50 years ago, the Ramones released their self-titled debut LP. Adorned with a black-and-white photo of the faux brotherhood against a brick wall at the back of CBGB (taken by photographer and CB’s door person, Roberta Bayley), Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee stood somewhat awkwardly wearing jeans in various stages of destruction, T-shirts (shoutout to drummer Tommy for going with the belly shirt), leather jackets and sneakers. 

It’s important to remember that it was 1976, so this particular fashion choice was not yet au courant, because they had just codified it. The outfits that they’d wear walking around were the same outfits they’d wear onstage. They standardized on this particular uniform because everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to wear onstage and they didn’t want audiences to think they were a glam band or, worse. “I mean, these guys were not hippies,” said Legs McNeil, co-creator of “PUNK” magazine. No, they weren’t.

“Ramones” features 14 songs in total, seven songs on each side, because Ramones songs come in around two minutes and change. The album opens with one of the best opening tracks of any debut album: “Blitzkrieg Bop.” That wall of sound barrage of guitars and then: “Hey, ho, let’s go!” It never fails to sound like a call to arms. As an introduction to this band, they couldn’t have chosen a better song; it precisely conveyed exactly who the band was and what they were about. 

Fifty years later, “Blitzkrieg Bop” feels ubiquitous. The intro gets blasted at sporting events to raise energy or when something good happens, and it never fails to rally a crowd. That opening track has been featured in at least one video game and a wide selection of TV commercials for a long line of different product offerings: airlines, car brands, fast food, exercise equipment, financial products, mobile phone networks, vaccinations, a cartoon movie, and perhaps most memorably, diet soda, featuring animated pogoing soda cans. 

But in 1976, and in fact the entire duration of the band’s existence (they officially ceased operations in 1996), the Ramones did not achieve chart positions of any note. “Ramones” went to #111 on the Billboard 200, and their highest charting album was 1980’s Phil Spector-produced “End of the Century,” which reached #44 in the U.S. and got as high as #11 in the U.K. “It’s crazy when Phil Spector produces your record and you still don’t have a top ten record,” Eddie Vedder mentioned when he inducted the Ramones into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Their singles didn’t do much better. Only three Ramones songs ever made it to the Billboard Hot 100 — “Rockaway Beach,” “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” and “Do You Wanna Dance,” all absolute bangers that should be enshrined in the culture. “Rockaway Beach” did the best out of the three, and by “best” we’re still talking #66 (and it took a year to get there); the other two only got as high as the 80s. The numerous post-breakup compilations and live albums didn’t fare any better, and not even an appearance on “The Simpsons” in 1993 or numerous other mainstream cinema placements (like the title track for a Stephen King movie, “Pet Sematary”) moved the needle in any meaningful direction from a sales or chart or airplay perspective.

With that information in hand, it won’t be surprising to learn that none of the singles released from the 14 albums put out during the band’s existence (or again, afterwards) garnered any radio airplay on commercial radio (college radio is of course another story), and outside of places like Brazil (and towards the end of their career), the Ramones could not get arrested, much less sell out arenas or anything much larger than a theater. (In Brazil, however, they sold out stadiums and their tour bus was mobbed with crowds that made Beatlemania look like nursery school.) 

“Ramones” also featured such hits as “Beat on the Brat,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.” Of course that statement is inaccurate, because the Ramones didn’t have any hits, not in 1976 and not ever. That wasn’t the plan — no one in the Ramones, their management or their record company was pretending that commercial success wasn’t important to them. It just eluded them.

To quote Legs McNeil in “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones”: “Those songs are classic American pop songs. Why weren’t they played on the radio?” 

Two words: punk rock. 

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The Ramones were the second band from downtown NYC’s Class of 1975 to be signed to a major label (Patti Smith was first). They had the full support of Sire Records and a great manager in Danny Fields (who would become the subject of the band’s song “Danny Says” later). The band toured the U.S., playing anywhere that would have them; there was no touring circuit for original bands starting out back then. Danny Fields later explained, “Every place we went to, there were bands that did not exist when the Ramones first played there, and when they came back, they did.” (They’re not the only band that can make that claim, but that doesn’t make it untrue or irrelevant.)

A show the band played in London on July 4th, 1976 is considered by the people involved to be a major impetus to the formation of U.K. punk rock, with members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Damned (and more) in the audience that night. No less than Joe Strummer would later say, “If that Ramones record hadn’t existed, I don’t know that we could have built a scene here. Because it filled a vital gap between the death of the old pub rocking scene and the advent of punk.”

But it would be precisely that historical moment that would be the band’s downfall. When the Sex Pistols’ record came out, initially the Stateside reaction was positive, at least from people in the Ramones’ camp. “Not only did Malcolm [McLaren, Sex Pistols’ manager] steal the scene and repackage it, but the music was good,” Legs McNeil was quoted as saying. “We kind of felt us and the Sex Pistols would become almost like The Beatles and the Stones; we were the new revolution,” Joey said. 

And that might have happened, if the Sex Pistols had booked their first U.S. tour through the kinds of major, music-friendly cities that most bands visit. Instead, Malcolm McLaren wanted the tour routing to go through more authentic, working-class cities, so it opened in Atlanta and traipsed through the Southwest, visiting places like Memphis, San Antonio and Tulsa before finishing up (and breaking up) in San Francisco. 

The Sex Pistols headlining the Palladium in New York City or the Agora in Cleveland wouldn’t have made splashy headlines. But when you play smaller cities that don’t usually get international touring acts, and when everything you hear about the band and the movement they represent is exaggerated and sensationalized, and the band are absolutely willing to play into all of that for the sake of headlines, it’s not going to end up well for anybody. The Sex Pistols arriving in Memphis was the kind of news story that would show up on your local news station at 6 p.m., and once one station ran with it, the rest followed. 

“It was getting such a negative feeling of . . . it was going to destroy the whole thing, which is what happened; it scared everyone else off, scared off the music industry, scared off the radio,” Joey remembered. And then there was the episode of NBC’s “Weekend” news magazine, which would run in place of “Saturday Night Live” one weekend a month. In June of 1977, “Weekend” ran an episode about U.K. punk. Years later, Joey Ramone offered, “One day on 60 Minutes was a thing about the Sex Pistols and the safety pins and everybody gouging each other’s eyeballs out and strangulation, and everybody flipped out, and things changed radically. It really kind of screwed things up for ourselves.”

Danny Fields explained how the view of the Sex Pistols as 100% representative of “punk rock” ended up impacting the Ramones: “. . .when their records went around to radio stations, they intuitively say, ‘What do I know about them? They’re trouble. They throw up, and if we play it, we’ll have to have them here, and they’ll throw up on the console in the recording studio, and we don’t want them. Don’t play their records; it’s easier.’ It’s always easier not to do something than to do it.”

It wasn’t just the Ramones. Blondie’s Debbie Harry complained that the radio stations would tell her, “We like you. Give us something to play,” when they’d just released their version of “Denis,” a surefire pop hit if there was one. Blondie would eventually break through into actual pop stardom, but also had to fight back against the “punk” label.

This explanation is going to feel thoroughly anodyne in 2026, when you can walk into places like Hot Topic or Target and buy merchandise from bands that at least once upon a time were considered “punk.” If you could even find a Ramones T-shirt in the ’70s or ’80s, you weren’t going to wear it anywhere besides a Ramones concert unless you wanted to find yourself in an argument, or worse. Musician Jesse Malin lived in Queens, a subway ride away from CBGB, and yet he tells endless stories about getting hassled by random passersby or having stuff thrown at him from car windows just for dressing differently. 

The Ramones eventually retired because of interpersonal issues: Johnny stole Joey’s girlfriend. And it would probably be a lot easier to deal with all of that if your band had achieved the kind of commercial success you deserved and weren’t still touring in an Econoline van. (When they were inducted into the Rock Hall, Eddie Vedder commended them for still touring in a van, but a tour bus might have kept them around a while longer.) The Ramones wrote songs and played music because it was the only thing they wanted to do, the only thing they could do, the only thing that made sense to them. 

Countless bands have given them their props — Pearl Jam took them out on tour, they were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1996, U2 wrote a song about them, among many others  — and the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, their second year of eligibility, but not early enough for Joey to have seen it happen; he died in 2001, and would be followed by Dee Dee (2002), Johnny (2004) and Tommy in 2014. (Later, Ramones CJ and Marky are still carrying the torch.) 

The records are still there and still sound great, even if they didn’t earn their creators the kind of money and lifestyle that they deserved. And the Ramones are still inspiring kids all over the world to write a song, pick up a guitar, and go out and play, no matter how bad they might think they are, because that’s exactly what the Ramones did. 

The post 50 years later, the Ramones’ debut still defines punk appeared first on Salon.com.

The road to Democratic control of the Senate remains steep, but Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, the misbegotten war in Iran and a wobbly economy have opened a slender path.

The thinking goes that if Democrats can hold every blue seat, prevail in North Carolina and defeat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, then they must take any two from a list of red states that could well be in some semblance of play: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska.

Imagine that almost everything goes right. Democrats hold Georgia and New Hampshire. They claim North Carolina, vanquish Collins, and spring upsets in Texas and Alaska. But the chamber remains in GOP hands because Michigan Democrats could not reunify after a bruising primary. Kick away a winnable race in Michigan and, in this scenario, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska also becomes a must. 

So don’t lose Michigan. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens to claim the Democratic nomination. All the instant analysis is true: This was a political earthquake and one of the biggest wins progressives have scored. Stevens was better funded and the candidate of the Democratic establishment. El-Sayed’s win is a sign of the importance of Gaza inside the Democratic coalition, and of shrinking support for Israel. Now, his ability to close the deal this fall will be a crucial test of progressive electability ahead of the 2028 presidential election. 

The race was also closer than expected. With a small number of votes outstanding, El-Sayed’s lead is just under 16,000. He fell short of a clear majority, winning with 48.5%. And while both candidates continue to say all the right things about coming together for what will be a very close battle against an old-school conservative in former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers this fall, the tight margin, El-Sayed’s failure to secure a true majority and the nastiness of the race could make that difficult.

After all, El-Sayed recently had to plead with his backers not to take personal shots at Stevens and her accent online. The airwaves were filled with millions of dollars in negative ads, many of them determined to paint El-Sayed as unelectable in the general. He called Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” She retorted that “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” A unity breakfast might not be enough to paper all that over in a matter of weeks, especially if the super PACs that backed Stevens continue to spend millions to fan the flames against El-Sayed in the general election. 

This race could have been run in a far different and more positive manner. If it had, both progressives and Democrats as a party would be in a much stronger position heading into what will likely be a very competitive general election that decides control of the chamber. The stakes are high and will determine, among other things, whether Trump can confirm Supreme Court justices over the next two years.

Imagine the difference that ranked choice voting would have had in the primary. A third Democrat, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, won over 4% of the vote despite dropping out of the race several weeks ago. She won 61,000-plus votes, almost four times the difference between El-Sayed and Stevens. If Michigan used RCV in its primaries — like Maine, New York City and dozens of cities nationwide — the winner would have been able to claim a majority, and an easier path to unifying the party.

Some $60 million of negative ads flooded Michigan’s airwaves over this primary. Ranked choice voting wouldn’t have stopped that entirely; important, contentious issues were at stake. Outside dollars were a given. Yet RCV has been proven to lower the temperature in races like this and encourage conversation, coalition-building and respect. 

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It’s entirely likely that an RCV race would have looked quite different. McMorrow and other challengers — forced out to provide voters with a binary, two candidate contest without spoilers — would have been able to stay in the race. Then, El-Sayed, Stevens and the others would have had every incentive to build a coalition through second choices to reach 50%. That comes from finding common ground, not from scare ads and nasty attacks. The winner of a race like that would be in far stronger shape, and ready to focus on the Republicans. Instead, El-Sayed is stuck trying to rebuild an intra-party coalition after the primary.

Instead, as McMorrow faded, party leaders and donors leaned on the state senator, a promising, charismatic politician, to exit and reduce the field to two. But this strategy didn’t produce a majority winner. It just limited choices before voters, and the winner still fell short of a majority. Democrats look less unified in a must-win race as a result.

Ranked-choice voting doesn’t fix everything that’s wrong with our politics. It’s not a silver bullet that cures polarization, settles complicated policy debates or ensures that everyone gets along. But it’s such an obviously useful tool in races like this that it makes zero sense not to use it. 

Win or lose, progressives and centrists will debate the meaning of this race for some time to come. That’s fine. In some form, the party is endlessly re-fighting 2016 over and over again. The more immediate issue is that primaries like this are going to continue to be contentious. Democrats would be in a better position to win races they absolutely must win if they adopted ranked choice voting in primaries like Michigan’s this. (Republican primaries would benefit from this nonpartisan tool too). 

This is a lesson that Democrats absolutely must learn ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries. Then, it won’t simply be a schism between centrists and the left, but between multiple candidates within each lane and others representing different perspectives, backgrounds and parts of the country.

It will be painful for Democrats if they fail to take the Senate because they lost Michigan. But if that happens, it might not be because El-Sayed was too progressive for a swing state — but because Democrats chose their nominee through a process that bloodied and embittered everyone with no hope of consensus, and no easy path to reconciliation. In Michigan, and in other bitter primaries to come, they are going to need one.

The post Ranked choice voting could have saved Michigan appeared first on Salon.com.

For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago.

The good doctor exercised his Fifth Amendment rights in response to most questions, correctly pointing out that Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.” Furious that Fauci wouldn’t give him even minor discrepancies as an excuse to launch go-nowhere perjury charges, Paul and other Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted several days later to hold the 85-year-old in contempt. 

Most voters don’t even want to think about the pandemic anymore. But the social media response to the Fauci hearing showed that one group of people wishes it could be 2020 all over again: MAGA diehards. Right-wing accounts went buck wild with posts reviving all their favorite lies from the pandemic, from claiming vaccines don’t work to insisting that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon. The What’s Resonating newsletter laid out the astonishing levels of media coordination on the day of the committee hearing: 

Right-leaning accounts posted 2,300 times about Fauci yesterday—for comparison, that’s more post volume than the Super Bowl (1,900 posts for right-leaning accounts, same for left-leaning accounts). The coordination is notable—Fauci was mentioned in an astonishing 20% of all right-leaning posts yesterday, with three entities mentioning him more than 75 times in a day.

For normal people, yearning for a time when we were socially isolated and afraid of dying from a highly contagious virus is downright bizarre. MAGA, though, has a reason to feel nostalgia for a pandemic that killed millions. It was an era when the GOP got to do what they love more than anything: play the victim as loudly as possible before huge audiences that were especially vulnerable to disinformation.

The pandemic was a painful, scary time that many of us have tried to block out. But at the height of the pandemic, the right found both unity and energy by denying the seriousness of a virus that was, at its height, killing thousands of people a day. Echoing Trump’s “hoax” language about the pandemic, MAGA decided the whole thing was being exaggerated — or even made up altogether — by Democrats for hazy but nefarious purposes. This created endless opportunities for conservative white people to insist that they are the most oppressed, put-upon people on the planet.

This was the era of angry white people going into grocery stores unmasked, so they could film themselves throwing tantrums when the underpaid, scared clerks asked them to follow the rules.  It was a moment when evangelical preachers, always hungry for proof that Christians are facing persecution, claimed it was a violation of religious freedom when they were asked to obey the same bans and restrictions on large indoor gatherings as everyone else. When a vaccine was finally released that offered protection against the deadliest version of the disease, MAGA was unwilling to give up a pandemic that was clearly serving their political purposes. Mass numbers of conservatives refused the vaccine, which cost many Republican lives and drew out the pandemic — and their opportunity to play the victim — for months longer than necessary.

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Fascist movements have historically thrived in times of great social stress that leave people vulnerable to misinformation and eager for scapegoats to blame, and the pandemic era was no different. With people isolated and bored at home during the lockdown, many were more willing to engage in conspiracy theory content that runs rampant online. The pandemic was the peak of QAnon, sucking in millions with elaborate fantasies that Trump was a savior out to defeat a worldwide Satanic child cannibalism cabal. Many people, some of whom had even identified as liberal in the past, were radicalized to the right. Fauci became a favorite scapegoat for people who wanted to believe there was an evil mastermind behind the virus, instead of viral replication and transmission. It’s easy to forget it now, but Jan. 6 was fueled by Covid-19 and the sense of disconnection that drove a lot of once-ordinary people to lose their intellect and rationale. 

Five years later, MAGA isn’t doing so hot. Between the Iran war and a faltering economy, Trump’s presidency is failing, and his approval ratings are in the toilet. In this environment, it has become increasingly hard for conservatives to play the victim when Trump has unleashed a secret police in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is rounding up people and sending them to detainment camps. People aren’t as isolated; they are reconnecting with the real world. MAGA media is fracturing, and their audiences are a small fraction of what they had during the pandemic. Republican in-fighting has grown to the point where podcaster Tucker Carlson, once a loyal Trump ally, is fueling speculation that he’s going to start a third-party. 

Right-wing politics has always been about escaping from contemporary problems by hiding in nostalgia. After all, “Make America Great Again” is a painfully literal version of that mentality. So it’s no surprise that the movement is responding to their current stress with fantasies about bringing back the glory days. By reviving the harassment campaign against Fauci, the GOP has inadvertently revealed the time they long to return to, an era that is remembered by most people as miserable and deadly. 

There’s no more compelling indictment of MAGA than this: The moment they felt most ascendent was when everyone else was in hell.

The post MAGA has pandemic nostalgia appeared first on Salon.com.

Elvis Brooks thought he had an airtight case when he applied for compensation from the state of Louisiana after he was wrongfully convicted in a fatal bar shooting that kept him in prison for more than four decades.

The 69-year-old New Orleans native has never wavered in his claims of innocence, insisting since his 1977 arrest that the cops had the wrong guy. But it would take nearly 45 years and a prosecutor admitting he failed to turn over key fingerprint evidence before the courts threw out Brooks’ conviction.

That decision made Brooks eligible for up to $480,000 under a program created by Louisiana lawmakers to pay those wrongfully convicted in a state with one of the highest rates of overturned guilty verdicts. But Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, the top prosecutor in the state, has vigorously fought Brooks’ compensation claim, asserting in court filings that he is still guilty and therefore should not receive any money at all.

And it isn’t just Brooks: Since taking office two years ago, Murrill has opposed all but one of 23 compensation claims brought by people whose convictions have been vacated by the courts. These include cases in which the men were exonerated through DNA or blood evidence and others in which police are accused of fabricating evidence. Once, Murrill even threatened to block an exoneree’s ability to obtain a license to practice law if he didn’t drop his claim.

Civil rights attorneys say Brooks’ case is one of the most egregious examples of a wrongful conviction in recent years. Murrill has been pushing the court since September 2024 to reject his compensation claim and also to reinstate a manslaughter charge against him. The case is pending before a district court judge in New Orleans; attorneys are scheduled to appear for the next hearing Monday.

When Brooks heard what Murrill was trying to do, five months after he’d filed his claim, he said he was flooded with anger and disbelief. Once again, he said, the state was trying to rip away his good name and falsely brand him a killer.

“She knows people are innocent but she doesn’t care,” Brooks said of Murrill during a recent interview, his voice rising with frustration. “She wouldn’t want nobody to do this to one of her loved ones.”

Some states that have more recently created compensation funds have experienced startup problems. In Michigan, narrow criteria and confusion over eligibility have prevented exonerees from getting paid. But in Louisiana, conservative politicians who oppose the very existence of a compensation fund and therefore fight nearly every claim have proven to be the biggest obstacle.

Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who served as attorney general for eight years, during which time he hired Murrill as the state’s solicitor general, opposed 10 of 12 compensation claims during his tenure. Both have staked their political careers on a tough-on-crime agenda. By contrast, Murrill’s more moderate Republican predecessor, Buddy Caldwell, who served as attorney general from 2008 to 2015, opposed just 33% of all claims.

Murrill’s hard-line tactics, particularly in Brooks’ case, stand out among her peers in other states, said Jeffrey Gutman, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University Law School and a national expert on compensation funds.

“I can’t think of an attorney general who has been quite as aggressive in trying to prevent people from getting compensation,” Gutman said.

Murrill, through her spokesperson, declined interview requests and did not answer questions regarding her opposition to the compensation fund. Both she and Landry have made their views on the fund clear during recent legislative sessions. Murrill told lawmakers last year that defending the state against these claims consumes an enormous amount of time and resources and that the fund should be abolished altogether. And in June, Landry vetoed a bill passed unanimously by the Republican-controlled Legislature that would have increased the amount paid to the wrongfully convicted. In his veto statement, Landry painted many of the exonerees as “convicted criminals” whose only interest is money.

Murrill’s opposition doesn’t necessarily mean that Brooks and other exonerees won’t eventually be compensated. The claims are ultimately decided by one of a number of district court judges, whose approach to this issue may vary. But it ensures that a process the law says should take no more than five months could instead drag on for years, exacting financial hardship and emotional pain on people who have already endured decades of both, said Herbert Larson, an attorney representing exonerees and a senior professor at the Tulane University Law School.

“If they’ve got DNA evidence that points at somebody else, if they’ve got fingerprints that point at somebody else, if it looks like sloppy police work, then we should pay the money and not spend the next two years litigating it,” Larson said. “That’s not a very effective use of time and money on the part of the attorney general.”

Brooks filed his application in 2024, but more than two years later, his case has yet to be heard by a district court judge. After having 42 years of his life stolen — missing his son’s childhood and losing his parents and three siblings while he was behind bars — Brooks said he shouldn’t continue to suffer at the hands of the state.

“It’s miserable and it’s frustrating, the games they play,” he said. “But if they think I’m going to give up, wave the white flag, they got me wrong.”

Conflicting Evidence and a One-Day Trial

On most days, Brooks can be found riding his bicycle down to Tricou and Douglas streets in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, where he was raised, or through the French Quarter, where as teens, he and his friends would go to meet girls.

But there is one place he avoids: a vacant lot at the intersection of Dauphine and Alabo streets. That’s where the Welcome Inn once stood, and where a murder took place that would change his life.

In July 1977, a man named Cecil Lloyd was seated at the bar in the local dive when he was shot to death during an armed robbery. Less than three weeks later, police arrested 19-year-old Brooks.

There was no physical evidence tying him to the killing, and a dozen people testified that Brooks was at a family party at the time of the shooting. But three white witnesses said they saw the perpetrators in the dimly lit room and picked Brooks, who is Black, out of a photographic lineup. Although studies have shown that witnesses often have difficulty correctly identifying suspects of another race, and despite the fact that the three witnesses gave conflicting descriptions, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder after a one-day trial.

What the jurors weren’t told is that fingerprints lifted from beer cans held by the robbers did not match Brooks’, or that police suspected the same men had robbed several people less than a block away just before the Welcome Inn robbery, according to prosecutor records discovered by Brooks’ attorneys 40 years later. The victims of the earlier crime were shown a photo of Brooks and ruled him out as a suspect.

After his conviction, Brooks was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola at a time when the maximum-security prison was considered one of the most violent in the country. Three years after Brooks arrived, his brother Errol, who was serving a 99-year sentence there for armed robbery, was stabbed to death.

“Angola was a madhouse,” Brooks said. “A hellhole.”

While Brooks served his life sentence, the criminal justice system was being revolutionized through the introduction of DNA evidence and, with it, proof that innocent people had been convicted. This led to a deeper look into other factors contributing to wrongful convictions, including prosecutorial misconduct and mistaken eyewitness identifications, especially those made by witnesses with different racial backgrounds from the suspects.

As a result, the number of exonerations nationwide increased from 25 in 1989 to 259 in 2022, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project operated by universities in Michigan and California. By 2025, Orleans Parish, where Brooks was convicted, had the highest rate of exonerations among U.S. counties with more than 300,000 residents, according to the registry.

Many states reacted to the rise in exonerations by creating funds to compensate those who were wrongly convicted. Louisiana established its fund in 2005 and today is one of 39 states, in addition to the District of Columbia, that compensate the wrongfully incarcerated. But it is far from a rubber-stamp process.

To be eligible, a person has to have been imprisoned as a result of a conviction that was later vacated by a court. Applicants, like in all states with these funds, must then prove their innocence. Having a conviction thrown out is not enough to do so: A court can vacate someone’s conviction for a number of reasons, including an ineffective attorney or significant errors committed by the judge or prosecution. But that only means there were problems with the original trial. It is up to the person applying for compensation to present evidence that they did not commit the crime.

In many states, innocence in the compensation process is proven by a “preponderance of evidence,” which attorneys understand to mean that there is more than a 50% chance that the person is innocent. This is the standard used in civil cases. The threshold is higher in Louisiana and some other states, where applicants are required to prove they are innocent by “clear and convincing” evidence. This is supposed to leave little doubt in the judge’s eyes that they did not commit the crime.

That’s the hurdle Brooks must clear to receive any money from the state.

Exonerated but Not Paid

Brooks filed for compensation in April 2024, just a few months after Murrill and Landry took office. He didn’t know much about the process, he said, except that it was meant to help people like himself get back on their feet after a wrongful conviction. Brooks assumed it wouldn’t take long at all, maybe a few months. But like nearly all the others, his request was met with fierce opposition from the attorney general’s office.

Murrill, seen by many as a future candidate for governor, has earned the reputation as a fighter unapologetic about the methods she is willing to use to enact a conservative agenda, both in the political world and the courtroom.

Verite News and ProPublica interviewed the attorneys of 17 of the people whose compensation claims Murrill opposed. The majority expressed shock at her tactics. When Landry was attorney general, his office regularly spoke with defense attorneys and assured them that the attorney general would not stand in the way of compensation in the rare times the office agreed that a former prisoner was innocent, according to two of the attorneys. Landry did not respond to a request for comment.

Those conversations no longer happen under Murrill, the attorneys said. In nearly every case, Murrill’s office has insisted that the exoneree either is guilty or has failed to sufficiently prove his innocence.

Of the 23 people who have had active claims under Murrill, four so far have been awarded compensation. The rest are pending. Of the successful claims, two of the men were cleared by DNA evidence, while blood serum evidence was used to prove innocence in the third. Yet Murrill opposed all three, delaying their compensation for nearly two years. (In the fourth case, Murrill dropped her opposition to Patrick Brown’s claim after the victim testified that the exoneree was innocent).

Jarvis Ballard is one of the four. He spent 23 years in prison before his 1999 rape conviction was vacated after his DNA was not detected in any of the blood or semen samples found at the scene. In addition, the victim reported two men committed the crime; however, three men, including Ballard, were prosecuted and convicted. The other two men testified that Ballard was not involved.

The St. Bernard Parish district attorney’s office admitted in a 2021 statement that the office had made a mistake in prosecuting him. “DNA evidence, witnesses recanting their prior statements and polygraph testing all supported the ‘actual innocence’ claims of Jarvis Ballard,” district attorney Perry Nicosia wrote.

In another case, Darrill Henry was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for a double homicide. Nine years later, New Orleans Criminal District Court Judge Dennis Waldron threw out his conviction after DNA evidence found under the fingernails of one of the victims cleared him, saying there was “clear and convincing evidence that he is indeed factually innocent of the crime.”

And in a third case, Sullivan Walter was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1986 for burglary and rape, among other charges. He was only 17 at the time but was tried as an adult. His conviction was overturned in 2022 when blood evidence ruled him out as the perpetrator.

“This is horrible,” Criminal District Judge Darryl Derbigny said to Walter as he ordered his release from prison, according to news reports. “I’m at a loss of words to express the sorrow and the anger I have at the treatment you’ve been dealt by the system.”

But in all three cases, Murrill told the courts that despite the DNA or blood evidence, the men did not sufficiently prove their innocence.

“They’re taking a position that is inconsistent with what many prosecutors argue every day in seeking conviction,” Zac Crawford, staff attorney at Innocence & Justice Louisiana, a nonprofit law firm specializing in wrongful convictions, said about Murrill’s office. “Prosecutors frequently use DNA testing to match someone to a crime as a means of getting a guilty verdict, and they are not willing to concede that that same evidence also proves innocence.”

Murrill hasn’t confined her fight against compensation claims to the courts, having used threats to prevent at least one exoneree, Calvin Duncan, from even pursuing a claim. After serving 28 years of a life sentence for murder, he accepted a plea deal to secure his release in 2011. Ten years later, a district court judge ruled that he was factually innocent and threw out his conviction, citing the suppression of exonerating evidence by police, among other factors.

When Duncan filed for compensation in 2023, Murrill issued a threat, Duncan said during a recent legislative hearing: drop the claim or she would charge him with perjury for falsely saying he was exonerated. At the time, Duncan was pursuing a law license. He said Murrill added a second warning: If he didn’t drop the claim, she would report him to the bar association to prevent him from getting his license.

Duncan said he reluctantly agreed to withdraw his compensation application, with the understanding that Murrill would then drop the matter. But she didn’t keep her word, Duncan told legislators. During Duncan’s campaign last year for New Orleans criminal court clerk, Murrill sent him a letter threatening “further action from this office” if he didn’t stop referring to himself as being exonerated. “You have not proven you were actually innocent,” she told him.

She then used his plea deal against him, saying, “You knowingly and voluntarily pled guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery.”

Duncan, who declined to comment, won his election but was stripped of his office after legislators, with Landry’s support, eliminated his position. His campaign manager said Duncan has paused his pursuit of a law license in part because of his race for court clerk and Murrill’s persistent threats.

Malcolm Alexander spent nearly 38 years in prison before being exonerated through DNA evidence in 2018. Despite the opposition of Landry, then attorney general, Alexander was later awarded compensation, though he said these claims aren’t all about money. Even more important is that when a judge awards an exoneree compensation, it comes with a definitive ruling that the person is, in fact, innocent.

So while Murrill’s desire to deprive exonerees of money is terrible, Alexander said, her efforts to prevent them from having their names officially cleared are truly reprehensible.

“It Wasn’t Right From Day One”

Brooks was 60 years old and had been in Angola prison for nearly two-thirds of his life when his legal team discovered a wealth of new evidence that appeared to conclusively prove his innocence. Among these items were fingerprints lifted from beer cans held by the shooters during the Welcome Inn bar robbery and fatal shooting. And those fingerprints did not match Brooks’.

In January 2019, Brooks’ legal team filed a motion to overturn his murder conviction. Leon Cannizzaro, the New Orleans district attorney at the time, objected, telling the court that his office did not purposefully withhold any evidence.

Brooks said he was ready to wage a lengthy legal battle to prove he was not a murderer. But five months later, Cannizzaro approached Brooks with an unexpected offer: If he agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter, his life sentence would be reduced to 42 years and he would be allowed to walk out of Angola prison. Brooks agonized over the decision. The idea of standing up in court and saying he had killed someone was unimaginable. But he also didn’t want to die an old man on a rusted prison cot. So he took the deal.

Two years later, as Brooks was struggling to adjust to life outside of prison and still strapped with a felony record, his legal team found a memo in a pile of records they had requested from the district attorney’s office that detailed a 2019 internal meeting with one of the prosecutors at Brooks’ murder trial. He admitted that they didn’t turn over the fingerprint evidence and that it would have been helpful to Brooks’ case, according to the memo.

The meeting had occurred just two weeks before Cannizzaro offered Brooks the plea deal. If Brooks had known about the prosecutor’s admission, he said, he never would have accepted the plea.

“It wasn’t right from day one,” Brooks said.

In 2022, when presented with this new information, the district court agreed. It ruled that the district attorney withheld crucial evidence when offering the plea deal and threw it out along with Brooks’ conviction. Current New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams declined to retry the case, clearing the way for Brooks to file his compensation claim two years later.

Cannizzaro could not be reached for comment. In a statement issued after Brooks’ 2019 release from prison, the former district attorney said he offered Brooks the plea deal because his office believed he was “rehabilitated and will not go out and reoffend.” Cannizzaro rejected the idea that Brooks was wrongfully convicted, saying at the time that if he were innocent, Brooks and his attorneys would have turned down the deal. “Notably, they did not,” he said.

Murrill is now using that discredited plea deal against Brooks, just as she did in Duncan’s case, in an attempt to quash his compensation claim. In a September 2024 motion, Murrill claimed that by vacating Brooks’ manslaughter conviction while he was a free man and not a prisoner, the court essentially pardoned him. And under the state constitution, only the governor has the power to issue pardons. As a result, she has asked that the court reinstate the manslaughter charge against Brooks.

Murrill did not, however, address the fact that the court vacated the deal because prosecutors intentionally withheld key information, according to court records.

In her motion, Murrill said she only learned the plea deal had been thrown out when Brooks filed his claim. And that, said attorney Harry Daniels, who represents Brooks, is when she started the effort to reinstate charges against him. “It’s only when he started demanding what he’s entitled to for being wrongfully convicted that this even became an issue,” Daniels said.

Brooks has described applying for compensation as torturous, a barricade that is constantly preventing him from being able to move forward. And life has been difficult: His only source of income is his $994-a-month Social Security payment, enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a low-income senior center.

There are moments, though, he said, when he allows himself to dream about what he would do with the money. The first would be to buy a bigger headstone for his family gravesite, where his parents, four siblings and a nephew are buried in a single plot in the Green Street Cemetery. All but one died while he was wrongfully imprisoned. There is room on the headstone for only three of the seven names.

“I want to put all our names on there,” he said. “Give them some respect, especially my momma.”

The post He’s eligible for up to $480K for being wrongly imprisoned for 42 years. The GOP AG says no appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump this week criticized Texas for being anti-data centers, just days after Republican Gov. Greg Abbott paused industry-wide approvals until the companies provide the state with more information on things like power and water use.

“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” Trump said in a nearly hourlong sit-down interview with Punchbowl News released Friday. “I think it’s a mistake. And I’m not taking positions, I just think it’s a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community.”

Abbott’s spokesperson in a statement Friday defended the policy move as necessary because less than 10% of data centers responded to the state’s requests for them to report their power and water usage.

“Many are unaware that [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] is tracking a more than 500% increase in peak electricity demand. This unprecedented growth could endanger the reliability and stability of the Texas electric grid,” Andrew Mahaleris said. “The Governor’s pause requires data centers to provide [Public Utility Commission of Texas] and ERCOT with the required information for them to make fully informed decisions. Simply put, Texans must come first.”

The moratorium, which Abbott announced Monday, will require state regulatory agencies to audit proposed data centers seeking connection to the state’s electric grid and find out whether they’re receiving tax breaks, how much power and water they will use, what kind of cooling they will use, what efforts they’ve made to reduce community impacts, and who owns the facilities.

Any projects that fail Abbott’s ordered “comprehensive verification and audit” should be denied connection to the grid, the governor said.

The move was in contrast to the Republican’s typical pro-business stature, underlining how the data center debate has put Texas conservatives between Trump and angry constituents in rural, unincorporated areas where The Texas Tribune has reported most planned data centers are set to be located. Texans have mobilized across the state to oppose the new developments, airing concerns that the facilities will drain local water supplies, drive up electric bills and cause noise, light and air pollution.

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Abbott’s announcement came after he had previously been bullish about the industry, calling Texas “epicenter of AI development” in November when he unveiled Google’s $40 billion investment in the state that included data center facility development.

The three-term governor’s Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, has made greater oversight of data centers a key piece of her campaign.

“Abbott’s call for a ‘pause’ could be for one day – and no one buys it,” she said in a statement this week. “He’s taken millions from data center CEOs while giving Texans lip service to non-existent restrictions.”

Trump went on to say that data centers are “tremendously important for the economics.”

“For Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake in the sense that it could be bigger than oil,” he added.

Disclosure: Google and Punchbowl News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post Trump calls Texas’ data center opposition a “mistake” appeared first on Salon.com.

A fashion label called Fecal Matter is having a moment.

Matières Fécales — literally French for “fecal matter” — has gone from an intentionally provocative outsider project to dressing some of the world’s biggest celebrities, including Zendaya, Lady Gaga, Demi Moore and Kylie Jenner.

And yes, the name is intentional.

Canadian designers Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran founded the label after meeting as fashion students in Montreal. Frustrated with an industry they viewed as wasteful, exclusionary and obsessed with consumption, the pair wanted a name that reflected their criticism of it.

They landed on Matières Fécales — not the more familiar French “merde,” or “caca,” but the considerably more clinical term for fecal matter.

The designers initially became known for an intentionally unsettling aesthetic that included shaved eyebrows, extreme makeup, alien-like silhouettes and their infamous “skin heels,” footwear designed to appear as though a human foot had been stretched into a high heel.

Now, Fecal Matter has gone decidedly mainstream.

Zendaya recently wore an enormous white winged creation from the label to the premiere of “The Odyssey,” styled by longtime collaborator Law Roach. Lady Gaga wore the designers to the Grammys, while Demi Moore appeared in Matières Fécales at Cannes.

Kylie Jenner has even worn the brand in a Dunkin’ campaign.

The label’s growing popularity presents a certain irony for a project founded partly as a critique of fashion’s excesses: Matières Fécales is now luxury fashion itself.

Pieces from the label can sell for hundreds or even more than $1,000 through luxury retailers, while the designers have moved from selling early creations online to appearing on some of fashion’s most prominent stages.

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And perhaps that’s also the point.

Fashion has a long history of turning provocation, rebellion and even criticism of the industry itself into something desirable — and expensive. Matières Fécales set out to confront a fashion industry they believed was full of excess and waste.

So, the fashion industry responded by making Fecal Matter chic.

The post “Fecal Matter” mocked luxury fashion. Then luxury fashion bought it appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump knows grass.

In fact, he would like Americans to know that he knows quite a lot about it.

“I’m very good at grass because I have a lot of golf courses all over the world,” Trump said Wednesday during an appearance at the White House, once again returning to one of his more persistent areas of self-proclaimed expertise.

Trump was discussing changes he has made to the White House grounds, including replacing portions of the Rose Garden lawn with a stone patio, when the conversation turned to turf.

“I know grass,” Trump said. “I know grass better than most people.”

It wasn’t the first time.

During a visit with U.S. Park Police officers in Washington last August, Trump offered an even more expansive assessment of his landscaping credentials.

“I know more about grass than any human being,” Trump said, explaining that his experience operating golf courses had given him extensive knowledge of different varieties of turf.

The president then turned his attention to Washington’s federal parks, complaining about patches of dead grass and offering advice about how they should be maintained.

Grass has become a recurring feature of Trump’s effort to remake parts of Washington and the White House grounds according to his preferred aesthetic.

Since returning to office, Trump has taken a hands-on interest in landscaping around the White House, including the controversial decision to pave over the Rose Garden lawn. He has also criticized the condition of parks around Washington and pushed federal officials to improve their appearance.

Trump’s interest isn’t limited to grass.

The president has weighed in on paving stones, marble, flagpoles and other aesthetic details around the White House as he reshapes the presidential grounds. He is also pursuing construction of a massive 90,000-square-foot ballroom complex despite a federal appeals court ruling blocking most aboveground work without congressional approval.

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But when it comes to landscaping, Trump maintains that his experience gives him particular authority.

Golf courses, after all, require quite a bit of grass.

“I’ve had tremendous experience,” Trump said of the subject last year.

For anyone keeping score, that leaves Trump’s publicly stated resume including businessman, president, golf-course owner — and, apparently, one of the world’s foremost grass experts.

The post “I’m very good at grass”: Trump assures the U.S. amid his renovation projects appeared first on Salon.com.