St. Louis—More than two decades after he was wrongly imprisoned, Jonathan Irons filed a federal civil rights lawsuit this week against the officers of the O’Fallon Police Department and the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department who falsely arrested him at age 16 and fabricated evidence to send him to prison for 23 years for a shooting he did not commit. For decades, these officers hid critical evidence showing that another person had committed the crime.

In July 2020, after spending the majority of his life as an innocent man behind bars, Jonathan’s wrongful conviction was set aside by Missouri courts when the concealed evidence finally came to light. Jonathan’s exoneration was secured with the help of WNBA star Maya Moore, who put her career on hold to shine a spotlight on the staggering injustice that Jonathan had suffered. Jonathan and Maya have since married and settled in Atlanta, where they are focused on their family and their continued fight for criminal justice reform through the Win With Justice social action campaign that Maya founded.

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Without evidence connecting Jonathan to the crime, the defendants fabricated a case against him. Given Mr. Stotler’s extreme injuries and the very limited opportunity he had to see the shooter, he was unable to describe or identify the perpetrator. When the defendants first showed him a set of photographs that included Jonathan, Mr. Stotler did not identify Jonathan. But that did not stop the defendants. They manipulated Mr. Stotler into making a wholly unreliable identification of Jonathan. They then bolstered their fabricated case by inventing a story that Jonathan had confessed to the crime, when in fact Jonathan had consistently denied any involvement in the shooting. The defendants wrote false police reports and testified that Jonathan had confessed, while simultaneously destroying their notes and recordings of Jonathan’s interrogation, which would reveal the truth.

“Jonathan’s only ‘crime’ was that he was a Black kid present in a predominantly white neighborhood. As a result, even though there was not a shred of evidence suggesting Jonathan committed the shooting, the defendants decided to frame him,” said Anand Swaminathan, one of Irons’s attorneys. “It is rare to see a case where literally every piece of evidence implicating the criminal defendant is fabricated by the police, but that’s exactly what happened in Jonathan’s case. The police took the stand and swore on a Bible that Jonathan had confessed to them, even though they knew that was a lie, and they coerced a gravely injured victim to identify their suspect in court, knowing that he had no clue who had shot him.”

The report, which groups states into ones Trump held versus ones that were flipped, says that voters found Biden more competent to deal with the coronavirus crisis and in both groups gave him higher marks on being honest.

Although Trump “dominated” among voters focused on the economy, according to the analysis, “Biden won Coronavirus voters, which was a bigger share.”

It outlines in specific detail how Trump lost key demographic groups that he needed to win, while lauding some of his gains among minority groups.

“POTUS suffered his greatest erosion with White voters, particularly White Men in both state groups. However, he made double digit gains with Hispanics in both groups, while his performance among Blacks was virtually the same as 2016. POTUS lost ground with almost every age group in both state groupings,” the autopsy reads, adding that the worst loss was among White college-educated voters.

For the first time since 1960, the membership of the National Baseball Hall of Fame will remain frozen.

No player on the Hall's 2021 Baseball Writers' Association of America ballot reached the 75% threshold needed for enshrinement in Cooperstown. The results of the voting were announced by Hall of Fame president Tim Mead on MLB Network on Tuesday night.

The leading vote-getter was controversial pitcher Curt Schilling, who was named on 71.1% of the ballots, 16 votes shy of the minimum needed for selection. Schilling was followed by all-time home run leader Barry Bonds (61.8%) and 354-game winner Roger Clemens (61.6) in the voting.

All three former All-Stars were in their ninth year of eligibility on the ballot, leaving them one more chance next winter. Players get 10 shots at enshrinement via the writers' voting before moving on to consideration by one of the Hall's various era-based veterans committees.

This isn’t about which party wins elections, but whether democracy itself survives. Some anti-democratic measures were deliberately built into a system that was designed to benefit rich white men: The Senate was created to boost small conservative states and serve as a check on the more democratic House of Representatives, while the Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of slave states through the three-fifths clause. But these features have metastasized to a degree the Founding Fathers could have never anticipated, and in ways that threaten the very notion of representative government.

In the past decade, the GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans. Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts. This strategy of white grievance reached a fever pitch when domestic terrorists emboldened by the president occupied the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory. But that unprecedented attempt by Trump and his allies to overturn the election results is a mere prelude to a new era of minority rule, which not only will attempt to block the agenda of a president elected by an overwhelming majority but threatens the long-term health of American democracy. “The will of the people,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, “is the only legitimate foundation of any government.” And now that foundation is crumbling.

No one has benefited more from minority rule—and done more to ensure it—than Mitch McConnell. For six years, he presided over a Senate majority representing fewer people than the minority party, the longest such stretch in US history, until the January Georgia runoffs gave Democrats a razor-thin majority. Now he’ll do everything he can to obstruct Biden’s popular mandate. Two days after the presidential election, sources close to McConnell told Axios that he would block Biden’s Cabinet appointees if he considered them “radical progressives.” McConnell didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s victory until 42 days after the election, when the Electoral College finalized it.