For the first few weeks after he arrived at the immigration detention center in Winnfield, Louisiana, 18-year-old Elder Chavez was wide awake most nights, listening to the creaky sounds of the bunk beds and to voices of dozens of men, also sleepless, around him. He suffered terrible headaches and would finally doze off around 4 a.m. — just when guards would begin to summon the detainees for breakfast. Then he’d sleep for most of the rest of the day.

He had developed the schedule of an owl. And he thought to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one.

He’d landed at the Winn Correctional Center after Alabama state police had caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license. He was on his way home from getting his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was pulled over. Once the officers realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Chavez offered to show them documents that proved he wasn’t living in hiding. Immigration authorities had granted him Special Immigrant Juvenile Status because, as a toddler, he’d been abandoned by his parents in Honduras and had come to this country on his own when he was 14. His sister, who’d migrated years earlier and was living in Alabama, offered to help take care of him. A lawyer was helping him pursue permanent residency. 

“I’m legal in this country,” Chavez pleaded with the officers. But the officers, he said, weren’t having it. One of them told him, “Your papers are of no use to me.”

And just like that, an otherwise law-abiding high school student — who loved his welding and carpentry classes, had braces and a girlfriend, and spent weekends playing soccer at the park with his nieces and nephews — was thrown into detention and put on a path toward deportation.

“I’m just waiting here,” he said during a video call from detention. “I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”

Chavez is hardly alone. A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office. In addition, a ProPublica analysis of court data found that immigration judges, who report to the Justice Department, have issued more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors who either migrated alone or with relatives, a rate that is nearly four times higher than in Trump’s last term.

The vast majority of unaccompanied minors removed last year had no criminal history in the United States, ProPublica’s analysis of ICE data showed. 

Before Trump returned to office last year, Chavez would have likely been given a ticket and allowed to return to his sister. But as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign, his administration has moved to systematically roll back policies that provided immigrant minors access to legal counsel and relief from deportation while they pursued permission to permanently stay in the country. Those policies were based on laws that had been implemented over more than two decades, with bipartisan support, because both parties believed unaccompanied immigrant minors — ill-prepared to navigate a new country on their own, much less a legal system daunting to most adults — are especially vulnerable to trafficking and other kinds of exploitation. 

Congress created SIJ specifically to protect immigrants, like Chavez, who are under 21 and are able to prove in family court that they had been abused, neglected or abandoned by at least one parent in their home countries.

Trump administration officials have long argued that not only are the programs designed to help unaccompanied minors rife with fraud, but that their very existence has encouraged hundreds of thousands of children to embark on dangerous journeys to the border, increasing their risk of falling into criminal hands. To make its case, his administration points to the record 450,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border and were released into the country under President Joe Biden. 

Neither those children nor the people to whom they were released were properly vetted, say Trump administration officials. As a result, administration officials say, some of the children became victims of abuse or exploitation. Alarming numbers of them were found working illegally in factories or in other jobs that put them at risk for trafficking, injury and wage theft. 

Other minors, the administration has said, became criminals. It put out a July 2025 government report that said since 2013, some 19,000 SIJ petitioners were found to have criminal arrest records, including hundreds with serious charges like murder and sex offenses. The administration says the best way to stop such abuses and criminality is to disincentivize immigrant children from coming in the first place. 

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is “undoing the damage Biden did.” Responding to questions about ProPublica’s data analysis, which was based on data provided via Freedom of Information Act requests and was validated with outside experts, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency “could not verify the veracity” of the data. 

Advocates argue that the administration is using exceptional cases to cast all immigrant minors and the adults who sponsored them in a negative light. They say that some of their clients who have been living in the U.S. for years, including those, like Chavez, who have since turned 18, face serious risks if sent back to their home countries. The majority of the unaccompanied minors who have come to the United States in the last decade were fleeing Central American countries crushed by economic turmoil, violence and political upheaval. Some came from families riven by poverty and domestic violence. Some, like Chavez, have no parents to go back to. 

“These children have been through incredibly harrowing and traumatic experiences,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a legal defense organization. “And ICE is retraumatizing them.”

To the administration’s claims that its policies are aimed at protecting minors, he said, “If you’re worried about the welfare of kids, stop rounding kids up and trying to deport them.”

ICE Is Detaining and Deporting More People in the Country Who Entered as Unaccompanied Minors

A growing number of immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors without parents or legal guardians are being arrested in the country’s interior and removed via deportation or voluntary departure orders.

Sometimes the deportation orders issued in immigration court have been coming so fast that lawyers say even they have a hard time explaining them to their clients. Within a span of three hours on a single morning in April in a downtown New York immigration courtroom, Judge Jem Sponzo issued deportation orders for 25 minors, almost everyone on her docket appearing virtually that morning. Some of the hearings were only a few minutes long, and some of the minors were too young to understand what was happening to them.

Among the children in court that day was an 8-year old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and SIJ. The girl’s mother had already won asylum in a separate case. But Sponzo ordered the girl to be deported anyway. 

In another case, an attorney pleaded for more time to prepare enough evidence to support an asylum petition for her client from Guatemala. The attorney said her client’s home in Guatemala was dominated by an abusive father whose violence made it hard for her to gather information she needed for the case. Sponzo politely denied the request, saying, “I empathize and thank you for your efforts.” Then she ordered the child deported.

A high school senior from Guatemala who lives in Queens, with side-swept black hair and wearing a short sleeve athletic shirt, appeared on a video screen from a room with piled-up clothes on the bed and an American flag tacked on the wall. He stayed on mute while his lawyer asked for more time for his applications for SIJ and asylum to be processed. Sponzo said no and ordered him deported. His lawyer said in an interview her client is now afraid he could be picked up by ICE at any time.

At the end of the day, several of the attorneys said they felt blindsided by the judge’s rapid-fire denials. Although they all said they would appeal her rulings, which could buy their clients some time to stay in the U.S., one said the deportation orders would “hang over their heads like a loaded gun.”  

Olivia Cassin, a former immigration judge who oversaw juvenile dockets in New York, said that before Trump returned to office, there was widespread recognition that it took time for immigrant minors’ SIJ and asylum petitions to work their way through the backlogged system. For SIJ recipients, getting a green card often takes years. Judges typically gave minors that time. Now the authorities overseeing immigration courts have instructed them not to do so. Sponzo cited those instructions at the end of many of the cases she heard that day in April.

Cassin is one of the more than 100 immigration judges who have been fired since Trump returned to office. Some of the judges who lost their jobs said they believe they were pushed out because the administration saw them as not aligned with its agenda. But they also say they’ve received no official explanation for their firings. Sponzo was also fired recently. She could not be reached for comment. 

The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the firings.

Since the Start of Trump’s Second Term, Immigration Courts Have Averaged More Than 10,000 Removals of Minors Per Month

It’s not just the overhaul of the immigration courts that is having an effect on immigrant kids. Early on in Trump’s second term, officials moved to curb funding for advocacy groups that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors. It also put an end to a Biden-era policy known as “deferred action,” which protected minors who had been granted SIJ from deportation. SIJ on its own does not confer legal status, and the deferred action policy was implemented to cover those with SIJ until they could get their green cards.

After advocacy groups took the administration to court, federal judges ordered the government to restore funding for legal assistance and access to deferred action for SIJ recipients. Despite those rulings, some legal advocates say they still have not been paid what they’re owed. And earlier this month, several groups said federal agents appeared at their Washington-area offices, seeking to look at client files, even though they didn’t have warrants. The advocates said they saw the move as an attempt to intimidate them. 

As for granting deferred action, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement that the agency would do so only under “compelling circumstances on a case-by-case basis.” DHS, which oversees USCIS and ICE, emphasized in an email that having SIJ “does NOT confer lawful status,” adding that “any recipient may be subject to removal.” The agency did not respond to a question about the agents who visited advocates’ offices.

Over the last year, the administration says it has tracked down 146,000 of the unaccompanied minors who entered the country under Biden in order to check on their well-being. The majority of all the minors who entered the country in recent years had been released to one or both parents in the United States or to other close relatives. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a June press conference that some of the welfare checks found minors were doing fine with their families. But he asserted that he’d also tracked down children who were in the hands of rapists and other criminals. “We start digging into these cases and you start hearing absolute horrific things,” he said. 

When asked for verifiable details about some of the cases Mullin mentioned, DHS did not respond. A DHS spokesperson later sent a list of 16 people who had sponsored immigrant minors and had previously been charged with crimes including assault, drug trafficking or domestic violence. Meanwhile, Justice Department officials said they’d indicted less than a handful of people on charges of smuggling or exploiting immigrant minors.

No officials from DHS or the Justice Department explained what had become of any of the children connected to those indictments. As for immigrants who had entered the U.S. as children and are now adults, Mullin said, “we are working on the process of sending them back.”

Soon after Chavez arrived in detention, one of the men in his cell recognized the teen’s pattern of sleeping through the day as a silent cry for help. Carlos Della Valle, who had migrated to the United States from Mexico, was attuned to Chavez’s struggles because he had a son around the same age. Even in detention, Chavez, with a head full of  tousled black hair and big brown eyes, had an easy laugh and smile. Della Valle worried that Chavez was “losing valuable time that he’s never going to get back.”

Winn was a tough place, advocates and detainees said. Two migrants died there earlier this year. One of the deaths was reportedly caused by cardiovascular disease, and authorities have not determined a cause for the other.  

A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General described unsafe and unsanitary conditions at Winn, including leaking ceilings, dirty food prep areas and an incident in which a guard put a detainee in a prohibited choke hold. A DHS spokesperson said that the agency is working to address the issues raised in the report, adding, “our death rates are lower than most state prisons.” 

Della Valle began nudging young Chavez out of bed in the mornings and put him to work helping keep their cellblock clean. 

Detainees were given an hour a day outside, sometimes less than that. Della Valle told Chavez that keeping himself busy, in whatever constructive ways possible, was the only way to make it through the monotony with his sanity intact.

Chavez briefly took a job in the barber shop that paid the standard wage for someone in detention —  $1 a day — but he said that giving haircuts to around 80 men in a shift was so grueling that he only lasted a month. Instead, Chavez and Della Valle pored over passages from the Bible together. They sat together for most every meal. Chavez learned to mix packets of powdered juice just the way Della Valle liked it.

Della Valle offered to help Chavez navigate the immigration system. He knew it well. In 1997 he’d twice illegally entered the United States. He was deported the first time but illegally entered again, married a U.S. citizen soon after and settled in Pennsylvania. 

Because of his reentry, which is a felony, he has been ineligible to regularize his status. But he lived underground with little worry. Immigration authorities generally avoided targeting immigrants with long ties to their communities, like him. Not anymore.

Authorities intercepted Della Valle when he and his wife were returning from a Virgin Islands vacation, though they released him on bond at the time. Months later, however, he was taken into ICE detention. By the time he met Chavez, he had spent months being transferred among close to a dozen holding facilities. He worried about what detention might do to Chavez. Other men in his cellblock, who nicknamed Chavez “El Niño,” worried too.

“It was hard to see him, you know, because he’s just a boy. He’s not a grown man,”  Della Valle said. “I had to do whatever I could for him.”

While the administration has made progress bending immigration courts to its will, there’s evidence that federal courts, where tens of thousands of immigrants have challenged their detentions as illegal, are pushing back. 

The National Immigration Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, tracked the cases of 263 immigrants who entered the country as unaccompanied minors and SIJ applicants. The group found that federal judges ordered releases or bond hearings in all but 12 of them since the start of the second Trump administration. In March, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown issued a scathing rebuke in one such case, writing, “The laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” 

The administration can set policy, he wrote, but he added that “it is forbidden from trampling our system of laws — a system which has safeguarded this nation for close to 250 years.”

Among those recently released was 20-year-old Fredy Martinez. Born in Honduras, he was a teenager when he crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor. He had graduated from high school in Texas and was delivering a DoorDash order on his bike when he was detained, according to court documents about his case. He was held for eight months at a sprawling and deeply troubled tent detention camp in El Paso, Texas — which has seen a measles outbreak and detainee deaths, including one ruled a homicide — before a federal judge found his detention was illegal and ordered him released. DHS did not respond to a question about the center.

Another teenager named Carlos from Guatemala said in an interview that he was detained on his way to work at a car wash in Rockland County, New York, when he was 18, despite having been granted SIJ and deferred action. He was flown over 1,000 miles to a detention facility in Louisiana, though not the same one as Chavez. Carlos asked to be identified only by his first name because of his ongoing immigration case. 

After his arrest, he said, “I was just thinking that I would never see my family again.” Carlos was held for more than two months before a federal judge set him free.

The DHS spokesperson did not answer questions about any individual cases. They said federal court rulings against the administration “should come as no surprise,” since “many activist judges have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate.”

Six months into his detention, Chavez is on his own. He was ordered deported but is appealing the decision and filed a habeas petition. 

Della Valle has been released, thanks to his wife’s outspoken advocacy. His release was bittersweet for Chavez. But Della Valle has not forgotten him. 

Della Valle and his wife, Angela Della Valle, have helped Chavez’s sister, Mayuri Chavez, to pay off his outstanding traffic tickets and prepare his defense. The couple started a letter-writing campaign for him. They’ve passed out flyers with a picture of a chair Chavez made in carpentry class, asking people to color it in and send him messages of encouragement. 

Della Valle said he feels pangs of guilt about leaving Chavez behind. He still speaks to Chavez most days and tries to keep the teen’s spirits up, but worries his words don’t carry the same weight now that he’s out. Della Valle tries to convince himself that Chavez will be OK, saying, “I think me being out might be good for him because he knows that there’s hope.”

Meanwhile, Chavez has been moved to different cells multiple times. One had only a single functional shower for dozens of men. The video call system often malfunctioned. Someone stole his small notebook, where he had carefully written down all the telephone numbers of the people he was in touch with outside. One night he dreamt he was free. When he woke up and realized he was still in detention, he panicked and had trouble breathing. 

He said he has been trying to keep up the routine he started when Della Valle was there, but each passing week makes it harder.

In a series of interviews from detention, Chavez worried about losing half his junior year of high school. He missed a required English test and a deadline to turn in a history project, and now that the school year is over, he is unclear if he will be able to make the assignments up to be able to graduate on time. His sister spent a lot of money to get him braces, and without regular adjustments he worries it will all be for nothing. He missed the birth of his new nephew, and he is unsure if he will be able to meet him.

“I had so many plans,” he said, “but now everything is ruined.”

The post These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled. appeared first on ProPublica.

The abandoned house next door meant a lot to Christina Kary. For years, she tended to it, planting purple flowers, removing weeds and picking up trash. She attached locks to the doors to prevent trespassers from entering. 

She had considered buying the property, located on the Cadillac Heights block where her family built the first houses in the early 1900s. Several years ago, she learned that the small home with a front porch was owned by the Detroit Land Bank Authority, which manages the city’s vacant properties. Kary, 86, said she told a land bank inspector she wanted to purchase it but didn’t follow up, thinking she would eventually hear back.

Then, one morning in 2024, she heard a commotion as heavy equipment squeezed through the alley. Kary watched from her backyard as the house was demolished, her feet vibrating beneath her. She marked the day in yellow highlighter on her paper wall calendar where she records other notable events like birthdays, doctor appointments and Bible study meetups. She would later learn that the city had sold the home to Crown Enterprises, a real estate firm owned by members of the Detroit area’s wealthy and politically connected Moroun family.

Over the last seven years, Crown has obtained dozens of parcels in Cadillac Heights and secured permits to demolish more than 20 structures. In all, the company now owns more than 160 lots in the neighborhood, most of which are barren. It also has erected a concrete-mixing plant just across the street from Kary’s home, creating clouds of dust, noise at early hours of the day and late into the night, and industrial lights that pierce through the area. 

The company’s takeover of the southeast section of the neighborhood has marked the end of the community Kary and her neighbors knew — a process aided by the decisions of city officials. First, the city turned over dozens of properties to the company as part of a historic land-swap deal in 2019 and then gave it first dibs to purchase other lots, including the one next to Kary’s home, until 2034. 

The city has also enabled the company in other ways, providing latitude on permitting and neighborhood maintenance. For instance, although city inspectors have repeatedly ticketed the company for violating rules limiting the spread of dust, the city also set up a system under which the company’s fines were dismissed.

As Detroit rebuilds from the largest municipal bankruptcy in history, major construction has reshaped the city: the first new skyscraper in 50 years, new hotels and sports complexes, repaved roads, and the renovation of Michigan Central Station, which had sat empty for decades while owned by the Moroun family and became a symbol of the city’s decline.  

To meet the demand, at least three new concrete facilities have opened in the city since 2019. One is by a park, and two are in residential neighborhoods, including the plant in Cadillac Heights, called Kronos. The state also approved a permit for a new cement grinding plant that has not yet opened in an industrial area of southwest Detroit. Other proposed operations have been blocked after residents protested. 

The new concrete plants are producing materials needed to help rebuild parts of the city while creating a bitter irony for residents such as Kary. She said Detroit’s decision to turn so many properties over to Crown “guarantees the death of this area.” 

In written responses to questions from BridgeDetroit and ProPublica, company representative Kenneth Dobson called Kronos “a good neighbor.” He said the company complies with all permitting requirements and city ordinances, and that it properly mitigates dust. 

Dobson said having a concrete supplier within the city helps support rebuilding and broadly improves the lives of Detroiters. Without concrete facilities in Detroit, “not only would there be less jobs and less City tax revenue, but the cost of both public and private infrastructure development would go up,” wrote Dobson, vice president of the Detroit International Bridge Company, another Moroun-owned business. 

Dobson said Crown has invested $10 million in the neighborhood. When asked what that has funded, he cited costs related to the Kronos development: demolishing homes, obtaining permits and equipment to operate, and taking measures to control dust and monitor air quality.

Messages sent by ProPublica to email addresses linked to Matthew Moroun, who oversees the family business, didn’t receive a response. Dobson said the email was forwarded to him and he responded on Moroun’s behalf.

With City Help, Crown Moves In  

Cadillac Heights’ most recent transformation began in May 2019, thanks in part to a vote by Detroit City Council to approve a nearly $267 million multipronged land swap orchestrated by former Mayor Mike Duggan.

The deal delivered ownership of dozens of lots in Cadillac Heights to Crown. In exchange, Crown gave up land in another part of the city, which allowed automaker Stellantis to open the first new car plant in Detroit in three decades, with the promise of 5,000 new jobs. 

Duggan declared the day the land swap was approved as the “greatest” day he had had as mayor. 

“Today was historic,” Duggan, who served for 12 years and recently gave up his bid for governor, said at a press conference. “Detroit was the city that built the middle class in America, and today we started to rebuild the middle class in Detroit.”

The news that day focused on the promise of Stellantis, not on what the deal meant for Cadillac Heights. Duggan spokesperson Andrea Bitely said the mayor did not know that Crown would put a concrete plant in the neighborhood and that doing so would ultimately drive out residents. 

At its prime in the 1960s, Cadillac Heights had been full of local businesses and community life. The neighborhood attracted a predominantly working-class community of Black families who lived in modest single-family houses. 

Buddy’s Pizza, famous as the birthplace of Detroit-style pizza, was founded there and drew crowds from across the city. Cadillac Heights also was home to Simpson’s Records, one of the city’s longest-running record shops.

But over several decades, Detroit declined under the weight of the crack epidemic, massive population loss and disinvestment. City historian Jamon Jordan said some neighborhoods saw more problems than others, but Cadillac Heights “had all of those things.”

By the time of the 2019 deal, roughly a third of the homes that were left had been abandoned, according to census data, and the streets were lined with empty storefronts. The remaining residents, many of whom, like Kary, had lived in Cadillac Heights for decades, said they tried to keep the neighborhood clean and enjoyable.

The Moroun family, too, had owned property in Cadillac Heights since the 1960s and operated a trucking depot there, which residents also found bothersome, but less so than the concrete facility. (The family also owns the Ambassador Bridge to Canada and more than 1,000 properties throughout Detroit, and has tried to block a competing bridge to Canada.)

Crown gradually acquired more land in Cadillac Heights and had about 80 properties at the time of the land swap, records show.

The deal gave Crown 34 more parcels throughout the neighborhood and the first rights to purchase others if they end up in the Land Bank by repossession due to tax foreclosure or other reasons. So far, Crown has purchased seven parcels under this option and demolished three homes, including the one next to Kary’s. 

Detroit officials made other decisions, some in violation of city rules, that enabled Kronos to operate by summer 2022, before the company obtained a permit. The city ordered that operations stop. It then issued the permit without fining the company, and the concrete plant was reassembled. A city spokesperson did not respond to a question about why the company wasn’t fined.

The city issued a permit even though Crown had unpaid tickets for blight violations, which should have disqualified it from getting the approval to move forward. Crystal Rogers, a manager in the city’s Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, attributed that to “human error.” 

The company also accrued tickets between when it first applied for the permit and when the city approved it; Rogers said checking whether a company has pending tickets during that time period would “slow the development process.” 

The tickets also should have prevented Crown from purchasing property from the county’s tax auction, according to city law. Yet records show the company was able to purchase a four-bedroom, single-family house in Cadillac Heights in October 2022 while it had unresolved blight tickets. Crown said it had disputed some of the tickets. The city acknowledged the tickets but said they were resolved by the time the sale was recorded months later.  

After the concrete plant opened, the company acquired additional property from homeowners who decided to leave, further transforming the neighborhood. Dobson said the company is buying properties to create a buffer around the plant.

Martin Murray, a University of Michigan urban planning professor, said what’s happening in Cadillac Heights follows a similar pattern to other U.S. cities undergoing redevelopment. Businesses “can promise jobs, they can promise a tax base, and the city will go along with that, because it makes them look better and they’re willing to sacrifice residents,” he said.

City Council President James Tate Jr. and member Scott Benson, who represents the Cadillac Heights neighborhood, voted in favor of the land swap. Tate said he thinks the arrangement benefited the city overall, but that officials should have questioned how Crown would use the properties before they approved the deal.  

“Knowing what I know now, there are some additional protections and questions that I would ask,” he said. “I would never sacrifice one neighborhood to satisfy another, but there are times when you have to look at deals, and there may be some unintended consequences.” 

Benson declined to comment on his decision to approve the deal and said he has advocated for zoning changes that would make the area less industrial.

“They Could Taste the Dust” 

Since the Kronos plant opened four years ago, residents have filed about 80 complaints to both city and state environmental offices, according to records obtained by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. They have sent photos, videos and pleas for help. 

In complaints filed with the state, they described “literal whiteout conditions” and “dust clouds.” They said the dust was blanketing their neighborhood and irritating their eyes. They said they had to stop doing yardwork, go inside and shut all their windows.

“They could feel grit and debris hitting their eyes, that they tried not to inhale but they could taste the dust,” according to a state inspector’s summary of one complaint. The state’s environmental division repeatedly has recommended that Crown spray the site with water to minimize dust, which the company says it does every hour the plant is operating. Inspectors also told Crown multiple times to reduce the speed of its trucks to limit the spread of dust.

Josef Stephens, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said that while the state has noted dust at and around the Kronos site, it has not been opaque enough to warrant a violation.

City officials, too, are aware of residents’ concerns. In 2024, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring companies to control the spread of dust or face penalties. The city set up a hotline and email address so residents could submit complaints. 

Nearly half of the complaints submitted to dust@detroitmi.gov have been about Kronos,  according to city officials. 

Dobson, the company representative, said readings from its air monitor have never exceeded the city’s pollution limits and that the facility is “fully compliant.”

Matthew Tomasz, who lived across the street from Kronos, filed complaints with the city and also ended up in a legal battle with Crown. The company sued him for trespassing on its vacant property next to his home. He countersued, claiming the company had violated the city’s dust ordinance when particles from the concrete facility traveled onto his property, calling it an “invasion.”

“Each day that dust from Kronos or the vacant lots lands on Mr. Tomasz’s property, a new trespass occurs,” according to the complaint. The lawsuits settled in February, but the terms were not made public, records show. 

“I feel like I’m staring into a wasteland every day,” Tomasz said in an interview late last year. He said dust from the plant was so thick that he couldn’t see 10 feet in front of him. “There’s no peace to be had at my house.” 

The city required that Kronos develop and adhere to a plan to limit the amount of dust. But despite five violations since Kronos agreed to adopt a plan, only once has the city’s environmental department fined the company for its failure to comply. The city last month dismissed two tickets issued to Crown, totalling $2,500, for the company’s failure to keep dust from traveling into the neighborhood.

The company has been excused from the dust-related fines, as well as tickets for other reasons, because of an agreement it signed with the city in 2022 after the plant opened. That first-of-its-kind property maintenance agreement gives Crown up to 30 days to fix nonemergency building and environmental violations — and up to 10 days to address overgrown weeds and trash — before it is assessed fines. The city has since entered into similar agreements with two other concrete businesses and a developer.  

The agreement with Crown came after the company racked up blight tickets across the city. At the time it was signed, the city’s law department acknowledged it didn’t know the number of outstanding tickets but agreed that the company could pay $50,000 to resolve all the past violations before the new agreement kicked in. 

One ticket that was excused last year came after Detroit resident Jahdante Smith emailed a complaint to city officials in July with a video showing a cloud of dust blowing near the facility. “This is a ridiculous everyday occurrence,” Smith wrote.

A city inspector issued Crown a $500 ticket seven weeks later for failing to mitigate dust, but the city’s environmental department dismissed it under the agreement. 

The city also waived a $1,000 ticket issued to Crown in October for exceeding state and city requirements to limit dust opacity. The company temporarily suspended operations and agreed to sweep and spray water on the streets daily to control the dust, and the ticket was dismissed, Rogers said. 

City inspectors also alerted Crown to code violations at other properties in the neighborhood, including a vacant lot littered with garbage and another with overgrown weeds and broken tree limbs. An abandoned home was unsecured, leaving it open to trespassers, a city inspector found. 

Because of its agreement with the city, Crown was not issued any fines after it addressed the issues with the three properties. The vacant home has been demolished, and the other lots are now barren. 

However, a recent visit to the neighborhood showed that similar issues have resurfaced: Another home that Crown purchased in January had missing first-floor windows and no front door, allowing anyone to enter. The lawn was covered in tall weeds and grass, and trash littered the yard. Crown plans to demolish the home but is waiting on the utilities to be disconnected, said Dobson, the company representative.

Dobson said the property maintenance agreement has worked because the company responds to concerns and fixes “the potential violation.” Conrad Mallett, the city’s top attorney, who negotiated the agreement, said it is “working well from the perspective of both parties.”

But residents and advocates have continued to protest, speak out at City Council meetings and collect hundreds of signatures to shut the plant down and get the area rezoned to be less industrial. Councilmember Benson asked the city’s law department about legal avenues the city could pursue to close Kronos.

The department, in response, said officials have no legal authority to interfere because the plant is properly permitted and complies with zoning regulations and city rules. And even though the city is considering rezoning some parts of Cadillac Heights to make them less industrial, the plans stop just short of the lots owned by Crown, records show.

The Moroun family continues to expand its concrete supply business, called Hercules Material Holdings, which now has seven locations in Michigan. Other facilities are expected to open in Toledo, Ohio, and Windsor, Ontario, where the Morouns have been purchasing properties for decades.

Residents Move Out  

Some Cadillac Heights residents say they can’t coexist with the concrete plant. 

They recently turned to the Wayne County Commission for help. At a May county committee meeting, advocate Sharon Buttry told commissioners that residents are frustrated that Crown hasn’t been ticketed more.

Commissioners voted to pass a resolution urging the state and city to further monitor the site and revoke permits if there are violations. “Our neighborhoods should never have to sacrifice their health and peace of mind for industrial operations that create ongoing public nuisance concerns,” county Commissioner Martha G. Scott said in an interview. 

The county is paying a local air monitoring company, JustAir, to track and analyze air quality near Kronos. The company found the quality was “measurably worse” during the six days of the week when Kronos operates.

Separately, Mayor Mary Sheffield, who took office this year, directed the city’s environmental agency to install four monitors near the plant so residents “knew that the administration is taking their concerns seriously,” according to city spokesperson John Roach. He said the monitors have not measured pollution that exceeds moderate levels. (Sheffield voted against the land swap when she was on City Council.) 

Kronos representatives, meanwhile, have worked to build public support. The company has said that it has hired Detroiters to work at the plant, donated food and backpacks to community groups, and paved a new parking lot for a neighborhood church. A few years ago, it published renderings online showing how it would improve the neighborhood with paved sidewalks, mature trees and 6-foot-tall grassy hills to create a buffer from the plant.

Those images don’t match what the neighborhood looks like. Sidewalks are missing or cracked. Barbed wire hangs from fences over debris-strewn lots. Water sprayed to control dust creeps into the streets, creating small pools of green liquid. Lots are barren and gray after being treated with herbicides to prevent weeds.

Dobson said Crown hasn’t been able to carry out the improvements because the city hasn’t signed off on its plan. Roach said the city won’t grant permission until the company addresses code violations, including an unpermitted chain-link fence and inadequate screening to hide operations. 

If Crown doesn’t make the improvements soon, Mitchell Gross, who lives across the street from Kronos, said he’s going to plant evergreen trees himself “to filter the dust.” 

He said he keeps his windows shut and that his son and his two young grandchildren, who used to live with him, have left Detroit to protect their health. “They’re in a nice place and getting good air to breathe,” said Gross, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 50 years.

Some of Cadillac Heights’ longtime residents aren’t sticking around to find out whether things will improve. At least 16 residents who lived in the area closest to the Kronos plant have sold their land to Crown since the land swap, according to records reviewed by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. The sellers have received “a windfall,” with an average 2024 purchase price of $114,000 that has been “increasing,” according to Crown representative Dobson. 

Bitely, the spokesperson for Duggan, said that having so many private sales to one entity “had never happened before in Detroit.”

Samantha Flowers was among the first residents to fight against the concrete operation. Last year, she texted BridgeDetroit and ProPublica a video of the plant, taken at 6:15 a.m., to demonstrate the daily noise and bright lights residents are accustomed to. “Typical morning in the neighborhood,” she wrote. 

Flowers sold her home and five other parcels to Crown in January for $125,000, according to the county’s online records. Tomasz, who had filed a lawsuit against the company, gave up his hope of buying the lot next to his and instead sold his home to the company for $150,000. Dobson said the property will be used to create additional buffering from the plant.

Kary, however, plans to live out her final years in her family’s home. She pays for grass seed to maintain the Crown-owned vacant lot next to hers so she can look out her windows at something nice. 

“It’s home,” she said. “I’m not leaving.”

The post Left in the Dust: How a Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant Took Over a Detroit Community appeared first on ProPublica.

Guards at an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, could see a detainee in his cell with one end of a bedsheet wrapped around his neck and the other tied to the door handle. If they opened the door, the sheet would tighten and strangle him. 

The detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, had been in detention at Camp East Montana for a month by then. The facility itself was still relatively new and had been opened as part of the Trump administration’s plans to house and quickly deport thousands of immigrants at a time.

Almost immediately after being admitted, the 55-year-old Cuban immigrant began expressing frustration about his care, according to a nearly 300-page unpublished medical examiner’s investigative report. 

The report, reviewed by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, includes dozens of notes that detail medical staff interactions with Lunas Campos, who had a history of mental illness and had been previously institutionalized in New York. 

The report and the records it contains offer a rare and disturbing look at how immigrant detention facilities — erected rapidly and with little oversight — manage detainees with serious mental health needs. The records paint a portrait of a man in a crisis and a facility whose staff, on several occasions, discussed transferring him to a facility where he could get a higher level of care. 

According to the records, he complained at least eight times to staff about skipped or late doses of antipsychotic drugs to treat his depression, anxiety and hallucinations. He “expressed frustration regarding his medication dosage,” says a Sept. 9 entry from medical staff. 

They point to moments of exasperation that led to self-harm. He banged his head against the wall after he couldn’t afford to pay the charges to talk with his children in New York. That left him with a black eye. In response, staff simply noted that they spoke with him about “not hitting his head against the wall bc he must take care of his brain and his eyes.” 

The incident with the noose and the doorknob came in early October. A mental health provider eventually coaxed him to untie it. Notes detailing the incident stated that Lunas Campos affirmed he wasn’t suicidal. The notes dismissed what occurred as a “suicidal gesture made to force security staff to release him” from the isolation room where he had been segregated from the rest of the detainees. Hospitalization, the notes stated, was “not clinically indicated at this time based on assessed risk and protective factors.”

Lunas Campos died in detention nearly three months later, after an altercation with guards over his medication. The Trump administration initially claimed that he had experienced medical distress, but a coroner later ruled his death a homicide. 

The conflicting accounts over the cause of his death have drawn significant media attention and served to rally advocacy groups who have alleged that it is one of the more shocking pieces of evidence of the dangerous conditions endured by immigrants in federal detention facilities. 

But little had been reported about Lunas Campos’ condition and treatment before that day. On Monday, Lunas Campos’ three children sued the companies running the facility at the time of his death. The lawsuit alleged that guards killed him and argued negligence, including missed medication doses and the improper use of force and restraint. The Washington Post on Thursday reported that Lunas Campos had repeatedly sought treatment for his mental illness, pointing to the medical examiner’s investigative report. The companies have not responded to the allegations in court filings and did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment.

ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed the contents of the report several weeks ago. Two doctors, who are experts on mental health and deaths in detention, also reviewed the report at the news organizations’ request. The takeaway was clear: The detainee asked for help, the facility staff failed to adequately respond.

The news organizations separately reviewed more than 160 emergency calls, as well as records and interviews with staff and government officials familiar with the detention center. They show medical and mental health emergencies beyond those experienced by Lunas Campos, as well as staff indicating they felt ill-equipped to respond. Detainees had little access to recreational activities and time outside, which mental health experts say exacerbates their despair. Staff also ignored warning signs, such as detainees’ previous efforts to harm themselves.

“It’s civil detention,” said Will Horowitz, an attorney representing Lunas Campos’ adult children in the lawsuit. “They’re not in detention because they’ve committed a crime.”  

The White House declined to comment. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview and did not answer a list of written questions. The administration has previously dismissed detainee accounts of inadequate medical care and poor conditions at Camp East Montana and other detention centers as “false” and called them “fearmongering clickbait.” Federal officials have repeatedly said that for many immigrants, the medical care they receive in detention is the best in their lives.

In Lunas Campos’ case, officials from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, initially minimized the incident that led to his death, pointing to his criminal history. Later, in response to news reports that the medical examiner planned to rule the death a homicide, a DHS spokesperson said guards had used force to keep him from killing himself. 

Lunas Campos was sentenced to a year in jail after a 2003 conviction for sexual contact with a child under the age of 11, according to The Associated Press. The news organization also reported that he was convicted of attempting to sell a controlled substance and sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervision in 2009.

Horowitz said Lunas Campos’ criminal history is irrelevant to his detention. Lunas Campos’ children declined to comment on the failures highlighted in the medical examiner’s report or on his criminal history, but, Horowitz said, “They want people to know that he was a person like anyone else and that he didn’t need to die.” 

In a report issued after Lunas Campos’ death, DHS officials said he received regular medical and psychiatric evaluations, with staff adjusting his medication as needed. They also contended that he was monitored for suicidal ideation. Investigative records from the El Paso medical examiner show a period during which facility staff checked on him every 15 minutes following his suicide attempt, as required by the federal government. 

But the medical examiner’s report also brings into focus a series of breakdowns in care, according to Dr. Sanjay Basu, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He said Lunas Campos’ case is a model of how such moments compound, creating crisis after crisis with dire outcomes.

“The clinical trajectory documented in his chart — escalating agitation, self-harm, pressured speech, repeated confrontations with staff over medication — is the predictable result of erratic psychotropic medication administration in a patient with serious mental illness,” Basu said.

He pointed to records that show staff didn’t transfer Lunas Campos to a facility that could better treat his mental health, even after noting that they were working to move him as early as Oct. 8. Lunas Campos was also repeatedly placed in segregation cells, separate from the rest of the camp population, which had little more than a bed in them. The government’s own detention standards say staff should generally make every effort to avoid placing detainees with a serious mental illness in segregation. 

Most critically, instead of taking his previous suicide attempt seriously, staff interpreted it as an effort to manipulate them, Basu said.

The records, Basu said, clearly show “systemic neglect.” 

A System Unraveling

Camp East Montana was supposed to be the model for how detention centers across the country would operate under President Donald Trump’s administration. It was near the U.S.-Mexico border and had easy access to a highway and an airfield to quickly transport and deport unauthorized immigrants. Its location on barren, massive Fort Bliss land also allowed for a space that could hold up to 10,000 unauthorized immigrants at a time, more than any other facility in the country.

Instead, the detention center became an example of what could go wrong. 

Within months of the camp’s opening, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the federal government, published accounts from immigrants who said they were beaten by guards, denied lifesaving medication and kept in squalid conditions with sewage at times spilling into their eating areas. Detainees commonly caught measles or tuberculosis. The government hasn’t responded formally to the lawsuit, but in statements to the media a DHS spokesperson said claims of inhumane conditions and detainees being abused are “categorically false.” 

The problems treating people with mental health challenges were not as visible but stacked up in ways that experts said added mental distress and could contribute to more suicide attempts. In the worst cases, they said, detainees unnecessarily died.

The facility was never set up to house detainees struggling with serious mental health conditions, a DHS official and a medical provider who worked there told ProPublica and the Tribune. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government did not authorize them to discuss conditions at the camp. 

Several staffers told the news organizations that they had a lot of relevant information they could share, but they had signed nondisclosure agreements.   

The DHS official said immigrants didn’t have adequate space to read, pray, write or get legal services. They were kept inside windowless cells with nothing to do. Detainees were also granted little time outside, partly because the facility’s outdoor space was not big enough for all of them, a government report later found. The federal government requires detention centers to provide detainees at least one hour of outdoor time per day, but many got only a couple of hours a week, detainees told ProPublica and the Tribune. 

“Recreation and amenities, games, books, TVs, are all lifelines for people in detention,” the DHS official, who did not participate in the report, said. 

Prolonged confinement made detainees more anxious and desperate, at times leading to hunger strikes and fights. Immigrants were only supposed to remain at Camp East Montana for a maximum of two weeks, according to contract documents and statements from federal officials. When Lunas Campos died, the typical detainee had spent 38 days in the facility, according to a ProPublica analysis of government data provided to the Deportation Data Project, which collects and posts immigration enforcement information. He had been there far longer, more than 100 days.

Dr. Katherine Peeler, a medical adviser for the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights who has studied healthcare in immigration detention centers, said that the conditions reported at Camp East Montana signal that it is not a safe place for any detained individual. 

“You’ve been detained. You don’t know what the process is going to be. You don’t know when you’re going to be released,” Peeler said. “It’s really hard to trust people who are in charge to give you accurate information and so, as a result, you’re going to have a lot more despair and a lot more kind of anguish.” 

The situation is worse for people with a history of mental illness, Peeler said. Solitary confinement can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, self-harm and suicide risks, according to a 2024 report that Peeler co-authored with partners, including students and staff at Harvard University. 

“We are creating a mental health crisis that does not need to be there,” Peeler said.

Some detainees at Camp East Montana who showed signs of potential self-harm were placed in isolation rooms that were not suicide-proof. They had doorknobs and mesh ceilings to which detainees who wanted to harm themselves could tie a bedsheet, the DHS official said. 

National detention standards don’t specify the number of suicide-proof rooms needed in each facility but make clear that detainees who are suicidal should be placed in rooms “free of objects and structural elements that could facilitate a suicide attempt.” 

“It’s insane,” said the medical provider who spoke to ProPublica and the Tribune. “If somebody wants to kill themselves, there’s nowhere to put them that’s actually safe.” 

“They Just Didn’t Do It”

Lunas Campos was in such a room when he first tried to commit suicide. By then, staff had reported at least three other suicide attempts to 911.

There were the two calls in September, one about a detainee who lay on the floor holding his stomach in agony and unable to speak after swallowing an unknown object. The other about a man biting his arms and trying to cut his wrists with a piece of cardboard and a comb. 

Another call came in October, the day before Lunas Campos was spotted with a sheet tied around his neck. A man being kept in a medical isolation room to rule out tuberculosis tried to hang himself, the caller told the 911 operator. 

Suicide attempts are warning signs of a larger problem at a detention center, which could include inadequate strategies for observing or flagging self-harm or more general medical issues, said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior official at ICE who served in the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations. 

Out of 53 deaths in ICE custody since Trump returned to the White House, at least 10 have been reported as presumed suicides. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for independent investigations into the ICE deaths and expressed alarm over the reported use of solitary confinement.

“You would hope that if you have a number of negative outcomes of problematic incidents like that, that they would do critical incident reviews, figure out what was going on and try to take corrective action,” Trickler-McNulty said.

Last week, DHS’s inspector general launched probes into detainee deaths and whether the department was following its own standards on the use of force, citing a rise in ICE custody fatalities since 2022. 

Other problems were already identified in a report released last month by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found millions of dollars had been wasted, pointed to gaps in medical care and noted unsanitary conditions at the El Paso facility. The report mentions that in October, ICE officials raised concerns with the contractors running the facility about the lack of windows on some doors in medical holding rooms, which prevented staff from easily seeing what was happening inside. 

The DHS official flagged several other problems that the government could have worked to improve. It could have assigned more ICE agents to help with chronic staffing shortages, created more opportunities for recreational activities and built special tents with suicide-prevention rooms, the DHS official said. 

“There was no lack of money or space and there was an obvious incentive to do it,” the official said, referring to the suicide attempts at the facility. “They just didn’t do it.”

There seemed to be a push-pull between career ICE staff and political appointees, the DHS official told the news organizations. 

“The political side didn’t want to give the appearance that it was so chaotic, they wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening,” the official said. 

Even without the proposed changes, staff at the detention center should have done more to treat Lunas Campos’ mental illness, said Joanne Ahola, a psychiatrist who has spent 17 years evaluating immigrants inside detention centers for Physicians for Human Rights’ volunteer Asylum Network. She also reviewed his records at the request of ProPublica and the Tribune.  

Lunas Campos’ early pleas for help continued throughout his detention. Nearly two weeks after his suicide attempt, he again flagged that he wasn’t getting his medications.

“Pt reported being very frustrated and anxious because he had not received his medication for a couple of days,” a medical note from Oct. 19 read. It noted that Lunas Campos was visibly “irritated and yelling.”

Another note on Nov. 10, said Lunas Campos “had not gotten his medications since Nov. 6.” 

And, on Nov. 11, more than a month after staff told Lunas Campos that they were working to move him to a facility with a higher level of care, shorthanded as HLOC, he was still waiting. “Continues to request transfer to HLOC stating conditions at current facility are adversely affecting his mental health,” according to a note from that date.

Lunas Campos was temporarily moved to another facility, but it was another detention center that experts say did not provide the higher level of care he needed.

On Jan. 2, a day before his death, he returned to Camp East Montana. A note from medical staff at 9:42 p.m. said they “provided emotional support,” “reviewed grounding and breathing techniques to manage anxiety,” encouraged him “to seek ongoing mental health support as needed,” and added his name to the medical sick call for a psychiatric evaluation. 

“This is a man who needed regular medications, a full evaluation, mental health clinicians and, no doubt, re-hospitalization,” Ahola said.  

“Instead, it almost seems like it was brushed off or brushed under the rug,” she added. 

Less than two weeks after Lunas Campos’ death, the health administrator at Camp East Montana called 911 again.

Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan native, was found in a cell with his pants tied around his neck. He was in a room with no windows.The staff found him as they were doing routine checks.

An ambulance was needed, the health administrator told the operator, explaining where emergency responders should go upon arrival at the facility. Without hesitation, he added, “They’ve been out here many times.” 

Díaz, who cooked chicken and washed dishes at a Minneapolis Korean restaurant, had been picked up and flown to Camp East Montana a week earlier. The GAO noted that ICE itself later acknowledged in a report that staff had not properly followed procedures after he “exhibited risk factors for suicide.” Staff placed him in a medical holding room — not a suicide-resitant cell — and left him unattended for periods longer than 15 minutes, the GAO stated. 

His autopsy, which was conducted by the military, has not been made public. 

The post “He Didn’t Need to Die.” How an Immigration Detention Center Repeatedly Failed to Address a Mental Health Crisis. appeared first on ProPublica.

Massachusetts’ deadline to prosecute rape cases will no longer be one of the strictest in the nation under a bill Gov. Maura Healey pledged to sign into law.

State law currently bars nearly all rape prosecutions involving cases with adult victims after 15 years, making it difficult to charge someone after that deadline even in cases where new evidence is likely to lead to a conviction. The new law would ensure that if DNA is matched to a suspect after that 15-year window, prosecutors could file charges indefinitely. 

Healey pushed to revise the prosecution deadline for rape as part of her annual budget proposal in January. The move came after WBUR and ProPublica found that as many as 47 other states allow more time to charge rapes or similar sexual assaults than Massachusetts. 

Many of those states extended their deadlines in recent decades as DNA technology helped solve old cases and as evidence mounted that police across the nation had failed to fully investigate rape cases.

Healey’s proposal survived the legislature’s monthslong budget process. She announced Wednesday that she’d sign the $63.4 billion budget and has until July 11 to approve it. It would go into effect as soon as it’s signed.

“Today, DNA evidence can provide new answers years later, and our laws should reflect that reality,” Healey said in a statement. “This change gives survivors another path to justice while helping law enforcement hold violent offenders accountable.”

Prosecutors must still file charges within the existing 15-year deadline if a match is made within that timeframe, as they were required to under the old law. The new law could open the door to prosecution for cases for which the statute of limitations has not yet passed. 

In Massachusetts, legislators have tried unsuccessfully to change the rape statute of limitations every session since 2011, WBUR found. Defense attorneys opposed those bills, saying a longer deadline risked violating the rights of the accused.

Read more

DNA Finally Tied a Man to Her Rape. It Didn’t Matter.

Rape survivors have worked with state Rep. Adam Scanlon, a Democrat, for the last five years to create a DNA exception, he said. They joined the effort because they were frustrated that they could no longer pursue justice after the deadline, even when new evidence emerged.  

 ”It gives them hope in the future to ensure that no one has to suffer the same indignities,” Scanlon said, adding, “This was a long process driven by survivors.” 

Some survivors whose cases were too old to be prosecuted pushed for the change. One of them was Louise, who was the focus of WBUR and ProPublica’s investigation. WBUR doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault without their permission and agreed to identify Louise only by her middle name.

In October 2005, she was raped and repeatedly stabbed by a man who gave her a ride in Boston, according to police and court records. Seventeen years later, a DNA match identified an area man as a suspect. 

DNA evidence also linked that suspect to another rape. Suffolk County prosecutors charged the man in both cases in 2022, but had to drop the cases because the statute of limitations had expired. He maintained his innocence. Had this law been enacted a few years ago, Louise could have seen the suspect in her case face trial.

“It really was devastating,” Louise said. “ I never fathomed that time lapsing would be an issue.” 

Louise testified before state legislators in support of the DNA exception after her interview with WBUR. She said she’s relieved it will become law.   

“It’s nice to have the government move in the right direction, which builds a sense of trust, a sense of safety — and justice,” Louise said.

The post Massachusetts Set to Extend Statute of Limitations for Rape Cases With DNA Evidence appeared first on ProPublica.

Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. 

At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.

Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.

Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story? 

“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.

Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, per the website, had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. This was puzzling: Our reporting had led us to believe Calce was struggling to raise enough money for a single project in the U.S., not overseeing a massive, multinational oil storage corporation. 

Had we been wrong? 

We turned to Google to learn more about the company’s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience at major energy firms. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, “built the company’s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,” according to his bio. But we couldn’t find any trace of either of them online. Chalk it up to common names? 

We then Googled one of the more distinct names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had “spearheaded the ‘Future Fuels’ program, preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen.” But, again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.

When we searched the company’s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.

We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead. 

We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website. 

What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed an odd notation, “This feature isn’t implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”

We checked the site’s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it, and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Appear on Google and AI search automatically.”

Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company’s bona fides:

When I searched for an award the company claimed on its website to have won, the Google AI Overview said that “Recent notable recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oil and terminal operations sector.”

Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is a real LLC. But everything on its website — from its history of the company, to its job postings, a diversity and inclusion policy — appears to be fictional. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the proprietor of the world’s primary research tool, has rolled out AI Overviews that can indiscriminately take in fake material and authoritatively spit it back out as real.

In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: “AI Overviews are rooted in our core Search ranking systems, surfacing reliable and high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there might not be high quality information published that matches the query — and we use these examples to improve our search systems.”

After we reached out to Hostinger, the company pulled down the site. “After receiving your inquiry, we carried out an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we suspended the website and the account behind it in line with our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, The New York Times reported on an analysis that found Google’s AI Overviews were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times, noting that that added up to “tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour” given vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study has “serious holes.” The company has acknowledged that AI Overviews “can make mistakes.”) 

Read More

An Indian Billionaire Was Targeted by Trump. Then He Poured Money Into a Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr.

A BBC reporter wrote a fictional article naming himself the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs, and Google’s AI as well as ChatGPT quickly picked it up and parroted it back.  

And the source material for the AI Overviews also appears eminently gameable, even when not trafficking in actual fiction. “It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests,” ran a recent headline in 404 Media. 

The mystery website ended up as just a single paragraph in our story. But the larger implication is obvious: fakes, counterfeits and frauds that would have taken considerable effort to create just a few years ago can now be churned out pretty much instantly.

While preparing this piece, we reached out to Calce asking about the site. An attorney for his company, America First Refining, replied to us with a letter dated June 24 that the attorney sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.  

“I write to demand immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to America First’s office address on your website,” the letter said. “As you are aware, America First has no connection or affiliation with the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website and has not authorized the use of its corporate address there.”

I’m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it put up by some malicious actor who simply found the company’s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was it a test site that was mistakenly put online? Or could it have been designed for consumption by someone who was meant to think it was real? 

We don’t know, and our emails to the press contact listed on the website, media@brownsvilleenergyterminals.com, bounced back.

The post How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral appeared first on ProPublica.

In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court.

These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent. 

The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked — and has done so with little to no explanation. 

These emergency decisions have thrown lower courts’ processes into turmoil and have sometimes directly contradicted longstanding legal precedent. The outcomes have been consequential: The high court has used the process to limit federal courts from issuing nationwide injunctions and diminished Congress’ authority over federal agencies, and it has allowed for the detention of American citizens by immigration agents. 

ProPublica analyzed over two decades of Supreme Court rulings, which cover all of the years under Chief Justice John Roberts and go as far back as the online archives allow. We found that when the last court term ended, justices had issued 63 orders on the shadow docket, as opposed to 56 orders on the more traditional merits docket — where the court hears oral arguments scheduled months in advance and the justices issue signed opinions.

Legal scholars and court watchers were shocked by our finding. They told ProPublica it’s likely the first time in modern history that so many consequential decisions were made in secret by its nine members.

“The patterns show a court going out of its way to enable Trump,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and a Supreme Court analyst. He said that our findings reinforce the appearance that the justices are voting on their political preferences. 

“That’s the real blow to the court’s credibility,” he said.

Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to a detailed list of questions. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House wrote, “President Trump has faced a historically unprecedented number of injunctions by liberal lower court judges, the same judges who would rather push their own policy schemes and undermine the Administration’s lawful agenda. President Trump will not stop implementing the America First initiatives on which he was elected.”

For the First Time in Two Decades, Decisions on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Outnumber the Merits Docket

There are two ways to get a decision from the Supreme Court. One is to exhaust your appeals to lower courts and ask to argue your case in front of the high court. The justices determine whether to take the case on, and if they do, lawyers argue their case in front of them. The other is to petition the justices directly via the emergency docket — to freeze a lower court ruling or government policy while the case goes through appeal.

The appeals to the emergency docket have long outnumbered those to the merits docket, but most are procedural requests or requests to stay execution for capital offenses. When those are removed, what’s left is known as the shadow docket — cases that seek to skip the usual order of things and ask for a quick ruling from the court’s justices.

The modern shadow docket was born in 2016 when the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, experts say. Papers obtained by The New York Times show that liberal justices at the time urged Roberts not to decide the case on an emergency basis because it broke with longtime precedent. The conservative justices, meanwhile, forcefully argued that the president’s plan would eventually be overturned by the court anyway and that it would put too much of a burden on the energy industry.

Driven by its numerous losses in lower courts, the current Trump administration appeals to the emergency docket significantly more often than previous administrations, and the court has increasingly agreed to take quick action on its appeals.

The Obama and George W. Bush administrations together filed just eight petitions in 16 years. The Trump administration filed 32 in 2025 alone, an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found.

The increased willingness of the Roberts court to intervene on Trump’s behalf — as well as in other issues that favor conservatives and Trump allies — has upended American life, said Donald Ayer, a former deputy solicitor general and deputy attorney general who served under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

“On many subjects of real importance to our future, they’ve demolished what used to be the law,” he said.

Public scrutiny of the shadow docket ramped up in September 2021 after the Supreme Court used it to issue a one-paragraph, unsigned opinion that further rolled back abortion rights established in the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. In the order, the court refused to block Texas’ Senate Bill 8, the “Heartbeat Act,” which banned abortion after an embryo’s cardiac activity is detectable, typically at six weeks of pregnancy and before many people know they are pregnant. Protests erupted nationwide, and the Senate held a hearing on the shadow docket.

In an unusual public acknowledgement, Justice Elena Kagan referenced the shadow docket by name in her scathing dissent, accusing the majority of green-lighting a “patently unconstitutional law” with only a cursory review in less than 72 hours.

“In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decisionmaking — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend,” Kagan wrote.

That an opinion was even issued and that four of the justices signed their names to it was uncommon. On the shadow docket, justices do not have to make their votes known. In rare cases, their votes are revealed in terse indications that they grant or deny the application, or even more rarely, as an opinion. We found that just 17% of votes cast had any sort of public record of a vote or opinion.

Responding to public criticism, Justice Samuel Alito contended that the court isn’t to blame for the rise in shadow docket cases. “We do not file these emergency applications,” he said. “Parties file them.”

The debate has continued. “We cannot expect the public to have faith in our judicial system if, without clear explanation, we consistently green-light harmful acts that do real damage,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during an April speech on the shadow docket at Yale Law School.

Until this past Supreme Court term, emergency applications fluctuated year to year but showed no clear upward trend. The applications are given first to a single justice, who decides if a case is worth referring to the full court. In recent years, justices have referred more of such appeals for a review and vote by the full court.

Last term, when there were both more cases and more referrals to the full court, the appeals to the shadow docket finally overtook those to the merits docket.

Emergency Applications Referred for a Full Court Vote Have Risen Sharply

Total applications have varied over the last two decades, with a surge last term under President Donald Trump. 

The cases were consequential. On June 23, 2025, after a lower court had ruled that eight men being deported to South Sudan should have due process, the Supreme Court intervened after a request from the administration to stop that order. The men were deported. The majority didn’t issue an opinion justifying its ruling.

Three months later, the Supreme Court voted to allow immigration agents to stop people based on racial or ethnic characteristics while still-ongoing litigation against it proceeded. To justify the decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a rare shadow docket opinion that people who were in the country legally would be “free to go after the brief encounter.” These became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Last year, ProPublica found more than 170 citizens who had been stopped and detained by ICE agents. The more than 50 Americans held even after agents learned of their citizenship were almost all Latino.

And in May, while an election in Louisiana was already underway, the justices allowed the state to immediately redraw its electoral map, removing one of the two majority-Black voting districts. Louisiana can now use that map for the 2026 midterms as part of a nationwide redistricting battle for control of the House of Representatives — an effort touched off by Trump’s call for Republican-led states to create more safe seats for themselves.

Roberts once signed on to a Kagan dissent that assailed the shadow docket. But our analysis found that he has referred more substantive cases for a vote by the full court than any other justice, going from just one in the 2005 term when he joined the court to nearly half of all referrals in the last term.

There is an additional difference between the shadow docket and the merits docket. After the court holds public argument, the justices’ ultimate merits decisions are closely watched and extensively covered by the press. The summer’s “decision season,” when the final and most significant rulings come down, has a predictable cadence that ends when the justices go on summer recess. Not so with the shadow docket. Increasingly, the justices are making big decisions after they’ve issued their final merits docket decision, when public attention has waned.

A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., have sponsored legislation to make the shadow docket more transparent.

Raskin told ProPublica that the court’s legitimacy has fallen with every significant decision made without “real opinions or analysis.”

“Lower federal courts have been deciding against the Trump administration in an overwhelming majority of cases with weighty and well-reasoned opinions,” Raskin said in a written statement. “Yet when things get to the twilight zone of the shadow docket, the Supreme Court is overturning 100-page opinions with a flippant sentence or two.” He added, “The result is a body that looks less like a Supreme Court and more like a Royal Court rubber stamping the madness and folly of the Trump Administration.”

“The jurisprudence of the Roberts Court today is as murky as the green algae water in the Reflecting Pool.”

How We Reported This Story

To compare the number of cases on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to the traditional merits docket, we compared emergency applications listed on the court’s online docket search with counts of decisions compiled in Penn State’s Supreme Court Database (Version 2025 Release 01). For the merits docket, we counted only signed decisions in argued cases, the typical format for those rulings.

The court’s online docket goes back to the year 2000, but our analysis looks at Supreme Court terms from October 2003 to October 2025, where emergency applications are easily identified by the letter “A” in their docket number.

We identified more than 27,000 emergency applications during that period, including thousands of requests that are not commonly understood to be a part of the shadow docket. Most appeals to the emergency docket are the type of requests that were traditionally handled there: procedural requests, such as extending the time to file, and requests to stay execution for capital offenses. The remainder are the focus of our reporting.

Substantive Shadow Docket Cases Are a Small Fraction of All Emergency Applications

We defined a substantive application on the shadow docket as any filing where the full court was asked to intervene in the traditional appeals process, such as staying a lower court’s order. 

Most of the cases we excluded are decided by just one justice, each of whom oversees one or more federal circuits and has the power to refer filings to the wider court. When the cases are referred to the full court, they are the subject of a vote by the justices. We ran our approach by multiple experts, all of whom found it sound.

A filer can appeal to another justice if their application is denied. The next justice to receive the application always refers it to the full court. We did not include these renewed applications because our analysis found the court has never granted one.

The court has labeled capital punishment cases only since the October 2017 term. To identify them prior to that, we flagged applications for stays of execution. We then manually reviewed every case referred to the full court. For applications decided by a single justice, we used an AI model to flag potential capital cases by examining the parties on the application and the relief requested. The model flagged over 60 possible capital cases, and those were manually reviewed. Despite our effort, it is possible some capital cases may still be included in our final tallies before the 2017 term.

Although rulings on the shadow docket are typically unsigned and do not include vote breakdowns, we were able to identify how a justice voted in some cases. The analysis is based on either the opinions issued by the justices, most of which are dissenting opinions, or if the justice indicated they would have granted or denied. In some decisions, the justices issued a statement not attached to either a grant or denial. We did not record these as votes.

The post A Troubling Milestone: Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes With Little Justification appeared first on ProPublica.

It took less than a day for the detective to give up on the case. A patrol officer had reported a harrowing, violent midnight rape in a Syracuse, New York, park. Hospital records recounted that the victim, an 18-year-old freshman at Syracuse University, was “crying uncontrollably.” Her face was bruised, and she had scratches on her neck. Her hymen had been lacerated in two places. Her urine was “grossly bloody,” according to the hospital report, and there was semen inside her.

At 8 on the morning after the assault, after the victim looked fruitlessly through books of mug shots in hopes of identifying her assailant, Syracuse detective George Lorenz interviewed her. She had been awake most of the night for a first police interview, followed by forensic and medical exams: everything from gathering physical evidence of the rape to X-rays of her skull because the attacker had pounded her head on a brick walkway. To alleviate the pain from her injuries, she had been given Demerol, a powerful opioid.

Lorenz, a burly 17-year veteran of the department who had worked as a meat cutter and truck driver before becoming a police officer, seemed annoyed that she had trouble staying awake, according to her subsequent account. “That’s inconsequential, just the facts,” he barked when he thought she was providing extraneous detail.

The detective was dubious that a rape had occurred, according to his preliminary report. “It is this writer’s opinion, after interview of the victim, that this case, as presented by the victim, is not completely factual,” he wrote. After speaking to the male student whom the victim had been visiting before she was attacked, the detective checked the crime scene for anything his colleagues, who had recovered a knife and the victim’s glasses, might have missed.

That was the totality of Lorenz’s investigation. Five hours after receiving the case, in a report marked 13:00 on May 8, 1981, he placed it in the “inactive file pending further info.” The consequences of that decision are still playing out nearly a half-century later.

Alice Sebold returned to campus for the fall semester that year, aware that nobody was looking for her rapist. She happened to encounter a man on the street and, with a jolt of terrified recognition, was certain she recognized her attacker. Sebold brought him to the attention of the police. Her testimony convicted the man, who spent 16 years in prison and nearly 23 more as a registered sex offender.

Sebold was no ordinary survivor. At a time when few even reported rapes, she publicly described her experience in searing detail — in op-eds, on “Oprah” and then in a memoir about the attack and its aftermath — inspiring others to speak out rather than live in silent shame. That memoir, “Lucky,” was published in 1999, then sold a million copies after her first novel, “The Lovely Bones,” became a publishing phenomenon and, later, a Hollywood movie. Years after that, an attempt to turn “Lucky” into a movie led screenwriters and producers to examine the badly flawed police work and prosecution stemming from the assault of Sebold. The details had been sitting in plain sight in Sebold’s memoir.

The case publicly disintegrated in 2021 when a judge vacated the conviction of Anthony Broadwater and Syracuse’s district attorney said in court that the prosecution “should never have happened.” Involving, as it did, a white woman accusing a poor Black man of rape, and coming back to court a year after the convulsions caused by the murder of George Floyd, the news detonated in the media, with Sebold vilified even after she apologized to Broadwater. The case was yet another reminder, if reminder was needed, of the racism in the U.S. justice system. And what had once been a central identity for Sebold — a person who had built a voice and a career out of standing up to sexual violence — suddenly turned on its head.

As all of those details unspooled in court, on television, and in the pages of The New York Times and the Syracuse press, two former colleagues of mine began to report on the case. One detail lost in the frenzy raised the question of how many other victims had been left behind and what else the police might have missed: The district attorney said in court that there had been other rapes in the same park where Sebold had been attacked, including one a little over a week after Broadwater’s conviction. The DA expressed frustration that “nobody might have put two and two together back then.” My former colleagues moved on to other projects and publications.

Eventually my editors asked me to pick up where they left off. What could we uncover if we tried today to investigate the case that the Syracuse police never truly investigated — Sebold’s — as well as any others that may have been related? Could we untangle how things went so wrong and perhaps even point to a potential culprit? And if the authorities had bungled the case this badly, what mistakes had they made in other cases and what could be learned from those errors?

As an investigative reporter with almost two decades at ProPublica, many of those years focused on criminal justice, I have delved into countless cases gone wrong. On one occasion, I set out to report an article on a man unjustly convicted of murder — a case where an appeals court had belatedly found prosecutorial misconduct serious enough to overturn his conviction — only to have the man confess to me that in fact he had pulled the trigger. He recounted the victim’s dying words and told me, “I did what I had to do.”

Sebold’s case would turn out to be far more complex than that one, and its layers and effects far broader than what emerged in the wake of the exoneration. There were even more turns — including civil litigation that continues to this day — in what was already a baroque narrative.

Or so I would learn after I embarked on what became two and a half years of reporting, trying to excavate the Syracuse criminal justice system in an era before DNA evidence and cellphones, before the Police Department even had computers, a time in which cities all over the country were grappling with a massive rise in violent crime. Reconstructing the truth decades after the fact, needless to say, is even harder than trying to pin it down in the moment.

What’s clear is that no part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And one of the most powerful institutions in the city, Syracuse University, seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it. There were police reports of sexual assaults near the campus marked “no press.” A former detective testified that the files were marked that way at the university’s request.

In this atmosphere, at least one serial rapist was on the streets — and sexual assaults that closely resembled Sebold’s continued for years, even while Broadwater was behind bars. Meanwhile, the case gnawed at former Syracuse detective Paul Clapper. He wondered whether the wrong man had been sent to prison. After he left the force, he raised the name of a confessed and convicted rapist who closely matched the physical description of Sebold’s assailant but committed most of his crimes indoors rather than outside.

That man’s record was lengthy and violent. I eventually found myself knocking on his battered door, wondering whether, at long last, I had found the true perpetrator. Or was I falling into the same trap that the Syracuse criminal justice system had tumbled into when it wrongly convicted Anthony Broadwater 44 years ago?

1

When Alice Sebold arrived as a college freshman in 1980, Syracuse was a city in decline. It had risen a century and a half earlier because of its proximity to the Erie Canal, then for decades was the site of factories for companies like General Electric and Carrier Corp. By the 1970s, those companies were closing facilities. Poverty climbed and the city’s population dwindled, emptying rows of Victorian homes that had housed generations of working-class families. Syracuse’s downtown, already severed by the interstate highway, withered.

One institution, however, was flourishing: Syracuse University. Enrollment surged, its sports teams excelled and new buildings rose. The university was a bubble inside the city, according to former students.

Sebold was drawn by the school’s distinguished poetry program. Raised in a household of voracious readers in suburban Philadelphia, her father a professor of Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania and her mother having worked for magazines, Sebold disdained the university’s frat culture. She preferred to skip the keg parties in her dorm and instead lounged in the basement of the art building, drinking endless cups of instant coffee and reading Emily Dickinson.

Just after midnight, on May 8, 1981, the last night of her freshman year, she was attacked. Sebold was crossing through Thornden Park on her way back to her dorm from a friend’s apartment. A stranger grabbed her from behind as she walked along a brick path. He put one hand over her mouth and threatened her with a knife. “I’ll kill you if you scream,” he said. Over a period of more than an hour, according to police reports and Sebold’s memoir, the assailant bludgeoned Sebold with his fists, pounded her skull into the brick and choked her.

Sebold frantically searched for words to deter him: She told him she was a virgin, then an orphan. She offered him the $8 she had in her back pocket. He laughed and said he wasn’t interested in that.

He forced her to kiss him, then to undress. He made clear she was not his first victim. “You’re the worst bitch I’ve ever done this to,” he said.

Then, when he was done, he fell asleep on top of her. She tried to escape, but he woke up and offered a tearful apology. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He told her to kiss him good night and called her beautiful. “It was a date to him,” she wrote in “Lucky.”

Just as quickly, he reverted to hostility. The attacker pocketed her $8 after all. He let her go, then asked her name as she walked away. “Alice,” she told him, writing later, “I didn’t have a name other than my own to say.”

“Nice knowing you, Alice,” he said. “See you around sometime.”

2

Thornden Park, where Sebold had been assaulted, was both a refuge and a menacing locale adjacent to the university. Once the estate of a salt baron, the rolling 76-acre park had broad fields — with tennis courts, a pool and an earthen amphitheater — as well as dense clusters of maple and oak trees that provided dark, isolated enclaves where an attack might go unnoticed.

The park had been the site of two sexual attacks seven months before Sebold’s rape. A third had occurred a block away. The reports in those cases had also been quickly consigned to the inactive file.

One woman had told police that a man dragged her into a wooded section of the park. When she resisted, the report stated, he “began to punch her in the face” and “ordered her to remove her pants.”

As with Sebold’s case, the police report was dismissive. One officer asserted that the victim was “retarded” and had run away from a nearby halfway house. The staff there said that she had complained of a similar incident two weeks prior and that she was having “difficulty adjusting.” The case was put on ice just hours after it had been reported.

Four days later, another young woman was making her way across Thornden Park when a man in a ski cap grabbed her by the neck and put a knife to her face. As she squirmed and tried to push him off, the man struggled to pull off his pants and hers. The woman suddenly realized the weapon was just a table knife, so she screamed as loud as she could and he ran away.

There was no indication in the police reports that these attacks might have been connected. Nor was there much evidence of public alarm. I found no articles about any of these October 1980 assaults in newspaper archives.

Trying to piece this information together was daunting and complicated. My colleagues and I made more than two dozen requests for all manner of law enforcement records from the Syracuse district attorney’s office, Police Department, the state prison system, local jails, archives and courts. Many were initially denied. After appeals, I wound up with thousands of pages of documents. There was little or no organization among them, and some were scrawled in barely decipherable handwriting. Even the redactions were haphazard, with some names still visible.

I started to map out the attacks around Thornden Park, using police reports and stray newspaper clips for some of the later ones. The numbers and proximity were jarring. More than a dozen women reported being raped or attacked by strangers within half a square mile over four years.

Women were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and in student apartments, walking out of grocery stores or on their way to the library. A nursing student was attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators were often eerily similar. They frequently carried a knife. And several were roughly the same height, weight and race.

It appeared that there was a public safety crisis emanating from the park area, with no sign of urgency from law enforcement.

3

Syracuse’s criminal justice system was chaotic during the 1980s and ’90s. One prosecutor would get into a scuffle, on live TV, with a candidate who had just won the race for DA. The police crime lab would lose its accreditation. The doctor who led the county medical examiner’s office resigned after an investigation found he had routinely removed organs from corpses without consent from the victims’ families. His employees had posed playfully for photos over the body of a woman who had died by suicide.

Given the level of dysfunction — and the fact that DNA evidence hadn’t yet come into use in the early ’80s — rape was particularly difficult to investigate. Survivors were wary, corroborating evidence hard to find. The Syracuse Police Department had no separate sex crimes unit at the time, and officers were still using typewriters.

“We were doing everything from homicide to robberies,” one supervisor of detectives during this era told me. He remembered nights with 18 felonies and fewer than a dozen detectives to work them. “A person with a knife in their back or a guy who got shot is going to take priority over a two-week-old rape case,” he said.

There was another impediment in those days: Syracuse University. I found a police report from 1980 on which someone had scrawled the words “NO PRESS.” A 19-year-old university student had been walking near Thornden Park when she, too, was attacked by a man with a knife. She got away by biting him when he tried to force her to perform oral sex.

The “no press” designation on police reports was not unusual, according to deposition testimony by Clapper, the former Syracuse detective, who would play a crucial role in the Broadwater saga. “No press,” Clapper testified in 2025, “means that Syracuse University put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.”

The university had influence in the Police Department, according to Clapper, and an obvious interest in making the campus seem safe: “If your little daughter wants to go to school at SU and calls the police, and says, How is the crime around Syracuse University? ‘No crime around there.’ There’s five girls raped within, let’s say, a six-month period … between campus and Thornden Park. And if it’s marked ‘no press,’ it’s like it never happened.”

4

Sebold’s case had been placed in the inactive file. That meant the police weren’t searching for her assailant. But she couldn’t help herself. According to Sebold’s memoir, she walked the university campus, “looking for Him.”

“I was very aware that he could be around any corner,” she told me decades later. A sense of “hypervigilance” coursed through her like “a bunch of electrical wires,” she said.

Five months after the crime, Sebold saw a man on a street filled with restaurants and bars near the university. She felt a sudden, visceral certainty: “right height, right build, something in his posture.” She wrote that the man walked up to her and said, “Hey girl, don’t I know you from somewhere?” He then began nonchalantly chatting with a police officer across the street. (Both Broadwater and the officer would testify that they said “don’t I know you” to each other.)

When Sebold reported the sighting to the authorities a few hours later, Clapper recognized himself as the cop she saw and Anthony Broadwater as the man he was talking to. Broadwater, then 20, had grown up as one of six children of a janitor who worked for Syracuse University. After a brief stint in the Marines, he was working as a telephone wiring installer. Growing up, Broadwater told me, he’d had run-ins with the police and had served time in juvenile detention for theft. (Clapper had known Broadwater since he was a boy, he would testify years later. When asked if he had ever known him “to be involved in anything like rape,” Clapper replied, “No.”)

Broadwater was arrested. He vociferously protested his innocence and did whatever he could to prove it. He volunteered a pubic hair for comparison to one found on Sebold after the rape, and he agreed to participate in a lineup.

When Broadwater saw the other lineup participants, he began to worry. None of them looked much like him. They were all too tall or had a lighter complexion or both. He suggested that another inmate closer to his height and build be included to make it more fair. Broadwater’s court-appointed lawyer got the jailer to bring another man down from the detention facility above the police building.

Sebold looked at the row of men and picked the person who had just been added to the lineup. The man was standing next to Broadwater.

The case should have ended then and there, in the view of the DA today. “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy. She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony,” Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick told ProPublica. “Case is over. Stop.”

But it didn’t stop.

5

The prosecution of Broadwater had been assigned to a young assistant district attorney named Gail Uebelhoer (pronounced EE-bull-hair). Sebold wrote that she felt an immediate connection to Uebelhoer, whom she described as “solid and female” with “sparkling, intelligent eyes.” As Sebold put it in “Lucky,” “She wanted what I wanted: to win.”

After Sebold failed to identify Broadwater in the lineup, she could sense that Lorenz, the detective who had overseen the process, was unhappy. (Lorenz died in 2017.) Sebold said she had been scared and confused, torn between the men in positions 4 and 5. Instead of seeking out additional evidence, Uebelhoer asked Sebold to draft an affidavit on the spot, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she had picked No. 5 because that person had been looking at her. Broadwater was in position 4.

The prosecutor then told her it was only natural that she would make such a mistake, according to Sebold’s memoir. “They really worked a number on you. He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Sebold said Uebelhoer told her. “They’re dead ringers.” Both men are adamant that they had never been in a lineup before.

Within three hours of the botched lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. Sebold wrote that she put on “the best show” of her life and several grand jurors “fought back tears.”

At least one of them was uneasy about the manner in which Broadwater had been identified, according to a transcript. “When someone is picked out of the lineup, doesn’t it have to be absolutely sure that the person that they picked out of the lineup is the one they’ve seen before?” one grand juror asked Clapper while he was on the witness stand.

“That’s correct,” Clapper said.

Uebelhoer quashed the discussion. “He really can’t give you an opinion on that,” she told the juror, adding that Clapper hadn’t been present for the lineup.

The juror asked about it two more times, but Uebelhoer kept deflecting. Broadwater was indicted on every count she had presented, including rape, sodomy and robbery.

Illustration by Vanessa Saba for ProPublica

6

When Broadwater’s case was set for trial, Uebelhoer was visibly pregnant. It was passed to William Mastine. Mustachioed, 6’6” and pugnacious — Mastine is the prosecutor who would scuffle with the DA-elect a few years later — he was known for his swagger and courtroom theatrics. Fitzpatrick, then a fellow assistant district attorney, would dub Mastine the “Garbage Man” in a newspaper profile for his ability to bring cases with scant evidence or, as Fitzpatrick put it to me more pungently, “take shit and make it hit.”

This was no minor consideration. Acquittals in rape trials were common at the time in Syracuse. At one point in the 1980s, a local news article reported that the district attorney’s office had suffered nine trial defeats in a row. Uebelhoer was quoted saying “juries are looking for a perfect victim, but they don’t exist.” She saw Sebold as a standout, writing in a memo as the case was transferred to Mastine: “Good luck. Victim is excellent witness.”

Sebold’s testimony would be crucial at trial, since it was nearly the entirety of the evidence. Mastine repeatedly emphasized that she was a credible witness. She had been a virgin, he pointed out, arguing that it would more firmly cement the image of her rapist in her mind. He said her study of drawing as a high school student equipped her to remember facial characteristics. She was shaken during the lineup. The identification on the street was what mattered, he argued.

Aside from Sebold’s identification, the only other piece of evidence was the pubic hair Broadwater volunteered, which was compared to a hair found on Sebold after the rape. The two hairs were examined under a microscope by a lab expert who testified that they were “consistent” with each other. That essentially meant that both had come from a Black person. There were approximately 27 million Black Americans at that time. (In the absence of DNA technology, the prosecution could have tested the semen found in Sebold to determine its blood type, but it never did. That would have narrowed the list of possible perpetrators to only those with the specific blood type.)

The trial was peppered with irregularities. Broadwater and his lawyer had opted for a bench trial, hoping that a judge would see the paucity of evidence and wouldn’t be swayed by emotion. But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. During a break in the proceedings, he spoke to Sebold privately, according to her memoir, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. Had a juror done such a thing, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared. (The judge died in 2009.)

In a final, highly unusual turn, Uebelhoer took the stand herself, as a witness for the prosecution. She testified that Broadwater was unhappy with one of the people in the lineup and that he managed to swap that person out for the man Sebold picked. She seemed to imply that Broadwater was responsible for any confusion in the lineup process.

When it was over, the judge didn’t even leave the bench to deliberate. He found Broadwater guilty directly after Mastine finished his closing argument.

Mastine defends the trial and the verdict. When I reached him by phone, he noted that he was brought onto the case after the indictment had been handed up. Mastine otherwise repeated what he’d said at the time: that Sebold’s identification of Broadwater on the street trumped the one in the lineup room, so it was appropriate to take the case to trial.

Mastine said that Fitzpatrick anointed him the “Garbage Man” after his work on the Sebold case and congratulated him on the victory. Mastine denied that he felt any pressure in light of the defeats his office had endured. “A trial lawyer has to have a bathtub mind,” he told me. “During trial, you fill the bathtub up. When the verdict comes in, you empty the bathtub and start all over again.” (Years after the Broadwater trial, Mastine, by then in private practice, pleaded guilty to possessing a check on which he forged a client’s signature. He agreed to give up his law license.)

Through her lawyer, Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she could remember little of the Broadwater case. She said repeatedly that she could neither admit nor deny what Sebold had recounted in her memoir. But Uebelhoer emphasized that she had no way of knowing whether the man Sebold picked had appeared in a lineup with Broadwater before. “How would I know that?” she testified. “I’m not down there for every lineup.”

Responding to Fitzpatrick’s assertion that the case should have been dropped after the lineup, Uebelhoer testified that he likely would have been at meetings where the case was discussed but “registered no objection.” (Fitzpatrick denies this. “I’m not saying I don’t have a recollection of the meeting,” he told me. “I’m saying that meeting did not take place.”) Uebelhoer, for her part, added, “I thought that I did my job by putting it all in front of the grand jury to let them hear and see if they found her to be believable or not.”

Two months after the guilty verdict, Broadwater was sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in state prison.

7

Broadwater was sitting in the local jail after his trial, he told me, when a Syracuse newspaper reported that another woman had been raped in Thornden Park. “I told you it wasn’t me! It never was me,” he said he told his attorney. “That guy is still out there doing it.”

A police report seems to line up with Broadwater’s description. The attack happened on May 27, 1982, and resembled the rape Broadwater had been convicted of just nine days earlier.

At about 9 that evening, a 19-year-old actress was jogging through a wooded section of the park when she heard someone behind her. Suddenly she was in the grip of a man dragging her by the neck behind a cluster of trees. He forced her to perform oral sex, then pulled her sweatpants down and raped her. She reported that her assailant was Black, about 5’9”, 140 pounds, muscular and around 16 years old.

Those details did not draw a lot of notice at the time. But they fit the description of a rapist who would soon become well-known to the Syracuse police. Only four months after Broadwater was found guilty, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women. The crimes had begun in late 1981, he said in a statement taken by Clapper. Four of them occurred less than a mile from Thornden Park. Weakfall, according to police reports, had provided “certain facts only the perpetrator would have known.”

Weakfall seemed at war with himself, conscious of the brutality he inflicted. “I go to sleep Tommy Weakfall,” he would say in one confession, “and then in the middle of the night I wake up in a cold sweat. … I feel this pressure pushing me to go out side and do something.” He admitted burglarizing houses and raping women. When he was done, according to an account Clapper gave years later, Weakfall would “wrap them in a blanket, hold them in his arms and tell them he was sorry he did it.” Many of the police reports I examined, including Sebold’s, noted that the rapist had apologized to the victim.

There’s no evidence that Weakfall assaulted Sebold, but there’s no denying he matched key elements of the description she gave. Sebold had told police her rapist was Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20, stood 5’6” and weighed about 175 pounds.

Despite Weakfall’s confession, the rape case against him collapsed. Officers learned — after taking his statement without a defense lawyer present — that he was being represented by an attorney on an unrelated burglary charge. Weakfall’s confession wouldn’t be admissible in court.

He ended up pleading guilty to second-degree burglary. Weakfall’s sentence wouldn’t require a single day of jail time. He got five years of probation and remained on the streets.

8

On the morning of Sept. 29, 1983, a man matching Weakfall’s description led police on a dramatic foot chase through downtown Syracuse after being interrupted while attempting to rape a woman inside her car.

Records show Weakfall was arrested for the offense and released on Oct. 11, 1983. Four months later, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, attempted sexual misconduct, and was sentenced to one year.

During the four months that Weakfall was still free, there was another notable assault. Sebold’s roommate was raped that November in the apartment they shared. She was one of five women attacked in the same cluster of blocks over five months, according to news accounts at the time. Police suspected that one man had committed the crimes. The homes had been burglarized and the women had been raped at knifepoint and beaten; some were also bound and gagged.

These elements matched Weakfall’s methods, though the reports suggested a noticeably taller, older perpetrator. Several survivors were asked to look at a photograph of Weakfall as part of an array of mug shots, but they didn’t identify him.

Sebold’s roommate told police that after the rapist broke into the apartment, he gagged, bound and blindfolded her, then became “very gentle” and “took his time.” She added that “he didn’t talk street talk either. He had a good use of the English vocabulary.”

He led her into Sebold’s room, put a “thin metal object” to her throat and told her, “I just want you to be good.” When he finished raping her, he tossed her jeans to her and covered her with a blanket.

The roommate also reported an exchange that suggested her rapist may have encountered Sebold in the past. After the assault, she tried to get him to leave by yelling out that her roommate was coming home. The assailant replied: “I know her, we had a thing, we had a deal in the past.”

Clapper viewed this as significant enough that he put it down in capital letters in his report. But he never followed up, Clapper testified years later. The perpetrator was likely fabricating a connection that didn’t exist, he said. Clapper never suspected that it was Weakfall or that the same man raped both Sebold and her roommate. He said the description didn’t match Weakfall, and Broadwater was locked up by then. He acknowledged that victims sometimes get these descriptions wrong, but he had another reason for ruling Weakfall out: “I think he was incarcerated then,” Clapper testified. But the records I had seen showed that his memory was incorrect: Weakfall had been a free man at the time Sebold’s roommate was attacked.

9

In 1985, three years after Broadwater’s conviction, Clapper encountered Weakfall again. The detective identified him in a surveillance photograph of a man using a stolen bank card at an ATM. Clapper interviewed him again. Once again, Weakfall confessed.

The police reports, along with the signed confession, spelled out in chilling detail how Weakfall had raped at least three women between September and November of 1985. He would spot a vulnerable location — an accessible window, a woman home alone — and climb in quietly, first ransacking for valuables, then threatening them with a knife, sometimes beating or tying them up if they resisted.

When Weakfall was done, some women got an apology. One said he was “soft spoken” and did not use “slang or street type language.” He kept calling another one ma’am. Others got nothing but raging hostility. He told one woman that he felt understood by her, then threatened to burn her house down if she called the police.

Weakfall went on to say, effectively, that he had raped so many women in so many different places that he couldn’t remember them all. In the final paragraph, he made a garbled cry for help. He described sexual violence as a compulsion. The rapes were “accidents,” he said, and the courts “haven’t helped me at all.” He hoped that the next judge would get him some counseling.

This time Weakfall’s confession held up. He pleaded guilty to three rapes and a burglary and was sentenced to a maximum of 18 years. He served 12. While in prison, Weakfall participated in a treatment program intended to stop people from committing sexual violence.

Illustration by Vanessa Saba for ProPublica

10

Accusations against prominent men eventually began bringing the issue of sexual assault to the forefront in Syracuse. In 1986, a star Syracuse University football player was accused of rape. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was initially allowed to remain on the team. An uproar ensued, prompting the university’s chancellor to intervene and suspend him for five games.

Then, in November 1988, came another attack with a notable defendant, a crime that would inspire a second rape memoir by a Syracuse University student. The book describes how Laura Gray-Rosendale, a 20-year-old sophomore, had fallen asleep while studying in her bedroom when 23-year-old Michael Holm broke in, then bound and beat her. “He raped me every way someone can be raped,” she told ProPublica. “It was excruciating to be in my body.” A roommate called the police and officers kicked down Gray-Rosendale’s door, finding Holm with a screwdriver in his hand, standing over Gray-Rosendale, as he pulled his pants up. Her hands were tied and she was naked from the waist down. Holm tried to flee, injuring three officers, before they finally subdued and arrested him.

The defendant was white, the grandson of Melvin Holm, a former chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees who had been the CEO of Carrier Corp., one of the city’s largest employers and the eponym for the university’s domed stadium. In her book, “College Girl,” Gray-Rosendale recounted getting a phone call from a university administrator who told her the Holm family made major donations to the university. “I’m like, why are you telling me this?” she said. “But I know why. … She’s trying to dissuade me from testifying.”

In an interview, Gray-Rosendale described having a “complete breakdown” in the months after the assault and said that seeing “anyone who resembled [Holm] physically would be like a trigger and send me into a full out panic attack.” Through years of therapy and writing her memoir, she eventually found healing. But, she said, “I was never the same.”

Despite being caught mid-assault, Holm pleaded guilty to burglary. The word rape did not appear in his plea allocution. He ultimately served eight years in prison. (ProPublica could not locate him to seek an interview. His lawyer declined to comment.) “I was very glad that he got jail time,” Gray-Rosendale said of Holm. “But … that term, burglary. It did not in any way account for the multiple crimes that he committed, and that stuck with me then, sticks with me now.”

11

Pressure was building in Syracuse. In 1989, six rapes had been reported in the first two months of the school year, including one on the chancellor’s front lawn. Students began marching, organizing nighttime campus patrols and pressuring university officials. Gray-Rosendale told the university’s trustees at a campus meeting on sexual violence that she had been raped by one of their grandsons. “I’m not a statistic,” she said. The turmoil attracted the attention of media ranging from talk show host Geraldo Rivera to The New York Times.

Finally, that year, the university convened a task force and began to implement security measures that advocates had been demanding for years, including improvements to transportation services off-campus, the expansion of “blue light” emergency phones and the provision of counseling services and public speaking events on sexual assault.

In response to detailed questions regarding events from the 1980s, a spokesperson for Syracuse University said in an email that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions or decisions of prior administrations,” but the university is now equipped with “comprehensive policies, a steadfast commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence and robust support structures to help every survivor that comes forward.”

By this point, the city had become the leading edge of a national issue. In March 1990, a Syracuse University student named Kristin Eaton-Pollard testified before a congressional subcommittee in Washington. She described being raped as a freshman in 1988 in Thornden Park, which she “later learned was notorious for its frequent occurrence of violent crime, located only about 100 yards from my residence hall.”

Eaton-Pollard criticized the university for being too slow to appreciate the need for the new security measures. “The programs at Syracuse University should have been initiated of their own accord a long time ago,” Eaton-Pollard said. Her testimony helped inspire the passage, that same year, of the Jeanne Clery Act, legislation named for a Lehigh University freshman who was raped and murdered by a fellow student. The law requires all colleges that accept federal financial aid to publicly report campus crime statistics every year.

12

Broadwater was unaware that the issue of sexual violence was roiling Syracuse. He remained in prison and had never stopped trying to prove his innocence. He kept a transcript of his trial with him as he was shuttled among 13 prisons in the 16 years he served for the Sebold conviction. He would show it to gang leaders to prove he shouldn’t be there.

“Rape charges here,” a cousin and fellow inmate had warned him when he entered Attica state prison, “they kill you.” As Broadwater puts it, “I caught holy hell” while incarcerated. He took to wrapping his torso with copies of National Geographic magazine in case an inmate came at him with a knife. In a riot, he saw a friend stabbed to death, took 12 stitches and nearly lost an eye trying to defend himself.

He filed myriad appeals and requests to reexamine the evidence, some without the help of a lawyer. Each was rejected. One petition was handwritten, laying out his logic in angled handwriting across lined notebook paper. Broadwater raised some of the arguments that eventually got him exonerated. He wrote, for example, that Uebelhoer’s testimony missed the point: “Whether or not I know the man … or was happy about the composition of the lineup had nothing to do with the victim’s failure to pick me out.”

Four times Broadwater came before the parole board. Four times he was denied. He refused to go to his fifth scheduled appearance. Commissioners wanted an admission of guilt, not claims of innocence, and Broadwater wouldn’t apologize. He didn’t come home until Dec. 31, 1998. He was 38.

Broadwater was free but unable to escape the shadow of a rape conviction. Even members of his family shunned him. He was required to register as a sex offender, which made it impossible to get any but the most menial job. Broadwater eventually managed to get a position on an assembly line, stamping the logo of Syracuse China on dishware from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. He liked that he had to punch in, and that the factory was filled with security cameras. Broadwater wanted to work at a place that always documented his whereabouts in case anyone tried to accuse him of something.

13

For her part, Sebold had struggled to get her life on track over the years. Rootless and experimenting with drugs in her 20s — heroin was her favorite, by her own account — it was only as she confronted the consequences of the attack that she slowly began to grapple with her trauma. She began by writing an op-ed for The New York Times on the rape in 1989, then later appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” By the mid-’90s, she had started work on a memoir about her assault and the aftermath.

Sebold returned to Syracuse to research the book. She nervously walked around Thornden Park while her then-boyfriend stood by and took snapshots. And Sebold met with Uebelhoer at the district attorney’s office.

Uebelhoer helped her gain access to records, including a box of evidence from the original case. Both Uebelhoer and Sebold recall seeing the clothing Sebold had worn the night of the attack, and Sebold remembers seeing the pubic hair that was key to Broadwater’s conviction. (It was yet another example of the scrambled Syracuse justice system: An evidence log stated that all of the evidence in the case had been destroyed in the late 1980s, but both women have said they saw the box of materials years after that.)

The prosecutor helped promote Sebold’s memoir when it was published. Uebelhoer’s sister created a packet of publicity materials that, according to Sebold, included a glossy 8-by-10-inch photograph of Uebelhoer. Uebelhoer, who had left the district attorney’s office by this point to clerk for a judge, spoke at book clubs and introduced Sebold to discuss the book on a panel at a law enforcement conference in New York City. “She was incredibly proud,” Sebold said.

14

Sebold and Broadwater weren’t the only people who couldn’t let go of the case. There was a third person: Clapper, the veteran Syracuse detective who’d been chatting with Broadwater when Sebold first identified the man she thought had assaulted her.

Lanky with striking red hair and a cocky demeanor, Clapper was dogged and respected by his fellow cops. He would stay on cases for months, scouring for witnesses, checking in with informants, interviewing anyone he could find. Clapper’s work was threaded through the wave of Syracuse rape cases. He had investigated many of the attacks in and around Thornden Park and elicited Weakfall’s confessions.

Clapper initially indicated he was open to an interview for this article, then demurred, saying he’d had only tangential involvement in the Broadwater case. When I kept pressing, he eventually sent me a sprawling, 13-page statement that spanned the 50-odd years of his career. It was filled with brackets and parentheticals, written in different fonts and colors, much of it in capital letters, at once detailed and cryptic.

Clapper emphasized that he had been through a lot since Sebold was assaulted. Over the years, he had worked undercover, participated in hundreds of drug busts, been stabbed and “struck over the head with bats, wine bottles, and fallen down several flights of stairs.” He spent the better part of nine years caring for his sick wife and today, at age 74, his hair still thick but now snowy white, he works as an investigator for a district attorney in another county. Given all that, his statement maintained, it would be “close to ridiculous” to assume he could recall the particulars of Sebold’s case or other crimes with much specificity.

Still, the document provided revealing details, including one that hinted at the disturbing scale of Weakfall’s crimes. Not long after Broadwater’s conviction, according to Clapper’s statement, he had become aware of Weakfall’s “first series of rapes” and gotten him to confess. He had driven Weakfall around Thornden Park, during which Weakfall pointed out 23 buildings where he had raped and robbed women. Weakfall wasn’t charged in multiple cases, Clapper explained, because many of the survivors “just wanted to forget it” and refused to cooperate.

Clapper said Weakfall willingly admitted raping women inside buildings near the park but “flatly denied any involvement” in crimes outdoors at the park. Clapper found that distinction persuasive. Noting that the crimes Weakfall committed indoors involved rapes, burglaries and stabbings, he said, “Why would Weakfall honestly admit to all of these other [more serious] cases and not take credit” for those in Thornden Park?

Weakfall was always under scrutiny, Clapper would say in a 2025 deposition. “I know this guy better than I know my own brother,” he testified, repeating that Weakfall never admitted to any rapes in the park.

One by one, the attorney questioning Clapper got him to acknowledge the similarities between Sebold’s rape and those that Weakfall had confessed to: that she had been threatened with a knife, that her rapist took a small amount of money from her, that the rape happened blocks from others that he said he had committed at around the same time, and that afterward, her rapist held her and apologized to her.

The lawyers asked Clapper about four other cases of sexual assault in or near the park, three within months of Sebold’s, the other nine days after Broadwater was convicted. All involved Black assailants, at least three aged between 15 and 20 and nearly the same height and weight as Weakfall or Broadwater. Clapper pursued several of them but never thought to connect any to Sebold’s rape.

“Why would I?” he said.

15

It’s one of the many oddities of this decades-long saga that Sebold’s memoir of her assault — a 1999 book that portrayed Broadwater’s conviction as righteous — is what would ultimately lead to the unraveling of his conviction.

Sebold’s memoir, which ultimately sold 1 million copies after “The Lovely Bones” became a hit, eventually generated interest in Hollywood. Producers wanted to make a film version of “Lucky,” and several contacted Clapper as part of their research for writing a script.

Laurie Parker, a producer then working with director Jane Campion as part of a project that Sebold was cooperating with, reached Clapper in 2013. Parker said Clapper emailed her that there were questions about the case: No. 1, was the right person arrested? No. 2, was Sebold a good witness? No. 3, if DNA testing had been available, would there have been the same outcome? Parker tried to get him to elaborate, but he didn’t respond.

Clapper himself looked into getting a DNA test done on the pubic hair more than 20 years after Broadwater’s conviction, according to his statement. But when Clapper called the Syracuse police crime lab, he was told the hair had been destroyed.

Parker, tasked with writing a script based on “Lucky,” became increasingly consumed with doubts: “I had a feeling, a very strong feeling, that at best it was an illegal conviction and at worst, they got the wrong person,” she said. Her script was rejected in 2014. (The director had gotten busy with other projects, according to Sebold.)

Illustration by Vanessa Saba for ProPublica

16

The next year, in 2015, came an unrelated event — unknown to Broadwater — that further undermined the credibility of his conviction. The FBI, working with the Department of Justice and two advocacy groups, released the findings of a national review of cases in which hair evidence had been used. The study reported that expert hair testimony in 90% of the 500 trial transcripts they’d examined included “erroneous statements” and noted that the FBI no longer used such evidence. The study “strongly” encouraged states to review past convictions in which hair analysis had played a role.

At the time, Fitzpatrick was on a state commission that sets standards for crime laboratories. He was also feuding with the Syracuse Police Department. The two sides publicly savaged each other, with dueling allegations of mishandling forensic evidence, among other things. The Police Department, Fitzpatrick told me recently, was run by “fucking morons” back then and its lab was antiquated. Shawn Broton, a deputy police chief at the time, said Fitzpatrick had used the state commission as a “weapon” against the Police Department and worked to consolidate power for himself.

As a result of the FBI review, Fitzpatrick’s office examined New York cases that had used hair evidence. But that effort did not unearth Broadwater’s case. It relied on electronic searches for the word “hair” in appeals court opinions. The appeals court opinion in Broadwater’s case — all of two paragraphs long — didn’t mention the word. Fitzpatrick told me that his staff had also reviewed all the cases in which the hair analyst in Broadwater’s case had testified, but it concentrated on defendants who were still incarcerated. Broadwater had been out of prison for more than a decade by then. Another chance to reveal the flaws in his case had been missed.

Eventually, a second movie producer got interested in Sebold’s story, and like the first producer, he began delving deep into the case. The producer got suspicious enough that he ultimately hired a private investigator to look into it. (The producer in question, Timothy Mucciante, has a backstory that could fill its own movie: He is a disbarred lawyer who served time in prison on an array of bizarre fraud charges. He promised money to finance the movie version of “Lucky” but never delivered, then tried to make his own documentary about the debacle called “Unlucky,” which also fell apart. Mucciante did not respond to requests for comment.)

The private investigator, Dan Myers, called Clapper, who left him with the strong impression that he thought Broadwater was innocent and Weakfall was guilty. Clapper denies he went so far as to say Broadwater was innocent. Still, Clapper acknowledged in his statement that he spoke “cop to cop” with Myers, a former officer, and told him, “Like ANY investigator, you wonder ‘if’ Weakfall was involved.”

That conversation had a domino effect. Myers got two Syracuse lawyers, David Hammond and Melissa Swartz, involved. (Swartz had previously worked in the DA’s office under Fitzpatrick.) They were shocked by what they read in the book and the trial transcript. They filed a motion to vacate the conviction in 2021.

In a matter of weeks, the long-stalled process of examining the conviction was resolved. Fitzpatrick joined in the motion to vacate the conviction, and in a brief hearing on Nov. 22, 2021, the judge agreed.

At the defense table that day, Broadwater, wearing a gray pinstripe suit, choked back sobs and hugged his lawyers. At 61, with hints of gray in Broadwater’s cornrows and a cane in his hand, it was hard to picture the 21-year-old he had been when a judge had found him guilty.

17

Unlike Broadwater, who has no criminal record since his release in 1998, Weakfall found it harder to stay out of trouble. He got out of prison in November 1997. Six months later, he was caught stealing speakers and cash from the apartment of a woman he had just met. He told police the burglary was “meant as a joke.” Weakfall pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass and served 135 days in jail. He was arrested four more times through 2015, pleading guilty on separate occasions to patronizing a prostitute and resisting arrest. Records show police responded to multiple allegations of domestic violence against him through 2017, but the victims all declined to press charges. His record shows no involvement with the police since then.

Weakfall still lives in Syracuse, in an area some former officers refer to as “the Gut.” I made my way to his door on a Saturday in the fall of 2024. His apartment was on the ground floor of a clapboard building along a block of dilapidated homes surrounded by overgrown weeds. A gaggle of stray cats curled up against one another around the corner from his front door, which had a bumper sticker on it that read “Let’s Pray for America.”

After a few knocks, the face I recognized from the New York state sex offender registry poked out. He was bald with a full beard. Well-built for a man of 60, with a scar across his upper abdomen, Weakfall was wearing nothing but royal blue boxer-briefs. He said he had just gotten out of the shower.

I knew I might never get another shot to speak to him, so I started talking without giving him a chance to get dressed. We spoke for more than an hour. He never opened his door more than a foot.

Weakfall was, quite reasonably, skeptical of me. He kept saying, “You’re catching me off guard here, dude.” He said he carried a lot of guilt over his crimes and was “disgusted” with himself. He told me he had found religion and wasn’t inclined to revisit a period of his life that he had left behind. Weakfall also said he realized during his 12 years in prison that he may not have served as much time had he not been so open with the police. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I assured him I wasn’t a cop.

After a while, Weakfall seemed to relax. He spoke softly in gushes of information followed by sudden pauses. He described growing up without a father in a tough neighborhood; the pressure of bad influences leading to drugs; a graduation of sorts from shoplifting to home invasion, then sexual assault, or, as he put it, “violating someone” when he happened to find a woman home alone.

He acknowledged raping women. But he said that once he began to make admissions, the police saw him as a scapegoat and tried to put “all the load on one person just to satisfy the community.” Once in custody, he said, he was “scared out of my boots.” He said the police had dragged him out of his cell repeatedly, driving him to places he had never been and asking him about rapes he said he hadn’t committed. “Man, they had me admitting to things that I know I did not do,” he said.

Full of contradictions, Weakfall spoke in loops that were hard to follow. He said that he had confessed honestly to the rapes he committed in 1985, but that the confession in 1982 was coerced by the police. (He later said something that seemed to undercut that assertion: “What they didn’t understand in 1982 is that if you’re not really giving me any counseling … it’s bound to happen again.”)

When I started to ask about Thornden Park, describing what happened to Sebold, he cut me off. “More of my encounters was invading a home, if you do the search,” he said. He vociferously denied assaulting any woman in a car and said the police “mixed me up with other people that were doing things at the same time.”

This did not strike me as implausible, given what had happened with Broadwater and all I’d learned about the Police Department at the time, not to mention the sheer volume of assailants and assaults back then.

I kept pressing, asking if he would be willing to go through each case with me. He said no. He wouldn’t be able to remember them anyway, he said. I brought up the rape of Sebold’s roommate and several others, but the whole exercise began to feel futile. I thanked him for his time, handed him my card and asked if we could speak again after he had some time to think. He said he’d pray on it.

Weakfall called me the next morning. He was rattled and rambling. More aggravated this time. He started denying things that he had either confessed to or that were well-established in the criminal records: He claimed he had never stolen anyone’s ATM card; he had never taken property from anyone’s home; he had never apologized to any of his victims.

18

I returned to Syracuse twice more in 2026 and spoke with Weakfall each time. He got more sweeping and more adamant in his denials. By the third visit, he was insisting that he had confessed to only one rape and that the police had embellished or fabricated the rest.

When I called Fitzpatrick, the Syracuse DA, to discuss what I had learned in my broader reporting, he was at a loss. “It escapes me, honestly. I mean, it’s just staggering,” he said of the police and prosecutorial failures in the 1980s. “The level of misattention to detail. I just don’t have an explanation.”

But now it was too late. The best shot at making a conclusive determination on who raped Sebold would come through DNA analysis of the physical evidence. But the evidence from her case is gone.

Even if evidence that implicates a perpetrator were to turn up in a hidden corner of a dusty warehouse, Fitzpatrick couldn’t do anything. The statute of limitations on these rapes expired decades ago. Prosecution would be out of reach, he said.

As it happens, one legal proceeding continues in the Broadwater saga. After his conviction was vacated in 2021, Broadwater filed two civil lawsuits, one against the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment and a second against Syracuse and its surrounding county for constitutional rights violations in his prosecution. The state settled its case in 2023, agreeing to pay Broadwater $5.5 million.

But the city and county are contesting the claims. The lawyers declined to comment for this article, citing the litigation. But expert witnesses they have retained are defending the conduct of the police and prosecutors, questioning the accuracy of Sebold’s book and arguing that there was no pattern of rapes in and around Thornden Park worthy of disclosure to the defense.

19

I met Sebold on a recent, drizzly morning at her home in San Francisco. We sat in a room appointed with an ornate rug, fine photography and rare works of literature hugged by striking geode bookends.

Always an introvert, Sebold sank deeper into isolation after Broadwater’s exoneration. She went from hero to villain overnight. Strangers yelled at her on the street. A tabloid reporter badgered her on camera as Sebold, wearing a COVID-era mask and gingerly carrying a bag of dog poop, walked her sick French basset to the vet.

Afterward, she said, she didn’t step out of her house for a month. Even now, five years on, she can’t bring herself to leave the city limits. “There’s something about the safety of being near my home,” she said, “which has become increasingly important to my sense of mental health.”

As I laid out what my reporting had uncovered, she betrayed little surprise at the number of sexual assaults in Syracuse; she thought there might be more. “It’s my nature to believe that there’s more violence than people like to admit to, especially back then,” she said. It provided no comfort to learn that the police had failed other women, too.

Now fully convinced of Broadwater’s innocence, Sebold looks back on the entire episode with deep mortification. She feels shame that she was ever raped. And she now questions her decision to go to the police. “What if I hadn’t reported my rape?” she said. “None of this would have happened.”

Sebold recently completed a letter to Broadwater. She declined to share a copy but described its contents. It’s more personal and considered, she said, than the apology she released right after the exoneration, which was criticized as tepid and which she said was hastily written. Sebold said the letter takes responsibility for her role in Broadwater’s wrongful conviction and offers details about her recent life, her dog and the Dao, the Chinese philosophy she has come to rely on. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sorrow I hold for what happened.”

It took her four years to compose those three pages. “I’ll never write anything good enough,” Sebold said. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I’ll ever write.”

Through intermediaries, Sebold and Broadwater have broached the possibility of meeting. Like Sebold, though, Broadwater is fearful of traveling. He is worried something bad will happen if he leaves New York state. He has floated the idea of meeting in Niagara Falls. Neither of them have been there before.

I last met Broadwater at his lawyer’s office in Syracuse. Now fixing up a modest farmhouse he bought outside town, he had taken a break from his hobby of barbecuing and still smelled faintly of sweet smoke from a batch of baby back ribs.

He keeps his distance from people, too. He told me that some who shunned him after he went to prison are now reappearing in his life. They tease him about all the media attention he received. Their questions also trigger his paranoia, making him think they got word of his civil settlement and want a piece of it.

Broadwater said the stigma of being a convicted rapist was still hard to shake, even after his exoneration. “I’m still embarrassed that I was convicted and sent to prison for rape for 16 and a half years,” he said, his gentle voice catching as he reached for a Kleenex. He likened the experience to being scalded with boiling-hot water. The exoneration, the celebrity, the settlement, it’s like “a skin graft” over a festering wound, he said. “Still ain’t normal. Ain’t never gonna be normal. How could it be normal?”

The post “That Guy Is Still Out There” appeared first on ProPublica.

Down a dirt road in northwest Oklahoma, only a few hundred yards from where the city of Enid draws its drinking water, a company injects the toxic byproduct of oil production deep underground.

That close proximity violates a state rule meant to protect public groundwater supplies from oil field wastewater, which can be saltier than the sea and laden with toxic metals. Injection operations are banned within a half-mile of public water wells unless regulators hold a hearing to ensure that such activity will not pollute the water. 

But in 2018, without a hearing, state regulators approved this injection well, an apparatus that applies pressure to dispose of wastewater down a steel tube. And in the years since, the well, named the Flying Monkey, has repeatedly failed structural integrity tests, signaling a potential leak.

The Frontier and ProPublica mapped every injection well in the state to determine how close they are to public water wells. We identified at least 114 injection wells in communities across Oklahoma — including the Flying Monkey and two others in Enid — that are located within a half-mile of a public water supply well. More than 300,000 Oklahomans live in communities that rely on these water wells, according to our analysis.

Explore our analysis of Oklahoma oil field wastewater wells near public drinking water wells on ProPublica’s website.

The city of Enid has complained to the state about the threat to its water. In Oklahoma and beyond, toxic oil field fluid has spread underground and threatened municipal supplies. Midland, Texas, is still cleaning up groundwater polluted by a leaking injection well more than two decades ago. 

But Enid officials are powerless under state law to pass their own rules governing these wells. And so they are appealing to the same Oklahoma agency that had approved the Flying Monkey to now revoke the permit that allows the well to inject wastewater. The city is also asking the state to impose stronger protections against pollution from injection, as more oil and gas companies seek permission to drill wells that dispose of their wastewater nearby. It’s a rare example of pushback against one of Oklahoma’s most powerful industries. 

The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which is responsible for ensuring that industry operations do not pollute groundwater, has approved thousands of orders for waivers or adjustments to state rules in recent years, according to the agency’s administrative court database. These include nearly 400 orders granting exceptions to injection regulations alone since 2022, agency records show. 

The agency has repeatedly declined to punish oil and gas companies for causing widespread pollution, according to an earlier investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier. The news outlets also found that the agency chose not to pursue stronger rules for wastewater injection following industry opposition. In response to that reporting, the agency told the news outlets that the state is committed to “doing the right thing, holding operators accountable, protecting Oklahoma and its resources, and providing fair and balanced regulation.”

Enid’s case will be heard in the agency’s administrative law court later this year. Neither city leadership nor their attorney agreed to be interviewed before the matter is resolved. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing case, as did the Flying Monkey’s current operator, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings LLC. 

Ben Ezzell, a former Enid city commissioner, said he hopes the state recognizes that the community is asking for “reasonable” protections against catastrophic long-term damage to its water supplies. 

“It’s ultimately all one big aquifer,” he said. “You can’t just pee in part of the pool. If any of the aquifer is tainted, all of the aquifer will be tainted.”

Skirting State Laws 

A row of hulking grain elevators sits just outside Enid’s main commercial district, evidence of the prolific local farm economy that earned the city of 50,000 the nickname “Queen Wheat City.” But in the heart of downtown, a large art deco building gestures at one of Enid’s other vital, long-standing industries: It was once the office for Continental Resources, now the world’s largest private oil company.

Although Continental outgrew Enid more than a decade ago, pumpjacks pulling up oil still seesaw up and down near town. Oil production inevitably means wastewater. And dozens of injection wells west of Enid blast the industry’s byproduct underground in the same area where many of the city’s water wells are located.

The nation’s bedrock water protection law — the Safe Drinking Water Act — singles out oil and gas injection of wastewater as a particularly urgent threat to drinking water. And it requires oil states to draft specific regulations to protect public water wells. 

Oklahoma, however, has not always followed its own rules. In 2018, a small company called Hinkle Oil & Gas applied for a permit for an injection well — the Flying Monkey — less than a quarter-mile from two of the city’s water wells, according to publicly available data. 

But on its application, the company had checked a box attesting that the injection well was not within a half-mile of a public water supply well — the distance that, under state rules, should have triggered a hearing to evaluate the Flying Monkey’s pollution threat. “This was demonstrably false,” Enid’s lawyers wrote in a September 2025 court filing. 

The commission approved Hinkle’s application for the well without a hearing, giving the company the green light to inject more than 800,000 gallons of wastewater into the earth each day. Hinkle declined to answer questions about the Flying Monkey. The commission did not respond to questions about whether it verified the distance before approving the permit. Nor did it respond to The Frontier and ProPublica’s offer to show agency officials our mapping of the 114 injection wells across the state that are located within a half-mile of a public water supply well. 

Later in 2018, Hinkle transferred the well to another small company, which applied for a new permit to convert the Flying Monkey to a commercial well to dispose of the wastewater produced by other oil companies, too. By approving the permit, the city contends, regulators allowed the company to violate another state rule meant to protect public water wells from commercial disposal sites. The new company’s application also failed to acknowledge the close proximity of the public water supply well. The company has since filed for bankruptcy.

Both of these permits were ultimately signed by Patricia Downey, the manager of the agency’s underground injection control program, and read: “decision without hearing.” Downey did not respond to any questions sent directly to her, including whether she knew about the Flying Monkey’s proximity to public water wells.

In the last five years, the state has shut down the Flying Monkey repeatedly — for months at a time — for failing mechanical tests required by the state that evaluate the well’s structural integrity. Failing these tests can indicate a problem with the well that may be allowing wastewater to escape. The well has failed five of these tests since 2021, including one in March due to a leak in the well’s tubing that the company had reported to the agency, according to state records. The agency’s report about the March incident does not reference an investigation into whether the leak reached nearby groundwater. The agency typically notes when an investigation is conducted. It did not answer questions about whether it investigated the well for potential pollution.

In the court filing last fall, Enid’s lawyers described this pattern of violations as “a significant compliance red flag, especially given the well’s immediate proximity to Enid’s public supply well.” The city wants the state to terminate the Flying Monkey’s permit. After a period of inactivity last year, the well began injecting wastewater again last summer, only to be shut down again this March. State records indicate that the Flying Monkey’s operator, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, repaired the tubing leak in April, and the well’s status is listed as active; the company declined to comment.  

Neither the company’s nor the commission’s court filings include responses to Enid’s accusations. In June, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings refiled a permit application for the Flying Monkey, acknowledging the proximity of the city’s water supply wells.

Close by the Flying Monkey, another wastewater injection well — Estill #8 — sits roughly a quarter-mile from three of Enid’s water wells. 

In its application, submitted in August 2012, an affiliate of the U.S. Energy Development Corp. acknowledged the proposed injection well’s proximity to the city’s water supply but subsequently urged state regulators to approve an emergency order to allow the well to begin injecting wastewater immediately. Waiting for the required hearing, the company wrote, would result in “irreparable financial harm” because any delay would deprive it of a way to get rid of the wastewater generated by its nearby oil wells. In general, oil companies want their wastewater disposal sites to be as close as possible to their producing wells to reduce the cost of transporting the fluid. The commission approved the emergency order on a temporary basis while it considered whether to issue a permanent permit, and the well began injecting wastewater in November 2012. 

In February of the following year, the company returned to the commission to renew its request to continue injecting without a standard hearing. The commission approved the second request in March and two weeks later authorized the well’s official permit without a hearing. The commission did not answer questions about the permitting process for Estill #8.

The well has been operating ever since, injecting more than 12 million gallons of wastewater into the earth last year. (A third injection well also operates within a quarter mile of a city water well, but that one was permitted in the 1970s, before modern regulations were established.) The state has tested these injection wells every few years and has not identified problems with either one.

Three Wastewater Injection Wells Are Within a Half-Mile of an Enid Public Water Well

Enid’s Quiet Battle

In this arid part of Oklahoma, where surface water is scarce, Enid has become a vital source of drinking water for a dozen smaller, more rural communities as well as Vance Air Force Base. Even after the recent completion of a 70-mile, $400 million pipeline to bring water from Kaw Lake, Enid will continue to rely heavily on its groundwater wells. 

“In the 21st century, water is going to be the new gold,” Frank Baker, an Enid city commissioner, said in an interview. 

Driven by increasing concern over water scarcity and the potential for contamination, the city’s effort to protect its water has stretched for two years but has received scant attention around town. The issue hasn’t previously been covered in the media. The City Council hasn’t discussed it in public meetings. And few follow the obscure quasi-judicial system of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. 

If residents knew how close injection wells operate to their drinking water supply, they would be concerned, said Elizabeth Betchan, a barista at a downtown coffee shop. “I would feel more comfortable if there was more of a buffer there,” she said. 

Enid is asking regulators to impose a ban on oil and gas wastewater injection within a half-mile of its water wells, with no possibility of exceptions. It also wants the state to require additional testing, pollution monitoring and mechanical safety measures for wells within 1 mile of an Enid water well, according to its application to state regulators. 

“I think a mile is probably too close,” said Eddie Mack, a retired manager of a rural water district who also served on Enid’s planning commission.

Pollution from high-pressure wastewater injection can radiate much farther than a mile. Oil companies have acknowledged that their injection wells can impact one another’s operations that were 3 miles apart, according to agreements between companies on how to respond in such scenarios. The Frontier and ProPublica identified more than 400 wastewater injection wells across Oklahoma that are within 1 mile of a public water supply well. 

Regulations for this issue vary widely among oil states. Colorado and Ohio set a minimum buffer of 1,000 feet between injection wells and public water supplies. Many states do not have fixed setbacks, instead relying on belowground geological evaluations to ensure that injected fluid does not contaminate aquifers. 

A leak from one injection well can cause severe pollution that lasts decades. That’s what happened more than 20 years ago in Midland, Texas, which has no fixed buffer requirement between injection wells and public water wells. After the company responsible went bankrupt, cleanup fell to the city, which has spent millions of dollars trying to stop the pollution from spreading, according to an investigation by Inside Climate News. 

But Enid’s bid to protect its groundwater faces numerous obstacles. 

Five companies have formally opposed the city’s request for stronger rules to protect its groundwater. Those include Flying Monkey owner BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, Estill #8 owner U.S. Energy Development Corp. and two others — D&B Operating and Royalty Energy Development LLC — that have pending applications for new injection wells near Enid. Neither of the latter two companies responded to requests for comment.

Matthew Allen, an attorney representing U.S. Energy Development Corp., argued in a May procedural hearing that the city’s proposed changes would “significantly increase the regulatory burden” and costs to companies. He also said that the administrative court was the incorrect venue for the city to pursue such a significant change. Neither Allen nor other company representatives responded to requests for comment. 

Kaylee Davis-Maddy, Enid’s attorney, emphasized during the hearing that the city was not trying to establish a statewide rule. Rather, she said, Enid wants the rules to apply within a geographic boundary to protect its freshwater. Davis-Maddy declined to be interviewed.

Enid has to bring its appeal to the state agency in large part due to a 2015 law that forbids cities and counties from establishing their own regulations on oil and gas operations. 

That matters because even if the administrative law judge sides with Enid, such a decision must be approved by the regulatory agency’s three elected commissioners. Right now, two of them are former state legislators who in the past have opposed efforts by Oklahoma municipalities to restrict oil and gas operations.

Before winning election to the commission in 2024, Brian Bingman served in the state Senate, where, as the Senate president pro tempore, he was the lead author of the bill to ban local governments from regulating the oil and gas industry. Kim David, another commissioner, voted for the bill as a state senator. All three commissioners were elected with significant financial support from the oil and gas industry. Neither Bingman nor David responded to requests for comment. 

At the time the preemption law passed, several local governments were considering restrictions on hydraulic fracturing amid a wave of earthquakes caused by oil and gas injection. The legislation mandated that any regulation of the industry be approved by the corporation commission. 

The state Supreme Court upheld the law in its 2022 decision nullifying a requirement by the city of Norman, about 20 miles south of Oklahoma City, that oil and gas companies maintain extra liability insurance.

“Municipalities no longer possess a broad police power to regulate oil and gas,” the court wrote in its unanimous decision. 

The post To Protect Its Drinking Water, This City Has to Appeal to the Oil Regulators That Put It at Risk appeared first on ProPublica.

Last year, when the Trump Justice Department dropped its oversight of troubled police departments in cities such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, it argued that the reform efforts were “factually unjustified.”

But according to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, officers in those places were continuing to engage in the very behaviors that attracted federal scrutiny in the first place, including using excessive — and dangerous — force against people experiencing mental health crises.

The ACLU reviewed hundreds of police use-of-force reports in four communities where, under the Biden administration, the DOJ had found evidence of unconstitutional policing. In their review, ACLU investigators found agencies continuing to misuse Tasers and failing to properly review their officers’ use of force.

In one case, Minneapolis police repeatedly shocked a man with a Taser after he complied with their orders. In another, a Louisville officer broke a man’s car window during a mental health call while a second officer pointed his gun, escalating the encounter, according to the report. That officer then pulled the man from the car, at which point the man brandished a knife. The officers hit him with a baton and shocked him seven times.

The records primarily span from late 2024, after President Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, to early 2025, as the new administration began to shift the Justice Department away from its traditional focus on civil rights enforcement. 

The report also cites reporting by ProPublica, which has detailed police misconduct and reform efforts in Louisville and Memphis, Tennessee. In the fall of 2025, Trump deployed hundreds of National Guard troops, U.S. Marshals and immigration officials to Memphis because, he said, “of the crime that’s going on.” The operation, ProPublica found, ensnared innocent residents of the majority-Black city who said they were targeted and harassed because of their race. The U.S. Marshals Service, which led the effort, disputed the claims of racial profiling.

The aim of the ACLU effort, the authors said, was to hold local police accountable in the absence of federal oversight and to keep reforms moving in communities where investigators found or had concerns of excessive force and racial targeting. To do that, the nonprofit made public records requests for reports detailing officers’ use of force and other records from police or sheriff departments in Phoenix; Louisville; Worcester, Massachusetts; Minneapolis; Mount Vernon, New York; and Memphis.

“We did this project because we feared the Department of Justice was abandoning communities that needed help to ensure that reforms were made in their communities, and our analysis of the records unfortunately proves that to have happened,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director on policing for the ACLU.

The ACLU also sought records from Rankin County, Mississippi, where in 2023 members of the 

Rankin County Sheriff’s Department, calling themselves the “Goon Squad,” beat and tortured two Black men. The officers were convicted and sentenced to decades in prison in 2024. Biden’s DOJ launched an investigation into the sheriff’s department, and reports indicate that the Trump administration is continuing the probe. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s department told Mississippi Today that the agency “will continue its cooperation with the investigation in order to show that all aspects of the department’s policing are within constitutional boundaries.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed the ACLU’s findings as “partisan talking points” from an organization that she said “suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” She also defended the administration’s approach. “President Trump is a champion for our great law enforcement officers and has encouraged them to arrest criminals and enforce the law — unlike the Biden Administration,” Jackson said.

The ACLU report spotlights Louisville and Minneapolis in particular because they had signed reform agreements with the Biden Justice Department before the Trump administration dropped the underlying lawsuits and quashed the cases in 2025. The two cities were also more forthcoming than the others in response to the ACLU’s records requests. 

According to the report, officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department used excessive force, including striking people in their face, head or body while they were handcuffed, and failed to adequately review incidents of force, mischaracterizing facts during those reviews to make force appear more reasonable. A spokesperson for the Louisville police department told ProPublica it “reviews use-of-force incidents through multiple layers of supervision, and when policy violations are identified, appropriate corrective action is taken.”

Police also escalated encounters with people experiencing mental health crises by pointing their guns at them, the ACLU found. The issue has been particularly pronounced this year.  

In March, Louisville police officers fatally shot and killed a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall in her apartment while she was experiencing a mental health crisis. The incident is still under investigation, but police have said Hall posed a threat to officers because, they said, she was holding a piece of broken porcelain. 

Two months later, a Louisville police officer shot and killed 27-year-old Martin Nitzken Jr., who was unarmed and naked in the street. A caller reported Nitzken was having a “mental break,” according to local reports. The officer who shot Nitzken was indicted on charges of manslaughter and reckless homicide. He has pleaded not guilty. The officer’s lawyer did not respond to a request to speak to his client.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s records showed evidence of excessive force, improper use of Tasers and poor reviews of use of force, the ACLU report says. The police department didn’t provide comment.

Both Louisville and Minneapolis have adopted local versions of the reform agreements they had inked with the Biden administration, and local leaders have pledged to institute changes, which are being overseen by independent monitors. A spokesperson for the city of Louisville noted that its leadership “voluntarily” took on the reform effort after the DOJ “abandoned” federal oversight.

But, as ProPublica has reported, progress has been slow in Louisville, and the results have been mixed there, particularly in the area of mental health. 

“That the problems are still persisting in the same way is suggesting to me that the police departments are not doing enough to improve that conduct,” Borchetta said.

After the killings of Hall and Nitzken, Louisville’s mayor, Craig Greenberg, told local press the city was “moving as rapidly” as it can to change the way police respond to mental health calls by allowing behavioral health experts to help officers during such incidents.

Read more

After the Trump DOJ Halted Police Reform, This City Stepped In. Then Officers Shot and Killed Katelyn Hall.

The ACLU’s findings were “not all bad,” though, the authors wrote. The nonprofit credited Louisville for its transparency and for instances in which the review process worked “to identify, correct, and improve possible misuses of force.”

The organization had intended to produce a more expansive report but said that proved impossible due to the resistance and delays by the other local police departments it was scrutinizing. The Justice Department had investigated those cities and issued reports finding evidence their departments had engaged in unconstitutional policing. But the cases had not progressed beyond that when Trump was elected. 

Memphis and Phoenix refused to turn over the use-of-force records, the ACLU said, so the organization turned to the courts. The nonprofit sued Memphis in February for the documents. “Only then did Memphis finally agree to respond. This production is continuing, as is the ACLU’s review,” the report states. A spokesperson for the Memphis Police Department blamed the delay on the ACLU’s initial request, which they said was “overly broad” and lacked specificity and was thus denied.

The nonprofit sued Phoenix earlier this month for its records. The litigation is ongoing. The police department there did not respond to a request for comment.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, where the DOJ had previously found officers engaging in sex acts during undercover investigations, the ACLU said officials initially withheld a substantial amount of records, citing a statute meant to protect the privacy of sexual abuse victims. Worcester eventually relented and provided more records, the ACLU said, but still withheld reports for more than a dozen incidents. “Reliance on the statute to exempt records of police activity from public scrutiny thus turns a protection for survivors into a sword against them,” the report states.

A spokesperson for the city of Worcester rejected the ACLU’s assertion that the reports were withheld to protect the police department. “To conclude that the reports were withheld to protect the WPD when the law allows no discretion in determining whether such reports are public or not is an egregious misrepresentation of the law and of the city of Worcester’s appropriate response in accordance with the law,” the spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement.

Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has criticized the use of federal reform agreements, known as consent decrees, saying they represent an expensive form of micromanagement and “divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs.”

Notably, in its report, the ACLU found that a number of the law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force records were not detailed and thorough, making it difficult for the public or the agencies themselves to identify problems or prevent excessive-force issues. 

Borchetta said that the ACLU’s review is ongoing and the organization will take whatever action is needed to unlock more public information.

“You can make real change when people in the community want change and are pushing for it,” she said. “So we expect and hope that we can continue to work with communities and support them with this information, so that they can get the reform the DOJ tried to deny them.”

The post Trump’s DOJ Said Police Reform Was “Factually Unjustified.” A New Report Shows Otherwise. appeared first on ProPublica.

This spring, Father Dustin Feddon began waking up in the middle of the night. Heart racing, he would stand at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing cold water on his face until the feeling passed.

For about a dozen years, Feddon had visited prisoners on Florida’s death row as their appeals wound their way through the courts. Some had waited for decades, but the priest learned, more or less, how to accompany people through years of confinement and isolation without losing himself in their desolation. Then in January 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at an accelerated rate. What followed was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades in a state that has long been a stronghold of capital punishment.

In November, DeSantis set the execution date for Frank Walls, one of the men Feddon was counseling. Walls was moved from death row, at Union Correctional Institution, about an hour west of Jacksonville in the northeast part of the state, to nearby Florida State Prison. There he was placed in one of the three cells, known as death watch, that sit 30 feet from the execution chamber. And with that, Feddon was drawn into the strange, intimate work of accompanying a condemned person through the final weeks of his life. 

Seven days before Christmas, he sat beside Walls in the execution chamber, his hand resting on the man’s leg. Walls, with whom he shared communion just hours before, lay strapped to the gurney, his head freshly shaved, intravenous lines running into his right arm. His chest began to heave as he gasped for air for several minutes. Feddon watched as the man’s eyes rolled back and his body went slack and then fell still.

He was the 19th man put to death that year, shattering the state’s annual record of 11, first set in 1936; the Sunshine State accounted for 40% of all executions in the United States in 2025. 

Soon there were more prisoners who sought out the priest. One received an execution date in February, another in May. With each new death warrant, Feddon felt the panic rising in his chest. The pace of executions had upended the nature of his work; no longer was he ministering to men living under sentences of death; he was preparing them to die.

Feddon spent years getting ready for this role without quite knowing it. He entered the seminary in his 30s after temporarily taking a break from a doctoral program in religion, and during a year of hands-on ministry before his ordination, he began visiting prisoners. He went on to found Joseph House, a reentry home in Tallahassee, where he lives alongside men newly released from prison and often scarred by years in solitary confinement. There, he helps residents rebuild their lives — driving them to jobs, doctor appointments and therapy sessions; helping them obtain ID cards and open bank accounts; refereeing the inevitable dramas of communal living. There were no off days. He spent one Christmas waiting with a resident in an emergency room.

By the spring, he was ministering to the two men on death watch. As often as allowed, he came to see them, spending four hours on the road, round trip, to talk and pray with the men as they awaited execution. Some mornings he drove to Florida State Prison after only a few hours of sleep; and some days he returned to Joseph House so drained that the demands and small crises awaiting him there seemed strangely distant. At a spiritual retreat one afternoon, he suddenly became preoccupied with the idea that the priest who stood before him speaking was on the verge of collapse. Searching for an explanation, he told me he had become “hypervigilant of mortality — of other people dying, not me dying, but other people dying right in front of me.”

Florida has executed nine men this year, more than all other states combined. The pace has transformed death watch, which had typically been empty or held one man at a time. Now all three cells are often occupied, with the next man scheduled to die housed closest to the chamber. After each execution, the prisoners advance one cell closer; then another condemned man receives an execution date and is moved into the vacant cell. Death watch, once a lonely way station, has begun to resemble an assembly line.

Florida’s renewed embrace of the death penalty has unfolded against the backdrop of a decades-long national retreat from capital punishment. Thirty-three states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in at least a decade. New death sentences have dropped even more precipitously, with prosecutors in capital cases seeking them less often and jurors more likely to choose life in prison. Just 23 people were sentenced to death in the United States last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, compared with 307 in 1995. 

Support for capital punishment has been worn away by an accumulation of forces. The mounting number of death row exonerations — more than 200 since the early 1970s — has made the risk of executing an innocent person impossible to ignore. The steep cost of capital prosecutions has forced many prosecutors to think twice before seeking death; the years of litigation required to obtain and defend a death sentence can add millions of dollars to a case. Decades of declining violent crime have further blunted the public appetite for executions. Support for the death penalty now stands at its lowest since 1972; a Gallup poll last year found that a majority of Americans under 55 opposed it.

This July marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty, making it a defining feature of the American criminal justice system. But capital punishment has since lost its hold on the political imagination, with executions persisting in only a small number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri.

That retreat from capital punishment is apparent in governors’ offices across the country. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, declared a moratorium on executions, after the exoneration of 13 men who had been on death row; before leaving office, he commuted nearly all death sentences in the state to life in prison. More recently, Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania imposed or maintained moratoriums. In June, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican and a former prosecutor who helped write his state’s death penalty statute, called for abolishing capital punishment there, concluding that it did not deter murder and abandoning his belief that it was morally justified. 

President Donald Trump, by contrast, has long been one of the death penalty’s most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone of his law-and-order agenda. He resumed federal executions in 2020, ending a 17-year hiatus and reviving a punishment that had become an increasingly rare exercise of federal power. Before Trump took office, the federal government had executed just three people since 1963; in the final six months of his first term, it executed 13. He returned to the issue repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail, calling for broadening the categories of crimes eligible for execution by proposing death sentences for drug dealers, human traffickers and migrants who kill American citizens.

Hours after taking office in January 2025, he signed a sweeping executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety” — signaling that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind the revival of capital punishment. He instructed the attorney general to pursue death sentences more aggressively, called on the Justice Department to challenge Supreme Court decisions limiting the death penalty, directed federal officials to help states obtain the increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs needed to carry out executions and encouraged state prosecutors to seek capital punishment more often.

Nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida, thanks to an unusual concentration of power in the governor’s office. In most states that still carry out executions, the process follows a familiar legal path: Once a condemned prisoner has exhausted their appeals, courts — not governors — set execution dates. In Florida, however, the decision rests entirely with the governor, who decides whether — and when — to sign a death warrant for one of the state’s eligible prisoners.

DeSantis, like his predecessors, makes execution decisions behind closed doors; the state’s Supreme Court has long held that setting execution dates is an exercise of the governor’s executive authority, putting it beyond the reach of the state’s otherwise expansive open-government laws. As a result, there is no way to know what criteria DeSantis uses when he chooses who will be put to death, a Tampa-based attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, Maria DeLiberato, told me. “He could be deciding who is next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” she said, “or spinning a roulette wheel.”

The secrecy surrounding those decisions has left victims’ families, prisoners and their lawyers searching for clues about what principles, if any, guide DeSantis’ selection process. How long a prisoner has spent on death row does not appear to be a deciding factor; DeSantis has bypassed prisoners who committed their crimes as far back as the 1970s, scheduling the executions of men convicted of murders committed decades later. With no obvious overarching logic governing who is chosen next, the process has become a contest to attract — or avoid — his attention. Hoping to prompt him to issue a death warrant for Ronald Heath, convicted of the 1989 robbery and murder of a traveling salesman, the victim’s family sent DeSantis custom blue Sharpies — his pen of choice for signing both legislation and death warrants. DeSantis subsequently did so, and Heath was executed on Feb. 10.

In March, after the execution of a man named Billy Kearse by lethal injection took roughly twice as long as usual, lawyers for another man on death row, Chadwick Willacy, filed a public records request seeking information about the state’s execution protocol. A week later, DeSantis signed Willacy’s death warrant. That timing introduced more fear and uncertainty into an already opaque process. Lawyers representing condemned prisoners were left to wonder whether every legal challenge they raised risked drawing the governor’s scrutiny — and whether vigorous advocacy, intended to save a client’s life, could instead move them closer to death.

DeSantis has offered little public explanation for the record number of executions carried out since 2025 on his watch. The acceleration is particularly striking because it came after years of relative inactivity. In 2019, the first year of DeSantis’ governorship, Florida carried out two executions, and then three years passed without another. Though six men were executed in 2023, just one was put to death the following year before the pace abruptly ramped up in 2025. At a news conference in Jacksonville last November, a reporter asked him to explain the sudden increase. 

DeSantis blamed the disruptions of the pandemic as well as bureaucratic challenges for the slow pace at the start of his governorship. Meeting with victims’ families, he said, had reinforced his determination to see old death sentences carried out. “There’s a saying: Justice delayed is justice denied,” DeSantis said. “We’re doing it to be able to bring justice to the victims’ families.” When I asked his office for comment, the head of communications, Alex Lanfranconi, sent a short response: “My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people.”

Some observers see a different calculus. DeSantis is term-limited and will leave office in January, but his political future remains an open question. Since ending his campaign for the White House in 2024, he has worked to repair his relationship with Trump; in April, Axios reported that he was lobbying for a position in the administration, with an eye toward attorney general. Few who follow Florida politics believe he has abandoned his presidential ambitions. The sheer number of death warrants, wrote the editorial boards of the Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun Sentinel last summer, “gives rise to wonder: Why the sudden rush? Is it another sign that he’s planning another run for president in 2028? Would he campaign as the governor who tried to empty his state’s death row?”

When DeSantis signs a death warrant, no one on death row knows who among them has been selected until prison officials arrive at the condemned man’s cell. Of the 242 prisoners on death row, roughly half have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for a warrant. The routine is always the same: A cluster of officials in dress uniforms suddenly appears, the arrival announced by the heavy cadence of boots on concrete and the metallic jangle of handcuffs and restraints. “The warden is first, followed by the colonel and the major and the captain and about four of the biggest guards you’ve ever seen in your life,” a former death row inmate, John Buzia, who was resentenced to life in 2017, told me from prison. “They come walking down the wing and it’s dead silent, because they’ve got their game faces on.”

The men listen as the footsteps pass one cell, then another. From inside their cells, they can see little beyond their immediate neighbors, unless they slip a mirror between the bars in violation of prison rules. Somewhere along the way, the footsteps stop. The warden informs the man whose name appears on the piece of paper he carries that the governor has signed his death warrant. The prisoner is placed in restraints and led back down the wing before being transported to Florida State Prison and placed on death watch.

Even before the ramp-up of executions in 2025, waiting for this moment was an exercise in near constant close listening. “You become very ear-sensitive, sound-sensitive,” Buzia said. Years spent in near total isolation and the same monotonous routine sharpen the senses, lending the smallest break from the ordinary an outsize and terrifying significance: the unmistakable sound of several officers approaching, a certain rattle of keys, the wing suddenly falling silent.

Feddon saw the effects of this last July, when he went to visit Walls, who had been sentenced to death for killing an Air Force airman and his girlfriend during a 1987 robbery. Ten death warrants had been served in the previous seven months, and Walls was visibly on edge, telling the priest that he was barely sleeping because he was sure that his death warrant was going to come down at any moment. “They kind of know there’s this mysterious list,” Feddon said, “and they know they’re on it.” Walls, usually animated as he talked about whichever saint or prayer had most recently captured his imagination, struggled to collect his thoughts, and they sat in silence while he tried to focus. Feddon watched as exhaustion eventually overtook Walls and he nodded off. 

The lawyers who represent condemned prisoners, most of whom work for Florida’s Capital Collateral Regional Counsel — a state-funded agency responsible for representing death row inmates in their final rounds of appeals — live with the same uncertainty, never knowing which client will suddenly be scheduled to die, or when. Until a warrant is handed down, they can only guess which of the many cases they juggle will become their most urgent.

Texas, which has historically had the most active death chamber, requires at least 90 days to pass between the setting of an execution date and the execution itself. But in Florida, the period between the signing of a death warrant and an execution is roughly one month, on average. When a warrant arrives, it can set off an all-consuming race against the clock to determine whether there is any legal or factual reason the execution should not go forward: Were there witnesses who were overlooked? Or leads that earlier attorneys failed to recognize or fully investigate? Newer, more sensitive forms of forensic testing — which may have been unavailable, or less reliable, just a few years earlier — can shed light on old evidence. Advances in science and research can alter how courts view a prisoner’s long-standing claims of mental illness or intellectual disability. The imminence of an execution can prompt witnesses who have remained silent for years to speak. 

This spring, a prisoner named James Duckett, convicted of the 1987 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, received an execution date. Five days before Duckett was to be put to death, the Florida Supreme Court stayed his execution while last-minute DNA testing and analysis in the case were completed.

Cases like Duckett’s illustrate why the period between a death warrant and an execution is so important, serving as a final safeguard against an irreversible punishment. Florida’s own history of wrongful convictions in capital cases underscores what is at stake. No state has exonerated more death row prisoners, 30 men in all.

Now, with the added strain of one death warrant following another in rapid succession, the burden on the lawyers who are responsible for these cases has grown even heavier. “You have an execution, and then within a week or two, you’re working on a warrant again,” says Linda McDermott, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Office of the Federal Defender in Tallahassee, which represents Florida death row prisoners in federal court. Last year, eight prisoners represented by her office were executed.

The state’s accelerated pace leaves little room for error, or for the demands of life beyond the courtroom. When DeSantis signed a death warrant for Kearse on Jan. 29, Kearse’s lead attorney of more than 20 years, Paul Kalil, was grappling with a family crisis: His father, who had been hospitalized for several months, would enter hospice care less than a week later. As Kalil worked to prepare the final challenges to Kearse’s death sentence, his colleagues sought additional time, explaining in one court filing that “due to his ethical obligations to Mr. Kearse,” Kalil had not been able to spend sufficient time with his father in the final days of his life. The courts granted only 48 additional hours.

Kalil’s father died on Feb. 8. Afterward, Kalil’s colleagues again asked for more time, explaining that the lawyer with the deepest knowledge of the case was now grieving his father’s death and making funeral arrangements. The Florida Supreme Court denied the request, and three weeks later, Kearse was executed.

On April 21, the day Florida was set to execute Willacy, I made my way to the vigil that would be taking place outside Florida State Prison, near the small town of Starke. Across the two-lane highway that leads to the prison, a few dozen people were unfolding camping chairs on a sunbaked field, carrying signs with messages like “Execute justice not people” and “Thou shalt not kill.” A single, broad-canopied oak tree provided the only shade. There were no satellite trucks or television crews, no signs that something momentous was about to take place, other than a single counterprotester: a death penalty proponent who held up a sign listing the names of every man executed since early 2025, each name crossed out with a red X. Every so often, a lone car or pickup would come barreling down the highway, hurtle past the protesters and vanish.

The relative invisibility of executions — the sense that they take place with little public awareness — was what prompted Melanie Verdecia, a Jacksonville attorney, to start writing a newsletter on Substack, “Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty,” that chronicles everything from new capital prosecutions to last-minute death warrant litigation, in real time. Years ago, Verdecia told me, she was driving to the Florida Supreme Court, where she was clerking, on the day of a scheduled execution, having spent weeks immersed in the legal battle over whether it would proceed. As she sat in traffic looking at the commuters around her, she realized none of them had any idea that a man was slated to die that day.

Verdecia is one of a small number of Floridians who meticulously track the state’s use of the death penalty, trying to make sure executions — and more recently, the ramp-up in death warrants — do not pass completely unnoticed. On the afternoon of the Willacy execution, Grace Hanna was sitting in a doughnut shop in Starke, keeping a different kind of record. Hanna, the 29-year-old executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, sat at her laptop as she communicated with a network of people who were affected, in one way or another, by Florida’s death penalty, including capital defenders whose clients were under active death warrants and the state’s many death row exonerees, to family members of condemned prisoners who were preparing for final visits or grieving in the wake of an execution. Hanna told me that one of the most haunting parts of her job is when she is needed to collect the ashes of a condemned man and deliver them to his family.

When Hanna was 8 years old and growing up in Tallahassee, a cousin who worked the overnight shift at a convenience store in North Carolina was beaten to death during a robbery. The crime spurred long-running conversations in her home about crime, punishment and how society should respond after someone commits an act of violence. Her parents, Baptist deacons who ultimately left the church over its refusal to ordain women, raised their children to wrestle with such questions. “Clearly, something stuck,” Hanna told me. She went on to become a social worker, her brother a public defender. The man who killed her cousin received a sentence of life without parole, a punishment that spared her family from the many years or even decades of appeals that often accompany a death sentence. Justice, she said, had not demanded putting another person to death.

That day, Hanna was drafting a news release, as her team did every execution day, to be sent out after Willacy was put to death. It began by acknowledging the victim at the center of the case, Marlys Sather, who was 56 when she returned to her home in Palm Bay during her lunch break one day in 1990, interrupting a burglary. Court records show that Willacy beat her, bound her and set her on fire before fleeing.

These news releases try to hold two realities at once: the suffering caused by the crime and the complicated path that led there. Drawing on court filings, prison records and years of discussions with the lawyers and family members who know these men best, Hanna writes about forces that shaped their lives before prison: mental illness, intellectual disabilities, addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and childhoods marked by neglect. She also looks at the decades of incarceration that follow their convictions, during which sometimes profound transformations take place. “This is often the only obituary these men will get,” she said.

Yet that was not the central focus of the Willacy release she was writing. Hanna devoted much of it to his unsuccessful effort to force the state to disclose records about its lethal-injection protocol. “Every Floridian,” she typed, “should be asking themselves tonight: What is the State of Florida hiding in those records?”

The execution went forward that evening. Shortly after 6 o’clock, around the time the lethal-injection drugs began to flow, the protesters gathered around a large metal bell. One by one, they stepped forward. “Not in my name,” each said before striking it. The sound was low and resonant, reverberating after each blow. The counterprotester, meanwhile, a lean retiree named Bill Campbell, tried to drown out the sound with a boom box blasting “Another One Bites the Dust.”

Above them, the sky stretched to the horizon, luminous in the early evening light. “Whenever we’re here for an execution, something wild happens in the sky, like a torrential downpour or the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen,” Hanna told me. She often takes a photograph of the sky and sends it to the prisoner’s family if they cannot bear to be there.

Soon a convoy of white vans emerged from the prison gates carrying witnesses, two members of the media and prison officials. The Florida Department of Corrections announced Willacy’s time of death as 6:15 p.m. 

The protesters folded their chairs and gathered their belongings. A half-hour later, the vigil site had emptied out. Across the road, there was no visible sign that a man was put to death there that evening.

Another execution was already scheduled for nine days later. James Hitchcock, one of the longest-serving prisoners on Florida’s death row, was set to die on April 30. As Hanna headed to her car, she called out to another woman: “See you next week.”

Last December, with Florida on the verge of carrying out its 19th execution of the year, a retired warden named Ron McAndrew sat down to write an opinion piece for the Tampa Bay Times. A two-time DeSantis voter and self-described “law-and-order guy,” McAndrew was troubled by the rapid increase in executions. “That pace matters,” he wrote, “because executions depend on human beings performing complex, high-risk tasks under extreme pressure.” He warned of the potential for a serious error and the toll on those responsible for carrying out death sentences. “When something goes wrong in an execution chamber, it is not elected officials who absorb the consequences,” he wrote. It is prison staff members “who carry the memories long after the chamber is cleaned and the state moves on.”

McAndrew served as warden of Florida State Prison in the mid-’90s, when Florida still used the electric chair. He walked three men to the execution chamber and gave the signal that sent electricity coursing through their bodies. The last execution he oversaw, on March 25, 1997, would help hasten the end of Florida’s reliance on the electric chair. Moments after that prisoner, Pedro Medina, received the first jolt of electricity, his head caught fire and flames leaped into the air. Smoke filled the chamber. Medina’s chest heaved until he was pronounced dead.

McAndrew threw out the uniform he wore that day, which smelled of burning flesh. Afterward, Gov. Lawton Chiles sent him to Texas to study lethal injection, the primary method Florida uses today. The cumulative weight of the executions followed him. He drank heavily, sometimes downing a bottle of Johnnie Walker in a single day. At night, he often awoke to find the men whose executions he had overseen sitting on the edge of his bed. “They’re haunting me,” he told his wife.

Thirteen years of therapy allowed him to regain his footing. Now retired, he lives in the small town of Dunnellon, roughly 70 miles southwest of Florida State Prison, where he had hoped for a quiet life, puttering along the Withlacoochee River on his pontoon boat. But as executions accelerated last year, he found himself worrying about the people inside Florida State Prison who were being asked to shoulder the burden he once carried, and of the effect on them of so much killing. He knew what it was like to stand inside the execution chamber, and what it was like for the other prison officials and staff members who were required to see the process through to the end. “It was damaging, and I mean very damaging, to the people in that room.”

I thought of the emotion with which McAndrew said “damaging” — as if he were describing an injury that never fully healed — when I spoke to Feddon on June 3, the day after a prisoner named Andrew Lukehart was executed. 

Feddon had accompanied Lukehart, who was sentenced to death for the 1996 killing of his girlfriend’s 5-month-old daughter, through the final month of his life. The crime, the remorse he carried and the abuse that had marked his childhood were not the subjects to which Lukehart most often returned. Again and again, he spoke of the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that winds across northern Spain, imagining that one day he might somehow walk its dusty roads. He and Feddon recited prayers, which the priest had found for him, that pilgrims have spoken for generations along the Camino.

Late in the afternoon on June 2, Feddon had been brought into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison, where he took a seat beside Lukehart, who was strapped to the gurney, and rested his hand on the man’s leg. Lukehart’s execution was the third that the priest would witness at Florida State Prison, and his voice was heavy as he spoke to me the following morning. “To begin the sacrament of last rites for an otherwise utterly healthy man …” he said, trailing off.

He told me he had been flooded with images of the execution since waking before dawn. The scenes returned one after another: Lukehart’s face, flushed with pooled blood, as if he had been doing a headstand; a doctor leaning over the gurney, raising Lukehart’s eyelids to verify that he was dead; the prayer rope Feddon laid across the man’s still chest. Before Mass that morning, the images looped in his mind. “I just was seeing it, and seeing it, and seeing it.”

The priest was struggling to reconcile what he believed he was called to do with what that calling now required of him, and how to move forward as death warrants continued to be signed at a relentless pace. How could he keep doing this work? And yet, how could he abandon the men who had asked him to walk beside them? Inside the death chamber with Lukehart, Feddon told me, he felt a tension between the privilege of being with the condemned, he said, “to speak words of healing, of love, of God’s mercy” at their hour of greatest need, contrasted with the taking of a life. “Everything makes you want to cry out to the people around you, ‘Why are you making me do this?’” he said. 

Lukehart was gone, but another prisoner he was counseling, Duckett, whose execution had been put on hold for DNA testing, remained. The testing yielded no clear answers, and prosecutors were now asking the Florida Supreme Court to lift its stay so that the execution could proceed. The machinery of death had paused for him, but only briefly. Feddon would return to Florida State Prison to see him in just a few days.

The post Florida Is Executing Prisoners at a Record Pace, Even as Most of the U.S. Abandons the Death Penalty appeared first on ProPublica.

Former Louisiana death row inmate Jimmie “Chris” Duncan is officially a free man following a unanimous ruling Monday by the Louisiana Supreme Court. In the opinion, justices upheld a lower court’s decision to toss out Duncan’s 1998 conviction for killing his former girlfriend’s toddler, Haley Oliveaux, citing flawed forensics practices used to convict him. 

Justice Cade R. Cole wrote on behalf of the seven-member court that new evidence presented by Duncan’s legal team left no doubt that his conviction should be overturned.

“The post-conviction evidence undermined the core factual premises on which the state depended,” Cole wrote in the official opinion.

Two other justices, including Chief Justice John Weimer, issued opinions concurring with Cole.  

“I am flooded with relief,” said Chris Fabricant, a member of Duncan’s legal team and director of strategic litigation with the Innocence Project in New York, in an interview. “It would have been a moral outrage for the conviction to be reinstated.”

The court’s ruling came after a 2025 Verite News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of the key forensic evidence used to convict Duncan, now 57. At the time, he faced the possibility of being put to death as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause.

Duncan’s conviction was based largely on now-discredited bite mark evidence presented by forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Steven Hayne. Their analysis, which was critical to Ouachita Parish prosecutors securing Duncan’s conviction, claimed to match marks on Haley’s body to Duncan’s teeth. 

But experts have since deemed such evidence, fairly common at the time of Duncan’s 1998 trial, to be junk science. Meanwhile, the longtime partnership between West and Hayne has come under scrutiny from civil rights attorneys, forensic experts and the courts over concerns about the validity of their techniques.

In the 28 years since Duncan’s trial, nine other prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row. Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work.

In his opinion, Cole reexamined the use of supposed bite marks, which were the only physical evidence tying Duncan to the alleged crime. Cole pointed to a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at trial. In that recording, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed. Referencing previous testimony from a defense expert, Cole wrote that “it was ‘scientifically indefensible’ to identify those marks as having been made by Duncan, and that the angles shown in the West Video were physically impossible for a human bite.”

West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks.

Read More

He Was Convicted Based on Allegedly Fabricated Bite Mark Analysis. Louisiana Wants to Execute Him Anyway.

Weimer wrote in a concurrence that the bite mark evidence used to prosecute Duncan was similar to “trial by water” tests used by witch-hunters in the 17th century, in which suspected witches were bound with rope and lowered into a body of water. If they floated, they were considered guilty of witchcraft, while those who “passed” the test by sinking often drowned. 

“We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “The bite mark evidence and the sexual abuse evidence used in the trial against the accused has proven to be similarly specious.”

Duncan’s prosecution “demonstrates we cannot be too careful in determining whether the death penalty should be implemented in cases such as this case because of the finality of the sentence and the impossibility of rectification,” Weimer wrote.“Such an irreversible and tragic consequence is inimical and deleterious to our system of justice if carried out based on evidence that is devoid of legitimacy.”

“This Should Be the End of This Case”

Police arrested Duncan on Dec. 18, 1993. He was babysitting Haley that day in the home he shared with the girl’s mother in West Monroe. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went downstairs to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed upstairs to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Duncan was initially booked for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after Hayne and West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.

While Duncan awaited an execution date, his new team of postconviction attorneys uncovered evidence that pointed to his innocence, including an expert witness who said that the child’s death was not a homicide but the result of an accidental drowning. In addition, investigators working for Duncan’s legal team interviewed a jailhouse informant who recanted his earlier trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.

Duncan’s conviction was overturned in April of last year by former Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp. He was let out of prison on bail in December, but he continued to await a final decision on his case after prosecutors appealed Sharp’s ruling. 

Steve Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, has never wavered in his insistence that Duncan was guilty of murder and that he should be put to death. His office appealed Sharp’s decision to the state Supreme Court.

During oral arguments in April, Tew said that since Duncan was the only person with Haley at the time of her death, his guilt could not be debated. “We don’t need the bite mark evidence to put Mr. Duncan in the apartment alone with this child,” Tew said.

Haley’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, has publicly supported Duncan’s release from prison and the overturning of his conviction; so have family members of Haley’s father, Lloyd Donald Oliveaux, who died in 1996. They have excoriated the state’s tactics, claiming they repeatedly asked for a meeting with prosecutors to express their concerns, but never received a response.

Tew, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, said at the April hearing that should the Supreme Court refuse to reinstate Duncan’s conviction, he would retry him, though he did not say what charge he might pursue.

When asked about the prospect of Duncan being retried for murder, Fabricant, the Innocence Project attorney, said, “If there is any sense of fairness and justice left, this should be the end of this case.”

In addition to the Innocence Project, Duncan’s legal team includes the Mwalimu Center for Justice in New Orleans and the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm in Atlanta. 

The post Louisiana Supreme Court Frees Death Row Prisoner, Calling Evidence Against Him “Scientifically Indefensible” appeared first on ProPublica.

A deal to bring Colorado River water to Native American communities in northern Arizona, where a third of homes lack running water, is being blocked by neighboring states, caught up in a broader battle over how to divide the dwindling river.

The largest tribal water rights settlement in U.S. history — the product of decades of negotiations to secure water for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe — was on the verge of being realized before Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming stepped in to oppose it being codified by Congress.

“We have significant unresolved concerns with the legislation that may affect each of our states’ rights to and interests in Colorado River water,” negotiators for Utah and Wyoming wrote in March to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in a previously unreported letter. New Mexico and Colorado sent similar letters.

Those four states, known collectively as the Upper Basin, are at a stalemate with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada over new rules governing how they share the Colorado River, a key water source for nearly 40 million people. Congress and the White House, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, have declined to approve the settlement until all parties reach an agreement.

For 83-year-old Marilyn Tewa, the stalemate means her family will continue to go without running water. Tewa serves on the Hopi Tribal Council, where her duties include working on the water rights agreement, but her village of Mishongnovi, on the tribe’s northern Arizona reservation, lacks indoor plumbing.

Every other day, she loads 5-gallon buckets into her pickup and drives 5 miles to a windmill originally built for livestock that draws untreated water from underground.

“That’s what keeps us alive,” Tewa said, tapping the spigot on a May afternoon.

Back home, Tewa bustled about her kitchen while her daughter kneaded dough for dinner. There’s no faucet in the kitchen, which is decorated with a framed American flag and a painting of a katsina, a figure with spiritual significance in Hopi culture. Instead, the family stores water in large plastic containers. Because of the lack of indoor plumbing, the Tewa family and its neighbors use portable toilets that stand among the houses.

If passed into law, the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act would resolve the largest outstanding claim on the Colorado River while providing about $5 billion in federal funding to build infrastructure to transport the water across the reservations. The legislation would also go beyond water rights, creating a reservation for the San Juan Southern Paiute. The tribe’s effort to secure a permanent homeland was added to the settlement due to their difficulty getting it through Congress independently.

“That’s my prayer,” Tewa said, “that we get this settlement through for all three tribes.”

The tribes need pipes, pumps and treatment plants to use the water secured through the settlement. To defray the cost beyond the federal government’s expected contribution, the Navajo and Hopi plan to lease some of their water rights, almost certainly to growing towns around Phoenix. The towns would pay to use the tribes’ water for a set number of years.

While the Lower Basin states support the settlement, the Upper Basin states have latched onto this provision in particular as they stand in the way of the settlement.

The Colorado River’s upper and lower basins don’t precisely follow state borders. Some states have portions in both sections, and the line dividing the two basins cuts across northeastern Arizona and directly through the Navajo reservation. If water moves across that line, they argue, the rules governing the river give them veto power over the settlement. (It’s an open legal question whether approval from all seven states is necessary.)

The Upper Basin states fear that, in the future, water they currently control might be leased on an open market. They view any monetary transaction that moves water downstream as setting a precedent that could allow the highest bidder — possibly thirsty cities with money such as Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas — to buy vast quantities of their water.

In an effort to assuage that concern and close the deal, the Navajo and Hopi made major concessions over the volume of water and length of time they could lease. The tribes also offered to leave some of their water in one of the river’s drought-depleted reservoirs to help keep water levels high enough that it could continue flowing downstream. But the Upper Basin has not wavered in its opposition.

ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix reached out to the governor, senators and lead negotiator from every Upper Basin state for comment. Utah’s and Wyoming’s lead negotiators deferred to the letter they co-signed. A spokesperson for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement that the tribes addressed most of the state’s concerns but that questions remain as to whether the water that the tribes would lease to Arizona cities could be counted as part of what the Upper Basin states are legally required to send to the Lower Basin. “New Mexico remains committed to finding a workable solution,” the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also said the state is “committed to finding a path forward” and pointed to the letter that Becky Mitchell, the state’s lead river negotiator, submitted to Congress. Mitchell wrote that the settlement’s leasing provisions violate laws governing the river and that the state was concerned about what the sale of water across the basin would mean for “the security and certainty” of Colorado’s share of the river.

Heather Tanana is an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s law school, where she focuses on federal Indian law. She is also a citizen of the Navajo Nation and said the Upper Basin is “trying to hide behind” how the river has traditionally been managed rather than find a way to give the tribes access to a resource that is rightfully theirs and one that they need to survive.

“It’s a fundamental human rights issue,” she said.

While negotiations drag on, the three tribes continue waiting for water they say will help them to build more housing, grow sustainable economies, better protect public health and preserve cultural practices.

The Hopi believe their ancestors return as clouds to bring the rain that nourishes their corn, but drought is wracking the region. An overreliance on groundwater has dried up springs that have been used for ceremonies and agriculture for centuries. When the settlement brings more water to the reservation, Tewa said, aquifers will have a chance to recharge, restoring the springs.

“I’m speaking on behalf of my children, my grandchildren and their children that haven’t come yet,” she said. “I hope, in the future, that they will have water.”

Fighting for Water Since Elvis Was on TV

That the settlement even reached Congress seemed like a small miracle to those involved.

The 30 federally recognized tribes with land in the Colorado River Basin are estimated to have a right to at least a quarter of the river’s flow. But there’s little incentive to hand tribes the water to which they are entitled. Their rights are the most senior on the river, meaning in times of shortage everyone else would see their water cut before the tribes. But because the tribes currently use a fraction of their water, farmers, cities and businesses are able to use the rest for free.

If the tribes were to use every drop to which they are entitled, the system of sharing the river that supports more than $1 trillion in annual economic output would collapse.

“Everybody’s getting free Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute water right now. The seven basin states are all benefiting in the absence of a settlement,” said Ethel Branch, a former Navajo attorney general who was involved in the negotiations, adding that the water had been “stolen for over a century.”

In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that, if the federal government confined tribes to reservations, then it owed them enough water to sustain an agrarian economy on that land. But securing that promised water, referred to as “Winters rights,” has proven arduous.

Tribes were excluded from the compacts that apportioned the river. The Navajo in particular were barred from joining a seminal case quantifying other users’ rights, and members of the tribe themselves rejected a proposed settlement in 2012 when they viewed the deal as unfair. So the tribe went back to the Supreme Court, asking that the justices force the federal government to quickly settle the claims. The Navajo once again lost, with the court’s majority deciding that their treaty with the U.S. didn’t require the government to take any “affirmative steps” to deliver the water it owed the tribe.

“At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote of the Navajo in his dissent. “When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Arizona politicians and tribal leaders have since concluded that they needed to combine all three tribes’ claims to finally settle their rights.

That was no simple feat. The Navajo and Hopi have long had a contentious relationship. Underlining their thorny partnership, leaders of various tribes around the region have accused Navajo, the largest tribal nation in the U.S., of flexing their political strength to the detriment of other tribes.

Arizona also historically clashed with local tribes over water. The state often inserted unrelated provisions into proposed settlements, which some tribes viewed as poison pills and had the effect of stalling the agreements.

But Navajo and Hopi struck a deal, and Arizona moved off its bargaining position. Now in lockstep, the settlement’s supporters turned to Congress, only to hit more roadblocks: The House of Representatives balked at the spiraling price tag to fund the deals; presidential administrations were unwilling to expend political capital on such settlements; and more than a dozen settlements are in the works, clogging the system. (No settlement has been enacted since 2022.)

“Partisanship has gone to a new low in this country, and Indian water settlements have gotten swept up into that,” said Pam Williams, who spent about two decades as director of the Secretary’s Indian Water Rights Office in the Department of the Interior before she retired last year.

In November 2024, as President Donald Trump prepared for his return to the White House, the tribes believed they had an opening to get their settlement through Congress while President Joe Biden was still in office.

Navajo leadership had supported the Democratic presidential ticket and feared the incoming administration would be vindictive toward them.

Every basin state’s lead negotiator, tribes’ staff and a federal representative descended upon the Arizona Department of Water Resources’ offices in Phoenix for what several attendees described as a “Hail Mary.” At the meeting, the Navajo offered a major compromise: limiting how much water they could lease and for how long they could lease it.

But the Upper Basin states showed up with a list of grievances, multiple attendees told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, and weren’t interested in negotiating over the Navajo leasing concessions.

“It’s difficult for the Upper Basin to wrap their heads around this settlement,” said Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River lead.

In March 2026, leaders from the tribes traveled to Washington for a Senate hearing where they made an impassioned plea for Congress to pass a version of the bill that now included the concessions they had offered in the Hail Mary meeting. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who ran the hearing, expressed support for the settlement but worried its $5 billion price tag was too high, a concern echoed by an Interior Department official who testified. (The tribes and department are currently negotiating to shrink that cost.)

All four Upper Basin states submitted comments opposing the settlement. Their main concerns were about the ability to lease across the basin and whether the water for the settlement would be counted against the upper or lower division of the river.

Leasing would last only as long as it’s needed to pay for infrastructure to distribute their newly acquired water, said Navajo President Buu Nygren. It would not set a precedent, he said, because no other tribe straddles both basins.

“We shouldn’t be punished for being in two basins,” Nygren said, “because other tribal nations, other settlements have been able to lease water.”

“How Precious Water Is to Us”

During the decades that the tribes fought to access their water, they helped quench the thirst of growing cities in the Colorado River Basin.

A water intake plant on Navajo land drew from Lake Powell to cool the nearby Navajo Generating Station. The coal plant powered pumps for the Central Arizona Project, the 336-mile series of canals that sends Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.

The power station shut down in 2019, and the intake plant was handed over to the Navajo for the iiná bá-paa tuwaqat’si pipeline, which means “for life” in Diné and “water is life” in Hopi, to deliver water to the three tribes. But for now, the massive pumps remain mothballed, the building sitting musty and dark like a tomb, and the pipeline remains an engineering schematic, waiting for funding from the stalled settlement.

The irony is not lost on tribal leaders, they told ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix: After helping deliver water beyond their lands, they are now blocked from using that same water and infrastructure to sustain their communities. The insult is compounded, they said, by the fact that water use is drastically lower on reservations.

“It’s not about green-grass lawns or golf courses or swimming pools,” said Crystalyne Curley, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council. “It’s just basically turning on the faucet and getting water to boil eggs for your children or turning on a faucet to wipe and clean the table or washing your hands after butchering a sheep.”

For the San Juan Southern Paiute, the settlement is also about having a permanent homeland. They have no reservation but struck a deal with Navajo in 2000 to transfer some of its land. Since the tribes already reached an agreement, it’s an uncontroversial proposition. But, without political clout to get Congress to take it up, the land transfer was pulled into the water settlement.

“​​During the COVID era, it took a lot of the tribal elders, and there are only a handful that saw the treaty signed and are really wanting to see this before their time is up,” said San Juan Southern Paiute Vice President Johnny Lehi Jr., whose father signed the 2000 agreement. Finally securing a reservation, he said, means the ability to build housing and develop an economy for a tribe that currently rents its government building.

Nearby, on the Hopi reservation, Councilmember Marilyn Fredericks grabbed a pair of hiking poles, donned a hat with a roadrunner pin on it and set out from her village on a recent spring afternoon. To stay fit as she grows older, she walks up and down the hand-carved steps of a terraced garden that used to produce food for her community.

Seven natural springs once fed the garden, but only two still flow. Ponds that stored their excess sit dry, stains on the rock now just a memory of the water. It’s been six years since there was enough to plant.

The settlement would fund a pipeline that would be “our umbilical cord,” Fredericks said. Future generations of Hopi have a right to clean, reliable water, she said. “This is evidence of how precious water is to us.”

The post Native American Tribes Came Together to Secure Their Rights to Colorado River Water. Four States Are Stalling the Deal. appeared first on ProPublica.

Chris Casad awakens each day before dawn on the Central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes before water shortages forced him to fallow fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land. 

At 38, he’s got tractors older than he is. His two kids are under 5. His wife, Cate, has two jobs. They’re staring down a pile of debt from their 85 acres and its unending supply of things in the process of breaking. 

The crisis for their farm started in drought — three summers during which starving grasshoppers descended on the area’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry and the springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.

But the death knell for Casad’s crops was Oregon’s century-old law, which protects some water users at the expense of others. 

The couple saw the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes in the name of that law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There were a number of suicides, let alone people who closed up shop, older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going,” Casad said.

At the same time, a few miles upstream, state law encouraged landowners to soak some of Oregon’s most expensive real estate and least productive farmland, a ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting analysis of water use has found. These water-rich Oregonians live in the Central Oregon Irrigation District, a quasi-municipal corporation — part public utility, part homeowners association — that manages and distributes the lion’s share of the Deschutes’ water.

Six irrigation districts together take more than 90% of the river in Bend from May to September. COID is, by far, the most powerful. It has rights to more than half of the volume of the river because when the state was carving up the Deschutes, back in the early 1900s, COID was near the front of the line with a plan to use the water. And in Western water law, that place in line — senior rights — guarantees that when drought hits, your share is protected. 

The Central Oregon Irrigation District Diverts More Water Annually From the Deschutes in Bend Than All Other Irrigation Districts Combined

That same law also says COID can keep taking all that water as long as it can prove that landowners in the district are putting it to “beneficial use.” Waste is forbidden.

But Oregon policymakers have such loose definitions of what’s beneficial and what’s waste that, during the drought, our reporting found, only 1 of every 4 gallons COID took from the river was absorbed by crops. 

The news organizations shared our analysis of state-commissioned satellite data with both officials who manage water for Oregon and with COID. While the state did not dispute the numbers, irrigation district leaders said they didn’t trust the state data, which Oregon lawmakers created to study water availability. COID also said that the drought years were anomalous; however, our analysis across wet and dry years showed crops drank a similar share of the diverted water each year. 

Other records from the district and the state describe how most of the water percolated into the ground, evaporated into hot, dry air, or drained off fields into scrubland and desert. Some fed the aquifer. Some went back into the river downstream, where environmental regulators have found waterways warmed and polluted. 

And that one gallon that quenched crops? Almost all of it went to grass and pasture. 

“We’re Just Wasting Water” 

Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s biggest city, where he watched developers slice farmland into subdivisions. The lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture turned instead toward tourism and recreation.

Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes, and then to the estates, farms, ranches and destination resorts on the city’s outskirts. Among those sits a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame, one of the wealthiest families in the world and, our analysis found, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website shows. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water. 

Another long, gated driveway leads to an 80-acre property that was once dry scrubland. Cinematographer Byron Garth bought water rights from another landowner through COID a decade ago to irrigate part of the property. 

The water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as an auction listing last year put it, with a 6,300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors, three guest houses, a 10,000-square-foot garage and a swimming pool — all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass. 

For a few years, Garth used his water rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats, but in the end, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he did have reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he reasoned that somebody had to use it. 

“For the aesthetic value,” realtor Jen Bowen said about the grass last year, as she gave OPB a tour of the estate shortly before Garth sold it for $4.8 million.

“I think most of us would agree — it’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than it is the high desertscape,” Bowen said.

One of the district’s thirstiest developments is Ranch at the Canyons, a gated subdivision of dozens of multimillion-dollar Tuscan-style mansions whose residents mutually own an equestrian center, a luxury wedding venue, a winery and a nonprofit farm run by “dedicated ranch management and local farmers.” A development manager did not respond to a request for comment. Its website promises homeowners “the peaceful rhythm of agricultural life — without the work.” 

A similar property listed for $15 million invites its future owners to imagine more than a residence or a cattle ranch, but “a Playground for Ambitions, for Imagination, for Dreamers, and for Doers.”

Our analysis of the most recently available state data, covering 2015 to 2022, found that more than 9 out of every 10 acres in the district were growing grass — pasture and hay fields for livestock as well as landscaping. 

Casad started his life as a farmer in the district, but he was not one of those grass growers. He began leasing land near his hometown in 2010, and within a matter of years was turning a profit, annually growing thousands of tons of organic potatoes, pulling them from the earth with a gargantuan harvester he called “the white whale.” He liked the idea of farming in a region that once sold 1 of every 4 bags of potatoes in the state. He leased more land, sold out at farmers’ markets, supplied a local brewery with spuds for its fries, and welcomed school field trips, “just to show kids what a working farm is, where their food comes from.”

COID’s water was a boon.

“It was just always on,” Casad said. 

But the glut of water became a problem. He couldn’t just cut off the flow without risking his landlord’s water rights. So he did what others in the district do: figure out a way to use the “overabundance” or capture it in ponds. When one pond was full, Casad started digging a second one so the excess water wouldn’t inundate his neighbor’s property.

On more than a third of COID’s acreage, landowners irrigate their crops by intentionally flooding the fields. Water flows directly from ditches across the land — saturating plants, pooling and running off as it evaporates or seeps into the ground. 

Water experts are quick to point out that water running off fields or leaking out of canals filters into aquifers or drains back to the river. That is not waste, they say, because it recirculates in the river basin. 

This recycling takes time, while the consequences on the Deschutes are immediate. Farmers are drying up acreage and, for about 40 miles downstream of Bend, fish habitats suffer, state scientists told us. Once irrigation districts take their 90% of the river during the growing season, average remaining flows over the last decade have been about half what the ecosystem needs, according to stream gauges and state conservation targets. “The river always loses,” former state biologist Brett Hodgson said. 

The fact that much of the irrigation water is, in some form or fashion, recycled elsewhere doesn’t put COID landowners like David Fisher at ease either. Fisher said he flood irrigates about 60 acres of his property to grow hay and pasture for cattle.

“We’re just wasting water. Really. We are,” remarked the 72-year-old butcher shop owner. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a tree hugger or one of those people that think that we should stop this for the frogs or the fish. But there’s got to be a middle of the road.”

Only a Quarter of the Water the Central Oregon Irrigation District Diverted From The Deschutes River Was Consumed by Crops

Most of it leaked from open canals, percolated into the ground or ran off fields before returning to aquifers or to the river downstream.

“Waste Is Like Pornography”  

Both how much water the district uses and what its landowners are growing have the state’s blessing. Oregon, like other Western states, says that as long as irrigation is put to “beneficial use without waste,” no one can take your water rights.

But growing anything is considered a beneficial use as long as it’s planted, irrigated and not a native species or noxious weed. Policymakers and courts have labeled so few uses as waste that one of the most well-known legal precedents was set 90 years ago by a California court, said Colorado-based water law attorney Sarah Klahn. The case forbade the use of irrigation water to drown gophers. 

Water rights are a form of property rights, Oregon-based water law attorney Karen Russell said, and although the law is designed to adapt to changing times, the courts have typically allowed past practices to dictate how much water landowners can use.

In the eyes of Oregon courts, “waste is like pornography,” she said: “You know it when you see it.” 

So it doesn’t matter if landowners are watering the prized crops that decades ago were celebrated by the Deschutes Basin’s annual potato festival, when local women vied to be crowned “Miss Spud,” or the grass and hay for today’s “Playground for Ambitions.”

This is the point COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell, who is in charge of the district’s day-to-day operations, tried to drive home at a town hall meeting in Redmond last March. The moderator read a question asking about incentives that might make “hobby farms” more efficient. Horrell bristled at the term, calling it a label intended to “shame and coerce us into change.” 

“We as district managers don’t get to decide whether we like somebody growing carrot seed or somebody having two llamas and a Prius in the driveway,” he shot back. “If you’re using your water beneficially and growing a beneficial crop, that is what we manage. We don’t have the right to say whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

The district is vigilant about ensuring one thing — that landowners are growing a non-native crop, which the district checks through field visits and by aerial reviews, COID’s Deputy Director of Water Rights Jessi Talbott said in a recent interview. 

Every summer, a COID-hired plane flies over the district’s more than 70 square miles of fields, an area larger than Salem, Oregon’s capital city, looking for brown patches. If landowners aren’t using the water exactly where they are supposed to at least once every five years, the state can cancel unused water rights. Oregon regulators have canceled irrigation water rights just four times since 2020, and none of those were in the COID. 

“Nobody else in the state does what we do to try and encourage use,” Talbott said. 

Since 2021, the district has sent more than 1,000 letters to landowners warning them they were in danger of losing water rights. The intent of the letters isn’t to scare people, but to educate them about water stewardship, Talbott said. If landowners suspected of not using water don’t take action, COID can and will confiscate rights itself, she added, but this rarely happens.

Casad’s landlord got a letter from COID in 2016, after aerial surveillance spotted “specific dry areas” on the property, district records show. Casad and his wife, Cate Havstad-Casad, had turned one rocky corner into a compost pile and parking area for their equipment.

“In order to satisfy the powers that be seeing that we’re using the water, there was an entire season where we had to water that compost pile and equipment yard,” Havstad-Casad said. 

By the next year, a COID inspector’s report noted “enough growth to avoid confiscation.” In 2023, on another property, Andria Truax and her husband Dan Baumann got a COID warning letter that sent them into “panic mode,” they said. The couple owns a nursery raising drought-tolerant landscaping plants on a 10-acre property near Bend. 

“We’re supposed to keep some of these areas green that are next to impossible to grow anything on,” Truax said. 

They didn’t want to douse rocky soil and fight back the weeds that immediately sprang up. The irony struck her because “farmers are getting cut off from water downstream and meanwhile we’re being told to water more.”

Still, to protect their water rights and property values, they turned on the sprinklers. 

COID doesn’t tell people to water rocks or compost piles, Talbott said in an interview last year. In a more recent interview, she said OPB and ProPublica’s finding that only about 25% of the district’s diversion was consumed by crops was “infuriating.”

“We do so much to educate our patrons and for them to use the water right and make products out of it, feed the community, feed cows, whatever is in alignment with water law,” Talbott said. 

In the same meeting, Horrell said the district not only doesn’t overdeliver water, but some properties don’t get enough. COID doesn’t directly measure how much water landowners use, only how much land they’re irrigating.

In its water management conservation plan, which covers 2015 to 2020, COID approximated how much water crops required, based on surveys of its landowners about what they were growing — largely pastures — and federal weather data. Those averaged estimates showed crops required about 27% of what the district took out of the river annually. That roughly mirrors our own finding of what crops actually drank, based on the state’s study of satellite data. 

Horrell and other district officials did not respond to multiple questions about the numbers in COID’s own conservation plan. 

“They Have All the Cards”

State leaders have long wrestled with how to divvy up the Deschutes Basin in the face of increasing drought, booming population and growing demand. Bend and Redmond, the basin’s two largest cities, are facing uncertain future supplies; during the drought of 2022, COID diverted over 12 times more water than both cities combined, with their then roughly 132,000 total residents. While farms are, by far, the biggest water users in the nation, the COID’s contribution to the state’s agricultural economy is among the lowest in Oregon. The region leads other Oregon counties only in horse sales.

Republican state Rep. Mark Owens, a hay farmer from Eastern Oregon and one of the state’s leading voices on water management, said the district’s hobby farmers are getting excess water “which they do not need, should not have to utilize and should not be delivered to them.” Oregon, he said, is long overdue to look again at how it manages water. 

The beneficial use rule was designed, he said, to build up rural economies, and “it’s what allowed some of our communities to prosper.” But now, “you have a group of folks that employ nobody, harvest nothing, so how are you actually providing a public benefit for that water?” he said. “So is there something broken? Yeah, there is.”

How, he asked, “do you get the most crop per drop?” 

Rather than mandates, the Legislature has turned to incentives, like authorizing programs that pay people to leave water in the river without losing the right to it. Baumann and Truax eventually did just that with a sliver of their water rights. But the state doesn’t dictate how irrigation districts use those incentives. COID’s board of directors has capped participation so that very few properties are eligible. 

Horrell said the district has to limit enrollment in water-sharing programs because its 120-year-old delivery system will fail if the canals aren’t brimming full.

The district’s hundreds of miles of open, unlined waterways rely on gravity to push huge volumes out of the river and propel the water that ends up on fields more than 30 miles away. When COID has reduced the volume of this “carry water” too much in the past, Horrell said, farms at the ends of the system suffered. 

But the district acknowledged in public meetings and in our interviews that all the water leaking and evaporating along the way is wasteful. To change that, it’s seeking more than $700 million in public funding to replace the canals with new, pressurized pipes. It’s already gotten more than $65 million for piping since 2015.

Read More

Oregon Leaders Are Trying to Save the Deschutes River. Here’s Why That’s So Hard.

“There is no dispute that we all want a better, more equal, more balanced water delivery system that benefits our river, our partners, districts, cities. That’s a given,” Horrell said, “How we get there is what we argue about.”

COID is a business, he emphasized, one that he said does need to become more sustainable as the climate changes.

COID’s rights allow it to take even more water from the Deschutes than it does. Even so, Horrell pointed out, it has voluntarily scaled back over the last decade of droughts. Thanks to piping, he said, it sends some water to downstream farmers when it doesn’t have to.

But, he said, that “doesn’t mean that it is not ours.” 

The Deschutes, like rivers across the country, is owned by the public, and taxpayers are spending big to conserve it. But irrigation districts still have all the power, said environmental advocate Yancy Lind, who contributes to a state-supported water planning group with districts, cities and state managers.

“We live in the West and in the West, water is power and the irrigators have the water. It’s that simple,” he said. “They have all the cards. We’re just trying to pull little crumbs out from them.” 

“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”

After seven years of leasing land in the COID, Casad headed north to nearby Jefferson County and the North Unit Irrigation District, where he now lives. He moved because he could afford to buy there and the land was more fertile — it produces more than half the world’s supply of carrot seed. Plus he wanted to live among people like him, dedicated farmers, someone like Jos Poland, “a tough dude” and the lifelong dairy farmer who became his new neighbor.

The move came with one big tradeoff. Casad went from a district with plentiful water to one that has long had to make do with less. North Unit is the first to be cut off during a drought. Compared to the COID, even in a wet year, North Unit promises half as much water per acre, and it loses an even higher percentage in leaky delivery canals, but its crops still consume a much higher percentage of what the district takes out of the river, our analysis found. 

North Unit’s farmers pride themselves on that efficiency. Drive through Casad’s neighborhood and you’ll see rows of water-saving sprinklers, and pumps churning to recycle and reapply the runoff captured by specialized ponds. “It’s the only way we’ve been able to survive,” said one of the district’s longtime farmers, 80-year-old Gary Harris.

Casad knew this, so he calculated that half as much water on fertile land would be enough.

And it was, until the drought hit in 2020. To keep his farm going, he started drying up two acres of land for every acre of potatoes he planted. Down the road, Poland’s organic cow pastures died. He had to sell half his herd. 

“I was losing money so fast that I couldn’t afford to feed my animals,” Poland recalled. “That threw me in a big depression.” He struggled to get out of bed. Casad started helping him with the dairy, working through the night on his own farm. 

“I remember watching the lights of the tractor out the window,” Cate Havstad-Casad said. She was pregnant with their first child, sitting in the bathtub having contractions, she said, but she waited hours to call her husband inside “because I understood the pressure on his shoulders.”

Casad wept as he dredged up memories of the drought. “Some of this stuff you just bury,” he said. “You bury it down deep.”

During those years, which overlapped with the pandemic, Jefferson County Commissioner Kelly Simmelink said he heard from farmers dealing with falling commodity prices, rising operational costs, “and then the real fact of water availability — I don’t know how you continue.”

As the drought wore on, the suicide rate in Jefferson County nearly doubled. “Our farmers and ranchers face immense pressure,” he told the Legislature in early 2023, successfully urging it to launch a state-funded suicide prevention hotline for agricultural producers. 

Two years into the drought, Casad learned at North Unit’s spring meeting that he would have to cut back his water use even more. For every acre of vegetables he could plant, four would have to go fallow. He called his wife to break the news when she was out of town. 

After she hung up, she sat alone in her hotel room and broke down.

“It doesn’t have to be this way” she said through tears in a video diary she recorded at the time. “It is Oregon water law which will give a very wealthy person with a hayfield that they literally mow and leave in the field and do nothing with because their life has nothing to do with the land, …  that person will get twice as much water as any professional farmer will get in North Unit.”

Casad no longer grows potatoes. The bins where he once stored them sit empty in the barn. Now he grows mostly hay and grass for cattle — crops that he said need less water. 

But rough years are coming for farmers in the Deschutes Basin. This year Oregon’s snowpack is one of the lowest it’s been in recorded history. That snow takes years to percolate and it’s what feeds the mountain springs powering the river. More than half of Oregon counties have already declared droughts. 

The Casad farm is still paying down the debts from the last drought. Chris Casad worked part-time at a feedlot this winter. Now he’s a school bus driver. 

To his two young children, his “whale” of a potato harvester has never been anything other than a slide, their playground for make-believe. 

The post An Oregon Law Lets One Wealthy Region Turn the Desert Green. When Drought Hits, Farmers Pay the Price. appeared first on ProPublica.

Every year, about 90% of Central Oregon’s Deschutes River disappears into networks of canals and pipes traversing high desert. Between April and October, what’s left in this major river — one of the largest spring-fed waterways in the U.S. — looks more like a creek trickling out of Bend, Oregon.

Six irrigation districts — quasi-public corporations — divert the water to green up the properties of about 7,500 landowners in one of the state’s driest regions. Of the six, none is as powerful as the Central Oregon Irrigation District. It has rights to use more than half of the Deschutes’ volume — more than all the other districts combined. And under state law, in times of scarcity, most of the others must cut back to protect COID’s share of the river. 

During the last drought, state water law forced commercial farmers downstream to fallow their land while COID diverted four times what its landowners’ crops consumed, an Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis of state data found. 

Our analysis showed similar ratios across both wet and dry years, roughly aligning with estimates of what COID told the state its crops required. While state water managers did not dispute our analysis, the irrigation district said it didn’t trust the satellite-based data we used, which Oregon lawmakers backed to study water availability.

Read More

An Oregon Law Lets One Wealthy Region Turn the Desert Green. When Drought Hits, Farmers Pay the Price.

COID landowners are doing exactly what the law encourages them to do, state legislators said. To keep rights to the water, districts have to prove to the state that their customers are consistently using it “beneficially.” In the district, our reporting found, more than 9 out of 10 acres were pasture — grass for grazing or landscaping, or hay for livestock — considered beneficial under the law.

Oregon and other Western states have so far rejected any legislation that restricts what people can grow or how efficient they must be: Opposition to change is strong because water rights are a form of property rights. Water rights also raise property values and can bring agricultural tax breaks.

If lawmakers took on bedrock water law, “we’d get crushed by the powers that be and we might even not be reelected,” said state Rep. Ken Helm, the Democratic co-chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Land Use, Natural Resources and Water.

“What should we do? I think we should leave more water in the river. Legally speaking, that doesn’t have to happen,” he said. Helm, a land-use lawyer, grew up in Bend and has watched the region transform. “Affluent people are moving into Central Oregon for reasons that have nothing to do with growing a crop,” he said.

As things stand now, COID’s Managing Director Craig Horrell said he “can’t tell people what they can and can’t farm, if it’s allowed.” The district’s job is to distribute water to its customers and to “deliver it much more efficiently and sustainably in the future,” he said.

The question is how.

Oregon has pushed three main solutions: 

1. Pipes

COID delivers most of its water through open canals built 120 years ago. Blasted from porous lava rock, the canals have to be completely full for gravity to push water across the district’s more than 42,000 acres. Nearly half the water evaporates or seeps into the ground under the canals before reaching its destination. COID’s state water rights factor this in.

Replacing the canals with pressurized pipes could save a lot of water. It could also take 50 years and cost more than $700 million. The district is in the final planning stages of what could be a $360 million project to pipe a main artery leading to more than a thousand landowners between Bend and Redmond, Oregon. Few make their living as farmers, our reporting found. In exchange for federal and state funding for piping, COID has pledged to send water downstream to farmers outside the district.

The plan has gotten broad support, especially from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley: “Repeated severe droughts make every drop of irrigation water highly valuable, and the best way to preserve irrigation water is to pipe it,” he told OPB and ProPublica.

The catalyst for focusing on COID, he said, was a threatened species of frog, which lives exactly where irrigation districts have long siphoned water, destroying its habitat. To stave off lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act, the districts agreed to leave more water in the river over time. 

As it switches from canals to pipes, COID is supposed to send the water it saves to a neighboring district that will have to take less from the river as part of the plan to restore the frog’s home. That district, North Unit, serves a valley famous for commercial farms, but it’s already water-poor. It has rights to far less water from the Deschutes than COID does. Evan Thomas, a fifth-generation farmer and leader of North Unit, put the stakes plainly at a March public meeting in Redmond: “This pipe has to go in the ground by 2028 or North Unit, all of Jefferson County, basically quits farming.”

But even those who acknowledge that piping is a critical solution note that it won’t stop COID from diverting more water than its customers need — or from sending that water to a lot of residential properties growing grass and pasture. Last year, the nonprofit Central Oregon LandWatch pushed for a bill to put limits on overwatering. Helm and Republican state Rep. Mark Owens started drafting legislation, but they never introduced it. Owens, a hay farmer in Eastern Oregon, said irrigation districts weren’t happy with the proposal. “I weakened,” he said. “We weren’t going to get it through the building. We lived to fight another day.” 

2. Sharing

The Deschutes has never had enough water for all the landowners who laid claim to it more than a century ago, said Deschutes River Conservancy Executive Director Kate Fitzpatrick. Leaving water in the river for fish and wildlife wasn’t even considered a legal, beneficial use of the resource until the 1980s. 

“So that’s what we’re working with,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re not going to win the game by pointing fingers at who’s doing what with the water.”

With more demand than supply, her nonprofit works with irrigation districts to roll out incentives for landowners to be more efficient or share voluntarily. One program pays landowners to dry up land so COID will leave more water in the river. But the district limits participation, and the program’s efficacy has plateaued for decades, state data shows. 

State lawmakers last year also created a pilot “water bank” program. The concept marks a big change in the law and could allow COID landowners to keep what water they need and rent out the excess to farmers downstream without losing rights to it. 

But since Oregon’s governor signed the bill into law nearly a year ago, COID and other key players haven’t signed anyone up. That’s because the canal system fails if it doesn’t have enough water in it, Horrell, the district’s manager, said. Piping could allow the district to scale up these other solutions in the future, he said.

There’s another problem, too: To rent out part of a water right without completely drying up their property, landowners would need to measure their use precisely — something many don’t want to do.

3. Data

COID said it doesn’t measure or report the volume of water it delivers. This is typical across Oregon, where the vast majority of water goes to agricultural lands. But policymakers and experts have long said the state can’t tackle water shortages unless it knows how much the people with irrigation water rights use on their properties. 

The Legislature’s attempts to require meters on all individual farms and wells have faced fierce public backlash. “At one point my office was getting a call a minute,” Owens, the state representative, recalled of an effort last year. The fear, he said, is that the state will use data to take away water rights or to try to charge by the gallon. 

Owens has given up on trying to force statewide metering for now, he said. 

On his own Eastern Oregon hay farm, he started a pilot project that uses a weather station and satellite data to track how much his fields drink. He can look on his phone and see how many days he should irrigate the following week, he said. He also led the charge for Oregon to invest in a cutting-edge study to apply this technology to statewide water planning. Scientists with the Oregon Water Resources Department co-authored a report with researchers from the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute. It provides estimates over nearly 40 years of how much water crops consumed on every irrigated field in Oregon. The data, which OPB and ProPublica used in our reporting, was published last year. Horrell said such data has too many variables and is not ready to guide how the district monitors water use.

State managers are not currently using that data to regulate how water is used, but instead to account for where it goes, Oregon Water Resources Department Director Ivan Gall said in a recent interview. He said tight state budgets have so far kept his agency from sharing it “with the public and decision makers in a way that is understandable and meaningful.”

Owens and Helm said they tried and failed to make it easier to learn from critical data about Oregon’s water — how much there is, how clean it is, where it’s coming from and where it’s going — but a pilot project ground to a halt after state funding dried up last year.

The post Oregon Leaders Are Trying to Save the Deschutes River. Here’s Why That’s So Hard. appeared first on ProPublica.

An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that fossil fuel companies have been funding climate research at prestigious U.S. universities for more than 30 years. Their support has helped amplify the work of scientists who promote the idea that we can stop the climate crisis without breaking our dependence on oil, gas and coal. 

The research produced by those schools in turn shaped global climate models, as well as the policy and technology solutions adopted by governments around the world. 

Ultimately, it fostered a misperception that climate change could be solved without dramatically curtailing fossil fuels — a notion that has delayed emissions cuts by decades.

Corporate funders sponsored entire centers, paid the salaries of researchers, kept offices on campus and in some cases had veto power over projects. 

Companies maintain they are supporting innovation and needed science. Universities say that with safeguards, sponsorship enhances research programs while preserving academic independence.

Still, the impact of funding constitutes a pattern that Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford, called the “colonization of academia.”

The post Carbon Captured appeared first on ProPublica.

This story works better on ProPublica’s website.

Global leaders are banking on tech advances to solve climate change.

One leading idea is to capture carbon pollution from the air and then bury it underground forever.

It may sound practical.

There is no conceivable way it can work.

For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Among their favored fixes is carbon capture and storage.

An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that boosters of CCS have ignored evidence of the technology’s limitations, or overstated its potential, and convinced the world it could be effective. 

They’ve promoted this idea despite the fact that for CCS to work at the scale now envisioned, the world would need to devote almost unimaginable resources. Even if that were done, it might still prove impossible to trap so much carbon dioxide inside the earth.

Optimism has reigned, however, because small tests have worked and because slow global response to climate change has left few other options.

In 2008, the International Energy Agency projected that to stave off dangerous levels of warming, we would have to be burying around 1.6 billion tons, or 1,600 megatons, of CO2 per year by 2025.

Since then, its optimistic projections have continued. But deployment of the technology has never come close to those ambitions.

Right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.

Some experts point to the CO2 that gets pumped into the ground to help extract oil as proof CCS works. But that process, called enhanced oil recovery, isn’t designed to function the same way and isn’t monitored as stringently.

Global leaders are betting on carbon capture working now more than ever.

The models used in the latest United Nations assessment presume the technology succeeds.

IEA representatives and U.N. modelers say their projections reflect what the world has to do to achieve its goals of averting extreme warming.

To make CCS work, we would need to capture CO2 pollution in four ways:

Trap it from smoke stacks.

Absorb it from the air with fast-growing grasses or trees, then capture it from those plants when they are burned for fuel.

Scrub it from the air, often using giant fans.

Then we would pump all of it into porous rock deep beneath the earth’s surface.

The U.N. analysis now suggests that countries must inject 6 billion tons of CO2 underground each year by the middle of the century.

Getting 6 billion tons of CO2 a year out of the atmosphere, though, is a daunting task.

Imagine the neighborhoods and parks near oil, gas or coal-fired industrial plants. We would need to add equipment to capture the CO2 from each facility, in some cases doubling its land footprint.

And we would need to devote about 768,000 square miles of land worldwide to growing those carbon-absorbing plants. That would cover an area roughly the size of Mexico — and compete for valuable land used to grow food or sustain forests.

If all of this works, and the CO2 is successfully captured, it must then be moved to a place where it can be buried.

In the U.S. alone, this could require building more than 68,000 miles of new pipelines in a little more than two decades.

That’s more than double the distance to fly around the earth.

And longer than the country’s entire interstate highway system.

Globally, pipelines could tally in the hundreds of thousands of miles.

To cross the oceans, we would need at least 85 specially built tankers to move the high-pressured gas. As of April, there were only three ships in the world equipped to do that.

Then, there is the challenge of finding a place to put 6 billion tons of CO2 a year.

Today, just 12 large-scale geologic reservoirs have attempted to permanently store CO2 pollution — but we would need more than 2,000 reservoirs of that size for CCS to work, each requiring years of study and engineering before it could be used.

That means we would need to open a brand new geological waste site somewhere on the planet every four days for the next 25 years.

Every site would need constant monitoring for decades to ensure the CO2 doesn’t leak.

Even if this could be done, it would cost tens of trillions of dollars.

Right now, U.S. taxpayers are paying oil and gas companies $85 for every metric ton they put underground.

At that rate, by 2050, the world could be spending half a trillion dollars — more than China’s military budget, and 10 times more than the U.N.’s humanitarian and development aid budget — each year.

The few test sites that exist suggest that keeping carbon underground may not work at scale.

Since 1996, while the 12 large-scale geological storage projects have opened, plans for another 12 have been scrapped. Many CCS sites in operation — in Norway, Algeria, Australia and the U.S. — have been mired in problems, pointing to enormous challenges ahead.

Some rock layers can hold far less CO2 than experts have estimated.

Finicky pipes and injection systems can get clogged or break down.

The rock that seals CO2 in place can crack, risking a leak. In one instance, injected CO2 caused the ground above it to bulge.

In another instance, CO2 escaped from an old oil industry well nearby.

Thorough, long-term monitoring can be expensive, but without it, such leaks could be missed.

Climate experts know about the costs, technical troubles and failures of CCS test projects.

Yet many of them have continued to boost the technology even as they have downplayed solutions showing greater progress.

For example, the same modelers who overestimated the potential of geological carbon storage repeatedly underestimated solar power — one of the energy technologies that would allow more oil to remain in the ground.

Over the last several decades, solar power is the technology that has thrived. 

Carbon capture and storage remains elusive.

The post Why Carbon Capture Can’t Conceivably Solve Climate Change appeared first on ProPublica.

Carbon Captured How the fossil fuel industry influenced climate research

An investigative series by ProPublica and Drilled

It is rare that a single scientific paper shapes how people think about a challenge as daunting as climate change. But one, known as “Wedges,” published 22 years ago by researchers at Princeton University, told an irresistible story. 

It made solving climate change seem possible, even simple. It claimed that the world didn’t have to wait for innovation because it had the tools to start work immediately.

The trick was to do a little of everything and let the effects add up. Renewable energy, nuclear power and conservation were certainly pieces of the solution puzzle. But so were a slew of steps that involved using oil, gas and coal despite the carbon dioxide emissions they would continue to produce. 

One fix that “Wedges” leaned especially hard on was carbon capture and storage, a technology that promised to grab carbon pollution from smokestacks and other sources and trap it forever underground. Do that enough, and climate change could be curtailed without upending the world as we know it.

The paper, written by scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, became a phenomenon. Former Vice President Al Gore highlighted it in his Oscar-winning climate change documentary. U.S. presidents from George W. Bush to Joe Biden incorporated ideas from it into policy. The United Nations’ panel on climate change worked it into at least three major reports over more than a decade. It was presented in classrooms at Harvard and MIT and cited more than 3,000 times in scientific papers. It was even turned into a board game.

For a generation, people learning how to address global warming were taught the ideas in the “Wedges” paper.  

What they didn’t learn was this: “Wedges” was significantly shaped by the British oil giant BP — one of the single global entities most responsible for causing climate change. 

In 1997, BP abandoned climate change denial. Instead, the company quietly launched a far-reaching effort to intertwine oil company interests and climate science, in part by using its vast resources to shape the research that major universities undertook. 

While its chief executive, John Browne, was rebranding his company as Beyond Petroleum, BP sought out researchers who were already thinking about how to address climate change without replacing fossil fuels. The company found them at Princeton University, where it set about amplifying their work by donating $15 million to start the Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The research program was framed around finding solutions to climate change while keeping fossil fuels in play, focusing heavily on carbon capture. 

The “Wedges” paper was the initiative’s first big swing. And it succeeded beyond anything its authors could have imagined. 

BP executives were deeply involved throughout the paper’s creation, according to an investigation by ProPublica and Drilled. Socolow and Pacala, the authors of “Wedges” and the new center’s co-directors, not only discussed ideas with the company but, in a departure from academic norms, passed drafts back and forth and welcomed extensive feedback. 

Like a book publisher shaping a clunky early draft into a bestseller, an executive at the company suggested the scientists punch up the language, which they did. Browne himself suggested wording that became a part of the title. Together they helped make wonky scientific ideas more digestible for popular consumption. BP even tried — unsuccessfully — to revise a version of it.  

“Chaps, I have had a go at rewriting the paper,” Browne’s climate adviser wrote the researchers at one point. 

Then, while the paper was being prepped for publication, BP began aggressively promoting the ideas it contained. Browne touted the framework in a speech as evidence that oil and gas had “sustainable futures” and published an endorsement of “Wedges” in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. BP inserted the paper’s ideas into its sustainability reports promoting greater efficiency and natural gas — which it argued offered a low-carbon alternative to coal. 

“Wedges,” whose ideas were turbocharged by the sort of high-level marketing scientific papers rarely get, became a regular part of thinking about climate change in classrooms and boardrooms alike. And as that happened, BP kept pouring millions more dollars into Princeton each year, in part to explicitly advance carbon capture and storage technology and, as internal documents make clear, to get the university’s help in turning the idea into a bona fide government-backed solution. 

Gardiner Hill, a former vice president and climate executive at BP who worked with the Princeton program, told ProPublica and Drilled that BP took academic freedom seriously. It “did not oversee any of the publications” that Princeton put out under its sponsorship, he said. A spokesperson for BP declined to respond to two lists of questions sent by ProPublica and Drilled.

Socolow and Pacala say they were sincere in their intent to solve climate change in the best way they believed possible, at a time when it was not obvious that wind and solar would succeed the way they have today. The researchers say BP had no control over the scientific content of the paper. They rejected the view that technologies didn’t exist to start solving climate change immediately and hoped carbon capture offered, as Pacala said, a way to make fossil fuels “climate safe.” 

But “Wedges” oversold the readiness of carbon capture and storage, describing it as “already deployed” industrially. Reporting by ProPublica and Drilled has found that even today, the technology faces financial and technical hurdles and is unlikely to ever work at the scale needed to avert extreme warming. 

And the broader solution set that “Wedges” promoted, including expanding the use of natural gas, has meanwhile helped perpetuate a system in which fossil fuels remain the predominant source of energy and the emissions they cause have continued. 

“An unfortunate consequence” of the “Wedges” paper, wrote climate scientist Ken Caldeira, New York University physics professor Marty Hoffert and others in a 2013 critique, “was to make the solution seem easy.”

Moreover, for the past quarter century, as research into carbon capture and storage and other industry-friendly solutions have enjoyed robust funding and attention, other ideas that might have replaced carbon-heavy energy entirely — reducing warming and potentially saving lives — were drowned out, several researchers told ProPublica and Drilled.

“Wedges” would likely never have been written without BP’s funding, Socolow said. Scientists and ethicists say the paper may not have been seen as credible or earned its acclaim had the extent of BP’s involvement been fully disclosed. 

Neither BP nor Princeton responded to specific questions about our findings. 

This is the story of how one of the most influential climate papers in history came to exist thanks to the support of one of the companies most responsible for causing the climate crisis — and one with a deep financial stake in how the technologies described in the paper would play out. It is part of a broader investigation by ProPublica and Drilled into how the fossil fuel industry has helped steer the global response to climate change by pouring billions of dollars into research at elite universities. Since the 1990s, oil companies have sponsored research centers, kept offices on campuses, paid the salaries of scientists and, in at least one case, held veto power over what professors and scientists could study with their money. 

Today, the impacts of those efforts are everywhere, so ingrained in our understanding of what it means to solve climate change that it can be hard to conceive of another way forward. Even the U.N.’s assessment of how to deal with the threat of climate change continues to pin hope on capturing tremendous amounts of carbon pollution and burying it in the Earth. 

So little has been done to avert fossil fuel emissions for so long, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth, that there is little remaining choice. 

“We’ve just wasted so much time,” he said, that meeting goals to limit global warming has become “functionally impossible.” 

2

A Place of Influence

“Establishing cooperative relationships”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

On a sunny morning in the spring of 1997, Browne took to the podium at Stanford University’s open-air Frost Amphitheater to deliver a speech unlike anything ever heard from an oil executive. 

“There is now an effective consensus … that there is a discernible human influence on the climate,” Browne, a small, professorly man with an air of British formality, told the audience. For years, BP and the other big oil companies had been part of an industry group called the Global Climate Coalition, working to sow doubt about global warming and avert agreements that would force cuts in heat-trapping pollution. Now Browne, having pulled BP out of the group, was suddenly pledging his company would be taking “substantial, real and measurable” action to fix the crisis.

Still, Browne cautioned against haste even as he urged action. If governments were too aggressive in cutting fossil fuel use, he warned, their actions would “crash into the realities of economic growth.” Instead, BP would seek to be more efficient — seizing “low-hanging fruit.” And it would experiment with capturing carbon to stop fossil fuel emissions from entering the atmosphere. 

This was the start of a long transition in BP’s branding and in the way it worked with thought leaders to shape the company’s future. 

By then, oil companies had already begun investing in universities’ climate work. Exxon started giving money for climate research to Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the late 1970s. Then in 1991, the company funded the launch of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the program’s former co-director, Henry Jacoby. Chevron, Shell and BP also later supported the program, which developed influential climate-related models.

Fossil fuel companies recognized that they could benefit from spotlighting the research of prominent scientists whose ideas were aligned with their interests. And they strategized to boost the influence of those ideas in the global policy response to climate change. 

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest and most powerful oil industry lobbying group in the U.S., established what it called its Global Climate Science Communications Plan. An internal document described the importance of outreach aimed at “establishing cooperative relationships” with “scientists whose research in this field supports our position” and developing “opportunities to maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours.” 

In 1999, Browne asked his chief scientist, Bernie Bulkin, to find research programs the company could support in the U.S. Bulkin — who told ProPublica and Drilled that he had never heard of the API initiative to engage with scientists — decided to set up a climate-focused program that could test the viability of carbon capture and storage, a budding technology. 

For decades, oil companies had extracted carbon dioxide from the Earth and pumped it back underground to force more oil out under pressure, a process called enhanced oil recovery. If that process were adapted to store CO2 in the earth forever, then billions of tons of carbon emissions could, in theory, be captured from smokestacks and buried. Global emissions could be reduced without cutting fossil fuel use at all. 

A handful of scientists had been making the case that this might be doable. One of them was Socolow, a theoretical physicist who had been leading an interdisciplinary environmental program at Princeton since 1971. 

In 1997, Socolow ran a summer workshop for the U.S. Department of Energy in which he and other experts suggested that natural gas, coal and other fuels could be used to make clean-burning hydrogen. If the emissions from the process could be captured and stored away forever, it might be possible to use fossil fuels without contributing much to global warming. 

Socolow wanted to address climate change. But he was also predisposed to remedies that would not require what he described as “a priori, the sacrifice of the energy value of oil, gas, and coal.” In graduate school he studied with scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and he worried that supporting nuclear energy could lead to the proliferation of weapons. He thought solar, wind and hydro power would each present their own environmental problems.

Carbon capture and storage, though, could make switching away from fossil fuels less urgent and was something that “brings the oil industry to the table.”

The oil companies had doubts that carbon capture and storage technology would work. “Nobody had any idea what it would cost and whether there was anything practical at scale,” Bulkin recalled in an interview. Still, Bulkin thought there would be little downside for BP in trying. If it didn’t work for the climate, it might help the company produce more fossil fuels. 

Bulkin began evaluating America’s top universities. It was, he wrote in his 2019 memoir, a “determinedly elitist” selection process aimed at getting “the greatest benefit to the company.” Researchers at MIT and Stanford had pioneered work on carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery. But a colleague had heard Socolow give a presentation on carbon capture and was impressed. So Bulkin added Princeton into the mix, and in early 2000, Bulkin said, each of the universities submitted proposals to BP for funding of a program to expand carbon capture research. 

Stanford saw carbon capture and storage as a geological problem, MIT more of an engineering challenge, Bulkin said. Princeton’s labs didn’t have the technical expertise in carbon capture that the other two schools had. But Socolow came off as masterful at synthesizing energy challenges and environmental concerns, and Pacala brought deep knowledge of how carbon moves between Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans. Together, they offered a more systemic way of thinking about carbon capture. 

That June, weeks before BP announced it was rebranding as Beyond Petroleum, Bulkin told Pacala and Socolow they had won. BP would commit roughly $15 million over 10 years to form the university’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative. The program would focus roughly one third on earth sciences research, one third on carbon capture and one third on policy efforts. Pacala got Ford Motor Co. to contribute $5 million more. 

When it was announced that October, the $20 million gift amounted to the largest corporate grant in Princeton’s history. 

A spokesperson for Princeton told ProPublica and Drilled that partnerships with corporations make up just over 3% of the university’s research funding but help it “address real-world problems.” Princeton, the spokesperson added, maintains policies that “prevent outside funders from exercising undue influence over research,” including not permitting sponsors to have veto power over publications. 

Representatives from Columbia University and Ford did not respond to requests for comment. A representative from MIT wrote that Exxon “did not direct the Joint Program’s research agenda.”

From the start, Princeton’s contract with BP was supposed to protect its academic independence, Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled. The company wasn’t supposed to direct what its money was going to be spent on, he said. “BP can’t tell us what to do.” 

But BP and the Princeton researchers were eager to collaborate, and both Socolow and Pacala said they sought ideas no matter where they came from. “The university has an obligation to welcome all points of view, while fiercely protecting its own independence and the independence of its investigators,” Socolow said in an email. 

In late 2000, Princeton researchers, BP officials and representatives from Ford gathered at the enormous Italianate mansion of Princeton’s president. 

“We spent about two days just talking about what would be useful to us,” Bulkin recalled in an interview. Princeton scientists “threw out ideas, and we said, ‘Well, we could help on this’ or ‘That’s maybe interesting, maybe not,” he said. “Tell us more.’”

Together, the scientists and their funders hammered out an ambitious vision: According to a memo summarizing the meeting, the Carbon Mitigation Initiative would become a “world-class” program focused on basic earth science and carbon capture through “a new kind of engagement.” 

It would become “a place of influence” that would, ultimately, “help shape government research priorities.”

3

Evolution of “Wedges”

“A complete blank-sheet-of-paper rewrite”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

In January 2003, BP executives traveled to Princeton for the Carbon Mitigation Initiative’s second annual meeting. The center had much to show for its work on earth systems modeling and had made technical progress on carbon capture and storage. But Pacala and Socolow quickly turned to their newest work: a simple framework they were developing to bring CO2 emissions under control immediately using methods that already existed. 

Climate progress was in a state of paralysis. Groups denying the evidence of climate science were eroding political support for policy action. At the same time, climate modelers were suggesting it might be too expensive to fix climate change until the end of the century. President George W. Bush, in tacit agreement, pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty, the 1997 legally binding agreement that 192 countries signed to reduce emissions. Instead, Bush’s administration focused on expanding basic research into low-carbon energy technologies, which suggested to Pacala and Socolow that leaders didn’t think they had tools to address the crisis. 

The Princeton researchers believed they did have tools and that failing to deploy them soon could spell disaster for the climate. They’d listed the fuels, technologies and conservation approaches that would lead to lower emissions, including manufacturing cars that get 60 mpg, expanding wind and solar power, regrowing forests and developing hydrogen-based fuels. The idea was to stack them up, allowing each to account for a portion of the reductions needed to flatten the surging rate of global emissions. They diagrammed it for their BP sponsors as a big triangle beneath the rising line of future carbon emissions, what Socolow recalls describing as a “wedge,” cut up into equal-sized slices. Each one represented a strategy that could offset a billion tons of CO2 each year by the middle of the century.

Two Charts in Pacala and Socolow’s Original Paper Introduced the Concept of “Wedges”

The first chart shows how emissions would rise under a business as usual (BAU) scenario versus one where emissions were stabilized (WRE500).

The second chart shows a “stabilization triangle” made of slices or wedges representing possible methods for reducing emissions.

Many of the approaches remained dependent on using fossil fuels and could result in still more emissions, not less. So the plan also leaned heavily on carbon capture to remove pollution and make those approaches work. “We were CCS enthusiasts,” Socolow said in an interview. 

But the researchers appeared to be stretching their own parameters to make carbon capture and storage fit. The “Wedges” framework was supposed to be made up of “ready to deploy” technologies. Yet carbon capture and storage had barely been tested, and no experts interviewed could recall a commercial power plant using it. 

Still, the Princeton group kept it at the center of the mix. 

That fall, Pacala traveled to London to present the work directly to BP CEO Browne. In the city’s Westminster district, Pacala traversed the leafy St. James’s Square and entered BP’s brick office building, where he was shown past a pair of security guards and seated across from Browne in a busy room. 

Pacala, whom a colleague described as an expert “pitchman,” presented his chart of ideas: Use oil and gas more efficiently. Replace coal-fired power plants. Reduce emissions, ultimately, by capturing them and burying them underground. Each action, he said, would take “slices” out of the total amount of future carbon pollution. 

Browne listened attentively. The straightforward framework made a complex problem seem manageable. But the “slices” terminology confused him. “They’re kind of wedges, aren’t they?” Pacala recalls him saying.   

“We’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever you want,’” Pacala remembers thinking. “‘You’re paying the bills, buddy.’”

From that point forward, Socolow and Pacala were thoroughly committed to “Wedges.” Days after the London meeting, they wrote the material up into a white paper for BP titled “The Stabilization Wedge: Consolidation of BP’s Environmental Leadership.” In an email to ProPublica and Drilled, Socolow wrote that the document was not a first draft of “Wedges,” but, he added, it was the first substantial write-up of his ideas. 

In the months following, Pacala and Socolow refined that work, and BP remained closely involved. 

At one point the researchers sent an early paper draft for review, and Chris Mottershead, Browne’s climate adviser, offered “scathing criticism,” Pacala recalls. Mottershead asked for a “punchy” and “non-academic” tone that might have more popular appeal. 

In response Pacala says he did “a complete blank-sheet-of-paper rewrite” and sent the revised draft back to Mottershead and Socolow four hours later. Mottershead loved it. He later replied with a question: “What is the potential for co-branding the ‘wedges paper … ?’” Socolow and Pacala declined. Mottershead wanted to change certain terms and asked for a more open-ended timeframe to reduce emissions. He was denied. Another time, he checked the researchers’ calculations, finding a single error. 

In late 2003, Browne himself borrowed from the “Wedges” thinking in a speech. A few months later, records show, Socolow solicited feedback from another member of BP’s management. The researchers also contributed ideas from their work for BP’s internal training and corporate communications. 

Then in March, Mottershead wrote his own version of the two scientists’ near final draft, stating in an email that he was attempting to “make the word ‘wedge’ the brand for the work.” 

To Mottershead, Princeton’s draft was too dense to break through into popular discourse. He pushed for language that would make the “wedges” concepts more digestible. 

Most significantly, the draft shows, Mottershead tried to inject language that raised doubt about the legitimacy of basic climate science, describing that science as “provisional” and adding that “great uncertainties remain.”

Ultimately, Mottershead did not convince the authors to adopt that specific text. “BP tried to cross the line repeatedly,” Pacala said in an interview. “They were constantly trying to push their agenda. We just didn’t do any of it.”

But several edits would survive, including one that couched emissions in the context of economic growth and another in which Mottershead suggested moving a punchy line from lower in the article up to the very top. All, Pacala says, were changes the researchers would have made anyway. 

Still, the situation amounted to what several academic researchers describe as a highly unusual level of coordination on a major scientific work on climate change. Pacala went so far as to offer Mottershead co-authorship, at one point placing his name at the top of the paper. Yet Mottershead declined. In retrospect, Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled, Mottershead contributed to the paper’s style and presentation but not to its original scientific ideas. Mottershead did not respond to several messages, including a list of questions, over several months. 

The relationship “flies in the face of the idea of academic independence,” said Benjamin Franta, an associate professor of climate litigation at University of Oxford who studies fossil fuel influence in academia.

Pacala and Socolow each defended their independence in several interviews with ProPublica and Drilled, saying that it is common for sponsors to be involved in sharing preliminary ideas. Socolow wrote that he was buoyed by BP’s interest and thought it offered “a way of amplifying Steve’s and my impact.” 

Pacala acknowledged that there are “inevitable dangers of proximity” to industry but said that BP’s staff had “no control over the findings.” Instead, the researchers believed they were influencing BP by encouraging it to plan for climate change, which, Pacala said, “was a win.”

Pacala rejected the concern that BP’s influence on their thinking might be subtle, stating that people who are subconsciously influenced in this way have “weak character.” 

In fact, decades of peer-reviewed research has found that, across fields of study, industry funding tends to bias researchers whether they are aware of it or not, affecting what people choose to study and what they find. Industry-funded studies of food or drugs are more likely to conclude they are safe. In medical settings even a small gift from a drug company — like a box of doughnuts — can lead doctors to prescribe its brands more often. One of the few studies to look at the impact of oil and gas funding in academia found that reports out of fossil-fuel-funded research centers describe natural gas more favorably than renewables, whereas reports from centers less reliant on that funding do not. The influence of this funding, according to a working paper from Harvard researchers, is not always visible to those swayed by it. 

“It’s the whole subconscious bias problem,” said Harvard historian of science and corporate influence expert Naomi Oreskes. If “continued funding relies on having this good relationship and having this alignment, you are going to be influenced by it.”

At Princeton, Michael Oppenheimer, the director of Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, said that he does not believe Socolow or Pacala would have been swayed by feedback they disagreed with. But Oppenheimer, a close colleague of the two, added that Princeton doesn’t train researchers on how to navigate the influence that might come from close interactions with sponsors. 

And whether the researchers were affected by that proximity or not, Mottershead’s persistent feedback about the article’s scientific ideas “goes over the line,” Oppenheimer said. “That’s bad, that’s unacceptable.”

A spokesperson for Princeton told ProPublica and Drilled that the university provides “extensive guidance and information” to faculty and researchers about working with industry. Sponsors review drafts only to guard confidential material, the university added, or in cases where a sponsor is a co-author of a work. The university did not respond to a question about whether the extent of BP’s involvement in “Wedges” violated its policy and did not say whether it trains its staff on how to protect against more subtle influence.

Other colleagues at Princeton encouraged Socolow and Pacala to challenge BP more. In written feedback on the original draft for BP, visiting scientist Stefano Consonni said that the researchers needed to be more blunt with BP about the difficulty of and need to move away from fossil fuels in order to truly reduce carbon emissions. Bob Williams, a senior research scientist at Princeton whose detailed work on carbon capture inspired Socolow’s, warned the researchers that the draft made solving climate change “sound easier than it actually is.” 

In early May 2004, Socolow and Pacala submitted their paper to the journal Science. By then, “slices” had indeed become “wedges,” a decision Socolow says they made to “harmonize” their vocabulary with Browne’s. The paper included 15 wedges, three of which involved some form of carbon capture and eight of which involved using traditional fossil fuels, though in more efficient, or less polluting, ways. 

It described all of those wedges as “already deployed at an industrial scale,” a characterization that some experts said stretched the facts in the case of carbon capture and storage. Pacala told ProPublica and Drilled that each of the components required for carbon capture and storage were in use and just needed to be combined in a new way. He conceded the paper’s description was a “communications compromise.” 

And the researchers made a key assumption — one that left room for the continued use of oil and gas — about how much carbon pollution the atmosphere could absorb while still avoiding disastrous warming. The number was in the mainstream at the time, but BP officials made it clear to the researchers that they supported it. 

In an email to Socolow after the paper’s submission, Mottershead celebrated, writing that the target meant that “around 50% of primary energy could still come from fossil fuels.”

This, Mottershead wrote, was “THE key piece of the framework for politicians and business, in my view.” Socolow acknowledged, in another subsequent email, that the figure would keep the fossil fuel industry a “part of things for at least another 50 years.” 

In the July/August 2004 edition of Foreign Affairs, Browne published his own lengthy essay, titled “Beyond Kyoto,” in which he introduced key elements of the “Wedges” framework. 

Then, in mid-August, Science published the “Wedges” paper. 

In a small-type footnote that comprises “References and Notes,” Socolow and Pacala list BP and Ford as sponsors of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative and thank Mottershead as a BP employee, along with several other scientists. 

But it is not clear that anyone understood the depth of their collaboration. In response to emailed questions, Science pointed to its policy stating that anyone contributing substantially to an article must be listed as an author. The journal does not have a policy about sponsors providing editorial feedback on drafts. And in a statement, a spokesperson wrote, “Science cannot assess authorship questions based on third-party descriptions of contributions.” 

Science also pointed to a conflict disclosure essay from 2004, which describes a “check off form” the journal supplied researchers to gauge potential conflicts. The journal said it did not keep copies of forms from that time. 

“Obviously there’s a conflict of interest here,” said Oxford’s Franta, pointing to BP’s financial interest in climate policy that might arise from the paper’s conclusions. 

“The issue is how well it is managed,” Pacala said, noting that “almost every researcher” with outside funding grapples with such issues. “Of course there is conflict of interest.”

Regardless of whether explicit conflict disclosures were in place or were met, said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who studies climate policy and activism, there were norms and expectations around interactions with sponsors. BP’s repeated input on the “Wedges” paper throughout its development, she said, was simply “wrong.”

“That is not how science is supposed to happen.”

4

A Credible Success

“How to save the world in fifteen easy steps”

Photo illustration by Tonje Thilesen for ProPublica

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” exposed millions of viewers to the fact that fossil fuel use was pushing the planet toward disaster. Gore soberly presented the earth’s dwindling ice, rising seas and increasingly violent weather. And then, toward the end, he shifted to optimism. Americans need not despair, he said, because “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” Behind him as he spoke, the opening words of Socolow and Pacala’s paper — the same ones Mottershead had suggested moving to the top — appeared on a screen. 

Papers published in Science often enjoy a media moment before fading into obscurity. “Wedges” was different. Its simple, optimistic message — polished with the help of BP’s sophisticated public relations expertise — had an irresistible allure. And the media loved it. “How to save the world in fifteen easy steps,” read one headline the day it was published. “The 15 ways to stop global warming revealed!” read another. 

Socolow gave dozens of interviews and spoke at institutions including the American Petroleum Institute, Lehman Brothers and the United Nations Conference of the Parties, where representatives from more than 190 countries coordinate international climate action. When the Bush administration released a major climate change technology strategy document in 2006, it highlighted the “Wedges” framework. “‘I get it, we don’t need pie in the sky,” Socolow recalled an administration official telling him. 

“Wedges” fast became part of the zeitgeist. In 2006, Pacala and Socolow wrote a popular article about it for Scientific American. BP, in lockstep, took out a full-page ad. In 2007, Princeton released a “Wedges” game online, which Pacala built a prototype for from planks of wood in his garage. High school students, business leaders and policymakers played it. University professors folded Princeton’s climate plan into their lessons across the country. Geoffrey Supran, a climate disinformation expert at the University of Miami, says that the paper was “mandatory reading” when he was a grad student at MIT.

“This was a paradigm paper for a whole generation of university students and grad students,” said Franta, who was also taught the “Wedges” paper as a graduate student at Harvard. “It was like, ‘This is how you solve climate change.’”

Had a BP executive’s name been on the top of “Wedges,” the paper’s message would likely have been less credible and its release met with more skepticism as a product of oil industry interests, several academics told ProPublica and Drilled. 

“Would Gore have used it if he knew?” asked Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego, referring to the details of BP’s involvement. “Many were already skeptical of the wedge paper’s reliance on CCS,” he said. “If they saw the hand of BP behind it, that skepticism would have grown.”

A spokesperson for Gore distanced him from Socolow and Pacala’s work but did not directly address the question of whether knowledge of BP’s role in the paper would have changed his opinion of their findings. Pacala said in an interview that he thought broader disclosure of BP’s partnership would have made the paper more credible, not less. 

Branded as Princeton research, the paper’s influence continued to expand, boosting the university program’s renown and Pacala and Socolow’s stature. 

In 2007, Time magazine touted the scientists as “innovators” in its “Global Warming Survival Guide.” Socolow was offered a seat on a National Research Council committee on climate policy. He testified before the Senate Finance Committee, where, in a 2007 hearing, he touted a BP carbon capture and storage pilot project as evidence that the technology was “commercially mature.” He argued that the U.S. should offer tax credits for coal power only if those plants used carbon capture technology. A year later, Congress inserted a significant carbon capture subsidy into the tax code — though it didn’t require coal plants to adopt it.

Pacala, meanwhile, was selected as chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committees focusing on emissions monitoring and on carbon dioxide removal. In 2021, when President Joe Biden appointed him to serve on his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a White House press release cited the “Wedges” paper as Pacala’s standout accomplishment.  

The paper would go on to see an explosive degree of exposure. According to Supran’s lab at the University of Miami, the roughly 3,000 peer reviewed papers that cite “Wedges” have themselves now been cited over 210,000 times, demonstrating a ripple effect rare in the universe of published science.

“Wedges” “certainly did help them a lot,” Bulkin said of the two scientists’ swift rise. “And of course, it increased the reputation of CMI and of Princeton as leading thinkers about climate change.”

This was exactly what was intended. And the benefits cut both ways.   

BP’s investment in Princeton had proven an enormous success. “Wedges” “drove strategy” within the company, according to a 2014 internal memo. After the paper was published, BP announced it would double down on carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. It also said it would spend $8 billion over 10 years on four other wedge strategies: solar, wind, hydrogen and natural gas. (The company had nearly $240 billion in oil-and-gas-related revenues in 2005 alone.) 

As BP’s initial commitment came to a close, Princeton and the company worked out a deal to keep it going. Princeton’s proposition was that it would continue to do work that would grow political and regulatory support for carbon capture, effectively using the university’s reputation to advance BP’s policy interests. “The few research groups perceived by the public as relatively unbiased will have a major role to play,” Pacala and Socolow wrote to BP in a 2007 funding document.

In response, Pacala says that Princeton was “advancing its own interest to provide to the public unbiased information.” Any “partial alignment” with BP was coincidental. 

Another funding document stated that with BP’s support, Princeton sought to become “the world’s premier institution in climate and energy” and suggested its graduates could one day work for the company. In addition to carbon capture, the documents showed the initiative’s work had expanded in earth sciences, climate modeling and policy.

Jeff Greenblatt, a former researcher for Socolow who contributed to the “Wedges” paper, said the researchers had engaged in “a delicate dance” between maintaining their intellectual integrity and pleasing BP. “I’m sure that if they included that fossil fuels were not part of the solution to a significant extent, they probably would have seen their last year of funding,” he said. “That’s just the reality of these kinds of things.”

Socolow, in an interview, agreed that BP’s funding was likely conditioned on his support for maintaining fossil fuels. “There was a synergy,” he told ProPublica and Drilled in January. When the university and BP revisited their relationship for a 2016-2020 funding renewal, the parties made it explicit: “A premise from the outset was that CMI’s job was to invent a future where the fossil fuel industries have not disappeared,” the renewal document said. “This is still our job.” 

BP extended its funding for Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative three times. It was originally slated to sunset in 2010 but was renewed through 2015, then 2020 and finally until 2025. All told, the company gave Princeton’s program more than $56 million. 

Meanwhile, for all of the paper’s popular acclaim, many fellow scientists say “Wedges” missed its target. 

“We thought it was wrong,” Caldeira, the climate scientist and former researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told ProPublica and Drilled. His research showed that far more carbon needed to be dealt with than “Wedges” acknowledged and that effective solutions would require much more research. 

Two years before “Wedges” was published, Caldeira and Hoffert, the NYU professor, published their own research in Science concluding that a “radical restructuring of the global energy system,” was needed. They thought that few of the technologies “Wedges” focused on were mature and described “severe deficiencies.” In 2013, they explicitly criticized Pacala and Socolow’s analysis in a rejoinder article titled “Rethinking Wedges,” in which they wrote that “Pacala and Socolow gave us a way to believe that the energy-carbon-climate problem was manageable.” 

To a lot of people, Hoffert said, “Wedges” served a purpose. “You have to give people hope” that climate change could be solved without radically disrupting society, he said in a recent interview. “Yet in the end,” he added, if that hope is gained by convincing people they can continue without getting rid of fossil fuels, “you’re gonna be driving the car over a cliff.” 

The fact is, he added, BP “got their money’s worth.”

The post Beyond Denial: How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study appeared first on ProPublica.

Arizona’s largest sheriff’s department is losing ground in its effort to comply with court-mandated reforms tied to a long-running racial profiling lawsuit and settlement, a monitor has found.

An investigation launched last year by the monitor’s team and published this month alleges a “disturbing pattern” of violations of department policy and court orders that undermined efforts to investigate misconduct and root out racial profiling in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. The findings echo allegations from a decade ago that led to contempt charges against sheriff’s office leaders.

The monitor’s investigation follows an analysis by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that found ongoing racial disparities in traffic stops by the sheriff’s office, which continue to hold back its compliance with court orders. The accusations this time center on the department’s Professional Standards Bureau, which investigates reports of misconduct.

U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow, who is overseeing the settlement, appointed Robert Warshaw as the monitor in 2014 to track compliance with mandated reforms. Among other things, Warshaw said the sheriff’s office leadership tried to pressure the bureau’s commander to reopen closed investigations into two deputies who had been disciplined and placed on the Brady list, a public database of officer misconduct. The monitor also claimed that top leadership attempted to interfere in the disciplinary process to protect employees accused of wrongdoing. When the commander resisted, he was placed on leave, investigated by an outside agency and temporarily transferred out of the bureau, the report alleges.

“What the Monitoring Team has found here is an attempt to create an internal culture where favor and reprisal are tools of control: to impact outcomes; to instill fear in changemakers; and to grant favors and position to those who bend to misguided directions,” the report stated.

As a result, the monitor determined that the sheriff’s office has regressed in its compliance with the reforms mandated in a settlement of the Melendres v. Arpaio class-action lawsuit. The suit accused the law enforcement agency of using traffic stops to arrest people on immigration charges, racially profiling Latinos in the process. At the time, the court found that when the public did report misconduct, then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio and others interfered with investigations. The court held Arpaio in criminal contempt in 2016 for continuing to make immigration arrests in violation of court orders, though he was eventually pardoned by President Donald Trump.

The constitutional violations began in 2007 under Arpaio. The current sheriff, Jerry Sheridan, inherited the settlement when he took office in January 2025. Sheridan climbed the ranks of the department to become Arpaio’s second-in-command in 2010. He was found in civil contempt in 2016 for denying knowledge of a court order to stop making immigration arrests, despite evidence to the contrary presented in court. Sheridan contends he was always truthful. He distanced himself from his former boss during his campaign and after taking office, stating that he was committed to seeing through the reforms.

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The sheriff’s office filed a 78-page response to the inquiry with the court, denying any violations of court orders or department policy and labeling the investigation as “speculative” and “improper.” The sheriff’s office said the incidents in question proved that internal checks strengthened by court orders were working properly, and that the monitor was penalizing the department for following those orders and policies. The department also asserted that the sheriff’s decision to place the commander on administrative leave and refer him for investigation by an outside agency was justified and also required by court orders.

Upon taking office, Sheridan’s newly appointed staff asked the bureau commander’s advice about reviewing investigations that had been completed or were under appeal to understand if they could potentially change the outcome, but ultimately chose not to take further action, the office said.

“Because the complaint alleged criminal-nature misconduct (evidence tampering) against the current PSB Commander, referring the matter to an outside agency was the only way to avoid a conflict of interest,” the sheriff’s office said in the court filing.

In a separate statement to reporters, Sheridan questioned whether the monitor’s investigation had strayed into “areas involving management discretion, personnel administration, and internal policy disagreements that are more appropriately addressed by agency leadership.”

The sheriff’s office also questioned the timing of the inquiry’s release, two weeks before oral arguments over whether to end court oversight. Lawyers for the sheriff’s office are preparing to argue that the law enforcement agency has fulfilled all of the settlement’s requirements on racial profiling and should be released from the settlement. The monitor “discussing these issues has everything to do with providing inflammatory soundbites” to aid the plaintiff’s opposition to Maricopa County’s motion to end oversight, the sheriff’s office stated in its response filed in court.

Snow has issued four court orders since 2013 with 368 requirements for the department. Warshaw, the monitor, tracks compliance with Snow’s orders and reports the department’s progress quarterly.

The Professional Standards Bureau remains a focal point of court oversight, largely over a backlog in misconduct investigations. Its failure to eliminate the backlog is one of the main reasons the sheriff’s office has not fully complied with orders to prove it can police itself.

Capt. Gregory Lugo has led the bureau since February 2021. He helped reduce the backlog from over 2,100 misconduct investigations in November 2022 to 371 as of May. But in April 2025, Sheridan placed Lugo on leave, sparking the monitor’s inquiry.

At the same time, the sheriff’s office referred a criminal complaint against Lugo to the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The state agency closed the investigation without finding evidence of wrongdoing, according to the monitor’s report. A separate investigator hired by the court to review the Department of Public Safety’s investigation found the allegations against Lugo were unfounded and also cleared him of any wrongdoing.

The criminal complaint was filed by a sergeant whom Lugo demoted in 2020. Lugo also had filed insubordination charges against him. The sergeant appealed the charges, which were initially sustained but overturned after Sheridan took office.

“The Monitoring Team concluded that the stated reason for Captain Lugo’s transfer was a pretext,” and that instead it was taken in retaliation for not going along with the meddling in investigations, in violation of court orders, the report said.

The monitor team also highlighted the case against a deputy who was dismissed for clocking into a sheriff’s office station when he was instead working an off-duty job. The deputy appealed. Sheridan’s second-in-command questioned the deputy’s dismissal and asked Lugo about reviewing that decision, but Lugo said the deputy was fired for timesheet violations totaling “thousands of dollars.”

The monitor said Sheridan and another member of the command staff also inquired about potentially weakening disciplinary policy to avoid firing a sergeant who was arrested for DUI. Command staff argued the sergeant should not have been fired because he self-reported the arrest. Lugo warned that change was not likely to be approved by the monitor or the attorneys involved in the settlement.

The monitor’s inquiry into the Professional Standards Bureau has resulted in a decline in the sheriff’s office compliance with the settlement. Compliance rates, which measure the department’s progress, decreased in three of the four court orders. The biggest drops were for an order focused mainly on internal oversight and discipline, where implementation rates dropped from 95% to 70%. Compliance rates for an order directed at ending the backlog in pending investigations dropped from 88% to 68%.

Because the sheriff’s office disputes the accusations, it contends that it remains in full compliance with requirements related to the monitor’s inquiry and called the change in its compliance rates “punitive, draconian oversight.”

The costs to taxpayers of implementing the reforms has reached $350 million, according to the county. On June 22, the county’s Board of Supervisors approved an additional $36 million for compliance expenses in the upcoming fiscal year. But the court has questioned these costs. The monitor published an audit last October that determined the sheriff’s office misattributed or inflated about 72% of its settlement-related expenses.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents all Latino drivers in Maricopa County as part of the settlement, said the monitor’s latest inquiry proves that the department cannot be trusted to police itself without court oversight and called for the sheriff’s office leadership to be held accountable for the alleged violations of court orders.

“A public law enforcement agency like the MCSO cannot be allowed to operate with impunity if it is to have any legitimacy with the communities it serves,” the ACLU said in its response to the monitor’s inquiry.

Snow will hear oral arguments on Friday over the motion filed by Maricopa County attorneys. They argue court oversight of the sheriff’s office should end completely and immediately, asserting that court reforms have now gone beyond the original scope of the lawsuit and that the sheriff’s office does not racially profile any longer.

The post Court Inquiry Denounces “Disturbing Pattern” of Violations at Arizona’s Largest Sheriff’s Office appeared first on ProPublica.

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe has spent months telling voters that the state constitution is under threat from “out-of-state special interests” using ballot initiatives to bypass the Republican-controlled legislature and enact major policy changes. The measures have included legalizing recreational marijuana, expanding Medicaid and restoring abortion rights. 

That argument is at the center of Kehoe’s support for Amendment 4, a measure in the Aug. 4 primary that would make it harder for Missourians to amend their constitution through citizen-led ballot initiatives.

“Our constitution shouldn’t be the victim of out-of-state special interests who spend millions to deceive voters and pass out-of-touch policies,” Kehoe said in a video posted to the social media site X.

But when it comes to a different constitutional amendment central to his own agenda, Kehoe is benefiting from financial support provided by a Delaware nonprofit that does not disclose the identities of its donors.

Kehoe has slated Amendment 5, which would put Missouri on a path toward eliminating the state income tax, on the ballot for the August election, along with Amendment 4.

While the governor and other proponents argue that phasing out the income tax would make Missouri more economically competitive and lower the overall cost of living, opponents say it would shift the tax burden onto working-class families by imposing new sales, use taxes on products and services not currently taxed, and increase Missouri’s existing sales tax rate. 

Critics also warn that the higher taxes could put Missouri retailers at a disadvantage, particularly in the Kansas City and St. Louis areas, where consumers can easily cross state lines to make major purchases. The cities are within a few miles of Kansas and Illinois, respectively.

A political action committee supporting Amendment 5, Missouri Promise PAC, has received $1.9 million from a nonprofit with almost the same name — Missouri Promise Inc. — that was incorporated late last year in Delaware. Neither the nonprofit nor the PAC discloses the identities or locations of the donors financing the campaign.

Missouri Promise PAC has placed ads online and on TV. A 30-second ad follows the governor through a city neighborhood and a manufacturing plant before ending with him on horseback in cowboy attire.

“He made a promise,” the narrator says. “Now he’s going to deliver.”

Kehoe’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Missouri Promise Inc. is led by Garrett Lott, a longtime Missouri Republican operative and political fundraiser, and Alex Melendez, a political consultant affiliated with Ohio-based Clark Fork Group, a firm that has provided consulting for conservative campaigns. 

Neither Lott nor Melendez responded to requests for interviews or to questions about the group’s operations. 

Marc Ellinger, a lawyer who serves as the treasurer of Missouri Promise PAC, said that the campaign had publicly disclosed all information required under Missouri law. Ellinger’s law office is also listed as the address for Secure Missouri, a Missouri nonprofit formed last year that recently contributed $1.5 million to the PAC.

Asked about the identities of donors to Missouri Promise Inc. and Secure Missouri, Ellinger said he could not address what disclosures the nonprofits themselves may eventually make about donors in their tax filings to the Internal Revenue Service. And he questioned whether any story would also examine financing behind opponents of Amendment 5. One campaign opposing Amendment 5 has been almost entirely funded by a $1,900,001 contribution from the Missouri Realtors PAC — a dollar more than Missouri Promise Inc.’s donation to the pro-Amendment 5 campaign. 

Ellinger suggested that the contribution was not necessarily more transparent than the funding behind Amendment 5, questioning whether the public knew the ultimate source of the Realtors’ money. But unlike Missouri Promise Inc. and Secure Missouri, which do not disclose their contributors, the Realtors’ political committee reports its donors in public filings with the Missouri Ethics Commission. Those filings allow the public to see who gave money to the committee and in what amounts.

Ellinger has been involved in Missouri tax-policy campaigns for years. In 2010, he served as spokesperson for a ballot initiative backed by St. Louis financier Rex Sinquefield that sought to require periodic votes on the 1% tax on wages paid by residents and workers in St. Louis and Kansas City. Missouri voters approved the measure, forcing both cities to submit the tax to voters every five years.

Sinquefield has spent millions of dollars over the past two decades supporting efforts to reshape Missouri’s tax system, including campaigns to eliminate the state income tax and curb local earnings taxes. Sinquefield did not respond to a request for comment.

Critics of both amendments said that Kehoe’s position is difficult to reconcile.

“The fact that the governor is benefiting directly from his face and image being plastered across Missouri TV screens by a dark money group from Delaware — or somewhere, not here — shouldn’t be lost on anyone,” said Mark Jones, a political strategist and spokesperson for the Missouri National Education Association, which opposes both amendments.

Ken Warren, a professor emeritus of political science at Saint Louis University and co-director for the SLU/YouGov Poll, said Kehoe’s complaints about out-of-state money shaping Missouri politics were somewhat surprising. Money from outside a state’s borders routinely flows into ballot measure campaigns and other political fights across the country. 

“It’s not good for democracy for dark money to be used,” Warren said. “Voters should be privy to where the money is coming from, whether it’s in state or out of state, because voters, when they make a choice, should know. So I agree in principle but note that he’s being hypocritical. Many Republican measures have been funded by out-of-state money and candidates. I don’t hold it against them because that’s the way campaigns are run.”

Taken together, the two amendments raise the stakes of what is typically a low-turnout August election. 

By placing them on the primary ballot rather than the November general election ballot, Kehoe ensured they would be decided by an electorate likely to be smaller and more Republican-leaning. The decision also separates the measures from a November ballot that will feature a high-profile fight over abortion rights, an issue that has proved capable of mobilizing large numbers of Missouri voters. 

The claim that outside interests have been driving constitutional change has become a familiar refrain among conservatives in Missouri and other Republican-led states, where voters have used ballot initiatives to enact policies that diverge from the priorities of GOP lawmakers. 

Republican lawmakers in Missouri and in other Republican-led states have responded by reversing voter-passed measures and making it more difficult for voters to amend state constitutions. 

Under Missouri’s current system, supporters of a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment must first collect signatures from voters across the state to qualify for the ballot. Once there, the proposal passes if it wins a simple majority of votes statewide. Under Amendment 4, citizen-led constitutional amendments would have to carry each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts in addition to winning statewide. As a result, a proposal that won statewide but fell short in a single district would fail, no matter how big the statewide margin. 

Critics say that requiring a measure to win in every district would require a level of political consensus that is increasingly rare in a state marked by sharp geographic and ideological divides. 

Supporters counter that such a requirement would ensure constitutional amendments reflect broad statewide agreement rather than support concentrated in a handful of population centers.

“There would have to be an even greater consensus to change the state’s primary document,” said state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson who supports Amendment 4. “It would give a consensus.”

The new requirement would apply only to constitutional amendments proposed by citizens through the initiative process. Amendments placed on the ballot by the Missouri General Assembly — like Amendments 4 and 5 — would still pass with a simple statewide majority.

That distinction lies at the center of the debate over Amendment 4. Critics argue the proposal would create two different sets of rules for amending the same constitution. If a statewide majority is no longer sufficient for citizens to amend the constitution, they ask, why should it remain sufficient when lawmakers propose an amendment? 

Supporters argue that citizen-led initiatives are especially susceptible to influence from wealthy donors and national interest groups, and therefore should be required to demonstrate support across Missouri’s diverse regions. Seitz said he is comfortable with the possibility that the higher standard could someday make it harder for Republicans to pass constitutional amendments if Democrats gain control of state government because, in his view, the goal is to make constitutional changes more difficult regardless of which party is in power.

Seitz said the legislature itself serves as a safeguard against one region of the state dominating another. Because lawmakers are elected from districts across Missouri, he argues that any proposal referred to voters has already been vetted by representatives from urban and rural areas alike.

“We’re not a democracy,” he said. “We are a representative republic.”

The post Missouri’s Governor Is Opposed to Out-Of-State Funding, but Not for His Own Ballot Measure appeared first on ProPublica.

A Minnesota home seller and financier has been found liable for violating state laws in a scheme that targeted East African Muslims with deceptive real estate deals marketed as “sharia compliant.”

After a two-week trial in downtown Minneapolis, a jury sided with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office Monday afternoon in a civil case alleging that Chadwick Banken knowingly deceived home buyers through a complicated process known as “contract for deed.” The unusual real estate contracts, according to Ellison’s office, reaped massive sums of money for Banken and his companies while leaving his customers financially ruined. 

Through those predatory deals, Banken sold homes to Muslim buyers at high markups and on worse terms than offered on traditional home sales, the state’s lawyers argued, luring customers into risky transactions through the promise of the American dream of owning a home.

“Chad Banken exploited people’s willingness to sacrifice for this dream,” Assistant Attorney General Karthik Raman said during his opening argument. 

The seven-person jury deliberated for about eight hours over two days before finding Banken and several of his companies civilly liable for violating the Minnesota Human Rights Act. The jury also determined that Banken violated the state Consumer Financial Protection Act on two counts, along with the Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The latter four verdicts are considered advisory, meaning a judge will make the final determination on those counts. 

The court will also determine whether to order restitution be paid to victims or assess other penalties, which could include up to $25,000 in fines per violation, along with surrendering profits.

The lawsuit, filed in Hennepin County District Court, followed a 2022 investigation by ProPublica and the Sahan Journal that found a rising market in Minnesota for contract-for-deed home sales, in which homebuyers pay the sellers directly in installments. Many buyers in Minnesota’s expansive Somali community say that paying interest violates their Islamic religious beliefs. They often turned to investors like Banken, who buy the houses and then resell them to people purchasing through a contract-for-deed program, as a way to purchase “interest-free” homes.

In some cases, however, Banken hid the amount of interest, or he front-loaded it into abnormally high down payments, according to lawyers in Ellison’s office. Banken used inflated home prices, confusing paperwork and six-figure balloon payments due at the end of short contracts to push buyers into default and to ultimately retain ownership of the property, the attorney general’s lawsuit said.

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Some customers sacrificed far more than they understood when they signed the paperwork. They lost their life’s savings and their homes, unknowingly violating their religious principles in the process. One testified that he ended up homeless and living in his truck.

“I’m not saying Mr. Banken wanted these transactions to fail — I’m not saying that — but he sure was indifferent,” Assistant Attorney General Mark Iris told jurors during closing arguments last Thursday.

Banken sold 160 homes using contracts for deed, targeting Muslims and buyers with poor credit with an offer of “creative financing.” Ellison called Banken’s contract-for-deed scheme “one of the worst that I’ve seen.”

Throughout the trial, Banken’s lawyer, Jack Pierce, described Banken as an honest businessman who only offered alternative financing to those who couldn’t qualify for or objected to traditional avenues. He said Banken purchased the houses his customers picked out, flipped them the same day and charged a markup for profit. 

“For some people it didn’t work out,” Pierce told jurors. “And that’s too bad. It’s unfortunate. That’s life. Sometimes things don’t work out.”

Pierce said Banken was not to blame for the failures. He said his customers’ realtors were responsible for referring clients to his program, drawing up the paperwork and explaining the terms, and he only came in at the end of the process. Pierce said the prospective buyers approached Banken — not the other way around — and Banken only offered a menu of options. It was up to the customers to decide which they wanted, Pierce said.

“Is that wrong?” Pierce asked the jury. “Are we going to punish somebody for providing the opportunity for someone else to buy a house in the option they wanted?”

Lawyers for the state countered that Banken did not give buyers an informed choice, and the customers, some of whom were not native English speakers, didn’t understand what they were agreeing to when they signed the contracts. In some cases the clients were quoted a price and then were surprised at the end of the process with much higher costs. 

Abdinoor Igal, 40, was among the customers who lost money through Banken’s program. A long-haul trucker who operated his own small business, Igal testified through a translator that a real estate agent told him he could purchase a no-interest home through Banken’s sharia-compliant program. 

Igal, whose story was featured in the ProPublica-Sahan Journal reporting, said he put down $20,000 in 2022 to secure a house in suburban Lakeville, which he was originally told would cost about $638,000. When he began to see documents showing a cost of $727,000, he said he had second thoughts, but he was told he would lose his down payment if he backed out.

Later, he found out a large portion of his monthly payments was going toward interest. When he realized the deal he’d entered into was different from what he’d thought it was, Igal asked for an emergency meeting with Banken, saying he needed to sell the house immediately and back out. 

”Put on the market as for sell,” Igal wrote in an email provided to the jury. “I don’t wanna be your slave.”

Unable to get out of the deal, Igal eventually walked away from the house after making $170,000 in payments, according to the lawsuit. The financial toll was so devastating, he said, that he had to send his kids back to live in Africa while he rebuilt his savings. 

“I lived in my truck for one year as a homeless person,” Igal told jurors.

Igal said after the verdict that he was “very happy” with the outcome.

“Me and my kids — we got justice at least,” he said.

The post Jury Finds Home Financing Scheme That Targeted Muslims in Minnesota Violated State Law appeared first on ProPublica.