Katie Benner

The official, David Neal, said that he would retire from his position as head of the judges’ appeals board effective Saturday. “With a heavy heart, I have decided to retire from government service,” Neal wrote in a letter sent to the board Thursday and obtained by The New York Times.

He gave no reason for his abrupt departure and asked his colleagues to “keep true to your commitment to fairness and justice.”

No replacement has been announced, and a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, citing a policy to not do so on personnel matters.

Neal’s decision follows a shake-up at the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the court system that adjudicates the country’s immigration cases, including asylum cases. It is part of the Justice Department, not the judicial branch.

Three of its senior career officials — MaryBeth T. Keller, the chief immigration judge; Jean King, the general counsel; and Katherine H. Reilly, the deputy director — all left their roles this summer. King stayed at the immigration office in a different post.

Neal’s departure also comes amid the backdrop of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb both illegal and legal immigration, which have taxed the immigration courts, the criminal courts and border patrols along the nation’s southwestern border and prompted long-running discontent among immigration judges that they are being used to expedite deportations.

As President Donald Trump has sought to suppress immigration and cut down on the number of people who claim asylum in the United States, he has notched two wins at the Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, justices said in an unsigned order that amid an ongoing legal battle, the administration could bar most Central American migrants from seeking asylum in the United States if they passed through another country and were not denied asylum there. That decision will allow the administration to effectively bar migration across the southwestern border by Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and others who must travel through other countries to get to the United States.

And in July, the Supreme Court said that the Trump administration could use $2.5 billion in Pentagon money to build a barrier along the border with Mexico, which would help Trump fulfill a campaign promise to build a wall on the border to stop immigration.

Amid these hard-line policies, a vocal group of immigration judges — part of the larger total of about 400 judges and appeals judges — have been at loggerheads with the Trump administration for more than a year.

Leaders of the judges’ union have pushed back against the imposition of quotas that they have said would expedite deportations at the expense of due process. Under former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, they accused the Justice Department of trying to turn the immigration courts into a deportation machine.

Sessions treated the judges “like immigration officers, not judges,” said Paul Schmidt, a former judge in the immigration courts.

Some judges have also bristled at a recent Justice Department decision that handed over the power to rule on appeals cases to the director of the office, a political appointee. The judges saw the move as an attempt to undermine their authority.

That decision also directly impacted Neal, demoting him “in practice,” by transferring his authority to decide appeals cases to the director of the office, said Ashley Tabbador, the president of the union that represents immigration judges.

“This regulation upends the entire system created to decide these cases,” Tabbador said. Should the new system run into problems, “the chairman would have been held accountable. I would have quit, too, if I were in David’s position.”

Though they are part of the Justice Department, many immigration judges view themselves as independent arbiters of the law and believe they must act within the confines of existing immigration statutes.

They have long deliberated over whether they should be part of the Justice Department — a debate that has intensified under Trump.

Last month, tensions increased when a daily briefing that is distributed to federal immigration judges contained a link to a blog post that included an anti-Semitic reference and came from a website that regularly publishes white nationalists.

After the episode, the immigration review office said that it would stop sending the daily briefing and would not renew its contract with the service that provided it.

This article originally appeared in

Top Immigration Judge Departs Amid Broader Discontent Over Trump Policies

WASHINGTON — The nation’s immigration judges lost a key leader this week, the latest in a string of departures at the top of the system amid a backlog of cases and a migrant crisis at the southwestern border.

The warden, Lamine N’Diaye, will be temporarily assigned to the Bureau of Prison’s Northeast Regional Office while the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general conduct investigations into Epstein’s death. The Justice Department said that it might take additional punitive actions.

The attorney general, William Barr, on Monday ordered the inspector general to look into how Epstein had managed to commit suicide while in custody and why he had been taken off a suicide watch 12 days earlier. “We will get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.

Jail guards discovered Epstein, 66, dead in his cell in at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, officials said. He had apparently hanged himself with a bedsheet, fastening the sheet to a top bunk and pitching himself forward, law-enforcement and prison officials said.

Epstein had been awaiting trial on charges he had sexually abused scores of teenage girls at his mansions in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida.

He had tried to commit suicide once before, on July 23, shortly after he was denied bail, which resulted in him being placed on suicide watch, prison officials familiar with the incident have said.

Six days later, prison officials determined he was no longer a threat to his own life and put him in a cell in the protective housing unit with another inmate, officials said. That inmate was later transferred out of the cell, leaving Epstein alone on Friday night.

Though it is standard practice to house people who have recently been taken off suicide watch with another person, the prison did not immediately replace Epstein’s cellmate.

The two guards in the protective housing unit where Epstein was held — 9 South — were supposed to check on him every half-hour, but did not do so that night. The guards did not look in on Epstein for about three hours before he was found, two prison officials familiar with the incident said.

In addition, one of the guards was not a regular correctional officer, but a prison employee who had been pressed into service as a guard because of a staff shortage. Both were working on overtime.

The Justice Department, which oversees the Bureau of Prisons, did not immediately identify the two correctional officers who were placed on administrative leave.

James Petrucci, the warden at a federal prison in Otisville, New York, has been named acting warden of the Manhattan jail, officials said.

Some union leaders for prison workers expressed dismay about Barr’s decision to allow the warden to continue working, even as the two staff members were placed on leave.

“It makes me angry that they reassigned the warden,” said Jose Rojas, an official in the prison employees’ union and a teacher at the Coleman prison complex in Sumterville, Florida. “They didn’t put him on administrative leave like the others. The warden made the call to take Epstein off suicide watch and to remove his cellmate. That is egregious.”

Epstein’s death has drawn outrage from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. On Monday, the chairman and ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons, Hugh Hurwitz, demanding answers about how Epstein could have been unsupervised long enough to take his own life.

The letter said the Epstein’s apparent suicide had brought to light “severe miscarriages” or deficiencies in how inmates are managed at the jail and had “allowed the deceased to ultimately evade facing justice.” It was signed by Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Doug Collins, R-Ga.

Nadler and Collins demanded the Bureau of Prisons hand over by Aug. 21 details about Epstein’s mental health evaluations and his housing, as well as the bureau’s protocols for handling inmates considered at risk of suicide. They also requested to be told how Epstein was being monitored and what the surveillance cameras may have recorded in or near Epstein’s cell.

At the same time, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb. and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, urged Barr on Tuesday to rip up an agreement federal prosecutors in Florida had reached with Epstein in 2008 that shielded not only him, but any other co-conspirators who may have helped him lure teenage girls into prostitution.

“This crooked deal cannot stand,” Sasse said in his letter.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-jail-officers.html" id="8223745a-a49b-34e3-a4ce-251636ce3b23">The New York Times</a>.

Warden and Two Guards at Jail Where Jeffrey Epstein Died Are Removed

NEW YORK — The warden of the federal jail in Manhattan where Jeffrey Epstein apparently killed himself was temporarily reassigned on Tuesday, and two correctional officers who were guarding him were placed on administrative leave, pending the outcome of an investigation into the death, the Justice Department said.

The announcement reversed what had been essentially a moratorium on the federal death penalty since 2003. Five men convicted of murdering children will be executed in December and January at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, Barr said, and additional executions will be scheduled later.

Prosecutors still seek the death penalty in some federal cases, including for Dylann S. Roof, the avowed white supremacist who gunned down nine African American churchgoers in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.

But the federal government has only executed three inmates since it reinstated the death penalty in 1988, including Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in 2001, and Louis Jones Jr., who was executed in 2003 for the rape and murder of a female soldier.

“Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals,” Barr said in a statement. “The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

Barr also said that he had issued a protocol replacing the three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions with a single drug, pentobarbital, that is widely available. The drug cocktail had fallen out of favor because of botched executions that prompted a slew of lawsuits.

Barr did not say why the Trump administration was reinstating executions now, but the Justice Department also filed notice Thursday in a long-running case challenging the use of the three-drug combination, saying that it was moving to the new protocol. The department finalized the logistics to schedule the executions and change the lethal injections procedure several weeks ago, according to a department official.

President Donald Trump has long supported the death penalty, declaring last year that drug dealers should be executed. By applying it to inmates convicted of murdering children, he may make a more politically powerful argument for it amid diminishing public support.

Democrats, including presidential hopefuls, immediately criticized Barr’s directive. Sen. Kamala Harris of California called capital punishment “immoral and deeply flawed.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts restated her opposition to the death penalty, and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio called it “blatantly prejudiced and unevenly applied.”

The Democratic candidates have increasingly staked out opposition to the death penalty after decades of party stalwarts supporting it to appear tough on crime. Former Vice President Joe Biden reversed course when he unveiled a criminal justice platform Tuesday, joining nearly all of his opponents. He noted that 160 people sentenced to death since 1973 in the United States were later exonerated, a statistic that he repeated Thursday on Twitter, adding, “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty.”

Biden was the lead sponsor of the bill that became the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Some of the inmates now scheduled to be executed are eligible for the federal death penalty under that law.

In response to the Justice Department announcement, Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, D-Mass., introduced a bill that would abolish the federal death penalty.

The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, four years after effectively striking it down. Many states quickly adopted laws restoring capital punishment, though the federal government did not do so until 1988 for a few offenses and 1994 for many more.

Like the president, Barr has long supported capital punishment, including during his first stint as attorney general during the George Bush administration. “We need a death penalty to deter and punish the most heinous federal crimes such as terrorist killings,” Barr wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times in 1991 when he was acting attorney general. “That penalty would send a message to drug dealers and gangs.”

But public attitudes toward the death penalty have changed in the ensuing decades. Support for it went from nearly 80% in 1996 to a two-decade low three years ago, when just under half of Americans polled backed it for people convicted of murder, according to the Pew Research Center. Public backing of capital punishment ticked back up to 54% last year, the center found.

Capital punishment fell out of favor as researchers questioned whether it deterred people from committing heinous crimes and as more defense lawyers proved that their clients had been wrongfully convicted. Fewer than two dozen executions have occurred annually in the United States in recent years, down from a high of 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

With pressure building to replace capital punishment with life in prison, 21 states have outlawed the death penalty.

Civil rights advocates have also noted the racial disparity among inmates on death row and argued that capital punishment was disproportionately applied to black men.

“The death penalty is plagued by racial bias and geographic bias,” said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the Capital Punishment Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Junk science has played an outsized role in who gets the death penalty and who does not,” she added, pointing to instances of experts overstating hair or fingerprint evidence in court testimony.

Advocates and inmates have also argued in lawsuits against state and federal governments that the practice was inhumane. Many of them focused on botched executions where the drugs used were ineffective or caused severe suffering before death.

Nearly a decade ago, drugmakers in the United States and Europe stopped selling the sedatives that prison officials had long used to render inmates unconscious before executing them. In at least one case, a prisoner in Oklahoma regained consciousness during a state execution in which an alternative sedative was used.

Former President Barack Obama briefly considered ending the federal death penalty after that botched execution, directing Attorney General Eric Holder to study the issue, but Holder’s proposal to declare a formal moratorium never gained traction.

A federal lawsuit filed by several death row inmates in 2005 challenging the use of the three-drug cocktail, which is pending in federal court in the District of Columbia, has been in limbo because the government has had difficulty obtaining the drugs used in that combination.

The Justice Department, which has regularly told the court that it was reviewing its death penalty protocol, filed notice Thursday that it was moving to the use of pentobarbital. The move will most likely prompt the plaintiffs to review their case.

The five men who are newly scheduled to be executed are not among the plaintiffs in the case, and the Justice Department said that the five have exhausted their appeals.

The Supreme Court term that ended last month featured several bitter clashes over whether inmates can challenge the use of the chemicals used in lethal injections on the grounds that they can cause intense pain.

In 2015, the Supreme Court examined whether lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel punishment. The justices upheld the use of lethal injection, but in a dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer urged the Supreme Court to take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the death penalty.

He said there was evidence that innocent people had been executed, that death row exonerations were frequent, that death sentences were imposed arbitrarily and that the capital justice system was warped by racial discrimination and politics.

But only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Breyer’s dissent, and there have been no signs that a majority of the justices have qualms about the constitutionality of the death penalty. To the contrary, the court’s five more conservative members have expressed frustration with what they say is litigation gamesmanship used by opponents of capital punishment to put off executions.

More broadly, they have noted that the punishment is contemplated in the Fifth and 14th Amendments, which call for grand juries in federal cases involving “a capital or other infamous crime” and say that no person may be deprived “of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/us/politics/federal-executions-death-penalty.html" id="46f2b6d8-5b5b-300d-a630-76e7fb5ed573">The New York Times</a>.

U.S. to Resume Executions of Federal Inmates on Death Row

WASHINGTON — The federal government will resume executions of death row inmates after a nearly two-decade hiatus, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday, countering a broad national shift away from the death penalty as public support for capital punishment has dwindled.

The announcement reverses what had been essentially a moratorium on the federal death penalty. Five men convicted of murdering children will be executed in December or January at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, Barr said, and additional executions will be scheduled later.

Prosecutors still seek the death penalty in some federal cases, including for Dylann S. Roof, an avowed white supremacist who gunned down nine African American churchgoers in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber. But the federal government has executed only three inmates since it reinstated the death penalty in 1988, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, who was put to death in 2001, and Louis Jones Jr., who was executed in 2003 for the rape and murder of a female soldier.

The number of executions in the United States had fallen to less than two dozen a year since a high in 1999, when 98 executions were carried out at the state level, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Public support for the death penalty hit a two-decade low three years ago, when just under half of Americans polled backed it for people convicted of murder, down from nearly 80% in 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. Support for capital punishment ticked back up to 54% last year, the center found.

Capital punishment fell out of favor as researchers began to question whether it deterred people from committing heinous crimes and as more defense lawyers proved that their clients were wrongfully convicted.

Civil rights advocates also noted that there was a great racial disparity among inmates on death row and argued that the penalty was disproportionately applied to black men.

With pressure building to replace the capital punishment with life in prison, 21 states have outlawed the death penalty.

Advocates and inmates argued in lawsuits against state and federal governments that the practice was inhumane, and many of them focused on botched executions in which the drug cocktail used was ineffective or caused severe suffering before death.

Nearly a decade ago, drugmakers in the United States and Europe stopped selling to the federal government the sedatives that it had long used to render prisoners unconscious before executing them. In at least one case, a prisoner regained consciousness during an execution in which an alternative sedative was used.

On Thursday, Barr said that he had issued a protocol that replaces the three-drug procedure previously used in federal executions with a single drug, pentobarbital, which is widely available.

In 2015, the Supreme Court examined whether lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel punishment.

The court upheld the use of lethal injection, but in a dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer urged the Supreme Court to take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the death penalty.

He said that there was evidence that innocent people have been executed, that death row exonerations were frequent, that death sentences were imposed arbitrarily and that the capital justice system was warped by racial discrimination and politics.

But only Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Breyer’s dissent, and there have been no signs that a majority of the justices have qualms about the constitutionality of the death penalty. To the contrary, the court’s five more conservative members have expressed frustration with what they say is litigation gamesmanship used by opponents of the death penalty to put off executions.

U.S. to Resume Executions of Death-Row Inmates

WASHINGTON — The federal government will resume executions of death-row inmates after a nearly two-decade hiatus, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday, countering a broad national shift away from the death penalty as public support for it has dwindled.

“Under administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against the worst criminals,” Barr said. “The Justice Department upholds the rule of law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

The announcement reverses what had been essentially a moratorium on the federal death penalty. The federal government has not executed an inmate since 2003, though prosecutors still seek the death penalty in some cases, including for Dylann S. Roof, an avowed white supremacist who killed nine African-American churchgoers in 2015, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber.

Barr said that Hugh Hurwitz, acting director of the Bureau of Prisons, has scheduled executions in December and January for five men convicted of murder. They will take place at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and additional executions will be scheduled later, Barr said.

WASHINGTON — The federal government will resume executions of death-row inmates after a nearly two-decade moratorium, Attorney General William Barr said Thursday.

“As we use encryption to improve cybersecurity, we must ensure that we retain society’s ability to gain lawful access to data and communications when needed to respond to criminal activity,” Barr said in his keynote address at the International Conference on Cybersecurity at Fordham University Law School in Manhattan.

The Justice Department has long pushed technology companies to help the government gain access to information on electronic devices, a conflict that last peaked in 2016, when investigators obtained a court order that required Apple to help the FBI unlock an iPhone recovered after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.

Tensions eased after the FBI found a way to get into the phone without Apple, but the case reinvigorated the debate over tech freedom, security and encryption.

That conversation gained momentum again at the end of last year, when the Australian Parliament passed a controversial encryption bill that requires technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications.

The remarks were Barr’s first significant speech on “going dark,” law enforcement’s term for how encryption and other technology innovations have made it harder for investigators to carry out court-approved wiretaps and search for information on electronic devices.

Barr said that allowing “lawful access” to consumer devices should not be incompatible with a company’s business model.

“Our societal response to advances in technology that affect the balance between individual privacy and public safety always has been — and always should be — a two-way street,” Barr said.

While the attorney general did not mention Apple by name, the company’s strong encryption has long been a selling point. And several technology companies, including Amazon, Facebook and Google, signed a letter this month criticizing the new Australian law.

Barr also said that companies that sell encryption with the goal of ensuring “that law enforcement will not be able to gain lawful access” are “illegitimate.”

Barr’s position echoed that of former Justice Department officials, including James B. Comey, the FBI director, and Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who took the lead on the law enforcement side of what has been a long-running tension with technology companies and champions of personal privacy.

Privacy advocates have long argued that law enforcement can get most of the information it seeks by subpoenaing technology companies for user records and other data and that those companies do not need to create ways to break into their own encryption at the behest of the government.

The FBI director, Christopher A. Wray, and other officials have long argued that strong encryption was hindering crime solving, previously citing a total of 7,800 mobile devices that investigators were kept out of in the fiscal year that ended in September 2017, even though the bureau had the legal authority to gain access to them.

But last year, the FBI acknowledged that it had erroneously inflated the number of smartphones and other mobile devices it has been unable to open because of encryption, blaming a programming error.

Privacy advocates immediately attacked Barr’s speech.

“Encryption reliably protects consumers’ sensitive data,” said Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff lawyer in the Center for Democracy at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There is no way to give the FBI access to encrypted communications without giving the same access to every government on the planet. Technology providers should continue to make their products as safe as possible and resist pressure from all governments to undermine the security of the tools they offer.”

Barr is assuming that the negative effects of encryption on law enforcement investigations “far outweigh encryption’s benefits for protecting individuals, business and the nation,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

“That assumption has never been borne out by evidence in the form of actual, accurate numbers about encryption’s effect on law enforcement’s ability to solve crimes,” Pfefferkorn said.

But Barr said that the current debate over encryption was no different from earlier debates over how to balance privacy when searching a person’s home or car or other objects, which is governed by the Fourth Amendment’s constraints on unreasonable search and seizure.

“The Fourth Amendment strikes a balance between the individual citizen’s interest in conducting certain affairs in private and the general public’s interest in subjecting possible criminal activity to investigation,” Barr said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/william-barr-encryption-security.html" id="4b958a97-b239-33b0-a1ae-05c95f258dc1">The New York Times</a>.

Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday that technology companies should stop using advanced encryption and other security measures that effectively turn devices into “law-free zones” that keep out law enforcement officials conducting criminal investigations.

Barr Revives Encryption Debate, Calling on Tech Firms to Allow for Law Enforcement

The department has faced sharp criticism over its execution of the act. The partial government shutdown in January stymied progress on its implementation, which was further overshadowed by a debate over when the bill authorized the release of thousands of prisoners.

Advocates have expressed worries that the department would slow-walk implementation because former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others within the department who stayed on after he was fired had fiercely opposed the law.

The deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, sought to tamp down those concerns at a news conference Friday to announce that the department had met the deadline for the prison releases, as well as other milestones of the law, called the First Step Act.

“The timely, efficient and effective implementation of the First Step Act is a priority for the Department of Justice and this administration,” Rosen said. “The department intends to implement this law fully and on time.”

In addition to the release of 3,100 inmates, the Justice Department said that it had redirected $75 million from Bureau of Prisons inmate care programs and institutional administrative funding to fully fund the law for the fiscal year that started in October.

The department will work with Congress to obtain the funds needed for the law going forward, Rosen said, including money for services at its heart, such as vocational and job readiness training, rehabilitation and trauma care services that prisoners can participate in to earn reduced sentences.

Amid acrimony between Democrats and Republicans, the criminal justice overhaul passed overwhelmingly in December. Trump has hosted two events to highlight the law, and he is likely to tout it during his reelection campaign as one of his administration’s signature achievements.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/politics/inmates-released-criminal-justice-overhaul.html" id="c9fa9b67-53d4-3b4c-a9d1-dbbb20dee5fe">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — More than 3,000 inmates were freed from federal prison Friday as part of the Justice Department’s implementation of the sweeping bipartisan criminal justice overhaul that President Donald Trump signed into law late last year.

Inmates Freed as Justice Department Tries to Clear Hurdles of New Law

He also said that the department had created a tool that gauges whether inmates are ready to leave prison. The Bureau of Prisons will use the tool to screen all federal inmates to identify risk factors that could increase their likelihood of recidivism, and match them with programs aimed at reducing that risk, such as drug treatment and job training courses.

As the law is written, inmates who had already earned credits and were eligible for early release could not leave until after the Justice Department created the risk assessment tool. Critics argued in recent months that the language did not accurately reflect the intent of the lawmakers who drafted the bill, and they pressed Congress to rewrite it so that thousands of prisoners could immediately be freed.

That didn’t happen, so the eligible prisoners had to wait until Friday for early release. Of the 3,100 prisoners released nationwide, about a third of them were subject to detainers, meaning they will go from federal custody to serve state prison sentences or they are in the United States illegally and will be released to face immigration court proceedings.

But the overhaul had a difficult birth, partly because of opposition from Sessions, according to legislative aides and advocates who worked on it. Sessions promised to provide feedback, they said, but he eventually criticized a draft without giving lawmakers what they considered substantive recommendations or improvements.

A representative for Sessions, who has returned to private life, disputed that characterization Friday in a statement. “The Department provided significant substantive feedback on the proposed bill over several month period both at the staff and member level,” the statement said, adding, “The members also were well aware of the Department’s grave concerns about the bill’s large reductions in sentences for violent and serious federal criminals and the need to maintain truth in sentencing.”

Once it was clear that Trump supported the bill, Sessions began publicly backing it but privately worked through back channels to oppose it, encouraging law enforcement associations and other groups to voice their opposition to lawmakers and other stakeholders. When supporters of the bill heard about his efforts, they sought White House help to ensure its passage.

But after Congress passed the law, they expressed concern that Justice Department officials who had sided with Sessions and remained in their jobs after he was fired in November would delay its implementation.

“Sessions represented an all-time low for prospects for successful passage at the time and also prospects for implementation,” said Holly Harris, the president of Justice Action Network, a criminal justice reform advocacy group. “We’re looking at a vastly improved situation,” she said of Attorney General William P. Barr, who replaced Sessions in February.

Barr assured supporters of the law that he would back its full implementation. Before his confirmation hearing, he met with senators including Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and the former head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was one of the bill’s strongest backers. Barr said that his thinking on criminal justice had evolved, and that he no longer supported the harsh sentencing measures that he had pushed for during his first stint as attorney general in the early 1990s.

During an interview this month after touring a federal prison in Edgefield, South Carolina, Barr defended the tough-on-crime measures he had supported at the time as “essential for reducing the crime rate and also tackling the crack epidemic.” But with crime rates down substantially, he said he felt that the time was right to identify and free inmates who no longer constituted a safety risk.

“After someone has been in prison for a substantial period of time, and you can really assess whether they continue to pose a threat to the community,” Barr said, “then obviously you’re more inclined to modify the sentence or strike the balance in favor of some kind of monitoring that doesn’t involve the heavy cost and the isolation of this kind of prison system.”

The law consists of a package of incentives and new programs designed to improve prison conditions and prepare prisoners considered low risks for recidivism to re-enter society. It also outlawed the shackling of pregnant inmates and the placement of juveniles in solitary confinement and said the Bureau of Prisons must place prisoners close to home if possible.

The law also makes retroactive the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which decreased the relative penalty for possession of crack versus powder cocaine.

In the run-up to Friday’s announcement, both Barr and Rosen worked with Antoinette Bacon, a Justice Department lawyer who is in charge of implementation, to ensure that the department met the deadline for developing the risk assessment tool, called Pattern, and prisoner releases.

In June, Rosen met for nearly two hours with the team creating Pattern, discussing research that showed how risk factors including age and gender affected the likelihood of recidivism. Ignoring these disparities, the committee warned, could result in early releases being applied unfairly.

Barr met with the committee Thursday to hear about steps to improve Pattern in the coming months as the committee gets feedback from the Bureau of Prisons and advocates about its effectiveness.

In addition to Barr’s recent visit to the medium-security federal prison in South Carolina, Rosen visited a maximum-security penitentiary in Colorado in recent weeks to discuss programming and rehabilitation efforts.

Advocates said they were pleased that Barr was speaking positively about the criminal justice overhaul, but they called for a congressional oversight hearing about the implementation of the entire law and vowed to closely monitor the process, especially the efficacy of the risk assessment tool.

It “has been a real mystery to a lot of groups,” said Harris.

The department said that it found that prisoners in the Alabama prison system endured some of the highest rates of homicide and rape in the country, and it cited a “flagrant disregard” for their constitutional right to be free from excessive and cruel punishment.

The Alabama Department of Corrections is already the subject of federal civil rights lawsuits that say prisoners are not protected from violence and are not given proper medical and mental health care. The prisons are severely understaffed, and the department has requested $31 million to hire 500 more correctional officers and raise pay across the board.

The report focused on the failure to prevent prisoner-on-prisoner violence through inadequate training, failure to properly classify and supervise inmates, and failure to stem the flow of contraband including weapons and drugs.

“The violations are severe, systemic, and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision,” the report said. It also cited “the use of segregation and solitary confinement to both punish and protect victims of violence and/or sexual abuse; and a high level of violence that is too common, cruel, of an unusual nature, and pervasive.”

The Justice Department is still investigating excessive force and sexual abuse by prison staff members, an investigation that former federal prosecutors say could lead to criminal indictments.

The department concluded that the Alabama prison system did not protect prisoners from physical and sexual violence at the hands of other prisoners.

In a single week, the department detailed a horrific list of abuses that included instances of multiple stabbings, prisoners attacking a sleeping man with socks filled with metal locks and a prisoner being forced to perform oral sex at knifepoint.

The department also concluded that the system does not provide “safe and sanitary” living conditions. Open sewage ran by the pathway that government attorneys used to access one facility, which the state closed soon after the inspectors visited.

Gov. Kay Ivey said the state was already aware of and trying to fix the issues raised by the Justice Department.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/alabama-prisons-doj-investigation.html" id="00ceaa00-1038-357b-a043-50d77c362d8e">The New York Times</a>.

The Justice Department threatened to sue the Alabama state prison system Wednesday over shocking and brutal conditions uncovered during a 2 1/2-year investigation into the state’s massively overcrowded facilities.

Justice Department Threatens to Sue Alabama Over Prisoner Safety

<h1>NEW YORK — A contentious, yearslong debate inside the Justice Department over whether to bring federal civil rights charges against an officer in the death of Eric Garner ended Tuesday after Attorney General William Barr ordered that the case be dropped.</h1>

The U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, Richard P. Donoghue, announced the decision one day before the fifth anniversary of Garner’s death at the hands of police officers on Staten Island.

The case had sharply divided federal officials and prompted national protests over excessive force by the police.

Bystanders filmed the arrest on their cellphones, recording Garner as he gasped “I can’t breathe,” and his death was one of several fatal encounters between black people and the police that catalyzed the national Black Lives Matter movement.

His dying words became a rallying cry for demonstrations that led to changes in policing practices across the United States.

Still, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who was captured on a video wrapping his arm around Garner’s neck. The federal civil rights investigation dragged on for five years amid internal disputes in the Justice Department, under both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump.

In the end, Barr made the call not to seek a civil rights indictment against Pantaleo, just before a deadline for filing some charges expired.

His intervention settled the disagreement between prosecutors in the civil rights division, which has pushed for an indictment, and Brooklyn prosecutors, who never believed the department could win such a case.

On Tuesday morning, Donoghue called Garner’s death a tragedy but said “the evidence does not support charging Police Officer Pantaleo with a federal civil rights violation.” He went over the entire arrest step by step, maintaining the government could not prove Pantaleo willfully used excessive force to violate Garner’s rights.

The Garner family and its supporters immediately condemned Barr’s decision, saying the Justice Department had failed them.

Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, shifted the pressure to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, calling on the city to fire Pantaleo and vowing to fight to hold the officers involved in the arrest accountable.

“We’re not going away, so you can forget that,” Carr said. “New Yorkers need to come out and flood this city tomorrow.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was standing with her, said, “Five years ago, Eric Garner was choked to death; today the federal government choked Lady Justice, and that is why we are outraged.”

At a later rally on the steps of City Hall, a parade of family members, community leaders, local politicians and civil rights lawyers vented their fury at Barr and other officials.

Stuart London, a lawyer for Pantaleo, said that his client was “gratified” to hear of the Justice Department decision.

Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said Pantaleo had been unfairly singled out for blame and was carrying out a superior’s orders.

“Scapegoating a good and honorable officer, who was doing his job in the manner he was taught, will not heal the wounds this case has caused for our entire city,” Lynch said.

From the start, the Pantaleo investigation sharply divided the Justice Department.

Eric H. Holder Jr., Obama’s attorney general at the time of Garner’s death, said that evidence strongly suggested the federal government should bring charges against Pantaleo, even though it was notoriously hard to prosecute police officers for deaths in custody.

The last time the federal government brought a deadly force case against a New York police officer was in 1998, when Officer Francis X. Livoti stood trial on — and was eventually convicted of — civil rights charges in the choking death of a Bronx man named Anthony Baez.

But the prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, led by Loretta E. Lynch, did not believe they could win in court and balked at bringing charges.

Once Lynch succeeded Holder as attorney general in April 2015, however, Vanita Gupta, the head of the civil rights division, and her lawyers convinced Lynch that the officers had very likely violated Garner’s civil rights.

Lynch allowed the civil rights division to take a lead role in the case, and the following September the department replaced the FBI agents and prosecutors who had been working on the case with a new team from outside New York.

The two sides disagreed over whether the widely published video of Garner’s arrest proved that Pantaleo had acted wrongfully. Prosecutors in Washington accused their colleagues in Brooklyn of mishandling the investigation.

The case stalled again after Trump won the presidential election and appointed Jeff Sessions as his attorney general. Civil rights division prosecutors recommended to the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, that charges be brought, but he declined to move forward.

As the Russia investigation engulfed the department and Sessions was fired, the case languished until Barr took it up.

To the bitter end, prosecutors on both sides of the debate lobbied Barr in a series of briefings; and Barr reviewed the video multiple times, officials said.

But it remains unclear if prosecutors interviewed Pantaleo, which would have helped establish his state of mind and intent when he put Garner into a hold. When asked whether prosecutors had interviewed the officer, a Justice Department official would say only that the department had access to “statements relevant to that analysis.”

Barr, in the end, sided with prosecutors in New York.

But it is ultimately up to Commissioner James P. O’Neill, as the final arbiter of police discipline, to decide whether to fire Pantaleo or punish him in some other way.

But O’Neill will not make a formal decision until the police administrative judge who oversaw a disciplinary trial that ended in June renders her verdict, a spokesman for the department, Philip T. Walzak, said in a statement.

Pantaleo, 34, has been on desk duty without a shield or a gun since Garner died, a status that has allowed him to accrue pay and pension benefits.

Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, D-N.Y., called the Justice Department’s decision an “outrage” and said the Police Department “must make their departmental findings fully transparent to the public and take immediate actions to ensure this officer is no longer on the force.”

Garner, who was 43, died on a Staten Island sidewalk July 17, 2014, after Pantaleo wrapped an arm around his neck from behind and took him to the ground. Other officers put their weight on him, compressing his chest against the pavement.

The officers had been ordered to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes, and he had resisted. A medical examiner testified at the disciplinary hearing that the pressure on Garner’s neck and chest set in motion a fatal asthma attack.

Federal prosecutors did a “rigorous analysis” of the event, but in the end they did not believe they had enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Pantaleo had committed a crime, a senior Justice Department official said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak on the record.

To prove criminal conduct, the official said, the government had to convince a jury that in the middle of a dynamic arrest, Pantaleo made a clear decision to apply a chokehold, which the Police Department had banned more than two decades ago. It was a burden prosecutors did not believe they could meet.

None of the New York officers involved in Garner’s death have been charged with a crime or disciplined by the Police Department. That fact has enraged the Garner family and various advocacy groups devoted to holding the police accountable for abuses of power.

The state grand jury declined to bring charges against Pantaleo in December 2014, after the police officer testified in his own defense that he did not put Garner into a chokehold, and that he feared that he would be pushed through a storefront window during the struggle.

The Justice Department said Tuesday that it had weighed four elements in deciding whether to charge Pantaleo, including whether he used unreasonable force, whether he willfully violated the law, whether he acted in his official capacity as a law enforcement professional and whether the other person was injured.

Donoghue said prosecutors did not believe they could prove he had intentionally used unreasonable force. Even if they could prove the officer had used force that was “objectively unreasonable,” the government would still have to show the officer did so “willfully,” a very high level of intent.

The Brooklyn prosecutors who studied the video of the incident concluded that Pantaleo did not initially intend to apply a chokehold, and that he eventually did so for seven seconds after the two men crashed to the ground, Donoghue said.

Katie Benner

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