Bolts

Chris Duncan has spent more than half his life on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he says never happened. His conviction in 1998 relied on now-debunked bite-mark evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse informant. In 2007, his legal team discovered a hidden autopsy video showing a forensic expert pressing a mold of Duncan’s teeth into the skin of the child—creating the very marks used as proof of guilt. That video was never shown to the jury. In 2024, after years of post-conviction litigation, Duncan was finally granted an evidentiary hearing to present new evidence of his innocence. The hearing featured expert testimony about junk science, prosecutorial misconduct, and the severe failures of Duncan’s original defense. It lasted six days. The judge has not yet ruled, leaving Duncan in limbo—caught between the possibility of a new trial and the threat of execution. The stakes have never been higher. Just this week, Louisiana carried out its first execution in years, killing Duncan’s friend and fellow death row prisoner Jessie Hoffman. The state’s attorney general says more executions are coming. While Louisiana accelerates its return to capital punishment, Chris Duncan waits—after 26 years, still hoping for a chance to clear his name.

Since 2019, Utah has been the only reliably red state in the country to automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter. Today, more than nine out of 10 Utahns vote by mail, and the option is a valued convenience for rural voters who live far from polling places. But Donald Trump’s false claims that mail ballots are responsible for widespread fraud have largely turned conservative politicians against mail voting since 2020, and that rhetoric has now caught up even with this state. Republican lawmakers this month passed a major voting-system overhaul. If it’s signed into law by the Utah governor, who recently called the bill “brilliant,” it would end universal vote-by-mail in the state. The reform would require instead that Utahns proactively request a mail ballot, instead of expecting it to land in their home without asking. It would create additional restrictions on how they must return ballots, for instance ending the grace period for when they must be delivered to election offices by postal workers. “We are known for safe, secure, and convenient access, and this is going to make everything a lot more difficult,” Lannie Chapman, the county clerk who runs elections in Salt Lake County, told Bolts. “This is going to decrease participation. It’s not fair to our voters.”

Arizona is set to execute Aaron Gunches today despite the unresolved concerns that Arizona's lethal injection protocols could subject people to prolonged and painful executions that violate constitutional protections. When Governor Katie Hobbs flipped the state blue in 2022, her approach to the death penalty seemed to set her administration apart from her predecessor. In her first month in office, Hobbs ordered an independent investigation into the series of drawn-out and bloody lethal injections under the previous GOP governor and temporarily halted executions. The preliminary findings of that outside probe revealed serious issues at every stage of the state's execution procedures, which are hidden from public view. In a draft report, the former magistrate judge who Hobbs tapped to investigate the state’s death penalty outlined “chilling examples of failures that can occur when others are not watching—from corrections officials seeking to learn on the eve of an execution what doses of lethal drugs to administer from Wikipedia, to shipments of state procured lethal drugs delivered to a private home in Phoenix with no apparent or verifiable chain of custody, to the storage of lethal drugs in unmarked jars with no labeling whatsoever.” But in late November, weeks after Donald Trump was reelected president, Hobbs abruptly pulled the plug on the outside investigation and fired the former judge leading it, announcing that the state would soon resume executions in spite of the problems surfaced by the independent probe. Ahead of today's execution, the state still haven’t answered key questions about their execution processes.

U.S. prisons rely on incarcerated labor. People behind bars cook, clean, manufacture goods, and even work in hazardous industries like agriculture and firefighting—often for just cents an hour or nothing at all. This system has deep roots, stretching back to the post-Civil War South, when states criminalized Black people through “vagrancy laws” and leased them out as forced laborers. Today, prison labor persists under the 13th Amendment’s exception clause, which allows slavery as punishment for a crime. Historian Robert Chase, author of We Are Not Slaves, has spent years studying how southern prisons built a lucrative system rooted in exploitation, how reforms often intensified labor divisions, and how incarcerated workers have organized to fight back. As part of our “Ask Bolts” series, we invited you to send Chase your biggest questions about prison labor—and once again, you delivered. You asked about where prison labor happens, what happens when someone refuses to work, and what real change would look like. We narrowed your submissions to just nine reader questions, plus one from our own staff. Read the Q&A here to learn what alarms Chase about the realities of forced prison labor today—and where he sees resistance movements making an impact:

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Jail voting has soared in Colorado after the state mandated polling places in county lockups. This mandate is a national first, and no other state has ever conducted an election with polling places inside all its jails.

Diana Teran, an advisor to former District Attorney George Gascón, was a relatively unknown figure in Los Angeles politics for years. But California Attorney General Rob Bonta stunned the city’s political and criminal justice communities in April 2024 with his decision to prosecute Teran over her efforts to track cops with a history of misconduct. Bonta’s office has alleged that Teran violated California hacking laws by accessing personnel records for sheriff deputies with a history of misconduct in her previous role at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Later, the AG alleges, she “impermissibly” shared those records with Gascón’s office after she took a job advising the DA on law enforcement accountability. But Teran’s lawyers argue that she is being criminalized for her effort to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that mandates prosecutors disclose potentially exculpatory material to the defense—like a deputy’s history of lying or making racist statements. Local observers are worried that the prosecution of Teran may chill local reform efforts. “This unprecedented case has had a devastating impact on the criminal justice system in California, nowhere more than in law enforcement oversight,” one of Teran’s lawyers told Bolts.

Daniel Jenkins has volunteered to boost voter turnout on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus since becoming a student there in 2022, helping other students fill out voter registration forms and walking them through information about polling places and hours. He also reminds them they’ll need to bring an ID to vote. That last part, he reassures them, should be easy, since Indiana’s voter ID law allows state university students to present their campus IDs at the polls. But Indiana may soon make voting much tougher for college students: Legislation banning the use of student IDs for voting passed the state Senate with near unanimous Republican support in early February and now sits with the GOP-run House. “I think at best, it’s a misguided policy that is building on anti-student sentiment, and at worst, it’s a targeted form of voter suppression to try to make it harder for students to vote,” Jenkins told Bolts.

More than 100,000 people descended upon New Orleans last month to watch the Super Bowl. But also in town, patrolling the streets outside the Superdome in the central French Quarter, were thousands of law enforcement officers. The heavy police presence was the result of an emergency declaration by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in the wake of the New Year’s Day truck attack that killed 14. The executive order authorized Landry to bulk up the presence of Louisiana State Police within the city of New Orleans, and to “compel the evacuation of all or part of the population.” With a signature, Landry gave himself the authority to send LSP officers out to forcibly displace unhoused residents of New Orleans’ downtown encampments, bussing over 100 people to a then-unheated warehouse miles away, under threat of arrest. Reporter Delaney Nolan describes the knots of camo-clad Louisiana National Guard soldiers at every intersection of the French Quarter, toting semi-automatic rifles. And she speaks to unhoused people who were forced out for fear of arrest. Landry’s emergency declaration is ostensibly temporary. But local police watchdogs say that they were increasingly worried that the state police force may be there to stay, enacting the governor’s vision of a tightly controlled New Orleans: one where business interests rule, the poor and unhoused are pushed out of sight, and local priorities are subverted by the state. One advocate said he is concerned about “LSP’s deployment as a de facto occupying force in a Black-majority city.”

Derek Osborne, the sheriff of Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, did something routine: He released a man from jail after he’d served his sentence. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted Osborne to hold the man, an undocumented immigrant, past his release date so the federal agency could arrest and deport him. The U.S. Department of Justice is now investigating and threatening to prosecute the sheriff for failing to cooperate with ICE. The threats show how far the Trump administration is willing to go to pressure local police to work with ICE and it may serve as a test case for whether federal officials can successfully spook local officials into compliance, Bolts and New York Focus report in their latest collaboration. The Trump administration “is throwing every piece of spaghetti at the wall to force people and scare them into capitulating,” said Lena Graber, an attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “The fact that they publicly announced the investigation—they don’t even have to file charges for that to have a chilling effect.”