[Tina Marie] Peters was convicted of four felony and three misdemeanor charges in August 2024 for using another person's security badge to allow someone associated with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a prominent election denier and ally of President Donald Trump, access to county election equipment involving Dominion Voting Systems.
In Thursday's long opinion in People v. Peters, Colorado Court of Appeals Judge Ted Tow, joined by Judges Craig Welling and Lino Lipinsky de Orlov, decided Thursday by the Colorado Court of Appeals, in an opinion by Judge Tow, affirmed the conviction, holding (among other things):
President Trump's pardon of Peters could only affect federal offenses, and not the state offenses for which he was convicted (a pretty well-settled principle, since the pardon power extends only to "offenses against the United States," which is generally understood as violations of federal law).
Peters didn't have any Supremacy Clause immunity from state prosecution, because such immunity just affects federal officers discharging their federal responsibilities.
There was sufficient evidence that Peters was responsible for false representations alleged by the prosecution.
But the court concluded that Peters' sentencing (which led to a sentence of 6 months in jail plus 8¼ years in prison) violated the First Amendment by "punish[ing] her based on her protected speech regarding allegations of election fraud":
"Though referred to the Alabama State Bar for any disposition it deems appropriate, the undersigned regrettably recommends" that the lawyer "be found incompetent to practice law."
Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. filed several pleadings which contained fabricated citations and false statements of law that he failed to check or correct prior to submission. The Court had already discovered problems with Mr. Eaton's filings when Defendant filed its first motion flagging numerous misstatements of law. The Court then issued two show cause orders regarding the misstatements, which were partially acknowledged by Mr. Eaton, though he has failed to fully and accurately address the Court's numerous concerns despite as many opportunities to do so.
From the outset, the Court notes that this case is not just about Mr. Eaton's most recent misstatements of law, but rather about a pattern of conduct throughout this case that raises significant concerns about his competency to practice law. In sum, the misstatements and misrepresentations were just the final straw. After a careful review of the matter, the Court finds that Mr. Eaton's conduct amounts to bad faith. Therefore, the Court SANCTIONS him under Rule 11, Alabama R. 3.3, and the Court's inherent authority and ORDERS as follows:
Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. is hereby REPRIMANDED and this reprimand shall be published as follows:
Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall file, not under seal, a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order in any case in any court wherein he has appeared as counsel and final judgment has not been entered;
Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall file, not under seal, a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order in any case in any court wherein he appears as counsel for twelve (12) months after the date of this order;
Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall provide a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to any jurisdiction in which he is licensed to practice law within two (2) business days of the issuance of this order. He shall further file a notice of compliance with the Court no later than the third business day from the date of this opinion.
The Clerk of Court shall send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to the General Counsel of the Alabama State Bar for review. Though referred to the Alabama State Bar for any disposition it deems appropriate, the undersigned regrettably recommends that Attorney Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. be found incompetent to practice law.
The Clerk of Court shall send a copy of this Memorandum Opinion and Order to the Chief Judges for the Northern District of Alabama, the Middle District of Alabama, and the Southern District of Alabama.
To further effectuate the reprimands and deter similar misconduct by others, the Clerk of Court is DIRECTED to submit this order for publication in the Federal Supplement.
Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr. shall pay attorney fees in the amount of $55,597.00 to Defense counsel for their time spent addressing Mr. Eaton's misstatements of law.
Pursuant to S.D. Ala. GenLR 83.4(a) and (h)(1), the undersigned refers to the Judges of the Southern District of Alabama a review of Franklin Hollis Eaton, Jr….
The court begins by pointing to a wide range of past behavior by Mr. Eaton:
So reports Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases Database. And recall that likely (1) many hallucinations aren't spotted; (2) many that are spotted aren't noted in court decisions; and (3) the great majority of court decisions are in state trial courts, and thus aren't posted on Westlaw or Lexis or any other place where Charlotin and others can easily spot them.
From last week's decision in U.S. v. Murfin by Judge Gregory Frizzell (N.D. Okla.):
At various times from July to October, 2025, Mr. Murfin allegedly posted the following five statements on the social media platform, "X" (formerly known as Twitter) under the alias "Azulenq":
"Need too start shooting these 'just following orders' pigs. Ice agents are reenacting ww2 nazi germany and its not acceptable. Only good ice terrorist is buried 6 feet under.";
"Every ICE agent needs shot between the eyes 'just following orders' isn't acceptable and they already exposed they are human garbage.";
"Every Ice gestapo needs too be shot. 2nd amendment right too carry everyone should stay armed and when these terrorists come by just kill them. They dont deserve too live after 'just following orders' we aren't reliving ww2 germany. They dont want due process so show em.";
"but we as US citizens should be gunning down these domestic terrorists. All ice gestapo can not use the 'just following orders' excuse. If you're complicit in this act you've gotta be executed for this act."; and
"Yeah ICE agents need to get shot in a 3,959 mile radius no where safe for gestapo pigs."
Murfin was prosecuted under federal threat statutes, and the court allowed the case to proceed:
For a variety of reasons, I oppose Donald Trump's efforts to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and those in the US on temporary visas. And I have argued he deserves to lose the Supreme Court case on this issue. But unlike many other opponents of Trump's policy and of his constitutional arguments, I am not convinced birthright citizenship is the ideal system. It is, at most, only a second-best option, in the sense that it's better than the currently likely alternative.
Under current political conditions, that likely alternative is subjecting hundreds of thousands of children to deportation, and many adults, as well. Even though Trump's executive order is limited to children born at least 30 days after it was issued, the logic of his legal arguments would deprive millions of adults and older children of their right to live in the United States, as well. If the Fourteenth Amendment denies birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa-holders, that fact did not begin suddenly in 2025, but must have been true all along. Thus, the likely consequence of a legal victory for Trump would be grave harm to millions of children and descendants of immigrants, plus severe damage to the American economy and society from the resulting deportations and legal uncertainty. In addition, millions of other Americans would find it difficult to prove citizenship status if it can no longer be done on the basis of a birth certificate.
But while birthright citizenship is better than the likely alternative at this point in history, I do not believe it is the ideal policy. I explained some of the reasons why in a 2018 post:
More generally, one of my (and many others') main objections to immigration restrictions is that they restrict people's liberty and opportunity based on arbitrary circumstances of ancestry and place of birth. If you were born to the right parents or in the right place, you get to live and work in the US; if not, you can only do so if the government gives you permission, which in the vast majority of cases is likely to be denied. In that respect, they are very similar to racial segregation and South African apartheid. In both cases, liberty is gravely restricted and many are consigned to a lifetime of poverty and oppression because of morally arbitrary circumstances of birth over which they have no control.
Birthright citizenship is an improvement, in this respect, over a policy based on ancestry and parentage. For many children, it creates an alternative pathway to get around unjust restrictions. But it still restricts liberty and opportunity based on circumstances of birth, in this case based on place of birth, as well as parentage. And people have no more control over the location of their birth than over the identity of their parents. Neither determines your moral worth or how much liberty you are entitled to.
Thus, the far superior policy is simply to let people live and work where they want, regardless of who their parents are or where they were born. If that liberty is to be restricted, it should be only if the people in question pose some grave danger that cannot be addressed in other ways. And, in such extreme situations, native-born people's liberty could potentially be restricted, as well. I develop these points in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
Obviously, under current circumstances, citizenship includes not only the right to live and work in the US, but also rights to vote, hold public office, and receive various welfare benefits. In an ideal system, restrictions on voting and office-holding would be based on competence and (in some cases) there might be exclusions based on a demonstrated danger to liberal democratic institutions (as with Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court wrongly gutted, to a large extent). We already have some competence-based constraints on the franchise, such as excluding children, some convicts, and immigrants who cannot pass a civics test most native-born Americans would fail if they had to take it without studying.
Access to welfare benefits should, I believe, be much more severely limited than is currently the case for both immigrants and natives. But even now the vast majority of immigrants contribute more to the public fisc than they take out, and limiting the welfare state is a bad argument for immigration restrictions that - if applied consistently - would also justify severely restricting many other liberties.
Thus, the ideal political system would have a strong presumption against restrictions on migration, while also imposing competence-based constraints on voting rights and office-holding, and limiting welfare benefits in various ways. We need some combination of decoupling citizenship from freedom of movement, constraints on access to government power, and limiting welfare benefits to a class of people who genuinely cannot avoid severe privation without them. And none of these rights and privileges should be, to any great extent, based on parentage or place of birth.
But, obviously, there are serious questions about whether governments can draw these lines in the right places and be trusted not to abuse their powers. Elsewhere, I have argued that we probably cannot rely too much on competence-based restrictions on the franchise, because real-world governments generally cannot be trusted in this field. We should instead address the problem of voter ignorance and bias by other means. It is also obvious that we are not going to get anywhere close to full freedom of movement for migrants anytime soon.
For these kinds of reasons, I think birthright citizenship for all people born in the United States is the best available option at this time. That's especially true because it does not preclude creating and expanding other pathways to residency, work rights, and citizenship. But we should be under no illusion that it is anywhere close to ideal, and we should remember that it includes an important element of unjust discrimination based on arbitrary circumstances of birth.
In this case, as with other situations involving unjust discriminatory immigration restrictions, the right approach to arbitrary discrimination is to "level up" rather than "level down." We should not deny birthright citizenship to those who currently enjoy its benefits. But we should also do all we can to expand these opportunities to others.
Mr. Riera was employed in a fixed term, non-tenure track faculty at Central Washington University (CWU)…. On the morning of April 1, [2024,] Mr. Riera called the CWU police to report an older, "apparently homeless," woman wandering around Samuelson Hall. He said he wanted to make a report "before things get … out of control." An officer reported to Samuelson Hall and confirmed the identity of the woman as a CWU professor. No further action was taken by campus police or Mr. Riera.
The CWU professor shared her experience with two colleagues. The colleagues immediately filed bias complaints with CWU, alleging the target of Mr. Riera's call—a Black woman—had been the victim of racial profiling.
This led to a great deal of institutional response, including a discussion at a faculty senate meeting. Defendant Erdman, "a lecturer at CWU and member of the faculty senate, emailed unofficial minutes [of the meeting] to non-tenured faculty," and her notes included this:
April 1, 2026 was an even busier day than I expected. The New York Times reports:
On Wednesday, the 60-year-old Ms. Bondi, downcast but determined, joined Mr. Trump for a glum crosstown drive to the Supreme Court, where they watched arguments in the birthright citizenship case. In the car, Mr. Trump told her it was time for a change at the top of the Justice Department.
Ms. Bondi hoped to save her job or, at the very least, buy a little more time — until the summer — to give herself a graceful exit.
She ended up with neither, and grew emotional Wednesday in conversations with friends and colleagues after she realized she was out. The next morning, Mr. Trump made it official, and fired her via social media post.
Bondi then sat next to Trump for nearly an hour. Several reports indicated that Trump sat emotionless during the oral argument. But what was Bondi's demeanor?
Yesterday, I submitted this brief as amicus curiae in United States v. Chatrie, the Supreme Court's case on the Fourth Amendment implications of geofencing and geofence warrants. You can get all of the briefs and materials in the case here. I'll probably blog about the case over the next few weeks, but for now I just wanted to flag my amicus brief. Here's the Summary of Argument:
The challenge of new technology is a recurring theme in Fourth Amendment law. This case raises a host of new and important questions, and this brief hopes to help frame the issues and provide directions for answering them.
The first set of questions considers whether obtaining Chatrie's Location History records was a Fourth Amendment "search" of his "papers." There are two different arguments to evaluate. The first is the virtual private locker question. Did Chatrie store his Location History records in a virtual private locker with Google, such that he had Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of the virtual locker just as he would with an equivalent physical locker? This brief concludes that the answer is likely no. Although the record is murky on the point, Chatrie likely lacked the control over the records needed to have Fourth Amendment rights in them.
The second search argument considers whether Chatrie had Fourth Amendment rights under the limits placed on the third-party doctrine by Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). This brief argues that he did not. Carpenter does not apply because Chatrie voluntarily opted in to have Google create and store his Location History records.
The next set of issues considers the lawfulness of the warrant, assuming that one was needed. The brief argues that a properly drawn geofence warrant can satisfy the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment does not present an all or nothing choice between zero protection and absolute protection. Where the law requires a warrant, it also provides a means to draft a lawful warrant.
On the specifics of the warrant in this case, the warrant was properly drawn as to Step 1 because it was sufficiently narrow in both time and space. The constitutionality of the warrant at Step 2 is uncertain, however. It is not clear that the Fourth Amendment allows multi-stage warrants, and the particularity of Step 2 debatable. Chatrie may not have raised these issues as to Step 2, however, so they may be waived.
The fact that this case reaches the Court so late in the Term, and that it raises so many complex issues, suggests that there may be value in pointing to a resolution that might plausibly reach consensus. If so, amicus suggests that the Court might want to resolve this case by focusing primarily on the warrant issues. The legality of the warrant implicates fewer contested questions and has a more complete factual record. For the sake of completeness, however, this brief covers both issues.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Protection Board (PCLOB) has just released a comprehensive staff report on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Since Congress must reauthorize section 702 or let it die this month, the report could hardly be more timely. And its conclusions make a strong case for reauthorizing the provision.
The report reaffirms the value of section 702 intelligence, including queries seeking information on US persons. The PCLOB learned of a number of threats to human life and infrastructure that were thwarted by data gleaned from US person inquiries; more generally, almost two-thirds of the President's Daily Brief contained section 702 information in 2025.
Compliance is much improved. Targeting compliance continues to flirt with perfection, with compliance rates over 99%. In past reviews of the program, FBI compliance with the US person query rules has been a sore spot. It has triggered heavy Congressional criticism and numerous reforms. The PCLOB reports that the FBI has implemented all of the most recent query rules with 98.5% compliance, and that FBI US person inquiries have continued to drop dramatically, from about 57,000 in 2023 to 7400 in 2025. The PCLOB infers from the decline that statutory and administrative changes are deterring unnecessary queries, but it also raises a concern that the reforms may have made FBI agents reluctant to conduct proper US person queries.
The report is also a fount of information about how section 702 and the statutory changes adopted in 2024 are working.
It demystifies the debate over an FBI filtering tool. The dropdown menu allowed agents to narrow their queries to focus on particular participants, some of whom might be US persons. Narrowing the data in this way was not originally seen as a separate query but DOJ has concluded it should be. Use of the tool now is recorded and restricted as though it constitutes multiple separate queries.
It reports on implementation of the expanded definition of "electronic communications service providers" who must intercept communications under 702. The change was made necessary by a narrow FISA court ruling that excluded important intermediaries that have emerged in recent years. Opponents claimed that the new definition would be used to impose intercept obligations on a range of Mom-and-Pop companies; DOJ assured the PCLOB that the expanded definition is being applied only to services that the ruling had unexpectedly put off limits.
In a section rendered somewhat opaque by classified information rules, the report questions whether the intelligence community is fully carrying out the intent behind Congress's expansion of border vetting using section 702. On the one hand, it notes the intelligence community's view that the expanded focus on drug trafficking has had a "monumental" and "unparalleled" impact on the government's ability to identify transnational criminal activity. On the other hand, it notes that the rules for vetting individuals have not fundamentally changed; in general NSA only disseminates US person information in response to vetting inquiries if the information is necessary to protect against terrorism or drug trafficking and "reasonably believed to contain significant foreign intelligence information." These limitations were imposed after an amicus focused the FISA court's attention on the risk that vetting would lead to disclosure of US persons' identities. I fear the limits may be overkill in the vetting context. If there is evidence in intelligence files that someone seeking to enter the country is tied to an American engaged in drug smuggling, does the American's name have significant foreign intelligence value? If it doesn't, should the information be withheld from border authorities? These are hard questions, and it's not clear how Congress intended them to be answered. Given the limits imposed by its classified nature, I'm not sure we even have enough facts to debate them.
According to the report, other reforms from 2024 are being carried out without much drama:
An FBI internal office now reviews all US person queries and a sample of other queries
DOJ also audits every FBI query for US person information on a weekly basis
FBI personnel now get training on 702 rules every year
FBI agents face additional penalties for negligence and misconduct in making or approving US person queries, and the bonuses and promotions of field office leaders depend in part on their office's 702 compliance record.
Amici now comment on all annual certifications of the section 702 procedures (it was this amicus participation that led to additional restrictions on US person disclosures during border vetting)
Members of Congress now have some access to FISA court proceedings, but as the PCLOB notes disputes remain over the constraints imposed by DOJ on that access
All in all, the PCLOB report provides a detailed picture of section 702 as it stands today. It may be particularly valuable to members of Congress who didn't want to support reauthorization without an assurance that this administration was implementing the 2024 act's reforms in good faith. The PCLOB report leaves little doubt on that score.
