By Phaedra Haywood, Santa Fe New Mexico |
January 30, 2021
New Mexico’s top prison official said the state could eventually end its practice of contracting with private, for-profit firms to operate four of its 11 detention facilities, but the change won’t come anytime soon.
The comments Friday by Corrections Secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero followed an executive order earlier this week by President Joe Biden, who said the U.S. Department of Justice must end its reliance on private operators for federal prisons.
Tafoya Lucero said she’s not philosophically opposed to the idea of getting rid of privately run prisons but she doesn’t favor the state taking such action now.
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Senate Bill 10, which would repeal the 1969 abortion ban on state law books, passed the Senate Health and Public Affairs Committee 5-3 Monday.
The vote fell along party lines with the three Republican state Senators voting against and the five Democrats on the committee voting in favor.
After a two hour wait due to technical difficulties, the committee hearing ran for nearly 2.5 hours due to the length of the debate on the issue. Members of the public for both sides gave impassioned speeches both for and against.
“(The bill) makes sure that women, in collaboration with their provider and families, can make decisions for themselves. It protects the system we have now in place. It doesn’t drive doctors away. It just maintains the status quo,” said state Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque.
Speaker of the House Brian Egolf will introduce a bill that would amend the New Mexico Civil Rights Act. The bill would have two components. One is to allow citizens the ability to sue for compensatory damages and attorney fees against the state when their rights have been violated. Currently, while a citizen can sue […]
The U.S. Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday to reinstate restrictions on the a medication abortion pill that allowed patients to receive it through the mail during the pandemic.
The justices ruled 7 to 2 on the decision in favor of the U.S. Federal Drug Administration. The FDA has maintained a rule that a patient must travel to a clinic to pick up the abortion pill mifepristone for the past 20 years when the drug first came onto the market. Reproductive advocates and experts have said that is politically motivated. The patient can take the pill in a place of their own choosing.
In the majority of police brutality cases, officers are not criminally prosecuted, and reform advocates contend that is in part because of something called “qualified immunity.”
According to Merriam Webster, qualified immunity is “immunity from lawsuits that is granted to public officials (such as police officers) for acts that violate someone's civil rights if it can be shown that the acts do not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would be aware.”