WJI's Daily Reads for May 10, 2022

WUWM: UW Law School report says Wisconsin's maps are the most partisan in the country.

"On every one of these standard partisan fairness metrics, these new maps are the worst, court-adopted maps that we’ve seen anywhere in the country," says Rob Yablon, an associate professor at the law school, who published the analysis.

The analysis finds that Wisconsin's state legislative maps have substantially higher levels of partisan inequity than other court-adopted maps, with a score three to five times worse on each metric. The inequity in these maps means that despite Republicans and Democrats getting approximately the same number of votes statewide, Republican politicians will likely continue to control the vast majority of seats in the Wisconsin state Legislature.
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Jacob Blake dismisses his lawsuit against Kenosha officer who shot him.

Reuters: The trend of criminalizing student misbehavior.

Much more troubling, teachers and administrators across the state have been routinely referring students’ misbehavior to local police, turning disciplinary issues that might have previously warranted a trip to the principal’s office into law enforcement matters, according to an analysis published April 28 by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica

The police issue costly tickets to students that carry long-term consequences, including tagging kids with a record and harming future credit scores. And the money extracted from families funds the system itself: It pays for lawyers who prosecute the students and for hearing officers who rule on the cases, according to the Tribune.

The New York Times: The stories of five men claiming innocence who helped each other obtain freedom from New York prisons.

The “Dateline” segments, which were broadcast over the span of a dozen years, bolstered each convict’s claims of innocence with new evidence and new witnesses, highlighting problems in how cases were investigated and prosecuted.

The chance of even a single inmate achieving exoneration is a long shot in the New York State prison system, where out of thousands of inmate appeals, only a handful are successful each year. The fact that these five men rallied to support one another is exceptionally rare.

In interviews with The New York Times, the men discussed how they bonded and worked together in prison to overturn the convictions that put them behind bars for a combined century’s worth of time. One after the other, they were released, but they would continue to help those left behind by visiting, donating money, raising awareness and even searching for other possible witnesses.

Reuters: Moderna argues immunity from any patent infringement regarding COVID-19 vaccine.

Facing claims that its COVID-19 vaccine violates the patent rights of two biopharma companies, Moderna Inc told a Delaware federal court on Friday that the companies should have sued the U.S. government instead.

Moderna said it is shielded from the lawsuit brought by Arbutus Biopharma Corp and Genevant Sciences GmbH, thanks to its agreement to supply the vaccine to the federal government. It cited a federal law that was previously used to keep patent claims from interfering with the supply of war materials during World War I.
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Intelligencer: Donald Trump's new explanation for not complying with subpoenas: he can't find his cell phones.

In an affidavit filed to the Supreme Court of the State of New York on Friday night, Trump’s lawyers wrote that he could not comply with state attorney general Letitia James’s subpoena to hand over documents related to a civil fraud probe into the Trump Organization because he lost the four cell phones containing those documents. “I don’t know its current whereabouts,” he says in the filing of one of the four phones provided to him by the Trump Organization. “I do not know their current location,” he says of “two flip phones and a Samsung mobile phone” he has owned since 2010 — adding that the Samsung was “was taken from me at some point while I was President.”