Former New York Giants RB found guilty in record-breaking dog-fighting operation
Johnson faced 21 charges after having 190-plus dogs seized from him in Oklahoma last year, the most ever from a single person in a dogfighting case. Ultimately, he was found guilty on six felony counts for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act's prohibitions against possessing, selling, transporting, and delivering animals to be used for fighting.
Although sentencing is pending, Johnson faces a maximum of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count, potentially totaling 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in penalties.
"This criminal profited off of the misery of innocent animals and he will face severe consequences for his vile crimes," Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. "This case underscores the Department of Justice's commitment to protecting animals from abuse -- 190 dogs are now safe thanks to outstanding collaborative work by our attorneys and law enforcement components."
During the trial, evidence was presented that Johnson bred and trafficked dogs for his fighting ring under the guise of a "sound foundation," Mal Kant Kennels.
At M K Kennels we strive to build a sound foundation of American Pit Bull Terriers. We have studied the blood of the past and present to help create the dog of the future. Our goal is to produce all around physically correct athletes that will succeed in multiple working events as well as in the show ring. And we believe that we have done just that, producing the future of many yards to come. We would like you to be a part of our dogs future.
We breed for the future with the past in mind. We have some of the best MAYDAY/BOLIO/ LUTHER dogs around. We also use other bloodlines to add a little something if we feel we are lacking a trait. In other words we don't discriminate.
"The FBI will not stand for those who perpetuate the despicable crime of dogfighting," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement. "Thanks to the hard work of our law enforcement partners, those who continue to engage in organized animal fighting and cruelty will face justice."
The 54-year-old Johnson previously pleaded guilty to state animal fighting charges in 2004.
Johnson was a third-round pick of the Green Bay Packers in the 1994 NFL draft. He also spent time with the Arizona Cardinals before joining the Giants in 1998. He missed that season after being diagnosed with lymphoma but returned to start in 1999.
In 62 career games (12 starts), Johnson rushed for 955 yards and five touchdowns.
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Schools are using AI surveillance to protect students. It also leads to false alarms — and arrests
Lesley Mathis knows what her daughter said was wrong. But she never expected the 13-year-old girl would get arrested for it. The teenage girl made an offensive joke while chatting online with her classmates, triggering the school's surveillance software. Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says. Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her 'Mexican,' even though she's not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: 'on Thursday we kill all the Mexico's.' Mathis said the comments were 'wrong' and 'stupid,' but context showed they were not a threat. 'It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?' Mathis said of her daughter's arrest. 'And it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.' Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices. Thousands of school districts across the country use software like Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert to track kids' online activities, looking for signs they might hurt themselves or others. With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement. "It has routinized law enforcement access and presence in students' lives, including in their home,' said Elizabeth Laird, a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Schools ratchet up vigilance for threats In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement. The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students' accounts. (The Associated Press is withholding the girl's name to protect her privacy. The school district did not respond to a request for comment.) Taken to jail, the teen was interrogated and strip-searched, and her parents weren't allowed to talk to her until the next day, according to a lawsuit they filed against the school system. She didn't know why her parents weren't there. 'She told me afterwards, 'I thought you hated me.' That kind of haunts you,' said Mathis, the girl's mother. A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl. Gaggle's CEO, Jeff Patterson, said in an interview that the school system did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said. 'I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,' said Patterson. Private student chats face unexpected scrutiny Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance, said Shahar Pasch, an education lawyer in Florida. One teenage girl she represented made a joke about school shootings on a private Snapchat story. Snapchat's automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours. Alexa Manganiotis, 16, said she was startled by how quickly monitoring software works. West Palm Beach's Dreyfoos School of the Arts, which she attends, last year piloted Lightspeed Alert, a surveillance program. Interviewing a teacher for her school newspaper, Alexa discovered two students once typed something threatening about that teacher on a school computer, then deleted it. Lightspeed picked it up, and 'they were taken away like five minutes later,' Alexa said. Teenagers face steeper consequences than adults for what they write online, Alexa said. 'If an adult makes a super racist joke that's threatening on their computer, they can delete it, and they wouldn't be arrested," she said. Amy Bennett, chief of staff for Lightspeed Systems, said that the software helps understaffed schools 'be proactive rather than punitive' by identifying early warning signs of bullying, self-harm, violence or abuse. The technology can also involve law enforcement in responses to mental health crises. In Florida's Polk County Schools, a district of more than 100,000 students, the school safety program received nearly 500 Gaggle alerts over four years, officers said in public Board of Education meetings. This led to 72 involuntary hospitalization cases under the Baker Act, a state law that allows authorities to require mental health evaluations for people against their will if they pose a risk to themselves or others. 'A really high number of children who experience involuntary examination remember it as a really traumatic and damaging experience — not something that helps them with their mental health care,' said Sam Boyd, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Polk and West Palm Beach school districts did not provide comments. An analysis shows a high rate of false alarms Information that could allow schools to assess the software's effectiveness, such as the rate of false alerts, is closely held by technology companies and unavailable publicly unless schools track the data themselves. Gaggle alerted more than 1,200 incidents to the Lawrence, Kansas, school district in a recent 10-month period. But almost two-thirds of those alerts were deemed by school officials to be non-issues — including over 200 false alarms from student homework, according to an Associated Press analysis of data received via a public records request. Students in one photography class were called to the principal's office over concerns Gaggle had detected nudity. The photos had been automatically deleted from the students' Google Drives, but students who had backups of the flagged images on their own devices showed it was a false alarm. District officials said they later adjusted the software's settings to reduce false alerts. Natasha Torkzaban, who graduated in 2024, said she was flagged for editing a friend's college essay because it had the words 'mental health.' 'I think ideally we wouldn't stick a new and shiny solution of AI on a deep-rooted issue of teenage mental health and the suicide rates in America, but that's where we're at right now,' Torkzaban said. She was among a group of student journalists and artists at Lawrence High School who filed a lawsuit against the school system last week, alleging Gaggle subjected them to unconstitutional surveillance. School officials have said they take concerns about Gaggle seriously, but also say the technology has detected dozens of imminent threats of suicide or violence. 'Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good,' said Board of Education member Anne Costello in a July 2024 board meeting. Two years after their ordeal, Mathis said her daughter is doing better, although she's still 'terrified' of running into one of the school officers who arrested her. One bright spot, she said, was the compassion of the teachers at her daughter's alternative school. They took time every day to let the kids share their feelings and frustrations, without judgment. 'It's like we just want kids to be these little soldiers, and they're not,' said Mathis. 'They're just humans.' ___ This reporting reviewed school board meetings posted on YouTube, courtesy of DistrictView, a dataset created by researchers Tyler Simko, Mirya Holman and Rebecca Johnson. ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
an hour ago
Schools are using AI to protect students. It also leads to false alarms — and arrests
Lesley Mathis knows what her daughter said was wrong. But she never expected the 13-year-old girl would get arrested for it. The teenage girl made an offensive joke while chatting online with her classmates, triggering the school's surveillance software. Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says. Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her 'Mexican,' even though she's not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: 'on Thursday we kill all the Mexico's.' Mathis said the comments were 'wrong' and 'stupid,' but context showed they were not a threat. 'It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?' Mathis said of her daughter's arrest. 'And it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.' Surveillance systems in American schools increasingly monitor everything students write on school accounts and devices. Thousands of school districts across the country use software like Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert to track kids' online activities, looking for signs they might hurt themselves or others. With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement. Educators say the technology has saved lives. But critics warn it can criminalize children for careless words. "It has routinized law enforcement access and presence in students' lives, including in their home,' said Elizabeth Laird, a director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement. The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students' accounts. (The Associated Press is withholding the girl's name to protect her privacy. The school district did not respond to a request for comment.) Taken to jail, the teen was interrogated and strip-searched, and her parents weren't allowed to talk to her until the next day, according to a lawsuit they filed against the school system. She didn't know why her parents weren't there. 'She told me afterwards, 'I thought you hated me.' That kind of haunts you,' said Mathis, the girl's mother. A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl. Gaggle's CEO, Jeff Patterson, said in an interview that the school system did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said. 'I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,' said Patterson. Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance, said Shahar Pasch, an education lawyer in Florida. One teenage girl she represented made a joke about school shootings on a private Snapchat story. Snapchat's automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours. Alexa Manganiotis, 16, said she was startled by how quickly monitoring software works. West Palm Beach's Dreyfoos School of the Arts, which she attends, last year piloted Lightspeed Alert, a surveillance program. Interviewing a teacher for her school newspaper, Alexa discovered two students once typed something threatening about that teacher on a school computer, then deleted it. Lightspeed picked it up, and 'they were taken away like five minutes later,' Alexa said. Teenagers face steeper consequences than adults for what they write online, Alexa said. 'If an adult makes a super racist joke that's threatening on their computer, they can delete it, and they wouldn't be arrested," she said. Amy Bennett, chief of staff for Lightspeed Systems, said that the software helps understaffed schools 'be proactive rather than punitive' by identifying early warning signs of bullying, self-harm, violence or abuse. The technology can also involve law enforcement in responses to mental health crises. In Florida's Polk County Schools, a district of more than 100,000 students, the school safety program received nearly 500 Gaggle alerts over four years, officers said in public Board of Education meetings. This led to 72 involuntary hospitalization cases under the Baker Act, a state law that allows authorities to require mental health evaluations for people against their will if they pose a risk to themselves or others. 'A really high number of children who experience involuntary examination remember it as a really traumatic and damaging experience — not something that helps them with their mental health care,' said Sam Boyd, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Polk and West Palm Beach school districts did not provide comments. Information that could allow schools to assess the software's effectiveness, such as the rate of false alerts, is closely held by technology companies and unavailable publicly unless schools track the data themselves. Gaggle alerted more than 1,200 incidents to the Lawrence, Kansas, school district in a recent 10-month period. But almost two-thirds of those alerts were deemed by school officials to be non-issues — including over 200 false alarms from student homework, according to an Associated Press analysis of data received via a public records request. Students in one photography class were called to the principal's office over concerns Gaggle had detected nudity. The photos had been automatically deleted from the students' Google Drives, but students who had backups of the flagged images on their own devices showed it was a false alarm. District officials said they later adjusted the software's settings to reduce false alerts. Natasha Torkzaban, who graduated in 2024, said she was flagged for editing a friend's college essay because it had the words 'mental health.' 'I think ideally we wouldn't stick a new and shiny solution of AI on a deep-rooted issue of teenage mental health and the suicide rates in America, but that's where we're at right now,' Torkzaban said. She was among a group of student journalists and artists at Lawrence High School who filed a lawsuit against the school system last week, alleging Gaggle subjected them to unconstitutional surveillance. School officials have said they take concerns about Gaggle seriously, but also say the technology has detected dozens of imminent threats of suicide or violence. 'Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good,' said Board of Education member Anne Costello in a July 2024 board meeting. Two years after their ordeal, Mathis said her daughter is doing better, although she's still 'terrified' of running into one of the school officers who arrested her. One bright spot, she said, was the compassion of the teachers at her daughter's alternative school. They took time every day to let the kids share their feelings and frustrations, without judgment. 'It's like we just want kids to be these little soldiers, and they're not,' said Mathis. 'They're just humans.' ___ This reporting reviewed school board meetings posted on YouTube, courtesy of DistrictView, a dataset created by researchers Tyler Simko, Mirya Holman and Rebecca Johnson. ___
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Trump faces Ghislaine Maxwell conundrum
President Trump is facing a Ghislaine Maxwell problem. Publicly releasing testimony from Maxwell, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein who was convicted in 2021 on sex trafficking charges, could help satisfy Trump supporters who have clamored for more transparency around the Epstein case. But further elevating Maxwell would keep the Epstein controversy front-and-center after Trump and top GOP leaders in the House have spent weeks trying to tamp down outrage among their own base. At the same time, Trump's comments about Maxwell have in recent days fueled allegations from Democrats that he has something to hide because of his past ties to Epstein. Trump's name reportedly appears in the Epstein files, though the president has repeatedly distanced himself from Epstein and has not been accused of wrongdoing. Trump has declined to rule out a pardon for Maxwell, saying only that he has the power to do it but hasn't thought about her case. The administration raised eyebrows by moving Maxwell to a lower security prison in Texas. And Trump has continually praised Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche — his former personal attorney — for sitting down with Maxwell for interviews. 'I didn't discuss it with him, but anything he talked about with her, or the fact that he did that, not unusual, number one, and most importantly is something that would be totally above board,' Trump told reporters of Blanche's conversations with Maxwell. Administration officials are weighing whether to publicly release some of Maxwell's testimony to Blanche. The furor over the Epstein case, especially among some of Trump's vocal supporters, had engulfed the White House in recent weeks and infuriated the president, who felt it was overshadowing better headlines. The outrage has died down, coinciding with lawmakers leaving for August recess. But Maxwell's situation threatens to reignite the controversy, depending on what Trump and the administration do. Offering sympathy or clemency for Maxwell would invite bipartisan scrutiny, sources said. And releasing more information could come with legal restrictions. 'There's no question they're trying to thread the needle,' one White House ally told The Hill. CNN and Fox News reported that top administration officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Blanche were set to join Vice President Vance at his residence on Wednesday night to discuss how to handle the ongoing Epstein saga, among other topics. Vance's office pushed back on the reporting, with a spokesperson asserting there was 'never a supposed meeting scheduled at the Vice President's residence to discuss Epstein Strategy.' Many Trump supporters, including some in Congress, have pushed for additional disclosures after the FBI and Justice Department last month stated Epstein did not have a 'client list' and that his 2019 death at his New York City jail cell was a suicide. Some prominent Trump allies have for years promoted conspiracy theories about Epstein's death and claims that a client list would reveal ties between Epstein and prominent Democrats. Epstein, accused in several cases of sex trafficking young girls, ran in high-powered circles with figures that included Trump, former President Clinton, Britain's Prince Andrew and a number of other celebrities and ultrawealthy people. House GOP leaders sent members home a day early for August recess amid a logjam created by a push among some members to release more Epstein-related files. With lawmakers on recess and other issues taking over the news cycle, Trump has gotten some respite from the backlash related to Epstein. But the administration's interactions with Maxwell, and Trump's own comments about her, have kept interest in the case simmering. Maxwell met with Blanche over two days in recent weeks to share information about the Epstein case. ABC News reported that Maxwell did not say anything during the interviews that would be harmful to Trump. In the wake of those interviews, Maxwell was transferred from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison in Texas. Officials have not said why. 'I didn't know about it at all. No, I read about it just like you did. It's not a very uncommon thing,' Trump said when asked Tuesday if he'd approved of the transfer. The administration is now weighing whether to release audio or transcripts of the interview. Doing so would likely aid Trump in distancing himself from Epstein and satisfy some members of his base who would like to see more transparency. But it may also renew attention on the Epstein case as a whole, something Trump has attempted to squash. Maxwell, for her part, is asking for the Supreme Court to intervene in her case, and her attorney has said she is seeking 'relief' from her prison sentence. Sources cautioned that Trump, who famously in 2020 said he wished Maxwell well, must tread carefully in how he handles her case to avoid it creating a larger controversy. 'The president wants to move on. But they may come out with something slightly more transparent, a little more meat on the bone,' the White House ally said.
