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Alaska man charged with sending graphic threats to kill Supreme Court justices
Court News |
2024/09/17 21:04
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An Alaska man accused of sending graphic threats to injure and kill six Supreme Court justices and some of their family members has been indicted on federal charges, authorities said Thursday.
Panos Anastasiou, 76, is accused of sending more than 465 messages through a public court website, including graphic threats of assassination and torture coupled with racist and homophobic rhetoric.
The indictment does not specify which justices Anastasiou targeted, but Attorney General Merrick Garland said he made the graphic threats as retaliation for decisions he disagreed with.
“Our democracy depends on the ability of public officials to do their jobs without fearing for their lives or the safety of their families,” he said.
Anastasiou has been indicted on 22 counts, including nine counts of making threats against a federal judge and 13 counts of making threats in interstate commerce.
He was released from detention late Thursday by a federal magistrate in Anchorage with a a list of conditions, including that he not directly or indirectly contact any of the six Supreme Court justices he allegedly threatened or any of their family members.
During the hearing that lasted more than hour, Magistrate Kyle Reardon noted some of the messages Anastasiou allegedly sent between March 2023 and mid-July 2024, including calling for the assassination of two of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices so the current Democratic president could appoint their successors.
Instead of toning down his rhetoric after receiving a visit from FBI agents last year, Anastasiou increased the frequency of his messages and their vitriolic language, Reardon said.
Gray-haired and shackled at the ankles above his salmon-colored plastic slippers, Anastasiou wore a yellow prison outfit with ACC printed in black on the back, the initials for the Anchorage Correctional Facility, at the hearing. Born in Greece, he moved to Anchorage 67 years ago. Reardon allowed him to contact his elected officials on other matters like global warming, but said the messages must be reviewed by his lawyers.
Defense attorney Jane Imholte noted Anastasiou is a Vietnam veteran who is undergoing treatment for throat cancer and has no financial means other than his Social Security benefits.
She told the judge that Anastaiou, who signed his own name to the emails, worried about his pets while being detained. She said he only wanted to return home to care for his dogs, Freddie, Buddy and Cutie Pie.
He faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for each count of making threats against a federal judge and up to five years for each count of making threats in interstate commerce if convicted.
Threats targeting federal judges overall have more than doubled in recent years amid a surge of similar violent messages directed at public officials around the country, the U.S. Marshals Service previously said.
In 2022, shortly after the leak of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, a man was stopped near the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh with weapons and zip ties. |
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After just a few hours, U.S. election bets put on hold by appeals court ruling
Legal Topics |
2024/09/14 19:02
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Just hours after it began, legal betting on the outcome of U.S. Congressional elections has been put on hold by a federal appeals court.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order Thursday night temporarily freezing the matter until it can consider and rule on the issue. No timetable was initially given.
The court acted at about 8:30 p.m. Thursday, mere hours after a federal judge cleared the way for the only bets on American elections to be legally sanctioned by a U.S. jurisdiction.
U.S. District Court Judge Jia Cobb permitted New York startup company Kalshi to begin offering what amounts to bets on the outcome of November elections regarding which parties win control of the House and Senate.
The company’s markets went live soon afterwards, and Kalshi accepted an unknown amount of bets, which it called “contracts.”
The Thursday night order put a halt to any further such bets. What might happen to those already made was unclear Friday.
Neither Kalshi nor the commission immediately responded to messages seeking comment Friday.
The ruling came after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission appealed Cobb’s ruling, warning that allowing election bets, even for a short period of time, risked serious harm from people trying to manipulate the election for financial purposes.
The Thursday night order put a halt to any further such bets. What might happen to those already made was unclear Friday.
Neither Kalshi nor the commission immediately responded to messages seeking comment Friday.
The ruling came after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission appealed Cobb’s ruling, warning that allowing election bets, even for a short period of time, risked serious harm from people trying to manipulate the election for financial purposes.
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‘The Mentalist’ star Simon Baker admits drinking and driving in Australia
Legal Topics |
2024/09/11 15:44
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Australian actor and director Simon Baker, best known for his role as Patrick Jane in the CBS drama series “The Mentalist,” avoided a conviction Wednesday after pleading guilty to a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol near his rural home.
The 55-year-old appeared in the Mullumbimby Local Court in New South Wales state for sentencing after pleading guilty the week before to a charge of driving with a blood-alcohol concentration exceeding the legal limit of 0.05%.
Baker acted alongside Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the Oscar-nominated 2006 film “The Devil Wears Prada” before starring as a former professional psychic who became a California Bureau of Investigation consultant in the hit series “The Mentalist” for eight seasons until 2015. He has worked on multiple shows and movies since, including a movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “ Klara and the Sun ” directed by Taika Waititi with an expected 2025 release.
Magistrate Kathy Crittenden accepted that Baker was remorseful and was unlikely to drive after drinking again. She released him on a nine-month good behavior bond with no conviction recorded. Australian judges have discretion to not record a conviction against first-time offenders under exceptional circumstances.
Police reported seeing Baker’s Tesla electric car driving erratically in the fashionable Byron Bay region where he lives at 2:11 a.m. July 20.
That was hours after a faulty software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike created worldwide technological havoc, disrupting airlines, hospitals, government offices and financial systems. Crittenden said the outage knocked police systems offline and an electronic breath test could not be completed on Baker.
She said police resorted to an “old-fashioned sobriety test.”
Police reported Baker was unsteady on his feet and smelled of alcohol. He told police he had consumed four glasses of wine over dinner since 6 p.m., roughly eight hours prior. He was alone in the car.
Baker was “very polite and cooperative” and “extremely remorseful for his actions,” Crittenden said. Baker had since completed a traffic offenders’ rehabilitation program, the court was told.
Crittenden said four character references were tendered to the court about Baker’s community contributions, significant remorse and attesting to his conduct being out of character.
“The court has little difficulty in finding that Mr. Baker is remorseful for his offending and it is unlikely he will offend again,” she said. |
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Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly
Legal Business |
2024/09/06 22:44
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One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.
They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.
“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
Dunn said Supreme Court precedents warn judges about “the serious risk of error or unintended consequences” when dealing with rapidly emerging technology and considering whether antitrust law requires intervention. She also warned that any action taken against Google won’t benefit small businesses but will simply allow other tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok to fill the void.
According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has actually declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023,
The trial that began Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, over the alleged ad tech monopoly was initially going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.
The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.
The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine, which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets. |
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A man who attacked a Nevada judge in court pleads guilty but mentally ill
Headline Legal News |
2024/09/04 22:45
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A man whose courtroom attack on a judge in Las Vegas was recorded on video has pleaded guilty but mentally ill to attempted murder and other charges.
Deobra Delone Redden ended his trial Thursday after Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus testified that she feared for her life when Redden vaulted over her bench and desk and landed on her. The attack happened Jan. 3 as Holthus was about to deliver Redden’s sentence in a separate felony attempted battery case.
Redden’s defense attorney, Carl Arnold, said in a statement Friday that the plea “reflects a delicate balance between accepting responsibility for a regrettable incident and recognizing the impact of Mr. Redden’s untreated mental illness at the time.”
Arnold told jurors who began hearing evidence on Tuesday that Redden had not taken prescribed medication to control his diagnosed schizophrenia. Holthus testified that she felt “defenseless” during the attack and that court officials and attorneys who came to her aid saved her life, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Law clerk Michael Lasso told the jury he saw Holthus’ head hit the floor and Redden grab her hair. “I absolutely thought, ‘He’s going to kill her,’” Lasso testified. He said he wrestled Redden away, punched him to try to subdue him and saw Redden hitting a corrections officer who also intervened.
An armed courtroom marshal suffered a bleeding gash on his forehead and a dislocated shoulder, according to court officials and witnesses. Holthus was not hospitalized and returned to work after treatment for her injuries. A prosecutor for more than 27 years, she was elected to the state court bench in 2018.
Redden, 31, is already serving prison time for other felony battery convictions. Prosecutor John Giordani said Friday he could face up to 86 years for his pleas to eight felonies, which also included battery of a protected person age 60 or older resulting in substantial bodily harm, intimidating a public officer and battery by a prisoner.
Clark County District Court Judge Susan Johnson ruled that Redden was competent and capable of entering his plea, the Review-Journal reported. Sentencing was scheduled for Nov. 7.
Arnold said in his statement that he will ask Johnson to order mental health treatment for his client behind bars.
Giordani said Redden told three correctional staff members after the attack that he tried to kill Holthus.
“While he clearly has past mental issues, he made a choice that day and failed to control his homicidal impulses,” the prosecutor said.
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Trial begins over Texas ‘Trump Train’ highway confrontation
Legal Business |
2024/09/02 22:43
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A federal trial is set to begin Monday over claims that supporters of former President Donald Trump threatened and harassed a Biden-Harris campaign bus in Texas four years ago, disrupting the campaign on the last day of early voting.
The civil trial over the so-called “Trump Train” comes as Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris race into the final two months of their head-to-head fight for the White House in November.
Democrats on the bus said they feared for their lives as Trump supporters in dozens of trucks and cars nearly caused collisions, harassing their convoy for more than 90 minutes, hitting a Biden-Harris campaign staffer’s car and forcing the bus driver to repeatedly swerve for safety.
“For at least 90 minutes, defendants terrorized and menaced the driver and passengers,” the lawsuit alleges. “They played a madcap game of highway ‘chicken’ coming within three to four inches of the bus. They tried to run the bus off the road.”
The highway confrontation prompted an FBI investigation, which led then-President Trump to declare that in his opinion, “these patriots did nothing wrong.” Among those suing is former Texas state senator and Democratic nominee for governor Wendy Davis, who was on the bus that day. Davis rose to prominence in 2013 with her 13-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in the state Capitol. The other three plaintiffs are a campaign volunteer, staffer and the bus driver.
The lawsuit names six defendants, accusing them of violating the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” an 1871 federal law to stop political violence and intimidation tactics.
The same law was used in part to indict Trump on federal election interference charges over attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection. Enacted by Congress during the Reconstruction Era, the law was created to protect Black men’s right to vote by prohibiting political violence.
Videos of the confrontation on Oct. 30, 2020, that were shared on social media, including some recorded by the Trump supporters, show a group of cars and pickup trucks — many adorned with large Trump flags — riding alongside the campaign bus as it traveled from San Antonio to Austin. The Trump supporters at times boxed in the bus, slowed it down, kept it from exiting the highway and repeatedly forced the bus driver to make evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision, the lawsuit says.
On the two previous days, Biden-Harris supporters were subjected to death threats, with some Trump supporters displaying weapons, according to the lawsuit. These threats in combination with the highway confrontation led Democrats to cancel an event later in the day.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, alleges the defendants were members of local groups near San Antonio that coordinated the confrontation.
Francisco Canseco, an attorney for three of the defendants, said his clients acted lawfully and did not infringe on the free speech rights of those on the bus. “It’s more of a constitutional issue,” Canseco said. “It’s more of who has the greater right to speak behind their candidate.”
Judge Robert Pitman, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, is set to preside over Monday’s trial. He denied the defendants’ pretrial motion for a summary judgment in their favor, ruling last month that the KKK Act prohibits the physical intimidation of people traveling to political rallies, even when racial bias isn’t a factor.
While one of the defendants, Eliazar Cisneros, argued his group had a First Amendment right to demonstrate support for their candidate, the judge wrote that “assaulting, intimidating, or imminently threatening others with force is not protected expression.”
“Just as the First Amendment does not protect a driver waving a political flag from running a red light, it does not protect Defendants from allegedly threatening Plaintiffs with reckless driving,” Pitman wrote.
A prior lawsuit filed over the “Trump Train” alleged the San Marcos Police Department violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by failing to send a police escort after multiple 911 calls were made and a bus rider said his life was threatened. It accused officers of privately laughing and joking about the emergency calls. San Marcos settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $175,000 and a requirement that law enforcement get training on responding to political violence. |
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Judge throws out machine gun possession charge, cites Second Amendment
Legal Topics |
2024/08/29 07:17
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A federal judge in Kansas has tossed out a machine gun possession charge and questioned if bans on the weapons violate the Second Amendment.
If upheld on appeal, the ruling by U.S. District Judge John W. Broomes in Wichita could have a sweeping impact on the regulation of machine guns, including homemade automatic weapons that many police and prosecutors blame for fueling gun violence.
Broomes, an appointee of President Donald Trump, on Wednesday dismissed two machine gun possession counts against Tamori Morgan, who was indicted last year. Morgan was accused of possessing a model AM-15 .300-caliber machine gun and a machine gun conversion device known as a “Glock switch” that can
make a semi-automatic weapon fire like a machine gun.
“The court finds that the Second Amendment applies to the weapons charged because they are ‘bearable arms’ within the original meaning of the amendment,” Broomes wrote. He added that the government “has the burden to show that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical firearm regulation
tradition.”
As of Friday, no appeal had been filed. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Wichita declined comment. Federal prosecutors in the case said in earlier court filings that the “Supreme Court has made clear that regulations of machineguns fall outside the Second Amendment.”
A June 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen was seen as a major expansion of gun rights. The ruling said Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.
Jacob Charles, an associate law professor at Pepperdine University who tracks Second Amendment cases, said the Kansas ruling is direct fallout from the Bruen decision.
“It gives lower court judges the ability to pick and choose the historical record in a way that they think the Second Amendment should be read,” Charles said.
Charles expects Broomes’ ruling to be overturned, citing Supreme Court precedent allowing for regulation of machine guns.
Eric Ruben, a fellow at the Brennan Center and an associate law professor of Southern Methodist University, agreed.
“As far as I know, this is the first time in American history that a machine gun ban has been found unconstitutional in its application,” Ruben said.
Shira Feldman of Brady United Against Gun Violence, called the ruling “an incredibly dangerous decision, and it’s inconsistent with what the Supreme Court has said the Second Amendment means.”
A message left Friday with the National Rifle Association wasn’t immediately returned.
Communities across the U.S. have dealt with a surge of shootings carried out with weapons converted to fully automatic in recent years. These weapons are typically converted using small pieces of metal made with a 3D printer or ordered online.
Guns with conversion devices have been used in several mass shootings, including one that left four dead at a Sweet Sixteen party in Alabama last year and another that left six people dead in a bar district in Sacramento, California, in 2022. In Houston, police officer William Jeffrey died in 2021 after being shot with a
converted gun while serving a warrant.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported a 570% increase in the number of conversion devices collected by police departments between 2017 and 2021, the most recent data available, The Associated Press reported in March.
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