Charles Adair’s relatives urge video to be made public after Kansas officer charged with second-degree murder
Relatives of a man whom investigators determined died after a Kansas sheriff’s deputy shoved his knee into the cuffed man’s back for a minute and 26 seconds have filed a federal lawsuit.
Attorneys for the family of Charles Adair renewed their demand on Friday that video of what happened be released publicly in announcing the wrongful death lawsuit.
Continue reading...After Calvin Duncan served 28 years for a murder he didn’t commit, he won an election to serve as criminal court clerk. But now the office might be shut down
A man imprisoned for nearly 30 years before being exonerated won a landmark election in New Orleans promising to fix a judicial system that failed him. Now, Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, and the Republican-controlled state legislature are racing to eliminate his job before he can be sworn in.
Calvin Duncan won 68% of the vote last November to become the Orleans parish clerk of criminal court after pledging to reform the justice system based on his own experience fighting to access court records while in maximum security prison.
Continue reading...Clarence Curtis Jordan was convicted in 1978 but hadn’t had a lawyer for over 30 years
The Texas court of criminal appeals has overturned the death sentence of Clarence Curtis Jordan, a 70-year-old man with intellectual disabilities, who spent nearly 50 years on death row – much of that time without a lawyer.
Jordan was convicted in 1978 for the murder of Joe L Williams, a 40-year-old grocer in Houston, and was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, courts determined that Jordan, who has intellectual disabilities, was “incompetent”, making him ineligible for execution under constitutional standards.
Continue reading...Michael Smith, 52, charged after flooding platforms with thousands of AI songs and boosting them with bots
A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms and his fellow musicians out of millions in royalties by flooding the services with thousands of AI-generated songs – and using automated “bots” to artificially boost the number of listens into the billions.
As part of a deal with federal prosecutors in New York’s southern district, 52-year-old Michael Smith pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Continue reading...Footage shows US musician struggling with field sobriety tests he calls ‘really hard’ before his 2024 arrest in New York
Justin Timberlake struggled to perform field sobriety tests requiring him to walk a straight line and stand on one leg after the pop star was pulled over in New York’s Hamptons in 2024 by police officers who suspected him of driving drunk, according to video footage released on Friday.
Timberlake tells officers at one point: “These are, like, really hard tests.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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