiting unaffiliated pop-up sites.
Illinois Attorney General Raoul’s office recommends asking what kind of tests are being administered — like molecular PCR or rapid antigen versus serology tests, which are not diagnostic — what lab processes the results and double-checking if the lab is properly accredited.
“In today’s numbers, the chances of someone has coronavirus are pretty significant,” said Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, an assistant professor of medicine studying infectious diseases at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Ideally, every time you have a gathering, you take a test — at least until cases drop.”
A bogus test, he said, means someone trying to be cautious gets false assurance that they can go to the office or gather with grandparents and unwittingly spread the virus.
“That’s why right now, accurate testing is so important,” he said.
Read more:
Rapid coronavirus tests are hard to find — unless you work for Google or play in the NBA
A 74-year-old woman spent 27 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. This week she was exonerated
The worst example of how messed up the system is is the conviction of INNOCENT people. Nobody knows for sure, but depending which study you read, there are between 10,000 and 100,000 innocent people in America’s prisons!
Excerpts from the Article:
A Tennessee woman who was wrongfully convicted of murdering her great-niece and spent 27 years in prison, was exonerated this week.
On June 26, 1987, Joyce Watkins, now 74, and her boyfriend at the time, Charlie Dunn, went to pick up Watkins four-year-old great-niece, Brandi, in Kentucky, according to a report filed with the Davidson County Criminal Court. The next morning Brandi was unresponsive, so Watkins took her to Nashville Memorial Hospital.
Brandi suffered from severe vaginal injury and head trauma. She was pronounced dead the following day, the report stated. The two were with Brandi for only nine hours, but the medical examiner, Dr. Gretel Harlan, concluded the injuries were sustained during that time.
A year later, in August 1988, Watkins and Dunn were convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated rape. The two spent 27 years behind bars before they were both granted parole in 2015. Before his release, Dunn, unfortunately, passed away in jail.
Prior to Brandi being picked up by the couple, she was living at the home of Rose Williams, Brandi’s great-aunt. Brandi’s mother was in Georgia at the time. Throughout that period, a Kentucky Department of Social Services worker visited the home after receiving a report Brandi had been abused. Williams explained Brandi’s injuries were due to a playground mishap, and the investigation was closed.
Now 35 years later, Watkins has been exonerated after she made it a point to clear her name. Dunn was also cleared of the crime and posthumously exonerated.
His daughter, Jackie Dunn, was at the hearing on Wednesday. “I wish my daddy was here to witness this day,” she said. “He knew he was innocent, he knew he did not commit those crimes,” Dunn said to CNN affiliate WTVF.
Watkins got help from the Tennessee Innocence Project and the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office. “We got this case because she (Joyce) came to us,” Jason Gichner, senior legal counsel with the Tennessee Innocence Project told CNN. “She just showed up at the office and said, ‘Let me tell you my story. I need your help.’ “
The report was filed on November 10, 2021, asking that the pair’s convictions be vacated. Joyce Watkins spent 27 years in jail and was released on parole in 2015.
The filing clarified Watkins noticed blood in Brandi’s underwear when they arrived home, only an hour and a half after the couple picked her up, with at least an hour of that time spent driving back to Nashville.
A report from Dr. Shipla Reddy was also included in the filing, who said Dr. Harlan’s “methodology for dating the head injury based upon a lack of histiocytic response in the brain tissue is not a legitimate method for dating pediatric head trauma.”
He was wrongly convicted of murder as a teen. After fighting for 26 years, his name has finally been cleared
The ruling noted Harlan conceded the error in her methodology years after the trial.
“Joyce Watkins and Charlie Dunn are innocent,” District Attorney Glenn Funk told CNN, “We cannot give Ms. Watkins or Mr. Dunn their lost years but we can restore their dignity; we can restore their names. Their innocence demands it.”
According to Sunny Eaton with the District Attorney’s Office, Watkins is the first black woman to ever be exonerated in the state and only the third woman in Tennessee history.
“Miss Watkins, this charge against you is dismissed,” Davidson County Criminal Court Judge, Angelita Blackshear Dalton, said Wednesday morning, according to WTVF.
As far as Watkins or Dunn’s family getting compensated for their wasted time spent in jail, Gichner said he is unsure of what will happen down the road.
In a comment to the media and CNN affiliate WZTV Watkins said, “I thank all the people for their prayers and helping me get out of this mess which has cost me half of my life for nothing, But I’ll get over it.”
In America, a child is shot every hour, and hundreds die. Here are 13 young lives lost in 2021.
As I have said too many times: too many guns in America! Like many excellent articles these days this one is lengthy, and I do not have the time to edit it properly.
Click at the end to read the awful, poignant stories of more child deaths. YOU should know what is happening to our kids.
Excerpts from the Article:
The sisters in Ohio, both in elementary school, were shot by their father. The boy in Texas was shot at home by someone in a passing a car. The ninth-grader in Arkansas was shot at school by a friend. The girl in Kansas was shot by a toddler, who didn’t mean to do it. The teenager in South Carolina shot himself, but he did mean to do it.
All of them were killed in an epidemic unique to the United States, where, on average, at least one child is shot every hour of every day. Many survive, but many others do not. In the nation’s capital, nine children were killed in gun homicides last year. In Los Angeles, 11 were fatally shot. In Philadelphia: 36. In Chicago: 59. Those figures don’t include the hundreds of other kids who died in accidental shootings and by suicide.
Just how many were taken by gun violence last year will remain unknown until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases its data months from now. But in 2020, the number exceeded 2,200 — by far the highest total in the past two decades — and 2021′s tally is expected to be worse.
The children featured below are broadly representative of those killed every year in America. Even babies are shot to death, but the vast majority of young victims are teenagers. Black kids are more than four times as likely to die in shootings as White ones, according to CDC data, though White kids are much more likely to use guns to take their own lives.
Often, children killed by bullets are memorialized only by brief news reports or anguished obituaries. But the way they lived matters as much as the way they died.
The 13 children profiled here were funny: the 6-year-old who wanted to be a doctor so she could give shots to all the doctors who had given her shots. They were generous: the 12-year-old who used his chore money to take his family out to McDonald’s. And they were ambitious: the 15-year-old who wanted to be a nuclear physicist.
These are their stories, one for each month of a violent year.
Muhammad, smiled from the front seat of the car. He loved to see his daughter so happy, but he wasn’t surprised. Janaria, who went by “Nana,” knew how to turn every single day into a party.
Her bedroom was proof of that. The previous year, she’d painted the walls a grayish purple, hung a string of lights, purchased a plush carpet and started to save up for a trundle bed, which she thought would help create a makeshift living room for sleepovers and after-school hangouts. It was a sparkle-filled teenage playground, perfect for the privacy she’d started craving from her parents.
Janaria had paid for that whole makeover with earnings from a handful of odd jobs: shifts at a local grocery store, babysitting and dog-walking gigs, and a side hair-cutting business. Because that’s who she was. Scrappy, flashy and fun.
Janaria was also a caretaker, of every member of her family. She helped her dad with technology so often that he liked to call her his secretary. When it came to her brothers, Janaria ruled the house. Whenever she heard that their grades were slipping, she would march up to them and say, “If you don’t study, you’re going to be a dummy. Period.” She liked to end most of her sentences with “period,” so you knew she was serious.
Janaria’s sister, 10-year-old Aniya, copied everything she did. And the list was long. Basketball. Volleyball. The dance team. If Janaria had had it her way, her parents said, she would have been quarterback of the football team, too.
“At 15, she was movin’,” her dad said. “You said describe her? She was like the sun. When you saw her, you lit up.”
That light was extinguished on Feb. 16. Janaria had left her house about 7:40 p.m. to meet her friends for a quick trip to her favorite restaurant, Kings & Wings, when gunfire suddenly erupted and a bullet pierced her chest. Lawrence held his daughter in his arms as she bled to death, steps from her freshly painted purple room.
She was one of five students at her neighborhood high school who were shot to death in the first half that year. No one has been arrested, police said, who are still investigating the incident nearly a year later.
Delaware AG Sues Town Over Fetal Remains Ordinance
Kathleen will do her duty, and will not be fooled by the city’s stay of enforcement of the ordinance!
Excerpts from the Article:
Delaware’s Democratic attorney general filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a small town’s passage of an ordinance mandating burial or cremation of fetal remains.
The Seaford town council passed the ordinance last month regarding disposal of fetal remains following any abortion performed within the city limits. The move came after Planned Parenthood opened a facility in Seaford in September, its first clinic in southern Delaware since a Rehoboth Beach location closed in 2011.
State officials are asking a Chancery Court judge to declare the ordinance invalid under Delaware law and to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting it from being enforced.
The ordinance makes clear that women have the right under state and federal law to get an abortion, while also noting that courts have held that the disposal of fetal remains can be regulated. The ordinance also states that Delaware gives municipalities broad “home rule” powers.
Attorney General Kathleen Jennings warned town officials before Tuesday’s court filing that the “anti-choice” ordinance is pre-empted by state laws regarding disposal of human remains and medical waste, as well as state regulatory powers over health care facilities.
State officials also argue, for example, that a fetus that is aborted before 20 weeks of gestation or which weighs less than about 12.5 ounces, is not considered a dead human under Delaware law. Therefore, most elective abortions would not result in a “dead body,” according to Jennings.
A dead body cannot be buried or cremated without a permit, and a permit cannot be issued without a death certificate, and “a death certificate can only be issued for a dead human body,” according to the state’s complaint.
Jennings also argues that the ordinance would pose a hardship on women by forcing them to pay for burial or cremation, even though a woman could opt not to select either option. In that instance, the abortion facility would be left to decide, at its expense, how and where to dispose of the remains.
“This ordinance is part of a national wave of anti-abortion policies funded by extremists who would have our country dragged fifty years into the past,” Jennings said in a statement. “Left unchecked, it threatens serious, irreparable, and unconstitutional harm. And at the end of the day, it will amount to little more than an expensive publicity stunt.”
The statement included supporting comments from officials with Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Delaware chapter of the National Organization for Women.
Seaford city solicitor Daniel Griffith did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The city council reviewed a draft of the ordinance in September but delayed a scheduled Oct. 12 vote after the attorney general and the ACLU of Delaware raised concerns about its constitutionality. On Dec. 14, despite threats of litigation, the council voted 3-2 to approve the ordinance.
The council voted on Dec. 30 to stay enforcement of the ordinance, but not its Jan. 22 effective date. The stay of enforcement was purportedly to see whether the General Assembly might enact legislation that could resolve the issue, but the council could vote to lift it at any time.
Justice Dept. forms new domestic terrorism unit to address growing threat
This is a good idea. We cannot allow domestic terrorism, and a specialized unit like this one is the best way to tackle this growing problem.
Excerpts from the Article:
The Justice Department is forming a new domestic terrorism unit to help combat a threat that has intensified dramatically in recent years, a top national security official said Tuesday.
Olsen said that the Justice Department previously had counterterrorism attorneys who worked both domestic and international cases and that the new unit would “augment our existing approach.”
His testimony came just a few days after the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, an event that some lawmakers say showed that the FBI underestimated the threat posed by domestic extremists and violence-prone members of far-right groups.
“This group of dedicated attorneys will focus on the domestic terrorism threat, helping to ensure that these cases are handled properly and effectively coordinated across the Department of Justice and across the country,” Olsen said.
The hearing was convened to assess the threat of domestic terrorism a year after the Jan. 6 attack. It often devolved into partisan bickering over the riot, which involved hundreds of Trump supporters who marched to the Capitol after a rally outside the White House, and the violence and looting that erupted at some racial justice protests in 2020.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) opened the hearing with a video showing footage and news coverage from the Jan. 6 riot, taking aim at Republicans for not being fully supportive of congressional efforts to investigate the attacks on police officers, threats against lawmakers and attempts to undo Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
“They are normalizing the use of violence to achieve political goals,” Durbin said.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) countered with a video showing unrest in Portland, Ore., and elsewhere. “These anti-police riots rocked our nation for seven full months, just like the January 6 assault on the Capitol rocked the nation,” he said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) lambasted Olsen and Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI’s national security branch, for not answering certain questions about Jan. 6-related criminal charges or about whether any FBI informants encouraged or participated in the violence.
“Your answer to every damn question is ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ ” Cruz railed at Olsen. To Sanborn, he suggested that undercover FBI agents or informants may have spurred on the rioters — an assertion for which there is no known evidence but which Sanborn would not categorically rule out.
“Ms. Sanborn, a lot of Americans are concerned that the federal government deliberately encouraged illegal violent conduct on January 6th,” Cruz said, asking her whether that was true. “Not to my knowledge, sir,” she replied.
She and Olsen sought to assure lawmakers that the Justice Department is investigating and prosecuting all of those who committed crimes, no matter what motivated them. Olsen said authorities had arrested and charged more than 725 people, including more than 325 facing felony counts, in connection with their roles in the Jan. 6 attack. The FBI is seeking to identify and arrest more than 200 additional suspects.
Sanborn said the bureau had opened more than 800 cases in connection with the riots during the summer 2020 and arrested more than 250 people.
The bureau assessed racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism and anti-government violent extremism as being the most “lethal” terrorism threats, Sanborn said. She added that the FBI had recently elevated anti-government violent extremism as a priority, on par with racially motivated violent extremism, homegrown violent extremism and extremism planned or inspired by the Islamic State.
The breach of the Capitol has spurred new political and policy debates about failures of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to prevent the attack, and about how the government combats domestic terrorism.
The Justice Department and the bureau have faced criticism in recent years for not focusing as intensely on domestic terrorism as they do internationally inspired threats, though officials have insisted they take both matters seriously.
Last year, the White House released a national strategy to address the problem, calling for, among other things, new spending at the Justice Department and FBI to hire analysts, investigators and prosecutors.
Capitol attack will spur broad crackdown on domestic extremists, analysts say
Historically, domestic terrorism investigations come with more procedural and legal hurdles than cases involving suspects inspired by groups based outside the United States, such as the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. The charge of material support for a foreign terrorist group, for instance, has no legal equivalent for someone eager to commit violence in the name of domestic political goals.
As a result, domestic terrorism investigators frequently settle for filing gun or drug charges, and often those are filed in state — not federal — court, which can mask the overall extent of extremist threats.
Democrats pressed Olsen to explain why prosecutors had not sought tougher sentences in Jan. 6 cases by seeking enhancements for terrorism. Olsen did not answer the question directly, saying each case had to be evaluated on its particular facts. He pointed to recent remarks from Attorney General Merrick Garland, who suggested such enhancements could come as prosecutors win convictions in more-serious cases.
Where precisely to draw lines about who is or who isn’t a domestic terrorist is also a subject of debate. At the hearing, Sanborn said that last year, there were four attacks conducted by domestic violent extremists, resulting in 13 deaths. She did not identify or describe the incidents, and FBI officials did not provide any details in response to questions from The Washington Post in the hours after the hearing.
Federal law defines domestic terrorism as criminal acts within the United States that are dangerous to human life and that appear to be intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population . . . to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or . . . to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”
After the Jan. 6 attack, Democrats said the Justice Department and FBI did not aggressively pursue domestic terrorism cases during the Trump administration.
From 2016 to 2019, the number of domestic terrorism suspects arrested per year fell from 229 to 107, before jumping to 180 in 2020. Since 2020, the number of open investigations has grown rapidly. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray has previously said that to handle the caseload, he more than tripled the number of agents and analysts working on domestic terrorism cases.
At Tuesday’s hearing, conservative lawmakers pushed Olsen and Sanborn to explain and justify a memo Garland wrote last year urging more scrutiny of threats against school officials. Grassley said the memo had “a chilling effect on freedom of speech.”
Olsen and Sanborn said the school-threats issue was a small part of their divisions’ work. Olsen said such matters were largely handled by other Justice Department components — including the criminal division and civil rights division — while the national security division played an “advisory role.”
Sanborn said the issue “is not a particular focus for the counterterrorism division,” adding that the FBI would only get involved if there was an allegation of a violation of federal law. She also sought to downplay the significance of the FBI’s efforts to track such cases by applying a particular record-keeping tag, saying that was “simply an administrative process to be able to better analyze trends.”
Even though Black men are more likely than Black women to be victims of domestic violence, Black men FOUR TIMES more likely than Black women to be arrested for domestic violence.
My friend Ed Bartlett sent me this. The racism in the system really is wild.
Dear Criminal Reform Colleague,
As you know, the over-arrest of Black men is a major injustice in our country. Here’s the mind-boggling problem:
Even though Black men are more likely than Black women to be victims of domestic violence, Black men FOUR TIMES more likely than Black women to be arrested for domestic violence. Because it’s such a disturbing problem, here are the actual numbers:
Annual numbers of Black victims of partner abuse:
· Male victims: 1.5 million
· Female victims: 1.4 million
Annual number of Black persons arrested for domestic violence:
· Males: 27,031
· Females: 6,341
You can see the links to the CDC and DOJ studies here: https://endtodv.org/black-men/
To stop this injustice, the Coalition to End Domestic Violence has set up a Change.org petition: https://www.change.org/p/congress-help-stop-the-mass-arrest-of-black-men-doing-nothing-ensures-this-will-happen-again
In advance of Black History Month, please sign our petition. Then share it with your colleagues and friends to get word out!
We can’t allow the current epidemic of arrests of Black men to continue. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Edward E. Bartlett, PhD
President
Coalition to End Domestic Violence
3220 N Street, NW, Suite 114
Washington, DC 20007
Phone: 301-801-0608
www.EndToDV.org
Centurion VP makes ‘damning admission’ on last day of Arizona prison health care trial
This joins scores of articles I have concerning abominable prison health care.
Excerpts from the Article:
Prisoners, wardens, psychologists, correctional experts and medical specialists testified over the course of four weeks in the Jensen v. Shinn prison health care trial in Arizona.They described their personal experiences and observations in Arizona prisons in a legal challenge in which prisoners allege the state is providing unconstitutional levels of health care.
But on the last day of the trial on Wednesday, Dec. 8, the court heard “damning” testimony from the state’s prison health care provider, Centurion of Arizona, that may undermine the state’s entire defense.
Tom Dolan, Centurion Vice President for the Arizona prison contract, took the witness stand to discuss his company’s performance since it took over from the previous provider, Corizon Health, in 2019. “We learned early on that, in order to meet the needs of our clients, some facilities needed additional staff,” Dolan said.
Dolan testified that the health care staffing levels in the Arizona prison system were set by the Department in a 2019 request for proposals. The contract requires Centurion to have 1,052.75 full-time equivalent positions.
But soon after it took over in July of 2019, Dolan said Centurion did its own independent evaluation to determine if that number was sufficient. He said the company worked with the 10 state-run prison sites to identify what additional positions they needed in order to provide services that lived up to the performance measures agreed to in the Jensen v. Shinn lawsuit, which was still under a settlement agreement at the time.
“We look at all of the statistics that we collect each month,” Dolan said. “We look at provider visits, nurse lines, number of HNRs, med passes, number of meds that patients are on. We look at man-down encounters per facility. We look at the overall facility and then build the staffing on the data.”
Dolan said Centurion used that information to submit a proposal to the Department to amend the staffing matrix. In an email sent in January of 2020 to an administrator at the Arizona Department of Corrections health services contract monitoring bureau, Dolan outlined what he referred to as a staffing “wish list.”
According to an attorney for the Department, Dolan was responding to a request from DOC “to review the staffing matrix and submit a staffing proposal without budget constraints.”
Dolan’s staffing proposal called for 161.5 additional positions than were in the 2019 Centurion contract. The additional staff included administrators, nursing directors, regional directors, records clerks, nurses, physicians, and special “man down” teams dedicated to emergencies.
But Dolan testified that after he submitted the staffing proposal, the Department of Corrections did nothing with it. Dolan said the Department was not open to amending the contract to add the additional FTEs, and they were not included when the Centurion contract was extended in July 2021. He testified that the current Department staffing matrix is still the same as the one provided in the original 2019 contract.
ACLU National Prison Project Deputy Director Corene Kendrick, representing the prisoners in the lawsuit, called the staffing proposal a “damning admission.”
“The legal analysis for this type of case is something called deliberate indifference,” Kendrick said. “This document is the epitome of deliberate indifference. Prison officials were told in Jan 2020 that they needed to increase health care staff by 15 percent and nothing happened. Instead, what happened over the next year and half is that many, many people died preventable deaths because of the failure to provide basic medical care and mental health care.”
“I think what it shows is that Centurion’s leadership recognized that the current staffing model that the state has dictated to them is not adequate to provide basic health care,” Kendrick said.
In 2012, the federal court recognized a group of people in Arizona prisons who claimed their Eighth Amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment were being violated. The class action lawsuit was then named Parsons v. Ryan, after named plaintiff Victor Parsons and then-director Charles Ryan. Arizona agreed to settle the case in 2014 and it was certified in 2015.
But since that time, the federal courts overseeing the settlement have found the state was not living up to the terms of the settlement agreement. Federal judges have twice held the Department in contempt, fining the agency millions of dollars. The case has outlasted judges, named plaintiffs and prison administrators. In 2021, it is now known as Jensen v. Shinn.
In July, Judge Roslyn Silver took the drastic measure of rescinding the settlement and ordering a bench trial, which began on Nov. 1.
During the four-week trial, the court heard testimony from several currently incarcerated people who claimed they had suffered due to lack of medical and mental health care.
Kendall Johnson, a witness for the plaintiffs incarcerated in the Perryville Women’s Prison, said she entered prison at age 19 in 2004 as a healthy young woman. In 2017, she started to experience numbness in her legs and feet. She repeatedly requested medical treatment for several years as her symptoms progressed. She said she experienced several falls that resulted in broken bones and eventually lost the ability to write and walk. In 2020, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Johnson wrote health needs requests begging for proper treatment, but she didn’t get it until May 2021. She told the court she is now confined to a special needs medical unit at the prison where she spends her days “counting the ceiling tiles.”
She is nearly immobile and has trouble speaking. “I tried to get help but it was like hitting my head against the wall,” she said.
Dustin Brislan, a named plaintiff, testified from the Tucson prison. He provided the names of more than 10 officers he accused of taunting him and encouraging him to self-harm, a tactic known in the prisons as “kickstarting.” “Kickstarting is where an officer or mental health staff push your buttons — they know your triggers — and get you to react,” he said. “It happened many times.” Brislan said he would often cut himself with rust from the isolation cells while on constant suicide watch, while correctional officers were watching and encouraging him to do so. He said the officer would watch him and not act to stop him.
“The officers actually encourage me to cut myself,” he said. “They say they want to see how bad I can get. They heard stories about me and wanted to see how seriously I could hurt myself. They know exactly how serious I am. There’s a lot of them that do it.”
Judge Silver could order receivership, in which a federal monitor who answered to the courts would be in charge of the health care services for state prisons. Silver could also order Centurion to hire more prison health care workers, or she could order the state to resume direct operations of the health care in state prisons as opposed to hiring a contractor.
If the ruling is unfavorable to the Department, it will almost certainly be appealed, as has been the strategy of the defense team in most other instances in response to orders from the court in the Jensen lawsuit.
Kendrick said she feels optimistic about their case.
“We presented testimony from multiple experts and people who actually still work there, Kendrick said. “We showed that the conditions in isolation units and the medical and mental health care are abysmal.”
“We hope that Judge Silver will find that the department has been violating the rights of incarcerated people,” Kendrick said. “We’ve asked her in the past to appoint someone independent to oversee the delivery of health care. And we’ve asked her to place very strict limits on the use of solitary confinement, including banning its use on people with serious mental illness, pregnant people and juveniles.”
The parties must now file findings of fact and conclusions of law by Jan. 21. Responses to those filings are due Feb. 11, meaning the ruling might not happen until March.
Read More Horror Stories and Lies from Prison Officials
Pedestrian, bicyclist fatalities have doubled over the past decade. What is Delaware doing about it?
I do not have time to edit this excellent, but long, article. Delaware is one of the worst states in America for pedestrian safety, and should do much better.
Excerpts from the Article:
Over the past decade, the number of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities on Delaware’s roadways has nearly doubled, yet many of the most dangerous roads for pedestrians and drivers alike remain largely unchanged.
The First State saw non-motorized fatalities climb from 21 in 2009 to 40 in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic and the latest statistics available through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s online database.
Those numbers were slightly lower in recent years: 28 fatalities in 2020 and 31 deaths in 2021, according to the Delaware Office of Highway Safety.
Although Delaware’s total pedestrian fatalities come nowhere close to larger states like California or Florida, it consistently ranks among the worst in the nation for pedestrian safety. There were 535 pedestrian or bicyclist-involved crashes in 2019, averaging nearly 1.5 each day in Delaware. The First State’s pedestrian fatality rate was 3.29 per 100,000 residents in 2019, federal traffic safety data shows. The only state worse off that year was Florida, with a rate of 3.32 pedestrians killed per 100,000 residents.
The state has added crosswalks and traffic signals to provide safer passage across Delaware’s multi-lane, high-speed thoroughfares for non-motorized users, but larger road calming projects – like reducing traffic lanes, slowing speeds and other techniques – often are avoided because of cost, community opposition or concerns of traffic congestion.
Bike Delaware, which advocates for safer roadway access for bicyclists and pedestrians, said there’s an overall lack of political will to pursue progressive roadway changes and so the grassroots group now advocates for less controversial improvements like median barriers.
“Traffic calming – for better or worse – does not seem to be an option on the big suburban roads where the problem is, so we have pushed for other ways to make progress,” James Wilson, of Bike Delaware, said. “DelDOT tries to do traffic calming projects and sometimes they don’t happen because they get shot down by local opposition.”
Traffic congestion becomes more likely as new residential and commercial development is concentrated on the main arteries, necessitating traffic studies and an examination of whether roadway improvements and pedestrian infrastructure should be added.
While developers are expected to consider all modes of transportation when designing and building new residential or commercial space, the standards used are car-centric, focusing on traffic engineering impacts to drivers rather than all users.
Depending on the size of a project, there are certain traffic requirements developers must follow, like conducting a traffic study and making any necessary road improvements. In some cases, though, developers can avoid improvements altogether by seeking a waiver of service level requirements from local government agencies.
New Castle County has issued two waivers in recent memory, one in 2016 for developing the Brandywine Campus of Wilmington University on Concord Pike, U.S. 202, which added three, three-story buildings, sidewalks, roads and parking lots to once vacant land.
A $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure plan aims to grow the economy in part through greener infrastructure and sets aside more than $13 billion for roadway safety in communities, helping fund tougher speeding enforcement, new crosswalks, safety lighting and underpasses beneath busy roads, among other efforts.
Communities that have adopted “Vision Zero” plans, in which local political leaders commit to concrete efforts to eliminate roadway deaths, can access additional federal funding, said Pam Shadel Fischer, senior director of external engagement for the federal Governors Highway Safety Association.
First implemented in Sweden in the 1990s, Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all.
Delaware State Police investigate a serious pedestrian crash on Silverside Road at Marsh Road on Monday, Sept. 13, 2021.
The key differences with this approach are a recognition that people will make mistakes and so the road system should be designed to ensure those “inevitable mistakes” don’t result in severe injury or death and a multidisciplinary approach that considers roadway design, speeds, behaviors, technology and policies, according to the Vision Zero Network website.
“It’s an approach that looks at how we can best move people around on our roadway system and make it as forgiving as possible because people make mistakes,” Fischer said. “There’s a focus on infrastructure, coupled with equity and equitable enforcement, an education component and also a big focus on speed reduction, because we know speed is such a problem. It mirrors what we are saying in taking that comprehensive approach.”
No communities in Delaware have adopted this initiative, but they are toying with the idea.
New Castle County’s comprehensive plan has a strong focus on making communities accessible for all modes of transportation, recognizing that the suburban county’s roads were designed primarily for cars, Hall said.
“As the county matures and we have more infill and think more about making our existing communities, and new ones, more connected, more vibrant, hopefully more walkable and bikeable, there needs to be a more elaborate and mature look at transportation,” Hall said. “It’s not just cars. We need to focus on moving people not cars.”
Make Prosecutors ‘Earn’ Immunity
Interesting ideas here, but they could be difficult to implement.
Excerpts from the Article;
When a witness embroiled in a criminal investigation is given a grant of immunity, it always comes with strings attached.
The witness gets immunity, but society gets the witness’s information in exchange—all of it.
If the information the witness provides isn’t truthful, or isn’t complete, the grant of immunity is withdrawn. The witness (often a potential defendant) pays the price.
A witness has to earn the immunity. But America’s prosecutors enjoy an absolute immunity from suits for damages caused by their misconduct, and that immunity comes at no cost. The immunity provided to prosecutors generates no gain in information.
(Something similar happens with police officers, who enjoy only “qualified immunity”—not “absolute immunity”—but who are indemnified from public funds against civil judgments in 99.8 percent of cases. In practical terms they too are immune. What information do culpable cops have to exchange for this? None.)
Simply to be a prosecutor whose actions can be tied theoretically to your advocacy role is enough to trigger absolute immunity—for hiding evidence of innocence, coercing witnesses, introducing illegally seized evidence, falsifying evidence, or soliciting perjured testimony.
Whether prosecutors should ever have enjoyed absolute immunity in the first place is a question for another day. To put my own cards on the table, I think the doctrine of absolute prosecutorial immunity should be eradicated.
It was conjured out of thin air by the Supreme Court in 1976, with no basis in the Constitution, simply because in the Court’s opinion it was “better” to relieve good prosecutors of “the constant dread of retaliation” than to recognize some means for sanctioning the bad ones and providing compensation to their victims.
The immunity has been grotesquely distended ever since, even applied in to cases, such as Connick v. Thompson, where prosecutorial misconduct contributed to sending John Thompson, an innocent man, to death row for 14 years.
The Supreme Court mobilized the prosecutorial immunity doctrine to set aside a lower court’s award of damages to Thompson from the District Attorney’s office based on its organizational failure to provide training in ethical practice. Barry Scheck has illuminated a variety of tools for improving the retrospective disciplinary accountability of prosecutors. They could help. Others have set out elaborate justifications for moving toward imposing statutory qualifications on prosecutorial immunity in tort litigation for Brady violations.
That effort could conceivably prove productive.
But whatever retrospective tools we develop we shouldn’t overlook a simple way to enhance the prospective “forward-looking accountability” that prevents future miscarriages of justice.
As long as an immunity doctrine survives in some form, we should make sure that culpable prosecutors earn their immunity. Prosecutors who want immunity should have to apply for it. The application should be countersigned by the elected District Attorney, and every judicial grant of an application should be conditioned on complete, truthful, disclosure to any parallel proceeding aimed at compensating victims and to a sentinel event review.
The applicant has to agree to provide the fullest possible narrative of the event he or she helped to contrive, detailing every condition and influence bearing on it.
No matter what you think of whacking bad prosecutors as a deterrent for misconduct, there is really no argument against demanding their information when that information helps prevent recurrences.
The exoneration cases cataloging official misconduct are not close calls: we know the violations occurred; we know who committed them.
But preventing the next wrongful conviction isn’t as simple as invoking the maxim “Good man, good result” and exorcising the bad men and women.
We have to keep two things in mind. First, the worst prosecutor in the world can’t contrive a wrongful conviction on his or her own; a wrongful conviction is always a system failure—an “organizational accident” for which all those involved―cops, defenders, courts―share some degree of responsibility.
Besides, the bad prosecutors’ decisions, no matter how despicable, were always “locally rational.” They are reactions to their environments, to pressures and incentives, to system weaknesses, including, but not limited to, the absence of sanctions.
To understand how to prevent the next episode, we need not just a performance review (via prosecution, civil suit, or bar discipline). We need a full-context event review. As things stand, we can answer the “Who?” and the “What?” of many prosecutorial misconduct episodes, but the most important preventive issues of “How?” and “Why?” are obscured.
Prosecutors who need immunity hold treasure troves of information bearing on those questions. They can teach us about the interior culture of the prosecution silo.
We know these prosecutors violated the rules, but we don’t know what feature of their professional lives caused them to zig when they should have zagged. Was the training deficient? Did office culture create incentives? Was the prestige of a “win” irresistible? Or the ignominy of a “loss” unbearable? Did they do it because “Everyone did it”, and the office had adopted consistent “covert work rules?” The prosecutors’ positioning also gives them windows into adjacent defender, forensic, and police silos. Did the ramshackle state of the local police department encourage fatalism about “the best case you’re going to get?” Did communication with the crime scene and forensics components mask violations? Did recognition of the feebleness of the local defender service agency or of a particular defender embolden the misconduct? Most importantly for future safety, they can also tell us how those system components interact. Did their decisions seem defensible because of weaknesses in investigative capacity? Did media pressure induce deviation from the rules? Had years of experience with a see-no-evil local judiciary set in motion a “practical drift” further and further from the rules with no apparent consequences? Was the misconduct an adaptation to the demands of a complex adaptive system?
In fact, the immunity from civil judgments for misconduct granted to prosecutors has had the indirect effect of shutting these inquiries down. (After all, as UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz has pointed out in the context of policing, litigation allows for learning, if anyone is inclined to pay attention.)
When we talk about prosecutors’ accountability for misconduct, we should remember, as Safety commentators do, that an “account” is a debt to be paid for misconduct, but it is also a story to be told. Prosecutors are currently free from any obligation to pay the debt for their misconduct. That makes it more important that they tell the story. Are the conditions and influences that tempted them still present? If they want immunity, they should have to tell us.
There is a tendency see prosecutorial misconduct as the work of swashbuckling wild men, arrogantly stomping on the rules. In fact, the problem more often turns out to be—as Diane Vaughan noted of the space shuttle Challenger launch decision—conformity to what is seen as expected.
Conformity to “covert work rules” is often motivated by a desire for membership in and status within a group. Sometimes, withholding exculpatory evidence—of police investigative botches, or lab tests—is a gesture of law enforcement solidarity that earns a place on the team, or in the club.
But conditioning a prosecutor’s immunity on the promise to fully disclose the role of these powerful internal cultural dynamics will not only afford us the opportunity to expose and attack them, it creates a new disincentive for committing the rule violations in the first place.
Awareness that being forced to “out” the other members will be the price for immunity for following illegal “covert” work rules introduces a counterweight.
Immunity—if we have it at all—should come at that price: it should require help excising the local code of silence. Advocates for immunity claim, after all, that it exists not for the comfort of violators, but for the good of society.
Requiring violators to give society the information it needs to prevent repeats serves that purpose.
If the prospect of betraying their collaborators to earn immunity deters unethical prosecutors, that is not a bad thing either.
The Whole Story:
HEALTH AND SCIENCE 988 suicide phone hotline getting $282 million to ease July launch
There is a huge need for this 3 digit Mental Health hotline! Let us hope that every state trains enough high quality MH counselors to staff it well.
Excerpts from the Article:
People in crisis and those trying to help them will have a new phone number — 988 — to reach the national suicide prevention network starting in July. On Monday, federal health officials are announcing more than $280 million to smooth the transition from the current 10-digit number to three digits.
Three-digit dialing to reach suicide hotline counselors has long been a goal for mental health advocates, lawmakers in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the telecommunications industry. The Biden administration says it wants to help deliver an on-schedule launch this summer. The new 988 number will also handle text and chat.
“We know that remembering a three-digit number beats a ten-digit number any day, particularly in times of crisis, and I encourage every state to rev up planning to implement 988 for the sake of saving lives,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.
Mental health experts are hoping that the three-digit number will deliver a breakthrough in assisting people in crisis who may otherwise try to harm themselves. They predict call center demand will skyrocket once the new system is in place and people know about it.
People who call, text, or chat 988 will be able to reach trained counselors who belong to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline network. Counselors at more than 180 local centers listen to people in crisis and provide support, connecting them with other services as may be needed. According to the Lifeline, the new dialing code will be available throughout the country starting July 16.
Of the $282 million being announced Monday, $177 million will go to bolster and expand the existing crisis network’s operations and telephone infrastructure, including centralized chat and text response, backup capacity and a sub-network for Spanish speakers.
The rest of the money, $105 million, will go to build up staffing at local call centers.
Suicide had been the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 47,000 lives in 2019, but dropped to 11th in 2020, mainly due to the coronavirus pandemic, which killed at least 345,000 Americans and became the nation’s No. 3 killer.
Suicide attempts result in more than 300,000 people seen in hospital emergency departments for self-harm injuries. Rates of suicide rose steadily over much of the last 20 years, and it remains a leading cause of premature death for people from their teens well into their 50s.
Recently, the FCC voted unanimously to require phone companies to support texting to 988 as well. Commissioners said nowadays many people may be more inclined to text and the choice of voice or text should make no difference when someone in distress is trying to find help.
The national suicide prevention network currently relies on a 10-digit number, 800-273-TALK (8255), to route calls to crisis centers. The country’s largest cellphone companies, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, already support calling 988, according to the FCC. The service may already be available in some parts of the country, although not every community has access yet.
The lifeline has received more than 20 million calls since its inception in 2005, with nearly 2.4 million last year, according to the network’s website. Its current 10-digit number will remain available even after 988 is launched.
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