Dear listeners,
Happy New Year, and welcome back to Serious Trouble. This week’s episode starts with the arrest of Nicolas Maduro. Maduro says he’s a prisoner of war — illegally arrested in the country he ran and kidnapped to the U.S. As Ken says, the question of whether this is true is unlikely to be interesting to the court where he will be tried; if the indictment is valid in the U.S., it won’t much matter how the government got him here to face it. On the other hand, the indictment is surprisingly thin on establishing the nexus between Maduro’s actions and the U.S. drug market. Of course, prosecutors don’t have to show all their evidence at this stage — but given how much the indictment speaks (or “shrieks”) on various other topics, it’s a little odd prosecutors didn’t say more about exactly what enrichment he got for what actions that led to cocaine imports to the U.S.
Next, we look at the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an ICE agent in Minneapolis. There’s a lot of people clamoring for charges, and officials in Minnesota are trying to conduct a criminal investigation of the shooting, though the federal government isn’t exactly being helpful. We may be headed for our first test of the proposition that state criminal law can be used to check the activity of federal immigration agents. There is related precedent — several decades ago, Idaho prosecutors took an FBI sniper from the Ruby Ridge incident to trial. Ken and I discuss what the process would look like, and what courts it would have to take place in.
That’s for free subscribers. Paying subscribers also get a look at a shadow docket ruling from the Supreme Court that curtailed Trump’s ability to deploy the national guard, and the surprising statutory reading that got a majority of the court there. We look at a dismissal of criminal charges from another scrap with ICE in Los Angeles, we discuss Mark Kelly’s legal options for fighting the reduction of his pension (and why he might choose not to use them), we consider why Lindsey Halligan keeps insisting she’s the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, we look at the bizarre upcoming criminal trial of Scotusblog co-founder Thomas Goldstein, and we have an update on the saga of the still-held-in-contempt Charles C. Johnson.
We hope you enjoy the episode,
Josh
