Settlement money to help stem the decades-long opioid addiction and overdose epidemic is rolling out to small towns and big cities across the U.S., but advocates worry that chunks of it may be used in ways that don't make a dent in the crisis. As state and local governments navigate how to use the money, advocates say local governments may not have the bandwidth to take the right steps to identify their communities' needs and direct their funding shares to projects that use proven methods to prevent deaths. Opioids have been linked to about 800,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999, including more than 80,000 annually in recent years, with most of those involving illicitly produced fentanyl. Drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies have been involved in more than 100 settlements of opioid-related lawsuits with state, local and Native American tribal governments over the past decade. The deals, some not yet finalized, could be worth a total of more than $50 billion over nearly two decades and also come with requirements for better monitoring of prescriptions and making company documents public. States alone fought the tobacco industry in the 1990s and they used only a sliver of the money from the resulting settlements on tobacco-related efforts. "We don't want to be 10 years down the road and say, 'After we screwed up tobacco, we trusted small government with opioids — and we did even worse,'" said Paul Farrell, Jr., one of the lead lawyers representing local governments in the opioid suits. He notes that with settlement money rolling out for at least 14 more years, there's time for towns to use it appropriately, and resources to help. The goal, experts say, is to help those who are taking opioids to get treatment, to make it less likely people who use drugs will overdose and to create an environment for people not to take them in the first place. For many, it's personal. Suzanne Harrison and her family launched a nonprofit dedicated to getting New Jersey residents access to treatment and recovery programs after her brother and Navy veteran, King Shaffer Jr., died from a fentanyl and heroin overdose in 2016, days before he was scheduled to try another treatment program. At the time, he was staying with a sister who lived in Moorestown, New Jersey. That town's administration decided to hand its portion of settlement money over to Burlington County, which has used settlement funds to distribute an overdose antidote and run camps for kids affected by addiction. "The County was in a much better position to handle this subject," township manager Kevin Aberant emailed, noting reporting requirements and restrictions on how the money could be used. The major opioid settlements, which include deals with Walgreen Co., CVS Health, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson and one with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that is before the U.S. Supreme Court, require that most of the funds be used to combat the crisis. More than half of the funds will be controlled by local governments, according to Christine Minhee, who runs the Opioid Settlement Tracker website. In the biggest agreements, states receive larger amounts by getting eligible local governments with populations over 10,000 to join the settlements. Unlike most states, New Jersey required local governments to complete reports on the funding. Using those submissions and additional reporting, The Associated Press examined the spending and decision-making processes for communities in Burlington County, which includes Philadelphia suburbs and rural areas. Fourteen communities there receive allocations and by last June the amounts ranged from $5,000 to nearly $88,000. By last year, most communities in Burlington County had not spent their allotted funds yet, nor had they followed advice to gather public input, devise strategic plans, conduct assessments of their communities' needs and design processes for awarding funds. In Mount Laurel, New Jersey, the police department was put in charge and launched outreach events around budget motels where first-responders often administer an overdose antidote. The idea is to connect people with treatment and other services, but advocates prefer police not be in charge of the spending. Deputy Police Chief Tim Hudnall also said there is consideration of hiring peer-support navigators to try to help people address addiction. Another New Jersey town, Willingboro, spent a little over $57,000 on a back-to-school wellness event, where students received backpacks full of school supplies and information about mental health resources. "We've been trying to be aggressive about it," Gary Lawery II, the deputy township manager, said of spending the funds. "If not, it's just going to sit there." But those approaches have not relied on the kind of community needs assessments that Sara Whaley, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who helps develop guides for counties, says are essential. Some service providers, such as Shaffer's sister Suzanne Harrison, have found the process frustrating. Her organization, King's Crusade, helps connect people with services, pays rent at sober living facilities and provides transportation to treatment. They've raised as much as $80,000 a year, but there is always more demand. Harrison said she hasn't had a chance to apply for allocations to subsidize this. Instead, the organization received $6,625 in opioid settlement money to organize a one-time recovery community event in Evesham Township. In Evesham, a suburb of 45,000 that's the most populous in Burlington County, most of the control over the settlement funds lies with the local alliance to prevent alcoholism and drug addiction, which is the sort of body Whaley says should be involved. Marc Romano, director of operations for Prevention Plus of Burlington County, said he also wished there was a call for proposals for using the money. The group was paid $2,000 to hold a painting night for women in recovery, which he said was "a nice event for recovery and recovery awareness," but the group could do more by getting funds to help support programs geared toward its mission of prevention. Council member Heather Cooper, whose own brother was killed by a fentanyl overdose, said there are service providers in the area that can help get people into treatment, get them rides there and offer other services. "But what we hear is families still don't know where those resources are," she said. "So I think the marketing of that has to increase." Other governments have used different approaches. In Arkansas, all the towns and counties pooled their money by creating the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership. Grants have gone to a drug task force to hire an overdose investigator and peer recovery specialist, for the American Indian Center of Arkansas to hire peer recovery specialists, and for a religious organization to expand its recovery housing center in projects ranging from $100,000 to more than $2 million. Kirk Lane, a former police chief and director of state drug policy who now serves as director of the partnership, said it's able to steer projects to underserved parts of the state and to fill in gaps in the state's treatment, recovery and prevention systems. He explained, "Individual mayors and county judges didn't have to worry about, 'How are we going to spend that money?'"

NEW YORK — Seventy years ago Friday, no one outside of the U.S. Supreme Court building heard it when Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision on school desegregation. Now, through the use of an innovative voice-cloning technology, it is becoming possible for people to "hear" Warren read the decision as he did on May 17, 1954, along with oral arguments by lawyers including a future Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. The "Brown Revisited" recreation is being made available at brown.oyez.orgv. It will be part of a website, painstakingly put together by former Northwestern University professor Jerry Goldman, that allows people to hear oral arguments in decades worth of Supreme Court cases and follow along with written transcriptions. Yet it always frustrated Goldman that the court did not begin recording oral arguments until 1955 — a year after the Brown decision was handed down. Print transcripts just aren't the same. "I could give you the libretto to 'Madame Butterfly,'" he said. "But would you rather read it, or would you rather sit and listen to the performance?" The Brown decision was a landmark in the civil rights movement. The court struck down an 1896 decision that institutionalized racial segregation with "separate but equal" schools for Black and white students, ruling that such accommodations were anything but equal. While the court began recording arguments in 1955, virtually no one heard them until 1969, when they were made available through the National Archives for scholarly and legal research. Full public access wasn't granted until 1993. The court began posting arguments on its website in the 2000s, but usually at a delay of several days. It wasn't until 2020 that the court regularly made livestreams of the arguments available. Cameras have never been allowed. A year ago, Goldman said, he attended a play where artificial intelligence was used to recreate a familiar voice, and he wondered if this technology could be put to use for historic court arguments. A Northwestern alum, James Boggs, CEO of the interactive audio firm Spooler, took interest when contacted. "It's good to draw attention to this case," Goldman said, "because it's fundamental to our understanding to the Constitution and it changed America." The first step was to find recordings of the long-dead principals in the case, preferably made around 1954 to approximate what they sounded like then. That wasn't difficult in the cases of Warren, a former governor of California, and Marshall. It was harder for integration opponent John W. Davis, whose lengthy career included the 1924 Democratic presidential nomination. He died in 1955. A Davis recording was tracked down through the Library of Congress. Recordings for some other participants could not be located. Through artificial intelligence, these voice samples were melded with those of actors who read the historical transcripts to make it sound like they were speaking anew. Actual arguments were sprawling — 18 hours over three days, with 38 participants. Goldman whittled things down to a one hour, 45 minute presentation, including Warren's reading of the decision. Goldman consulted written notes left behind by Warren, enabling the recreation to include the chief justice's emphasis that the decision had been unanimous. The growing ability of technology to recreate voices is a marvel, yet deeply troubling to many who worry it could put false words into familiar mouths — such deepfakes are a particular concern heading into the presidential election. Ravit Dotan, CEO of TechBetter and an instructor on the ethics of technology, said she's concerned about the practice of cloning people's voices without their consent, although consent isn't possible from people who are no longer alive. She believes "Brown Revisited" sets a bad precedent. "In the future, I can envision laws that determine how long a person's likeness rights persist after their death, similar to copyright, which expires 70 years after the creator's death," Dotan said. "But currently, there is no legal guidance, and I worry about people taking advantage of that, exploiting people's likeness or even disseminating disinformation." Instead of a deepfake, the Brown project is a "deep true," Boggs said. "We are not creating new content," he said. "These were things that were actually said and we have the historical documentation to prove it." Similar recreations have a natural limit. It was only in the late 1800s that sound recordings of voices have been available. Go back further, and they'd essentially be guesses. Who knows what George Washington actually sounded like? But for the curious, the "Brown Revisited" project offers a new window into history.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has approved legislation allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions, a change the Republican-controlled Statehouse championed amid concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned capital punishment in such cases. Lee, a Republican, quietly signed off on the legislation last week without issuing a statement. The new law, which goes into effect July 1, authorizes the state to pursue capital punishment when an adult is convicted of aggravated rape of a child. Those convicted could be sentenced to death, imprisonment for life without possibility of parole, or imprisonment for life. Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis enacted a similar bill nearly a year ago. A few months after being enacted, Florida prosecutors in Lake County announced in December that they were pursuing the death penalty for a man accused of committing sexual battery of a minor under the age of twelve. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the case is considered the first to be pursued under the new law. Meanwhile, Idaho's GOP-controlled House approved similar legislation earlier this year, but the proposal eventually stalled in the similarly Republican-dominated Senate. While many supporters of Tennessee's version have conceded that even though the Volunteer State previously allowed convicted child rapists to face the death penalty, the Supreme Court ultimately nullified that law with its 2008 decision deeming it unconstitutional to use capital punishment in child sexual battery cases. However, they hope the conservative-controlled U.S. Supreme Court will reverse that ruling — pointing to the decadeslong effort that it took to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that legalized abortion nationwide but was eventually overruled in 2022. "Maybe the atmosphere is different on the Supreme Court," said Republican Sen. Janice Bowling last month while debating in favor of the law. "We're simply challenging a ruling." Democratic lawmakers and child advocates worry that the law may instill more fear into child rape victims that speaking out could potentially result in an execution, warning that many children are abused by family members and close friends. Others have alleged that predators could be incentivized to kill their victims to avoid a harsher punishment. Execution law in the U.S. dictates that crimes must involve a victim's death or treason against the government to be eligible for the death penalty. The Supreme Court ruled nearly 40 years ago that execution is too harsh a punishment for sexual assault, and justices made a similar decision in 2008 in a case involving the rape of a child. Currently, all executions in Tennessee are on hold as state officials review changes to its lethal injection process. Gov. Lee issued the pause after a blistering 2022 report detailed multiple flaws in how Tennessee inmates were put to death. No timeline has been provided on when those changes will be completed.