National Roundup

Louisiana
Court: Texas, Louisiana can end Planned Parenthood funding

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court ruled Monday that Texas and Louisiana can cut off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood clinics — a move supported by opponents of legal abortion, but opposed by advocates who said it affects a variety of non-abortion health services for low-income women.

The ruling was handed down by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. While it expressly reversed decisions in Texas and Louisiana, it also affects Mississippi, which is under 5th Circuit jurisdiction. The issue is likely to go next to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Opponents of legal abortion have long sought to deny federal Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics.

Abortion rights supporters and advocates for women’s health have argued that the move would reduce access and choice for low-income women seeking cancer screenings, birth control and other non-abortion-related health services — even in states where Planned Parenthood clinics don’t perform abortions.

The decision by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans reverses an earlier ruling by a three-judge appellate panel that blocked Texas from enforcing its ban on Medicaid funding of Planned Parenthood. It also expressly reversed a ruling in a separate case blocking Louisiana from banning Planned Parenthood funding. A three-judge panel in 2015 had ruled against the ban and that decision stood when the full court deadlocked 7-7 in 2017, when there were only 14 active judges on the court.

The court’s personnel has changed since then. Six nominees of Republican President Donald Trump now sit on the court. Four of them participated in Monday’s case (one was recused and another joined the court too late to take part) and all four joined Judge Priscilla Owen’s opinion for an 11-member majority.

Owen wrote that the seven women who sued Texas officials to challenge the ban had no legal right to question the state’s determination that Planned Parenthood was not qualified to provide the services. She noted that a federal statute “unambiguously provides that a Medicaid beneficiary has the right to obtain services from the qualified provider of her choice,” but added that it “does not unambiguously say that a beneficiary may contest or otherwise challenge a determination that the provider of her choice is unqualified.”

In dissent, Judge James Dennis wrote that the ruling conflicts with other circuits’ decisions and will leave millions of people in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, which falls under 5th Circuit jurisdiction, “vulnerable to unlawful state interference with their choice of health care providers.”

The Texas and Louisiana defunding efforts followed the release by anti-abortion activists of secretly recorded videos in 2015. A state inspector general said the video appeared to show Planned Parenthood had improperly changed how abortions were performed so that better specimens could be preserved for medical research. Investigations by 13 states into those videos have concluded without criminal charges, and Planned Parenthood officials have denied any wrongdoing.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton applauded Monday’s ruling, saying the videos showed Planned Parenthood was guilty of “morally bankrupt and unlawful conduct.”

“Today’s decision from the 5th Circuit is yet another devastating blow in Texas’ long history of preventing people from accessing life-saving and essential health care at Planned Parenthood,” said Melaney A. Linton, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, in a joint statement with other Planned Parenthood presidents from across the state. Linton said that the decision was not the end of their fight and that “we must do everything we can to expand people’s access to essential health care, not restrict it.”


Washington
Execution rescheduled for only woman on federal death row

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government now plans to execute the first female inmate in almost six decades just days before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, takes office.

Attorneys for Lisa Montgomery said Monday that the Justice Department rescheduled her execution for Jan. 12. Biden’s inauguration comes Jan. 20.

A federal judge in Washington had delayed the December execution of Montgomery, 49, because her lawyers tested positive for the novel coronavirus after visiting her behind bars. The delay was meant to allow her attorneys to recover from the virus and file a clemency petition on her behalf.

Montgomery’s attorneys, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell, said they both tested positive for COVID-19 after they flew from Nashville, Tennessee, to visit her at the federal prison in Texas where she is serving her sentence. In court papers, they said each roundtrip visit from Nashville involved two flights, hotel stays and interaction with airline and hotel staff, as well as prison employees.

With the new execution date, Montgomery would be one of three federal inmates scheduled to die that week. Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs are scheduled to be put to death on Jan. 14 and 15 while two other executions are scheduled for December.

The Justice Department resumed federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus. Eight people have been executed since July, more than during the previous half-century, despite waning public support from both Democrats and Republicans for its use.

Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo has said the president-elect  “opposes the death penalty now and in the future” and would work as president to end its use. But Ducklo did not say whether executions would be paused immediately once Biden takes office.

Montgomery was convicted of killing 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore in December 2004. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and then cut the baby girl from the womb with a kitchen knife, authorities said. Montgomery took the child with her and attempted to pass the girl off as her own, prosecutors said.

Montgomery’s lawyers have argued that their client suffers from serious mental illnesses.

“It is difficult to grasp the extremity of the horrors Lisa suffered from her earliest childhood, including being raped by her stepfather, handed off to his friends for their use, sold to groups of adult men by her own mother and repeatedly gang raped, and relentlessly beaten and neglected. No one intervened to help Lisa, though many knew what was happening to her,” attorney Sandra Babcock said in a statement.

“No other woman has been executed for a similar crime, because most prosecutors have recognized that it is inevitably the product of trauma and mental illness,” Babcock said. “Executing Lisa Montgomery would be yet another injustice inflicted on a woman who has known a lifetime of mistreatment.”