Conner Mitchell

Nov 8, 2023 | lawrencekstimes.com | Conner Mitchell

Share this post or save for laterPost updated at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9: Mike Rogers, recently appointed as chief financial officer of Lawrence Memorial Hospital, was terminated after only a month on the job after hospital officials discovered he was a convicted felon who changed his name a year ago. In addition, the vice president of human resources at LMH was terminated on Oct. 27, the same day staff discovered Rogers had changed his name.

Oct 13, 2023 | ballsandstrikes.org | Jay Willis |Madiba Dennie |Conner Mitchell

In a two-sentence order issued on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court greenlit Texas’s efforts to execute Jedidiah Murphy, over the objections of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Several hours later, as the annual observance of World Day Against the Death Penalty came to a close, officials at the state penitentiary in Huntsville killed Murphy by lethal injection.

Oct 12, 2023 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie |Conner Mitchell |Jay Willis

Ignore the bad and focus on the good is decent advice for a lot of things in life, like modest progress on New Year’s Resolutions or kids who are mostly potty-trained. Evaluating the most powerful legal decision-making body in the country, however, is not one of those things. Yet a recent New York Times op-ed entitled “The Supreme Court Is Not as Politicized as You May Think” makes precisely this mistake.

Oct 11, 2023 | ballsandstrikes.org | Madiba Dennie |Jay Willis |Elie Mystal |Conner Mitchell

After the most recent census, South Carolina Republicans worked so hard to reduce Black electoral power while redrawing the state’s congressional maps that a lower court described them as “effectively bleaching” a key congressional district. Today, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP to determine if this electoral Clorox poses any constitutional problem.

Oct 10, 2023 | ballsandstrikes.org | Conner Mitchell |Madiba Dennie |Jay Willis

Over the past decade, the Court has considerably scrambled the law of gerrymandering, but broadly speaking, there are three ways a gerrymandering case can come down. Gerrymandering based on race is almost always illegal, whether under the Voting Rights Act or the Fourteenth Amendment. But gerrymandering based on political party, the Court decided in 2019’s Rucho v. Common Cause, is too hard for them to police, so they just don’t.