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By The Associated Press

Tennessee’s governor pardoned country star Jelly Roll on Thursday for his criminal past in the state, acknowledging the Nashville native’s long road back from drugs and prison through soul-searching, songwriting and advocacy for second chances.

The rapper-turned-singer whose legal name is Jason Deford has spoken for years about his redemption arc before diverse audiences, from people serving time in correctional centers to concert crowds and even in testimony before Congress.

Republican Gov. Bill Lee issued his pardon after friends and civic leaders of the Grammy-nominated musician joined in an outpouring of support.

Jelly Roll’s convictions include robbery and drug felonies. He has said a pardon would make it easier for him to travel internationally for concert tours and to perform Christian missionary work without requiring burdensome paperwork.

He was one of 33 people to receive pardons Thursday from Lee, who for years has issued clemency decisions around the Christmas season. Lee said Jelly Roll’s application underwent the same monthslong thorough review as other applicants. The state parole board gave a nonbinding, unanimous recommendation for Jelly Roll’s pardon in April.

“His story is remarkable, and it’s a redemptive, powerful story, which is what you look for and what you hope for,” Lee told reporters, adding he hopes to meet Jelly Roll for the first time soon.

Unlike recent high-profile federal pardons, which let people off the hook for prison, a pardon in Tennessee serves as a statement of forgiveness for someone who has already completed a prison sentence and been released. Pardons offer a path to get certain civil rights restored, such as the right to vote, although there are some limitations under state law, and the governor can specify the terms.

Jelly Roll broke into country music with the 2023 album “Whitsitt Chapel” and crossover songs like “Need a Favor.” He has won multiple CMT Awards, a CMA Award and also picked up seven career Grammy nominations, three of them recently.

Much of his work has become associated with overcoming adversity, like the song “Winning Streak” that tells the story of someone’s first day sober. Or the direct-and-to-the-point, “I Am Not Okay.”

“When I first started doing this, I was just telling my story of my broken self,” he told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “By the time I got through it, I realized that my story was the story of many. So now I’m not telling my story anymore. I’m getting to pull it right from the crevices of the people whose story’s never been told.”

In making his case to the parole board, Jelly Roll said he first fell in love with songwriting while in custody, stating it began as a therapeutic passion project that “would end up changing my life in ways that I never dreamed imaginable.”

Beyond his sold-out shows, he’s brought his witness to the US Senate, where he testified about the dangers of fentanyl, describing his drug-dealing younger self as “the uneducated man in the kitchen playing chemist wi

By Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — In March 2021, a Brown University doctoral candidate wrote an op-ed in the school paper criticizing Brown’s increasing use of surveillance cameras and lack of transparency.

“In the span of two decades, Brown University quietly deployed an expansive surveillance apparatus, unbeknownst to many in the community; it’s well past time we critically examined our University’s pervasive surveillance of College Hill,” John Wrenn wrote.

“It is impossible to cross (or even approach) Brown University without being surveilled,” he added. “I encourage you to try.”

The extent of that surveillance coverage is now under scrutiny amid the ongoing search for a gunman who killed two students and wounded nine others last Saturday before disappearing from the scene.

Law enforcement has released a series of videos from nearby homes and vehicles showing what the FBI has called an “unknown suspect,” but none of those appeared to come from Brown’s own surveillance cameras or from the building where the shooting took place. The shortage of visuals has led to sharp questions about surveillance at Brown.

“Why did Brown University have so few Security Cameras?” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social just after midnight Wednesday. “There can be no excuse for that. In the modern age, it just doesn’t get worse!!!”

In fact, Brown University has an “expansive network of security cameras,” with more than 1,200 cameras installed in buildings with both interior and locations, university spokesperson Brian Clark said.

The problem, though, is the shooting took place at the very edge of the university in an older part of a building that has “fewer, if any” cameras, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Tuesday. That left police to rely mainly on videos from the neighboring residential area to try to identify the person of interest.

“This building is on the literal edge of the campus, and the person of interest walked out the door (and) as soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk, was no longer on campus,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said.

“It’s part of the reason we keep asking for the community’s help so much, is because even though this occurred on campus, the route of travel and all of the video evidence you’ve seen, other than that very first video, has been video from off campus,” he said.

CNN spoke to several security experts to better understand the growth of Brown’s surveillance system, why its cameras failed to capture the attack or suspect, and the concerns about privacy and academic freedom that are the biggest resistance to their growing use.

“You would think that, ‘Hey it’s a school like Brown, they would have this investment, and they can figure out who this suspect is or at least help in identifying,’” said Glen Kucera, the president of the security company Allied Universal Enhanced Protection Services. “I’ve talked to a number of campuses across the country and some are more thorough in their surveillance system than others. Some have invested in it, and some haven’t.”

How many cameras is enough?

Like many modern institutions, Brown’s use of surveillance cameras has increased dramatically over the years. The university had just 60 surveillance cameras in 2000, a number that rose to Read more

By Katelyn Polantz, Evan Perez, CNN

(CNN) — Frustration is mounting inside the Justice Department as it races to redact thousands of pages of files related to Jeffrey Epstein before they must be released Friday, multiple sources familiar with the process told CNN.

A substantial number of redactions are needed, one of the sources said, and the documents each attorney is processing since Thanksgiving week can number more than 1,000 — a time-consuming task that likely will come down to the wire. The sensitivities of executive and legal privacy, victims’ protections and other concerns all could play in to the choices the lawyers must make when it comes to potential redactions.

Lawyers working on the Epstein files at the DOJ’s National Security Division also believe they aren’t getting clear or comprehensive direction on how to make the most information available under the law, several sources said.

Counterintelligence specialists were asked to drop nearly all of their other work to process the Epstein documents, two people said, but some lawyers declined to participate.

An act of Congress has mandated the Trump administration release troves of Epstein-related documents — from grand jury records, to FBI files and internal Justice Department discussions — by Friday, after months of the Trump administration promising and not delivering transparency.

The situation suggests that the persistent political headache connected to transparency for the Epstein files may not disappear with Friday’s deadline.

In whatever becomes public on Friday, sources said there will still be extensive amounts of information redacted — the type of lack of transparency that the American public may continue to scrutinize.

Some legal document specialists are already preparing for the possibility that the Department of Justice’s release of the files will have more redactions than what is required, and that there may be mistakes in what’s redacted and what’s made public. Mistakes especially could relate to the disclosure of sensitive personal information, because of the volume of documents and how fast the lawyers have had to work, the sources said.

“Either they’re going to screw it up or they’re going to withhold things. It wouldn’t surprise me,” said one lawyer outside the Justice Department who is awaiting the release to determine whether there should be complaints made about how the redaction work was done. “Some of it may be incompetence as much as deliberate.”

A challenging task

The Epstein files are vast, and thousands of records held by different sections of federal law enforcement have to be picked through to determine whether they are responsive to the transparency law’s requirements or need to be redacted because of various confidentiality rules and to protect Epstein’s victims.

There are only four pages the lawyers have been given as internal guidance to follow to make the redactions, one of the sources said. And nearly all of the guidelines the lawyers have received articulate exemptions to the transparency law.

There are also logistical headaches in the work. Duplicates in what the lawyers are working through haven’t been taken out of the cache, one source told CNN. That creates more of a possibility there may not be consistent redactions acr