Half of Manhattan’s drunk-driving cases got dismissed in 2022 due to Albany reforms

 Drunk drivers are getting a free ride in New York City.

Nearly half of all drinking-and-driving offenses in Manhattan were tossed out of court last year – as dismissal rates soared over five times higher than they were before state lawmakers enacted a controversial evidence reform law in 2020, records show.

Of the 262 drunk-driving cases handled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in 2022, 128 – or 49%—were dismissed on technicalities or for other reasons.

In 2019, the office, then led by Cy Vance, handled more than double the amount of DWI and other drunk-driving cases, yet only 55 — or 9% — of the 589 were tossed.

Critics blamed the startling statistics on the new “discovery” law overwhelming New York’s criminal justice system – which even the soft-on-crime Bragg concedes is a huge problem for prosecuting traffic offenses.

“This data makes clear that discovery is burying our prosecutors in paperwork that is often unrelated to the underlying substance of the case,” Bragg told The Post.

Almost half of the drunk driving cases handled by the Manhattan DA’s office were dismissed on technicalities or for other reasons in 2022.

William C. Lopez

Prosecutors are now required to turn over all evidence related to alleged felonies and misdemeanors within just 15 days of arraignments for traffic infractions and other petty offenses, and within 20 to 35 days for many other crimes.

Previously, state law only required discovery if the defense requested it in writing — and there was no rigid time frame.

The new rules have wreaked havoc throughout the five boroughs when it comes to DWI and other traffic-related prosecutions, according to multiple law-enforcement sources and records.

Of the 262 drunk-driving cases handled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in 2022, 128 were dismissed.

Steven Hirsch

Some prosecutors even said they’re offering plea deals at an unprecedented pace to avoid having cases dismissed.

Mohamed Taher Hassan — whose father Taher Ali Hassan, 63, was killed in December 2020 by a driver on the Belt Parkway in Queens traveling at nearly double the speed limit while high on booze and cocaine — said his family “didn’t see the full justice it was expecting” because of the new discovery law.

Instead, Jason Bical of Brooklyn copped a plea deal with Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz’s office and was sentenced in December to 5 to 15 years behind bars on an aggravated vehicular manslaughter conviction in the death of the elder Hassan.

The new law prevented the family of Taher Ali Hassan (pictured) from seeing the justice they expected after a drunk driver killed Hassan in 2020.

“Action must be taken to prevent all this from happening, or at a bare minimum, to put laws where they were, which was then much easier for prosecutors to act,” said Mohamed Hassan, who praised prosecutors’ work in the case.

“They’re handcuffed by the new laws, and to them, it makes them not want to do these types of cases.”

Thirty-one percent of all traffic infractions in Queens were tossed out of court last year, compared to 17% in 2019, while the traffic-felony dismissal rate surged ninefold over the same period, from 2% to 18%.

The Queens DA’s Office couldn’t immediately provide data on drunk-driving offenses.

The dismissal rate for traffic felony cases in Queens surged from 2% to 18% from 2019 to 2022.

Stephen Yang

In Manhattan, the dismissal rate for all traffic offenses rose from 18% in 2019 to 44% the following year, when the new discovery requirements went into effect.

In 2022 — which was Bragg’s first year as DA — the rate reached 51%.

Manhattan’s traffic-felony dismissal rate — which includes drunk driving offenses — also rose over the four-year period, from 6% to 15%

Since 2019 on Staten Island, 263 traffic cases have been tossed as the overall dismissal rate there has remained steady over that period at about 3% to 4%.

District Attorney Michael McMahon’s office said the new regulations have reluctantly forced its prosecutors to put extra emphasis on getting rogue drivers to cop pleas to reduced crimes in order to avoid having cases tossed altogether.

Staten Island DA Michael McMahon said prosecutors focused on getting rogue drivers to cop plea deals due to the discovery law reform.

Paul Martinka

McMahon, a moderate Democrat, told The Post he’s “tremendously proud” of his office’s “low” dismissal rate, but believes the discovery law needs a complete overhaul.

“My dedicated prosecutors are successful despite the crazy and nonsensical discovery burdens placed on us by Albany,” he said. “Without question, it has made the work of holding these offenders fully accountable more challenging and unless necessary changes are made, will soon border on impossible.

“I guess that is what our Albany leaders want: mayhem and death on the roads, crime, and chaos on every corner, and complete freedom for the career criminals. They should be careful what they wish for. If not for heroic cops and persistent prosecutors, they will get it.”

The dismissal rate for all traffic offenses rose from 18% in 2019 to 44% the next year, when the discovery law took effect.

Seth Gottfried

The Brooklyn and Bronx District Attorneys’ Offices refused to immediately provide dismissal rates for traffic offenses.

Bragg — who once championed the evidence reform law — said he hopes to “continue to work” with his fellow progressive Democratic “partners” in the state Legislature “to find commonsense solutions that preserve the intent of the new law while ensuring we can achieve appropriate accountability in all our cases.”

The discovery law was part of a larger legislative package approved by lefty state pols that included bail reform — which Bragg continues to support — and which is widely blamed for fueling crime by putting suspected bad guys back on the streets.

The discovery law came as part of a broader legislative package championed by lefty state pols that included the controversial bail reform.

Robert Mecea

Bragg contends his hands are tied, but some of his biggest critics are not buying his excuses for why so many drunk-driving offenses are getting tossed — given what they describe as his long history of catering to criminals, and other far-left causes.

“Bragg is either lazy or this is the result of the discovery law,” said City Council Minority Leader Joseph Borelli (R-Staten Island). “I suspect that it’s a combination of the two, and that combination is letting drunk drivers booze and cruise with impunity.” 

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/half-of-manhattans-drunk-driving-cases-are-being-dismissed/

'Revolving Door' Of DOJ, Big Tech Employees

 by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In the midst of an ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration alleging collaboration with social media companies to censor Americans, a new report has detailed the extent to which former Justice Department (DOJ) employees are now working at “Big Tech” firms.

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) investigated the resumes of recent hires and found that more than 360 current employees of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook/Meta are former DOJ employees. Likewise, more than 40 DOJ employees, many of them in senior roles, previously worked at Big Tech firms.

According to the report, since President Joe Biden took office, Google hired 40 former DOJ staffers, Amazon hired 61, Microsoft hired 26, and Meta hired 53.

While staff often move between government and the private sector, “this case is different because unlike government and industry moving expertise back and forth (knowledge about procurement rules for example) what we have seen moving back and forth between DOJ and tech is a shared political agenda, specifically to silence conservative voices,” Yitz Friedman, AAF communications manager, told The Epoch Times.

“Sadly, it is evidence that in the Big Tech community, corporate policy is the government’s policy.”

This concern is heightened by recent evidence of collaboration between the DOJ and Twitter to silence Americans, particularly regarding political speech.

After buying social media platform Twitter, Elon Musk released thousands of internal emails that allegedly showed collusion between Twitter and DOJ officials to censor speech, including banning a report by the New York Post before the 2020 election that reportedly incriminated then-candidate Joe Biden in illicit payments scandals.

‘Campaign of Public Threats’

The release of the “Twitter files” follows a lawsuit by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt that alleges illegal collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech companies to suppress free speech.

In a November 2022 interview with The Epoch Times, Landry stated that, because of the First Amendment, “the government doesn’t have the ability to censor speech, especially political speech. And so they can’t go out there and force these companies [to do it].”

Plaintiffs in this case filed a 364-page “finding of fact” document showing a “campaign of public threats against social-media platforms to pressure them to censor more speech on social media.” This document will be discussed in a congressional hearing on March 30 on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/investigation-reveals-revolving-door-doj-big-tech-employees

'1 in 4 college applicants avoids entire states for political reasons'

 A new survey, drawing notice in academia, shows that 1 in 4 applicants decided against applying to a college this year solely because of the politics in its state. 

The finding, long rumored in college admissions circles, has dire implications for some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. 

Tulane University in Louisiana, Stanford in California, Rice in Texas, Columbia in New York and the University of Miami all pride themselves on assembling a class from large pools of applicants drawn from every state. In the public sector, the University of Alabama counts on out-of-state admissions for revenue, enrolling nearly three-fifths of its students from outside its borders. 

Yet, large numbers of conservative and liberal applicants ruled out those schools, along with their states, because of partisan politics.  

“When you’re making a decision about a school, it’s really about choosing a community to live in,” said Chloe Chaffin, 20, a junior at Washburn University in Kansas. “Students want to feel that they belong to the city-community beyond the campus walls.” 

Chaffin chose to attend college near her home in the Kansas City suburb of Olathe. She identifies as a liberal and works as an abortion-rights activist. One reason she didn’t leave Kansas was the landslide defeat last summer of a ballot measure that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution, part of a national upheaval in abortion law.  

The new survey found that 31 percent of liberal applicants struck colleges from their lists for political reasons — especially abortion rights. The most-rejected states were Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Florida.  

“It actually tracks with conversations I’ve been having with my peers,” said Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami. “If you’re female, there’s some chance that you might need access to an abortion, and there are some states where that’s not possible. If you’re LGBTQ, you want to go to schools and to states that are friendly toward that.” 

Likewise, 28 percent of conservative applicants ruled out states on political grounds — namely California and New York. Conservatives rejected states less for specific policies and more for fear of an overarching, oppressive liberalism, on campus and off.  

“I completely understand why some people would choose to be with their own, as opposed to being in a sea of people who are politically opposed to them, on either side of the aisle,” said Nate Sirotovitch, 20, a junior at New York University who leads the College Republicans.  

Sirotovitch lives in conservative-leaning Florida but chose a college in liberal New York, confident he would find friends across the political spectrum, which he did. To him, the survey illustrates the nation’s growing partisan divide. 

“If we stay in our echo chamber,” he said, “it’s only going to get worse.” 

More than their conservative peers, liberals voiced specific concerns in the survey about becoming trapped in a state with no abortion rights, intolerance of the queer community and Wild-West gun laws.  

One issue, at least, cut across ideological lines. A significant share of conservatives joined their liberal classmates in rejecting states with restrictive abortion laws. 

The survey comes from the Art & Science Group, a consulting and research firm that serves the higher-education sector. Surveyors interviewed 1,865 high-school seniors in January and February and balanced the results to reflect the college-bound population. 

David Strauss, a principal at Art & Science, said he does not know of a prior survey that asked if college applicants rejected schools over local politics. 

“It was always anecdotal before, as far as we can tell,” he said. “We started hearing last year from clients who would say, ‘I just got a phone call from a student who said she’s not coming back,’ or a phone call from a student saying, ‘I’m not coming back.’”  

Generations of college applicants have avoided specific colleges or entire regions for political reasons. Some conservatives complain that liberal campuses suffocate opposing views. New England liberals might not consider a campus south of the Mason-Dixon line.  

Local politics took on new urgency last summer with a landmark Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. Many conservative states responded by curbing abortion rights.  

“There are real, tangible threats to people’s physical and medical wellbeing,” said Jenna Gorton, 22, a classmate of Chaffin at Washburn University. “I think it’s really hard for younger people to avoid being involved in this discourse.”  

Even in this mobile age, the impulse to cross the country for college is far from universal. Most Americans attend college within their state: Around 90 percent in Texas and California, 80 percent in Illinois and Florida, 70 percent in Pennsylvania and Arizona, according to federal data from 2019.  

But many elite campuses accept half or more of their students from out of state. And in the new survey, many applicants said they rejected colleges in their own states on political grounds. 

The least popular state among college applicants, eschewed by 38 percent of those who rejected any state, was Alabama. Most abortions are banned in Alabama. The Cotton State has some of the nation’s least restrictive gun laws.  

After Alabama, the most-avoided state was Texas. Most abortions in Texas are banned at six weeks of pregnancy. Texas also poses a challenge for students of any ideology who wish to vote. Texas is 1 of 6 states that do not accept student IDs for balloting purposes. Republican lawmakers in several states are working to narrow voting options for college students, who tend to vote Democratic. 

As a recruitment issue, Texas politics matter to Rice University, an elite Houston campus that draws only 36 percent of its students from within the state.  

Kavya Sahni, 22, is a Rice senior. When she applied to American colleges from her home in India, she recalled, “all of the schools on my list were in the Northeast. I had maybe one in California. And I think the one school that I picked anywhere in the South was Rice.”  

When Sahni told her parents she had applied to a college in Texas, they asked, “Are you going to be safe?” 

Four years later, Sahni is leading the school’s Young Democrats and heading to Harvard Law School.  

“Rice is a great school,” she said.  

Louisiana and Florida ranked third and fourth among states most likely to be crossed from an applicant’s list.  

Notably, Florida is home to Ron DeSantis, the conservative governor and potential presidential candidate. DeSantis has leveraged the Sunshine State as a public stage to wage an “anti-woke” campaign. He backed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which blocks teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in classrooms. He has promoted legislation to ban critical race theory — an academic framework evaluating U.S. history through the lens of racism that has become a political catch-all buzzword for any race-related teaching — and African-American studies.  

Some of those measures may have consequences the governor did not intend, said Sharon Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida.  

African-American studies has been a popular major for Black football players at Florida because the program represents “one of the few places on campus where you could actually find Black professors,” she said.  

House Bill 999, a pending state measure, targets programs that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion,” language that could be read to encompass African-American studies.  

“That is something that probably very concerning to them,” Austin said of the Black players. “And they are probably going to put some pressure on somebody. Because these are star athletes.” 

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3926811-one-in-four-college-applicants-avoids-entire-states-for-political-reasons/

Cell type that could be key to preventing marrow transplant complication

 A bone marrow transplant can be a lifesaving treatment for people with relapsed blood cancers, but a potentially lethal complication known as graft-versus-host disease put limitations on this procedure. New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison is helping to change that by identifying the cell population that causes GVHD, a target that may make bone marrow transplants safer and more effective.

An allogenic (from a donor) bone marrow transplant is a common treatment for blood cancers and other diseases of the immune system. During the transplant, the patient's immune cells are replaced with the donor's healthy cells. While the donor cells can help cure the patient's blood cancer, they can also cause GVHD -- in which donor T cells, a specialized immune cell in the blood, attack the patient's healthy cells. This causes complications similar to an autoimmune disease that can be lethal.

"Graft versus host disease is one of the most common complications after an allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation procedure, and the field knows quite well that the T cells from the donor are the ones mediating the disease," says the study's lead author Nicholas Hess, a scientist at UW-Madison's Carbone Cancer Center. "Before this study, there was no finite T cell population that we've been able to identify as the cause of GVHD, so all our treatment regimens generally impacted the entire T cell population. But targeting all the T cells is not ideal, as they don't just cause this detrimental disease, they also have a beneficial impact on the ability to prevent relapses."

Today in Science Advances, Hess and collaborators including Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center members Christian Capitini, professor of pediatrics, and Peiman Hematti, professor of medicine, published their findings, identifying cells called CD4/CD8 double positive T cells (DPT) causing GVHD in immunodeficient mice. To further confirm their findings, the researchers directly investigated human patient samples.

"We looked at over 400 clinical samples from 35 patients as a part of this study and found double positive T cells to be predictive of GVHD. We also found four other biomarkers which are predictive of not just GVHD, but also relapse in general," says Hess. "Based on that, our next step is to merge the biomarkers into a machine learning algorithm that can output a risk prediction model. Clinicians could then use this model to understand a patient's risk of relapse and GVHD."

A team of physicians and scientists at UW-Madison is working on ways to address the problematic cells in patients while leaving healthy and helpful T cells to flourish. Hess says that while the team is very confident the double positive T cells are directly involved in GVHD, the key step in bringing this discovery to the clinic will be developing a targeted depletion strategy and this prediction model.

"When we can gain confidence in this biomarker research and our ability to identify patients at risk, then we will potentially be able to treat them before they have all the detrimental effects of this disease," Hess says.

The study won a Best Abstracts Award from the American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy and was presented at the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) and ECOG-ACRIN conferences, creating excitement based on the findings' potential impact beyond blood cancer and transplantation.

"I've learned that DPTs have been found in a variety of chronic human inflammatory diseases, which goes to show that this is not a specific thing to graft-versus-host disease. It's probably a wider phenomenon that these human T cells are doing that we've never really appreciated before," says Hess. "It's very exciting because it gives us something to study further. I've always been interested in taking something you discover in the lab and translating it to the clinic. I think it's what gets me up every day. It is kind of the ultimate goal in my life to be able to say I participated in something that helped patients in some way."

Journal Reference:

1. Nicholas J. Hess, David P. Turicek, Jeremiah Riendeau, Sean J. McIlwain, Emmanuel Contreras Guzman, Kalyan Nadiminti, Amy Hudson, Natalie S. Callander, Melissa C. Skala, Jenny E. Gumperz, Peiman Hematti, Christian M. Capitini. Inflammatory CD4/CD8 double-positive human T cells arise from reactive CD8 T cells and are sufficient to mediate GVHD pathology. Science Advances, 2023; 9 (12) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf0567

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230324184419.htm

How steroids benefit severe COVID-19 patients

 In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors tried a variety of medications to determine what was helpful to prevent the deaths caused by a virus which humans had no natural immunity against.

At the same time, researchers tried to decipher the nature of the complex immune responses to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and develop effective drugs and vaccines. It was reported that using dexamethasone, a common steroid, prevented deaths in patients who had severe COVID-19 and were on ventilators in the intensive care unit, but it was not known why it helped.

In the summer of 2020, a team of University of Cincinnati researchers led by Ameet Chimote, PhD, from the laboratory of Laura Conforti, began studying the mechanisms of how dexamethasone works to treat COVID-19. They recently published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.

Shifting focus

Conforti's laboratory researches factors that decrease immune cell functions in cancers and has identified that alterations in molecules on the surface of immune cells called ion channels contribute to this decrease in function.

While at home during the pandemic lockdown and unable to physically be in the laboratory and continue their cancer research, the team shifted its focus to COVID-19.

"In those uncertain days, COVID-19 was on everyone's minds. We all wanted to do our best to help move forward and do our small part in contributing to the scientific research that was happening all over the world to understand this disease," said Laura Conforti, PhD, corresponding author on the study and a professor in the Division of Nephrology in the Department of Internal Medicine. "So we decided, why don't we take our expertise on how ion channels affect immune cell functions in cancer and apply our knowledge to understanding the immune response to COVID-19?"

Cytokine storms

In patients with severe COVID-19, the virus attacks the lungs, triggering a response from the body's immune cells aimed at eliminating the virus from the body.

"The immune cells congregate in the lungs and secrete proteins called cytokines that try to kill the virus, which in turn also attract other immune cells to strengthen the attack," said Chimote, lead author on the study and a research scientist in Conforti's lab.

"What happens during severe COVID-19 infections is that, as a response to high levels of the virus, a whole bunch of immune cells are recruited that secrete a lot of cytokines to kill the virus, but while doing so, they trigger a very bad inflammatory response in the lung, which damages the lung tissue," he added.

The damaged lung tissue causes the lungs to begin filling up with fluid and the patients start having trouble breathing, which often leads to patients needing supplemental oxygen or to be placed on a ventilator. This process of lung damage caused by an abundance of immune cells and inflammation in the lungs is called a "cytokine storm," and it remains the main cause for deaths in patients that have severe COVID-19.

A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2020 identified that the steroid drug dexamethasone prevented deaths caused by cytokine storms in severe COVID-19 patients.

"Dexamethasone has since then become a standard of care for any person with severe COVID-19 who is on a ventilator in the ICU," Chimote said. "Steroids are known to inhibit your immune system, but what are the mechanisms? And why was dexamethasone lifesaving in severely ill COVID-19 patients experiencing cytokine storms? Nobody knew."

Working together to make a difference

Supported by a pilot research grant from the Department of Internal Medicine, Conforti, Chimote and their colleagues set out to describe why dexamethasone prevents cytokine storms, especially by studying its effect on ion channels and ion channel-mediated immune cell function (that includes cytokine production), the focus of their research.

"The only thing that worked at that time to prevent deaths in severe COVID-19 was dexamethasone. At that time there was no COVID-19 vaccination, at that time no single drug or antibody treatments were shown to be beneficial," he said. "So we wanted to see what are the pathways by which dexamethasone was inhibiting cytokine storm and proving to be a lifesaver."

The team obtained samples through the UC-based Cincinnati COVID-19 Repository, which collected blood and plasma specimens of COVID-19 patients at the height of the pandemic and was led by Kristin Hudock, MD, and Margaret Powers-Fletcher, PhD.

"Along with banking the COVID-19 patient samples, they had compiled a large database of the clinical features of these individuals, so we knew what medications they were receiving, how sick they were, their demographics, their clinical outcomes, including how many days they were in the ICU and what oxygen or ventilatory support they had," Chimote said.

Using samples from patients with mild COVID-19, severe COVID-19 and severely ill patients who had been treated with dexamethasone, the team measured around 700 different genes through RNA analysis.

"We identified what kind of immune cells and what kind of immune cell function-related pathways were altered by the disease severity," Chimote said. "We further conducted data analysisto determine what disruptions were happening within the immune system of mild and severe patients. We also wanted to evaluate the alterations in the immune cells from the severely ill patients after they were administered dexamethasone in the ICU."

The research found that dexamethasone specifically inhibited many inflammatory pathways and several critically important genes contributing to the cytokine storm, inflammatory signaling and antiviral responses in immune cells. This could prevent the immune cells from attacking and destroying the patient's lungs, thus avoiding deaths due to cytokine storm.

"All of the genes that trigger cytokine storm in severe COVID-19 were inhibited by dexamethasone," Chimote said. "We also saw that dexamethasone inhibited the expression and function of ion channels that regulate immune responses, especially cytokine production."

Moving forward, Chimote said the COVID-19 virus is continuing to mutate quickly, highlighting the need to identify a specific target or drug to make treatments more effective.

"Just giving monoclonal antibody infusions is not going to help long term because the viral mutations are happening, and newer and newer strains are coming," he said. "But if we try to understand the mechanism by which the inflammation or the severity of the disease is produced, then maybe we can identify something that can be consistently targeted."

"Our findings that dexamethasone may act by inhibiting the ion channels also raises an exciting prospect that drugs that inhibit the function of these ion channels (that are currently in clinical trials in autoimmune diseases) can be used as a treatment modality in severe COVID-19," added Conforti, "and this could also be of benefit in other pathologies where cytokine storm occurs such as microbial infections and autoimmunity."

Ongoing research is also needed to understand the immune system mechanisms that lead to systemic problems like long COVID-19.

Journal Reference:

1. Ameet A. Chimote, Abdulaziz O. Alshwimi, Martina Chirra, Vaibhavkumar S. Gawali, Margaret V. Powers-Fletcher, Kristin M. Hudock, Laura Conforti. Immune and ionic mechanisms mediating the effect of dexamethasone in severe COVID-19. Frontiers in Immunology, 2023; 14 DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2023.1143350

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230330102419.htm