Articles & Videos

The judge didn’t allow Palestine Action activists at trial to explain they were trying to stop a genocide. Their attorneys decried terrorism sentences following a nonviolent conviction as unprecedented and dangerous to speech. Stephen PragerCommon Dreams In a decision that Amnesty International described as “completely disproportionate,” four demonstrators with the outlawed group Palestine Action were sentenced as terrorists in the U.K. […]

Sean Keenan, Next City. As World Cup matches begin, advocates warn that Atlanta is on track to repeat the arrests, displacement, and criminalization of homeless residents that drew criticism during the city’s 1996 Olympics. Atlanta promises a welcoming World Cup for everyone. But just days before kickoff, homeless advocates worry the city lacks the safety net […]

In the first two years of post-Dobbs America, 412 people were charged with “pregnancy-related” crimes, with 399 of these being related to substance use—including alcohol. These charges, which most frequently alleged either child abuse or neglect of the fetus, were made possible by politicians who have slow-dripped the language and ideology of fetal personhood into lawmaking for decades, a process that has only amplified since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For years, anti-choice lawmakers have sought to lay down legal precedents for fetuses and embryos to be considered fully fledged persons in need of legal protections as part of a wider framework to criminalize abortion as murder. But this language and this broader approach to so-called public health have ramifications beyond abortion: If a fetus is a person, then consuming alcohol or narcotics while pregnant and putting the fetus at risk for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD, and other substance-related birth defects is a form of child endangerment.Not only does this result in the criminalizing of pregnant people, it also hinders the prevention, research, and treatment for both the FASD and substance use disorders being weaponized to advance this anti-abortion agenda. What’s more, this ideology has proven to be wholly ineffective in the effort to “protect fetuses.” Laws around “pregnancy-related crimes” have only prevented mothers from seeking support, while simultaneously creating legal frameworks for restricting abortion access, creating a climate where pregnant patients are increasingly policed and where public health policies around prenatal substance exposure, FASD, and reproductive justice movements are increasingly linked.Dr. Sarah Roberts is a professor and legal epidemiologist at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health initiative at the University of California at San Francisco, and one of the only researchers in the United States working on the intersections of health care practices and policies around abortion and the criminalization of behaviors while pregnant. “Singling out drinking while pregnant isn’t effective,” she explains, noting that none of the punitive or so-called “supportive” FASD prevention policies that she’s analyzed actually prevented FASD.The only policies that actually prevented FASD and offered support to mothers and babies with FASD were those that addressed alcohol consumption across the board. “People who are drinking while pregnant were drinking before they got pregnant and are in families and communities where people are drinking as well, so by reducing drinking at a population level, that also relates to improved outcomes during pregnancy,” Dr. Roberts explains.In her research, Dr. Roberts has found that the states that criminalize pregnant people consuming alcohol largely overlap with states restricting abortion.“Anti-abortion laws have always opened up the potential for greater surveillance, policing, and punishment of pregnant people. We see that in the way that miscarriage is policed, the way that substance use during pregnancy is increasingly policed, in the way that people have been punished for this, under a range of laws that have nothing to do with abortion,” explains Dr. Gretchen Sisson, sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, and the author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.As Roberts explains, many of the policies that target pregnant people who drink also target those who consume other substances. These policies have deep roots, often dating back to the “war on drugs,” and, more specifically, the racist “crack baby” scare in the 1980s and 1990s. Media outlets of that era often presented sensationalist narratives that babies born to mothers using crack cocaine would be born with brain damage and overwhelm welfare systems, leading to a widespread targeting and policing of Black pregnant people, in particular. These policies were often ignored or brushed aside by mainstream pro-choice, often white-led organizing groups at the time, without the foresight of recognizing that this very same positioning of fetuses as people would be used to dismantle abortion access in the years to come. “There is a racist history to this, an ableist history to this, and a classist history to this, that these issues weren’t considered ‘mainstream’ abortion rights or reproductive rights issues,” explains Dana Sussman, the vice president of Pregnancy Justice.Today, Roberts’s research has found that Black mothers are still excessively targeted by “total welfare reporting,” or laws that require physicians to report pregnant patients to Child Protective Services if alcohol consumption is suspected. This reporting is linked to an increase in adverse effects for Black women and babies, despite the “pro-family” rhetoric behind them. Similarly, Black women are more likely to face restricted abortion access and be targeted by pregnancy-related (and abortion-related) criminal prosecutions.Pregnancy Justice is a New York–based organization that represents people charged with pregnancy-related crimes, the vast majority of which involve allegations of substance use. For Sussman, the intersections of pro-choice organizing and organizing around FASD and prenatal exposure to substances are clear: “We are all fighting for people to get health care,” she explains. For her organization, the idea of fetal personhood is the product of a shared ideology of control and coercion, linking restricted abortion access and the criminalization of pregnant people. “If your Supreme Court is interpreting your statutes around children to include embryos and fetuses, then how does that work with abortion?”Many of the clients of Pregnancy Justice under criminal investigation were reported or “found out” when seeking health care, including support for substance use disorders. Where mothers sought support for alcohol or substance use disorders, they found credible, legal threats against them under the guise of child protection policies. “We know that when you put people at risk of losing their children, either children already born or future children, or at risk of losing their liberty because they have a substance use disorder, whether it be alcohol or drugs, they will not get care, and outcomes will be worse for everyone—both mom and baby,” says Sussman.Advocacy groups for research and funding toward FASD acknowledge and condemn the criminalization of pregnant people consuming alcohol, with one organization, which requested to remain unnamed so as not to put its research at risk, reiterating that the punitive policies only prevent mothers from seeking help and add to the stigma of both mothers and children with FASD, undermining the principles of disability justice for which the movement is often fighting.At the same time, organizations dedicated to FASD appear to be in an uncomfortable position: Lawmakers supportive of funding and various supportive policies around FASD are not always advocates for struggling pregnant people or for reproductive justice. The FASD Respect Act, a 2025 bill that brought in waves of funding for FASD-related research and programming, for instance, was passed across party lines, with co-sponsorship from Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, rated an A+ by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America because he’s “voted to consistently protect the lives of the unborn,” and Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who describes himself as a “staunch advocate for life.”Many children diagnosed with FASD are adopted. “Children with special needs are more likely to be adopted because if you have a family that is low-resourced who doesn’t feel equipped to care for a child with special needs, they’re more likely to relinquish; and if you have a mother who is engaged in alcohol use at high levels, she’s more likely to be subject to family policing and child removal,” explains Sisson.Anti-abortion, pro-FASD-funding lawmakers appear to see adoption as a fundable, moral alternative to abortion, creating a contradictory overlap between the two movements—all while refusing to acknowledge the harmful ramifications of their policies. “There is definitely a pro-adoption thread within the disability community, and I think it is particularly pronounced in cases where disability is attributed to maternal actions during pregnancy, because then [it’s] even more about how adoption can be about saviorism,” Sisson remarks. This overlap also creates an apparent nervousness within FASD organizations to engage with pro-choice movements, reproductive rights organizing, or even the word feminism, for fear of having these lawmakers turn their back on them.The anti-abortion movement, despite many members labeling themselves as supportive of FASD research funding and programs for those with FASD and their families, seeks a framework that treats fetuses with FASD as the victims of crime—and the mothers as perpetrators. At a lawmaking level, this only propagates extreme stigma against both mothers and babies with FASD and prevents families from seeking help for substance use disorders and for disability support.Laced with saviorism and the desire to police both disability and pregnancy, the anti-abortion underpinning of pregnancy-related laws and prosecution hinders proactive and effective FASD-related support, resulting only in the targeting of pregnant patients, and not in the protection of children or mothers. On the flip side, for organizers working to support disabled people, abortion rights, and mothers targeted by pregnancy-related prosecutions, reproductive rights and policies on prenatal substance exposure are inseparable: The dismantling of fetal personhood ideologies is critical to the underpinning of both abortion rights advocacy and policies that effectively support mothers and babies, as well as reversing the Trojan horse the anti-abortion camp has been building for decades.

Dozens of ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol officers have been charged with sexual abuse of women or children.

The Supreme Court did something extraordinary on Thursday night: It refused to help the state of Alabama carry out an execution. Since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has almost never intervened in capital cases on defendants’ behalf. The justices have even overridden lower courts’ stays so that executions could take place on the state’s preferred schedule, even in cases where serious constitutional issues were at stake.But in Lovelace v. Lee, the court declined to step in at Alabama’s request. The case is important for three reasons. First and foremost, it appears to be the first successful constitutional challenge to a specific execution method since the Eighth Amendment’s ratification in 1791. Jeffrey Lee, a death-row prisoner who was convicted of killing two people in 1998, filed a federal lawsuit last year to challenge Alabama’s plan to execute him via nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama adopted the new method in 2018; Lee argues that it would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.Nitrogen-hypoxia executions are fairly simple in theory. Earth’s atmosphere is roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, with trace elements rounding out the remaining 2 percent. Humans have evolved to breathe large amounts of nitrogen, and we can do so indefinitely as long as some oxygen is present. Alabama’s plan is to simply subtract the oxygen—or, more accurately, to place a mask over Lee’s face so that he only breathes pure nitrogen until he dies.The state has already killed seven death-row prisoners by this method; Louisiana also executed a man via nitrogen hypoxia last year. Three other states have authorized the method. Proponents describe it as relatively simple and largely painless, even compared to lethal injection. Justice Sonia Sotomayor described it differently in a dissenting opinion last year:Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two … three.… The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.Sotomayor said that the death-row prisoner in that case would “immediately convulse,” “gasp for air,” and “thrash violently against the restraints holding him in place as he experiences this intense psychological torment until he finally loses consciousness” before finally dying about 15 to 20 minutes later. The justice’s description also assumes that everything goes as planned. Unsurprisingly, Lee asked the court to let him be executed by firing squad instead, which can be virtually instantaneous when done correctly.A federal district court judge in Alabama rejected those claims, citing the high threshold for execution-method challenges laid out by the Supreme Court in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. (More on that later.) The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling and instead found that there would be a “substantial risk of serious harm,” then asked the district court to consider whether Lee’s firing squad recommendation would be viable. The district court concluded that it would be and entered judgment in Lee’s favor.In its appeal to the justices, Alabama claimed that the ruling amounted to “the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” in American history. The Supreme Court itself has never explicitly held a specific method of execution to be unconstitutional. Though the justices have suggested in passing that the Eighth Amendment forbids certain medieval methods of execution, such as breaking someone on a wheel or burning them as the stake, the high court has never before compelled a state to abandon its preferred option.Instead, execution methods have changed over the years largely due to public pressure and criticism. Hanging was the most common method of execution in the nineteenth century, but it was often administered by unskilled amateurs. A competent hangman would ensure that the prisoner’s neck snapped at the first drop. More common outcomes were grisly scenes of strangulation or, in rare cases, decapitation.By the early twentieth century, states began to experiment with alternatives. New York carried out the first execution by electric chair in 1890 after the Supreme Court rejected the prisoner’s Eighth Amendment challenge. Electrocution was billed as a more scientific and humane method of execution in the early 1910s, but the reality was far more grim. In the late 1990s, the state of Florida carried out multiple executions with an unreliable electric chair, including at least one where a prisoner’s head burst into flames.After the Supreme Court agreed to hear an Eighth Amendment challenge to Florida’s use of electrocution, Governor Jeb Bush called a special session of the state legislature to switch to lethal injection. A three-drug cocktail developed by an Oklahoma medical examiner in the 1970s soon became the most widely used method of killing death-row prisoners in the late twentieth century. This form of lethal injection was explicitly sanctioned by the Supreme Court in the 2008 case Baze v. Rees. Things fell apart a few years later. The European Union imposed an embargo on drugs for executions in the United States in 2011 amid pressure from death penalty abolitionist groups. Many pharmaceutical companies had already largely cut off the flow in previous years. With no U.S.-based manufacturers of certain key drugs, death penalty states began to rely on unfamiliar chemical cocktails. This haphazard improvisation led to a series of botched executions in the mid-2010s, including one in Arizona in 2015 where a prisoner survived for almost two hours while gasping for air after the injections.The Supreme Court ultimately heard a challenge to Oklahoma’s use of the controversial sedative midazolam in the 2015 case Glossip v. Gross. It was not as receptive to the Eighth Amendment argument as abolitionists had hoped. At oral arguments, Justice Samuel Alito asked whether it was “appropriate for the judiciary to countenance what amounts to a guerrilla war against the death penalty,” which had “reduced” states to using less reliable drugs like midazolam. That hostile mindset was reflected in the court’s final opinion, which Alito wrote.In the U.S. constitutional order, the government has powers and the people have rights. When the former conflicts with the latter, the latter must generally prevail unless the government has an exceedingly good reason for doing something. The government’s mere desire to enact a preferred policy is typically not enough to overcome a person’s constitutional rights.Alito apparently disagrees. In Glossip, he subordinated a prisoner’s right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment to the state’s desire to kill prisoners. Because the death penalty is constitutional, he reasoned, “there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out.” Alito borrowed this flawed reasoning from Chief Justice John Roberts, who first expressed it in his three-justice plurality opinion in Baze. Glossip marked the first time that a majority of the court embraced it.In his own concurrence in Baze, Alito had warned that the court “should not produce a de facto ban on capital punishment by adopting method-of-execution rules that lead to litigation gridlock.” In Glossip, he turned that policy preference into constitutional law. To win the “guerrilla war,” Alito also required death-row prisoners to provide courts with a “substantially” less painful alternative method to be killed when challenging a state’s chosen option on Eighth Amendment grounds in the future.That requirement also came from Roberts’s plurality opinion in Baze, where the chief justice laid out a hard-to-overcome standard for challenges to execution methods. “To qualify, the alternative procedure must be feasible, readily implemented, and in fact significantly reduce a substantial risk of severe pain,” Roberts wrote. Showing marginal improvements in safety weren’t enough. Only then would a state’s refusal to adopt the alternative method be sufficient to suspect a desire to inflict cruel and unusual punishment.This is a threshold plainly designed to produce a specific outcome: Leave constitutional challenges theoretically intact, but make it effectively impossible for them to succeed. You can see echoes of this approach in later decisions written by Alito. Earlier this month in Louisiana v. Callais, for example, the conservative justices erased the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act by imposing bespoke hurdles. In effect, they elevated a state’s interest in partisan gerrymandering—a fig leaf in some states for eradicating Black electoral influence—above the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.Alito even required VRA plaintiffs to produce maps to achieve a state’s stated redistricting goals when they accuse that state of racial gerrymandering, echoing his earlier demand in Glossip for death-row prisoners to describe their preferred way to die when challenging an execution method. There is something deeply unseemly about the Supreme Court forcing litigants to argue against their own interests if they wish to defend their constitutional rights. It smacks of deterrence by humiliation.Moreover, this case was procedurally irregular, to say the least. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket typically works by hearing arguments for interim relief. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even argued that it should be called the interim docket.) In other words, the court’s shadow-docket rulings almost always involve preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders. Final judgments by lower courts are generally resolved by the court’s merits docket—which until 10 years ago was just “the docket.”Alabama’s challenge was different. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and expert on the shadow docket, warned the justices in a friend-of-the-court brief that the state was asking for something more significant this time. “Alabama’s application wears the familiar costume of a ‘state-on-top’ death penalty application—where a State asks this Court to vacate a lower court’s temporary stay so that an execution may proceed,” he wrote.“But the relief it actually seeks is far more extraordinary—the evisceration of a federal court’s final equitable judgment,” Vladeck continued. The Supreme Court has a long history and well-established set of precedents for handling last-minute appeals from death-row prisoners. Indeed, until the mid-2010s, that was the most significant work it performed on what we now describe as the shadow docket. Since Alabama was asking the court to “effectively set aside a final judgment on the merits,” Vladeck explained, it was really asking for summary reversal, which the court handles through its normal petition-for-certiorari process.The justices did not explain the reasoning for their decision in Thursday’s order. Alabama’s procedural misstep is significant enough, however, that it would not surprise me if the six justices who voted to deny the state’s request did so entirely for the reasons Vladeck described, regardless of their thoughts on the underlying merits of the lower courts’ rulings. Since the justices didn’t explain themselves, however, that would be only speculation on my part.You might wonder why I spent so much time describing execution methods if this is simply a procedural outcome. I admit that the court may ultimately overturn the district court’s ruling on the merits docket; that too would not surprise me given the court’s post-Kennedy approach to capital punishment. Surely there is another bespoke rule that they could craft to ensure that the state of Alabama can kill people without hindrance that would not repeal the Eighth Amendment altogether.But that brings me to the third and final thing that’s revealing about this case: Three justices still would have sided with Alabama. Alito, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, indicated in the court’s order that they would have granted Alabama’s motion to stay the lower court ruling. Since we’re talking about an execution here, that is also effectively a judgment on the merits—Jeffrey Lee could hardly retain counsel or continue appeals from beyond the grave.As I’ve noted before, the Roberts court is almost institutionally hostile to death-row prisoners. It treats the capital-defense bar as almost inherently suspect, as evidenced by Alito’s affront to the “guerrilla war” that death penalty opponents once waged. Again, nobody wrote any opinions in this matter so we can’t say for sure why they voted the way that they did.That doesn’t stop us from drawing some reasonable inferences. For Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, their skepticism of death-row inmates has limits and Alabama’s plea to suffocate this particular prisoner to death apparently found them. For the court’s other three conservative justices, there appears to be almost nothing that they are willing to prioritize over a state’s desire to kill someone.