SCOTUS Sides with Trump on Constitutionality of Census Citizenship Question, but the Question Is Still Unlikely to Appear on 2020 Forms Due to Remand

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In a complicated 5-4 ruling handed down on its last day of its recent session, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the census complied with the constitution, but also effectively blocked its implementation for the 2020 survey.

In short, the ruling finds that the executive branch has a right to reinstate a question about citizenship, but that it needs to come up with a better explanation for adding it.

A five-member majority composed of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg found that the Trump administration did not violate federal administrative law in the Administrative Procedure Act or the Enumeration Clause of the Constitution, which mandates a federal census. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch were opposed.

“The text of that clause ‘vests Congress with virtually unlimited discretion in conducting the decennial ‘actual Enumeration,” and Congress ‘has delegated its broad authority over the census to the Secretary,’” the majority found. “Given that expansive grant of authority, we have rejected challenges to the conduct of the census where the Secretary’s decisions bore a ‘reasonable relationship to the accomplishment of an actual enumeration.’”

At the same time, the ruling also sent the issue back to the lower courts for further development of the administration’s decision to add the question, citing “unusual circumstances” and a “disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given.”

“The reasoned explanation requirement of administrative law, after all, is meant to ensure that agencies offer genuine justifications for important decisions, reasons that can be scrutinized by courts and the interested public,” the ruling says. “If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case.”

Sending this issue back down the judicial chain, however, makes it highly unlikely that the question will appear on the federal 2020 census, given the fact that the case had already been fast tracked in order to provide a ruling before the administration had to start printing forms in the coming months.

Following the decision, the American Civil Liberties Union — which opposed the administration in the case — called the ruling “a victory for immigrants and communities of color across America. It is a victory for democracy itself,” and added that “Everyone MUST come together to make sure that the 2020 census counts every person.”

The administration announced the new question in March 2018. It was then challenged in federal court, where it was blocked earlier this year. Democrats’ opposition to the question has also led to a subpoena fight between House Democrats and the Departments of Justice and Commerce in recent weeks.

UPDATE:

“We are disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision today,” DOJ spokesperson Kelly Laco told Blaze Media in a statement. “The Department of Justice will continue to defend this Administration’s lawful exercises of executive power.”

(For more from the author of “Scotus Sides with Trump on Constitutionality of Census Citizenship Question, but the Question Is Still Unlikely to Appear on 2020 Forms Due to Remand” please click HERE)

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Upshot of Today’s SCOTUS Rulings: Courts Are God Except for One ‘Rare Circumstance’

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Today’s Supreme Court ruling in the gerrymandering cases was a victory for those who believe in the proper role of courts, irrespective of political outcome. It’s a refreshing change of pace from judicial supremacy. Unfortunately, what the chief justice giveth in the redistricting case, he taketh in the census citizenship case where he reaffirmed the power of the courts to get involved in every other political question and litigate it to death. His opinion in the census case will reverberate much deeper than the one in the redistricting case.

I am a conservative living in Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District, the most gerrymandered district in the country. As the entire squiggly line scheme was designed to place conservative voters at a disadvantage, I’m on the losing side of the gerrymander. Yet, I’m celebrating today’s Supreme Court ruling declining to get involved in gerrymanders from either party. Let’s leave political questions to the political branches and individualized legal questions to the courts.

As Chief Justice John Roberts rightfully wrote for the 5-4 majority in the combined redistricting cases in Rucho v. Common Cause:

Chief Justice Marshall famously wrote that it is “the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Sometimes, however, “the law is that the judicial department has no business entertaining the claim of unlawfulness—because the question is entrusted to one of the political branches or involves no judicially enforceable rights.” Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U. S. 267, 277 (2004) (plurality opinion).

After reading this opinion, some of us who take the originalist approach to judicial power seriously were dancing on tables. That is … until the census case – Department of Commerce v. New York et al. – was released to the public 15 minutes later. The notion that a state can sue the federal government for asking the most important question of a census, whether one is a citizen – a question that has been asked for most of our history – is absurd. The same way Roberts ruled that deciding redistricting disputes should be nonjusticiable, he should have understood that this is just as much of a political question with no avenue for courts to get involved.

In the redistricting case, Roberts recognized the common sense that “history is not irrelevant” and that “[T]he Framers were aware of electoral districting problems and considered what to do about them,” and settled on leaving it to political bodies. Then, in the census case, while recognizing that “our interpretation of the Constitution is guided by a Government practice [asking a citizenship question] that “has been open, widespread, and un-challenged since the early days of the Republic,” he refuses to reverse the lower court’s interference with its enactment.

In a complex and defragmented plurality ruling that morphed into a unanimous order, Chief Justice Roberts helped give liberals a majority in keeping the litigation against the census question alive by remanding the case back to the courts. Meanwhile, rather than rebuking the lower courts for getting involved in a political dispute in such an unprecedented way, he legitimized much of their ruling. Moreover, with this ruling, he gave them endless ammo to shut down any common sense and lawful executive actions governing the enforcement of many critical laws, which will reverberate in other spheres of policy such as border security.

The 2010 Census under the Obama administration was the first time since 1840 that the citizenship question was not asked in any form. The same way Obama decided to extirpate it from the Census without question, Trump had the power to reinstate it, absent no formal dictates from Congress. Moreover, just like with redistricting questions, states or third-party organizations should never have standing to sue an abstract political debate about census questions. That should have been the end of the inquiry. And for the most part, it appears that this would have been the general view of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, possibly with slight shades of variation.

In comes Roberts and admits that nothing in the Constitution or statute could possibly preclude the secretary of commerce from adding the citizenship question. But in what has become a pernicious pattern of the courts over the past few years, Roberts decided that he didn’t like the administration’s motivation behind it and feels it requires further litigation in the district court. He didn’t even agree with the plaintiffs that the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by promulgating a regulation that is “arbitrary and capricious,” another favorite of the lower courts.

So, what was the beef?

According to Roberts: the decision by Secretary Wilbur Ross was “pretextual — that is, that the real reason for his decision was something other than the sole reason he put forward in his memorandum, namely enhancement of DOJ’s VRA enforcement efforts.”

As Justice Thomas said mockingly of Roberts in his partial dissent, “According to the Court, something just ‘seems’ wrong.”

An indignant Thomas wrote:

“This conclusion is extraordinary. The Court engages in an unauthorized inquiry into evidence not properly before us to reach an unsupported conclusion. Moreover, each step of the inquiry offends the presumption of regularity we owe the Executive. The judgment of the District Court should be reversed.”

Justice Alito, in a separate partial dissent, quite bluntly pointed out that the courts have no power to butt in to political decisions. Absent any constitutional violations, “To put the point bluntly, the Federal Judiciary has no authority to stick its nose into the question whether it is good policy to include a citizenship question on the census or whether the reasons given by Secretary Ross for that decision were his only reasons or his real reasons.”

In reality, 13 U.S.C. §221 states very clearly that every resident is required to answer any question under penalty of fine unless it’s a question about religion. That is the only question walled off by Congress.

While many commentators will focus on the fallout of the census issue and how the citizenship question is on hold as we get closer to the deadline, the bigger issue is much broader and will resound in every area of politics. What Roberts himself sought to do in the redistricting case, which is to get the lower courts out of the political business, he countermanded by a factor of 1,000 by allowing the courts to now question political motivations of facially lawful executive actions taken pursuant to constitutional powers.

“With today’s decision, the court has opened a Pandora’s box of pretext-based challenges in administrative law,” predicted Thomas.

Indeed, the lower courts have already mandated that Trump continue dozens of Obama policies that never existed from George Washington until Obama’s second term simply because they didn’t like his motivation. Conservatives have been frustrated with the slow pace to which the Supreme Court has been rolling back these novel and officious lower court breaches of separation of powers. Yet, this is the first time the Supreme Court itself has invalidated an administrative act as pretextual.

Where is this headed?

“Now that the court has opened up this avenue of attack, opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them,” bemoaned Thomas. “Moreover, even if the effort to invalidate the action is ultimately unsuccessful, the court’s decision enables partisans to use the courts to harangue executive officers through depositions, discovery, delay, and distraction. The court’s decision could even implicate separation-of-powers concerns insofar as it enables judicial interference with the enforcement of the laws.”

Boy does that ring true for enforcement of our border and immigration laws!

As Alito predicted:

If this case is taken as a model, then any one of the approximately 1,000 district court judges in this country, upon receiving information that a controversial agency decision might have been motivated by some unstated consideration, may order the questioning of Cabinet officers and other high-ranking Executive Branch officials, and the judge may then pass judgment on whether the decision was pretextual. What Bismarck is reputed to have said about laws and sausages comes to mind. And that goes for decision making by all three branches.

Viewing this entire Supreme Court term in totality, not only were the lower courts not rebuked for their unprecedented expansion of power, they are now emboldened. Every last thing this president does – no matter the common-sense rationale, no matter how lawful, not matter how rooted in law and tradition – will be permanently placed on hold. Remember, much of what the president is doing is merely reinstating base law from past lawless deviations of previous administrations.

Case in point: Obama unilaterally vetoed immigration law and gave amnesty to illegal aliens. To this day, that amnesty is still in place and the Supreme Court refuses to police the lower courts on telling Trump to keep it. Now we know why.

Just take a look at our border. We are suffering from an invasion of illegal immigration, drugs, gangs, criminals, cartels, and health concerns all because of a single California judge violating 130 years of case law on sovereignty. This is the moral hazard of judicial supremacy – the notion that, at any moment, any judge can shut down a policy as if he had a presidential veto pen and have that opinion be self-executing against legitimate powers of other branches of government.

What is clear is that on the redistricting case, Roberts felt he had nowhere to run or hide because there simply is no standard for the courts to apply to map drawing, even if they were to take over the process. Yet, in almost every other fundamental political question, he will allow the liberal judges to get involved.

When looking into the crystal ball of the future of this court, conservatives should pessimistically expect the census citizenship case to be more predictive of future outcomes than the redistricting case. As Roberts conceded at the end of the redistricting case, “In this rare circumstance, that means our duty is to say “this is not law” and not get involved. Emphasis added for “rare,” indeed!

The Trump administration lawyers are going to have to come to terms with defending the prerogatives of the executive branch of government or risking the implementation of Obama’s third, and perhaps, fourth term in office. (For more from the author of “Upshot of Today’s SCOTUS Rulings: Courts Are God Except for One ‘Rare Circumstance’” please click HERE)

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GOP Rep. Chip Roy Urges President Trump to Go Nuclear and Defy the Courts

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Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, on Wednesday called for President Trump to defy nationwide injunctions imposed by federal courts on his immigration policies and secure the border.

Roy (Liberty Score A, 100%) was speaking on BlazeTV’s “Steve Deace Show” when he said it’s time for a “Jacksonian moment” from President Trump.

“You’ve talked about the court challenges this administration faces virtually any time it tries to honor any of its campaign pledges. What legal advice would you give them? At what point … would you advise them to stop taking [nationwide] injunctions and all the rest of this seriously?” host Steve Deace asked.

“I would tell the president to do that now. The time is now,” Roy responded. “We need a Jacksonian moment where the president of the United States looks at the courts and says, ‘you enforce that law.’”

President Andrew Jackson is famously attributed with responding to a Supreme Court opinion he had no intention of abiding by, saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Roy wants Trump to have the same attitude toward nationwide injunctions against his border policies.

Roy said the nationwide injunctions imposed by federal courts have prevented the Trump administration from securing the border. He cited the example of the 9th Circuit Court blocking Trump’s policy if having asylum-seekers wait for their cases to be processed in Mexico instead of waiting in the United States, where many illegal aliens have disappeared before their day in court.

Roy suggested that if that policy were allowed to go into effect, migrants would be disincentivized from attempting the dangerous journey across the Rio Grande river into the United States, knowing that they will be turned around after claiming asylum.

“People would have to go to the ports of entry, and then perhaps that man and that child would still be alive today,” Roy said, referring to the viral photo of a migrant father and his toddler daughter washed up dead on the shore of the Rio Grande river.

Federal judges have also issued nationwide injunctions blocking the Trump administraiton’s moratorium on travel to and from Middle East countries with terrorist activity, blocking Trump’s plan to give federal grants to police who enforce immigration laws, and blocking Trump administration policies rolling back Obamacare’s contraception rule and defunding doctors who perform abortions.

“This is a perpetual problem and at some point a president of the United States is going to have to look at the court and tell that court to pound sand when it is stepping over the ability of the American people to govern ourselves,” Roy said. “The president has the basic constitutional duty to secure the border of the United States and it’s absurd that we’re bowing down to the whims of judges and allowing that to create our policy so that now people are dying and getting harmed because we can’t actually do our job to secure the border.” (For more from the author of “Gop Rep. Chip Roy Urges President Trump to Go Nuclear and Defy the Courts” please click HERE)

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Report: ISIS Suspects Caught on Way to U.S. Border but None Were ‘U.S. Terrorism Watch Lists’

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Organized terrorist groups or state sponsors of terror might be evil, but they tend not to be unintelligent and illogical. Why would they not exploit the situation with the Mexican cartels controlling both sides of our border and Border Patrol essentially being abolished from their patrol duties to get in new terrorists that are not on any watch list? Well, if that sounds logical to you, then it’s illogical to assume our enemies aren’t trying it.

Aside from the president’s iron-clad immigration authority under 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) and foreign commerce authority under Article II of the Constitution to shut off all illegal immigrant asylum requests at our border, national security should dictate that he do so as well.

Several weeks ago, it was reported that ISIS had a plan to recruit terrorists to come to our border. On June 25, Breitbart reported that the Mexican government confirmed that three ISIS suspects were headed north from Costa Rica and detained in Nicaragua. The alert flagged Ibrahim Mohamed and Mohamed Eissa of Egypt, and Ahamed Ghanim Mohamed Al Juburi from Iraq.

Now, Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, is reporting based on a Reuters article that a fourth suspect, another Iraqi, was also detained in Nicaragua. According to Bensman’s sources, “One of the Iraqis is believed to be a convicted murderer in Iraq who was supposed to be serving a life sentence, one source told me. That Iraqi was carrying a genuine passport, apparently with his real name.”

Bensman, who was an investigative journalist covering terrorism for many years and also spent 10 years in the intel branch of Texas’s Department of Public Safety, says that according to his sources, “none of the four travelers were on U.S. terrorism watch lists.” Obviously, those who wish to do us harm will likely send newbies who have no prior paper trail of a criminal record.

Whether any of these four travelers are actually tied into ISIS and whether the intel sources alerting foreign governments are credible remains to be seen. But the known threat of convicted murderers or other security threats in the Western Hemisphere coming up with the caravans – both openly and smuggled in surreptitiously – is already a known problem. That’s why it would not be surprising for Middle Eastern terrorists would do the same.

The threat of those coming in as “runners” and “got aways” while Border Patrol is strategically tied down by the cartels with the family units is obvious. All of those with massive criminal records who were previously deported now have a freer lane than ever to come right back in. The same applies to known or ‘virgin’ terrorists.

But what is even more disquieting is that would-be criminal migrants are so emboldened by the notion that we will give amnesty to anyone with a kid, that a number of those coming with the family units are criminals. One border agent in Texas, who is on an evidence collection team and administers fingerprints, told CR that they are catching so many adult males who come with one child who think that despite their criminal record they will benefit from catch-and-release.

“And they are not entirely wrong,” said the veteran agent who must remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

“In every single group, almost without fail, there is someone with a criminal record, typically males with single kids,” the agent said. “There is a wide misconception about the majority of these people being females. They are overwhelmingly male. While we try to prioritize referrals for prosecution based on criminal history, we only have so many computers we can utilize and so many staff members.”

When I asked him if that means there are those with confirmed criminal records, even with convictions in the U.S., who have been released, he said, “absolutely. They are given a notice to appear in court like anyone else.”

According to Department of Homeland Security investigators, in a memo sent to GOP staff of the House Oversight Committee obtained by CR, there were enough criminal convictions (just from their previous time in the U.S.) among the January 2019 caravan members to account for roughly one quarter of the entire group! Homeland Security Investigations identified a total of 860 U.S. criminal convictions among the 3,345 people who left Honduras, including “22 individuals convicted of assault or aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, 27 individuals convicted of sexual offenses.” They also identified 47 gang members.

These were just the number of convictions in the U.S. of previously deported aliens. One can only imagine how many had engaged in criminality in their home countries and were coming here for the first time. And these people came in full sight knowing the authorities would be on to them.

“So many of those coming here now have no records in the NCIC and are from countries that don’t share information with us,” bemoaned the evidence collection agent I spoke to. “We literally have no idea who they are before we release them. They just give us a random name a birthdate and we have no way of verifying it. None of those from China are in the system and they certainly don’t share criminal histories with us. All of them are released into the asylum system. People from the Dominican Republic often melt their fingerprints or surgically alter them. I’ve processed a few of them who sliced their fingers and had them stitched up, thereby washing away the authentic print.”

Consider the fact that 208,000 aliens have been released since Dec. 21 and we have no idea who they are. Thankfully, Border Patrol catches murderers, sex offenders, and gang members every day. But if those are the fish that are caught, one can imagine how many are in that pond and how few we catch when the net is so small and thin.

Just this past month, there have been three refugees who have killed or attempted to kill Americans. Last week, a Ukrainian refugee allegedly killed seven Americans, including five retired Marines in a vehicular manslaughter. A Syrian refugee who was brought here in 2016 despite three arrests in Jordan was arrested by the FBI on terrorism charges for plotting an attack on a church in Pittsburgh. Earlier this month, a Czech refugee was suspected of shooting four people in Cleveland, Texas.

Now, consider that refugees are fully vetted, yet we still make mistakes. Those who come straight to our border and are released are not vetted at all. We will never know who is a criminal until an American is harmed by them. Even then, the identity of the perpetrator usually goes unreported.

Even if it were to say in the Constitution, “the right to immigrate with a child shall not be infringed,” that would never prevent President Trump from shutting down processing given the security concerns. After all, it does say that about gun rights in the Second Amendment and states can place all sorts of limitations on them for public security. How much more so when immigration is the antithesis of a constitutional right and sovereignty allows the president to always deny entry to any immigration flow he deems “detrimental” to U.S. interests. (For more from the author of “Report: Isis Suspects Caught on Way to U.S. Border but None Were ‘U.S. Terrorism Watch Lists’” HERE)

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Every Single 2020 Dem Wants to Give Illegal Aliens Free Healthcare

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Every single Democratic presidential candidate on stage during Thursday’s debate raised their hands in favor of giving illegal immigrants free healthcare.

(Read more from “Every Single 2020 Dem Wants to Give Illegal Aliens Free Healthcare” HERE)

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Poll Reveals That Americans Completely Overestimate Size of Homosexual Population

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A new Gallup poll suggests most Americans vastly overestimate how large the gay community is in the United States.

According to the survey, released Thursday, a majority of people believe close to one in four (23.6 percent) people are gay or lesbian.

Americans have continuously overestimated the size of the gay population in recent years—estimating 24.6 percent in 2011 and 23.2 percent in 2015. Only about 4.5% of Americans self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to an earlier Gallup study. But in this most recent poll, conducted in May, just 9 percent of respondents estimated under 5 percent. (Another 11 percent guessed between 5 and 10 percent.)

“Exactly who makes up the LGBT community and how this group should be measured is a subject of some debate,” Gallup pointed out in 2012. “There are a number of ways to measure lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientation, and transgender status. Sexual orientation can be assessed by measuring identity as well as sexual behaviors and attractions.” . . .

And the growing number of young people identifying as LGBT can also color perception. A 2017 GLAAD study found that 20 percent of Millennials identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. That’s nearly three times higher than Baby Boomers (7 percent) and significantly more than Gen-Xers (12 percent.) (Read more from “Poll Reveals That Americans Completely Overestimate Size of Homosexual Population” HERE)

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Bow Down, Pelosi: House Speaker Caves to Senate GOP on Immigration Bill

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Trump Wins, House will pass the Senate-backed and totally bipartisan immigration bill.

Via WaPo:

The House passed a $4.6 billion emergency spending bill for the humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, after Democratic leaders scrapped efforts to amend the legislation to add more restrictions on the Trump administration.

The vote was 305-to-102 Thursday and the legislation heads to President Trump, who is expected to sign it, since the Senate already passed the bill earlier in the week. The measure will pump billions into the budgets of agencies, including the Health and Human Services Department, that have been overwhelmed by the influx of Central American migrants at the Southern border.

When this is all said and done, the liberal media and their Democratic allies need to endure a brutal and bloody lashing. The manufactured crisis at the border was real. Gee—the president has only been saying that for weeks. The Department of Homeland Security has said they were running out of money dealing with the horde of migrants storming the border. We all said this was happening and yet, Democrats thought this was a figment of Trump and conservative America’s imagination. Wrong. They were dead wrong. And it was only after bodies started to stack and children were left destitute thanks to Democratic intransigence on border security funding that they decided to realize that this actually a problem. You people caused this—all of it. And you will be made to remember it soon, you negligent, hypocritical morons. (Read more from “Bow Down, Pelosi: House Speaker Caves to Senate GOP on Immigration Bill” HERE)

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WATCH: The Question from MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt That Made Bernie Visibly Agitated

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sat down with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt to talk about the 2020 race. One of the questions Hunt asked was simple: “If it’s clear that you are not going to be the Democratic nominee, will you leave the race before the convention?”

Sanders refused to say what he would do. . .

“Some people say that if maybe that system was not rigged against me [in 2016], I would have won the nomination and defeated Donald Trump. That’s what some people say. So I think we’re going to play it out,” he explained. “So our goal right now is to win it, and by the way, as you may know, poll after poll shows what against Trump? It shows me beating Trump by 8, 9, or 10 points. We’re going to beat Trump, we’re going to win the Democratic nomination.”

Bernie faced backlash from Democrats back in 2016 when his campaign continued through the Democratic National Convention, even though it was apparent he didn’t have enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination.

(Read more from “The Question from MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt That Made Bernie Visibly Agitated” HERE)

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Obama’s ICE Chief Reveals the Truth About Child Migrant Detention: Don’t Blame Trump

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The man who was the Obama administration’s chief of removing illegal immigrants said on Wednesday that it was his boss, President Barack Obama, who had the idea of putting illegal immigrant children in the “cages” that Democrats have used as a bludgeon against President Trump.

Thomas Homan, Obama’s executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement between May 2013 and January 2017, was responsible for “promoting public safety and national security by maintaining direct oversight of critical ICE programs and operations to identify, locate, arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from the United States,” according to his LinkedIn profile. Since January 2017, he has served as Acting Director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

He stated on Wednesday, “I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages. That facility was built under President Obama under (Homeland Security) Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built,” according to The Washington Examiner.

Homan, speaking at the conference hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, noted a Democratic chairman who asked a Trump official, “You still keeping kids in cages?” He snapped, “I would answer the question, ‘The kids are being housed in the same facility built under the Obama administration.’ If you want to call them cages, call them cages. But if the left wants to call them cages and the Democrats want to call them cages then they have to accept the fact that they were built and funded in FY 2015.”

Homan said that the Border Patrol facilities where illegal immigrants are detained “were not built to take care of children,” adding, “It’s chain link dividers that keeps children separate from unrelated adults. It’s about protecting children.” (Read more from “Obama’s ICE Chief Reveals the Truth About Child Migrant Detention: Don’t Blame Trump” HERE)

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Mom Charged with Unborn Baby’s Death After Woman Shoots Her in Stomach out of Self-Defense

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On Wednesday, an Alabama woman who was shot in the stomach last year was indicted in the death of her unborn baby girl.

During a dispute regarding the baby’s paternity in December 2018, the mother, identified as Marshae Jones, was shot in the stomach by another female out of what police said was self-defense; the baby, who was at about five months’ gestation, died from the gunshot wound.

Jones, 27, was indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on a manslaughter charge and taken into police custody, AL.com reported. The woman who shot Jones, 23-year-old Ebony Jemison, had a manslaughter charge against her dismissed after a grand jury failed to indict her in the death of the baby girl, the outlet noted.

The dispute between Jones and Jemison occurred outside a Dollar General. Police were called to the location after Jones was shot by Jemison, but when they arrived, the mother was gone. Jones was later found at a convenience store and taken to a nearby hospital, where the baby was pronounced dead.

“The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby,’’ said Pleasant Grove police lieutenant Danny Reid after the shooting, according to AL.com. “It was the mother of the child who initiated and continued the fight which resulted in the death of her own unborn baby.” (Read more from “Mom Charged with Unborn Baby’s Death After Woman Shoots Her in Stomach out of Self-Defense” HERE)

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