Raphael Stevens

In a year of franchise turmoil, Rivera will undergo treatment for carcinoma while helping to lead organizational change. More

The Kansas City Chiefs said on Thursday that the team was prohibiting fans from wearing ceremonial headdresses and Native American-style face paint at Arrowhead Stadium, becoming the latest organization to confront offensive symbols amid a nationwide discussion of racist imagery and iconography.The announcement came just over a month after Washington’s football team declared, under pressure from corporate sponsors, that it would drop its logo and the Redskins name.The Chiefs said that although the team had discouraged fans from wearing headdresses for several years, the organization had decided, after discussions with Native American leaders, to ban the headdresses, effective immediately, at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo.Fans will still be allowed to wear face paint, but any face paint “styled in a way that references or appropriates American Indian cultures and traditions will be prohibited,” the team said. Fans will be asked to remove any such face paint before passing through security checks outside the stadium, the team said.The team also said it was reviewing the “Arrowhead Chop,” a tomahawk-like arm motion usually accompanied by a made-up war cry that fans perform at games. The team said it was also exploring changes to the “Drum Deck,” an area in Arrowhead Stadium where Chiefs players and others bang a large drum to kick off games.The organization said it hoped to find another way to unify players and fans while better representing the spiritual significance of the drum in American Indian cultures. One possibility under discussion, the team said, would involve shifting the focus of the drum “to something that symbolizes the heartbeat of the stadium.”The Chiefs did not announce any changes to the team name or the name of its stadium.The Chiefs’ announcement after the decision by Washington’s football team to change its name increased pressure on the remaining professional teams with Native American mascots and logos to re-evaluate their names and monikers.In addition to the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chicago Blackhawks of the N.H.L. and the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball have long resisted changing their names and logos, though the Indians dropped the mascot Chief Wahoo last year and recently said they would review the team name.The Chiefs said the changes announced on Thursday had come after discussions that began in 2014 with a group of local leaders from diverse American Indian backgrounds as well as with a national organization that works on issues affecting American Indian people and tribes. The team did not name the organization.The Chiefs said they planned to continue several traditions intended to honor Native Americans, including a Blessing of the Four Directions, a Blessing of the Drum and an invitation that the team has extended to tribe members to attend its American Indian Heritage Month Game.“As an organization, our goal was to gain a better understanding of the issues facing American Indian communities in our region and explore opportunities to both raise awareness of American Indian cultures and celebrate the rich traditions of tribes with a historic connection to the Kansas City area,” the team said in a statement. More

Robert K. Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, won another decisive victory in his attempt to fight two misdemeanor charges of solicitation of prostitution, after judges issued a strong rebuke of police tactics used in the case against him.In a unanimous decision, a three-judge panel in the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach affirmed a lower court decision that the police improperly gathered video evidence central to the case made against Kraft and two dozen other men who were recorded visiting and receiving treatment at several South Florida day spas.“We find the trial courts properly concluded that the criminal defendants had standing to challenge the video surveillance and that total suppression of the video recordings was constitutionally warranted,” the judges wrote in their decision on Wednesday.Unless state prosecutors ask the state Supreme Court to hear their appeal, the decision effectively ends the case against Kraft, who was originally charged in February 2019 with two counts of soliciting sex in Jupiter, Fla., after the police investigated the spas and massage parlors on suspicion of prostitution and human trafficking.“We are pleased that the Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled in our favor by affirming suppression of recordings that should never have been taken,” a spokesman for Kraft said in a statement. “This ruling protects the constitutional rights and civil liberties of all the men and women who were illegally spied on in this case. More broadly, this ruling will further protect the civil liberties of all Americans, by helping prevent future Fourth Amendment violations like those that occurred in this case.”The decision is likely to reduce the chance that the N.F.L. will penalize Kraft, 79, for conduct deemed detrimental to the league. Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, has broad authority to hold players, league executives and owners accountable for their actions, and penalties can include fines of up to $500,000 and suspensions, based not just on the outcome of the legal case, but also on the damage to the league’s reputation.When law enforcement officials first brought the case, they claimed they had unearthed a human trafficking ring at day spas in South Florida. But over time, the case focused more narrowly on the misdemeanor charges against Kraft and the other men.While some of the two dozen other men who were also charged in the case have paid fines and performed community service to resolve their cases, Kraft declined to take a plea deal, which would have expunged any record of the case.Instead, Kraft’s lawyers argued that video showing him and other patrons at the day spa, Orchids of Asia, was improperly obtained by undercover cameras and that the police did not sufficiently minimize the scope of their surveillance when applying for a warrant to film there. The video, they said, violated the constitutional rights of Kraft and the other customers recorded.In May 2019, a Palm Beach County court judge agreed with Kraft’s lawyers and threw out the video evidence in the case. The ruling echoed decisions made by judges in nearby counties where defendants were charged with similar misdemeanors after having been identified in surveillance investigations.The Florida attorney general, Ashley Moody, taking up the case for the state attorney in Palm Beach County who charged Kraft and the others, argued that the police in the case followed established procedures for obtaining permission to install the cameras.Lauren Cassedy, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general, said her “office is reviewing the ruling.”The three judges on the appeals panel, however, said that “while there will be situations which may warrant the use of the techniques at issue, the strict Fourth Amendment safeguards developed over the past few decades must be observed.” The judges added: “To permit otherwise would yield unbridled discretion to agents of law enforcement and the government, the antithesis of the constitutional liberty of people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures.” More