Recalling the Scopes trial on its 100th anniversary

This week I will review some aspects of the famous 1925 Scopes trial that lasted from July 10 through Tuesday, July 21. It has cast such a long shadow, and has reverberated so much in public consciousness, that it is worthwhile to have a quick summary of the actual events of that trial, in order to separate the facts from the folklore that has arisen around it as a result of the hugely popular play and film Inherit the Wind, the former produced in 1955 and the latter in 1960.

The trial itself was brief, lasting just eight days, much of it involving wrangling over legal technicalities that took place with the jury out of the courtroom. It involved the question of whether John T, Scopes had violated the Butler Act passed by Tennessee in March of 1925 that said that “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” There were only two occasions when the two famous attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were able to make speeches and these occurred in the middle of the trial during legal skirmishes.

What follows is an extract from my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005.

Day 1, Friday, July 10: The morning saw the grand jury and witnesses appear to issue a new indictment, since the older one was discovered to have had a technical flaw. Scopes had to tell a reluctant student that he would be doing him a favor by testifying against him, and then was duly indicted again. After lunch, jury selection took place.
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The threat posed by masked law enforcement

There have been a vast number of news stories and videos of masked plain clothes ICE agents going around in unmarked cars and grabbing people, striking terror with this death squad-like behavior. Astonishingly, the attorney general Pam Bondi claims that she is unaware of this practice.

The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.

Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.

“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”

Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.

Yes, she has the nerve to claim that the federal agents who are terrorizing ordinary people are the real victims and scared. Law enforcement officer have long had their names and badges visible so why are ICE agents so scared? It is because they know that they are doing wrong. They are probably ashamed to have their friends and neighbors know what they are doing.
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Ten Commandments cannot be posted in public schools in Louisiana

There are many axioms that people adopt as desirable guidelines to live by, such as the Golden Rule or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, all designed to help us treat people well There is also the one that I prefer which is less elegant, which is ‘Don’t Be A Jerk‘. The guidelines that I consider the most useless are the biblical Ten Commandments. But in the US, the Ten Commandments have been used to make extraordinary claims, such that if it were only posted in public spaces such as school rooms and city halls and grounds, then many of society’s problem would disappear. They claim that it is the removal of the Bible and religious teaching in schools that is the source of all the problems in US society and that posting the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom would make our children become upstanding moral adults.

The commandments take different forms depending on the source religious text but usually the first four consist of telling people how to grovel before God, which is not particularly useful when it comes to dealing with other people. One of the next six tells us to honor our parents, which is fine but pretty limited and vague (what form does this honor take?). Another four tell us not to murder, lie, steal, or engage in adultery which are clear and specific but do we really need to be reminded of them? And the last one is the one I get the biggest laugh out of which is ““Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s”, weirdly including the neighbor’s wives in the list of possessions. And forbidding coveting the neighbor’s ass is something that will bring a smile to any school children in the US today. Also, what exactly is the problem with coveting things if one does not resort to murder, lying, or stealing in order to obtain them?
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What NOT to do if you are late for your flight

Suppose you arrive at the airport too late to board your flight and it has just left the gate. What should you do?

Normal people will kick themselves for being late and then either rebook for a later flight or just go home. But John Charles Robinson had an idea: Call in a bomb threat and have the flight delayed so that he could still board it.

According to a criminal complaint filed June 6 in U.S. District Court in Detroit, the bomb threat that led to a Spirit Airlines flight being evacuated and delayed by six hours at Metro Airport on Thursday, June 5, was a hoax. The person behind the hoax, the complaint says, is 23-year-old John Charles Robinson, of Monroe, who prosecutors say was headed to Los Angeles on Thursday morning when he missed his 7 a.m. Spirit Airlines flight and was told at the gate that he had to rebook.

Robinson, though, had another idea in mind: call in a bomb threat with the hopes of the flight being delayed long enough so that he could still make it on the plane, court records state.
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The investigation found no bombs on the airplane, or in any luggage.

But what authorities would eventually discover was a hoax, with cellphone records leading the FBI to Robinson, who had rebooked a 6:28 p.m. flight to Los Angeles.

But he didn’t make that flight either.

Robinson did arrive at the terminal on time, only FBI agents showed up to interview him.

According to the complaint, Robinson initially denied making any phone calls to Spirit Airlines. Though after he gave consent to have his cellphone searched, the complaint states, the agents discovered the hoax.

Robinson then reportedly fessed up:

“(He) stated that he made the call with the hope that it would delay the flight long enough for him to make it in time so he would not have to take a different flight,” the complaint states.

It boggles the mind that anyone would think that calling in a fake bomb threat was a good solution to being too late for a flight. Apart from seriously inconveniencing all the other passengers and crew on his flight as well as the knock-on delays for other flights, who these days does not know that calling in a fake bomb threat will result in serious trouble with the law?

Note that Robinson is just 23 years old, so file this story under the category of “Young men tend to do really stupid things”.

Finally! Kilmar Ábrego García (and another) returned after illegal deportations

When El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele visited the White House, he and Trump seemed to be treating the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, who had been wrongly deported by Trump to that country and was being held in a controversial mega-prison, as a joke. Trump coyly said that there was nothing he could do since Ábrego García was now under the jurisdiction of Bukele, and Bukele in turn said that he would not be released, despite demands from a US federal judge that he be returned. Then suddenly today, Ábrego García was brought back.

But that is not the end of his ordeal. The attorney general Pam Bondi has said that he faces criminal charges here.

In a press briefing on Friday, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that a federal grand jury in Tennessee had indicted the 29-year-old father on counts of illegally smuggling undocumented people as well as of conspiracy to commit that crime.
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In a statement to the Hill on Friday, Ábrego García’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg accused the Trump administration of having “disappeared” his client “to a foreign prison in violation of a court order”.

“Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him,” he added.

Sandoval-Moshenberg also said: “This shows that they were playing games with the court all along. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you’re punished – not after.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg said the White House’s treatment of his client was “an abuse of power, not justice”. He called on Ábrego García to face the same immigration judge who had previously granted him a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador “to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent” there.
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Ábrego García also had no criminal record in the US before the indictment announced on Friday, according to court documents.

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Preparing for confrontations with CBP and ICE

Two couples who are friends of mine are traveling separately to Europe over the summer. Each couple consists of one US-born person and the other a naturalized citizen. When describing their holiday plans, they spoke only of their itinerary and what they looked forward to seeing and doing, By contrast, if I were to be making a trip by air, even within the US, Trump’s America now requires me to think of what I should do if I am confronted by agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is no idle concern on my part, since my political views could well trigger interviews with them.

My post about the detention and questioning at Chicago airport of social media activist Hasan Piker by CBP on his return to the US from a trip to France made me think about what might be going on behind the scenes that trigger such detentions. In Piker’s case, there did not seem to be any obvious clues such as past violations of the law. What the CBP seemed to be focused on were his public criticisms of Trump and of Israel. But even if there had been some legal infraction, even a minor one, what is the process by which ‘violators’ are identified and pulled aside for questioning?
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What you should do in the police state that the US has become

In Trump’s America, no one is safe from government harassment and abuse. As we have seen, anyone can be picked up while walking along the street by masked people, bundled into unmarked vehicles, and ‘disappeared’, just like what happens in the worst kinds of despotic regimes. The abducted person may end up in a distant detention center and kept in awful conditions or even deported to countries like El Salvador that are notorious for their terrible prisons. You can see a list of recent such cases here.

So it is a good idea for everyone to know what rights they have and what they should do if ever they ever find themselves being taken in and questioned by the police or agents of the government for anything at all, however minor it may seem, like a traffic stop. This one-minute long video by longtime civil rights attorneys Bill Goodman and Denise Heberle, who look like a pair of genteel grandparents, succinctly tells you exactly what you should do in such situations.


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Supreme Court blocks Trump’s efforts to quickly deport Venezuelans

In the previous post, I wrote about the Trump gang’s efforts to quickly deport large numbers of Venezuelans using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that has only been used three times in its history: the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, claiming that these people were members of the gang Tren de Aragua and formed the invading force of the Venezuelan government.

Today, in a 7-2 opinion (predictably with Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting), the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees must be given time to challenge their deportations

The court emphasized that the men — whom the Trump administration has labeled “alien enemies” — are entitled to more due process than the administration has so far provided. That means advance notice of their deportations and a meaningful opportunity to challenge the deportations in court, the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In particular, the justices faulted the administration for its attempt last month to carry out swift deportations just one day after providing a bare-bones deportation notice to the detainees. The Supreme Court intervened at the time to stop those deportations, and in Friday’s decision, the court elaborated on its decision and extended its order blocking them.

“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster,” the court’s opinion said, without deciding exactly how much notice is required.

A small victory for due process against a government that has no regard for the law or human rights.

Rümeysa Öztürk released but not safe from further harassment

Finally, after being kidnapped during daylight hours in a public street near Tufts University where she was a graduate student by masked unidentified people in unmarked cars who were later revealed to be ICE agents, and then quickly transferred to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, Rümeysa Öztürk was released today after 45 days in captivity. Her release had been ordered by a federal judge.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

A federal judge on Friday morning had ordered Öztürk’s return to Vermont, where she was briefly held after being grabbed on the street by masked immigration agents near Boston, for hearings. But the judge decided not to wait for her physical transportation and she appeared remotely from Louisiana at the hearing in Burlington on Friday.

The ruling to release her came at the end of a hearing where the judge, William Sessions, said that the process by which she was placed in immigration detention “raises very significant due process concerns”.
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Supreme Court stops deportations

It has become clear that the Trump gang’s plan is to summarily detain and deport people before they have had a chance to challenge their detention in the courts via a habeas corpus petition. Once the people have been deported, they then claim that there is nothing they can do to bring them back, even if the plane carrying them was still in the air. This practice so enraged a district court judge James Boasberg that he began criminal contempt proceedings against the government because of their earlier defiance of his order to turn around planes that had been transporting people to El Salvador prions and then stonewalling his attempts to get them to give him a clear timeline of their actions.

A federal judge found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order gives the administration a final opportunity to come into compliance but says he otherwise will take steps to identify the specific people who flouted his March 15 ruling, which was later lifted by the Supreme Court, and refer them for prosecution.
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In dispute is whether the government violated an oral order from Boasberg given around 6:45 p.m. that day to halt or turn around any flights carrying migrants. 

The White House has sought to sidestep that question, saying it complied with a 7:27 p.m. written order. In court, however, they have declined to provide Boasberg with flight details and have asserted the ability to do so under the state secrets privilege.

Boasberg on Thursday raised the specter that the administration’s delay in publicizing the proclamation could have been “trying to put measures in place to get people subject to the proclamation removed from the country before it’s possible to challenge” their deportation and before it could be blocked by a court.

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