Mon: The Perfect Campaign Slogan

Marcus Chose to Hose. He Will Be Deposed

When Rosevony Duroseau turned 47 last year, her brother and sister-in-law hosted a small surprise party to celebrate.

Dr. Yves Duroseau, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital, and his designer wife, Claude, had about 15 guests over on Sept. 17, 2022—a Saturday evening—for a nine-course dinner in the back garden of their gracious Forest Hills home. The occasion was especially joyous for Rosevony, who had recently gotten engaged.

Yves, who in 2020 was the first physician in the U.S. to receive the COVID vaccine, and Rosevony, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asylum officer based out of Washington, D.C., are Haitian-American, and all but one of the guests at the gathering were Black or Latino. Among them were friends of Rosevony’s from Fordham Law School, where she earned her J.D., along with attorneys from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration, two bank executives, a New Jersey public schools administrator, at least one public defender, high-powered music industry player Rigo Morales, who co-founded the Recording Academy’s Black Music Collective, and Rosevony’s fiancé, the co-founder and CEO of a cybersecurity risk management consultancy. The meal was catered by chef Vanessa Cantave, 2011 winner of Bravo cooking competition show, Rocco’s Dinner Party.

But as things started to draw to a close, an unidentified white woman showed up with a “large, menacing German Shepherd,” and “demanded that the music playing in the backyard be turned down,” according to an astonishing civil lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast.

When the “effort to silence Plaintiffs and end their celebration” apparently didn’t happen fast enough, the party “abruptly and forcefully ended” when a white neighbor grabbed his backyard hose and started hosing the guests to get them to disperse—“creating a scene reminiscent of 1960’s Birmingham, Alabama, when White law enforcement officers used fire hoses to douse, assault and batter African Americans participating in civil rights demonstrations in an attempt to get them to comply and disperse,” the complaint states.

The neighbor, a married father of two identified in court filings as 48-year-old Marcus Rosebrock, allegedly turned his hose on the guests again and again, continually increasing the water pressure, until they were not only drenched but also thoroughly humiliated.

And Now For Something Completely Different:  A Case About "And"

It’s hard to imagine a less contentious or more innocent word than “and.”

But how to interpret that simple conjunction has prompted a complicated legal fight that lands in the Supreme Court on Oct. 2, the first day of its new term. What the justices decide could affect thousands of prison sentences each year.

Federal courts across the country disagree about whether the word, as it is used in a bipartisan 2018 criminal justice overhaul, indeed means “and” or whether it means “or.” Even an appellate panel that upheld a longer sentence called the structure of the provision “perplexing.”

The Supreme Court has stepped in to settle the dispute.

It’s the kind of task the justices — and maybe their English teachers — love. The case requires the close parsing of a part of a federal statute, the First Step Act, which aimed in part to reduce mandatory minimum sentences and give judges more discretion.

In particular, the justices will be examining a so-called safety valve provision that is meant to spare low-level, nonviolent drug dealers who agree to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors from having to face often longer mandatory sentences.

It’s much more than an exercise in diagramming a sentence. Nearly 6,000 people convicted of drug trafficking in the 2021 budget year alone are in the pool of those who might be eligible for reduced sentences, according to data compiled by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Overall, more than 10,000 people sentenced since the law took effect could be affected, according to Douglas Berman, an expert on sentencing at Ohio State University’s law school.

The provision lists three criteria for allowing judges to forgo a mandatory minimum sentence that basically look to the severity of prior crimes. Congress did not make it easy by writing the section in the negative so that a judge can exercise discretion in sentencing if a defendant “does not have” three sorts of criminal history.

The question is how to determine eligibility for the safety valve — whether any of the conditions is enough to disqualify someone or whether it takes all three to be ineligible.

Lawyers for Mark Pulsifer, the inmate whose challenge the court will hear, say all three conditions must apply before the longer sentence can be imposed. The government says just one condition is enough to merit the mandatory minimum.

Six thousand drug traffickers' sentences hinge on Supreme Court's interpretation of 'and'

Time to Toss All Your Expired COVID Tests

The Biden administration's program to distribute four free at-home COVID tests to every American household resumes today.

Go to www.covid.gov/tests to order yours. The process is simple - go to the website, click the blue "Order Free At-Home Tests" button, and supply your name and address (and, optionally, email address). Shipments via U.S. Postal Service will begin next week.

And Time to Get Your Updated Booster.