Police accused of misusing license plate data in hunt for woman who had abortion
Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias has asked the attorney general to investigate the matter.
He is also creating an audit system to ensure police departments do not violate a 2023 law that bans the distribution of license-plate data to track women seeking abortions or to find undocumented immigrants.
The incident highlights the fears that led to the law.
There were concerns that states that restricted abortion access after Roe v Wade was overturned would use the technology to follow and possibly prosecute women seeking the procedure by crossing into Illinois, where it is readily available.
"License plate readers can serve as an important tool for law enforcement, but these cameras must be regulated so they aren't abused for surveillance, tracking the data of innocent people or criminalizing lawful behavior," the Democrat said in a statement.
According to Giannoulias, police in Mount Prospect, 24 miles (39 kilometers) northwest of Chicago, shared license-plate data with the sheriff in Johnson County, Texas, who was looking for a woman whose family was worried because she had undergone a self-administered abortion.
Giannoulias says Mount Prospect also shared data outside of Illinois on undocumented immigrants, in violation of the law. Between mid-January and April, there were 262 searches on immigration-related matters in Mount Prospect alone, he said.
Telephone and email messages were left for Mount Prospect Police Chief Michael Eterno.
Violations by Mount Prospect could result in loss of state funding, deputy Secretary of State Scott Burnham said.
The incident was revealed by a website called 404 Media, which reported that the Texas sheriff sent a nationwide request for data from 83,000 cameras operated by the private company Flock Safety, including those in Mount Prospect.
At Giannoulias' request, Flock Safety blocked access to 62 out-of-state agencies that have sought data related to abortion or immigration, Burnham said. The company also set up a program to flag the terms 'abortion' and 'immigration' in requests for access and deny those requests.
Police agencies will also be required to comply with audits by the secretary of state to mark trends or upticks in certain requests, Burnham said.
The Flock Safety cameras take photos of passing license plates thousands of times a day. The technology, called Automatic License Plate Recognition, is helpful in tracking stolen vehicles or carjackings, missing persons and in other authorized cases.
The technology allows police agencies to read thousands of license plates per minute from images captured by cameras along roadways.
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Daily Mail
a minute ago
- Daily Mail
Father who tried to strangle daughter in Muslim ‘honor killing' is jailed for 32 months after shock verdict
A father accused of trying to strangle his teenage daughter in a Muslim 'honor killing' has been jailed for almost three years. Ihsan Ali, 44, stood trial for second-degree attempted murder alongside his wife Zahraa Subhi Mohsin Ali, 40, over the October 18, 2024, attack. A Thurston County Superior Court jury found them not guilty on July 31, but convicted Ihsan of lesser charges against his daughter Fatima Ali. SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO Case: Ihsan Ali, 44, listens as his daughter Fatima Ali tells the court at his attempted murder trial how he tried to choke the life out of her in an alleged 'honor killing' Ihsan was jailed for 14 months for second-degree assault, 12 months for unlawful imprisonment, and 182 days for fourth-degree assault. He was also ordered to complete a parenting class, do 18 months of community service, and have no contact with his daughter for 10 years. Judge Christine Schaller blasted Ihsan for his 'horrific actions' including the 'vicious assault on Fatima' outside Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington. The judge said she gave him maximum sentences because of the brutality of the crime and that Fatima was under Ihsan's care as his daughter. She said of his assault on Fatima's boyfriend: 'He victimized a defenseless young man for no reason and it is Isiah's good fortune that he was not more badly injured.' Judge Schaller also sentenced Zahraa for breaching a restraining order, which she already served in pretrial detention. Ihsan spent the past almost 10 months behind bars since his arrest days after the attack and will be credited with time served. Zahraa was released on July 31. Zahraa cried as Fatima, now 18, read an emotional victim impact statement to the court before the sentencing, calling Ihsan a 'monster' who tried to kill her with his own hands. Fatima told police she ran away from home after her parents tried to put her on a plane to Iraq. 'Her father had recently been threatening her with honor killing for refusing an arranged marriage with an older man in another county,' the initial police press release alleged. But this claim, central to the prosecution's original case last year, was completely absent from the three-week trial last month, by court order. Jurors were shown horrifying video footage of Ihsan grabbing Fatima by the throat before putting her in a chokehold on the ground outside the school. The footage is shocking, as were numerous witness accounts from traumatized teens, her boyfriend Isiah, and two men who stopped to help. 'Her face was looking pale and her eyes were starting to roll back,' Isiah, who was just 16 at the time, told the court through tears as he gave evidence. Other students described how Fatima 'couldn't breathe', her 'lips were turning purple' and she grabbed at her father's arm in 'obvious distress'. Josh Wagner, a motorist who stopped his car in the middle of the road and ran to help, said her face was 'changing color... she was gonna lose consciousness if it continued'. Fatima herself took the witness stand and testified that she lost consciousness four times and was terrified that she was going to die. The jury also heard that after Isiah, her classmates, and Wagner freed her by punching and kicking Ihsan dozens of times, Zahraa tried to finish the job. 'When she (Fatima) got away from her father, she tried to run, and her mom had grabbed her and she was grabbing her by the throat,' one classmate testified, as did other witnesses. That Ihsan choked his daughter to unconsciousness and punched Isiah in the face as he protected her was indisputable, due to the video evidence and overwhelming witness testimony. Had she died, there would likely be a slam-dunk case for manslaughter, at minimum. But that alone was a long way from proving intent to kill, the vital component that separates murder, or in this case attempted murder, from mere assault. The jury had to be satisfied, beyond reasonable doubt, that Ihsan and Zahraa intended to kill their daughter when they choked her. They weren't, and entered not guilty verdicts after three days of deliberation. Prosecutors were hampered by the collapse of the 'honor killing' claim that served as a powerful motive for the jury to convict. Deputy Prosecutor Heather Stone made it clear in a memorandum in the leadup to the trial that the state would no longer rely on it, and she wasn't sure how it became such a big feature of the case. 'There is no express evidence that such was the motivation of either defendant in this case and the state does not intend to argue such,' she wrote. 'Further, the state has no intention of even using the term at trial.' Judge Schaller also ruled before the trial that prosecutors couldn't bring up the arranged marriage or allow Fatima to talk in detail about a family trip to Iraq when she was 16. The veracity of the arranged marriage claim is less clear, but it was wholly denied by the defense during the trial. 'The entirety of the claims appears to be the result of Islamophobia,' Ihsan's lawyer Erik Kaeding wrote in his own memorandum. 'There is no evidence of either honor killing or arranged marriage supported by the evidence uncovered in the investigation of the case.' Ihsan's treatment of Fatima at home was also banned from being characterized as 'abuse'. The reason for Judge Schaller's rulings that stymied the prosecution's case was that their inclusion would unjustly prejudice the couple in the eyes of the jury. The result was a bizarre situation where everyone outside the court referred to the case as 'the honor killing trial' while inside the term was never uttered. Prosecutor Olivia Zhou didn't even mention the barbaric Muslim practice in her opening statement, or allude to any motive for murder. Fatima's testimony also didn't include the backstory she recounted to police in two-hour-long interviews in the days after she was attacked. Had the Daily Mail not obtained 100 pages of police reports detailing her interviews, and those with others, the public would never known the full alleged story. The evidence provided by Fatima in those interviews created a compelling argument for the thesis presented in Lacey Police Department arrest affidavits. They detailed her fears of being sent back to Iraq to be married off, after she saw how women were treated there during the trip when she was 16. Once her father found out she was dating Isiah, an American boy, he pulled her out of school and planned the arranged marriage, the story goes. When she protested, he allegedly threatened to kill her multiple times as he felt it would bring shame to his family. None of that was in the trial. The best prosecutors could do was rely on Fatima's ticket to Iraq being one-way, and her saying she 'didn't feel safe' in her birth country. Defense lawyers downplayed the significance of the flight by noting that one of the reasons for the trip was to get passports for her younger brothers, saying the tickets were one-way as Zahraa didn't know how long that would take. Absent of a compelling argument for motive, prosecutors were stuck trying to paint Ihsan and Zahraa as so determined to strangle their daughter that the backstory didn't matter. 'The state is not asserting that Ihsan Ali showed up on that day with the intention to try and kill his daughter,' Stone said in her closing argument. 'There was no premeditation that the state is asserting, but by the time Ishan goes into these events, the state's position is that that has changed. His intent has substantively changed.' Numerous prosecution witness accounts focused on the horrifying effects of cutting off Fatima's airway during the chokehold. Much was also made of how Ihsan withstood 30 to 40 punches to the head by Isiah alone, plus dozens more from classmates who also kicked and stomped on him. Isiah claimed Ihsan had to be knocked out cold before he let go, and Wagner spoke of prying the father's arms apart enough to free her. In the most gut-wrenching moment of the trial, Fatima took to the stand to testify against her own parents. 'Did you have any fear?' Stone asked. 'Yes.' 'Fear of what?' 'Of dying,' Fatima choked out, her voice breaking into a sob. She was barely able to respond 'no' when asked if she could say anything during the attack. '[I'm] heartbroken for what my dad did,' she said, sobbing as she described losing consciousness four times during the attack. If Ihsan wasn't trying to kill her, why did he choke her for so long and refuse to let go despite the battering he took, the argument goes. 'She's unconscious, and he continues to strangle her around the neck for another 15-18 seconds and would have continued to do so even longer but for the intervention of those adults,' Stone told jurors. Physicians who examined Fatima in hospital spoke of the severity of her injuries, which left her ordered not to swallow anything for a whole day. She also had a condition where air in the lungs is forcefully expelled, but due to her airway being blocked it caused the same effect as popping a balloon. The defense countered with their own expert, saying the lung issue - and other injuries - could have been caused by the efforts to free her, and that they were relatively minor anyway. 'There's no nefarious intent. There's no intent to hurt anybody badly, there's no intent to kill anybody. There's an intent to take your daughter home, a 17-year-old daughter who's run away,' Kaeding argued in his closing statement. The case against Zahraa was even more problematic. Footage from the bus camera that was damning for Ihsan didn't clearly show anything Zahraa did as there were so many people standing around. Prosecutors instead leaned heavily on witness testimony alleging Zahraa had her arms around Fatima's neck, while the girl mouthed that she couldn't breathe. Zahraa's lawyer Tim Leary disputed this in his opening statement, portraying her as a concerned mother who was comforting her daughter by holding her. 'You will see my client, her mom, come and attempt to help her daughter,' he said of the video. 'She is holding her daughter, she's not holding on to her neck.' Leary, both in his opening statement and in cross-examination of Fatima, noted the teenager told police she didn't think her mother was trying to hurt her. 'She was just trying to protect me from the chaos,' Leary quoted. Fatima admitted this, but told the court it was more that she 'didn't want to believe' that her own mother would try to hurt her. But Stone in her closing statement insisted Zahraa appeared to also be strangling her. 'You can't strangle your child to restrain them,' she said. 'She watches Fatima being strangled by Ihsan. 'She then puts her own arms around Fatima's neck. She's not comforting her. She's strangling her to keep her from fleeing. 'And when you look at that video, you see she does not provide any aid at any time to her child, zero aid. That is not an effort to comfort her child.' Leary claimed that when Zahraa chased Fatima and Isiah inside the school, it was out of concern, not an attempt to finish a murder. 'What does my client do? She leaves her husband behind, she runs into the school. Where is my daughter? Where's my daughter?' he said in his opening. He concluded: 'That is the accusations against my client for what she did attempting to hold her daughter - in the state's eyes is the allegation of attempted murder.' Fatima is in extended foster care and, now an adult, cannot be compelled to return to her parents.
The Independent
30 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump wants to change how elections are run. The Constitution won't let him
Donald Trump has vowed to implement significant changes to the conduct of US elections, despite constitutional constraints limiting his ability to act unilaterally. His pledges, made on his social media platform, are rooted in the same false information and conspiracy theories he has consistently used to account for his 2020 election defeat. Mr Trump specifically targeted mail voting, which remains popular and is utilised by approximately one-third of all voters, and voting machines, a form of which is employed across nearly all of the country's thousands of election jurisdictions. Ironically, these are the very systems that facilitated Mr Trump's victory in the 2024 election and enabled Republicans to secure control of Congress. Trump's post marks an escalation even in his normally overheated election rhetoric. He issued a wide-ranging executive order earlier this year that, among other changes, would have required documented proof-of-citizenship before registering to vote. His Monday post promised another election executive order to "help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm elections." The same post also pushed falsehoods about voting. He claimed the U.S. is the only country to use mail voting, when it's actually used by dozens, including Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Similar complaints to Trump's, when aired on conservative and conservative-leaning networks such as Newsmax and Fox News, have led to multimillion dollar defamation settlements, including one announced Monday, because they are full of false information and the outlets have not been able to present any evidence to support them. Trump's post came after the president told Fox News that Russian President Vladimir Putin, in their Friday meeting in Alaska, echoed his grievances about mail voting and the 2020 election. Trump continued his attack on mail voting and voting machines in the Oval Office on Monday, during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The announcement signals yet another way that Trump intends to stack the cards in his favor in the 2026 midterm elections, after he already has directed his attorney general to investigate a Democratic fundraising platform and urged states to redraw their congressional districts to help the GOP maintain its majority in the House of Representatives. Here's a breakdown of Trump's latest election post and why Congress is the one entity that can implement national election rules. Trump's post Trump for years has promoted false information about voting, and Monday was no exception. He claimed there is "MASSIVE FRAUD" due to mail voting, when in fact voting fraud in the U.S. is rare. As an example, an Associated Press review after the 2020 election found fewer than 475 cases of potential fraud in the six battleground states where he disputed his loss, far too few to tip that election to Trump. Washington and Oregon, which conduct elections entirely by mail, have sued to challenge Trump's earlier executive order — which sought to require that all ballots must be received by Election Day and not just postmarked by then. The states argue that the president has no such authority, and they are seeking a declaration from a federal judge in Seattle that their postmark deadlines do not conflict with federal law setting the date of U.S. elections. Trump also alleged that voting machines are more expensive than "Watermark Paper." That's a little-used system that has gained favor and investments among some voting conspiracy theorists who believe it would help prevent fraudulent ballots from being introduced into the vote count. Watermarks would not provide a way to count ballots, so they would not on their own replace vote tabulating machines. While some jurisdictions still have voters use electronic ballot-marking devices to cast their votes, the vast majority of voters in the U.S. already vote on paper ballots, creating an auditable record of votes that provides an extra safeguard for election security. In his post, Trump also claimed that states "are merely an 'agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes" and must do what the federal government "as represented by the President of the United States" tells them to do. Election lawyers said that's a misrepresentation of the U.S. Constitution. It also flies in the face of what had been a core Republican Party value of prioritizing states' rights. Thousands of elections, none under presidential control Unlike in most countries, elections in the U.S. are run by the states. But it gets more complicated — each state then allows smaller jurisdictions, such as counties, cities or townships, to run their own elections. Election officials estimate there are as many as 10,000 different election jurisdictions across the country. A frequent complaint of Trump and other election conspiracy theorists is that the U.S. doesn't run its election like France, which hand counts presidential ballots and usually has a national result on election night. But that's because France is only running that single election, and every jurisdiction has the same ballot with no other races. A ballot in the U.S. might contain dozens of races, from president on down to city council and including state and local ballot measures. The Constitution makes the states the entities that determine the "time, place and manner" of elections, but does allow Congress to "make" or "alter" rules for federal elections. Congress can change the way states run congressional and presidential elections but has no say in the way a state runs its own elections. The president is not mentioned at all in the Constitution's list of entities with powers over elections. "The president has very limited to zero authority over things related to the conduct of elections," said Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Courts have agreed — no presidential involvement Parts of Trump's earlier executive order on elections were swiftly blocked by the courts, on the grounds that Congress, and not the president, sets federal election rules. It's unclear what Trump plans to do now, but the only path to change federal election rules is through Congress. Although Republicans control Congress, it's unclear that even his party would want to eliminate voting machines nationwide, possibly delaying vote tallies in their own races by weeks or months. Even if they did, legislation would likely be unable to pass because Democrats could filibuster it in the U.S. Senate. Mail voting had bipartisan support before Trump turned against it during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, but it's still widely used in Republican-leaning states, including several he won last November — Arizona, Florida and Utah. It's also how members of the military stationed overseas cast their ballots, and fully eliminating it would disenfranchise those GOP-leaning voters. The main significance of Trump's Monday statement is that it signals his continuing obsession with trying to change how elections are run. "These kinds of claims could provide a kind of excuse for him to try to meddle," Hasen said. "Very concerned about that."
Daily Mail
31 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Transgender teacher buys Scottish souvenir plot in bid to be called Lord instead of Miss
A transgender teacher in Florida has bought a plot of land in Scotland in a bid to be called Lord instead of Miss. Toby Tobin, 30, who teaches maths and science to fifth graders, claims to have been forced to resign after school authorities insisted a female title and pronouns were used. The teacher, who is biologically female, was open about identifying as male when taking the job in 2021 and had previously been referred to as Mr Tobin. But in 2023, a new law was applied in the state which said that when it comes to public schools a person's sex is an 'immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person's sex'. It meant school staff were banned from asking students to refer to them by pronouns which do not reflect their sex at birth and students were not required to use them. In an effort to get around the law, the teacher bought a 4 sq ft 'souvenir plot' on an estate in Fife through a website offering customers the chance to become a 'Lord, Lady or Laird'. Toby purchased a 4 sq ft 'souvenir plot' on an estate in Fife through a website offering people a chance to become a 'Lord, Lady or Laird'. However, the school refused to let the teacher use the title or ask the 10 and 11-year-old children in the class to use it. In response, Toby filed a lawsuit against the Pinellas County School District claiming gender discrimination. The teacher said: 'After a conversation with the district they said I would have to use only female-specific pronouns and a title. 'In response to this I thought "OK, I can't be Mr Tobin, why don't I go purchase some land in Scotland and I could become a Lord?". 'So I did make some attempts to combat this in the most gentle way that I could at the time.' Toby also became an ordained minister and a Count of the Principality of Sealand - an offshore platform in the North Sea - in other attempts to dodge using a female title and pronouns. 'After proposing that I be Lord Tobin my administration said "no", but I did not give up,' the teacher said. 'I became a minister through the Universal Life Church so I now am Minister Toby Tobin as well as Lord Toby Tobin. 'I then found the Principality of Sealand and I became a Count with them which I thought would be hysterical because I taught math. 'Count Tobin was also not deemed appropriate for the classroom so I started to realise that if it wasn't Mrs it wasn't going to be it so I was essentially constructively discharged.' Toby's lawsuit, filed in the US District Court in Florida, states: 'Plaintiff attempted to work with the school district by voluntarily obtaining honorifics such as "lord" by purchasing a tract of land in Scotland. 'Defendant did not allow plaintiff to use any titles or pronouns other [than] ones that corresponded to the incorrect gender. 'Defendants' directives undermined plaintiff's identity, dignity, and ability to perform his job in a manner consistent with his personal and professional integrity.' Lawyers for the school authorities filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing Toby's pronoun preference is not protected speech and the state's interest in upholding the law outweighs his request. There are a handful of websites selling souvenir plots in remote parts of Scotland to give owners a chance to become a lord or lady. However, the companies warn that you 'cannot buy a noble title' and use of it is for enjoyment purposes only.
