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An Oshkosh police officer shot and wounded a suicidal 34-year-old man two blocks from the man’s house this summer after authorities say he pointed a hunting rifle at them.

Benson Thao’s identity was splashed in news stories across the region in the weeks after the June 29 shooting, in which the Winnebago County district attorney announced the police officer was legally justified in firing his service rifle.

Yet the identity of the officer and some of the others involved in the incident remain withheld from the public — even in court documents.

The reason for breaking a longstanding norm in Wisconsin law enforcement transparency?

Police and prosecutors say the officers were victims for having a gun pointed at them and Marsy’s Law, a constitutional amendment passed by voters in 2020 to protect victims’ privacy rights, includes law enforcement.

It’s the latest example of a national trend in which more than a dozen states have passed nearly identical amendments leading some law enforcement agencies to withhold identities of witnesses and officers in police shootings, a practice civil liberties advocates say erodes police accountability. 

In Columbus, Ohio, police officers involved in fatal shootings have had their identities withheld and even their faces obscured in edited body camera footage released after city attorneys cited privacy for police officers under Marsy’s Law. 

In Florida, the state’s highest court is weighing a legal challenge brought by the police union to prevent the city from releasing the names of officers who shot and killed suspects, arguing the officers are victims and should be afforded privacy. 

Civil libertarians point to similar episodes in South Dakota and North Dakota that were reported before Wisconsin voters approved Marsy’s Law at the urging of a lobbying effort funded almost entirely by a tech billionaire.

DAs diverge on release of key information

A similar nonfatal shooting by Stevens Point police in April played out quite differently than the Oshkosh incident. Police shot and wounded an armed man after he allegedly opened fire on officers who had surrounded him in his home’s detached garage. 

Initially, the names of the police officers were withheld in charging documents against Nicholas E. Meyer, the wounded 41-year-old who faces attempted murder charges.

But Portage County District Attorney Cass Cousins released the names of the two officers — Alexander Beach and Zachary Gartmann — in a press release announcing that he had cleared their use of deadly force.

“There is nothing specifically in the statute that says these names must be kept confidential,” Cousins told Wisconsin Watch. “I think there’s always gonna be a tension between transparency and victim rights.”

Sometimes the names of police officers are released while the investigation is underway.

In Grand Chute, town police Lt. Russ Blahnik was named less than 24 hours after he shot a 34-year-old fugitive twice in the leg on Aug. 1. The Outagamie Sheriff’s Office said Pierce Don Lee Folkerts ignored commands to drop what later proved to be a replica pistol after leading police on a foot chase through an apartment complex. He’s expected to survive.

Uncertainty in applying Marsy’s Law

The difference in disclosure standards can be traced to uncertainty among police and prosecutors on how to fairly apply Marsy’s Law — a constitutional amendment approved by nearly 75% of Wisconsin voters that broadens the definition of a crime victim and strengthens privacy protections that critics say comes at the expense of the rights of criminal defendants.

Oshkosh Police Chief Dean Smith said law enforcement officials are keeping with a national trend to afford more privacy to victims — including their own police officers acting in the line of duty.

“The voters have said this is what they want,” Smith told Wisconsin Watch. “And this is a piece of that.”

But civil rights groups argue the constitutional amendment question on the ballot was simplistic and didn’t fully explain the implications of the law. 

“Who in their right mind would be opposed to expanding victims rights?” said Margo Kirchner, executive director of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a public interest lawyer group that unsuccessfully challenged the constitutional amendment in court. “And that one question just leaves out so much information on what it does to defendants’ rights, what it does to the rights of the public to know about police shootings.”

Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment made it through the Republican-controlled Legislature with bipartisan support including an endorsement from Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. The 64-word question went to voters with no mention of changing standards for transparency in police shootings.

A foreseeable problem

Critics in the legal community say the complications created by Marsy’s Law were clear but crime victims’ rights are an untouchable third rail in politics.

“A lot of people knew that this was a problem coming,” said Ed Fallone, an associate law professor at Marquette University Law School who ran unsuccessfully for Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2013 and 2020. “And unfortunately, if you were an elected official or candidate for office, like myself, the smart thing to do from a vote-getting standpoint was to just keep your mouth shut.”

Oshkosh’s police chief pointed to the Winnebago County district attorney’s decision to withhold the names of the officers in deference to privacy concerns under Marsy’s Law. Still, he admitted it can cause frustration among some members of the public.

“This is a difficult thing,” Smith said. “I don’t know if when Marsy’s Law was enshrined within our Constitution, if there was a consideration of all the areas that this could touch.”

Winnebago County District Attorney Eric Sparr — a longtime prosecutor who began his career in the office in 2005 — said other than juveniles or victims of certain sensitive offenses like rape or domestic violence, it has long been standard for prosecutors to identify police, suspects and even witnesses in court filings.

“Once Marsy’s Law hit, we shifted right away and pulled all victim names from public documents,” Sparr told Wisconsin Watch.

That can include police officers that deploy lethal force. Sparr said he understands public concerns about loss of transparency but it’s a tough call and local prosecutors are left trying to interpret victims’ privacy rights, which he says are “annoyingly poorly defined” and left up to interpretation.

“There’s not a lot of guidance as far as implementation,” Sparr said. “Department of Justice has made some efforts to interpret and share their interpretations so there can be as much uniformity as possible around the state, but it’s just inherently difficult when the language and the amendment was really very general.”

The state Department of Justice referred Wisconsin Watch to a 2021 advisory from its Office of Open Government that discusses balancing victims’ privacy requirements with disclosure responsibility under the public records laws.

“Authorities cannot create a bright-line rule or policy to withhold all victim records and information,” it said. “Authorities must still apply the public records law balancing test to each and every record, on a case-by-case basis, to determine whether to release the records or information.”

Kaul declined to comment. But he did release a statement this spring on the third anniversary of the constitutional amendment.

“Ensuring that the rights of crime victims are respected both makes Wisconsin safer and is an important part of achieving justice,” Kaul wrote in a statement posted on the Marsy’s Law for All foundation’s website. “I’m proud of the excellent work the Wisconsin Department of Justice does to stand up for victims in Wisconsin.”

The department’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) investigates many police shootings in response to a 2014 law requiring outside agencies to assist such investigations. It continues to release the names of police officers in case files posted on its website.

But it has allowed local authorities to interpret the complex and competing responsibilities. In the case of the Oshkosh police shooting, it deferred to that city’s police department’s interpretation of officer privacy in a press release.

Fallone, who chaired the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission for two years until stepping down in July, said Marsy’s Law allows some police departments to backslide on transparency.

“It’s in the eye of the beholder,” Fallone said. “And I’m not surprised that some police departments and prosecutors define the victimhood of police broadly and other departments define it narrowly.”

Marsy’s Law doesn’t shield disclosure in Milwaukee

In Milwaukee, only one of the officers in a pair of police shootings on Cinco de Mayo that wounded two people has been identified in public documents. Milwaukee Police Officer Andrew L. Langer’s last name was included in charging documents against a teenager who allegedly fired an illegally modified pistol that fired rapidly like a machine gun.

Milwaukee police officials confirmed there is only one Langer on the force. He was also one of at least nine officers named in a lawsuit brought by a man who was clubbed, pepper sprayed and tased by several Milwaukee officers in a violent 2018 confrontation in which he fought off several officers. The incident attracted significant publicity and public scrutiny after being captured by bystanders and recorded on police body cameras.

The Milwaukee Common Council recently paid a $175,000 settlement after the civilian sued alleging excessive police force.

A Milwaukee Police Department spokesperson said it doesn’t publicly release the names of officers involved in shootings. But Fallone credits its police chief for not interpreting Marsy’s Law as a barrier against disclosure of officers in court records, public records requests or by members of the police commission. 

He said it’s important that the identities of officers involved in use of force be known so they can later be held accountable — which doesn’t always happen.

“Residents are still upset about officers who have kind of moved around and never really faced any consequences for their actions,” he said.

No charges were filed in an unrelated Cinco de Mayo shooting after the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s investigation found a 22-year-old Greenfield resident — whose name was not released — had been defending himself in a chaotic scene in which he exchanged gunfire with subjects in a car and legally owned the weapon.

The district attorney said MPD’s use of force remains under investigation in both May 5 nonfatal shootings. But in cases that aren’t prosecuted it remains unclear whether an officer’s name would be released.

Winnebago DA: Police aren’t automatically victims

In Shawano County in 2022, a police officer shot and killed 46-year-old Lucas Christenson in his home after he threatened his wife and her son with a shotgun. Shawano Police Officer Jeff Buettner fired 11 times — striking Christenson twice — as the man trained the gun on his wife and then aimed it at the officer.

Sparr conducted the legal review of the death of Christenson — who had mounted an independent challenge for county sheriff in 2014 — in response to a request by the Shawano County district attorney.

The sheriff’s office — which investigated the shooting in conjunction with state investigators — didn’t directly release the name of the police officer but did release Sparr’s full report, which identified everyone in the Nov. 19, 2022, incident aside from the dead man’s wife.

“We do a memo to law enforcement that does have those names,” Sparr said. “What they choose to do with that, ultimately is up to them.”

The decision to publicly name the officer who fired the deadly shots in that report contrasts with the recent withholding of key officer names involved in nonfatal police shootings in Oshkosh. 

Sparr said it’s a judgment call he has to make on a case-by-case basis.

“I don’t know if we were ever truly faced with the question explicitly of whether that officer or those officers were victims,” Sparr said. 

He said the person whose life was most threatened in that incident was the man’s estranged wife — whose name was withheld — not responding officers.

“The main person at least who was endangered in that one was someone else, not law enforcement,” Sparr added. “And so I guess I wasn’t, in that case, really thinking of them as victims.”

In another incident from this year, an Oshkosh police officer fired on a wanted suspect as he allegedly drove a car toward the officer. In that case the officer’s name remains blacked out in a legal memo and withheld in charging documents obtained by Wisconsin Watch.

Montrael Clark, the 44-year-old suspect who survived a gunshot to the forehead is identified in charging documents and faces felony charges of reckless endangerment.

If the case goes to trial, the facts of the case will be presented to a jury.

“And then clearly, names are coming out, people have to testify,” Sparr said. “There’s no way around it at that point.”

Fallone said taking police officers’ claim of victim privacy to the extreme, means normal scrutiny is made difficult.

“The day-to-day work of being a police officer could pretty much be construed by some in their own opinion as falling under Marsy’s Law,” Fallone said, “which makes any sort of public oversight and transparency and even some cases of discipline, quite difficult.”

In Dane County, the district attorney’s office hasn’t named officers in two recent press releases announcing it had ruled their use of force justified. But their names were released by the state DCI whose agents investigated the shootings.

The last time District Attorney Ismael Ozanne named officers who used force was in a March 2022 press release clearing Madison police officers who had tased a suicidal man in November 2021 after he shot himself with his own gun.

Ozanne did not respond to requests for comment about his office’s policy. 

Background to constitutional amendment

Marsy’s Law has been approved by voters in ballot measures in at least 14 states, though it has been overturned in Montana and Pennsylvania over questions of its conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

The movement to adopt the constitutional amendment was self-funded by tech billionaire Henry Nicholas III. The law is named after his sister who was killed by an ex-boyfriend in the early 1980s. 

In 2020 Wisconsin became the latest state to enshrine the law in its constitution after a $1.5 million legislative lobbying effort that at one point employed five registered lobbyists. 

Marsy’s Law for Wisconsin — which was funded entirely by Nicholas’ national organization — spent nearly $4.5 million to sway voters to support the constitutional amendment.

Wisconsin Justice Initiative tried to organize opposition but was outspent by a ballot measure that enjoyed support from both major parties.

“They had this single issue and a lot of money,” Kirchner recalled from the 2020 campaign. “They had ads on the air telling people to vote yes, there was nobody in response who could afford television ads.”

A legal challenge claimed that the ballot question was too simplistic. When the group won in Dane County Circuit Court, Wisconsin Justice Initiative publicly urged Kaul not to defend the amendment considering the well-publicized challenges in implementing it in other states.

“They could have decided to not appeal and just let Marsy’s Law fall — and they chose not to,” she said. “So Josh Kaul’s office chose to fight for the validity of the amendment.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately decided to uphold Marsy’s Law. But the 6-1 decision was fractured with five separate decisions applying different legal reasoning. For now it’s the law of the land with the criminal justice system left to sort it out.

Legal challenges to Marsy’s Law continue

There is another challenge pending in the Court of Appeals, including a contempt order against a prosecutor who allowed both victims to hear each other’s testimony in a battery case. Courts routinely sequester witnesses so their testimony can’t be influenced by others, but Marsy’s Law guarantees victims the right to attend every hearing and stage of a trial.

Marsy’s Law for Wisconsin’s state director Nela Kalpic said since 2020 there have been multiple incidents where law enforcement fired shots and the names of those officers have been released. She said she was not familiar with the Winnebago County examples, but acknowledged a potential need to clarify how the law should be fairly applied.

“It is appropriate going forward that state and local policymakers and courts work out the application of the law over time,” she said.

For critics like Fallone, the two-time Supreme Court candidate, the constitutional amendment that “sailed through with minimal scrutiny” has left just these sorts of complexities for the criminal justice system to untangle. It won’t be easy.

“Once you amend the Constitution to put something in there,” he said, “you kind of have to live with it.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Oshkosh police cite ‘Marsy’s Law’ to withhold names of officers who shot suspects is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Correction: A previous version of this story included an incorrect figure for the number of fatal Milwaukee police pursuits in 2023 and incorrect percentages of pursuits ending in injuries from 2007 to 2022.

At 1:06 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2019, Le’Quon McCoy was driving through a North Side Milwaukee intersection when the driver of a stolen Buick Encore ran a flashing red light and crashed into McCoy’s Jeep Renegade. 

The speeding driver, who was fleeing police, hit McCoy’s Jeep so hard that it bounced off a tree on one side of the road and into a parked car on the other side. McCoy, 19, died at the scene.

“He got off work around like 9 or 10 at night. He stopped here to see me,” his mother, Antoinette Broomfield recalled. “He told me he would be to see me the next day, and he was going to drop a friend off at home. And that’s the last time I heard from him.”

The death of McCoy — described as a warm, outgoing, “big teddy bear” with many friends — inflicted a still-unhealed wound, Broomfield said. 

A court sentenced Aaron Fitzgerald, the driver of the stolen Buick, to 10 years in prison and eight years of extended supervision related to McCoy’s death.

But Broomfield’s quest for accountability didn’t end there. She’s suing the city of Milwaukee and four officers who pursued Fitzgerald. Broomfield, whose attorney was present while she spoke to Wisconsin Watch and WPR, said the officers could have averted the tragedy by calling off a high-speed pursuit that spanned residential and commercial streets. 

Broomfield’s lawsuit, filed in March 2022, comes during a 20-fold surge of police chases in the years since Milwaukee loosened restrictions for pursuits — reaching an average of nearly three per day in 2022, according to Milwaukee Police Department records. 

The department engaged in 1,028 chases in 2022, up from 50 in 2012, according to data provided through an open records request. The 2021 tally was even higher: 1,078. It eclipsed all years since at least 2002, according to a 2019 Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission report.

The trend unfolds as Milwaukee grapples with a spike of reckless and deadly driving. 

More pursuits mean more chances of injuries to fleeing suspects, officers and other responders and third parties like McCoy who become unwittingly involved.

In 2022, for example, 132 pursuits injured at least one suspect, and 36 pursuits resulted in at least one third-party injury, data show. Officers faced injuries in five pursuits.

During more than 6,600 pursuits from 2007 to 2022, fleeing suspects were injured in 13% of pursuits, followed by third parties (4%) and officers (1%), according to an analysis of the 2019 Fire and Police Commission report and other data obtained by Wisconsin Watch and WPR. 

The toll of Milwaukee pursuits hasn’t ebbed this year. Four this year were recorded as fatal through June 26, the data show.

“There are good reasons not to permit the escape of dangerous criminals,” Broomfield’s lawsuit says. “But sometimes it is preferable to simply prolonging the danger to innocent motorists and pedestrians that occurs if a pursuit is not terminated.”

Milwaukee police pursuit data incomplete

Milwaukee’s full count of police pursuit casualties is unclear.

For example, although three people died last year when a pursued Toyota Avalon plunged off a bridge and erupted into flames, police records for that crash say it ended in “subject injury,” “violator death” and “third party injury.” One woman was hit and injured as the driver fled police, according to media reports.

Also not logged in the Fire and Police Commission report: instances of injuries occurring just after a pursuit was canceled.

Official police records often paint an incomplete picture of the impact of pursuits, said Jonathan Farris, chief advocate for the Wisconsin-based Pursuit for Change, which seeks to limit police pursuit casualties. Farris lost his son in 2007 when a driver fleeing a Massachusetts State Police trooper crashed into a cab his son was in, killing him and the cab driver.

Farris points to a 2015 USA Today investigation that found the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration significantly undercounted police pursuit deaths over several decades.

“Most of us who have been following this for a fair number of years have seen more than enough examples of pursuits that were not logged,” Farris said.

Milwaukee tightens, then loosens pursuit policy

The Milwaukee Police Department cites a nationwide surge in deadly driving as one of several factors leading to more police pursuits. Milwaukee’s loosened restrictions on pursuits have permitted officers to crack down on reckless driving and vehicle-based crimes in recent years, said Inspector Craig Sarnow, who has spent much of his 24-year department career in roles that monitor and investigate pursuits.  

“I can recall back to my time as a patrol sergeant, when the policy was more restrictive,” he said. “We used to have individuals that would try to bait Milwaukee police officers into getting into pursuits knowing full well that we couldn’t because our policy was so restrictive.”

But safety advocates say Milwaukee’s previous, more restrictive policy — adopted in 2010 under then-Chief Edward Flynn following a string of deadly pursuits — made progress that has since been erased. The policy allowed pursuits in narrower scenarios, generally when an officer had probable cause that a violent felony had occurred or was about to occur — or if someone posed a “clear and immediate threat to the safety of others.” 

Police under Flynn’s policy made fewer arrests related to pursuits compared to before the policy was implemented, but they also saw fewer pursuits ending in injuries.

A policy tweak in 2015 allowed police to pursue a vehicle if the vehicle was involved in a violent felony. That change allowed officers to pursue carjacked vehicles. Pursuits more than doubled that year, compared with 2014.

Milwaukee’s Fire and Police Commission in 2017 ordered Flynn to further loosen the policy, allowing pursuits in reckless driving cases, or when a car was linked to drug dealing. Pursuits in 2018 spiked to 940 from 369 the previous year. The number of pursuits ending in officer, suspect and/or third-party injury also swelled, with instances in each category more than tripling.

The public safety risk of pursuing those suspected of nonviolent crimes outweighs the risk from the violation itself, said Mark Priano, a board member with the advocacy nonprofit PursuitSAFETY. He lost his 15-year-old daughter in 2002 after a teenaged driver fleeing police ran a stop sign and struck the family’s minivan; she died a week later after slipping into a coma, according to media reports.

“These pursuit-related deaths or injuries are not accidents,” Priano said. “This was a planned event that could have been controlled.”

Safety advocates point to Milwaukee as an example of the consequences of rolling back a restrictive pursuit policy, said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and an expert in high-risk police activities.

“Cops like to chase. It’s exciting. It’s a fun thing to do,” he said. 

Alpert, who also sits on an advisory board for PursuitSAFETY, described the back-and-forth between Flynn and the Fire and Police Commission over pursuit policies and the ensuing surge in pursuit-related injuries as a “horror story.”

Pursuit reform often follows a cyclical pattern, Alpert said: more restrictive pursuit policies following injuries and deaths prove unpopular within police departments, prompting a return to the previous status quo.

Police call alternatives ‘practically impractical’

Companies are pitching to police a range of technologies aiming to reduce risky pursuits. They include high-tech GPS trackers, tire deflation tools and even a grappling device that might appear Batman-inspired — allowing an officer to entangle a fleeing vehicle to decelerate it.  

Milwaukee police in 2016 started attaching GPS tags to certain cars, allowing for tracking in lieu of a pursuit, but that was later discontinued. Neither that nor other methods worked as well as traditional pursuits, the department says. 

Before the Fire and Police Commission approved the latest version of Milwaukee’s pursuit policy last summer, one commissioner asked if alternatives existed to catch reckless drivers.

Nicholas DeSiato, the police department’s chief of staff, called nearly all alternatives “practically impractical.”

“They can be effective when appropriate, but it also requires incredible coordination and, sometimes, just dumb luck,” he said. “In terms of a hot pursuit, to effectively combat reckless driving, it’s a necessary tool.”

Priano of PursuitSAFETY acknowledged the need for police pursuits in certain situations. He advocates for restricting them to catch violent felony offenders — while finding other ways to deal with other reckless drivers.

As reckless driving persists, Sarnow doesn’t expect new restrictions on pursuits any time soon. But the department remains open to reviewing alternatives. 

“We’d be remiss if we didn’t revisit these things, because things change right?” Sarnow said. “And we have to make sure that we’re staying on the forefront.”

Fewer pursuits in Madison

Madison, Wisconsin’s second largest city, has limited police pursuits as Milwaukee’s number surges. The Madison Police Department logged just 20 pursuits in 2022, about 2% of Milwaukee’s count, records show.

Madison has just under half of Milwaukee’s population and has logged no more than 27 annual police pursuits since 2016, even amid leadership changes and local reckless driving challenges.

Madison police use a stricter pursuit policy than Milwaukee’s: Officers may initiate pursuits only when they have probable cause that a suspect is committing, has just committed or is about to commit a felony —– similar to Milwaukee’s former policy. A sergeant monitors the chase and can call it off. Additionally, officers must follow many traffic rules — including stopping at red lights and stop signs, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said.

The department also uses surveillance cameras and tire-deflating spike strips, Barnes said. If a suspect gets away, officers use detective work to locate them. 

Barnes, who years ago as a rookie drove his police cruiser through a fence and hit a tree during a pursuit on a rainy day (he was uninjured), said his department’s safety-focused culture leads to fewer pursuits.

“Anyone who thinks a pursuit is out of policy or not safe — if you stop that pursuit, no one will say anything about that,” he said. “Because you’re ultimately responsible for what happens with that vehicle.”

Still, Barnes doesn’t fault Milwaukee for pursuing more cars under its looser policy, suggesting that comparing Madison to Milwaukee is not apples to oranges. 

Milwaukee “may have more criminality, and we’re all dealing with the stolen car epidemic,” he said. “I think they’re trying to get a handle on it, just like we all are, and they’re doing what’s best for their community.”

“I wish it was all a dream”

The judge presiding over Broomfield’s suit has put the trial on indefinite hold, as both her attorneys and the city’s attorneys finish preparations. 

“There are police pursuits virtually every day of the week,” U.S. District Judge J.P. Stadtmueller said while presiding over a May pretrial hearing. “To suggest that each and every one of these cases exposes the officers to liability is very much an open question, at least in the mind of this judge.”

While Broomfield awaits the start of the trial, she’s trying to take care of her mental health, with regular trips to see a counselor. She is also getting support from her church congregation. Still, the pain persists.

“My husband ended up passing away from stress from a heart attack from just constantly being in pain and worrying about it,” she said. “My daughter, she’s not the same. She’s different. My son, he’s not the same. … Everybody is grieving.”

“Some days, I don’t even want to get out of bed,” she added. “Some days I just wake up and wish it all was a dream.”

Broomfield wants a more restrictive Milwaukee pursuit policy to prevent other families from feeling similar pain.

Her lawsuit isn’t about money, she said, and she also seeks accountability related to the pursuit that killed her son. 

“I know everybody makes mistakes,” she said through tears. “Why couldn’t I even just get an apology that it happened to my child?”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Hot pursuit: Milwaukee police chases now top 1,000 per year. Some prove deadly. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of a collaboration between Wisconsin Watch, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and The Appeal. 

Four decades ago, a newspaper investigation described Milwaukee’s municipal legal system as “cash register justice.” Thousands of impoverished residents with mental health or substance use issues languished in county jails due to unpaid civil violation fines, costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Responding to the outcry from The Milwaukee Journal’s 1985 investigation, the city stopped automatically jailing residents who failed to pay civil fines and expanded its Court Alternatives Program. As a result, Milwaukee sent people like Sue Eckhart to court, where they could help low-income residents and those with mental health problems by offering alternatives to incarceration. 

Eckhart has managed the alternatives program for decades, providing assessments, screenings, and referrals to treatments or community service for those facing civil violations, such as illegal parking or loitering.

Since 2015, the program’s vendor, currently JusticePoint, Inc., has served 705 people with mental health issues, 80% of whom resolved their cases without paying a fine, wrote Eckhart, the organization’s program director, in an email to Wisconsin Watch, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and The Appeal. The nonprofit says it’s served 11,000 total clients during the last eight years.

Although the organizations providing those services changed over time, the core staff — Eckhart and her colleagues — stayed put. But in May, Eckhart suffered a “gut punch” when the city terminated her organization’s contract before it expired in 2024.

Officials provided little explanation as to why and did not line up another vendor to take over what many see as vital work to curb mass incarceration. 

“I never saw that coming at all,” Eckhart said in an interview.

In a last-ditch effort to seek answers, JusticePoint sued the city on July 10 — a day before the city’s cancellation took effect. A Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge quickly granted a temporary restraining order, allowing JusticePoint’s services to continue as the dispute unfolds in court. 

But the prospect of eliminating — and not replacing — JusticePoint’s services has stirred confusion and deep concerns among those serving some of Milwaukee’s most vulnerable residents.

At a time when numerous states and cities are taking steps to reduce pretrial detention, advocates in Milwaukee say attempting to halt the city’s court alternatives program is a step in reverse.

“It is shocking that Milwaukee Municipal Court would suddenly cancel the contract for such an invaluable program,” wrote a coalition of 24 local organizations in May after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first reported the city’s plans. They added that the court had provided no information on what would happen to the hundreds of people JusticePoint currently serves. 

One of JusticePoint’s clients is Quintin Walls, a 42-year-old father of six, who owed $100 for a civil violation. He has received services from the organization three times now, starting when he received parking tickets while living in his car. Over the years, the organization connected him to community service to pay off his fines and to resources that led him to secure housing.

The coalition urged the mayor and the city’s Common Council to save the program, but officials say neither has control over the contract. The council funds but does not oversee the program, allocating $487,000 for JusticePoint’s services this year.

Two Municipal Court judges, Phil Chavez and Valarie Hill, recommended terminating the contract before a third judge, Molly Gena, was elected in April, city officials said during a June Common Council subcommittee meeting. It would have been illegal and unenforceable if the council had directed the court to rescind the termination notice, Assistant City Attorney Kathryn Block said at the subcommittee meeting. 

Alderman Jonathan Brostoff, who represents the city’s East Side, called the court’s decision “fishy” and “quite troubling.” 

Brostoff and Alderman Michael Murphy, who represents Milwaukee’s West Side, later told Wisconsin Watch they were concerned about the court’s lack of transparency.

Court officials declined to answer questions from Wisconsin Watch, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and The Appeal, citing the pending lawsuit.

A spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson declined to comment for this story, but added that Johnson “was not involved in any decision-making” regarding the contract.

Nick Sayner, JusticePoint’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said he’s troubled by the lack of transparency from officials.

“The court’s silence and the city’s silence tells you that you should be concerned that there’s something else going on here,” Sayner said.

Judges ‘lost faith’ in JusticePoint

Judges Chavez and Hill told Chief Court Administrator Sheldyn Himle they “lost faith” in JusticePoint over the longstanding practice of sharing citations with attorneys at Legal Action of Wisconsin, a nonprofit that provides free legal services to people with low incomes, according to a May 15 email between Sayner and Himle.

The city attorney’s office had advised JusticePoint to share citations during pilot phases of a program to help people with low incomes find legal representation, Sayner wrote to Himle.  

“It is not clear to me how we were to know we should have ceased this activity prior to receiving your feedback,” Sayner wrote. “Once we were notified by your office to end this activity, we stopped providing that information immediately.”

Sayner also told Himle that JusticePoint hadn’t received broader feedback from the court for several years, but was open to it as long as the program’s principles remained consistent. 

Legal Action of Wisconsin attorneys were not aware of any past issues with sharing citations, said Susan Lund, an attorney with the nonprofit. Her firm receives identical copies of citations through police department open records requests and said she did not know why JusticePoint’s information sharing would be a problem. 

(Legal Action of Wisconsin separately sued the Municipal Court in July, alleging the court failed to record hearings on judgments and case reopenings as required by state law.) 

In a May 15 letter, the city’s purchasing department informed Sayner it was terminating JusticePoint’s contract, effective July 11. JusticePoint had not delivered unspecified “possible solutions” following a May 5 meeting, the letter said. 

Eckhart, whose office sits on the second floor of the Municipal Court building, said she was mortified upon learning the news. 

“‘Oh, my God, what are our clients going to do?’” she said she thought. 

The city terminated the contract under a “convenience” clause, rather than for cause, allowing it to be canceled for any reason as long as the city gave JusticePoint 10-days written notice. If it had terminated for cause the city would have had to give JusticePoint 30 days to fix any alleged deficiencies.

“At no point was JusticePoint informed that failure to respond with possible solutions would result in the termination of the contract,” Sayner and fellow co-founder Edward Gordon wrote to the purchasing division.

Plan to replace JusticePoint’s services is unclear 

Speaking at a June subcommittee meeting, Himle said the court planned to continue the Court Alternatives Program without JusticePoint. She did not clearly answer how that would happen without a new contractor. 

“The judges have made some decisions on how to continue as best they can through referrals they may make,” Himle said.

James Gramling, Jr., a retired Municipal Court judge, said in an interview it was unreasonable to expect judges to make such assessments from the bench, particularly in cases unfolding on Zoom.

“The judges seem to think they’re going to be able to identify from the bench people that have addiction, mental health issues and refer them to some agency. Good luck with that — it’s not workable,” Gramling said. 

As a judge, Gramling would assess the needs of defendants and then rely on one of Eckhart’s case workers to perform a full screening outside of the courtroom, Grambling detailed in a letter to the Common Council. Defendants would often be directed to perform community service or receive counseling or treatment. 

“Many thousands of people are processed without individual treatment by the court,” Gramling wrote. “And many of those defendants are disadvantaged members within our community: the poor, those addicted to drugs and alcohol, those suffering from mental health issues.”

Nearly 60% of JusticePoint participants participate in community service. The program’s alcohol and substance abuse program serves more than 90% of participants, as do its mental health services, according to the city budget.  

Gena, the newest of the three Municipal Court judges, said terminating JusticePoint’s contract would make her job “a lot harder.” Speaking at the June meeting, the former Legal Action of Wisconsin managing attorney said she could order people to pay fines but can’t address root causes that will send many people back to court.

“It was indicated that maybe the other judges have a plan — I don’t,” she said. 

JusticePoint’s lawsuit argues termination lacked good cause

In its lawsuit, JusticePoint argues the city violated the Wisconsin Fair Dealership law, which protects “dealers” — typically business owners — whose economic livelihood could be imperiled by “grantors,” who, through a contract, grants dealers the ability to sell or distribute goods or services. The law prohibits a grantor from terminating a relationship with a dealer without good cause, proper notice and the ability to fix any issue at hand. 

“The City seeks to terminate — abruptly, unilaterally, and without good cause — JusticePoint’s relationship with the City,” the lawsuit argues. “Worse yet, the City has not contracted with another vendor to provide these critical services to the people of Milwaukee.”

The Circuit Court granted JusticePoint a temporary restraining order to maintain its contract as the case plays out. A hearing on that order is scheduled for October 5.

‘Thank you for being so kind to me.’ 

Eckhart has collected countless stories of people her colleagues have helped over the decades. She recalled one man who bathed in a pond outside of the Municipal Court building and had racked up many citations while struggling with alcoholism. Eckhart’s team connected him to a treatment service and resolved his tickets.

She said she later saw him with frostbite on his feet during the winter and gave him a pair of heavy socks. He later returned to thank the team. 

“And I’ll never forget that,” Eckhart said.

Then there was Theodora Athans, whose photo appeared in The Milwaukee Journal’s 1985 “Justice Denied” series that revealed how the court created “debtor’s prisons” within the Milwaukee County’s criminal justice system.

Athans lived with schizophrenia and the Milwaukee County Circuit Court found her to be a “danger to herself.”

But Eckhart said her team found Athans housing and the woman later volunteered for the alternatives program.

“Thank you for being so kind to me,” Eckhart recalled Athans later saying when Eckhart visited her while she was sick in the hospital.

“The people we help, I don’t think would get help anywhere else,” Eckhart said, “and that’s the part that bothers me.”

JusticePoint offers incarceration alternatives in Milwaukee. Two judges tried to cancel its contract. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

A viral TikTok claimed Disney World sought to lower the drinking age to 18. President Biden made outsized claims about job creation. A Twitter user impersonated a pharmaceutical giant announcing insulin is free. Russian agents leaked hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 

Each example reflects a type of what has collectively come to be known as “information disorder,” a term encompassing several kinds of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation that plague society. The various forms include propaganda, lies, conspiracies, rumors, hoaxes, hyper-partisan content, falsehoods and manipulated media, according to those who study the disease.

Journalists and academics around the world have dedicated themselves to examining information disorder. And conservative power brokers have begun to attack those efforts, often accusing them of suppressing free speech.

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers are leading a National Science Foundation-funded project to safeguard democracy by limiting information disorder’s scope and impact. 

As part of the endeavor, Wisconsin Watch, the Capital Times and Snopes are among the organizations that now have dedicated reporters covering how information disorder infects the body politic and destabilizes democracy — and how we can protect ourselves. 

Everyone is susceptible and could pass it along to others. But knowing what to look for and what to do about it can build resilience.

Here’s a guide to help diagnose information disorder, as well as some potential remedies.

Types of information disorder

The concept of information disorder comes from Claire Wardle, a researcher who co-founded First Draft and now leads the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. She developed the term as an alternative to “fake news,” which at one point referred to the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 presidential election, but became co-opted by former President Donald Trump to dismiss legitimate news stories.

She identifies three major strains of information disorder: 

Misinformation: False or misleading content spread by those who don’t know it’s false or misleading or without intent to cause harm. First Draft notes that as people share disinformation without realizing it’s false, it can become misinformation. Research shows people are more likely to share misinformation that aligns with their worldview or signals their belonging to an in-group.

Disinformation: Deliberately false content designed to deceive or to harm. According to First Draft, three main factors motivate people to make and spread disinformation: money, political influence or desire to cause chaos.

Malinformation: Factual content spread with the intent to cause harm. It’s often private information spread for corporate or personal interest, such as when someone posts intimate photos of an ex-partner online, an act known as revenge porn. 

What it looks like 

First Draft further breaks down information disorder into seven common forms. 

1. Fabricated content: Completely false or made up content — videos, photographs, stories — made to deceive or do harm.
2. Manipulated content: Genuine information or imagery altered to deceive. 
3. Imposter content: Content such as websites or posts impersonating real organizations or people.
4. False context: Genuine information shared alongside false contextual information, such as sharing stories that are old or from a different place as if they’re current and related to current events.
5. Misleading content: Content that may have genuine elements, or a “kernel of truth,” but are framed, recontextualized or reformulated in deceptive ways. 
6. False connection: Headlines, captions or visual elements that don’t support or accurately represent the content, such as clickbait. 
7. Satire or parody: Joking content that can dupe people into thinking it’s genuine or serious. This becomes more damaging the further it gets removed from its original source.

Josephine Lukito, a professor at University of Texas at Austin who studies mis- and disinformation on social media, said Russian troll campaigns favored false context and misleading content, often sharing real news stories with sensationalized framing to rile up a particular group. 

She recommends looking for a particular news story on Google to see if something similar appears on other outlets. If it’s a genuine event other news outlets will likely have covered it, too. 

Lukito said disinformation is also increasingly spread through videos and images, such as doctored screenshots purporting to be a news outlet posting a story, which can be harder to fact check.

Other imposter content commonly takes the form of websites or social media accounts, said Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wagner is the lead investigator for the NSF-funded research project in which Wisconsin Watch and the Capital Times are participating. 

“We’ve had misinformation since we’ve had information, and we’ve had people sharing things that aren’t true since they shared things that are true,” Wagner said.

In 2022, after Twitter changed its verification rules to allow anyone to buy a blue check, a tweet purporting to be a pharmaceutical company announcing it had made insulin free went viral. The company’s stock dropped about 4% — although it’s impossible to attribute it solely to the tweet. Months later, the company capped the monthly out-of-pocket price for all consumers. 

Although the person behind the imposter tweet said it was obviously satire, it was effective in part because the blue verification check, username and avatar mimicked the company’s. Other imposters might share other features as well, with only small departures from the real account. The same rules may apply for websites impersonating news outlets or companies, often with a slightly different address being the tell.

Why we’re susceptible

Research shows that our emotions and worldview play a significant role in what information we believe and share.

A headline, Wagner said, can hit “you in an emotional way that makes it hard for you to be motivated to think about why that might be wrong.”

Anxiety, in particular, enhances belief in disinformation and leads to its spread. When people feel uncertainty or fear, they’re more likely to pay attention to information that resonates with their present emotions. 

That also plays into a psychological concept known as cognitive dissonance: the discomfort felt when confronted with information contrary to one’s beliefs. It can lead someone to reject credible information that further threatens those beliefs, instead seeking out comforting, even if false, information.

Even when calm, people tend to believe and share information that supports their worldview, especially if it comes from within their own circles, a phenomenon psychologists refer to as “confirmation bias.”

First Draft compiled several foundational psychological concepts here. They include the “third-person effect,” which means considering others more susceptible to misinformation than oneself, and “fluency,” the tendency to believe information that is easier to process.

Madeline Jalbert, who studies misinformation and social cognition at the University of Washington, said in a webinar that humans assume information is true by default. And we’re more likely to believe misinformation is true when it feels easy to process, such as featuring a clean font and crisp audio quality, when it lacks cues to analyze information carefully and when it meets some of the basic elements we instinctively use to evaluate truth.

The “truth criteria” are:

1. Compatibility: Whether it’s compatible with other things known to be true.
2. Coherence: Whether it “makes sense.”
3. Credibility: Whether it comes from a credible source.
4. Consensus: Whether other people believe it.
5. Evidence: Whether it has supporting evidence.

How to protect yourself

“In this digital era, people are both consumers of information and producers of information,” Lukito said.

Because of that, she said, it’s as important to consider what you share as it is to consider what you consume. That means considering the truthfulness or veracity of content before sharing.

Wagner recommends approaching content with this goal: “Learn the truth.”

Repeating that mantra can help move beyond personal biases, making someone more open to the possibility that their “side” might have flaws and the other side “isn’t the devil,” he said.

It also encourages consideration of the content’s other aspects: the author and their motivations, the source, whether the story supports the headline, whether the cited evidence supports the claim, who is sharing it. The Trust Project, which Wisconsin Watch has joined, developed eight “trust indicators” to consider when reviewing a news story.

“We need to constantly be willing to ask ourselves, ‘Why am I believing this? Does this make sense?’ ” Wagner said.

Lukito recommends having a healthy media diet, an ever-evolving collection of various sources for local, state and national news, as well as specialized publications for topics like economics or technology.

It’s important to distinguish between pieces driven by opinion, speculation or fact, and “absolutely important” that these sources of information have a process for verifying information. And it’s even better if you can seek out some of these sources yourself, rather than only letting a social media algorithm feed you all your information. 

One key technique is “lateral reading,” which involves evaluating a source or content’s credibility by researching their claims on multiple other sites.

We live in a different media ecology than decades prior, one that puts new responsibilities on individuals, Lukito said. 

“This is a new expectation for citizens that we’ve not seen in the past,” she said. It requires energy and labor, but “I certainly think it’s worth it.”

Have you encountered some mis- or disinformation?

Whether online or in real life, we want to hear about it. Wisconsin Watch and the Capital Times will be reporting together and separately on mis- and disinformation in Wisconsin over the coming months, especially with the 2024 presidential election inching closer.

Email tips, questions or feedback to reporters Phoebe Petrovic (disinfo@wisconsinwatch.org) and Erin McGroarty (emcgroarty@captimes.com).

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Misinformation, Disinformation: A guide to sorting fiction from reality is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

Local officials in Wisconsin are planning to improve how sheriff’s deputies communicate with people who don’t speak English in response to a ProPublica report that found that an investigation into the death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy living on a dairy farm was mishandled due to a language barrier.

Dane County supervisors said that their goals include making language access a key part of department equity plans and creating a dedicated countywide language-access coordinator.

The efforts come as the parents of the boy, Jefferson Rodríguez, have settled a lawsuit against the farm and its insurance company over the July 2019 death in rural Dane, about a half hour north of Madison. As ProPublica reported in February, sheriff’s deputies wrongly concluded that the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, had accidentally run his son over with farming equipment.

But it was another worker, on his first work day at D&K Dairy, who had been driving the 6,700-pound Bobcat skid steer that crushed Jefferson, ProPublica found. The man had waited at the scene, expecting to be questioned, on the night Jefferson died. But deputies never interviewed him, in part due to a language barrier. ProPublica was able to reach him and he acknowledged he was driving the skid steer that night.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident and nobody was charged criminally. But Rodríguez was blamed in the official account. Rodríguez and Jefferson’s mother, María Sayra Vargas, who lives in Nicaragua, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020 against the farm and its insurer, Rural Mutual Insurance Company.

The trial was originally scheduled to begin this week in Dane County Circuit Court. But, about a month after ProPublica published its story, Jefferson’s parents reached a tentative agreement with the farm and insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The agreement was later finalized in court and the lawsuit was dismissed in April.

Lawyers for Rural Mutual and the farm declined to comment.

Rodríguez said that the truth about his son’s death “has come to light” because of ProPublica’s reporting. He declined to share the settlement amount, but said the money will be helpful to him and his family.

“It doesn’t mean I’m happy. The sadness remains,” said Rodríguez, who now works on another dairy farm in Wisconsin. “All the money in the world wouldn’t make me the person I used to be. … I would like to be able to share this with Jefferson. That is what would fill me with joy.”

In the weeks after our initial story was published, more than a half-dozen members of the Dane County Board of Supervisors told ProPublica they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to Jefferson’s death and the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Jefferson lived with his father above the farm’s milking parlor, the barn where hundreds of cows were brought day and night to be milked by heavy, loud machinery.

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for and can make recommendations to the sheriff’s office. But it is limited in its ability to set policy.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s department, which was not a defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit, said there have been no changes to its language access practices. The department has no written policies on what deputies should do when they encounter people who speak a language other than English or when to bring in an interpreter. The department relies on deputies to self-report their ability to speak languages other than English.

County Supervisor Dana Pellebon said one way she and her colleagues on the county board hope to improve language access at the department is through its equity work plan, a road map that each county agency lays out for how it can become more inclusive and fair. County departments are now updating those plans, she said, and the plans are then approved by the Equal Opportunity Commission, which she chairs. “Language access is something that will be a part of all the plans,” Pellebon said.

One area she hopes the sheriff’s office can address is ensuring language access in rural parts of the county where cellphone reception is weak and phone-based interpretation services aren’t available. “We want to make sure there is a workaround,” Pellebon said. “Either get to a space where there is cellphone service or find a landline at the space they’re at.”

She and other county officials are also considering the possibility of testing deputies’ proficiency in a foreign language instead of relying on their self-assessments. The deputy who interviewed Rodríguez the night his son died had described herself as a proficient Spanish speaker. But when a ProPublica reporter interviewed her, we discovered that the phrase she had used to ask Rodríguez whether he had run over his son with the farm machinery didn’t mean what she thought it did: It lacked a verb and a subject, and the result was confusing.

Rodríguez later told ProPublica he thought the deputy had asked whether his son had been run over by the skid steer, not whether he was driving the machine.

Dane County Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner said she will prioritize creating a countywide language-access coordinator position in next year’s budget to help agencies fulfill their obligations and organize the county’s plans and resources.

“It’s a basic access-to-government civil rights issue that permeates every department,” Wegleitner said. County departments that receive federal funding are required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to take steps to make their services accessible to people who speak limited English.

The challenges that non-English-speaking immigrants face in communicating with law enforcement officials extend beyond Dane County. ProPublica found that sheriff’s deputies and police officers across the state routinely fail to communicate directly with Spanish-speaking immigrant workers on dairy farms when responding to incidents ranging from assaults to serious accidents. Records from dozens of incidents show that law enforcement officials routinely rely on employees’ supervisors and coworkers to communicate with immigrant workers. Often they turn to Google Translate. Sometimes they don’t speak with the workers at all or ask children to interpret.

Language access is “haphazard throughout the system,” said Nancy Rodriguez, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine who co-authored a May supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on the issue. The report, which was based on a survey of criminal justice agencies and organizations across the country, recommended that agencies do more to understand the language needs of the people they serve and to monitor compliance with a language-access plan.

Our investigation into Jefferson’s death was the first story in our series “America’s Dairyland.”

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; difficulty accessing medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and problems with employer-provided housing.

Do you have ideas or tips for us to look into? Please reach out to us using this form.

And if you know a Spanish speaker who might be interested in this topic, please share with them a translation of the story about Jefferson’s death — which also includes an audio version — or this note about how to get in touch with us.

Following the death of an 8-year-old on a Wisconsin dairy farm, officials look to bridge law enforcement language gap is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

A car smelling like marijuana is enough for police in Wisconsin to justify searching a person in the vehicle, even though substances legal in the state can smell the same, the state Supreme Court said on Tuesday.

The court’s conservative majority ruled 4-3 that Marshfield police had grounds to search the driver of a vehicle that smelled like marijuana, overturning lower court rulings that said officers couldn’t be sure that what they smelled was not CBD, a legal, marijuana-derived substance. The scents of CBD and marijuana are indistinguishable.

Two officers searched Quaheem Moore in 2019, who was alone in a vehicle that smelled like marijuana when he was pulled over for speeding. Moore told police that a vaping device he had contained CBD and that the car was a rental belonging to his brother. Police did not smell marijuana on Moore.

Moore argued in court that police had no reason to believe he was responsible for the smell.

To justify searching someone, police need enough evidence to believe that person has likely committed a crime. When they obtain more evidence through an illegal search, it’s not allowed to be used in court.

Moore was never charged with possessing marijuana, but officers charged him with possessing narcotics when they discovered small bags of cocaine and fentanyl in his pocket during their search.

A circuit court judge and an appeals court had previously moved to disqualify the drugs that police found, saying the search wasn’t legal.

Justice Brian Hagedorn, who issued Tuesday’s opinion on behalf of the court’s conservative majority, wrote that because Moore was the only person in the car, police could reasonably assume he “was probably connected with the illegal substance the officers identified.”

Tuesday’s ruling referenced a 1999 Supreme Court decision that said officers were justified in arresting a driver because they linked the smell of marijuana from his vehicle to him. That opinion said that the “unmistakable” smell of a controlled substance was evidence that a crime had been committed.

But the court’s three liberal justices called that ruling into question, saying it was outdated and did not account for the subsequent legalization of substances that smell like marijuana. They also said officers did not have strong evidence that Moore had caused the odor in the car he was driving.

“Officers who believe they smell marijuana coming from a vehicle may just as likely be smelling raw or smoked hemp, which is not criminal activity,” Justice Rebecca Frank Dallet wrote in a dissenting opinion.

Moore’s attorney, Joshua Hargrove, warned that the ruling could allow police to base searches on unreliable conclusions and never be held accountable in court. “This opinion could subject more citizens engaged in lawful behavior to arrest,” he said.

The ruling comes as Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin continue to fight over legalizing marijuana.

Republicans who control the Legislature have rejected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ attempts to legalize recreational and medical marijuana. But GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in April he was working on legislation to legalize medical marijuana as soon as this fall.

Marijuana has been legal in neighboring Michigan and Illinois for years and will become legal in Minnesota in August under legislation passed last month.

Scent like marijuana enough to warrant police search, Wisconsin Supreme Court rules is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

When Jamie Gaffke gave birth to her first son in 2014, she and her spouse spent about $3,000 on a lawyer to ensure among other things that both of their names appeared on the birth certificate.

One reason the expense was necessary at the time: On birth certificates, according to Wisconsin statutes, the parents in artificial insemination cases are defined as the mother and the “husband of the mother” when the individual is conceived or born.

Gaffke, 43, and her wife Ruth Vater, 39, recalled in an interview with Wisconsin Watch feeling terrified during the hearing at the Rock County Courthouse where they went to file a petition to ensure Vater’s same-sex parental rights. At one point, the judge appointed a guardian ad litem, “a person whose responsibility would be to represent the interests of our child, as if we did not,” Vater said.

The case came shortly after the federal courts struck down Wisconsin’s 2006 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. But even in 2018 — three years after the U.S. Supreme Court had legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in the landmark decision Obergefell v. Hodges — Gaffke and Vater had to return to court to secure Vater’s parental rights for their second son.

For many same-sex couples in Wisconsin, the Obergefell decision being commemorated now during Pride Month was only one step in an incomplete legal journey.

State law still includes more than 100 references to “husband” and nearly as many references to “wife,” a Wisconsin Watch review found.

Those sections of the law include documents and laws related to not just birth, marriage and divorce, but also taxes, fishing licenses and veterans home accommodations. Even the definition of “parent” is outdated, including either a biological parent, a parent by adoption or a “husband who has consented to the artificial insemination of his wife.” The state’s unconstitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and the “Family Code” in state statute, which refers specifically to “husband and wife,” remain on the books.

Court decisions and administrative actions under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers have blocked the practical effects of those terms — for now. But the 2022 revival of Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federally guaranteed abortion rights reminds many in the LGBTQ+ community that some rights, once granted, can still be taken away.

“It’s really frustrating because most folks across the state of Wisconsin support the rights of our family, but the law doesn’t,” said Vater, whose family now lives in Madison. “Most people assume that the status for families like ours is much safer and better than the one we actually live with. The reality of our situation is much more tenuous than most people realize.”

Bipartisan legislation stalls

Wisconsin is among a small number of states that include discriminatory language against same-sex couples in how they define “parent,” according to a Wisconsin Watch review of all 50 state laws. Only two states — Wisconsin and South Dakota — include a reference to “husband” in the primary definition of “parent.”

At least 21 states have adopted neutral language through a law known as the Uniform Parentage Act, according to a recent report from the Movement Advancement Project, a research group that promotes equity and inclusiveness. Wisconsin is among 29 states that have not.

Maine, for example, in 2016 changed its definition of parent to include a person if “the person and the woman giving birth to the child are married to each other and the child is born during the marriage.”

In Wisconsin, a once bipartisan effort to update state law to include gender neutral terminology for spouses and parents has stalled in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, and several colleagues introduced bills to update the language in each of the past four sessions. The 2019 bill had two Republican co-sponsors, Reps. Todd Novak, R-Dodgeville, and Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay.

Spreitzer said when he has talked to Republican colleagues about the bill, which he expects to introduce again later this session, the term “let sleeping dogs lie” comes up.

“ ‘You’ve got your win at the U.S. Supreme Court, why do you want me to take a vote on something I’m going to take heat from my base for?’ ” Spreitzer said, characterizing the responses. 

Novak, the state’s only openly gay elected Republican lawmaker, said everybody acknowledges that same-sex marriage is the law “so there’s really no interest in doing a bill just for statute cleanup.”

“Most legislators don’t even realize the statutes say this,” said Novak, who declined to sponsor last session’s bill after clashing with the Legislature’s LGBTQ+ caucus over his support of an unsuccessful measure to ban transgender women from women’s sports.

Evers has proposed revising state statutes to incorporate gender-neutral terms in each of his last two budget requests, but the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee removed the language as part of a broad motion removing non-fiscal policy measures.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to requests for comment.

Public opinion, court majorities shift on same-sex marriage

Voters amended the Wisconsin Constitution in November 2006 by a 59%-41% margin to state: “Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in this state. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state.”

The Obergefell decision nullified that language, but it will remain in the state constitution unless the Legislature in two consecutive sessions votes to remove it, and voters approve the change. Should a future U.S. Supreme Court overturn Obergefell, some warn Wisconsin’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage could again take effect.

In a concurring opinion last year to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the half-century constitutional right to an abortion before viability, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas said the court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents” — including the 5-4 same-sex marriage ruling. The court now has a 6-3 conservative majority. 

In December, Congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden repealed the federal 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, even though Obergefell had already nullified it. A key provision of DOMA, which prevented states from having to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, was previously struck down in the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision U.S. v. Windsor.

Megin McDonell, executive director of FAIR Wisconsin, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, said there’s “definitely value” in updating the statutes.

“We want to make it permanent in the statutes, or as permanent as the statutes can be,” she said.

“This is the law of the land in all 50 states,” McDonell added. “We should update our state statutes just to reflect that. … Cleaning up the statutes and fixing the language would provide more clarity, more recognition for people.”

Asked for a response to advocates trying to neutralize gender-specific language in state law, Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action, the lead organization opposing same-sex marriage, chuckled and said, “I guess that ship has sailed.”

She later backtracked on using that phrase adding, “I will fight every single day to retain the terms husband and wife, mother and father, male and female, all those terms” in state law. Appling explained that retaining the terms is important in case Democrats take control of Wisconsin’s GOP-run Legislature.

“The minute we don’t have a more conservative majority in the state Legislature,” she said, “is the minute everything like that changes.”

There’s no doubt public opinion has shifted sharply on same-sex marriage in the past generation. In 1996, when Congress passed DOMA, just 27% of respondents nationwide told Gallup they approved of same-sex marriage. In 2022, that number was 71%.

Husband and wife in Wisconsin law

In June 2021, Evers issued an executive order directing “each cabinet agency to use gender-neutral language whenever practicable in external documents, including but not limited to: using gender-neutral terms and pronouns, drafting to eliminate the need for pronouns, omitting superfluous gendered words, and making any reference to gendered family relations, to the extent allowable by state and federal law.”

That order covered administrative rules, guidance documents, manuals, websites and all similar documents. But it could not re-write statutes. That’s the Legislature’s job.

Wisconsin state statutes remain riddled with language that excludes same-sex married couples. For example, the definition of “parent” that refers specifically to “husband” appears in multiple sections of law, such as for bone marrow transplants, juvenile justice and access to children’s medical records.

Other examples where “husband” and “wife” still appear in state law include: 

• The crime of theft doesn’t apply if the perpetrator and the victim are “husband and wife.”
• For bank accounts, marital accounts are defined as those who “claim to be husband and wife.”
• State law nearly covers same-sex couples in a section on veterans homes, acknowledging that the second priority for housing goes to spouses of those who qualify for a veterans home. But it later notes the department may deviate from that order “to prevent the separation of husband and wife.”
• Divorce proceedings allow couples to attempt reconciliation during which time they may attempt to live together as “husband and wife.”
• Statutes refer to a “combined husband and wife resident fishing license.”
• A homestead tax exemption applies to land owned “by husband and wife jointly.” 
• Even wild rice harvesting license rules say immediate family members, including “husband and wife,” may share licenses. 

Same-sex couples take cases to court

Evers’ order came after years in which same-sex couples had to return to court to ensure equal treatment under the law, even after it was legalized nationally.

“There was just a time when the language didn’t match the reality on the ground,” said Juscha Robinson, an attorney who has worked on real estate and estate planning cases for same-sex couples. “You would have couples flipping coins over who was going to be husband and who was going to be wife.”

Even though the 2015 high court ruling required that same-sex couples be granted immediately all of the same rights as heterosexual couples, Wisconsin and several other states continued to resist.

The Department of Health Services under Republican Gov. Scott Walker failed to update birth certificate forms to accommodate same-sex couples, despite employees expressing confusion internally about how to address the issue. 

In 2016, a federal judge in Madison granted a married female couple and other similarly situated couples the right to a birth certificate listing both spouses, suggesting that DHS update its forms. A 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed the right to have both spouses listed on birth certificates nationwide.

Around that time, other official forms in Wisconsin began to change. The Wisconsin Court Records Management Committee began updating divorce and child custody forms to include gender-neutral language in 2017, according to archived meeting minutes. Previously divorce forms specifically referred to husband and wife, but now refer to petitioner A and B.

Judges and court officials from around the state heard no objections as they oversaw updates to the forms, according to Court Information Officer Tom Sheehan.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Kevin Martens, chair of the forms subcommittee, said court decisions — not political considerations — drove the changes in the forms. Should a future U.S. Supreme Court decision overturn the right to same-sex marriage, the current wording on the forms should suffice, he said.

“Even if that were the case, it wouldn’t change identifying the parties as ‘petitioner,’ ” Martens said. “You wouldn’t go back to a caption that said ‘husband and wife.’ You wouldn’t need to.”

Fight for equal rights continues

When Laura Megna, 37, of Madison, had her first child in 2018, the birth certificate form she and her wife filled out at the hospital still asked for the name of the “mother” and “father.” They crossed out those words and wrote in “parent” and “parent.”

The hospital mailed in the form and the state sent back a proof of the final birth certificate asking for any corrections. It still said “mother” and “father,” so they corrected it again. The final birth certificate came back with the correct titles.

Megna, who is the family liaison care coordinator at UnityPoint Health-Meriter, said the process was similar in 2020 when she had their second child, but there was greater awareness in the health care world that the change was possible. Last year, when their third child was born — after Evers’ executive order — the form had a “parent” and “parent” option.

Although that issue has been resolved for now, Megna said she would still like to see the language in the law changed because “we’re significantly more evolved than when many of these things were written.”

LGBTQ+ legal advocacy groups recommend all same-sex parents not rely on birth certificates, but also have courts legally recognize their parental rights, said Emily Dudak Leiter, an attorney at the Law Center for Children and Families in Madison.

“It still comes down to the culture in our country,” Dudak Leiter said. “That’s why all of this is more societal, not legal. It’s until you don’t have to worry about that unfairness, that’s when I won’t want a court order for every single one of my clients.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin law still refers to husband and wife, a reminder to LGBTQ+ families that their rights are at risk is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.

When the clerk at VJ’s Food Mart confronted Corey Stingley, the 16-year-old handed over his backpack. Inside were six hidden bottles of Smirnoff Ice, worth $12, and the clerk began pulling them out one by one.

Stingley watched, then pivoted and quickly moved toward the door, empty-handed. But there would be no escape for the unarmed teen in the light blue hoodie.

Three customers, together weighing 550 pounds, wrestled the 135-pound teen to the floor of the West Allis, Wisconsin, store. They pinned him in a seated position, “his body compressed downward,” according to a police account. One of the men put Stingley in a chokehold, witnesses would later tell investigators.

“Get up, you punk!” that man, a former Marine, reportedly told Stingley when an officer from the police department finally arrived. But the teen didn’t move. He was foaming at the mouth, and his pants and shoes were soaked in urine.

He’d suffered a traumatic brain injury from a loss of oxygen and never regained consciousness. His parents took him off life support two weeks later. The medical examiner ruled Stingley’s death a homicide following his restraint in “a violent struggle with multiple individuals.”

That was more than 10 years ago.

None of the men, all of whom were white, were criminally charged in the incident that killed Stingley, a Black youth. Police arrested Mario Laumann, the man seen holding Stingley in an apparent chokehold, shortly after the incident in December 2012. But the local district attorney declined to prosecute him or the other two men, arguing they were unaware of the harm they were causing.

When a second police review led to a reexamination of the case in 2017, another prosecutor sat on it for more than three years, until a judge demanded a decision. Again, there were no charges.

Prosecutors move on, but fathers don’t. Refusing to accept that the case had been handled justly, Corey Stingley’s dad, Craig, last year convinced a judge to assign a third district attorney to look at what had happened to his son.

That prosecutor, Ismael Ozanne of Dane County, is scheduled to report back to the court on Friday. He could announce whether charges are warranted.

The case has parallels to a recent deadly subway incident in New York City. Both involve chokeholds administered by former Marines on Black males who had not initiated any violence. But unlike in Wisconsin, New York authorities acted within two weeks to file a second-degree manslaughter charge in the case.

While the New York subway incident grabbed national headlines, Corey Stingley’s death — which happened the same day as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut — did not gain much notice outside of southeast Wisconsin.

Years later, Craig Stingley tapped an obscure statute dating back to Wisconsin’s frontier days to convince the system to take a fresh look at his son’s death. The law states that if a district attorney refuses to issue a criminal complaint or is unavailable to do so, a private citizen can petition a judge to take up the matter. Today, it’s loosely referred to as a “John Doe” petition, though in this instance there was no doubt who restrained Stingley’s son: Laumann, who has since died, along with two other store patrons named Jesse R. Cole and Robert W. Beringer.

No one is alleging that the men set out to kill Corey Stingley. His father is asking the prosecutor to consider a charge of reckless homicide or even a lesser offense for using extreme force to detain his son.

“He wasn’t trying to harm anyone. He was trying to leave that store,” said Craig Stingley, who thought his son made a youthful mistake. “I believe he was scared.”

“You Guys Killed That Kid”

VJ’s Food Mart is a typical small convenience store, packed with chips, candy, soda, beer, cigarettes and liquor. On Sunday mornings it offers a special deal on hot ham and rolls, a local tradition for an after-church meal. To combat theft, the store is equipped with security cameras.

On Dec. 14, 2012, Thomas Ripley and Anthony Orcholski stopped by the store for beer and snacks. Only a few steps in, they saw that three men had someone firmly pinned on the ground.

Security video shows Ripley and Orcholski pausing next to the pile of people and watching intently. In statements to police they both said they saw Laumann lying on the ground with his arms around Stingley’s neck in a “chokehold.” Beringer had grabbed Stingley’s hair, they said; the third man, Cole, had his hands on Stingley’s back.

Ripley told police the teen was not moving and appeared to be limp.

“I don’t think he could breathe,” Ripley would later testify during a special review of the case to determine if there should be charges.

Orcholski told a detective that he was concerned about the teen on the ground and may even have instructed the men to let Stingley go.

A decade later, Orcholski is still bothered by what he saw. “I’m upset,” he told ProPublica. “Three men thought they were going to be heroes that day because a 16-year-old boy was shoplifting. There could have been numerous different ways to restrain him other than choking him to death.”

He added, “It’s common sense: When you squeeze somebody that hard for that long, they’re not going to be alive after it.”

The security video is grainy, and much of the confrontation took place out of view of the cameras.

Authorities had a third witness, though. Troubled by what he’d seen, store customer Michael Farrell felt compelled to go to the West Allis police station that evening and give a statement.

“I felt bad. I’m a dad,” he explained, court records show.

Farrell told police he could see through the store’s glass door that a man with a “crazed look on his face” had someone in a chokehold, very near the entrance. The guy was “squeezing the hell out of this kid and never let up,” he said. Farrell picked Laumann out of a photo lineup. (Farrell and another witness, Ripley, couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.)

Corey Stingley and his dad lived just a couple of blocks from the store, making them one of the few Black families in a predominantly white neighborhood and city on the border of Milwaukee. Comments from the three men who held Stingley down imply that they saw him as an outsider.

Ripley told police that Beringer, 54, held Stingley by the hair and shook the teen’s head a couple of times. “You don’t do that,” he said Beringer scolded Stingley. “We’re all friends and neighbors around here.”

With Stingley subdued, the store clerk held a phone to Beringer’s head so he could talk to a police dispatcher. “We have the perp, three of us have the perp on the ground holding him for you,” Beringer said, according to a transcript of the 911 call.

Police estimated that the men held Stingley down for six to 10 minutes. When Stingley stopped struggling, Cole later told police, “I thought he was faking it.”

He added: “I didn’t know if he was just, you know, playing limp to try and get real strong and pull a quick one, you know.”

When an officer arrived, she handcuffed Stingley with Beringer’s assistance but then realized that he wasn’t breathing and called for help.

Beringer walked outside the market, according to Farrell, only to be confronted by another bystander who said, “You guys killed that kid.”

“We didn’t kill anyone,” Beringer responded.

At nearby Froedtert Hospital, doctors concluded Stingley’s airway had been blocked while he was restrained.

He had petechial hemorrhages — tiny red dots that appear as the result of broken blood vessels — to his eyes, cheeks and mouth. A deputy medical examiner attributed this pattern to “pressure applied to the neck.” There also was a bruise at the front of Stingley’s neck, she testified.

She noted that his asphyxia also could be linked to compression of the chest.

Doctors put Stingley in a medically induced coma, attached him to a ventilator and inserted a feeding tube. As the situation became increasingly hopeless, his family spent Christmas at his bedside. Four days later, his parents made the agonizing decision to take him off life support.

“Mario Did Have a Temper”

In the New York subway case earlier this month, it took less than two weeks for the Manhattan district attorney to charge Daniel Penny, a former Marine, with second-degree manslaughter for the choking death of Jordan Neely, a homeless man who had yelled at other subway passengers. A prosecutor emphasized that Penny continued to choke Neely even after he stopped moving.

Penny’s lawyers have defended his actions by saying he was protecting himself and other passengers. Laumann, in contrast, never claimed Corey Stingley was a danger. But he did dispute that he put his arm around the teen’s throat.

Interviewed by police that night, Laumann, then 56, recalled “just leaning on him.”

Pressed by a detective, Laumann appeared less confident, saying, “A headlock is when you got your arms locked, right? And I didn’t have him locked.” He added: “I had my arm around like this, yeah, but I didn’t have him in a headlock. Unless maybe I did, maybe I — I don’t, no, I, I don’t remember that, no.”

His account conflicted with that of witnesses. And Laumann’s older sibling Michael, also a former Marine, isn’t so sure, either. Chokeholds are a part of basic combat skills, he said, used to restrain a person and take them down.

“That’s the first thing they teach you, not only in boot camp but also in subsequent infantry training. It becomes an automatic restraint, to save your own life,” Michael said. “I’m not saying that Mario did that. Because I don’t know the situation. But all I’m saying is that when you’re in the Marine Corps you’re taught how to save your own life. And to save the lives of your brotherhood. Sometimes it becomes, say, an automatic response.”

Michael Laumann said he and Mario — who died last year at age 65 — seldom talked, and when they did, the store incident never came up.

Mario Laumann, who worked in construction after leaving the Marines, lived about two miles from the store. His family had been dealing with a variety of crises. His wife was battling cancer. She had been arrested four years earlier for driving under influence of prescription medications. She died in 2013.

And, by the time of the encounter with Stingley, Laumann’s youngest son, Nickolas, was serving time in prison for sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl, intimidation of a victim and theft.

Writing online while in prison, Nickolas said his father would “scream at me” for drug use and “whoop my ass.” The police report about Stingley’s death notes that Laumann had been arrested twice for battery, but charges in both cases had been dismissed.

“Mario did have a temper,” another brother, Mennas Laumann, said recently.

The three men who held Stingley down didn’t know each other. Beringer, who lived next door to the food mart, told police he only recognized Laumann as “a neighborhood guy.”

Like Laumann, Beringer had had previous encounters with police. In 1996, Beringer pulled a gun on a Pakistani-born man and told him he hated “fucking Iranians,” according to a police sergeant’s sworn criminal complaint. Beringer pleaded guilty to misdemeanor gun charges and was jailed briefly then put on probation. A judge ordered him to complete a course in violence counseling or anger management and continue with mental health treatment, court records show.

Beringer, who no longer lives in West Allis, declined to talk to ProPublica. He came to the door of his apartment building and when asked to discuss Stingley’s death said, “No, no, see you later,” and closed the door.

The third man to wrestle Stingley to the ground, Cole, was a 25-year-old electrician who lived about a mile from the store. He’d gone there to get cigarettes. The prior year he had pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, for carrying a Glock handgun in the center console of his car and a magazine with 11 hollow-point bullets in the glove box. Cole didn’t respond to ProPublica’s attempts for comment.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, all three men cooperated with police.

Cole said that as he and the others tried to halt Stingley’s attempt to flee, the teen took a swing at him and landed a punch. He ended up with a black eye.

Asked by police why he restrained the teen, Laumann replied: “Because he’s a thief.”

“He Was My Buddy”

Several days after the struggle, West Allis police arrested Laumann and processed him for second-degree reckless injury. It was up to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm to decide whether to prosecute him and the other men.

Chisholm eventually arranged for a judicial proceeding where sworn testimony could be heard. There, the three men invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in declining to answer questions. The original witnesses recounted seeing Stingley grabbed around the throat.

Though Farrell said he couldn’t recall telling police that Laumann was “squeezing the hell out of” Stingley, he didn’t back away from his original description of a chokehold.

Months went by with no word on charges. But Craig Stingley, a facilities engineer, couldn’t just sit and wait. He rallied support from politicians in the community and tried to keep the pressure on Chisholm.

Stingley brought state Sen. Lena Taylor to meetings with the prosecutor to discuss the case. They came away discouraged. Taylor got the impression that the case was challenging for prosecutors on many levels. The video was not sharp, for one thing. Taylor also believed that race relations in Milwaukee County fed Chisholm’s concern that a jury might not convict anyone in the case.

At one meeting, Taylor said, she questioned what would have happened if the people involved had been of different races. “They wouldn’t let a group of Black guys do that to a young white guy, without any consequences,” she said.

More than a year after the incident, in January 2014, Chisholm announced he would not bring charges, on the grounds that the men did not intend to injure or kill Stingley and didn’t realize there was a risk to his life or health. “It is clear that the purpose of restraining Corey Stingley was to hold him for police,” Chisholm wrote in a five-page summary of his investigation.

“None of the actors were trained in the proper application of restraint,” he added

Corey’s mother, Alicia Stingley, was stunned. “It’s just mind-boggling to me, just the decision that was made that it was more so because he didn’t think he could win a case or didn’t think what they did was on purpose,” she said. “There were no repercussions for a grown man taking a young child’s life — by choking him.”

For Craig Stingley, it’s inconceivable the men did not know his son was in distress during the prolonged time they held him down. Applied properly, a chokehold “can render an aggressor unconscious in as little as eight to thirteen seconds,” according to a 2015 Marine Corps instructor guide.

Chisholm is still the district attorney. Through an assistant, he declined comment, citing the new review. Among the questions sent by ProPublica to Chisholm was whether he investigated Laumann’s training in restraints as a Marine.

Chisholm’s decision sparked media coverage and community protests. To Craig Stingley, Corey was more than a symbol, he was a cherished son.

“He was my buddy,” Stingley said, describing how he and Corey would watch sports together. A skilled athlete, Corey Stingley was a running back on his high school football team and a member of the diving team. He took advanced placement classes in school and made the National Honor Society at school, his father said. He also worked part-time at an Arby’s.

His social media accounts include references to girls and partying. It also catalogs his love of Batman, the Green Bay Packers and Christmas and shows him gently mocking his friends and family.

“My dad just got texting and he’s experimenting with winky faces,” he wrote in 2012, ending with “#ohlord.”

Craig Stingley and his ex-wife filed a wrongful death suit in 2015 against the three men and the convenience store, which led to a settlement. Records show that Laumann’s homeowners insurance paid $300,000, as did Cole’s. (Beringer didn’t have homeowner’s insurance.) There was no admission of wrongdoing by the defendants. In court filings the three men said their actions were legal and justified, citing self-defense and their need to respond to “an emergency.”

A good portion of the proceeds from the suit went to pay for hospital and funeral costs and lawyer fees, Stingley said.

In the civil suit, an expert forensic pathologist hired by the Stingley family’s lawyer concluded the teen died because his chest was compressed and he was strangled.

“Once his airway became completely obstructed,” Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen of the University of Michigan wrote, “Corey would have experienced severe air hunger, conscious fear, suffering and panic with an impending sense of his own death for a period of 30 seconds to approximately one minute until he was rendered into a fully unconscious state.”

Craig Stingley still obsessed about what had happened and how to revive a criminal case. He relived his son’s death over and over, watching the surveillance video of his last moments frame by frame, looking for something new.

Using a movie maker app on his computer, he slowed the video down and grabbed individual frames. He concluded that Cole initially had his son in a headlock, but that Laumann too had an arm around his neck before bringing him to the ground. That conflicted with Laumann’s statement to police.

Stingley took his findings to the West Allis police, where a detective agreed they’d missed this detail. The department wrote a supplemental report for Chisholm, who asked a judge to appoint a special prosecutor for another look.

Racine District Attorney Patricia Hanson got the case in October 2017. But what followed was more waiting.

Stingley said he called Hanson’s office routinely in the years that followed, but she never met with him. Reached via email recently, Hanson declined to comment.

The case “has not even been assigned a referral or case number after three years in that office,” state Rep. Evan Goyke complained in a December 2020 letter to Milwaukee County Circuit Court Chief Judge Mary Triggiano. “This is unacceptable,” he wrote.

In later correspondence, Triggiano noted Hanson had refused to say when her decision would be forthcoming because in the midst of the pandemic, she had a lot of cases needing attention.

In March 2021, Hanson told the court in a one-page memo that she had reviewed Chisholm’s file and agreed with his earlier decision: “I do not find that criminal charges are appropriate at this time.”

“My Son Got His Humanity Back”

John Doe proceedings allowing citizens to directly ask a court to consider criminal charges date back to 1839, when Wisconsin was still a territory, according to an account in state supreme court records. The law is used infrequently, legal experts said, and rarely successfully.

Petitions have been filed by prisoners, by activists alleging animal cruelty in research experiments and by citizens claiming police misconduct. The efforts typically fail, ProPublica found in reviewing court dockets, news accounts and appellate rulings. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin’s most populous, there were only 19 such cases in 2020, dockets show, including Stingley’s. None succeeded.

Other states have similar methods of giving citizens a voice, but none are exactly like Wisconsin’s. According to the National Crime Victim Law Institute, six states — Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and Oklahoma — allow private citizens to gather signatures to petition a judge to convene a grand jury to investigate an alleged crime. In Pennsylvania, individuals can file a criminal complaint with the district attorney; if rejected, they can appeal to the court to ask it to order the district attorney to prosecute.

Milwaukee attorney Scott W. Hansen, who has served as special prosecutor in a John Doe case, is critical of the Wisconsin process. He said it allows citizens to present a one-sided, skewed version of facts to a judge, “without benefit of cross-examination or adverse witnesses.”

The law, however, does state that the citizen’s petition must present facts “that raise a reasonable belief” a crime was committed.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske described the John Doe petition as a check and balance on prosecutors by citizens. “If people believe a crime has been committed, and you’ve got prosecutors not living up to their responsibilities, and you think somebody ought to be held accountable, it’s a way to have some judicial review,” she said.

Stingley has known all along that the odds were against him, so turning to a longshot petition didn’t daunt him. Writing to Chief Judge Triggiano in late 2020, he alleged “dereliction and breach of legal duty” by the Milwaukee and Racine county district attorneys to conduct thorough criminal investigations into his son’s death.

Triggiano assigned the case to Judge Milton Childs. He formally appointed Ozanne, the first Black district attorney in Wisconsin, as special prosecutor last July. Ozanne’s inquiry has included reviews of court transcripts and interviews with West Allis police and others.

Craig Stingley was pleased that Ozanne and his staff met with him for several hours to listen to his concerns and to hear about his son.

“When I left that meeting,” Stingley said, “my son got his humanity back.”

A black teen who had tried to shoplift died from asphyxia. Why was no one ever charged? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

 The fight over racial equity and free speech on Wisconsin college campuses is intensifying, mirroring a national battle as Republicans work to close campus diversity offices and demand that students and faculty treat conservative speakers with respect.

In the past two weeks, the state’s top Republican announced a push to defund the University of Wisconsin System’s diversity efforts — a move the Democratic governor lambasted as ridiculous. Nonetheless, the UW System’s chief announced Thursday that he has barred schools from asking job applicants how they would support diversity.

Meanwhile, a UW-Madison student has posted racial slurs online, triggering bitter protests but no announced discipline. And a state medical college canceled a diversity symposium featuring Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson out of concerns the discussion would be too disruptive, resulting in cries of bias from conservatives.

Amid that backdrop, Republican legislative leaders held a hearing Thursday with only invited speakers to discuss “how the lack of free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses affects the quality of higher education.”

“I think people are talking about viewpoint diversity as being as important or more important than other types of diversity,” said Republican Rep. David Murphy, chairman of the state Assembly’s colleges committee, who presided over the hearing. “And I think (diversity efforts aren’t) showing any benefits.”

Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said it’s disheartening to see a hearing on free speech with only invited speakers. She said the GOP is trying to paint diversity offices as giving minorities an unfair advantage when they’re only trying to help everyone understand a broad range of perspectives.

“Contrary to those opposed to these offices, our work includes protecting free speech,” she said.

Republicans argue that diversity offices, designed to help minorities navigate academia, only heighten racial tensions. And the GOP has maintained for years that colleges don’t give conservative presenters the same opportunities as liberals to speak on campus.

A survey released in February by the UW System, which includes 13 four-year schools, found almost half of the students who responded at least somewhat agree that administrators should bar controversial speakers if some students find the message offensive.

The issues have bubbled to the forefront this month, starting with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ announcement last week that he wants to defund campus diversity offices. He called the offices a waste of taxpayer dollars and said they exacerbate the racial divide.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has called Vos’ proposal “ridiculous,” but Vos’ plan tracks with a national GOP push to dismantle campus diversity offices.

Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states have proposed more than 30 diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using the bill-tracking software Plural. Some proposals would ban DEI offices or any funding for them. Others would forbid administrators from considering diversity as part of the hiring or admissions process.

Facing potential budget cuts, UW System President Jay Rothman announced Thursday morning that he ordered chancellors on Wednesday to stop asking job seekers to supply statements on their applications describing how they would support equity and diversity.

Asked during a news conference if the move was a concession to Vos, Rothman responded by saying applicants may view the requirement as a “political litmus test” and not apply, hurting recruitment efforts.

Last week a white UW-Madison student posted a racist screed online in which she said she wants to see some Black people enslaved so she can abuse them. The post triggered two days of protests on Wisconsin’s flagship campus with students demanding the student be expelled. University officials condemned the posting but said they can’t take action against legal free speech.

Meanwhile, officials at the Medical College of Wisconsin decided to cancel Friday’s campus symposium focusing on “the uses and abuses” of government-sponsored diversity programming on college campuses and in medical, science and tech education.

The college’s president, John Raymond Sr., sent a message May 4 to students and staff saying he canceled the symposium because discussions about the event have become “unacceptably disruptive.” Raymond issued the message on the same day as one of the UW-Madison protests.

Johnson was slated to take part in the symposium along Murphy and John Sailer, policy director at the National Association of Scholars, a conservative group that advocates against diversity policies. Sailer posted a copy of a letter that faculty sent to Raymond on April 30 saying they opposed the “pseudo-academic and potentially harmful meeting.”

Sailer tweeted that the letter was a “textbook hecklers veto.” Johnson’s office said the symposium will now be held online but the senator said in a statement that he hopes to meet with medical college leaders to discuss why they felt they couldn’t host the event.

Murphy kicked off Thursday’s hearing by complaining that the medical college had “canceled” him.

Daniel Hughes, who said he is a student at the college, told the committee that the institution leans so far left that its diversity stances sometimes trump approaching problems scientifically. For example, he said he’s been taught that biological differences between races are a result of systemic racism, not genetics.

Democratic state Rep. Katrina Shankland questioned Hughes’ claims, saying there was no way to verify them since no one else from the college was invited to speak. A spokeswoman for the medical college didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment Thursday.

Rothman addressed the committee for two hours, repeating his mantra that inclusion must mean something or the system will lose potential students and faculty.

Free speech, racial equity battles are playing out on Wisconsin campuses is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

The tip came into Wisconsin Watch: Milwaukee Tool, an internationally recognized brand, was using forced prison labor in China to produce work gloves. 

Tackling the story was tricky. The person who knew what was happening in Chisan prison was also the wife of a dissident imprisoned there. A recent immigrant living in the Twin Cities, Shi Minglei feared for herself, their daughter and her husband Cheng Yuan behind bars halfway across the world. 

And she did not automatically trust me. I am a Chinese national. I am also a fellow for Wisconsin Watch, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a master’s degree in journalism. I needed first to prove to Shi that I was not a spy and that she could trust me to tell her story. 

I told her that I had covered human rights activists for The Guardian’s Beijing bureau. In 2017, I reported the crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists across China. Their wives became invisible advocates of human rights in China for those languishing in prisons. I told her that as a reporter, I was approached by Chinese plainclothes police who questioned my loyalty to the country and what I reported on.

Shi decided to trust me and allowed me to report the story. That started a months-long quest to find out: Were the allegations of forced prison labor true?

I talked to a renowned human rights activist who had been incarcerated in Chishan prison in central China. Lee Ming-che told me about the grueling working conditions and excessive overtime he had endured over nearly five years of imprisonment. The types of work gloves and the name of the supplier are etched in his mind.

It was 9 p.m. in Madison, and we talked over Zoom. Lee coughed from time to time at his home in Taiwan. He said he had developed a chronic dry cough after inhaling too much fabric dust working in the prison factories.

Before I reached out to Milwaukee Tool, I amassed a lot of evidence. I verified the name of the subcontractor, Shanghai Select Safety Products, through prisoners and in regulatory filings.

Milwaukee Tool declined to answer detailed questions, saying it had investigated the claim but providing no evidence of what it investigated or found. The company issued blanket denials to our questions. 

I will admit, I was furious. How could Milwaukee Tool stand silent against such detailed allegations? And how has the giant corporation, in practice, upheld its policy against the use of forced labor? 

I continued to amass evidence. Another former inmate who could verify Lee’s story agreed to talk to me. We decided not to publish any identifying details, and we agreed to use a pseudonym, Xu Lun, for his safety. Xu’s narrative was nearly identical to Lee’s. Both said inmates were subjected to discipline, including beatings and banning family visitations, when they failed to get the work done on time. 

I attempted to purchase gloves on China’s version of Amazon. By talking with third-party vendors, I confirmed two suppliers are making work gloves for Milwaukee Tool. One of them is Shanghai Select Safety Products. 

Later, I made contact with a self-identified salesman for Shanghai Select Safety Products, who verified the company was a supplier of Milwaukee Tool gloves and was manufacturing the majority of work gloves for Milwaukee Tool.

I checked customs records showing that gloves bearing the brand were indeed shipped to the United States. I went to a nearby Home Depot to buy the same Milwaukee Tool gloves that the prisoners said they made.

I presented the two former prisoners’ accounts to more than a dozen supply chain experts, human rights lawyers, union leaders and people with insight into the brand in Wisconsin and beyond. All said Milwaukee Tool could be violating U.S. law by selling gloves made with forced prison labor.

My reporting showed that such questionable behavior is rarely uncovered by the self-regulating system currently in place — or by reporters like me. I also learned that supply chains at companies like Milwaukee Tool, with thousands of contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors — many of them overseas — are very difficult for reporters and auditors to investigate. Being able to speak Chinese gave me a window into this world, but it is just a peek.

And as of today, Milwaukee Tool still has no specific response to our investigation into allegations that some of their work gloves are produced by the sweat of prisoners forced to toil 12 to 13 hours a day for pennies per day. 

Zhen Wang is currently serving a fellowship with Wisconsin Watch through the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Why I investigated Milwaukee Tool work gloves — and what we learned  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally reported and published by MindSite News, a nonprofit news site that reports on mental health.

On August 5, 2012, Pardeep Kaleka was just down the street from the Sikh Temple his family belonged to in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, when he heard sirens and rushed to find a police barricade around the building. Inside was a scene of horror: A member of a violent white power group known as the Hammerskins had gunned down seven members of the temple before turning the gun on himself. Among those killed was Satwant Singh Kaleka, the president of the temple and Kaleka’s father.

In the following weeks, support poured in from interfaith communities and television cameras flooded Oak Creek. Kaleka struggled with his grief and fury over the attack, but as the son of the temple’s leader, he felt responsible for representing the community – while also taking care of his widowed mother.

“I had to put on a brave face to the world and face cameras and the media,” he remembers. But as the media attention receded, his sense of loss deepened. “I was trying to be there for my mother, who was grieving her husband and crying herself to sleep every night; there was an entire community to take care of.”

Three months later, Kaleka set out to meet Arno Michaelis, who had co-founded the white power group chapter whose member carried out the massacre. Michaelis had left the group years earlier, renouncing white supremacist extremism, and Kaleka was desperate for answers. Maybe the former extremist would help him understand why his father and the others were targeted. Why the Sikh temple? Why now?

Kaleka arrived early at the Thai restaurant where the two had agreed to meet and waited in his car. Seeing Michaelis walking toward the entrance, Kaleka – already in turmoil — was suddenly struck with apprehension: “He is this big guy, kind of walking a big-guy walk from side to side, wearing a hoodie,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll call him up and cancel, tell him my kids are sick.” But Kaleka pushed himself to enter the restaurant, forgetting that he had taped up his eyelid after a freak injury – a sight that led Michaelis to exclaim in sympathy when he spotted him. “All of a sudden, I see this big, intimidating, tattooed former racist feel empathy for me,” Kaleka recalls.

They spent the next three hours talking nonstop. They found they had several strange similarities – from their daughters’ quirky habits to how both their fathers had a penchant for taking lawn mowers apart, leaving the parts strewn across their respective living rooms for months.

But lurking in the back of Michaelis’ mind was the thought: “I had helped found the organization that produced the man who murdered his father.”

Helping extremists break away – and address their own trauma

At the time of his meeting with Kaleka, Michaelis had been out of the white power movement for 18 years. Today he, Kaleka and a handful of organizations are working together to help former extremists leave that life. Many suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, so the anti-hate groups provide referrals for mental health care as well as other support.

One such group is Parents for Peace, based in Tennessee. It was founded in 2015 by a father and sister of a Memphis man who had converted to Islamic extremism. He opened fire at a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2009, killing one person and injuring another. Parents for Peace, which both Kaleka and Michaelis work with, runs a helpline that links callers to clinicians and former extremists who educate families about extremism and “deradicalization,” and help them identify support in their communities.

Staffers also talk directly with those in extremist groups and those who are grappling with the idea of leaving them. “When someone calls, usually it’s because they feel like ‘if I don’t call, I’m afraid that the whole family is going to be on the front page of the newspaper,’” says Parents for Peace Executive Director Myrieme Churchill. The group also helps callers assess potential threats and is developing curriculum to train peers in how to work with violent extremists seeking to leave.

Life After Hate

Another group, the Chicago-based Life After Hate, which Michaelis helped found in 2009, works with families and violent extremists seeking to exit the movement. It helps guide them through the rough terrain of getting back to a stable life, in part by sponsoring family support groups.

Life After Hate’s social workers assess the extremists who reach out to the organization to determine their needs and challenges – and whether they need mental health support, or food or shelter. Those seeking to get out of extremism are paired with former extremists who serve as mentors.  

“Some of our ‘formers’ have been out for more than a decade, and they will tell you that each and every day they have to take accountability,” says Life After Hate CEO Patrick Riccards.  “They realize they’re constantly being judged, and they have to put in the work each day to demonstrate that they’ve earned redemption.”

This work is needed more than ever. In the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, teenagers and youth spent more time online, and many fell under the spell of extremist recruiters. Hate groups in the US numbered 733 in 2021, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based racial justice organization. These include neo-Nazi, pro-Confederacy, racist skinhead organizations, and white nationalist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Patriot Front, Proud Boys, Stormfront and the National Justice Party. Many use flyers, banners and stickers to recruit members, as well as YouTube videos, Twitch, and video game-related activities.

The Anti-Defamation League documented 3,697 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2022, a 36% jump from 2021 and the highest number on record since the organization began tracking such incidents in 1979. An analysis of FBI statistics by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news service, found hate crimes increased 167% against Asians, 70% against LGBTQ people, 35% against Latinos, and 14% against Black people from 2020 to 2021.

Meanwhile, the FBI reported that white supremacists posed a “persistent threat of lethal violence” and produced more fatalities than any other kind of domestic terrorist since 2000, according to a new report from the National Urban League.

On May 4, four members of the extremist street gang Proud Boys, including leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the violent scheme to stop the peaceful transfer of power that culminated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol after the 2020 presidential election.

Extremist groups operate online in both open and encrypted sites. “Direct conversations with extremists on social media, online games, and in other online spaces can be a gateway to online radicalization,” warned researchers in a parents’ guide developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and American University to help families recognize and counter radicalization in their kids.

Is there a common denominator that draws people to hate groups? While it’s not possible to predict who will be drawn into the vortex of violent extremism, unhealed past trauma and family problems, compounded by teenage identity crises and a search for belonging can set the stage, says Diana Hughes, the senior director of strategy and operations at Parents for Peace.

“Extremism provides a quick fix to their sense of pain,” she says.  

A Rand Corporation research brief notes that people who feel marginalized, have financial problems, have been abused or bullied or are struggling with mental health challenges may be especially vulnerable to extremist propaganda; a search for love and acceptance and social connections to people involved in such groups can also be a draw. Still, says Sara Winegar Budge, PhD, a psychologist who serves as vice president and director of client services at Life After Hate, “There is no profile or single pathway into violent extremism.”

Consider Michaelis, who describes his own childhood as idyllic in many ways. He had loving parents, but his father’s descent into alcoholism and the suffering it caused his mother upended his world and led him to search for an outlet. “I responded by lashing out at other kids,” he recalled. That behavior escalated when he was exposed to white nationalism through white power music and started his own white nationalist band.

“I was a drunk thug and using the ideology to justify that,” he said. The draw for him of white nationalism, he said, was to “piss people off, and nothing does that better than a swastika.”

Then a brawl between white supremacists and anti-fascist (antifa) demonstrators in Detroit ratcheted things up. “There was like 50 white nationalists brawling about 500 antifa, and that was a huge turning point for the worse,” he said. “The violent opposition we got drove home how right we were and how noble we were and that’s really what made me go from just a drunken hooligan to a militant white nationalist.”

Michaelis threw himself into the white nationalist movement from 1987 to 1994, proudly sporting his shaved skinhead, black flight jacket decked out with swastikas, red-laced “shit-kicker” boots, and a landscape of bruises and cuts from street battles. When not fighting, he sang lyrics peppered with antisemitic and racist slurs in raucous concerts.

In many ways, Michaelis says, he was living a double life. “I was a big deal, and I was a rock star,” he says. “I was a reverend in a racial holy war and a founding member of the Northern Hammerskins. People told stories about fights I got into. In real life, I was an alcoholic high school dropout who had a tendency to drink until he passed out and piss all over himself.”

After seven years in the Hammerskins, exhaustion and entropy were setting in. Looking for an excuse to get out, Michaelis had several wake-up calls. In 1994, his girlfriend broke up with him, leaving him to parent his 18-month daughter by himself. A couple of months later, a second friend was murdered in a street fight after one of his concerts.

“By that time, I lost count of how many people had been incarcerated,” he says. “It finally hit me that if I didn’t change my ways, death or prison was gonna take me from my daughter.”

‘I didn’t want to lose my family’

The turning point – when an extremist realizes their life is hanging in the balance – is different for everyone. But loved ones do appear to play a significant role. One study of 50 people involved in hate groups found that for those who disengaged, pressure from a partner was a significant factor in 70% of cases.

Chris Buckley, an Army veteran who became a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, now works for Parents for Peace – a change that began with an ultimatum from his wife. “I was really out there on the drugs. And I remember my wife told me that I had to choose between the drugs and the Klan – or her and the kids. I didn’t want to lose my family. So I started to do the work to get sober; I ended up going into treatment.” And because of his wife, he would soon receive a visit from Arno Michaelis.

For Lauren Manning, a former Canadian skinhead, the murder of a friend named Jan and the suicide of another friend, Tim, underscored her growing dissatisfaction with misogyny in the movement. “Between losing Tim and Jan, the false narratives of the subculture, and the hypocrisy of being a female submerged in hate, I felt I had no choice but to leave white power behind,” she wrote in Walking Away from Hate, a memoir she co-authored with her mother, Jeanette Manning. She now works as an exit specialist with Life After Hate.

Stepping away from hate is a messy journey and doesn’t happen overnight. The field of “deradicalizing” violent extremists is in its infancy, with “no standard model of how people turn away from or reject previously held extremist views,” according to a report by the Rand Corporation.

Threat assessment tools

One question anti-hate groups are investigating is how to measure a former extremist’s level of disengagement. Life After Hate is piloting a threat assessment and intervention tool known as T-SAM  in collaboration with Children’s Hospital of Boston and the Harvard School of Medicine. Meanwhile, Parents for Peace is piloting an assessment tool it developed based on an analysis of more than 1,000 interventions the group has conducted. Hughes says the group is gathering feedback from outside reviewers and will likely seek an evaluation from academic partners in the next year.

Jeanette Manning volunteers for Life After Hate, providing support to family members of people who are trying to step away or are still involved. One piece of advice she received from a friend proved crucial in retrospect: to “keep the door open” for her daughter, Lauren, and not cut off communication.

A parent’s love also helped Michaelis when he began to move away from extremism. Although his mother was disgusted by his beliefs, he said, she was always there for him. When his girlfriend left, he and his baby daughter moved back into his parents’ house with their support.

Michaelis himself took an unconventional route to freeing himself from hate. He spent years attending rave parties on Chicago’s South Side organized and attended by the very people he once vilified – members of the LGBTQ community and Black and brown people. 

Indeed, interviews conducted by Rand Corporation researchers with former extremists identified a striking theme: More than half said an encounter with someone they’d been taught to hate – someone who showed them kindness they did not deserve – inspired them to abandon hate.

During those Saturday night gatherings, Michaelis joined people of color and others in taking the “love drug” Ecstasy, which has been shown to have beneficial effects on people suffering from trauma and PTSD when used in a structured therapeutic environment.

Atonement and forgiveness

For him, the lesson was clear: “It’s natural to have a deep spiritual love for all your fellow human beings and for all of life.” After four years of raves, he began opening up about his past. He remembers one conversation he had with another participant:

“She had my forearm in her lap and was stroking my swastika and asked, ‘What’s this?’ I told her how I used to be a neo-Nazi skinhead and how horrible I felt. And she said, ‘Well you’re not that now, are you’? And I said, no, and she said, ‘OK.’”

He also apologized to the many African Americans who attended the raves. “Everyone there was super forgiving,” he marvels.

Still, Michaelis’s feeling of guilt and self-loathing persisted. To deal with it, he turned to meditation and writing, joining with others to create Life After Hate as an online magazine where former extremists and survivors could write their stories. The mission of the magazine – and the organization that grew out it – was to lead with compassion.

His stories morphed into a book entitled My Life After Hate, and he began fielding calls from people trying to get out of extremism – and from family members desperately seeking help for their loved ones in hate groups.

One such call came in 2016 from Chris Buckley’s wife. When Michaelis met up with Buckley, he was still under the spell of the Klan. “He was super hostile and I believe he was really trying to provoke violence from me. And he was pretty close to being successful,” Michaelis recalled.

He reminded himself to listen for the suffering underneath the hate, which, he says, allowed him to keep his temper. He told Buckley he was there because his wife was worried about him, and that he could show him how to appreciate life rather than be terrified by it.

Other than the caring from his wife, “it was the first time I experienced compassion from someone who wasn’t obligated to give it to me,” Buckley says in a documentary entitled Refuge, which recounts that meeting, their growing friendship, and Buckley’s transformation through a friendship with a Muslim refugee and physician.

Addicted to hate

Buckley told his fellow Klan members that he had decided to leave, which resulted in them beating him so badly that he landed in the hospital. However, he says, he still felt “addicted to hate.” Breaking away from his old way of thinking was challenging. He asked for guidance from Myrieme Churchill of Parents for Peace, whom he first met in 2017.

Buckley’s request was a familiar one, Churchill said. Extremism was “the drug of choice for numbing pain,” and, like drug addiction, there wasn’t a linear path out of it. But just as drug addiction is now tackled with a public health approach, she feels that addiction to hate and extremism should be as well.

In their team-managed interventions, Churchill explains that they ask family members for any support that can help provide solace and a way back to a stable life. “Coaches, clergy, favorite teachers, social workers – it takes a village,” she says.

Budge of Life After Hate says that while mental illness is not the cause of violent extremism, about half of violent extremists will eventually need mental health support. “Mental health issues may be the vulnerability that led a particular individual with other risk factors…toward violent extremism,” she says, and they can also be a barrier to getting out of violent extremism.

Buckley is a case in point. “As a kid, I was molested by a family member from the ages of 5 to 11 and had a home life filled with abuse from a racist, alcoholic father,” he says. Years later, when he served in Afghanistan, he saw a close friend killed in front of him. His addiction to opioids stemmed from a severe back injury he sustained while working with National Guard. All these experiences led to PTSD, anxiety, depression and a belly full of hate.

He eventually found help through talk therapy, which is ongoing. “Just to have somebody to listen while you kind of work some shit out, right?” he says.

Buckley also took a trauma studies course taught by the psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. It explained how the brain of someone who has previously experienced trauma can easily be triggered into acting out a full-blown threat response. “It was the most informative thing that I’ve ever experienced,” he says.

After the course, he says, “I would notice that my heart rate was elevated. And I would have to purposely tell myself, ‘Hey, listen to your eyes and ears. There’s no threat, you’re safe. Everything’s okay.’ ”

The course led him to yoga and mixed martial arts to “connect the body and mind.”  Recognizing the vulnerabilities that can pull servicemen and women into extremist groups,  Buckley developed a Trauma and Recovery Program for members of the military and police to help them develop positive coping skills. He is also building a global blueprint for deradicalization with John Horgan, PhD, an expert on terrorist behavior and a distinguished professor of psychology at Georgia State University.

A path of healing and forgiveness

Reflecting on his past life, Buckley says, “My wife has told me many times, ‘I always knew that you were in there, and I’m really glad to have you home.”

Eleven years after their first meeting, Kaleka and Michaelis have a very close friendship, even beyond the anti-hate work they’ve done together over the last decade. “We’re more like brothers,” Kaleka says. “We both just walk into each other’s houses. We don’t knock. My daughters call him Uncle Arno.”

Kaleka is a codirector of Not In Our Town, a nonprofit that works to stop hate, and an interventionist with Parents for Peace. He and Michaelis wrote a book together entitled The Gift of Our Wounds.

“Pardeep has helped me find peace with myself,” Michealis says. “He’s helped me come to believe that I’m a good person and that I do good work and that I deserve to be happy and to be successful and to be loved.”

Even so, Michaelis still struggles to forgive himself. “It’s a process I’ll be going through my entire life. And I’m super grateful for that process, because it puts me in a better position to help other people who need to walk that same path,” he says. “I’m walking that path with them. And I’m farther along in self-forgiveness than I ever have been before.”

A former Wisconsin white supremacist helps extricate Americans from violent hate groups is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Editor’s Note: In Chinese culture, people typically list their family name first, followed by their given name. On second-references to Chinese people quoted in this story, Wisconsin Watch is using their family name. 

Day after day over nearly five years in Chishan Prison, Lee Ming-che walked the 5 minutes from his cell to one of several manufacturing spaces on prison grounds. 

The prison in China’s central Hunan Province houses political prisoners like Lee, a renowned human rights activist who met with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during her consequential 2022 visit to Taiwan. Lee, a Taiwanese college administrator, was convicted in China of “subverting state power” in 2017 and released last year. 

In an interview in Mandarin with Wisconsin Watch from his home in Taiwan, Lee said officials forced him and hundreds of other Chishan prisoners to work roughly 13 hours a day, seven days a week with just a few days off around the Chinese New Year. His pay? The equivalent of about 48 cents a day.

“I was like a robot, doing work in the daytime and then returning to the cell (at night),” Lee recalled.

His tasks included cutting polyester fabric and sewing it together to make work gloves, producing at least 200 pairs a day. 

He said he knew the gloves were destined for the United States. 

He later learned about the company whose brand was on the gloves, stamped with a thunderbolt and the word “Milwaukee.” Shown photos of Milwaukee Tool gloves for sale at two Madison, Wis. Home Depot stores, Lee verified four types of gloves he was forced to make — Free-Flex, Demolition, Performance and Winter Performance.

“I can recognize the models and the logo of work gloves,” Lee told Wisconsin Watch. “As long as I’ve made them before, I can recognize them.”

A Wisconsin Watch investigation found additional evidence that Chishan prisoners were paid pennies to make work gloves bearing the iconic brand of Milwaukee Tool, a company with a nearly 100-year history in Wisconsin. 

A supplier for Milwaukee Tool subcontracted work to the prison, two former prisoners said in separate interviews. A self-identified salesperson of the supplier, Shanghai Select Safety Products, said it manufactured the majority of Milwaukee Tool’s work gloves. And regulatory filings show Shanghai Select was contracted to manufacture “Performance Gloves” for a subsidiary of Milwaukee Tool’s parent company.   

Milwaukee Tool: ‘no evidence to support’ forced labor accusation 

Wisconsin Watch began its investigation after Chinese exile Shi Minglei, who now lives in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, launched a change.org petition in November to pressure Milwaukee Tool to stop sourcing gloves made at the prison. She alleges her husband, imprisoned human rights activist Cheng Yuan, also has been forced to use a sewing machine to produce goods at the prison. Shi cannot verify he is making Milwaukee Tool products, but she heard from two former prisoners of Milwaukee Tool’s production at the prison.  

A Milwaukee Tool spokesperson said the Brookfield-based company has “found no evidence to support the claims being made” about its link to forced labor.

“Milwaukee Tool regularly conducts a complete and thorough review of our global operations and supply chain,” Kharli Tyler, vice president of brand marketing, said in an email that did not answer specific questions from Wisconsin Watch. 

Thirteen shipments of work gloves from Shanghai arrived at United States ports since the summer of 2019 when Lee said he noticed Chishan prisoners making Milwaukee Tool-branded gloves, according to an analysis of customs shipping data provided to Wisconsin Watch by S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

Listed as a consignee for the gloves: Milwaukee Electric Tool Co. 

Those records end in 2020, but whether the shipments ended is unclear. Companies can ask federal Customs and Border Protection to shield their names and addresses from published shipping data, said S&P Global spokesperson Katherine Smith.

“If Milwaukee Tool was sourcing from a foreign prison, they’re in violation of Section 307,” said Charity Ryerson, a human rights lawyer and executive director of Chicago-based Corporate Accountability Lab, referring to the federal law banning imports of goods made with forced labor.

Milwaukee Tool’s parent company, Hong Kong-based Techtronic Industries Company Limited, has a policy prohibiting the use of “modern slavery and human trafficking.” The Milwaukee Tool Legal Council in December told the Business and Human Rights Centre that “a thorough investigation of these claims was conducted, and we have found no evidence to support the claims being made.” The company  “does not tolerate the use of forced labor.”

In February, in a response shared with Wisconsin Watch, DLA Piper, a law firm with offices around the world that represents Milwaukee Tool and Techtronic Industries, said forced labor allegations were “investigated, and denied.” 

Prisoners discuss forced labor

Shi, who is pushing the change.org petition, has had little contact with Cheng since his imprisonment in 2019. She said her husband wrote three letters to his family in 2022 in which he opaquely referenced forced labor.

In a letter to his sister last May, Cheng implicitly described excessive hours of forced labor by citing two lines from a poem by Tao Yuanming, one of China’s great poets. Translations go like this: “I rise early to clear away the weeds, Till, hoe on shoulder, I plod home with the moon.” 

Shi said she aims to ease the slavery-like conditions endured by Cheng, who was arrested while running a Chinese organization that advocated for victims of discrimination.

Wisconsin Watch interviewed an additional former prisoner who claims Milwaukee Tool is profiting from forced labor at Chishan Prison. 

He asked to use the pseudonym Xu Lun to protect his safety.

While incarcerated at Chishan Prison, Xu remembers making all types of work gloves Lee identified and another Milwaukee Tool-branded model: Winter Demolition. 

“Everyone knows these things will be exported to America,” Xu said. “We stitched labels onto every single pair (of gloves). Labels do show the address.”

The label attached to one pair purchased by Wisconsin Watch reads: “ENGINEERED BY MILWAUKEE TOOL. PROFESSIONALLY MADE IN CHINA,” and it includes the company’s website URL and Brookfield address. 

Xu said many prisoners developed eczema in hot and humid conditions at the prison workplace. Lee said he now has allergies which his doctor blames on the clouds of fabric dust he inhaled while working in prison.

Contracting down the supply chain

Lee and Xu independently identified the name of the supplier that outsourced work to Chishan Prison as Shanghai Select Safety Products, which advertises its own line of gloves. 

Lee said he heard the name from the prison police and also saw it on purchase orders. Xu recalled hearing the supplier’s name from a prisoner who worked in a warehouse stocking  gloves.

In August 2015, Shanghai Select Safety Products signed a $1 million contract with Techtronic Trading Limited, a subsidiary of Techtronic Industries, according to a 2018 initial public offering filed with the Chinese National Equities Exchange and Quotations. The contract was later renewed, and the Chinese manufacturer was contracted to make “Performance Gloves” for Techtronic Trading in 2017, the IPO shows.  

Also in June 2015, Milwaukee Tool introduced a new product, Demolition work gloves. The next year, the company launched three more models: Free-Flex, Performance and a fingerless version of Performance made of the same polyester fabric. 

“For the next two, three, and four years, you’ll continue to see me up here talking about the new latest greatest gloves from Milwaukee,” a Milwaukee Tool product manager announced at a 2016 event.

Milwaukee Tool has continued to expand its product line to add gloves with dipped coating and goatskin leather work gloves.

Salesperson: ‘We’re making the majority of Milwaukee-branded work gloves’

In February, this reporter sought to purchase Milwaukee Tool-branded gloves on Taobao, China’s version of Amazon.com. Two third-party vendors told the reporter they sell work gloves that suppliers rejected as defective. Shanghai Select Safety Products was one of such suppliers.  

Posing as a middleman for an American buyer, this reporter separately contacted a self-identified Shanghai Select Safety Products salesperson. “We’re making the majority of Milwaukee-branded work gloves,” the salesperson said in a text message. 

The salesperson shared a catalog that identified Shanghai Select as a gloves supplier for Milwaukee Tool.

Shi believes Shanghai Select Safety Products outsources to cut labor costs and subcontracts portions of work gloves orders to the Chishan Prison corporation.  

China’s government prison enterprise system requires provincial governments to pay for prison operations. The government-run prison enterprise contracts with private businesses for prisoners to produce goods, generating revenue to run the prison. 

Chishan Prison contains around 2,900 prisoners. The same prison corporation runs 11 manufacturing spaces within the compound. 

Examining satellite imagery, Lee and Xu each pointed out the buildings on prison grounds where they made gloves.

These long, rectangular workshops cover more than 80,000 square meters.  Their metal roofs are brightly colored, often blue, but sometimes red or black, according to the satellite image.

Forced labor a growing concern

Concerns over the use of forced labor in China are rising in the United States. A 2021  law prohibits importation of all goods from China’s far-western Xinjiang region due to the rampant use of forced labor. Chishan Prison sits outside of that region. 

Since the 1990s, CBP has issued 60 active enforcement actions related to goods made by prisoner laborers, with two-thirds against Chinese goods. China in recent years has faced  scrutiny related to the use of forced labor of Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority group whom Chinese officials have forced into “re-education” camps — a move the United Nations has said could be considered a crime against humanity.

Ryerson of the Corporate Accountability Lab said the new regulations and scrutiny should prompt American companies to reassess and better monitor their supply chains.

“If you are so far removed from the supply chain that you are unknowingly sourcing from a Chinese prison, you are actually not keeping up with the rest of the industry,” she said.

Peter Rickman, president of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization, said such exploitative conditions stem from corporate executives who chase profits at the cost of the working class. Milwaukee Tool reported $8.1 billion in sales in 2022, mostly in North America.

“Maybe (Milwaukee Tool is) ignorant of it. Maybe they are surprised themselves,” Rickman said. “But that doesn’t lessen their responsibility for ensuring wherever their production facilities are that workers are treated with dignity, respect, and humanity and are paid living wages.”

Forced laborers at Chishan Prison get reimbursed monthly depending on the complexity of the task, ranging from 20 to 300 yuan, or $3 to $43, according to Lee and Xu. 

In Wisconsin, some prisoners work in state-owned correctional industries and facilities. They get paid 97 cents per hour on average, according to an ACLU analysis. That equates to a monthly wage of $155 under 40-hour work weeks. 

Over the past decade, American customers have found notes in the products hidden by inmates who make Christmas cards, paper bags, ornaments or garments in Chinese prison labor facilities. Released prisoners claimed they were forced to produce goods for renowned brands.

Dragged into glove production 

In the summer of 2019, Lee said he noticed many inmates pivoting away from other work to sew work gloves for Milwaukee Tool. He said the following year, he became part of the production line of hundreds of prisoners. 

Lee said the 90-plus hour weeks they produced Milwaukee Tool gloves violate China’s laws and regulations, including Chinese Ministry of Justice guidance to limit prison labor to 40 hours per week. The guidance also states prison labor products should be sold only within China. 

But Chinese law prohibits work refusal by incarcerated people who have the ability to work. Prisoners can be sent to solitary confinement for refusing work, not working hard enough or “intentionally destroying tools of production.”

“Everything we know about the prison system in China indicates that prisoners do not have any meaningful choice in terms of engaging in labor,” said Nicholas Bequelin, former Asian-Pacific Regional Director at Amnesty International and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School.

“There just is no evidence that prisoners can refuse to work. And so, to that extent, that would be considered slavery.”

Mixed results of self-regulatory tools

Techtronic Industries Company Limited, Milwaukee Tool’s parent, says it uses compliance tools and third-party auditors to ensure its 2,825 direct suppliers, including 1,165 in Asia, comply with its policy against modern slavery and forced labor.  

“The supplier relationship will be terminated if major compliance issues are not corrected to meet set standards,” the company said in a 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance report.

But self-regulatory tools used by many multinational companies are flawed and often unable to detect forced labor, research shows.  

For a 2021 book, Professor Sarosh Kuruvilla, a labor policies expert at Cornell University,  examined more than 40,000 factory audits from  2011 to 2017 spanning 14 industries and 12 countries, including China. He found  45% were based on unreliable or falsified information. Audits in China were unreliable more than half the time.

Li Qiang, the founder of the New York-based nongovernmental organization China Labor Watch, said suppliers falsify information in multiple ways, such as faking data related to workers, products and salaries. 

A 2018 study co-published by the University of Sheffield found audit systems tend to focus on the workforce of first-tier suppliers and neglect subcontracted portions, where the risks of forced labor are “highest.” 

The study argued big brands squeeze suppliers by imposing short-term contracts, penalties and fees for late or low-quality orders while demanding razor-thin margins from the bottom of the supply chain. 

Pressure to balance their own books and fear of jeopardizing contracts pushes suppliers to deceive auditors.

Li said subcontracting is common in China — especially for suppliers who cheaply fulfill orders from American buyers. Under these circumstances, the suppliers outsource part of the order without necessarily recording it, he said.

“When a supplier is placed to produce 10,000 pairs of gloves but subcontracts half, it is too hidden for auditors to find it out during the on-site audits,” Li added. 

Suffering ‘survivor guilt’ 

Back in Taiwan, Lee continues to speak out about his years in Chishan Prison. He calls forced labor a menace to human rights and global free trade. 

“I certainly feel that I have the obligation to prove the thing happened there,” Lee said.

Shi said she suffers from “survivor guilt” as she lives relatively comfortably in the United States while pushing to improve conditions for her husband in China. 

After Chinese officials arrested Cheng in July 2019 on subversion charges, Shi and her 3-year-old daughter were placed under house arrest for 180 days on suspicion of financing his activities. Shi said five Chinese security police officers interrogated her after she posted the family’s struggles on Twitter — threatening to take her daughter away if she continued posting. 

That prompted Shi to flee to the Twin Cities, where she plans to keep pressing Milwaukee Tool to stop benefitting from forced labor. In fact, Shi and her attorneys are gearing up for a lawsuit against the company for the use of forced labor. 

“We hope Milwaukee Tool will acknowledge it, apologize for it, and stop it,” Shi said. “We won’t surrender.” 

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Chinese prisoners: We were forced to make Milwaukee Tool gloves for cents each day is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.