Timothy Williams

The man, Jarrod W. Ramos, had previously pleaded not guilty on 23 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder, after what is considered the deadliest attack against journalists in the United States. A circuit court judge in Maryland, Laura Ripken, accepted Ramos’ plea and found him guilty after a lengthy hearing Monday.

Editors, reporters and a sales assistant were killed in the June 2018 shooting at The Capital, a daily newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. Ramos had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, the community newspaper chain that publishes The Capital.

A trial to determine whether he is criminally responsible is expected to start Nov. 4. If he is found not criminally responsible, he could be sent to a state psychiatric facility instead of prison.

Prosecutors said they had assembled overwhelming evidence proving that Ramos had carried out the attack. In court filings, prosecutors said they planned to show the jury surveillance videotape of the shooting, in which a gunman is seen firing shotgun blasts through the newspaper office’s glass doors and then continuing to fire once inside.

Anne Colt Leitess, the Anne Arundel County state’s attorney, told the court Monday that Ramos had barricaded shut the back door of the newsroom and an insurance business across the hall before opening fire.

Wendi Winters, a reporter at the newspaper, tried to stop Ramos by wielding a recycling bin, prosecutors said. Winters, 65, was killed in the attack.

Once authorities got inside the building, Leitess said, police officers found Ramos under a desk, hiding silently. Prosecutors said an officer’s body-worn video camera recorded Ramos saying: “I surrender. I surrender. I’m your shooter.”

When authorities first asked Ramos his name, Leitess said, he responded, “You don’t know my name?” Ramos then told them to talk to the leaders of the newspaper.

This article originally appeared in

Suspect Shifts to Guilty Plea in Newsroom Mass Killing

A man charged with killing five people in a Maryland newsroom last year changed his plea to guilty Monday but will still pursue an insanity defense, arguing he should not be held criminally responsible, authorities said.

A trial to determine whether he is criminally responsible is expected to start Nov. 4.

If Ramos is found not criminally responsible, he could be sent to a state psychiatric facility instead of prison.

Ramos had filed a defamation lawsuit against Capital Gazette Communications and several of its employees in July 2012, about a year after it published an article about his guilty plea in a previous harassment case. In that case, he was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation and ordered to attend counseling.

A judge dismissed the lawsuit when Ramos could not identify anything that had been falsely reported or that he had been harmed by the article.

Suspect in Capital Gazette Shooting Pleads Guilty

A man charged with killing five people in a Maryland newsroom last year changed his plea to guilty Monday but will still pursue an insanity defense that argues he should not be held criminally responsible, authorities said.

She has grown tired of people’s moral qualms about what she does for a living, of police harassment, and of the dangers of the work. But she is doing more than stewing about it.

Instead, Spellman is one of the architects of a bill before Washington’s City Council that would make it the first American city to decriminalize prostitution, placing the nation’s capital at the forefront of a growing movement that seeks to permit the activities of prostitutes, as well as pimps and johns, and to allow bordellos. An initial hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Spellman, a transgender woman and activist, has worked for more than two years with David Grosso, a City Council member, and advocacy groups in the city to try to marshal support for the legislation.

The proposal is dividing the city’s progressive community, pitting some women’s groups against advocates for sex workers. Some prostitutes who have been sex trafficked find themselves on the other side from sex workers who have not been. But all sides agree that prostitution practiced openly would reverberate well beyond the city’s thriving but shadowy sex industry of street prostitution, massage parlors, strip clubs and high-end call girls.

Prostitutes would most likely work openly out of homes in neighborhoods across the city. Certain blocks could become de facto red-light districts. And policing strategy would have to change so officers could distinguish pimps from sex traffickers.

Prostitution in the United States is legal only in a few counties in Nevada. In all, there are about 20 legal brothels in the state.

Four of the council’s 13 members have signed on as co-sponsors. Supporters say the bill — versions of which have recently made little headway in New York state, San Francisco, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and elsewhere — is the only effective way to combat sex trafficking. They say that only when every aspect of prostitution among consenting adults is made legal will prostitutes feel secure enough to report criminal activity, including coercion and abuse by pimps or sex buyers, without fear of arrest.

“It is an outdated law based on moral outrage,” Spellman, 52, a longtime advocate for sex workers, said about existing prohibitions on prostitution. “Why are they arresting people for having casual sex? I understand the need to protect people, and there are people being exploited, but not in the numbers that people think.”

Critics counter that the initiative is promoting a narrative that is dangerously false. They say decriminalization would exacerbate the sex trade’s worst abuses because it would increase demand for prostitution. That, they say, would force ever younger girls into prostitution and make it difficult for law enforcement to detect sex trafficking cases because citizens might call 911 less frequently if prostitution is legal.

Opponents have also spoken darkly about the nation’s capital becoming a destination for sex tourism.

“This bill is a sex trafficker’s dream,” said Yasmin Vafa, executive director of Rights4Girls, a Washington-based human rights organization that seeks to end violence against girls and young women. “This will cause more harm and more exploitation of our most marginalized people. Girls have told us they heard about the bill for the first time from their pimps, who were excited about it. If pimps and sex buyers are on the same side of this legislative proposal, doesn’t that say something to the other supporters?”

Groups supporting decriminalization include the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, Amnesty International and the World Health Organization. Opponents include the National Organization for Women and World Without Exploitation, a coalition of groups dedicated to ending sexual trafficking and exploitation.

The two sides speak about prostitution in very different terms.

For supporters, sex work for adults can be a viable, well-compensated profession that is generally free of exploitation. Pimps are referred to as managers and violence is uncommon. They argue that laws forbidding bordellos mean that prostitutes are unable to have consensual sex with clients in the safety of their own homes.

Spellman, who says she does not have a pimp and handles her own business affairs, said pimps and managers serve a vital role — from providing security and transportation to arranging appointments and dealing with child care.

“If the issue people have about pimps is that they are benefiting from other people’s labor, don’t they have managers who do that at McDonald’s?” she asked.

For opponents, however, prostitution cannot be separated from exploitation.

“This is an incredibly violent industry and a harmful industry,” said Lauren Hersh, national director of World Without Exploitation.

Many of the organizations that oppose decriminalizing pimps and johns support variations of what is known as the Nordic model, in which sex workers do not face criminal charges, and are instead offered social services, including housing.

Tina Frundt, a sex trafficking survivor and executive director of Courtney’s House in Washington, which provides services to children and young adults who have been trafficked, said 30% of the people who come to the center had been trafficked by relatives. Most are between 11 and 19 years old.

“I do not believe sex workers should be arrested — that’s a no-brainer,” she said. “But this bill legalizes pimping. This bill is horrible.”

In many ways, the disagreement is a sign of how quickly the decriminalization movement has become mainstream, an unexpected outgrowth of successful efforts during the past decade to call attention to racial disparities in mass incarceration and the mistreatment of women as part of the #MeToo movement. Prostitutes in many American cities are disproportionately African American, Native American and Latina women and transgender people, advocates say.

The murders of transgender women in recent years, some of whom were sex workers, have also fueled the movement. Advocates believe that decriminalizing sex work would specifically help protect transgender people because they often face discrimination when seeking jobs and decent housing.

Several cities have curtailed their arrests for prostitution in recent years, although buying sex is still prosecuted and pimping continues to be treated as a serious crime. Law enforcement officials say pimps are often also sex traffickers who force women and girls into prostitution through intimidation and violence, including kidnapping. Street gangs have increasingly become involved in organizing prostitution networks.

The experience of New Zealand, which decriminalized prostitution in 2003, is used by both sides to try to bolster their position.

Decriminalization advocates point to a 2012 study that found that “the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off” in New Zealand, while opponents call attention to the National Council of Women of New Zealand’s finding that some prostitutes continue to be as young as 13.

In Washington on an overcast autumn day this week, motorists could be observed pulling over and engaging in brief conversations with women who lingered on a sidewalk along a stretch of K Street, a few miles from the White House. The women would sometimes climb inside the vehicles and the driver would merge back into traffic.

The sex industry has grown as the city has gentrified, according to prostitutes and police. There have been numerous arrests on 14th Street and K Street in recent months, and prostitution in the K Street area has led to an FBI investigation into sex trafficking.

In 2017, police in Washington made 216 prostitution-related arrests, which includes crimes committed by prostitutes and pimps, according to police data. That figure increased to 519 in 2018, and there have already been nearly 800 prostitution-related arrests this year. The increase probably reflects changes in both police enforcement and in the prostitution market.

The K Street corridor is an illustration of why the legislation is needed, said Tiara Moten, an organizer with No Justice No Pride, a Washington-based group that works with the LGBT community.

“Decriminalizing sex work will make life easier not only for the people that complain about K Street, but also for the girls who are getting turned away from jobs, housing, health care and more,” she said. “Everyone needs to survive and everyone needs to make money.”

In addition to decriminalizing the entire sex industry, the legislation calls for the creation of a task force to study the law’s potential impact and then decide what changes might be necessary.

Despite the dire warnings of advocates about sex trafficking, Spellman said decriminalization cannot come soon enough for her and other transgender sex workers.

“People who have not walked in my shoes are telling me what’s best for me,” she said. People look at legalizing prostitution and see something nefarious, she said. “But what we’ve asked for is exactly what we need.”

In Washington, a Fight to Decriminalize Prostitution Divides Allies

WASHINGTON — Tamika Spellman, who is in her 50s, has worked as a prostitute since she was 14. The job, she said, is the most stable work she has had and helped put her son through college.

Overall, the nation’s crime rate decreased by 6.5%, led by a 6.9% decline in the property crime rate. It was the 16th year in a row in which property crimes dropped, the FBI said.

The decline in overall crime continues a decadeslong trend but follows a two-year uptick in violent crime in 2015 and 2016 that raised concerns about the possibility of a broad shift in the pattern.

“This largely shows we are not standing on the precipice of a national crime wave,” Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said of the latest crime statistics.

A number of large cities that had significant increases in murders in recent years had fewer killings in 2018, according to the FBI data. In cities with populations of more than 1 million people, the murder rate fell by 8.5% in 2018, including 14% in Chicago and 9% in Baltimore.

But several large cities saw their murder rates rise in 2018, including Washington, which had a 36% increase, and Philadelphia, which had a 10% rise.

Although crime has continued to fall, the number of rapes reported in 2018 increased by 2.7%. It was the only violent crime category that rose last year, according to the FBI report.

Criminologists said it was not clear whether more sexual assaults were occurring or more people were reporting assaults amid the “Me Too” movement.

Further complicating the results, the FBI has revised the way it classified rape to include males as victims and to expand the definition of rape to include types of attacks not previously counted. Since the FBI changed its guidelines in 2013, the number of reported rapes has grown by more than 18%, according to the data.

A similar increase in rapes was documented in an annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which was released this month. That survey asked people if they had been victims of crime during the past year, regardless of whether they had reported the incidents to law enforcement.

Murder Rate Drops Across U.S., but Not in All Large Cities

Violent crime in the United States, including murders, declined in 2018 for a second consecutive year, according to FBI data released Monday. The murder rate dropped by 6%, affected by significant declines in killings in Baltimore and Chicago. At the same time, more rapes were reported nationwide.

Brown Sr. asked the prosecuting attorney to reopen the case at a news conference Friday morning. Both state and federal prosecutors declined to charge Darren Wilson, the police officer, who resigned after the shooting.

“As a father, I vowed to protect my children,” Brown said. “I could not protect him that day and it breaks my heart.”

“We’re not stopping until we get justice,” he added.

The death of 18-year-old Brown Jr. — one of roughly 1,000 people killed by police each year — set into motion profound changes in policing, race relations and society that continue to reverberate.

Ferguson is a dramatically different city today than the one that erupted in violence five years ago after Brown’s death. The City Council, which had only one African-American member in 2014, now has six. The police department, which had only three African Americans on its 53-member force, is now about half black. Its chief, Jason Armstrong, is African American.

But Ferguson, its residents say, has also stubbornly remained the same place. Black people are still stopped by the police at disproportionate levels. The poverty rate remains above 20 percent. The Police Department lacks a neighborhood policing plan and has failed to collect data on police use of force.

At a memorial service Friday for Brown, mourners stood in silence for 4 1/2 minutes to represent the 4 1/2 hours his body was left lying in the street. The silence was followed by chants of “Mike Brown” and pledges to continue to seek justice.

“We haven’t achieved what we set out to accomplish, and we won’t stop until the police admit to what really happened that day,” said Jonathan Thomas, 31, from St. Louis. “You look around and nothing has changed. Same old, same old.”

The crowd of about 200 people, a mix of African Americans and whites, was made up largely of people who had been engaged in protests and for whom Brown remains an illustration of unfinished justice.

Afterward, they marched up Canfield Drive chanting, “Whose street? Our street.” It was on Canfield Drive that Brown was shot by a police officer.

This time, officers escorted them.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/ferguson-michael-brown.html" id="2b2d30a3-2377-3208-a51a-5f87bfd025b9">The New York Times</a>.

Five Years After Michael Brown's Death, His Father Wants a New Investigation

FERGUSON, Mo. — Five years to the day after the death of Michael Brown Jr., who was fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer, Michael Brown Sr. called Friday for a new investigation of his son’s death.

Democrats, who control the Oregon Senate as well as the House of Representatives, were preparing to vote on the measure last week when all 11 Republican senators disappeared. Without the votes to reject the bill, which would require businesses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Republicans denied the Democrats a needed quorum, blocking a vote from taking place in the Senate.

Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, has ordered the Oregon State Police to find the Senate Republicans and bring them back to the Capitol in Salem for a vote. As of Monday morning, none of the Republicans had been found. Some were said to have left the state. And there was no sign of a resolution.

What is this fight really about?

Oregon Democrats are trying to push through a bill that would significantly decrease the amount of greenhouse gases that businesses are legally allowed to emit. The Democrats say the bill is needed to reduce the effects of global warming.

Senate Republicans say the legislation would have a devastating effect on farmers, dairies and the state’s struggling logging industry, among others. More than that, Republicans say, the bill represents an existential threat to rural life, and they want the residents of Oregon to decide on the proposal, not the Democrats who control the state’s capital. Loggers have been protesting intermittently outside the Capitol for weeks, circling the building in their logging trucks on some days.

Democrats say the bill is critical to slowing the onset of climate change, which in Oregon has been blamed for drought and an extensive algae bloom off the coast in 2015 that devastated the shellfish industry from California to Alaska. Oregon Democrats want the legislation to be a model for other states.

What is in the bill?

The highly debated bill would make Oregon one of several states to impose an emissions-trading program, a market-based approach to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The bill would place limits on the amount of carbon dioxide that businesses could lawfully emit. By 2050, for instance, the bill would mandate an 80% reduction in emissions from 1990 levels.

Some businesses would be required to buy credits for every ton of greenhouse gas they produce. Those credits would then be purchased at special auctions and traded among businesses. Over time, the state would make fewer credits available, ultimately forcing companies to pollute less. The plan, commonly known as cap and trade, is modeled after a 2016 California law.

How does Oregon’s bill compare to other state climate policies?

It is far more extensive than most. Oregon would become just the second state, after California, to require that businesses in every sector of the economy pay for the planet-warming greenhouse gases that they emit.

Economists have long favored so-called carbon pricing policies as a particularly cost-effective way of tackling climate change. By making it more expensive to burn fossil fuels, cap-and-trade programs or carbon taxes give companies an incentive to reduce their emissions and switch to cleaner alternatives.

But so far, these policies have been a tough sell politically. Voters in Washington state twice rejected ballot initiatives that would have imposed a carbon tax. While 10 states in the Northeast have set up their own regional cap-and-trade program, it only affects electric power plants, which are responsible for about one-quarter of the nation’s emissions. Most states have shied away from this approach and have instead focused on requiring utilities to use more power from wind or solar generation, which is broadly popular with voters.

Oregon’s bill would go much further, directly regulating emissions from industries like cement and paper manufacturing, while also taking aim at the natural gas used to heat homes and the gasoline and diesel fuels that power cars and trucks. While scientists say that all of those sectors will need to be overhauled in order to head off the worst effects of global warming, the wider approach also increases the likelihood of political conflict, since every corner of the economy will be affected.

Will the Republican walkout kill the climate change measure?

The end of the legislative session is only a few days away, on Sunday. But Brown has threatened to call a special session if the climate change bill and other Democratic priorities are not voted on in the regular session because the Republicans haven’t reappeared.

The walkout over the climate bill is the second time in six weeks that Oregon Republicans — who are outnumbered in both houses of the state Legislature — have been frustrated enough to flee the Capitol to delay a vote they opposed. In May, Republicans disappeared for four days to block a vote on a school funding tax plan. Oregon is by no means the first state where a party in the minority has resorted to the tactic.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/oregon-climate-change-walkout.html" id="eaef9003-6353-3ed3-a94c-4fdef8081271">The New York Times</a>.

Oregon's climate bill and the case of the disappearing Republicans

A partisan legislative standoff in Oregon persisted Monday, as Republican state lawmakers stayed clear of the state Capitol for the fifth day in a row in an effort to block a climate change bill that Democrats are pressing to approve.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office charged Smith with seven counts, including battery on a police officer and resisting arrest. But after viewing body camera footage, a jury acquitted Smith, then 23, on most of the charges, and the prosecutors dropped the other counts. Smith’s lawyer said he does not believe a white person would have been arrested or prosecuted.

While the district attorney’s office disagreed with that assessment of the case, George Gascón, the district attorney, has acknowledged that a disproportionate number of African Americans are prosecuted in the city, which led him to ask a troubling question: To what extent does bias affect the work of prosecutors?

As a result, the office has begun experimenting with an approach it describes as “blind charging,” which prevents prosecutors in one of the nation’s busiest district attorney’s offices from seeing demographic information before making an initial decision on whether to charge someone.

Criminal justice experts said San Francisco appeared to be the first such office in the nation to test that approach.

“The question we want to ask ourselves is, ‘Would you charge based just on the behavior, without the race and other demographic information?’” Gascón said. “We wanted to see what might be causing a disparate application of the law.”

In recent weeks, the office has begun by removing details — like race and names — from police reports before turning those cases over to prosecutors to decide whether to press charges. Starting in July, the office intends to employ computer software designed by Stanford University researchers to redact a suspect’s race and name, and that of victims. Also removed will be locations where crimes were said to have been committed.

The only information prosecutors will initially have access to is an officer’s incident report, which generally includes the reason someone was stopped before an arrest, evidence that a crime was committed, witness statements and anything a suspect might say.

Only after assistant district attorneys make a preliminary decision about charges would they be permitted to access other information, including race and other demographic details, body camera footage and photos. In each case, regardless of the initial charging determination, all of the evidence will ultimately be reviewed, prosecutors said. If a prosecutor comes to a different conclusion between the first and second steps, that will be recorded and compared to historical data. Prosecutors will also be required to explain what changed their minds, and those patterns will be studied, the office said.

The experiment in blind charging comes as prosecutors’ offices across the nation have been instituting policy changes to grapple with what has been found to be extensive racial bias in the criminal justice system, which has led to disproportionate levels of incarceration among African Americans.

District attorneys in Brooklyn, Dallas County and elsewhere no longer prosecute low-level marijuana cases. Prosecutors in Philadelphia now handle shoplifting as a minor offense rather than a serious crime if the amount stolen is less than $500. And other district attorneys around the nation have stopped demanding bail for people facing misdemeanor charges.

Legal analysts said the San Francisco policy appears to go a step further by directly confronting ingrained racial bias that leads some prosecutors, for example, to file charges against African Americans for low-level drug offenses more frequently than against whites, even though studies show that white people use illicit drugs at higher rates.

“It strikes me as an interesting and intriguing thing to do because I don’t get a sense that there’s a lot of systemic change being attempted in this way,” said John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor and author of “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.”

Pfaff said the potential for bias might be greater among prosecutors than police officers because prosecutors are more likely to be white than police officers, and are generally from higher than average socio-economic backgrounds.

So far, blind charging has not been opposed by prosecutors’ organizations, police unions or crime victims’ rights groups.

Although there have been few detailed academic studies about bias among prosecutors, a 2017 report by Carlos Berdejo at the University of Loyola Law School found that white defendants in Wisconsin were 25% more likely than their black counterparts to have criminal charges dropped or reduced to less serious crimes.

Studies have repeatedly shown that San Francisco arrests and prosecutes African Americans at disproportionately high levels. And a 2016 Justice Department report found significant evidence of racial bias in the way the city’s police department enforces the law.

Although African Americans make up only about 6% of San Francisco’s population, they accounted for 41% of those arrested, 43% of those booked into jail, and 38% of cases filed by prosecutors between 2008 and 2014, according to the city.

Gascón, whose term expires early next year and who is not running for reelection, has frequently proposed ideas that run counter to notions about the work of district attorneys. He supported Proposition 47, an initiative that reduced punishment for some drug and property crimes; ordered his office to automatically wipe away old marijuana convictions; and supported legislation to seal people’s criminal records for misdemeanors and low-level felonies once they complete prison or jail sentences.

Gascón said an examination of cases handled by his office had showed no indication that his prosecutors make decisions motivated by implicit bias, but he said that the lopsided number of African Americans in the city’s criminal justice system compelled him to look deeper.

“We’ve found no bias, but we still have concerns,” he said.

For instance, a 2017 study commissioned by the district attorney’s office and performed by two independent criminologists determined that African-American suspects in San Francisco are less likely to have their cases dropped or dismissed than white suspects, and receive longer prison and jail sentences than others. The study concluded, however, that those results were likely not the result of bias, but of other factors, including that African-American defendants were more likely to have previous arrests, convictions and open cases.

In the 2016 case which led to the arrest and prosecution of Smith, the train passenger who told Smith that he smelled bad called 911 after Smith responded angrily, said Glenn Katon, Smith’s lawyer.

The man told the emergency operator that Smith had tried to rob him and might be armed, although Smith did not have a gun, according to court records.

Once the transit police arrived, a mobile phone video appeared to show Smith, who was with his pregnant girlfriend, being punched in the head by a police officer while he was handcuffed. The police say Smith spit at them.

After Smith was acquitted on most counts and the others were dropped, he sued the transit system and the officers and won a $40,000 settlement, Katon said.

Gascón’s office declined to comment on the case, but Max Szabo, a spokesman, said that “removing implicit bias and the implications of race” would help “enhance fairness in a system long plagued by inequities.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/us/prosecutor-race-blind-charging.html" id="0f3283a6-dd09-3561-a3cb-163ee09198e5">The New York Times</a>.

To avoid bias in court, prosecutors try leaving suspect's race out of it

While riding the train in San Francisco three years ago, a white man told an African-American man that he smelled bad and should move away from him. An argument followed, and the African-American man, Michael Smith, was eventually tackled by police officers and accused of assaulting them.

CBD, short for cannabidiol, is a chemical compound derived from the cannabis plant, but one that does not result in a high. It has become wildly popular during the past several months because of claims that it helps with a variety of ailments, from anxiety and diabetes to headaches and menstrual cramps.

But while CBD is now as common as coffee in some neighborhoods, sold in shopping malls and tested by a national hamburger chain, possession of CBD in some places can prompt an arrest.

In Duncanville, a suburb of Dallas, the authorities broke down the door of Wazwaz’s store, seized CBD products and thousands of dollars in cash, and confiscated employees’ personal cellphones.

“I’m not some mob boss,” Wazwaz said in an interview. “I’m a soccer mom with kids.”

Confusion over CBD dates back years, but it intensified last year when a provision of the 2018 Farm Bill lifted a federal ban on hemp production that had previously classified hemp as a controlled substance on a par with heroin.

Both hemp and marijuana are varieties of the cannabis plant, which is believed to have been among the first plants humans cultivated. The plants produce a family of chemicals known as cannabinoids, some of which are psychoactive — meaning they produce a high when smoked or ingested — while others are not. A major difference between marijuana and hemp lies in how much of each they produce.

Marijuana is rich in THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive component; it can account for as much as 40% of the total cannabinoid content. Hemp, on the other hand, is richer in CBD, and generally contains only 0.3% THC or less. CBD oils, which are processed from the hemp plant, are legal to possess under the new federal law as long as they, too, contain no more than 0.3% THC.

Most states, though, have yet to change their laws to match the new federal rules, leaving local police and prosecutors in a quandary over what is legal and what is not. The result has been a gold rush of CBD marketers, a raft of online ruminations about what is permissible, and, increasingly, confusion.

For instance, when farmers in Oregon and Kentucky, which produce large amounts of hemp, send their product through Oklahoma and Idaho, truck drivers are sometimes arrested by state and local police for drug trafficking.

Though now legal under federal law, CBD is still subject to regulation when it is sold with a claim of therapeutic benefit. Federal policy maintains that adding CBD oil to food products is the same as adding a prescription drug — in other words, forbidden without a doctor’s prescription. But states and cities have made their own rules on the issue, creating up a dizzying, sometimes contradictory patchwork of regulations for consumers, who also have few rigorous scientific trials or studies to rely on about the product’s true effects and limitations.

A recent Colorado law, for example, appears to clash with federal rules by stating that all parts of the hemp plant can be legally added to food for sale. And Missouri, which only a few months ago approved medical marijuana, now allows CBD to be served in alcohol.

Elsewhere, California, Georgia and New York City have sided with the federal authorities, banning the addition of CBD to food. In New York, health inspectors have begun to confiscate CBD-infused cookies.

Adding to the chaos, officials in Texas, Ohio, Nebraska and other states have arrested people for selling CBD products regardless of whether they contain levels of THC higher than the 0.3% permitted under the new federal rules.

The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled a public hearing this month on the safety, sale and use of products containing cannabis and cannabis-derived compounds, including CBD.

Texas is where much of the tension has arisen.

CBD products are widely available in Texas, even though state law allows prosecutors to charge people with a felony for possessing a product that contains even the slightest amount of THC.

In Austin, the police say they believe CBD products containing less than 0.3% THC are legal. Yet in Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Sharen Wilson, the district attorney, has said she will prosecute all CBD cases whether or not any level of THC is present.

Benson Varghese, a Texas criminal defense lawyer who has handled cannabinoid cases, said state lawmakers have not moved quickly enough to address the disarray.

“The citizens of Texas really need clarity,” he said, “because you have a lot of people who don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, but if you’re on the wrong side of a county line, you could be prosecuted for a felony.”

Residents in San Antonio may be confused even if they don’t cross any jurisdictional lines.

Joe Gonzales, the local prosecutor, said, “We won’t proceed on prosecuting CBD cases until the Texas Legislature clarifies the law.” But the city’s Police Department says it considers any amount of THC present in CBD to be illegal, punishable as a felony.

Around San Antonio, CBD is sold openly and shops display prominent advertisements for it. Three retailers said police officers were among their most dependable customers, using CBD oil for aches and pains as well as stress.

At the Dab Hemp Cafe in San Antonio’s Five Points neighborhood, the CBD-infused products for sale include juices, pastries, lip balm, face scrubs, suppositories, and drops added to coffee, hot chocolate or hibiscus tea.

“I have a lot of anxiety, and marijuana makes it worse, but this is calming,” Andrea Santinelli, 29, said of the daily dose of CBD she takes in her coffee.

The arrival of CBD was hardly calming in Duncanville, where police officers executed warrants in March on Wazwaz’s two tobacco shops, which also sell CBD products.

“I said, ‘Oh, we’re fine. We don’t have any marijuana. You can search as much as you want,’” Wazwaz recalled.

But when the officers began to confiscate hemp and CBD products, Wazwaz said she told them, “You know this is industrial hemp, right? And you know this is CBD oil?’”

The Duncanville police confiscated nearly $12,000 in cash, two firearms, cellphones belonging to employees, items containing CBD, and what officers described in police reports as more than 30 pounds of marijuana. Wazwaz said it was hemp.

“We go by the letter of the law,” said Nathan Roach, a Duncanville police sergeant, who said that officers found products containing THC in the store, and the department considers those products illegal. “The only way you can legally possess CBD,” Roach said, “is if you have a prescription for Epidiolex.” Epidiolex, a drug containing CBD, has been approved by the FDA to treat epilepsy.

Duncanville’s pursuit of Wazwaz put local prosecutors in an awkward spot, because the district attorney, John Creuzot, has pledged to stop pursuing low-level cases, including those for marijuana possession.

But while Creuzot contemplated charges, his office signaled its intentions by filing asset forfeiture documents requesting that the authorities be allowed to keep items seized from the shops.

After The New York Times contacted Creuzot’s office about the case, a spokeswoman for Creuzot wrote in an email that the office had decided not to pursue charges against the Wazwaz family and would halt its efforts to retain items confiscated during the raid.

Wazwaz said she was pleased to hear that but remained cautious, given all the lingering confusion over CBD. “I want it in writing,” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="0677038a-a464-3392-a5e2-fc7c78f0c22a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/us/cbd-cannabis-marijuana-hemp.html">The New York Times</a>.

CBD Is Wildly Popular. Disputes Over Its Legality Are a Growing Source of Tension.

DUNCANVILLE, Texas — When the police raided Amy Wazwaz’s tobacco shop in North Texas this spring, officers seized every product containing CBD oil, from bath balms to lollipops.

CBD is wildly popular, disputes over its legality are a growing source of tension

Local news stations aired images of agents from the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service carrying out box after box of documents and other items seized from at least six locations, including Pugh’s second-floor office in City Hall and her two homes in northwestern Baltimore. The coordinated raids sought financial records related to the children’s books.

Hours later, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, called for the mayor, a Democrat, to resign, saying she could no longer govern effectively. “Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust,” Hogan said in a statement. “She is clearly not fit to lead.”

The governor’s demand for Pugh’s resignation comes a little more than two weeks after the Baltimore City Council urged Pugh to step down, and three weeks after Hogan ordered a state investigation into the business relationship between Pugh and a health care system with extensive financial ties to the city.

In addition to the searches at City Hall and at Pugh’s homes, agents executed search warrants at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program that was once led by Pugh; the officer of her lawyer, Steven D. Silverman; and the home of Gary Brown Jr., a former mayoral aide.

Pugh, who has denied wrongdoing, has been embroiled for weeks in a scandal over hundreds of thousands of dollars she received for the books before and after she became mayor in 2016.

On April 1, Hogan asked state prosecutors to investigate $500,000 that Pugh received from the University of Maryland Medical System, a nonprofit health care company that operates hospitals and other health care facilities in Baltimore and around the state.

The payment was for 100,000 copies of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, which promote healthy children’s eating and exercise. The books, which she began writing in 2011, were to be distributed to schools in the city.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6dfa7eaf-b31c-3275-a5a3-82f8c78b0693" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/catherine-pugh-fbi-raid.html">The New York Times</a>.

FBI Raids Baltimore City Hall and Mayor Catherine Pugh's Homes

What began with questions about bulk sales of an obscure children’s book series erupted Thursday into a full-blown political scandal in Baltimore, where federal agents raided City Hall and two houses belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh, the author of the books. Critics of the mayor renewed calls for her to resign.

FBI raids Baltimore City Hall and Mayor Catherine Pugh's homes

At the time the arrangement with the organization began, Pugh was a state senator and sat on the organization’s board of directors. She resigned from the board after news of the payments became public in March, apologized for oversights she had made on financial disclosure forms, and returned $100,000.

Pugh also received more than $100,000 over three years starting in 2015 from Kaiser Permanente, the health care company, for 20,000 copies of the books, Kaiser Permanente said.

As embarrassing new details continued to emerge, including that the vast majority of the books never reached school children and could not be located, a growing number of elected officials called for her resignation.

In the midst of the uproar, Pugh took an open-ended leave of absence earlier this month after contracting pneumonia and being hospitalized. Her aides have said that she plans to return once she recovers. In her absence, the City Council president, Bernard C. Young, has led the city.

Silverman, Pugh’s lawyer, said in a statement Thursday that federal agents had arrived at his office with a subpoena and had taken what he described as financial records related to the “Healthy Holly” books.

“We will continue to vigorously defend the mayor, who is entitled the presumption of innocence,” Silverman said in the statement.

Rep, Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat and an ally of Pugh who represents parts of Baltimore in Congress, issued a statement Thursday that stopped just short of calling for her to resign.

“Baltimore needs and deserves leadership that is above reproach and which can lead the city forward in ways that engender the trust and confidence of all essential stakeholders,” Cummings said.

He added that Pugh must “now focus on these very grave matters that have everything to do with her personal business endeavors and nothing to do with the priorities of the city of Baltimore.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/catherine-pugh-fbi-raid.html" id="6dfa7eaf-b31c-3275-a5a3-82f8c78b0693">The New York Times</a>.

“Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust,” Gov. Larry Hogan said in a statement. “She is clearly not fit to lead.”

The governor’s demand for Pugh’s resignation comes a little more than two weeks after the Baltimore City Council urged Pugh to step down and three weeks after Hogan ordered a state investigation into the business relationship between Pugh and a company with extensive financial ties to the city. Pugh is a Democrat. Hogan is a Republican.

Federal authorities did not disclose Thursday what they were looking for in the morning searches at City Hall and two of Pugh’s homes in Baltimore as well as at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program.

The agents, from the FBI and the IRS, also executed a search warrant at the law office of Steven D. Silverman, Pugh’s attorney.

Pugh, who has denied wrongdoing, has been embroiled for weeks in a scandal over hundreds of thousands of dollars she received for a series of children’s books she began writing in 2011.

On April 1, Hogan asked state prosecutors to investigate a $500,000 payment that Pugh received from the University of Maryland Medical System, a nonprofit health care company that operates hospitals and other health care facilities in Baltimore and around the state.

The payment was for 100,000 copies of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, which promote healthy children’s eating and exercise. The books were to be distributed to schools in the city.

At the time of the arrangement, Pugh was a state senator and sat on the nonprofit organization’s board of directors. She resigned from the board after news of the payments became public in March, apologized for oversights she had made on financial disclosure forms and returned $100,000.

Pugh also received more than $100,000 from Kaiser Permanente, the health care company, for 20,000 copies of the books, Kaiser Permanente said.

The vast majority of the books involved never reached schoolchildren and could not be located.

Silverman, Pugh’s lawyer, said federal agents had taken what he described as financial records related to the “Healthy Holly” books.

FBI Raids Baltimore City Hall and Mayor's Homes

Hours after federal agents searched Baltimore City Hall and homes belonging to Mayor Catherine Pugh on Thursday morning as part of a series of coordinated raids, the governor of Maryland called for the mayor to resign, saying she could no longer govern effectively.

Federal authorities did not disclose Thursday what they were looking for in the early morning searches at City Hall and two of Pugh’s homes in Baltimore as well as at the Maryland Center for Adult Training, a nonprofit job training program.

The agents, from the FBI and the IRS, also executed a search warrant at the law office of Steven D. Silverman, Pugh’s attorney, said an FBI spokesman, Dave Fitz.

Timothy Williams

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