Federal prosecutors say a jury, not a judge, should hear the Las Vegas trial of an Arizona man facing a federal ammunition manufacturing charge after selling bullets to the gunman who staged the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

A Tuesday court filing leaves the decision to a judge.

Douglas Haig's lawyers asked for a bench trial, arguing jurors can't fairly hear evidence in a city where 58 people died and over 850 were injured in October 2017.

Prosecutors say his fingerprints were found on bullets in the high-rise hotel suite where the gunman shot into a concert crowd.
Haig has pleaded not guilty to illegally making tracer and armor-piercing bullets at his Mesa, Arizona, home.
His trial is scheduled for Aug. 12.

It happened when Assembly Republicans dumped Jim Wheeler as their leader and unanimously selected Robin Titus to replace him. The reason it went under the radar was that it happened during the final 24 hours of the session, when lawmakers were scrambling to resolve such major issues as school funding.

But make no mistake, this was a change worth noting. It signaled that the state GOP could be headed in a different — and healthier — direction in trying to appeal to Nevada voters.

What Nevadans made clear during those years was that the Republican Party’s divisive stances on issues like immigration, reproductive rights and immigration don’t play here anymore. Voters demanded responsible, bipartisan-minded leadership, not party ideologues like Wheeler.

The ousted leader, Wheeler, represents much of what voters found so repellant in the party, especially those in Clark County. The Minden resident checked off the boxes up and down the list in supporting GOP dogma — pro-NRA, anti-abortion, immigration hardliner, etc. Not only that, but he proposed casting Clark County out of Nevada by making it its own state or district, and once told a California legislator he’d exchange Las Vegas for Lake Tahoe. He perhaps was best known for telling a group that he’d vote to legalize slavery if that’s what his constituents wanted him to do.

This year, state Sen. Holly Mitchell introduced SB 144—the Families Over Fees Act—which would eliminate many administrative fees and discharge billions in debt, according to estimates from backers of the bill.

Unlike fines, which include traffic tickets, fees are not meant to be punitive. But because they’re charged to a high proportion of low-income people who cannot afford to pay, “they end up being punitive,” Stuhldreher said. “The only job of a fee is to recoup costs.” A recent national report found two-thirds of people on probation make less than $20,000 per year and nearly 40 percent make less than $10,000 per year. A 2015 survey found that mothers pay nearly 50 percent of court costs. A respondent from Oakland said the costs amounted to “everything my mother had in savings,” and it meant she went “back to working paycheck to paycheck.” Greene put it simply: “We know the way that policing happens—you can map race, ethnicity, levels of poverty by it.”

Unlike fines, which include traffic tickets, fees are not meant to be punitive. But because they’re charged to a high proportion of low-income people who cannot afford to pay, “they end up being punitive,” Stuhldreher said. “The only job of a fee is to recoup costs.” A recent national report found two-thirds of people on probation make less than $20,000 per year and nearly 40 percent make less than $10,000 per year. A 2015 survey found that mothers pay nearly 50 percent of court costs. A respondent from Oakland said the costs amounted to “everything my mother had in savings,” and it meant she went “back to working paycheck to paycheck.” Greene put it simply: “We know the way that policing happens—you can map race, ethnicity, levels of poverty by it.”

A little over a year ago, San Francisco eliminated many local court fees and some fines after reviewing the coalition’s analysis. Neighboring Alameda County followed suit after similar lobbying. Both also discharged debt, eliminating more than $70 million across the two counties. SB 144 would do “at the state level what we did in San Francisco,” said Stuhldreher.

There’s precedent at the state level too. In 2018, California eliminated juvenile administrative fees, but it didn’t include debt elimination. Los Angeles County decided to eliminate juvenile debt independently, and thereby wiped out $89 million in debt.
The problem lies in how that revenue is generated. The US Department of Justice’s report after the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, showed 40 percent of the city budget’s revenue came from fines and fees, which led to a “focus on generating revenue” in the police department. It brought in money but harmed the city.

San Francisco discovered the same issues. “We were handing people a bill for a few thousand bucks when they got out of jail,” Stuhldreher noted. “It just didn’t make sense. The math didn’t add up. The fees are charged to very low-income people who cannot pay them.”

But there could soon be a solution. PFM launched the Center for Justice and Safety Finance to help forge a national model for reducing revenue from criminal justice fines and fees. The group is working with three counties—Dallas in Texas, Davidson in Tennessee, and Ramsey in Minnesota—to develop plans. Funded by a $1.3 grant from the Arnold Foundation, it’s an explicit test run, said Eichenthal, to create a blueprint for local government to end reliance on the criminal justice system for revenue.

He says many local governments want to make the change but are not sure how to do it. “They’re just sort of frozen in their ability to move forward until they can answer the question of, can you do this in a fiscally responsible way?” he said.

The former Maryland congressman was giving a speech on the importance of “smart policies” when he zeroed in on health care.

“Medicare for All may sound good, but it’s actually not good policy nor is it good politics,” Delaney said, to which the crowd immediately responded with loud boos.

“I’m telling ya. I’m telling ya,” Delaney tried to say over the booing while wagging his finger at the audience. “We should have universal health care, but it shouldn’t be a kind of health care that kicks 115 million Americans off their health care.”

The personal is now public. Consider Facebook. As the global leader in platforming interpersonal interactions with public discourse across boundaries, Facebook enjoys a virtual monopoly in reflecting power.

Facebook’s massive global reach gives the platform immense influence to shape public perception, awareness and opinion. Notably, one of the platform’s creators, Chamath Palihapitiya, did admit that the team “knew something bad could happen,” having “created tools that are literally ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Still, public awareness of this subterfuge has changed nothing.

A conceptual model of the late 1980s can help pry apart the puzzling performances of this anti-social behemoth.