Category: Uncategorized

When Americans think about campaign finance, they usually picture wealthy donors, political action committees and super PACs pouring money into elections.

But some of the most revealing money moves happen inside Congress itself.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives routinely give campaign money to fellow members of their own party. These transfers make up only a small share of total campaign spending, but they can reveal something important: how parties reward influence, support vulnerable candidates and organize power from within.

In our recent study, my research colleague and I analyzed campaign contributions exchanged among House members from 2009 to 2022, using data from the Federal Election Commission. We looked at who gave money to whom across seven election cycles and asked a simple question: Are these decisions mostly ad hoc, or do they follow clear political patterns?

We found that they are far from random. Internal campaign giving reflects the structure of party politics in the House. Senior members and party leaders are more likely to be givers than receivers, and members facing pressure from outside spending are more likely to attract support from their party colleagues. We also found that Democrats and Republicans organize these campaign contributions differently.

A hidden side of campaign finance

Campaign contributions between House members are legal, common and publicly reportable. In practice, these transfers can help members build alliances, strengthen their party standing and direct resources to competitive races.

That makes these contributions politically meaningful even if they do not dominate the overall money race. More than a financial act, a contribution from one representative to another serves as a signal about who matters and who is vulnerable.

To study this, we treated member-to-member contributions as a network. Each House member was a node, and each contribution created a link from one member to another. This allowed us to track broad patterns over time rather than focusing only on high-profile lawmakers.

Leaders give more than they receive

One of our clearest findings is that party insiders – meaning senior lawmakers and members in formal leadership roles – play a major role in steering campaign cash.

In our study, leadership included the speaker, party leaders, whips, caucus or conference chairs, and committee chairs or ranking members. Across the seven election cycles that we analyzed, about 79% of Democratic leaders and 71% of Republican leaders gave to at least one fellow House member, compared with 65% and 58% of nonleaders.

Leaders also tended to give to far more colleagues. In the 2021-22 election cycle, for example, Democrat Hakeem Jeffries gave to 76 fellow members in our network, Nancy Pelosi to 61, and Republican Steve Scalise to 192. Republican Jason Smith gave to 100 fellow members.

Public reporting shows the scale that these efforts can reach. During the 2021-22 cycle, Kevin McCarthy’s Majority Committee PAC reportedly contributed about US$4 million to select House Republicans in difficult reelection races.

Seniority mattered too, especially among Democrats. Longer-serving Democratic members were more likely to give and less likely to receive. This suggests that experienced members often help channel money toward colleagues with greater electoral need.

The two parties do not look the same

Our study also found a striking difference between the two major parties.

Democratic contribution networks were relatively stable over time. Their giving patterns remained more centralized, with money flowing repeatedly through a smaller set of members. That suggests a more consistent and hierarchical internal system for directing support.

Republican networks changed more over the same period. Early in our study, their money flows were also more centralized. But over time, contributions became less focused on a small core of recipients and were more likely to occur within smaller connected groups. That suggests support was being coordinated less through a single hub and more through clusters of politically connected members.

While Democrats do seem to rely more on a stable central structure, and Republicans appear to have moved toward a more dispersed system, it should not be taken to mean that one party is orderly and the other is chaotic. Both approaches offer their own advantages.

In today’s political language, a uniparty means the idea that Democrats and Republicans are basically one indistinguishable establishment. Our findings point the other way: At least in internal campaign finance, the parties are behaving in distinct ways.

What outside spending may be signaling

We also examined the role of super PACs, which can spend unlimited sums independently to support or oppose candidates.

We found a consistent pattern across both parties: Members targeted by more super PAC activity were more likely to receive contributions from fellow party members and less likely to contribute to others themselves.

A concrete example shows why this matters. In the 2020 cycle, our data shows that outside spending reached about $8.4 million in Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia race for the House and about $7.36 million in Rep. David Valadao’s California race. When that much outside money floods a contest, it sends a public signal that the race is competitive and strategically important. Other lawmakers can see that signal and redirect their own money toward the colleague under pressure.

Why this matters

At a time when the role of money in politics remains deeply contested, such patterns remind Americans that campaign finance is not just a story about donors and interest groups. It is also about how politicians finance one another from the inside.

Those internal flows help show how parties build influence, protect vulnerable members and respond to election pressures. They also offer a window into broader differences between Democrats and Republicans.

More interestingly, it tells a story about party insiders making strategic choices about where money should go — and, in doing so, helping shape the balance of power in Congress.

Mayank Kejriwal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

President Donald Trump’s choice for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, has proved controversial. Pulte’s lack of background in national security matters has sparked resistance from Democrats on Capitol Hill, which is not surprising. But some Republicans, too, have expressed dismay at the president’s choice, a Trump loyalist who currently runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

“I see no evidence of any qualifications for that job,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas.

The current director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is leaving the job at the end of June 2026.

Here’s why it matters who holds the job of director of national intelligence.

Principal national security adviser

To speak of telling truth to power seems terribly old-fashioned these days, but as a veteran of White House intelligence operations, I know that is the essence of the job.

The director of national intelligence is the president’s principal adviser on intelligence, though the CIA director has remained somewhat co-equal in that role. In past administrations, the director of national intelligence has been responsible for both the President’s Daily Brief, where the most crucial and sophisticated intelligence is presented, and for the work of the National Intelligence Council.

Most of the President’s Daily Brief items are still done by the CIA, but the director of national intelligence or a deputy briefed the president, daily in most administrations but one or two times a week in the first Trump administration. Now, it is not clear the briefings take place.

The issues in those briefings lean toward the immediate and tactical: What is the situation on the ground in the wars in Iran and Ukraine? If the United States does X, how will the Iranian regime or Russian President Vladimir Putin respond?

But intelligence strives to push presidents and their colleagues to think more strategically: What are the implications of hypersonic missiles? What is the trajectory of the relationship between Russia and China? What are China’s geostrategic objectives, and what is the role of the Belt and Road Initiative in that vision? What if, far from toppling it, U.S. and Israeli attacks push the Iranian regime to become more hard line, or even produce some “rally ’round the flag” effect among previous opponents of the regime.

9/11 led to intelligence changes

I was chair of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, providing day-to-day intelligence support to the National Security Council and its committees, as well as trying to find time to do more strategic intelligence, looking at trends and connections across issues, producing what are called National Intelligence Estimates.

The director of national intelligence, known as the DNI, sits atop the 17 agencies that make up what is called the U.S. intelligence community. The director neither runs those agencies nor has full control of their budgets.

Rather, the director of national intelligence coordinates them, which sometimes seems like the proverbial herding of cats. They assemble a combined budget for intelligence, but many of the big agencies, such as the National Security Agency, which makes and breaks codes and intercepts signals of interest, belong to the Pentagon.

The creation of the director of national intelligence position was a direct result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The report of the 9/11 Commission was vividly damning about the failures of communication between agencies in the run-up to 9/11. In meetings in New York that summer, CIA and FBI officers were literally unsure what they could tell each other: The former wondered whether the FBI people were really cleared to hear this, while the latter feared that talking might blow a case they were working on. That lack of coordination played a role in letting the plotters slip through intelligence, often in plain sight.

The result of the commission’s work was the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created the director of national intelligence position.

Before that, the director of central intelligence wore two hats, as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and loose coordinator of the broader intelligence community. Hardly surprisingly, directors of central intelligence spent most of their time running the CIA, for that was the source of their troops – and their troubles when they arose.

A score of blue-ribbon panels over 50 years had recommended breaking the director of central intelligence’s conflict of interest – coordinating agencies and their budgets while running one of them – and creating a director of national intelligence position.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence for whom I worked as chair of the National Intelligence Council, constantly emphasized “integration.” Across agencies, integration mostly means talking to each other and sharing information. This works against the natural tendency to scoop your colleagues.

Across disciplines, integration means better aligning what information intelligence agencies collect with what analysts need.

How integration works

If presidents want to know what the CIA thinks about a particular issue, they can simply ask. Usually, though, the question is what does the intelligence community think, and then the question goes to the National Intelligence Council, the director of national intelligence’s interagency group for intelligence analysis.

The National Intelligence Council is organized like the State Department, with officers for regions and functions. Once a question has been presented, the relevant national intelligence officer will convene his or her colleagues from the other agencies. They will argue about the answer to the question, a process sweetly called “coordination,” then agree on the answer. If need be, the process can be done in a few hours.

Major strategic analyses – national intelligence estimates – like one done in 2022 on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic out to 2026, may take months. In all cases, though, the analysis carefully records where there are differences of view in the intelligence community.

In my last year chairing the National Intelligence Council, of the 700 or so analyses we did, about 400 were responses to questions – called “taskings” in governmentese – from the national security adviser or one of the deputies.

National intelligence officers are national experts from inside or outside federal government, and their deputies – the heart and soul of the NIC – are all assigned from intelligence agencies. The largest number come from the CIA, but I worked with a cyber analyst from the Secret Service and a wonderful analyst from the New York Police Department.

Resolutely nonpolitical stance

What was striking then and has struck me both times I’ve had the privilege of running a U.S. intelligence agency is the dedication of the officers.

They work for the nation, not for a political party or ideology. As chair of the NIC, I had no idea of the politics of my people, save for the several closest to me. For them, telling truth to power is not a slogan. It is what they do. They are always worried about “politicizing” – producing an assessment to suit a policymaker’s preference or, worse, being pressured to do so.

The president’s daily briefers, for instance, give up a year of their lives to come to work at 4 a.m., learn their briefs and then fan out across Washington to brief senior officials. They like being “on the team” of the person they brief, but they become uncomfortable if the conversation turns political.

The director of national intelligence sets the tone for that resolutely nonpolitical stance and polices it through principles articulated in the agency’s analytic integrity and standards. As chair of the NIC, for instance, I’d receive regular assessments of both the quality of our analyses and whether we risked becoming “politicized.”

For their part, do politicians and agency leaders like it when their pet projects are assessed by intelligence as unwise or infeasible? Of course not. I’ve been on that side of the intelligence-policy divide as well. But the United States is much the better for it.

This story, originally published on Dec. 4, 2024, has been updated to reflect that Bill Pulte has been chosen by President Trump to be the acting director of national intelligence.

Gregory F. Treverton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

More people are talking about the Declaration of Independence now than they likely have for decades, largely because of the festivities, exhibits, historical commemorations and other public events associated with the upcoming 250th anniversary of American independence.

But even as they discuss the historical meaning, purpose and ideas of the declaration, they should remember that independence was only the first step in becoming a nation.

Despite laying out the purposes of the new nation, the declaration did not say what kind of government the new United States should have. That discussion was left for later debates, leading first to the Articles of Confederation and then, ultimately, to the Constitution.

Yet, fully understanding the Constitution requires referring to the another crucial founding-era document: The Federalist, known to many as The Federalist Papers. Without it, the Constitution may not have been ratified, and it has helped guide American government and law for the past 2½ centuries.

Drive for ratification

Under the Articles of Confederation, adopted by the Continental Congress in late 1777, the national government was exceptionally weak, unable to levy taxes or tariffs or enforce treaty obligations. Moreover, the states often abused their authority, both over their own citizens and with regard to each other. For example, states would often impose tariffs on each other’s goods, even if those goods were moving only from Virginia to Maryland and vice versa, thereby inhibiting the development of a national market and hamstringing internal trade.

The Constitution sought to correct these problems by creating a much stronger national government able to protect itself from national security threats, both foreign and domestic, and secure liberty at the same time.

Those supporting ratification adopted the name Federalists on the idea that they supported strengthening the national government, which was often described as a federal union. Their opponents, who sought to defeat the Constitution’s ratification, were then dubbed the Anti-Federalists, much to the latter’s consternation.

While there were a variety of Federalist authors writing to support the Constitution during the ratification debates in 1787-88, the essays of The Federalist were specifically co-authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay under the collective pseudonym “Publius.”

The practical political purpose of the essays was to convince New York to ratify the Constitution. Nine states had to ratify to put the Constitution into effect, yet it was recognized that without key states such as New York, Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, the Constitution – and more broadly the union – could not survive.

Thus, even though 10 states ratified before New York, enabling the Constitution to go into effect, New York’s ratification remained essential.

Each of The Federalist’s 85 essays – 51 by Hamilton, 29 by Madison and five by Jay – were addressed “To the People of the State of New York.” Nearly all were published in New York newspapers as op-eds, with some republished in other states. They were meant to be read and thought about by an interested and educated public, as the authors understood the importance of public opinion not simply to the ratification process but to any democratic system.

Ratifying the Constitution was the immediate goal of The Federalist. But in making their arguments, the authors went further, addressing fundamental questions of politics by laying out the political theory that underlies that Constitution.

In short, The Federalist sits at the intersection where theory meets practice.

Advancing political science

In “Federalist 1,” Hamilton breaks down major issues to be considered in deciding whether to adopt the Constitution: the utility of the union; the defects of the Articles of Confederation; the need for energetic government; how the Constitution is analogous to the New York constitution; how the Constitution will preserve liberty and prosperity; and how the Constitution creates a republican government. Such a republican government is defined by Madison in “Federalist 39” as a government with powers derived from the people and administered by representatives for a period of time.

Reflecting the political debate, however, the authors had to be flexible with their writing plans as they responded to the arguments made by their Anti-Federalist opponents.

Yet, even in that dynamic environment, there are two consistent themes that contribute to The Federalist’s timelessness.

The first theme revolves around what Hamilton in “Federalist 9” calls “the science of politics.” Hamilton and Madison frequently address the ideas of past political philosophers and the traditional assumptions of what republics were supposed to look like.

This is most evident in “Federalist 10” where Madison overturns the long-held belief, articulated most clearly by the French philosopher Montesquieu and embraced by the Anti-Federalists, that republics needed to be small to preserve liberty.

Madison shows that, on the contrary, it was a large republic that could best deal with the problem of factions and preserve liberty by preventing any faction from gaining a majority, thereby providing “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

Similarly, in “Federalist 70,” Hamilton explains that a single strong executive is not inherently monarchical and antithetical to republican government, but rather is essential to a republic’s proper operation. “Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” he wrote.

The Federalist advanced political science itself, changing the conception of what a republic was and could be.

Accounting for self-interest

A second theme is the recognition of how human motivations interact with institutions.

Past philosophers, such as Aristotle, emphasized the necessity of virtue in both the people and their rulers, and Montesquieu argued that virtue was the defining principle of republics.

But Hamilton and Madison, focusing more on historical experience than theory, emphasized the need for institutions to account for the self-interested behavior of officeholders.

This emphasis is evident at the very beginning when Hamilton asserts in “Federalist 1” that a clean debate on the merits of any public proposal “is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected,” and that some people will be driven by personal interests.

In “Federalist 51,” Madison provides the clearest articulation of this view with his famous statement, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

In their view, it is not enough to rely on the virtue of officeholders. But we can arrange our institutions in such a way that our low, base, self-interested human nature may be channeled to ultimately serve a higher public good.

This is not, however, to say that The Federalist is a cynical work.

Enlightened statesmen not always at the helm

In “Federalist 55” Madison points out that “there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

That optimistic statement is followed by his observation, “Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

Republics rely on the people having some measure of public virtue to work. The key insight Madison brings out is that such higher qualities alone cannot be relied upon.

The institutions created by the Constitution are set up to be functional, but they are also built to account for the kind of human beings who will inhabit them. As Madison succinctly put it in “Federalist 10”: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”

Thomas Jefferson called The Federalist “the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.” It remains the most systematic and important exploration of our constitutional system.

As Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, it is worth reflecting on the institutions that have facilitated the endurance of that independence. You can find no better guide to that reflection than The Federalist.

Jordan Cash does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

_Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison says alerts from ShotSpotter, a gun detection technology, help officers respond quickly to shootings.

“Without it, I wouldn’t have the closure rate [of resolved crimes] that I have and a lot of families wouldn’t have the justice they deserve,” he said in March 2026, according to BridgeDetroit, a nonprofit news service.

_During a Detroit City Council committee meeting on May 18, 2026, police officials said ShotSpotter led to hundreds of search warrants and confiscated guns in 2025. _

It’s not clear how many arrests resulted last year. Bettison has been quoted saying that ShotSpotter during the May 18 City Council meeting and
256 during a March 23 budget briefing. We reached out to the Detroit Police Department to clarify the number, but it didn’t respond by our deadline.

The department has requested a nine-month extension for ShotSpotter, which would cost the city an additional $US2.06 million, while it considers other vendors to provide gun detection technology, the Detroit News reported.

The system uses a network of acoustic sensors to detect, locate and alert police to shots fired. ShotSpotter is in use in more than 180 American cities, according to the company. The technology has been criticized for its high price tag, ineffectiveness in improving public safety and lack of transparency.

Detroit City Council first approved ShotSpotter in 2020, and the system became fully active in 2021. In 2022, City Council members narrowly approved, by a 5-4 vote, expanding the program to more neighborhoods. The technology now covers approximately 39 square miles (about 101 square kilometers), about a third of the city, and is deployed in the neighborhoods police say are most likely to experience gun violence. The contract that expires on June 30, 2026, cost $7 million over a four-year period.

Divya Ramjee and Tian An Wong are part of a team of researchers who studied the effectiveness of gunshot detection technology in Detroit during its first two years. The study is currently under peer review. They answered the following questions for The Conversation Detroit._

How did ShotSpotter affect calls to 911 to report gunshots?

Wong: Our research first looked at calls to 911 reporting gunshots before and after the first deployment of ShotSpotter in Detroit, covering February 2018 to November 2022. This data is available on Detroit’s Open Data Portal. In the areas of Detroit where ShotSpotter was implemented in 2021, calls to 911 to report gunshots initially dropped by 47%. This effect disappeared about after a year, however, and these calls returned to previous levels.

Our study does not cover the 2023 expansion of ShotSpotter in Detroit, though the data is currently available for those interested.

Although ShotSpotter alert time and location data is publicly available, the outcome of the police response to those alerts, is not and the DPD has never released data on the effectiveness of the technology during these first two years of use. To analyze outcomes, we made a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to the Detroit Police Department.

Did the technology affect officer response times or the rates of arrests for violent crime in Detroit?

Wong: By analyzing the FOIA data, we found that of the 5,853 ShotSpotter alerts from that first deployment, just two alerts, or 0.03%, resulted in at least one arrest. Additionally, 798 alerts, or 13.63%, resulted in at least one firearm recovered.

Those numbers are obviously low. However, we don’t believe that arrest rates should be used as a measure of ShotSpotter’s success. We need to understand the nature of those arrests and if they helped bring down gun-related incidents in the community.

We did not find any difference in officer response times. Some have argued that the alerts generate responses to events that would otherwise not have been reported due to lack of trust in law enforcement, but it is difficult to verify this claim.

I’d argue the request to renew ShotSpotter is not based on a rigorous review of the technology’s impact. In addition to ShotSpotter, Detroit also introduced a community violence intervention program in 2023 with a similar name – Shot Stoppers. That program determines grant renewals to participating community organizations based on a drop in homicides and nonfatal shootings in their geographic area.

But the reality is that homicides in Detroit hit a 60-year low in 2025, and nonfatal shootings are also significantly down. This tracks with nationwide crime trends. Our research tries to get at the role ShotSpotter played in this reduction, if any.

What do you make of Bettison’s statement that ShotSpotter alerts led to dozens or hundreds of arrests in 2025?

Wong: The arrest data that we obtained from the Detroit Police Department covers February 2018 to November 2022. Bettison is referring to a later time period – after the expansion of the coverage area – so his numbers don’t necessarily contradict ours. The only way to know for sure is to FOIA data for this most recent time period and fact-check what the chief is saying. This process is currently underway.

In the meantime, two arrests, as we found in the actual data we obtained from the police department, compared with 78 – or even 256, as Bettison as said – seems like a big jump, and more context is needed.

Is there any evidence that ShotSpotter saved lives of gunshot victims?

Ramjee: Evidence is inconclusive at best. Some research supports that the technology can potentially increase the likelihood of police transport of gunshot victims to hospitals and reduce EMS response times for victims, which could potentially improve survival outcomes. However, research hasn’t proved a corresponding reduction in mortality rates in areas where ShotSpotter has been deployed across the U.S.

How is ShotSpotter received in other U.S. cities?

Ramjee: There are continued issues with the accuracy of sensors, including false positives and missed gunshot detections, that complicate its practical effectiveness.

The lack of evidence that ShotSpotter improves public safety, given its high cost, has prompted a number of communities to reassess its value. Chicago; San Antonio; Houston; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Portland, Oregon have either terminated existing agreements or indicated that they do not intend to renew them upon expiration.

In New York, the city comptroller indicated that available evidence from a June 2024 audit did not support continued investment in ShotSpotter. Nevertheless, the New York City Police Department opted to renew its contract for an additional three-year term, at a cost of approximately $21.8 million.

What happens to the data ShotSpotter collects? Specifically, does the city of Detroit own it, can researchers access it, and how does that compare to 911 data?

Ramjee: ShotSpotter data ise not broadly shared with the public. The company, which rebranded as SoundThinking, Inc. in 2023, considers the raw audio from sensors, the underlying algorithms and other system-generated data to be proprietary. SoundThinking states that the company only shares alerts, gunshot locations, timestamps and short, isolated audio clips with police agencies. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and courts may also access this incident data as part of criminal cases, depending on legal rules.

Cities and municipalities themselves do not necessarily obtain full ownership of ShotSpotter data even when data is shared with them. In most cases, contractual agreements dictate the access and use of incident data by the respective jurisdictions, and there are generally constraints on how they can store, analyze or publicly release the data.

For 911 call data in Detroit, access to the data depends on the level of detail required. The city’s Open Data Portal provides a large dataset of law enforcement-serviced 911 calls that includes time of incident, call type, response metrics and ShotSpotter-initiated 911 alerts, but it redacts information that exposes a person’s identity.

Obtaining the actual dispatch logs or the arrest outcomes from ShotSpotter alerts typically requires submitting a FOIA request. That process can be tedious, may involve delays due to issues with resources, outdated technology or flawed data reporting practices, and may ultimately result in partial data or data with redactions.

Tian An Wong received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Divya Ramjee is affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

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Can kids go to prison? – Artie, age 10, New York City

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The United States has a special justice system for people under age 18. But youth can be tried in adult courts and go to adult jails and prisons for certain crimes.

The youth justice system was created because young people are different from adults. The part of the brain that helps control emotions and actions doesn’t finish developing until your mid-20s. Research shows that most people who commit crimes in their youth grow out of this behavior as they mature.

For this reason, juvenile courts and detention centers are designed to protect young people and help them return to normal life. That’s supposed to be balanced with holding young people accountable in ways that reflect their age and degree of maturity.

The Supreme Court has recognized that children are not little adults. It ruled in 2005 that sentencing a person under 18 to death violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

In 2010 the court reached the same conclusion about sentencing someone under 18 to life in prison without the possibility of parole for crimes other than murder. And in 2012 it ruled that states could not mandate life without parole for people under 18 even if they committed murder.

Juvenile court is not ‘kiddy court’

Many young people who end up in court are accused of delinquency – actions that break the criminal law, such as stealing a car or breaking into someone’s house. If they are found guilty, the consequences can be serious.

They may be put on probation and supervised in their community. But they can also be placed in residential programs or committed to locked juvenile facilities until age 18, or 21 in some states.

Young people can also be charged with what are called status offenses – actions that are illegal for people under age 18, such as skipping school, running away from home or being unable to follow the rules at home. Status offenders can be sent to foster care or group homes, where they are not locked up. They are not supposed to be placed with delinquents in juvenile facilities.

Children in court

The U.S. is more willing than many other countries to try young children in the criminal system. This is true even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that no person should be prosecuted in any court system unless they have a factual and rational understanding of the charges they face and can effectively communicate with their lawyer.

Many youth under age 14 lack these abilities and are not legally competent to stand trial. This was an important reason Massachusetts, where I served as a juvenile court judge, raised the minimum age of juvenile court jurisdiction for all offenses to 12 in 2018.

However, 24 other states and four U.S. territories have no minimum age for trying children in juvenile court. Among the 26 states that do have a minimum, that age is 10. Fourteen states and four territories allow children of any age to be detained or locked up.

The American Bar Association recommends that 14 should be the minimum age of prosecution. That’s the most common standard in other countries.

Trying young people as adults

In every state, cases that involve serious offenses, such as armed robbery or rape, can be moved to the adult criminal system. Generally, youth can be transferred to adult courts at age 14 for certain offenses. Some states allow transfer of people as young as age 10.

This can happen for different reasons. Some states allow prosecutors to ask juvenile court judges to waive jurisdiction after a hearing on the case. Other states let prosecutors directly file cases in the criminal system. Still others have laws that automatically send youth to the criminal legal system solely based on the offense charged.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1966 that transfer to adult court should not occur without a statement of findings or reasons by a judge. When judges considered these requests, the court held, they should take into account the nature of the offense, the impact on the victim, and the offender’s age, maturity, prior history and prospects for treatment.

But in states that automatically steer cases to adult court, or let prosecutors choose to file charges there, hearings don’t occur.

Where you live matters

Today, 28 states and Washington, D.C., have provisions for automatically sending youth to the adult criminal system. Data shows that this policy mainly affects people of color.

Between 2009 and 2024, for example, 80% of Maryland youth charged as adults were Black. In 2017, 84% of Alabama youth charged as adults were Black. And in Nebraska in 2024, 36% of youth transferred to the adult system were Black and 20% were Latino.

Florida prosecutes children as adults for serious crimes and sends juvenile offenders to adult prisons at higher rates than any other state. From 2009 through 2019, more than 16,000 children – some as young as 10 years old – were prosecuted as adults in Florida.

Transferring young people to adult prisons interrupts their education and social development. It also exposes them to high rates of violence by adult inmates.

What’s more, it doesn’t make the public safer. Studies show that youth who are transferred to the adult justice system are 34% more likely to commit new crimes after release than offenders who stay in the juvenile system.

Many of my fellow lawyers believe that trying young people as adults isn’t being smart on crime. In our view, the best way to keep the public safe and rehabilitate young offenders is to treat them in ways that reflect their age. That means channeling fewer young offenders into adult courts and not allowing youth who are transferred to be locked up with adults.

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Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Jay Blitzman was a juvenile court judge in Massachusetts for 24 years, culminating as first justice of the Massachusetts Juvenile Court, Middlesex Division. Previously, he was a founder and the first director of the Roxbury Youth Advocacy Project and co-founded Citizens for Juvenile Justice, where he currently serves on the advisory committee. He is a member of several American Bar Association committees addressing youth justice issues.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Trump administration on May 20, 2026, indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro for murder, based on the downing of two planes near the Cuban coastline in 1996 that killed four people.

As a historian of Latin America and U.S. foreign policy, I believe the indictment may be the prelude to direct U.S. military action against Cuba.

Before Castro, the last U.S. indictment of a Latin American leader occurred in January 2026, when a U.S. attorney appointed by President Donald Trump charged Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro with narco-terrorism. Those charges were promptly followed by U.S. military strikes on Venezuela and the abduction of Maduro.

Since January, the U.S. has ended the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba and has used economic and military pressure to prevent other nations from trading with the island. And Trump recently threatened a “friendly takeover” of Cuba.

I believe that what’s missing from most recent analysis of this situation is the history of U.S. aggression against Cuba. This is essential context for understanding the Trump administration’s recent escalations.

‘Striking at Cuba constantly’

In 1823, U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams identified Cuba as “an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union.” The 1959 Cuban Revolution that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and replaced him with Fidel Castro, brother of Raúl, directly challenged those interests by asserting political autonomy and expropriating private property.

State Department officials observed that “the majority of Cubans support Castro” because of the government’s redistributive measures and its “real honesty, courtesy, and idealism.” One official warned “that if the Cuban revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban revolution succeed.”

They decided quickly. By December 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA director had approved plans to overthrow the Castro government. U.S. policy thereafter included direct sponsorship and safe haven for Cuban paramilitary groups.

The CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 is only the most famous episode. The U.S. trained 1,400 Cuban exiles to invade Cuba, hoping to ignite a nationwide rebellion. Instead, Cubans rallied behind the government.

Though U.S. analysts often criticize the invasion because it failed, it was also a major crime under international law. Several hundred Cubans were killed.

Fear of a repeat invasion also led Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to send nuclear missiles to Cuba, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 that nearly led to nuclear war.

Longtime CIA official Richard Helms later testified that in the early 1960s, “We had task forces that were striking at Cuba constantly. We were attempting to blow up power plants, we were attempting to ruin sugar mills, we were attempting to do all kinds of things during this period. This was a matter of American Government policy.”

In 1976, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, two Cuban exiles, planned the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner near Barbados that killed all 73 people aboard.

“The C.I.A. taught us everything,” Posada Carriles said later. “They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage.”

Both men were given refuge in the United States for the rest of their lives.

The Bay of Pigs invasion and the airline bombing violate the core principles of international law, including prohibitions on the unprovoked “threat or use of force” and collective punishment. The U.S. government itself defines “international terrorism” as “violent acts” intended “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” or to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

By that definition, its Cuba policy qualifies.

By ‘every possible means’

Another U.S. method of striking at Cuba was through economic sanctions, first imposed on the country in 1960. That year, a State Department official wrote that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba” so as “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” The logic of collective punishment was clear: make Cubans suffer enough that they rebel against Castro.

This policy is now more aggressive than ever. The tightening of U.S. sanctions since Trump’s first term has reduced Cuba’s income from tourism, remittances and overseas medical missions. Now, by choking off the supply of fuel, the U.S. has critically weakened the healthcare and sanitation systems that depend on electricity.

Medical professionals and United Nations observers have described scenes of ventilators and incubators left without power, pharmacies empty and healthcare workers forced into “horrible decisions” about who lives and dies. A recent medical study reported a 148% increase in infant mortality between 2018 and 2025, meaning that about 1,800 infants died who otherwise would have lived.

‘I was trained as a terrorist by the United States’

The focus of the recent U.S. indictment against Raúl Castro was the incident on Feb. 24, 1996, when the Cuban military, which was headed by Castro, shot down those two planes.

The planes were operated by Brothers to the Rescue, an anti-Castro group of Cuban exiles who said they were aiding Cuban emigres trying to reach Florida. The group’s head, and one of the surviving pilots that day, was José Basulto, a veteran CIA asset and participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In 1962, Basulto fired a cannon and machine gun “16 times” at a Cuban hotel, he later recounted. “I was trained as a terrorist by the United States,” Basulto once told an interviewer.

Basulto’s plane had entered Cuban airspace on Feb. 24, as a U.S. customs service specialist later testified. Correspondence from the day shows that Basulto did so knowingly. The previous July, he had told a TV audience, “We want confrontation.”

While the Cuban military could have deescalated the situation more carefully that day, Cuba had been trying for months to stop the violations of its airspace.

I believe indicting Cuban officials over the incident is disingenuous, given the provocations by Brothers to the Rescue and U.S. actions against Cuba, which are in direct violation of international and U.S. laws that prohibit threats, nondefensive violence and collective punishment.

Kevin A. Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In the case of United States v. James Brien Comey Jr., the U.S. president’s security is pitted against the bedrock right to free speech enjoyed by Americans.

Two federal charges have been lodged against former FBI Director James Comey and are based on his Instagram post that depicted seashells spelling out “86 47.”

Comey’s post was interpreted by the U.S. Department of Justice as a threat to harm President Donald Trump. The indictment, obtained by the DOJ, alleges Comey violated two federal laws: 18 U.S.C. § 871, which makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully” threaten, kidnap or “inflict bodily injury upon the President of the United States,” and 18 U.S.C. § 875, which criminalizes “communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.”

Comey’s argument against the charges is likely to be twofold: (1) He lacked the requisite intent that the prosecutor needs to prove his case, and (2) even if he had the intent required by the statute, his speech is protected by the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Louise Flanagan set Oct. 21 as the Comey case trial date.

I’m a scholar of constitutional and criminal law as well as the First Amendment. The charges against Comey exist in a legal gray area that includes the First Amendment and a series of court decisions over five decades that have gone back and forth over what dangers constitute speech that can be punished.

Parsing the charges

In criminal law, there are generally two parts to most crimes – the criminal act and the criminal intent. The criminal act is referred to as the “actus reus.” The criminal intent is known as the “mens rea.”

Some crimes also require a particular result. For instance, murder requires a death of a person. A defendant can neither be charged with nor convicted of murder unless and until the victim dies. If the victim doesn’t die, then at most the defendant can be convicted of only attempted murder.

The criminal charges alleged in Comey’s case don’t require a result, however. The president need not be kidnapped or injured for someone to be charged with violating either of them.

But the prosecutor must still prove the criminal intent and the criminal act for both charges to stick in Comey’s case. In my view, the Justice Department will have a difficult time proving the mens rea against him.

Comey has consistently maintained that he didn’t know “86 47” implied violence against the president.

Meaning and purpose

Comey has stated he came across the shells that spelled out “86 47” while walking on a beach in North Carolina, took a picture and posted it on Instagram.

The term “86” is commonly used to mean “to throw out” or “to get rid of” in American slang. According to Merriam-Webster, the term “comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out.”

Comey later removed the image from Instagram and posted a statement that read, “I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message. I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.”

Even though Comey has insisted that he thought it was a silly picture of shells arranged in a clever way to express a political viewpoint, the Trump administration argues that Comey not only knew the meaning of “86 47” but that he purposefully threatened the president.

What’s plausible?

The first crime charged in the indictment, 18 U.S.C. §871, requires the defendant to have “knowingly and willfully” threatened to kidnap or inflict bodily injury upon the president. This is the statute’s mens rea; the defendant must have known that he was threatening the president of the United States.

Comey’s statements suggest that he didn’t know the threatening nature of his Instagram post. Thus, he cannot be convicted of “knowingly” threatening the president if he didn’t know its meaning.

To convict Comey, the prosecutor must prove that he did, in fact, know the meaning of “86 47” when he posted it.

Comey’s career as a federal prosecutor and his tenure as the FBI director may work against him here. In my view, it’s more than plausible that Comey encountered the threatening version of the term “86” in his career. It’s also more than plausible that the term appears in documents, records and court filings that Comey has drafted and signed over his career, all of which could be used against him at trial.

But even if the Justice Department can prove Comey did, in fact, know the threatening nature of “86 47,” its case against him is not a slam dunk.

And that’s because of the First Amendment.

Testing what’s protected speech

As a constitutional law scholar, I’d expect Comey to argue that his Instagram post was protected speech.

Even though the laws charged in Comey’s case are generally valid and constitutional, criminal defendants can always argue that otherwise valid and constitutional laws are unconstitutional as applied to them and their particular case. Comey is likely to argue this in his defense, but it won’t be as straightforward as one might think.

The First Amendment is not absolute – not all speech and expression is protected by the Constitution.

In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire from 1942, Justice Frank Murphy wrote that it’s “well understood that the right to free speech is not absolute at all times and under all circumstances.”

In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Watts v. United States that while “true threats” are not protected by the First Amendment, political hyperbole remains protected speech. The Supreme Court defines true threats as statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of intent to commit an act of unlawful violence against a particular individual or group of individuals, but the speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat.

Watts v. United States involved a threat against the sitting president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson. In that case, Robert Watts expressed his strong opposition to the military draft at a public rally, saying, “If they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” He was subsequently charged and convicted under the same statute, 18 U.S.C. § 871, used in Comey’s case.

The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, ultimately agreeing with Watts, who had maintained that his statement was “a kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the President.”

As the court explained, quoting an earlier decision on press freedom, “For we must interpret the language Congress chose ‘against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wideopen, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.’”

Since Watts, countless defendants have faced similar charges for threatening the president. Many have been convicted.

In the 1970s, Eugene Hart was convicted of threatening the president after his brother reported Hart’s plan to assassinate President Richard Nixon. An appellate court affirmed his conviction, concluding that Hart’s verbal threat coupled with his detailed assassination plan couldn’t have been “uttered in jest or in the nature of a hyperbole.”

In the 1980s, David Hoffman was convicted of threatening President Ronald Reagan when he mailed a letter to the White House stating, “Ronnie, Listen Chump! Resign or You’ll Get Your Brains Blown Out.” And in 1999, Donald Adams was convicted of threatening the president when he approached the White House gates telling Secret Service officers, “I want to kill the president.”

But in those cases and others, the defendants took concrete steps that demonstrated their sincerity and conscious awareness of the threatening nature of their speech. In my estimation, both are absent in Comey’s case.

Wayne Unger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

In April 2026, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax was shot and killed by her husband while their divorce was pending.

She had done what she was supposed to do. She had initiated the legal process to leave Justin Fairfax, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia. It didn’t save her.

What happened to Wanzer Fairfax has a name: femicide.

Femicide is the intentional killing of women on the basis of gender. Women are most often killed by their partner, former partners or another person who believes they have a claim on their life. It happens in living rooms and driveways and parking lots. It happens during marriage, divorces, separations and in the weeks after a woman finally walks out the door.

As a scholar focused on the intersection of firearm violence and intimate partner homicide, I examine the policy and structural conditions that determine who is at risk and where prevention efforts are falling short.

Intimate partner homicide doesn’t affect all women equally. Black women have the nation’s highest rates of homicide by an intimate partner, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Intimate partner violence by the numbers

A 2024 study in The Lancet tracking homicide deaths from 1999 to 2020 found that Black women ages 25 to 44 are killed at nearly four times the rate of their white peers.

Spring 2026 saw three such cases make national headlines.

Just prior to Wanzer Fairfax’s death, Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer Bowen of Coral Springs, Florida, was shot to death – allegedy by her husband. Also in April, in Louisiana, Shaneiqua Pugh was shot by her husband, as was Christina Snow, the mother of three of the killer’s children. Pugh and Snow are both expected to survive. Eight children, however, were killed.

Three cases. Three states. One month. All, sadly, preventable.

Intimate partner homicide claims more than 1,800 lives in the United States every year. Nearly half of victims are killed by a current or former intimate male partner – not a stranger. These aren’t random acts of violence.

Separation is one of the most dangerous times in an abusive relationship. This is why we cannot see the death of Wanzer Fairfax and others like hers as one-off tragedies. They represent a decades-long pattern of intimate partner femicide in Black relationships – a pattern driven by firearm access coupled with inadequate policy enforcement.

Guns are what make intimate partner violence so deadly. About half of the roughly 1,800 annual intimate-partner femicide cases involved a gun. And in every region of the country, firearm homicide disproportionately kills Black women.

‘The partner loophole’

If the gun is what escalates the risk, it is also where policy has its best chance to intervene.

State law can explicitly restrict perpetrators of domestic violence from purchasing or possessing firearms through two types of civil protection orders: final domestic violence restraining orders and temporary restraining orders. Research demonstrates that states with strong gun restrictions along these lines have meaningfully lower rates of intimate partner homicide.

Generally speaking, though, these laws are not working as designed.

In most states, for example, only certain kinds of relationships qualify for protective orders to be issued against an abusive partner. The most common qualifying relationship is romantic partner or former partner. This characterization poses a problem called “the partner loophole.”

Federal gun-possession restrictions had a similar limitation for decades. If the relationship was a dating partnership, the prohibition against abusive partners obtaining a firearm did not apply. This came to be known as the “boyfriend loophole.”

In 2022, the bipartisan Safer Communities Act extended the gun prohibition to abusive dating partners. While the law now covers more kinds of relationships, it does not yet offer equal protection to Black women in those kinds of relationships.

Research using the National Violent Death Reporting System found that state-level enforcement of the policy was associated with reductions in intimate partner homicide among unmarried white victims, but not among victims of color.

Firearm-relinquishment laws are another weak spot I’ve identified in protecting Black women from intimate partner violence.

When a court issues a domestic violence protective order, federal law prohibits the restrained person from possessing a gun. But this prohibition does not automatically remove guns already in the person’s possession: A gun-relinquishment law must be invoked to compel them to surrender their weapons.

Some states, including California and Washington, have strong relinquishment provisions. They require judges to mandate surrender, set compliance deadlines and authorize law enforcement to recover unrelinquished weapons. These laws are associated with reductions in intimate partner homicide.

But other states give judges discretion. A 2025 review of civil protection order cases in South Carolina found that courts issued a firearm-protection order in only 32% of eligible cases in 2019. In North Carolina, a 2024 study examining state enforcement laws found that despite 93% of cases meeting the conditions for gun relinquishment, the policy was enforced in only 37% of cases.

As a result, researchers have found, firearms are discussed in fewer than 1 in 4 protective-order hearings nationwide, and courts order abusers to surrender their guns in 66% of applicable cases.

The result of unequal state policy enforcement is a prohibition that exists on paper and a gun that stays in the home.

The racial equity gap

The evidence is clear: When gun prohibition and relinquishment laws are fully enforced in abusive relationships, they can save lives.

Yet most states have gaps that limit how effective these policies are in practice. And that failure falls hardest on Black women.

Research shows that state firearm restriction laws with relinquishment provisions were associated with a 16% reduction in firearm intimate partner homicide for white victims. For Black victims, the reduction was not statistically significant.

This is especially concerning given that Black women experience the highest incidence of injury and death from intimate partner violence in the country.

The problem isn’t the laws themselves. It’s that the mechanisms of the law depend on a delivery system – courts, law enforcement, protective orders – that doesn’t work well for Black women.

After reporting domestic abuse, Black women are more likely to be incarcerated for defending themselves against their abuser, and they lose custody of their children more often once CPS becomes involved. A study examining preferences of intimate-partner violence survivors found that Black women report fear and distrust of police as a barrier to engaging with the legal system.

Because of these experiences, Black women understandably engage the criminal justice system less frequently. And laws protect only the people who can use them.

The media usually get Black femicide wrong

Another problem surrounding intimate partner homicide inflicts its harms after death.

When a woman is killed by her partner, media coverage often follows a familiar script: a name, a location, a grieving community. What it almost never includes is the word that I believe most accurately describes what happened: femicide.

Feminists in many countries, particularly in Latin America, have fought to enact femicide laws in response to pervasive violence against women. But the U.S. has no such laws and lags behind here.

Research has documented consistently that news coverage of intimate partner homicide depicts it as episodic rather than systemic, treating each killing as an isolated event rather than part of a preventable pattern.

When the victim is a Black woman, the issues compound.

Coverage of Black women’s deaths is less frequent, less sustained and less likely to generate the kind of public outrage that drives policy change. The focus in these stories, when they do run, tends to fall on the relationship or the victim’s personal history rather than on the systems that failed her.

This matters because media framing helps to determine what the public believes is fixable.

When journalists cover intimate partner homicide as a private tragedy, it becomes politically inert. When they contextualize it as the result of an unenforced gun law or a legal loophole, it becomes a policy failure – and policy failures have a policy remedy.

I believe the U.S. needs comprehensive standards for firearm restrictions in domestic violence cases, more robust enforcement and targeted efforts ensuring these protections reach all communities equitably.

For Black women, delay or failure may be the difference between life and death.

This story was produced in collaboration with Rewire News Group, an independent, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering reproductive health.

Sativa Banks does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Tennessee set out to execute Tony Carruthers on May 21, 2026, but he lived to tell about it.

Carruthers, who was sentenced to death for a 1994 triple murder, survived his date with death when the execution team members could find only one suitable vein in which to secure an IV, but not, as USA Today reports, the “backup line, which is required under the state’s lethal injection protocol.”

After the failed attempt, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee gave Carruthers a one-year reprieve, a decision the governor did not explain.

What happened to Carruthers is a reminder that things frequently go wrong in executions, even if in almost all cases the problem is resolved and the execution is completed.

Indeed, in the past 80 years, only eight other men have had experiences like Carruthers’ and survived execution attempts.

Four of those execution “survivors” were killed by a second execution attempt, while others escaped that fate. Three others died on death row; one of them after the state agreed not to try to execute him a second time, and one of them is still alive and awaiting his fate.

Having studied capital punishment for decades, I know the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” has shaped constitutional discussions around failed executions. But so far, courts have not stood in the way when state governments have wanted to try to execute the same man again.

Not just a lethal injection problem

Carruthers survived a lethal injection attempt, but execution failures have not been confined to that method. A look at the history of hanging reveals several instances in which it failed.

In 1833, for example, a hanging in Pennsylvania failed to kill Charles Getter, who had been sentenced to death for murdering his wife.

“The rope was placed around Getter’s neck. The hangman drew it up fast,” true crime author Amanda Howard notes. “Getter struggled and kicked, choking, before the rope broke, throwing him to the ground.” However, Getter did not die.

The executioner sent someone to look for a stronger rope. This time, the rope did not break and Getter met “the fate of a murderer.”

In 1894, Will Purvis’ hanging also failed when the noose loosened. Instead of dying from a broken neck, Purvis survived, suffering only rope burns on his neck.

Unlike Getter, Purvis returned to prison contending that he was innocent. His lawyers unsuccessfully tried to get the courts to prevent a second execution attempt. Purvis remained behind bars until 1898, when Mississippi’s governor pardoned him. Purvis is the only execution survivor ever to receive such grace.

In the late 19th century, the electric chair replaced hanging as the country’s primary execution method, but it did not prevent failed executions. At least once in the 20th century, the electric chair also failed to kill.

In the spring of 1946, the state of Louisiana tried to use it in the execution of Willie Francis, a 16-year-old Black youth who had been convicted of murdering a local sheriff. At the time, the electric chair was said to be the most humane execution method.

But what Francis experienced hardly seemed humane. When the electric current reached him, “He started going into convulsions.” The executioner “flipped the switch again,” but Francis was not killed.

Later, like Purvis, Francis turned to the courts to try to stave off another execution attempt. The decision in his case would set the precedent for how judges would deal with other execution survivors.

An accident?

In January 1947, months after Francis survived the electrocution, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Louisiana permission to try again. The justices split, with five giving Louisiana the green light and four dissenting.

Justice Stanley Reed’s majority opinion emphasized that what had happened to Francis was accidental and that, without malicious intent, there was no violation of the Eighth Amendment. As he put it, “The fact that an unforeseeable accident prevented the prompt consummation of the sentence cannot, it seems to us, add an element of cruelty to its subsequent execution.”

In his view, “The cruelty against which the constitution protects a convicted man is cruelty ‘inherent’ in the method of punishment, not the ‘necessary suffering’ involved in any method employed to extinguish life humanely.”

Justice Harold Burton spoke for the dissenting judges. As he put it: “The intent of the executioner cannot lessen the torture or excuse the result.” A second execution would offend the “fundamental instincts of civilized man.”

Francis was put to death almost a year to the day after his first execution failed.

It would be several decades until another person survived an execution. But the pace of failed executions has only picked up since the start of the 21st century.

21st century execution survivors

From 2009 until May 2026, six people survived failed lethal injection attempts. Romell Broom became the first 21st-century execution survivor when in 2009 the state of Ohio gave up after trying for two hours to find a usable vein in which to secure an IV line.

In his case, the Ohio Supreme Court, relying on the Francis precedent, decided that “The insertion of IV lines is merely a preparatory step to the execution.” In its view, Broom’s punishment had not really begun. Therefore, a second execution would not violate the prohibition on double jeopardy or on the imposition of cruel punishment.

But before Ohio could again attempt to execute Broom, he died on death row in December 2020 after contracting COVID-19. Another 21st-century execution survivor, Alva Campbell, also died on death row.

In 2018, Doyle Hamm reached an agreement with the state of Alabama stating that he would not be subject to a second execution after executioners couldn’t access a vein during an attempted lethal injection. Hamm died from cancer in 2021.

However, Alabama succeeded in executing two other execution survivors, Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith, both in 2024. In both cases, they had survived failed lethal injections.

And Thomas Creech is, like Carruthers, still alive after lethal injection failure, this time in Idaho. It’s not clear if and when Idaho will try again to put him to death. If it does, the state will use the firing squad, which will become its primary execution method on July 1, 2026.

Carruthers’ fate

As Carruthers awaits his fate in Tennessee, defense lawyers in the state have asked Gov. Lee to halt all executions pending a thorough review of its protocol.

And as the Death Penalty Information Center reports, “attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office filed a new federal lawsuit … to prevent Tennessee from attempting to execute Mr. Carruthers a second time.”

That suit builds on litigation filed in March 2025 alleging that the administration of lethal injection in Tennessee inflicts cruel and unusual punishment.

Only time will tell if the judges who hear those cases will be persuaded by what Justice Burton wrote in the Francis case: “Although the failure of the first attempt, in the present case was unintended, the reapplication of the electric current will be intentional … The present case demonstrates that, today, two separate applications are sufficiently ‘cruel and unusual’ to be prohibited.”

When the state, Burton explained, seeks to execute someone, it has a duty “to make sure that there (is) no failure.”

Austin Sarat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When researchers founded Anthropic in 2021, they said the race to build powerful AI was moving too recklessly. They inserted detailed safety measures into their products and marketed their commitment to safety as the corporate quality that distinguished them from competitors – notably OpenAI, the rival company they had left. In March 2026 that reputation was tested when the Trump administration declared that Anthropic was a supply chain risk.

The company had refused to remove built-in safeguards that prohibited domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons from products it had supplied to the Pentagon. President Donald Trump ordered the federal government to stop using Anthropic and its large language model, Claude, labeling the company a national security risk. Within hours, OpenAI made a deal to be the Pentagon’s supplier instead.

Despite Anthropic’s apparent stand, during its clash with Trump the company quietly scrapped the binding principles in its main safety policy. Several weeks earlier, Anthropic’s head of safeguards research had resigned, warning that “the world is in peril.” And a week after the Pentagon officially banned Claude, the U.S. military was still using the technology to select and target sites to bomb in Iran.

As a philosopher studying the rule of law and democracy, I’ve found that authoritarian governance of technology often does not involve direct censorship. Instead it delegitimizes the intended protections, poisoning any external regulation and even voluntary self-regulation that deviates from the regime’s goals or values.

The Trump administration, which follows the authoritarian playbook, has argued that AI safety standards and user restrictions are ideological impositions rather than sound engineering decisions. The “Preventing Woke AI” executive order of July 23, 2025, didn’t change what companies are allowed to do with their products. By by attaching the “woke” label to basic ethics protections, the administration made those protections politically costly to maintain.

The Brennan Center, a legal policy and advocacy organization, has documented how AI ethics is being redefined through contract negotiations. In these cases, the government weaponizes terms such as “biased” to disqualify companies that maintain civil rights protections from competing for federal contracts.

The prisoner’s dilemma

A single U.S. Defense Department AI contract can be worth billions of dollars. It can also provide access to data no private company could otherwise have and unlock further government work. Companies that maintain the ethics guardrails risk ceding ground to competitors that don’t.

When OpenAI moved in to take the Pentagon work, CEO Sam Altman told his board of directors the move looked “opportunistic and sloppy.” But he said the company took it anyway, because admitting that an action looks bad is different from being willing to fall behind.

This situation reflects the classic prisoner’s dilemma. If Anthropic maintains safety provisions and OpenAI strips them away, OpenAI gets the contracts and the future advantage. If both companies maintain the provisions, digital protections might survive. But because neither company can be certain the other will hold the line – and because being left behind is not a good option – the rational choice is to discard safety measures.

These circumstances differ from a standard market race to the bottom in one key respect: The trap of having to strip away guardrails isn’t an accident of competition; it’s being maintained by the government through incentives.

Palantir didn’t wait to be caught in this trap. The data analytics company was founded by Peter Thiel and run by Alex Karp, who spent years denouncing “woke” Silicon Valley. Palantir built its business model around government surveillance and military data infrastructure. While Palantir has said it is committed to privacy and civil liberties, critics contend that the company is dismantling those protections. The company’s stock has surged under the Trump administration, its contracts have expanded, and it now has a front-row seat where AI policy is being written. Palantir solved the prisoner’s dilemma by defecting first.

It’s important to note that the dissolution of safety teams across the industry, such as OpenAI’s Superalignment team and Microsoft’s ethics unit, isn’t the result of anyone deciding to abandon safety. What I see in analyzing the different companies’ actions is a pattern: an accumulation of collective, incremental compromises that quietly reorient the definition of safety away from the public and toward the state. The resulting harm and risks fall on everyone whose lives are shaped by AI systems.

Redefining safety to serve the government

Across government contracts and policy documents, I have also observed that the original definition of AI-related safety has shifted from protecting the public toward making systems controllable for the state. The “anti-woke” framing accelerates this shift: Once ethics requirements are characterized as ideological rather than technical, removing them can be framed not as a safety reduction but as a correction.

This shift does not require bad faith from the companies. Safety teams are still doing rigorous work. The companies are not lying when they describe their safety commitments. Those commitments are now simply oriented toward the government rather than the public.

The case for stronger AI regulation assumes that a government constrains commercial entities on behalf of the public. But blacklisting a company for maintaining civil rights protections, and then banning the military deployment of its AI hours later, shows that the federal government in this instance enables the harm that regulation is meant to prevent.

Expanding regulatory authority over AI companies does not necessarily protect citizens. Safety regulations – intended to constrain corporate power – in authoritarian regimes become tools to coerce compliance.

Michael Gregory does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation