It Could Happen Here - The Limits of Abortion Sanctuary Laws

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

We're joined by Alejandra Caraballo, Yveka Pierre, and Michelle McGrath to discuss the limits of abortion sanctuary laws, the role of big data in abortion arrests, and how we can build a better future for reproductive justice.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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the what what it looks like when this sort of the interconnectivity of the american judicial system comes apart under the weight of uh dueling abortion laws and with us to talk about that is a lot of people who have written a lot of very good stuff about this so with us is alejandra caraballo who is a clinical instructor at harvard law Cyber Law Clinic, where she works on the intersection of gender and technology. Hello. Hi. Welcome to the show. We also have Michelle McGrath, who is a public defender in New York City for almost a decade

and specializes in bail and parole litigation. Michelle, welcome to the show. Hey, happy to be here. And finally, we have Yves Capierre, who's a senior litigation counselor where she works at the intersection of reproductive and criminal law, and she is on cases where folks are criminalized for their pregnancy loss. So, Yves Capierre, welcome to the show as well. So, y'all have written, actually, actually i don't it occurs to me that it's been long enough this is still not published yet right yes it's uh so it's basically we submitted it to cuny law review and we're waiting for edits we expect our law review article to be published

in december um so uh but you know we've we've basically created a TLDR that we collaborated for Slate. So, you know, there's a 1200 word article on Slate that you can read that kind of condenses down our article from like 25,000 words, as much as we can. Yeah, we were graciously provided the long one. We were graciously provided the long one. And so we read the long one. We're going to talk about it because, yeah, it's a really interesting look at, I don't know. There's a lot of sort of points. Okay, so I guess we should rerun and talk about what this actually is, which is that one of the things that's been happening in the last, I mean, basically since Dobbs is a series of questions about what, okay, so it's a series of questions here and yeah and this article is a very

very sort of in-depth and really interesting look at it and i guess okay i i want to jump into this at a kind of weird place but i wanted to start with one of the things that one of the things that's in this article that's i haven't really seen much discussion of is about the way that the sort of safe harbor laws that states have been setting up are being... The way that they can potentially be in the way that previous safe harbor laws for immigration stuff were sabotaged by the fact that all of the cops are sending all of their stuff to each other. So yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that. I guess it's like a lead into it. Yeah. I mean,

I, with respect to specifically like how all the law enforcement is talking to each other, I think Alejandro might know a little more with respect to that, but when it comes to the way these laws are being written, they're, to the way these laws are being written. They really don't have the kind of teeth that sort of the politicians are spinning to the public.

They're sort of letting folks think that, well, we would never, we in New York would never send you to Texas for anything related to the criminalization of a pregnancy loss. And because of the way the law of extradition works in the United States, which is actually a constitutional law, it's going to be hard in a lot of ways for them to resist that. And so we have, our article does talk about a little bit, in actually great detail about how they could actually craft laws

that would be a little bit different. Yeah, I think one of the things that, you know, just this past week, there was this story that came out of Nebraska where Facebook provided the DMs of someone who is, you know, being charged with, you know, it wasn't even charged with, like, there wasn't a formal charge of, like, committing an abortion. Like, the person that was being charged, it like disposing of a body like and uh basically hiding a body and so facebook like released a statement and was saying like well we weren't told that this had anything

to do with an abortion and like that's the exact problem right is that when states are going to seek extradition they're going to bring charges that have probably nothing to do with it in the immediate, like on its face to do with abortion, it could just be like, you know, they can repurpose all kinds of laws, like endangerment of a minor, right, like they can do all these things that like would ordinarily like never apply in a pregnancy, but they can just kind of do it just to bring charges um and so you know um my colleague who's unfortunately not here uh cynthia conti cook has written about this excessively about like the criminalization aspect but in terms of like how you know these these safe harbor states you know these laws like are going to be very difficult i think it's just really what

we're dealing with the effects of surveillance capitalism right so like facebook turned over these dms facebook has been in the process of moving to end to end encryption which basically would have made this impossible to do in the first place because it would have been similar to signal but what facebook did is because they realized that they would have lost access to data around people's messages and what they're talking about, they made it optional instead of by default. And so most people who are not very tech savvy or very familiar understanding of, you know, who has access to the messages and whether the government can get access, they might not know that they can set this to end-to-end encryption. And so essentially,

like in pursuit of profit facebook doesn't enable this privacy feature but this is the exact same kind of stuff right so like facebook has access to this data but there's also this whole shady system of data brokers that gets access to all kinds of data and that's exactly how i think what you alluded to when you asked this question about ice having access to basically all this information on immigrants that states had swore they would never share with federal immigration officials like ice has basically built this entire shadow system where they're purchasing data about driver's licenses and all this stuff basically by purchasing it on the open market and that bypasses all kinds of formal data requisition requests warrants subpoenas all

those things that would normally be required because it's just freely available so you know suffice to say as much as these states may want to protect things on that end in terms of data it's going to be incredibly hard to do so. And I think the previous efforts around safe harbor for immigrants and asylum states and things like that, it's just going to be really hard to enforce in practice. However, on the extradition side, when criminal charges are actually brought, there is some things that states can actually do to help protect folks who are caught up with any kind of abortion related charges in their states. I just also want to jump in to say that the system works the way that it works because nobody's monitoring it. So when we're talking about law enforcement officials that are talking to one another and

getting information through very informal means, right? Things that probably by the book would take a warrant to go from one place to the other, just takes Marcy calling over Janice that works at the other system and getting something faxed over. Even if they're not doing it out of malice, it's just, oh, this is out of convenience. It makes life a lot easier to get information from this place to that place and folks have these informal systems that are set up that even when the law says that they cannot do it if we don't have safeguards that I hate to say go after people because it seems so carceral but like that protects what the intent of the law is it It has no teeth. If your law doesn't stop Marcy from calling Janice

and getting information on someone that they're not supposed to have, then your law doesn't matter. It's kind of a nothing sandwich. I have plenty of thoughts and stuff to say about the criminalization when we get there later because that's a lot of my work. I think that gets to

what Michelle and Alejandra and what um Conti who's not here have found it's just you gotta have something more than nothing sandwiches something more than something that seems good on the surface and doesn't actually help the people that we want to help and I want to sort of help folks sort of understand how this plays out on the ground so in the article article, we give an example, right? So maybe I've got a New Yorker who gets prescribed a medication that would induce abortion and they bring it to their friend in a state where that's criminalized and they give their friend the medication. The pregnancy ends, maybe the person is concerned and they go to the hospital. Quite often, nurses and doctors are part of the criminalization process. And so,

you know, maybe they call law enforcement official based on this information, they get a subpoena for that person's phone. So now they're in the phone and they can find out, wow, they got this medicine from the New Yorker. Well, now the person who took the medication perhaps is charged with homicide, right? I think what's key here is that they're not necessarily going to be charged with abortion. Maybe they're charged with homicide. They're charged with infanticide. And guess what? The person who came from New York is now probably going to be charged as an accomplice. So now we have a warrant for a homicide for the person in New York. Because of all the national databases that we have, the NYPD, any of the law enforcement in New York is going to see, oh, that New Yorker's wanted for homicide. Let me go get that person.

And so when then that person comes in front of a judge, even though New York is saying or Connecticut is saying, you know, we're not going to give any resources to extradite someone related to the termination of pregnancy. in front of a judge who sees that they're wanted for homicide, right? And so on the ground, these laws don't have anything to stop them. And so we've sort of suggested things that involve immediate right to counsel. People need to be released for extradition. And we can talk about some of those more, but I think it helps to sort of give that example to see how it's happening how it would happen in real life there's something else i wanted to sort of talk about with this because one of the things that that on the sort of surveillance front has been the way in which

like what we're seeing now is sort of the culmination of like a bunch of the types of surveillance that have been inflicted on a bunch of the types of surveillance that have been inflicted on a bunch of different groups of people you have the anti-sex worker stuff you have the the surveillance the surveillance stuff that's been used because immigrants you have uh the sort of post 9-11 like i mean this is where the sort of fusion centers um come from is the sort of like post 9-11 security state build-up and then you have the stuff that's been used to go after activists and i think that's been really interesting to me to sort of i mean incredibly like depressing too to watch has been yeah like

i don't know like i remember like defeat like one of the things if these fusion centers were like all of these sort of like uh law enforcement agencies like share information with each other like i don't know like i remember in 2020 like they were like sending one of my friends tweets around because that was one of the things they were doing to like go after people during the protests and like i don't know i i i was interested in in this question of of these fusion centers because it's it's this i don't know it's this real sort of like like it it it really seems like the the sort of like the the next step of where all of this stuff goes is you know diffusion centers becomes becomes this place where it's really really easy to bypass

the law because you know all this stuff is just getting shared anyways and it brings up this other problem which i was interested in which is about like to to what extent can the state even control law enforcement? Because like, okay, like law enforcement are those like cops in general, very reactionary. There's, you know, if you go back into the history of the anti-abortion movement, there's a lot of them being like aided and abetted by the cops and i was wondering i don't know what what you think about like like what what do you even do if the cops just decide they don't want to follow the law at all and they're just you know they're just gonna keep passing information on no matter what you do i i think alejandra and i probably uh differ on views about where things are going next probably just because of the nature of our our work and the things that we're dealing with the most. So this is going to be fun. So I actually think, so yesterday, two days ago, whenever this airs, however many days ago, one of our colleagues at If, When, How, my colleague Laura Huss, who's brilliant, has been working on this research project for like

the last two years, tracking cases of when folks are criminalized for self-managed abortion. Why self-managed abortion? Because that is the abortions that were happening outside of clinical spaces, right? That were, there were always questions about who can be criminalized for self-managing their care. There weren't as many protections in the law for a lot of helpers and things like that in self-managed care. So when her and her team looked at this data, what they found was that the biggest risk of criminalization didn't actually necessarily come from external forces looking at big data, right? But was actually like the hell is other people? Because what they were finding was that

nearly the majority of cases of folks coming to the attention of law enforcement was coming from medical professionals so i want to say i have the numbers in front of me somewhere it's um well so it's something like 45 of folks that were reported to the police were reported by some sort of medical professional whether that's a doctor a, a nurse, or whoever that was at a hospital when they were seeking care or they were getting prenatal care at some point when they found out they were pregnant. That's how they came to the attention of law enforcement. Another 25, 26% of those folks that came to the attention of law enforcement came to people that they told information to, that they

entrusted, whether that was a family member, a partner, a former partner, whoever the heck. Right. So what we're finding is that the vast majority of people that came to the attention of law enforcement was because of folks like actual people that had the information. And then that turned into them being individually targeted by police and then that turned into their data being mined on their actual physical devices not like big brother down but small brother up right so uh when i certainly think about kind of how big data can be used and manipulated and like absolutely messed up to do a dragnet of folks that's always kind of a possibility that's swimming but I think the immediate possibility is like how do you protect your individual data on your individual devices what safety plan do you have in place about how you use the internet wholesale

because I'm a lawyer I can't tell people to commit crimes but I can tell people to be very careful about how you manage your devices and how you manage information who do you tell your business to full stop right because that's how folks are coming to the attention of law enforcement but can the laws control cops I think what we generally see is like probably not um but will the courts respond to cops that work outside of the law? I think the lawyerly awful answer is it depends on the jurisdiction that you manage to find yourself in. Yeah, I think Eve just hit it right on the head. You know, in cybersecurity, your weakest link is always the human element. So, like, that's always going to be the biggest concern, right?

Like, who are you telling about any of this? Like, who knows about it? Like, you know, on a 10-year-old issue a tangential issue like with gender affirming care in texas like one of the one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against texas like one of the trans boys like that that was like you know found out about you know uh governor abbott's letter to like basically equate gender affirming care as child abuse attempted suicide and then when was taken to the hospital the hospital staff then made a report to like the department of yeah so I mean this was all in in the ACLU's lawsuit and it's like it's just

insane right so like that that's exactly the the thing like the the biggest risk is always gonna be the human element like you're like the doctors the nurses your friends like family members you know it and it might even be people like you deeply trust you just never know and so that's always going to be an aspect but i think one of the the biggest risks as well is is that the amount of data that we have now like even if that can't be used in a proactive way to target people, on the back end, once you do have that kind of friend turning you in, all of a sudden they have intent.

They have all of these things from messages. They have location data. They show exactly where you were at what time. It's just the perfect surveillance system that basically makes like any kind of reasonable defense nearly impossible right like they can show where you were who you talked to um and so like i think the the best tweet that i saw about this is from from someone who works at digital defense fund and they're basically like they're um or actually might not have been them

i just remember it was just like there there is no conversation about criminal activity there is only conspiracy like basically it's like anytime you're chatting about any of this stuff like it's basically like that that in itself can be potentially considered like criminal conduct and like that can be used like as intent and like all these things and like um in prosecution so like there's all of those aspects and i think uh just to answer your question like more broadly on on like what police can be done like like to be honest i guess an attorney it's like been very very frustrating seeing qualified immunity just being like increased right like so so basically there's been no appetite by the courts to like like remove this doctrine or whittle it away actually it's like

being rapidly expanded especially the aspect around um uh federal agents right and now like there is some can you explain sorry briefly just what what that is for people who don't know yeah so qualified immunity basically means that you can't bring a civil rights lawsuit particularly what they call like a 1983 lawsuit which is like the federal statute that allows you to bring civil rights lawsuits against state and federal individuals for any kind of civil rights abuses and it's everything from like discrimination on basis of race to basically you know the cop beating someone you know within an inch of their life though so basically any kind of civil rights violations so this's called like a 1983 case,

which is like the citation to the actual law that like dates back to the 19th century, like it's part of like the Ku Klux Klan Act, which like, so this is a long running like civil rights statute that really gained prominence in the last 60 years. But, you know, so basically what qualified immunity does is it basically says,

well, if it wasn't a clearly established right when this abuse or violation of your civil rights happened the the officer or the government official it can't be held like liable for it so basically like and the way that they do it is very strictly interpreted so it's like clearly established right so it's like well it wasn't clearly established, that you weren't supposed to be able to be beaten with a baton. Like, and it's just like, what? Like, it's some of these cases get really crazy. I'm not an expert on this by any means. But like, I've, you know, come across a few and it's, it's absolutely insane.

Like how, how like narrowly though, oftentimes like define what like clearly like, it's not like, you know, broadly defined right of like, maybe police officers shouldn't be beating people. But, you know, and I think what's even crazier is that this law review, or there's an upcoming law review article by this professor that I was just came across the other day. And like, apparently, there is a whole provision of 1980 of the section 1983 that has been omitted from the federal register for 140 years basically like a clerk omitted a section and this law like this this um like this law basically uncovered this omission that should have been in the federal register it passed in congress i like but hey if you we did it wasn't a clearly established right alejandra so does it really apply the the the one that i'm like haunted by that i that i

read about that was that was one of the disqualified media cases was like there was a guy who got lit on fire by a cop with a taser and the courts ruled that because they're because there hadn't been a prior instance of someone attempting to like you don't have a clearly established right for a cop not to light you on fire with a taser. Yeah, this guy burned to death because, again, he got lit on fire with a taser. Because there wasn't a clearly established thing. This is like the worst...

Yeah, the secret is it's never clearly established. Mostly, folks lose these lawsuits, and I mean, this is where you know i i think folks need to recognize uh and i say this very much as a lawyer that the law is not at the end of the day what's gonna save us like collective organizing and working together to keep each other safe is because the law is not designed to hold police accountable. It is not designed to keep people out of jail.

In fact, it's designed to do the opposite, right? And I think we're going to see a whole lot of folks start to understand how criminalization works in a way that they may not have realized before. And to your question, as a public defender in new york city who spent many of those years in the bronx like no the police are not accountable to anyone and they continually do unlawful things all day and this is part part of one of the solutions and again all of these are stopgap measures so that people have time to plan and plot and organize and do what they need to do. But is that in these states that are saying, oh, we're going to keep state resources away. No, no one shall use state resources to move someone for any of these criminalization of pregnancy.

But we imagine that law enforcement is generally a rather conservative group of people will simply disagree with that law and probably at times do things anyway. Right. And sure, we can file a lawsuit later, but that's not really preventing the harm in the interim. Right. Like someone's going to be incarcerated. All of these things are going to happen. proposals is that it should be crystal clear that any any state actor who does participate in such extradition uh can be sued individually they will have none of this qualified immunity it will not exist now listen this seems very reasonable to me and to us but do i think it's something that a legislature will actually pass i i'm not particularly optimistic about most of our proposals on this because it will mean a lot of other folks who will not be criminalized in addition to folks who are criminalized for abortion. But so so I do think that that that does police. We have a problem with rampant police impunity in this country and it will up here, just like it does in many other sectors.

I think sometimes when we talk about criminalization of abortion wholesale, for folks that have not been working in and about repro, it feels very new. Like this is something that we need to kind of like gird our loins and prepare for, but folks that have been working in the RHRJ movements, reproductive rights, health, and justice movements, we have been talking about criminalization for a long time. And the reason that we've been talking about criminalization is because it's been happening for a long time. So, I was talking about my colleague's research that the preliminary info just came out. So, when she was combing through all of these like different clerk's offices all over the country she unearthed like 61 cases of folks being criminalized for self-managed abortion in 26 states now we only have three states that have laws criminalizing

self-managed abortion left on the books so holy crap the fact that there have been prosecutions in 26 states when only i think at the time that some of these cases were about, only like five or six states had these laws on the books, tell us that prosecutors are very, very creative in the ways that they go after people. So, the likelihood of always seeing abortion written at the top of the warrant is going to be low. And then in some states, we are going to start seeing it because they are going to, if they haven't already criminalized abortion wholesale, any kind of abortion, right? All abortions are going to become self-managed because folks are not able to get clinical care. So it's not new. And I think that's one of the things that I want to make sure that folks understand that there are like criminal defense attorneys can and can deal with this because it's just the same messed up ways that they charge

people in a variety of other cases but I think the shock and awe um that's hitting some folks who the criminal legal system doesn't move within their lives is I need folks to get out of shock and all quick and get into work mode because some of the things that I'm seeing on the internet while we're talking about how hell is other people and how we can protect ourselves in our communities some of the ways that folks are talking about this on the internet shows that they're not people that have had the impact of the criminal legal system necessarily touch their lives right like folks that think they're doing opsec on twitter by like if you want to get a manicure you can come to my state and i'll pick you up for your manicure and that's when we talk about how cases get put together on the back end and i think

michelle can probably speak to this too, like as a public defender, when you're seeing how, when you have a very motivated prosecutor, a cop that actually knows how to do their job and the information that they're able to gather when they investigate, yes, they will pull your tweets.

Yes. Even if it's not your case, they will pull your tweets and connect that person that got their abortion to the tweets that you put online to show that they intended to go to your place to go and get an abortion and then try to use those things to prosecute them over here. So even if you're willing to take the risk with your own life, if you're trying to help people, don't put them in a position that they can be harmed by some of the things that we say out loud because if you're living in a state where you're not afraid of criminalization but the

person you are trying to help is in a state that and they have to go back to somewhere they can be criminalized you got to think about how you're protecting them that's my soapbox rant i think that's really valuable actually this like we saw a lot in the Trump administration too this like legal constitutional magic that uh like like the um Seth Abramson the the the twitter thread guy right like it it um it's um it yeah it distracts from useful organizing and mutual aid because people are just like well if this and this and this and this and this and then like I understand this and no one else does, and this is a special secret, and then if we do this and turn around three times and go through the wardrobe, then Donald Trump will be impeached.

Or, you know, I can give you a safe access to reproductive health care rather than just doing the work. And I think another part of what was going on here, and this has been something that, like, you know, if you talk to people who've been doing this, like okay, if this is a thing you genuinely want to do,

there are people who have been doing this kind of work for decades and decades and decades and decades and they know largely what is safe and what isn't and what stuff is effective or not and the way that this sort of like like the kind of sort of like hey i'm gonna go do this on my own i have never done this before i don't know what i'm doing but

uh here i'm gonna sort of signal that i can do this thing like go talk if you want to do this go talk to the people who who have been doing it for ages and go support them because like you know again like the reason the reason we're here in the first place is because that this whole like the entire right to abortion has for literally decades been supported by just a really tiny number of incredibly underfunded and understaffed people and organizations so like go help them don't like strike out on your own to boldly get you and everyone you're working with arrested yeah i think you know some of that is you know i think some people have some good intentions but my god like that energy could be spent in so much more productive ways and it's kind of unfortunate i think that the worst aspect of it though is like the tech bros coming in and being

like i'm gonna save this space with no crypto we're gonna create a dow and like distribute funds and i'm like oh my god like i'm just sitting here like you know because this is something like you know i i've looked into with students like this earlier this year like you know how payment transactions could be used um and basically how there's basically almost no security with with payment transactions right like like if you're using venmo which which in and of itself has like a social media function. So like, you know, you can see when your friend, you know, Joe is like getting brunch on Sunday and like, you know, they could, you know, if you're not sending that to private by default

like that, that's already a problem. But basically like, you know, they can get access to those records pretty easily in a much easier way. And, you know, one of the things we started to look at like towards the end was like oh you know let's you know had some some students being like well can you can you use crypto can you use like bitcoin it's like you still have to interact at some point with a financial institution and they can tie these things back it is not that exceptionally hard especially like now it's been shown that like coinbase is like cooperating with the feds and basically acting like a giant honeypot so like i just i fundamentally wish

like people would just like realize that like technology is not going to save us here like it can help if used wisely and creatively but don't think that like you're just going to like do this one little neat trick like as james was saying, and then suddenly, we're going to fix this because it's not right. Like this is going to take a million different solutions with a million different people doing all the little things that they can to push back. And like, that's one of the things I think we we tried to be very humble about in our paper is like, look, none of this is a silver bullet. We're just trying to provide some concrete solutions that states can take and some steps that

they can take. But we realize that nothing is ever going to be perfect to solve this kind of Pandora's box that's been opened by Alito and all these like right wing reactionaries on the court. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I guess speaking of things that are not silver bullets will not save us um yeah i guess could we get a bit more into looking at what the sort of like because like a lot of this article is talking about i guess the, the, the history of extradition, uh,

and how, how that's sort of been understood and interpreted. And so I guess I was wondering, yeah, could we go into talking about what the sort of legal stuff is going to look like when it, like, you know,

if, if we start getting these large showdowns between like States with like actually sort of, like, you know, if States actually start trying to have sanctuary laws that are like, have teeth and are good, what, what, what like actually sort of, you know, if states actually start trying to have sanctuary laws that are like have teeth and are good, what is that sort of, what is that going to look like? Yeah, so this is the kind of part that I focused on in the article. And so basically,

a lot of people aren't aware about this, because it's not really a contested area of the Constitution. But basically, when the Constitution was drafted, and and ratified it contained what was called the extradition clause and basically what it said is that you know all the states have a duty to turn over fugitives from other states that have been charged with the crime and have fled into those states because the united states is kind of weird it's a federal system so like every state is still considered kind of its own sovereign in some ways in a very like quasi-sovereign way and so there was a question about you know since all criminal prosecutions basically at especially at the inception of the united states were done at the state level you know what what happens when somebody crosses and uh across state lines like

how are we going to handle that and so basically this was you know one of the the drafts and initially they tried to set it at a higher bar like to be like high crimes and misdemeanors similar to kind of the impeachment clause and you know they whittled it down to it and basically made it very applicable to set all crimes um but it really did not get much play until basically in the 1840s when obviously the tension around slavery picked up. Right. So you had enslaved people escaping to the north and the south being very angry about that and wanting the north to to return the escaped enslaved folks and the north being like, no. folks and the north being like no and congress tried to figure out a way to like thread some kind of needle but made it 10 times worse and put us on an accelerating path towards civil war by passing the fugitive slave act of 1850 and a bunch of radical abolitionists in the northeast were like we don't ever want to comply with, right? So like Vermont passed this bill called the Habeas Corpus Act,

which basically created all kinds of legal procedures so that Southern bounty hunters wouldn't just come into the state and just kidnap the first black person they saw because they assumed that they were been an escaped and slave person rather than a free person. And it was trying to stop that kind of issue of kidnappings and also just not to comply with this you know the institution of slavery because

there were people who had escaped slavery and were in the north and so it was causing all kinds of tension and while like the the vermont law was never fully tested it did like create a lot of incendiary back and forth between like the north and the south and the press and it was really interesting like reading some of these old like newspaper articles from the like 18 like from 1850 because it was like basically the press in richmond and the press in boston like taking stabs at each other and it was like the 1850 version of shit posting because they were like one person was just like, this is nullification made easy. And like basically with like,

it's just, it was the most surreal thing. Like if, you know, if you get a chance when, when our full article comes out in December, there'll be some, some highlights from that in the footnotes.

But basically what it really got tested was in 1861, the case started in 1859 though um it's called kentucky v denison and so what essentially happened is there was someone who aided um an enslaved person escape kentucky and get to ohio and basically the governor of ohio was an abolitionist and was like i don't want to comply with this right and i do not want i don't believe like this is a crime because this is not a crime in our state and the attorney general of ohio basically wrote a long legal memo stating that this this is a crime not known to the laws of civilization or man so basically yeah they thought it went all the way to the supreme court and chief justice taney also notable for dred scott

decision so like absolutely you, just terrible court. Like they were, this came, I think, about like three weeks before the Civil War. So this was like, I think it was in like March of 1861. So basically like three weeks before Fort Sumter got like sacked by the South. But basically what it did was, is that it said states actually can't utilize

any discretion in extradition. So the governor of Ohio can't say, I have concerns about human rights and that this isn't a crime in our state. There's not this dual criminality analysis, and we're concerned about human rights and all these things. So the Supreme Court basically said, no, states don't have that discretion. But they essentially split the baby by

by them saying, federal courts can't issue a writ of mandamus, which is basically an order for a government official to do something. They said that federal courts couldn't do that to a state governor in extradition. So basically, it means that like states don't have discretion, but federal courts can't enforce it. So therefore, it's just a non issue, right? Fast forward 120 years and we get to a case called Puerto Rico v. Branstad, which basically somebody committed murder in Puerto Rico, fled back to Iowa, and then was sought for extradition back to Puerto Rico. And there's a huge element of racism here

because they were concerned that a white man couldn't get a fair trial in Puerto Rico, which is just deeply offensive. And there was also a question of like territoriality right because puerto rico is a territory i wasn't sure if like they had to comply with the extradition clause and so essentially the supreme court said yes federal courts can comply uh with uh or can issue a writ of mandamus to to ensure extradition. So essentially what it did was it partially overturned the Kentucky v. Denison case but upheld the central ruling that basically says states have no discretion. So what does that mean? Basically that states can't really stop

the extradition of someone in their, in their, um, jurisdiction, even if they have extreme concerns, right? So if you have, like, let's say going back to Michelle's example earlier, someone who sends their friends like abortion pills, um, from New York to let's say Texas, right. And Texas is seeking extradition in New York. It's like, well, that's not a crime here. So we don't want to extradite. Um, you know, the States would typically be hard pressed, but there's kind of two kind of, or there's one major issue with like the extradition part right it actually has to apply to someone who's quote-unquote an actual fugitive meaning that they had to actually be present in the state when the crime occurred and the commission of the crime can't in itself create

what's called constructive presence. You have to be corporeally present in the statement. You have to be physically present. You can't just like the commission of the crime doesn't constitute that. So in this instance, you know, the person who sends a pill in New York, technically, like constitutionally, does not have to be extradited, right? Like they can contest that. does not have to be extradited, right? Like they can contest that. The problem is, as Michelle pointed out, is that, you know, the extradition clauses that exist today is pretty much almost entirely just a formality that is waived basically almost every single time. And so the courts,

like the state attorneys, the district attorneys, even defense attorneys might not be familiar with that and might not know that that's something that they could potentially contest, or it's even something that they can, that it's a potential constitutional issue, right? And so that's one of the things that we focused on as our potential solution is to ensure that people who were not present in the state where the act had occurred are able to mount a challenge to the extradition. You know, it creates all kinds of other problems because there's still federal extradition, meaning like if you leave the country and come back in,

border patrol could potentially get you. We still don't have a clear understanding of how that necessarily would work, you know, because that's never been a question that's like fully resolved so you know basically at the end of the day like we want to make sure that like folks are aware of that but like the folks that like leave texas right so like if you committed abortion you were charged in texas and you go to new york like new york is not going to have very many options to protect you from being extradited back to Texas. And so, you know, one of the things that, you know, I fundamentally believe Kentucky v. Denison was wrong, was wrongly decided on the sense that states shouldn't be able to have a concern around human rights, because it essentially acts as a one way ratchet where the states with the most regressive anti-human rights criminal justice laws get to have like

get to dictate that over all of the other states similar to how um slavery like the the southern states were trying to enforce the institution of slavery on northern states that had that had abolished slavery decades ago so it's a very complicated issue and again i i reach back to that slavery analysis because not because i i think that you know the slavery and abortion should be compared directly but because this is like this is fundamentally the last time where you have criminal laws that are so different between states like one state's human right is another state's capital crime. Like you can't get further apart than that. Yeah. And I wanted to just clarify for folks,

if I drove the pill to Texas, then I would have committed the crime in Texas and New York could extradite me. And I, what I also think, I'm sort of here as the what happens on the ground, right? So if you, to be clear, while, as Alejandra correctly points, if I just mailed it to Texas and they have the warrant, while we're sorting out this extradition warrant, I am very likely incarcerated. And the sorting out of the extradition warrant will probably take 90 days. So just because, and I think folks get confused with this a lot,

just because something is illegal doesn't mean, or your lawyer's arguing it's illegal, doesn't mean it just magically stops or the process ends. And so this is something where we think that really there should be a basis to contest your extradition on a human rights ground on two grounds. Either there is no dual criminality. That is, this is not actually a crime in the other state. Interestingly here, handing someone a prescription pill in New York is actually a felony, whether or not you get money for it. Most folks don't know that. He's smiling because she also was a public defender in New York City. Because it blows your mind. You're like, wait, they just handed it to them. There's no money exchanged. Yeah, that's a felony drug sale. So we might have dual criminality.

New York might actually say you did do a crime, so I will extradite you you which is why we think there also needs to be a human rights defense and this may also extend to well we're not going to extradite them to Texas because they have the death penalty and we think that is a clear contravention of human rights maybe we can extend it to prison conditions I don't know how that far that goes again these are things I don't know they'd be likely to be codified but if we're actually dreaming up the world that we think where this could work like i as your attorney should be able to come in and say there's no dual criminality this is in contravention of human rights and once i mount that defense then the court is bound to release you while we sort that out um and and that

is sort of our vision another thing that that aleandro mentioned, the Vermont law in the 1800s, and one of the things that it said was you could get a jury of your peers in a situation like this. There's no jury in an extradition case. But the idea, of course, is that a jury is going to say this is morally wrong. I don't care what the law says. We're not sending this person back to enslavement and the idea here is if you put a jury in and you assert a human rights defense perhaps the jury will say no we're not sending you so these are these are a lot of ideas that we've been coming up with so we're doing the the plan there was jury nullification yes it absolutely was it absolutely was jury nullification love love love love love love jury nullification yes it absolutely was it absolutely was jury nullification

love love love love love love jury nullification i i anybody with the law review that's listening to this let me write about jury nullification for you and i feel like they won't but but we we i feel like i i have been wanting to explain jury nullification on this show literally since the like i i asked if i could do an episode on it the first week yeah call me back for the next one so i there's something that i don't want to be lost and that's the idea of like people don't necessarily know what they're being charged with in the state that's asking for them to go back because there's not really a requirement that that so for an extradition like thinking through what you actually need like the bare bones of an extradition it

needs to be like a piece of paper that's signed by the governor but not necessarily the governor of the state but somebody with authority to ask for you to return back and that's in essence it right just like a piece of paper signed by somebody that says xyz birth date xyz did a crime in our state give them back to us right oh they don't have to say what crime not really a requirement it usually says it but it doesn't it doesn't require a probable cause affidavit which i think is really the more important part it doesn't require you to prove that there is enough to charge them with a crime in the sending state right so we're saying that's a bare minimum change that we can make to laws to make the state that's asking for you to use your resources to put somebody in a cage and then put them in a traveling cage to bring them to our cages.

And I keep saying the word cage because I don't want us to move away from what like prisons and jails actually are. It's like bars and cages and boxes, right? So does it really harm the system? Does it really tear y'all apart to say, and here's what they're being charged with and the reason why because that would be the bare minimum for someone to be charged for a crime in New York you would need to have probable cause for the arrest and then a judge that's sitting on the bench gets to say yep there's enough probable cause for this person to be charged next court date you know and but we don't have that with extradition we just trust that the wheels of bureaucracy are turning the way that they need to. Holy crap, that can harm so many people. So we're just saying, hey, make them

write it down. So maybe a judge that's sitting in Illinois can look at this warrant from Missouri that says, we want XYZ back here because of a self-managed abortion. And then they can see whether or not Illinois' new fancy extradition law which they haven't written yet but i'm sure they will applies right i think that's a bare minimum that we can do and as much as i crave shaking systems and tearing them apart i don't think that's going to be a thing that does it but it might you know have y'all ever played mario kart you know when you're driving and you're able to throw the turtle shell or the banana? That might be the banana that might slow down the process of somebody getting dragged along on this course.

I think there's another thing that that would do, too, which is that that buys time for community response. Because if we go back to the ice stuff, it was like, well, yeah, okay. Ice raids weren't stopped by the sanctuary laws the thing that like did slow them down was massive community response yeah i think i think that's very uh it's certainly i've seen that happen here like in san diego it wasn't any of our performative democrat laws it was people getting out into the street yeah i was gonna say there's it's also like in the uk in the last couple of months there's been a lot of really really impressive community defense things and like cops showing up and like just entire communities and neighborhoods showing up

the cops just like running away and it's been it's been incredible to watch, and you too can also do this. But performative Democrats keep giving us good laws. Like, give us something. Give anything. Like, a nub of a thing that folks can hang their hats on. I just don't want any politician out there to think that they're absolved from the job of protecting people. Yeah, well, and I think, again, the thing with these laws right is like you you actually like with this extradition stuff like i don't know how like i don't know how you would even like try to stop it unless like because like you don't know

like i mean i'm like unless unless you're going to commit to try to stop trying to stop every person who gets arrested which i think is like a noble goal but like there's no we don't have the capacity for that like if if we lived in a world where we could do that like the world would be much better and the state would be running for its life but yeah it's like like it seems like a thing that like it it gives like it gives time for the law to act more importantly it's like it gives time for us to act and that that's absolutely one of the most important thing is it's buying time for people to organize and people to be able to push back and also creates a higher barrier right like at the end of the day like

these systems are still made of people, and people are incredibly lazy. And oftentimes the police and other folks don't want to have to deal with engaging and going with an extradition request. Because the actual process for dealing with that is actually very onerous. They have to physically go to the state to pick them up, and they have to do all these things. And so what we're doing is we're suggesting make it even harder. and they have to like do all these things right and so what we're doing is like we're suggesting is like make it even harder like make it absolutely hard for them to to go through this and actually have to litigate in courts and like bring all this stuff um and just basically like slow down the process and raise that kind of barrier to entry on it but you know i think it's like i think

that's you know very um important to say is like you know the community defense aspect like cannot be overstated because at the end of the day like laws are just words on paper right like it's it's the people that give them the effect and the power so really what we need is like people say like this is morally wrong right like we're not going to prosecute people for for exercising their bodily autonomy engaging in a fundamental human right and so you know one of the things i've been heartened by is, you know, like Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club in Dallas, like what they've been doing, like protecting houseless folks, like under the overpasses, like they show up and like, you know, in Texas, they can open carry and like the police doesn't um come in and sweep you know the only belongings that these people have and like that in and of itself brought so much attention that like brought so much scrutiny to dallas pd's actions so like it's that kind of community defense and i think it also harkens back to how these extradition issues like prior to like the civil war worked out, it wasn't necessarily like these formal systems in Vermont that like stopped,

you know, escaped us like persons from being returned back to the South. It was like entire mobs of people coming and like being like, you're not taking this person out of our town. And if you try to, you're not going to leave here like as a whole person, I guess is probably the best way to put that um shoot your local bounty hunter yeah and so like essentially like that that's how it worked right and like

you know at the end of the day like i feel like you know i don't want to endorse any kind of violence but like like what really what it means is like when people show up and they physically put themselves in in in the way it makes it so much harder for the like this kind of wheel of injustice to to continue and so that's really what it's much harder for the like, this kind of wheel of injustice to continue. And so that's really what it's going to take. And like you were mentioning with like the with the ice raids and everything like that, like it took people, sometimes physically putting their bodies in front of ice fans to stop them from driving away and like chaining themselves to stop. And like, that's the kind of like nonviolent, like direct action that i think is like gonna be like needed yeah and i i think folks seem to have figured out that their district

attorneys are elected and the person bringing the fugitive case which i don't think i've been crystal clear about is the district attorney so then you the the police officer is going to go to the district attorney's office and and that is the person who's going to bring the court case to help facilitate sending the person um and i know new york recently has seen a number of successes of folks organizing around individual people would be saying you need to drop these charges this conviction got overturned you should not be continuing with the case this person is for whatever reason folks are organizing around right and so if we can create some delays whereby the person is free right because this is the key thing we don't want people incarcerated incarceration in of itself is extreme violence right so if the person is not incarcerated then we can sort of delay this process and organize around

pressuring whoever needs to be pressured particularly the the toothless democratic politicians who say they're against all of this stuff but then at the end of the day are they going to ignore the homicide extradition warrant like that's where the rubber meets the road are you going to do it or not right and and and i think that's a much harder question when it comes down to that for them because they're like well it's a homicide warrant right and and so that's where they need the pressure because um all the wild ideas go out the door in that moment yeah i think like i think that's the thing with with these people it's like ideologically like they don't care enough to do it do it but if you but you can force them to care yeah they care about having a job yeah well it's not not even just so much that like

there there are long established ways of putting pressure on people and systems that can force them to do things they don't want to do and yeah go do that because we're gonna need it frankly i think part of this is also destigmatizing work right um because when we have kind of these big divergent ideas when we find ourselves at this split of like good versus evil right like slavery versus not slavery bodily autonomy versus not bodily autonomy um sometimes the good guys compromise to the point that we get ourselves to this position later on down the line and what we can do is kind of galvanize community response and also civic engagement by forcing folks to take a look at the laws that we so rely

on and questioning why does this thing exist this way why is this process moving that way someone that didn't know that folks facing an extradition warrant like often have to make the decision at an arraignment am I going to waive my right to extradition and wait for them to come get me because they said that takes 30 days for them to come and get you but if you don't waive it's going to take 90 days for them to come and get you so you'll be sitting there longer and that's a decision that you need to make kind of like in that moment if we're talking about extradition in normal conversation we're moving forward to a place where we're destigmatizing and frankly demystifying what the criminal legal system really looks like in the nuts and bolts it might end up with better conversations and better output for folks in the future it might end up with you being able to

talk about jury nullification and having like and not having it be kind of like a shaking the table conversation because frankly these are all like civics it's civics it's rights it's things that are written in the constitution that governs us where the cops don't need to know the law but we're all expected to right so it takes all kinds it takes all responses for us to just get to the place that's better than the stop gap that roe had been giving us for the last 40 some odd years and i'll say like the one thing that does terrify me in this end is like or i guess like really concerns me is like what ron desantis just did in florida in hillsborough county like i grew up in hillsborough county so i'm from there so it's like like the twice elected uh state attorney there was just suspended because he said he would

refuse to um prosecute crimes related to abortion and gender affirming carry like also refused to like prosecute trans people using the bathroom right so like these kinds of things and desantis just like sacked him right an elected person that like reflects the values of that county and so like that that's the other thing to to be aware of it's you know like even when you do exercise that power and like say like this is our as a community these are our values on like who we should be prioritizing um in the criminal justice system there are still people out there that will will try to circumvent that in a very authoritarian and autocratic way and so um you know i think it's not just who you're voting for your local da it's who are you voting

for governor who are you voting for like you know these people that have broader powers over this Were you voting for, like, you know, these people that have broader powers over this? Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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Available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanted to briefly talk about this because I know it was proposed, at least by my representative. I think it's being bandied about as a solution uh and uh it doesn't seem like it is but this my body my data act uh which i was trying to read through it a little earlier it seems like it allows people to like sue tech companies for selling their data that leads to

their prosecution i don't know if you all are familiar with it but maybe we could just discuss a little bit what no okay all right i mean so i'm i'm not familiar but based on what you just said right i think there's this and i really think it goes back to what evco is saying about folks just like not not fully understanding precisely how the criminal legal system just like runs over people okay great so i can sue the tech company after the police have put me in a cage and and convicted me based on the date like like okay i mean great maybe i'll have a lot of money in my commissary my family will have enough um like uh funds to come drive and visit me at whatever state prison they've got me locked up in, right? Like, this is where we have to step back and think, is this thing actually preventing the harm? Because I think a lot of times folks are just like, we can sue them or we could get back at them.

And I also want folks to remember that just making something illegal does not prevent harm, right? And we're going to have a whole other conversation about criminalization as a solution to anything, which I think it is not. But just on the face of what you've said to me, that doesn't sound like a solution that if I, it wouldn't feel adequate to me

if I were in that situation. And also thinking about how cases become cases from what we know, it's not, again, it's not coming from big data down, right? For the most part, it certainly can happen. But really what's happening is violations of people's Fourth Amendment rights, cops being able to access things on people's actual devices, oftentimes without warrants, oftentimes by not fully explaining that people have the right to say no. And I'm sure Michelle has had clients that were like, oh, they just took my phone. How many times have we heard that? Right. They just took my phone and started going through it.

A police officer that does that is not going to write in their report. And I just took his phone without any permission. It's always permission was granted. It was in plain view. I saw it from the street. I smelled it as he was walking by. Like if the laws that are being created are not actually responsive to the harm that folks are experiencing in a way that actually prevents it then we need to kind of push back at our legislators and say okay this is great but is it

responding to the thing that you're saying it's responding to because yeah shout out to people being able to sue big tech for selling our data without our permission bet but is that gonna prevent prosecutors from going after folks that have abortions probably not because even in the Nebraska case that Alejandra mentioned at the top of the hour that was a warrant that was signed by a judge it was a search warrant that was provided to Facebook that didn't say the words abortion on it that didn't say that we're going after someone for abortion it had I think the words like abuse of a corpse or something of that nature on there and for them it was wrote what they normally do bureaucracy search warrant stamp here's the data that you're looking for a law that prevents folks

from selling your data doesn't prevent that from happening something i think a lot about those one of my sort of like former political experiences was back in like, I think this was happening in 2012, 2013. Right after the revolution in Bahrain. So, okay, so the revolution in Bahrain, Saudi tanks roll in, they crush it, they kill a bunch of people, and the government starts doing this crackdown.

The way the government does the crackdown is they go to Facebook, and they take stuff that was on people's public accounts, and then they go to Facebook, and they ask them for information. And Facebook turns it over. And, you know, the government just goes through and finds everyone who was at a protest and starts arresting them. And, you know,

Facebook was just like, eh. And like that, you know, if they will comply with a literal monarchy who has had a second monarchy send an army across the border in order to crush a bunch of protests, they're going to comply with the US and they're going to keep doing this stuff to you. And so, yeah, even if you can sue them, they're still going to cooperate with the US government because... Yeah, they have a greater financial interest in doing so.

Big tech doesn't give a fuck about you. Yeah, I think folks, again, as Eve was saying, like Eve was saying, it was just so like, this is rote. This is what they do every day. This is not that serious or that deep to them. And I think we need to start asking bigger questions about why do we have a system where it's so easy for the government to just like come in and

have a subpoena signed? Like the subpoenas are easy to get. Like we have, these mechanisms are all in place. And that's what I was sort of saying earlier is that I think folks who haven't been paying attention to this, who are all of a sudden like, wow, how is this happening? Oh my goodness. Well, these are the machines of mass incarceration that we have spent a few decades really building up. And so now when the person, the people you're sympathetic with start to get criminalized,

all of a sudden we're very shocked. And listen, however you got here, great, welcome. I'm glad folks are here and saying like, wow, this is a problem. And I want folks to think the if the abortion context and the self-managed abortion is your entry point. I hope it is not the end point. I hope that you are thinking bigger about how did all these systems get here? Who do they serve? And and and i hope how do we dismantle them because it's it's not just this select few people group of people that we should care about i think it's all the

people who are who are exposed to this on the daily um so yeah that's my soapbox i always wonder how many judges um have refused to sign a search warrant that's like a big wonder of mine i i don't judges don't hang out with me obviously for a lot of obvious reasons but if i were to like just whisper in my ear real quick how many times have you ever said no to a police officer that comes to ask to swear a warrant in front of you How many times have you found there is no probable cause, dude? This is sketchy. This is weird. To be fair, there have to be a certain number of times where they're trying to go after another judge.

No, they don't do that. Nobody goes after other judges. I don't know. It's got to have happened once. There has to have been one time where a cop was like this judge pissed me off i'm gonna go raid his car or something never never that i can probably like that i can think about never happening but i just wonder how many times has somebody said we are gonna go search for drugs in xyz house in this specific neighborhood that a cop that a judge says huh you don't have enough here.

Try again. It doesn't happen. Yeah. At least not in state court. I'm told in federal court, maybe they turn down one out of 25. But in state court, my experience is, again, it's routine. It's just how things go. I mean, one of the things that I came across when I was, you know, it's not dealing with particularly judges issuing warrants, but one of the things I

did when, when I was looking into the payment app issue this past spring is, you know, I talked to a former prosecutor and was like, you know, what is it like to get documents from, or, or data from like Facebook and Instagram or meta or whatnot, or like Twitter or any of these other places. And they were just like, oh, we just send a request. Like we don't even like, it's basically an administrative subpoena and they just like hand over everything. Like, um, it's basically, they're just like so routine oftentimes, especially if it's coming from a district attorney's office or law enforcement like oftentimes these companies just like casually hand over stuff all the time especially when it's like dealing with low-level

drug stuff um or any kind of like issues like that you know they they like to say oh we're big on on civil rights and stuff like that and and making sure your data is protected but in reality like there's so many requests around this stuff. And it's just, you know, the only time they ever maybe make a stand is when a case is higher profile and it may damage their brand, right? And that's the only time they actually ever care. On the defense attorney side, it's hard as heck to get your client's records for things. Yeah.

Like, so hard. So, so hard. You're looking for information on a Facebook for somebody that's incarcerated that might get them out of jail and they don't remember their password. You don't know how to get into their stuff. And it needs to be not a screenshot because that you might not be able to get that authenticated and admissible in court. And it is so hard when you're working on the other side and not in law enforcement to get data and information. But on the flip side, when it comes to like people's medical information, which comes into play in a lot of these cases, because we're at this intersection of bodily autonomy and health and the criminal legal system, we've certainly seen in cases where folks are having a medical emergency and cops are able to just go and do a bedside interview with somebody that's coming out of surgery still drugged up right they're able to just go up to a charge nurse and being like so how's he doing and they're getting information that's wild because I have had requests for my

clients medical records with signed HIPAA authorizations returned because I signed with blue ink instead of black ink. It's not rote. It's not rote when it's not coming from law enforcement sometimes. And that's kind of the wild thing. There's this assumption that folks in law enforcement have a right to all information at all times forever. And that's where things get rubber stamped. And that's the stuff that we're not really looking at that have large impact on how people access their rights i was just as we were talking about like facebook knowing everything about you and uh loving the cops uh i was like reminded of fuko's panopticon and like this idea that you'll start to internalize discipline because you never know when you're

being watched right um and so i wondered like if obviously like uh when fuko talks about it the idea is that you will do you act like you think the state is watching because the state could always be watching therefore you have to act like it is watching uh and like it's we're not there yet right like we're totally there have you not heard the fbi in your phone joke the fbi on my computer like I hope he likes my makeup today we're totally there like I think there's an assumption that we're all being watched I don't know Eve sometimes I wish our clients uh thought they were being watched more because sometimes people put too much on Facebook we all do well yeah you're right let me not keep myself

from that because I am very much included yeah but yeah so like that's what i wanted to ask right like how do we not uh i've known you know we don't want people to listen to this and do crimes but um like how should people act in their interactions uh like in in a way that is like i guess uh i don't know that makes them less vulnerable to like these very obvious obsec fails i guess um i have some resources uh so at if when how we have this thing called the repro legal helpline it's repro legal helpline.org it's also a warm line with the phone number that people can call and ask questions like, what are my rights when it comes to my abortion, my self managed abortion. And on that website, we have digital tips about how do you protect yourself and sanitize your digital space, just for safety as a whole, not to hide information from everyone. But how do you move and prevent

and minimize your risks? What does harm reduction look like to you? We also have the Repro Legal Defense Fund, and that exists for folks when they are actually being criminalized to pay for things like bail, help out with attorney's fees, help out with expert fees. So there are folks that are working on this stuff that exists as resources, and there are resources out there. But I would tell folks to really think about who are you telling your business to? Um, when you share information, is that information that's necessary for treatment that you're being asked? Um,

just because we're used to being in spaces where there's a power imbalance about sharing all of the information that's asked of us. And I think when it comes to spaces and times where we're more vulnerable to state actors causing harm to us, being mindful about what questions are you being asked? And is that question necessary for you to be able to receive care or services XYZ? And it sucks to have to put work on the back of folks that are already being oppressed by systems. It's absolute trash. And I fully recognize that it's messed up. But when we're thinking about what does harm reduction look like, I think that's one of those things that we have to keep in mind. And harm reduction also looks like folks knowing generally what the law is and being able to advocate for themselves in those spaces. I'll just add from my side, from like kind of just, you know, from a cyber perspective,

it's, you know, just in general ways, like there's nothing that's going to be bulletproof or a silver bullet in terms of always protecting your privacy. But like the quicker ways that you can have at least make yourself generally safer is use apps like Signal for chatting. Also use like auto delete features um you know don't don't keep like years worth of text messages and stuff like that um additionally um you know don't use biometrics uh because you don't have a fifth amendment right for self-incrimination for biometrics right so? So it's a long, long reason why that is in the courts.

Use a password. Don't use a short pin. Use a password. I know it's annoying. I know it's like, you know, a fingerprint or face unlock is much more convenient. But, you know, if you are at high risk or you worry about this stuff

and you're concerned about your privacy, like use those things because they can't compel you to do that generally. You know, the other things is the Yuki app, E-U-K-I, which is a sexual health app that has a lot of information about, you know, reproductive issues. It also has like a menstrual tracker, but it's all encrypted client side. They get no data and it has, it also has like a menstrual tracker but it's all encrypted client side they get no data and it has it prompts you for a password and pin to open it um and it also has uh uh resources for self-managed abortion um and and how to safely handle those um and yeah you know just generally you know anything you put out there on social media, also, like, be careful, like, what you put out there.

Like, stay to end-to-end encryption. Use VPNs if you can. You know, these are just kind of, like, general stuff. Like, nothing is, again, ever going to be foolproof. But, yeah, there are some small steps you can take to at least increase some of your protections. And on my end, you know, you have a right to remain silent. You should use it. And thanks to the Supreme Court, you have to say, I want to be silent in order to invoke your right to be silent. You cannot just be silent. So you, I would advise

people to say, I want to be silent and I want a lawyer. Those are the magic words. I also want to hold that being captured by police officers is a violent experience and a scary experience. And sometimes asserting your rights can provoke more violence. And so people do what they need to do to stay safe in that moment. they need to do to stay safe in that moment um from the law perspective saying i would i want to be silent and i want a lawyer um are the things that invoke all of your constitutional protections um and the police may lie about whether or not you said that later so you know say it as many times as you need to, but those are really the only things you should say, which is a lot easier said than done.

But that is the thing that folks should do if they do find themselves in the custody of law enforcement. And also, if you're on the street, ask if you're free to go, and if you're free to go, please walk, do not run away. There's also a case about that. Ah, God, hate the cops well thank you all so much for joining us um this this has been really great and yeah don't talk to cops yep would you like to plug anything before we uh leave with don't talk to cops yeah i can just throw my personal side.

You can follow me on all socials on Twitter and Insta at Esquire underscore, so it's like Portmanteau of Esquire and Queer, S-E-S-Q-U-E-E-R underscore. And also I have a podcast called Queering the Law where I talk about a lot of these issues as well. So if you want to give that a listen. um or talk about a lot of these issues as well um so if you want to give that a listen um don't follow me on social media uh because all my stuff is closed uh but i would uh recommend

that folks follow at if when how on all socials because we're always uh providing up-to-date information on what's actually going on with criminalization of self-managed abortion and resources from you know community partners that are on the ground local that are doing the work so if folks are looking to get connected I would say reach out to if one how and we can usually point you in the right direction you could follow me on twitter but I don't really remember what my handle is so uh what I would suggest that you do, pretrial detention and bail litigation is really my heart. You got folks locked up and they haven't even been found guilty. Not that anyone should be locked up.

So donate to your local bail fund if you don't know who that is. There's a lot of orgs, National Bailout, The Bail Project. There's a lot of places you can find that. But throwing $5, $10, $15 at your local bail fund will get someone free because you can purchase your freedom here in 2022 America. So do that.

Yeah, thank you so much. This has been Nick and Appen here. You can find us in places. Don't talk to cops. And yeah, if there there weren't any cops you couldn't make things illegal it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. Danny Trails and Step Into the Flames of Fright, an anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.