Flint Water crisis

[Winehole23]

Criminal cases against former Gov Rick Snyder and nine other state officials are still live.

Flint water prosecutors asked the Michigan Supreme Court to keep their criminal cases against nine former government officials afloat on Wednesday, May 4, defending their use of a one-person grand jury to issue indictments in the cases more than a year ago.

Justices heard arguments from attorneys for former Gov. Rick Snyder and others Wednesday, contending they were denied their cons utional rights when a single grand juror indicted them, and an attorney for former Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Nick Lyon went a step further.

Former state Solicitor General John Bursch said the charges must be dismissed because the state Cons ution prohibits a single grand juror from both investigating and charging the officials with crimes.

Citizen grand juries are rarely utilized in Michigan and the use of a one-person grand jury, as was done in Flint, is even rarer, attorneys for those charged with water crisis crimes have said.

Genesee Circuit Judge David J. Newblatt served as the one-judge grand jury in the water crisis cases and heard testimony throughout 2020 before issuing indictments against Snyder and eight others in January 2021.

https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/202...ter-cases.html

[Winehole23]

Michigan Supreme Court throws out indictments

A judge had no authority to issue indictments in the Flint water scandal, the Michigan Supreme Court said Tuesday in an extraordinary decision that wipes out charges against former Gov. Rick Snyder, his health director and seven other people.


It’s an astonishing defeat for Attorney General Dana Nessel, who took office in 2019, got rid of a special prosecutor and put together a new team to investigate whether crimes were committed when lead contaminated Flint’s water system in 2014-15.


State laws “authorize a judge to investigate, subpoena witnesses, and issue arrest warrants” as a one-person grand jury, the Supreme Court said.


“But they do not authorize the judge to issue indictments,” the court said in a 6-0 opinion.

https://apnews.com/article/health-cr...a40c5d663620eb

[Winehole23]

While weekly bottled water donations have ended for citizens of Flint, Michigan, according to city officials, the water crisis there is ongoing.

Health officials are urging residents to continue to use faucet filters certified to remove lead until the residential lead service line replacement is completed.

The residential lead service line replacement was initially set to be finished in 2019, according to a settlement agreement with the city. That deadline was eventually pushed back to the fall of 2022 and has most recently been set for completion in August 2023, according to city officials.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/flint-resi...onations/story

[Winehole23]

Twenty-four samples returned lead levels higher than 15 ppb, the threshold for remediation and action for water suppliers − not schools, individual homes or private businesses − based on the federal Lead and Copper Rule. Some of those samples were as high as 140 ppb, like a flush sample taken on Dec. 22 at JM Clayton Elementary, according to the state data dashboard.

https://www.delawareonline.com/story...g/69825579007/

[boutons_deux]

Racist Repugs escape

Judge approves $600 million settlement over Flint water crisis

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3910886-judge-approves-600-million-settlement-over-flint-water-crisis

[Winehole23]

(hamster fart)

[MultiTroll]

What a pathetic perversion of justice.

And people wonder why some people have nothing to do with politics.

[Winehole23]

people complain about "necro threads," but what's really necrotic is attention and memory wandering away from persistent problems that hurt and kill people.

when people stop paying attention, underlying problems don't.

[Winehole23]

Reality is that which, when you wish it gone, doesn't go away.

[Thread]

Reality is that which, when you wish it gone, doesn't go away.

...or, in other words...President Trump.

tee, hee.

[Winehole23]

City of Jackson knowingly poisoned residential water and lied about it.

5CA says that's not justiciable.

Underneath the streets of Jackson, Mississippi, 1,500 miles of pipes deliver water to roughly 140,000 residents of the state’s capital. At least 100 miles of those pipes areover a century old and contain solid bands of lead every 20 feet. Lead is a toxic metal that, if ingested, can cause lasting damage to the heart, brain, kidneys, and reproductive organs. And the health risks posed by lead pipes can be exacerbatedby the water supply itself: Water sources with low pH levels, like the river that provides much of Jackson’s drinking water, wear away at the pipes’ lining and allow more lead to leach into the water.

In 2014, Willie Bell, the interim director of Jackson’s Department of Public Works, alerted Mayor Tony Yarber that the river’s pH levels were causing a dangerous increase in the amount of lead in the water supply. Bell warned that the city urgently needed to upgrade its corrosion control program, and that the city’s residents were at high risk of lead poisoning.

Yarber did not pass on these warnings to the public. He instead fired Bell and expanded the city’s use of the low-pH river water. As a result, the people of Jackson—more than 80 percent of whom are Black, and a quarter of whom live below the federal poverty line—kept drinking and cooking with and bathing in water that they didn’t know was poisoning them.
In June 2015, the Mississippi State Department of Health found that 22 percent of homes in Jackson had elevated levels of lead in the water, meaning the danger was even more widespread in Jackson than in Flint, Michigan. Still, no one told Jackson residents until early 2016. And even then, city officials downplayed the risks and told the public that the water was safe. “The system is not the issue,”saidYarber at a February 2016 city council meeting. “We are not even close to being Flint.”

https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-poli...n-originalism/

[Winehole23]

Last week, in a 10-to-5 vote, the Fifth Circuit granted the city’s request. In its opinion in Sterling v. City of Jackson, the Fifth Circuit held that the residents’ claims must be dismissed—not because the city was en led to qualified immunity, but because the residents were seeking the recognition of “new” rights that lacked “any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation.”

[Winehole23]

By touting the supposed neutrality of originalism, Engelhardt also obscures its function as a rigged game of historical hide-and-seek. The Jackson residents alleged violations of their due process right to bodily integrity and to be free from state-created dangers. Yet Engelhardt’s opinion reframed the rights they were trying to vindicate as rights “to not be exposed to water that was contaminated as a result of the acts or omissions of public officials,” and to “truthful information from public officials about the presence of contaminants in municipally supplied drinking water.”

[Winehole23]

In addition to promoting a neutered view of the Fourteenth Amendment, these suggestions are divorced from the reality of being Black, poor, and disenfranchised in Jackson. The city used to be majority-white, but when schools and communities began to desegregate in the 1970s, white people fled. Now, the city doesn’t have the tax base to fund the necessary repairs to its aging water infrastructure. The state government, which is controlled by white Republicans, has refused to fund improvements to Jackson’s water system for decades. And even when the federal government specifically allocates funding to repair water systems in Mississippi, as in the 2022 infrastructure bill, the state repeatedly withholds those funds from Jackson, steering them instead to areas with less need but more white people.



After the Civil War, Congress amended the Cons ution so that it would afford substantive protections to all of the country’s residents, regardless of race. Black people in Jackson have been persistently denied those protections. Federal courts had an opportunity to vindicate residents’ cons utional claims. By insisting that cons utional interpretation must be deeply rooted in history, they instead perpetuated a history of racist government abuse.