Category Archives: US justice system

Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba serving unlawfully as US attorney, says appeals court

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Habba disqualified from serving as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, appeals court says

Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba, whom his administration has maneuvered to keep in place as New Jersey top federal prosecutor, is disqualified from serving in the role, an appeals court said Monday.

A panel of judges from the third US circuit court of appeals sitting in Philadelphia sided with a lower court judge’s ruling after hearing oral arguments at which Habba herself was present on 20 October.

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Maine mother whose daughter died of leukemia wins $25m in wrongful death suit

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Verdict delivered in favor of Lyndsey Sutherland over death of daughter ‘Jazzy’ after doctors failed to identify condition

A civil jury in Maine has awarded $25m to a woman whose teenage daughter died from leukemia after being misdiagnosed with a condition linked to steroid-using men.

The hefty verdict delivered in favor of Lyndsey Sutherland on Thursday called for her to receive $10m for the wrongful 2021 death of 15-year-old Jasmine “Jazzy” Vincent as well as $15m for pain and suffering, said her attorney, Meryl Poulin.

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Pam Bondi and Senate Democrats spar amid Trump’s troop deployments

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US attorney general blames shutdown on Democrats as judiciary panel questions her on Epstein and deployments

Democratic senators sparred with attorney general Pam Bondi over her handling of the Epstein files and Donald Trump’s nationwide deployments of national guard at a bitterly partisan Senate hearing on Tuesday.

Bondi’s appearance before the Senate judiciary committee was her first since being confirmed in February, and comes as the president steps up his crackdown on political opponents and Democratic-run cities nationwide.

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Judges rule against Trump administration on deporting Guatemalan children and Venezuelans

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Double defeat protects Venezuelans with temporary protected status and Guatemalan minors

The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.

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Georgia supreme court ends Fani Willis bid to reverse removal from Trump case

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Election interference case in limbo as court declines to hear appeal against disqualification of Fulton county prosecutor

The Georgia supreme court on Tuesday declined to hear Fani Willis’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling disqualifying the Fulton county prosecutor from prosecuting Donald Trump’s election interference case.

In a 4-3 decision, the state’s highest court let stand the lower court order disqualifying Willis from the racketeering and election interference case that initially snagged 19 defendants, including Donald Trump, in 2023.

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US right capitalizes on fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina

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Far right points to lax criminal justice system and racist narratives, not mental health system failures as experts say

The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point – even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system.

The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues. He had been arrested 14 times and served a five-year stint for armed robbery. Brown had also come to believe that there was something alien and malevolent inside him – a “man-made material”, he told people, possibly a computer chip implanted by the government that was fighting him for control of his body.

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Frank Caprio, US judge who found fame online for his compassion, dies aged 88

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Host of TV show Caught in Providence billed his courtroom as a place ‘where people and cases are met with kindness’

Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge in Rhode Island who found online fame for his compassionate nature as host of the reality courtroom series Caught in Providence, has died aged 88.

Caprio’s official social media accounts said that he “passed away peacefully” after “a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer”.

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Trump contorting justice department into his ‘personal weapon’, experts warn

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Critics say DoJ has been ‘politicized like never before’ and the main job requirement is now ‘loyalty to Donald Trump’

As Donald Trump’s Department of Justice expands investigations of his foes and ousts dozens of lawyers and staff who worked on cases targeting himself and his allies, scholars and ex-prosecutors say the rule of law is under siege in the US as the department morphs into Trump’s “personal weapon”.

The justice department’s politicization to please Trump was underscored by an announcement on 23 July of a new “ strike force” to investigate unsubstantiated charges that ex-president Barack Obama and top officials conspired to hurt Trump’s 2016 campaign and his presidency with inquiries into Russian influence operations to help Trump win, say critics.

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Delta Air Lines sued over man’s use of lost iPad to record explicit videos

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A South Carolina family had forgotten the device on a trip and later found the clips uploaded to their cloud account

A Delta Air Lines employee stole a computer tablet left behind on a plane by a South Carolina child, then used it to record sexually explicit videos of himself – which saved to cloud storage and were discovered by the minor’s parents, a recent federal lawsuit alleges.

The child’s parents, Tory and Brooke Brewer, sued Delta in US district court in Charleston on 16 July, saying their family is owed damages for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and harassment, among other causes.

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Judges end Trump pick Alina Habba’s tenure as New Jersey’s top prosecutor

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Justice department retaliates by removing career prosecutor named as Habba’s replacement

Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s defence lawyer during a defamation case brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, has lost her bid to become New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor, with the clock running out on her interim status on Tuesday.

According to an order from New Jersey’s district court, a panel of judges declined to permanently appoint Habba to be the state’s US attorney, signaling a rebuke against the Trump administration.

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Two men found guilty in deaths of 53 migrants in Texas sentenced to life in prison

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Felipe Orduna-Torres and Armando Gonzales-Garcia abandoned locked truckload of people in summer heat with no AC in 2022

Two men face spending the rest of their lives in prison after a federal judge sentenced them on Friday for their roles in the deaths of 53 people – including six children – who were found dead in an abandoned tractor-trailer in Texas in 2022.

A federal jury in Texas had found the two men, Felipe Orduna-Torres and Armando Gonzales-Garcia, guilty of various charges at the conclusion of a trial in March. Federal judge Orlando Garcia sentenced Torres to life in prison and Ortega to 83 years of incarceration, essentially a life sentence.

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Suspect in ‘No Kings’ rally shooting death in Utah released from jail

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Police say Arturo Gamboa was carrying a rifle when safety volunteer fired on him and accidentally killed bystander

A man jailed on suspicion of murder for allegedly brandishing a rifle at a “No Kings” rally in Utah before an armed safety volunteer fired and inadvertently killed a protester has been released from custody.

Local district attorney Sim Gill’s office said on Friday that it was unable to make a decision on charges against Arturo Gamboa after the 14 June shooting that killed demonstrator Arthur Folasa Ah Loo – but that the investigation into the slaying continues.

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Revealed: drug tests in California prisons yielded false positives, affecting thousands of people

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Records suggest Quest Diagnostics erroneously detected opiates. Lawyers say parole requests were jeopardized in the process

Thousands of drug tests used by a major US diagnostic company in California prisons last year are suspected to have generated false positive results, an enormous error that has jeopardized the parole requests of some incarcerated people, according to civil rights lawyers and prison medical records.

California prison officials have known about the issue for months, but have failed to clear people’s records or reverse the consequences people have faced from the tests.

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Armed agents almost sent to home of DoJ official ‘fired over Mel Gibson case’

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US marshals sent to deliver letter warning Liz Oyer about testifying to Congress over actor’s gun case, lawyer says

The Trump administration-led justice department planned to send armed US marshals to deliver a letter warning a career pardon attorney about testifying to Congress after she says she was fired over a case involving the actor Mel Gibson, her lawyer said in a letter seen by Reuters on Monday.

“This highly unusual step of directing armed law enforcement officers to the home of a former Department of Justice employee who has engaged in no misconduct, let alone criminal conduct, simply to deliver a letter, is both unprecedented and completely inappropriate,” Michael Bromwich, a lawyer representing the fired pardon attorney Liz Oyer, wrote to the justice department.

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Florida man executed for killing eight-year-old girl and her grandmother

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Edward James received three-drug lethal injection under death warrant signed in February by governor Ron DeSantis

A Florida man who killed an eight-year-old girl and her grandmother on a night in which he drank heavily and used drugs was executed on Thursday.

Edward James, 63, was pronounced dead at 8.15pm after receiving a three-drug injection at Florida state prison outside Starke under a death warrant signed in February by Governor Ron DeSantis. The execution was the second this year in Florida, which is planning a third in April.

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Oklahoma executes man by lethal injection amid spate of judicial killings

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Wendell Grissom, executed for fatally shooting a woman, will be one of four people put to death in US this week

Oklahoma executed a man on Thursday for fatally shooting a woman during a home invasion and robbery 20 years ago.

Wendell Grissom, 56, was declared dead by lethal injection at the Oklahoma state penitentiary in McAlester at 10.13am, a prison official told the Associated Press. It was Oklahoma’s first execution of 2025.

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Alabama governor commutes death sentence of man convicted for 1991 murder

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Kay Ivey says Robin ‘Rocky’ Myers, who maintains he was innocent, will serve life in prison without parole

The Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, on Friday commuted the death sentence of Robin “Rocky” Myers to life in prison after noting questions about his case.

Ivey said Myers, who was facing execution this spring, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. She noted that was the sentence jurors at his 1994 trial had recommended. A judge overruled that recommendation and imposed a death sentence, a maneuver that has since been outlawed in Alabama, according to the human rights advocacy organization Amnesty International.

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‘I’m a new racist’: Michigan judge suspended after insulting gay and Black people on recordings

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Court worker secretly recorded calls in which Kathleen Ryan made homophobic slur and called Black people lazy

A suburban Detroit judge is no longer handling cases after a court official turned over recordings of her making anti-gay insults and referring to Black people as lazy.

Oakland county probate judge Kathleen Ryan was removed from her docket on 27 August for unspecified misconduct. Now the court’s administrator has stepped forward to say he blew the whistle on her, secretly recording their phone calls.

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FBI failed to investigate suspected child sexual abuse cases properly, report finds

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Internal justice department audit flagged 42 allegations from 2021-2023 requiring ‘immediate attention’ from FBI

The US justice department’s office of inspector general said on Thursday the FBI failed to properly investigate some suspected child sexual abuse cases and did not report some allegations to state or social services agencies.

A July 2021 report by the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, uncovered widespread and dire errors by the FBI that allowed the onetime USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar to continue to abuse at least 70 more victims before he was finally arrested.

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Missouri death row inmate executed despite widespread calls for clemency

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Brian Dorsey, convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband, put to death amid efforts by many to have his sentence commuted

Brian Dorsey, who was convicted of murdering his cousin and her husband in 2006, was executed in Missouri’s Bonne Terre state prison Tuesday despite an extraordinary effort by corrections officials and his appeals judge to have his capital sentence commuted.

Prison officials confirmed that Dorsey had been put to death by lethal injection. They said he had been pronounced dead at 6.11pm.

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