District attorneys says Alabama teen killed by police had grabbed a gun
But the teen's family questioned that conclusion and said they have many unanswered questions about what had happened.
Jefferson County District Attorney Dany Carr announced that no charges will be brought against the officer who shot and killed Jabari Peoples, 18. Peoples was shot on June 23 by a police officer in a parking lot in Homewood, an affluent suburb near the city of Birmingham.
Peoples and a friend had been parked in the parking lot. Carr said an officer had approached the car at about 9:30 p.m. and attempted to detain Peoples because of suspected marijuana in the car. The officer attempted to put handcuffs on Mr. Peoples 'for officer safety' after noticing a gun in the car door but a struggle ensued, Carr wrote. He said Peoples then ran back to his vehicle and grabbed a gun.
'At the time of the shooting, Mr. Peoples had the gun in his right hand and the officer fired one shot, hitting Mr. Peoples in the left side of the back causing injury that ultimately caused his death,' Carr wrote in a statement.
Carr made the announcement immediately after showing the family body camera footage of the shooting. The footage has not been released to the public.
But a family member said they were only shown a short clip that was hard to see and want additional information.
'I have so many unanswered questions, still. Today, what I saw on this video, my brother was afraid. He was scared. He was running for his life,' Angel Smith, People's sister, said.
Smith said her brother could be heard saying, 'Sir, I promise I'm not trying to resist.'
Ben Crump, an attorney representing the family, said they want full transparency. He said the police department should release all of the available video.
'We want exactly what you would want if this was your son that was shot in the back running away from the police,' Crump said.
Homewood Police Chief Tim Ross did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
Groups have staged regular protests in Homewood since the shooting, criticizing the police department's refusal to show the video to family members.
Carr made the decision to show the video to family members after the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency turned its findings over to his office.
Peoples was a 2024 graduate of Aliceville High School in the city of the same name, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Homewood.
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The Guardian
25 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Why did Ghislaine Maxwell do what she did?
Days after Ghislaine Maxwell met with the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, the convicted child sex trafficker and longtime Jeffrey Epstein girlfriend and procurer was moved from a women's federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a so-called 'prison camp' in Texas, a dramatically more comfortable minimum-security environment with dormitory-style housing and fewer guards, sometimes called 'Club Fed'. Maxwell's new camp primarily houses nonviolent offenders, and the inmates there are reportedly livid, and probably not a little bit frightened, to be imprisoned with one of the world's most notorious sex traffickers and alleged rapists. Maxwell, too, was not initially eligible for such a transfer, due to her sex offender status; connections at the Department of Justice had to waive a procedural requirement in order for the move to go through. The transfer appears to be a reward. As Donald Trump struggles to extract himself from the continuing fallout of the Epstein scandal, Maxwell finds herself, now, in the best position that she has been in since her one-time partner Epstein died in a jail cell in 2019. Suddenly, she has something that the president wants: the ability to say, truthfully or no, that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein's sex trafficking. The president, too, has something that Maxwell wants: the ability to issue a pardon. Maxwell has always formed the dark center of the Epstein saga, a woman who appears to have been exceptionally dedicated to arranging Epstein's life, facilitating his travel, luring new victims to his homes, and coordinating his sexual abuse over the course of decades. Alleged victims of Epstein recall being recruited by Maxwell in public places – including at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach – and through friends. They say that she inspected their bodies, brought them to Epstein's homes, talked incessantly about sex, and instructed them in Epstein's sexual preferences. They also say that Epstein and Maxwell sometimes made them available for sexual abuse by their friends. She is widely presumed to know more than she has yet been willing to tell about the extent to which Epstein's large network of powerful businessmen, politicians, and financiers knew about or participated in his rapes and trafficking of children. What is less clear, at least at first, is what motivated her to facilitate the abuse, and what kept her so loyal to Epstein over so many years. Maybe this kind of life – one spent attending to men's lesser desires – was always what Maxwell was destined for. The ninth and youngest child of a British media magnate, Maxwell was doted on by her father, the Hungarian-born Robert Maxwell, and raised in Oxford in a family as obscenely wealthy as it was darkly tragic: one of her older brothers was in a hideous car accident just days after Ghislaine's birth, and the boy lingered in a coma for years before dying before her 10th birthday. Her father financed her life as a high-class party girl – first in London, and then in New York – where she spent much of her time accompanying famous and wealthy men to the kind of rich people's social functions that have a pretext of raising money for charity. She does not seem to have had aims beyond that: despite her ample resources and encouragement, Ghislaine never showed much sign of intellectual ambition, or political interest, or business acumen, or general curiosity. (A short-lived 'ocean protection' charity that she founded accomplished little, and shut down after her arrest on sex trafficking charges.) It was not merely that Ghislaine was a product of an elite unburdened by principle, who often reduce their daughters to mere ornaments. It is that an ornament, it seems, is all that Ghislaine Maxwell ever aspired to be. It was not her charity, or her father's publishing, that were Maxwell's great passions. Her great passion appears to have been for the romantic attention of men – and specifically, her life's greatest animating goal seems to have been to achieve, and keep, the attention of Jeffrey Epstein. From those accounts we have of their relationship – and admittedly, these are not always reliable, given how intense, widespread, and prurient the attention on their activities has been – it appears that Maxwell's devotion to Epstein was intense. At her trial in 2021, prosecutors entered into evidence a photo of a cleavage-bearing Maxwell with Epstein, massaging his foot. This seems to have been her posture toward Epstein for the entire time she knew him: slavish, nearly worshipful. The pair met sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Maxwell's father, Robert, died in an apparent suicide in the ocean off the coast of the Canary Islands – aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine – in late 1991. Soon thereafter, it was discovered that millions of dollars were missing from pension funds that he managed; two of Maxwell's brothers were charged for their alleged role in the fraud. (They were later acquitted.) It was during this moment of rupture and imperiled status that Maxwell was romantically involved with Epstein. Her boyfriend would have served as a meal ticket as well as a source of validation: Maxwell is alleged to have received payments from Epstein totaling more than $30m; she told one of her victims that he bought her her New York City townhouse, just a few blocks from his own. By 1994, she was recruiting and grooming teenagers for his sexual abuse. Maybe Maxwell justified what she did for Epstein as kink – a kind of sexual libertinism that shrugged off the regressive, prurient mores of the lower classes. The 90s were the peak of a kind of reductive heterosexual sex-positivity: lots of women were telling themselves, and being told, that sexual submission was a mark of sophistication – that the more liberated they were, the more of men's desires they would grant. But this is all speculation: trying to provide a rationalization for Ghislaine Maxwell's actions evades the true terror of her, which is her seemingly profound and horrifying vacancy. To such a person, obedience does not require a justification. Unequal desire in love – particularly when the suffering lover is a woman – tends to elicit a kind of pity. Feminists, too, often depict women's outsized desire for men as a form of gendered victimization. Generally, it is not seen as serious – women's limerence, romantic obsession, and striving for men's attention is broadly relegated to the realm of the adolescent and the vulgar, the embarrassing and the silly. But Maxwell's case suggests such desire can breed not just frustrated vanity but also a kind of monstrousness. Untempered by principle or self-respect, it can contain in it the seed of the grotesque. In her efforts to please Epstein, and to make herself useful to him, Maxwell became something hideous and unforgivable. In her deficient, warped soul, it seems she lacked something that every woman must have: a morality that she valued more than male approval. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Epstein sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell banned from training service puppies at ‘Club Fed': report
Ghislaine Maxwell, the Jeffrey Epstein accomplice and convicted sex trafficker, has been banned from training service puppies at the prison camp in Texas where she was transferred last week, according to a report. Maxwell, 63, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in 2022 for helping Epstein, her former boyfriend, groom underage girls for sex but has recently returned to the spotlight amid the furore over Donald Trump 's administration's failure to release all federal files on the late pedophile, despite intense pressure from the president's supporters to do so. The disgraced British socialite was previously being held in Tallahassee, Florida, but, shortly after sitting for two days of interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, was quietly transferred to Federal Prison Camp Bryan in southeastern Texas on Friday. While her minimum-security new home is known for its comparatively peaceful atmosphere and has been dubbed 'Club Fed,' Maxwell will not be allowed to join the institution's other inmates in helping to train puppies during her stay. Paige Mazzoni, the chief executive officer of Canine Companions, the organization that runs programs at Bryan, told NBC News that Maxwell would not be invited to participate. 'We do not allow anyone whose crime involves abuse towards minors or animals – including any crime of a sexual nature,' Mazzoni said. 'That's a hard policy we have, so she will not be able to.' She added that the restriction was in place to protect the young dogs involved, explaining: 'Those are crimes against the vulnerable, and you're putting them with a puppy who is vulnerable.' ABC News reported on Wednesday that Maxwell told Blanche during their meetings last month that she never saw President Trump do anything that would provide cause for concern during the years in which he knew Epstein socially in New York and Florida. Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing over his past association with Epstein and is currently suing The Wall Street Journal for reporting that he once sent the sex offender a 'bawdy' doodle for his birthday. However, he has been under intense pressure for the last month after his Justice Department and FBI ruled that the deceased sex trafficker left behind no 'client list' and died by suicide in his New York jail cell in August 2019, a verdict that did not satisfy Trump's supporters, who continue to demand answers and suspect a 'coverup' to protect influential people. Trump has denied knowing about Maxwell's prison transfer in advance but has not definitively ruled out pardoning her in exchange for her cooperation. His administration is reportedly considering whether to release the transcript of Blanche's meetings with Maxwell, with the recording of their conversations currently in the process of being digitized. Another avenue the administration has taken in its efforts to quell the uproar over Epstein is to seek the release of grand jury testimony from Maxwell's criminal case, with Trump asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to do so but Maxwell's legal team opposing the move, warning it could adversely influence her chances of appealing her conviction before the Supreme Court. She had been due to give testimony before the House Oversight Committee about her activities with Epstein on August 11. Still, the panel's chair, Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, moved on Friday to postpone her appearance until after the country's top court has decided whether to act on her appeal. That will not happen until the justices return from their summer recess on September 29. Comer has, however, subpoenaed former president Bill Clinton, ex-first lady Hillary Clinton, and some former attorneys general and FBI directors to appear before his committee this month to give evidence on the disgraced billionaire and the more than 20 years of investigations into his crimes.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Lawyer condemns $1.3 million compensation for Australian woman wrongfully imprisoned for 20 years
An Australian state government's decision to pay 2 million Australian dollars ($1.3 million) compensation to a woman who spent 20 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing her four children was condemned by her lawyer Thursday as 'profoundly unjust.' New South Wales Attorney-General Michael Daley said Thursday that Kathleen Folbigg's lawyers had been told the sum the 58-year-old would be paid more than two years after she was released from prison. Daley did not make the figure public, but Folbigg's supporters confirmed the sum. 'The decision follows thorough and extensive consideration of the materials and issues raised in Ms. Folbigg's application (for compensation) and provided by her legal representatives,' Daley said in a statement. The government declined further comment. Folbigg's lawyer, Rhanee Rego, described the sum as a 'profoundly unjust figure' and 'hugely insulting.' 'Her (Folbigg's) reaction is really that it feels, well — we all feel that it's profoundly unjust,' Rego told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. 'When you look at the other comparison cases and take into account what she has endured: she lost her four children; she has spent two decades in jail; vilified as Australia's worst female serial killer,' Rego added. While Folbigg has no legal avenue to appeal Daley's decision, Rego said she supported a lawmaker's call for an inquiry into how Daley reached the figure. Rego didn't put a figure on appropriate compensation, but said it should be 'substantially higher.' 'I was very much hopeful that it would be substantially more because this is one of our worst wrongful conviction cases in Australia,' Rego said. In December 2023, the New South Wales Court of Appeal overturned all convictions against Folbigg, 20 years after a jury found her guilty of killing her four children. Folbigg had already been pardoned at the state government's direction months earlier and released from prison based on new scientific evidence that her four children may have died from natural causes as she had always insisted. The pardon was seen as the quickest way of getting Folbigg out of prison after an inquiry into the new evidence recommended the appeals court consider quashing her convictions. The inquiry that recommended Folbigg's pardon and acquittal was prompted by a petition signed in 2021 by 90 scientists, medical practitioners and related professionals who argued that significant new evidence showed the children likely died of natural causes. Her first child, Caleb, was born in 1989 and died 19 days later in what a jury determined to be the lesser crime of manslaughter. Her second child, Patrick, was 8 months old when he died in 1991. Two years later, Sarah died at 10 months. In 1999, Folbigg's fourth child, Laura, died at 19 months. Prosecutors argued Folbigg smothered them. She was convicted in 2003 and sentenced to 30 years in prison on three counts of murder and one of manslaughter. Folbigg's friend since childhood, Tracy Chapman, described the compensation sum as 'disgraceful.' She said Folbigg was unemployed and living alone with her dog Snowy in rental accommodation in the city of Newcastle. Chapman said Folbigg was 'pretty much rocking in a corner' in reaction to the news and unable to speak to the media. 'Kath's on ongoing mental health support that she needs for the rest of her days,' Chapman said. 'She's got to deal with the trauma of the loss of the four kids that was never done properly during 20 years wrongfully convicted in prison, the legal process and all the trauma that was attached to it as well as then living day to day in a world that has changed so much,' Chapman added. Chapman said Folbigg had told her she was 'deeply sad and there is no empathy here.' 'When I spoke to her she just said: 'Trace, the sad thing here is I'm not surprised,'' Chapman said, using an abbreviated form of Tracy.
