By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Coming to court this week, a police officer’s widow wanted to prove that a man assaulted her husband during a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol and ultimately was responsible for the officer’s suicide nine days later. A jury’s verdict Friday amounted to only a partial victory for Erin Smith in a lawsuit over her husband’s death.

The eight-member jury held a 69-year-old chiropractor, David Walls-Kaufman, liable for assaulting Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They will hear more trial testimony before deciding whether to award Erin Smith any monetary damages over her husband’s assault.

But the judge presiding over the civil trial dismissed Erin Smith’s wrongful-death claim against Walls-Kaufman before jurors began deliberating. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said no reasonable juror could conclude that Walls-Kaufman’s actions were capable of causing a traumatic brain injury leading to Smith’s death.

Reyes divided the trial into two stages: one on the merits of Smith’s claims and another on damages. For the damages phase, jurors are expected to hear attorneys’ closing arguments Monday.

In the meantime, the judge urged the parties to discuss a possible settlement over the weekend. Reyes said it would be “exceedingly rational” for both sides “to get this behind you” and avoid the time and expense of an appeal.

Erin Smith claimed Walls-Kaufman gave her husband a concussion as they scuffled inside the Capitol. Jeffrey Smith was driving to work for the first time after the Capitol riot when he shot and killed himself with his service weapon.

His widow claims Walls-Kaufman struck her 35-year-old husband in the head with his own police baton inside the Capitol, causing psychological and physical trauma that led to his suicide. Smith had no history of mental health problems before the Jan. 6 riot, but his mood and behavior changed after suffering a concussion, according to his wife and parents.

Walls-Kaufman, who lived near the Capitol, denies assaulting Smith. He says any injuries that the officer suffered on Jan. 6 occurred later in the day, when another rioter threw a pole that struck Smith around his head.

Walls-Kaufman served a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to a Capitol riot-related misdemeanor in January 2023, but he was pardoned in January. On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack.

Trump’s sweeping act of clemency didn’t erase Smith’s lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman.

Erin Smith, the trial’s first witness, recalled packing a lunch for her husband and kissing him as he headed off to work on Jan. 15, 2021, for the first time after the riot.

“I told him I loved him, said I would see him when he got home,” she testified.

Within hours, police officers knocked on her door and informed her that her husband was dead. She was stunned to learn that he shot himself with his service weapon in his own car.

“It was the most traumatic words I’ve ever heard,” she recalled. “You just don’t know what to do.”

Walls-Kaufman’s attorney, Hughie Hunt, urged jurors to “separate emotion” and concentrate on the facts of the case.

“This is tragic, but that doesn’t place anything at the foot of my client,” Hunt said during the trial’s opening statements.

Smith’s body camera captured video of his scuffle with Walls-Kaufman. In his testimony, Walls-Kaufman said he was overcome by “sensory overload” and “mass confusion” as police tried to usher the crowd out of the Capitol.

“I couldn’t tell who was pushing who or from what direction,” he said.

The police department medically evaluated Smith and cleared him to return to full duty before he killed himself. Hunt said there is no evidence that his client intentionally struck Smith.

“The claim rests entirely on ambiguous video footage subject to interpretation and lacks corroborating eyewitness testimony,” Hunt wrote in a court filing in the case.

More than 100 law-enforcement officers were injured during the riot. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed and died a day after engaging with the rioters. A medical examiner later determined he suffered a stroke and died of natural causes. Howard Liebengood, a Capitol police officer who responded to the riot, also died by suicide after the attack.

In 2022, The District of Columbia Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board determined that Smith was injured in the line-of-duty and the injury was the “sole and direct cause of his death,” according to the lawsuit.

“Will the next mayor treat reparations as the moral and economic necessity that it is, or let this moment pass, despite the will of the people?”

Racial equity legislation on the mayor’s desk at City Hall in 2020. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, something historic happened this spring. The city’s mayor, Monroe Nichols, unveiled a bold $105 million plan for reparations to the survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. 

Here in New York City, we also face a defining question: will the next mayor treat reparations as the moral and economic necessity that it is, or let this moment pass, despite the will of the people? 

Reparations in New York are not a fringe idea, as many media and political elites would have you believe. The recent survey conducted by New Yorkers for Reparations and Liberation Ventures shows that 48 percent of New Yorkers support reparations, and 70 percent would support or consider a candidate who champions them. This growing public consensus mirrors what advocates have long known: reparations are not only possible, they are inevitable. 

New York is leading the way in advancing reparations and reparative justice in many ways. The New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, formed after years of advocacy from grassroots organizers, has been working over the past year to gather community input through public hearings. The New York City Council, through the Commission on Racial Equity (CORE), is developing its own reparations process. 

Nationally, Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Summer Lee are advancing HR-40, legislation that would establish a national reparations commission. Their leadership reflects the moral clarity needed in this moment. 

The groundwork has been laid; now we need the political leadership to act. 

Which is why we hosted a Mayoral Forum on Reparations directly across from Seneca Village, now known as Central Park, which was once a thriving Black community that was taken via eminent domain. There, four candidates—Michael Blake, Zellnor Myrie, Zohran Mamdani, and Brad Lander— each declared their support for reparations. 

They didn’t mince words: 

“Closing the racial wealth gap is not just a better deal for Black New Yorkers, it’s a better deal for all New Yorkers.” -Brad Lander 

“We as a city have to ensure that we are connecting the wrongs of the past.” – Zellnor Myrie 

“New York City actively participated in the slave trade; it should reconcile and repair this legacy.” – Zohran Mamdani 

“We have to address economic injustice at the forefront, it’s simply too expensive to live in New York because of historical injustice.” – Michael Blake. 

To understand why reparations are urgently needed, we must begin with a simple truth: Black wealth in this city was not lost, but taken. Two hundred years ago, on the land that is now Central Park, a thriving, predominantly Black community called Seneca Village stood. By 1850 it was home to 20 percent of all Black property owners in the state, and in 1853, the state decided to take it through the power of eminent domain, and by 1857 the entirety of Seneca Village was erased, not by mob, as Elie Mystal explained, but by design, by law. 

This pattern of dispossession evolved into policies across the city and state that robbed Black New Yorkers of their wealth; redlining, racial covenants, urban renewal, underfunded schools, segregated hospitals, discriminatory hiring, and unequal wages. The result is a staggering Black-white wealth gap, with the median wealth for white New Yorkers is $320,000, for Black New Yorkers, it’s just $2,800. That is not a gap, as our coalition member and long-time reparations leader, Nkechi Taifa, reminds us, it is a chasm. 

New York City is not absent from the legacy of American slavery, far from it. In 1712, the city became home to its first slave trading post at the intersection of Pearl Street and Wall Street, the very heart of what would become America’s financial district. Long before Seneca Village, there was “The Land of the Blacks,” also referred to as the Negro Frontier, a documented Black presence in New York dating back to the early 1600s who would also eventually be displaced. This rich history was nearly erased until the rediscovery of the African Burial Ground near Chambers Street at the foot of City Hall Park. 

The very name “New York,” along with the state capital “Albany,” comes from James Stuart, the Duke of York and Albany. He, along with his brother King Charles II, co-founded the Royal African Company—a powerful enterprise that dominated the transatlantic slave trade, exchanging enslaved Africans for goods as part of the triangular trade.

As a major port city, New York positioned itself at the center of this global system, helping to build the wealth of the English Crown, New York’s merchant class, and Southern plantation economies. The city’s industrial processing and shipping infrastructure directly fueled and profited from slavery, until New York legally abolished slavery in 1827.

Given this history, New York should be leading the national call for reparations, in truth, policy, and wealth redistribution. The institution of slavery as we know it would not have thrived without New York’s central role in financing, processing, and profiting from Black bondage. New York has always been a city of ambition. It’s time we match that ambition with justice.

Nicole Carty is a Brooklyn resident, New Yorkers for Reparations coalition member, and executive cirector of Get Free. Rashid Littlejohn is a Staten Island resident, New Yorkers for Reparations coalition member, and vice president of the Anti-Negro Defamation League.

The post Opinion: Why Reparations Must Be A Priority Issue in the NYC Mayoral Election appeared first on City Limits.

By SARA CLINE and JACK BROOK

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A panel of three federal appellate judges has ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in each of the state’s public school classrooms is unconstitutional.

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The ruling on Friday marked a major win for civil liberties groups who say the mandate violates the separation of church and state, and that the poster-sized displays would isolate students — especially those who are not Christian.

The mandate has been touted by Republicans, including President Donald Trump, and marks one of the latest pushes by conservatives to incorporate religion into classrooms. Backers of the law argue the Ten Commandments belong in classrooms because they are historical and part of the foundation of U.S. law.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ order stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana school children from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates First Amendment language guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.

The mandate was signed into law last June by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry.

The court’s ruling backs an order issued last fall by U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to take steps to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.

Law experts have long said they expect the Louisiana case to make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, testing the conservative court on the issue of religion and government.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but served a plainly religious purpose.

In 2005, the Supreme Court held that such displays in a pair of Kentucky courthouses violated the Constitution. At the same time, the court upheld a Ten Commandments marker on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol in Austin.

A Minnesota lobbyist accused of sending text messages threatening to shoot people at the state Capitol now faces a felony charge.

Jonathan Michael Bohn of Woodbury. (Courtesy of the Carver County Sheriff’s Office)

Jonathan Michael Bohn, 41, of Woodbury, has been charged with threats of violence after allegedly sending a string of “threatening and disparaging” messages to an acquaintance, the Carver County Attorney’s Office announced Friday.

Bohn, a lobbyist with the Inter Faculty Organization, a union that represents faculty at Minnesota state universities, said he had bought “500 bullets” and was “excited to have my gun at the capitol and blow somebody’s (expletive) face off,” prosecutors allege.

The alleged threats did not mention any specific state lawmaker.

A person received the messages while at a restaurant in Waconia on Wednesday, according to the criminal complaint, which leaves the alleged victim unnamed for privacy reasons.

They came after a “falling out with the victim over political differences,” the Carver County Attorney’s Office said in a news release on the charges.

After learning of the alleged threats, law enforcement obtained a search warrant for Bohn’s Woodbury home and found an unloaded firearm in a locked case in his garage, according to the complaint. Police questioned took him into custody.

Bohn remained in the Carver County Jail in Chaska Friday afternoon. At his bail hearing Friday, Judge Eric Braaten set Bohn’s bond at $1 million, ordered no contact with the alleged victim and ordered him to stay at least half a mile away from the Minnesota Capitol.

In a statement, the Inter Faculty Organization said it had placed Bohn on administrative leave.

“The Inter Faculty Organization (IFO) condemns political violence and threats of violence in any form,” union president Jenna Chernega said in a statement. “Such acts are unacceptable and stand in direct opposition to the values that guide our work: civil discourse, mutual respect, and advocacy rooted in integrity.”

Rep. Jim Nash, a Waconia Republican, reported the threatening text to law enforcement on Wednesday.

Nash notified the House sergeant at arms, State Patrol and Carver County Sheriff’s Office of a “personal text message to a constituent that was threatening in nature,” the Minnesota House GOP Caucus said in a news release.

“The threat was not aimed at any particular lawmaker but the message did include a threat of violence at the Capitol,” House Republicans said. The news release didn’t identify the suspect but said authorities questioned and arrested the person on Wednesday.

Republicans said the House sergeant at arms is not aware of any further threats to the Legislature or its staff.

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Bohn’s arrest comes less than a week after a shooting spree that took the lives of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, and her husband, Mark, and injured Sen. John Hoffman, DFL-Champlin, and his wife, Yvette.

The alleged gunman visited the homes of two additional lawmakers that same night and had notebooks naming dozens more targets, federal prosecutors said this week.

Lawmakers’ home addresses have already been removed from the Minnesota Legislature’s website, and the Capitol saw a larger security presence than usual this week.

Elected officials have again called for new security measures at the state Capitol, such as entry checkpoints with metal detectors and X-ray machines.