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Convictions tossed in 2016 death of 16-year-old shot in minivan in Trenton
Attorney News |
2023/06/21 16:37
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An appeals court in New Jersey has tossed out the convictions of a man sentenced to 55 years in prison after being tried as a teenager in the 2016 death of a girl who was shot in a minivan as she and other juveniles were riding around Trenton.
The court found a number of problems with the prosecution of the then-17-year-old suspect, including the testimony of a detective and the process by which the prosecution was moved to adult court, NJ.com reported. As a result, the court ordered prosecutors to start at the beginning and seek a new adult court waiver from family court.
Although the Mercer County prosecutor’s office publicly named the suspect after indicting him in 2017, the appeals court used a pseudonym for the defendant, who is now 25 and has been serving a 46-year mandatory minimum term, according to court records.
Prosecutors say Ciony Kirkman and six other teens were in the minivan in April 2016 in Trenton when authorities said the suspect shot at the vehicle. Kirkman, 16, was struck in the head and died a few days later. A jury convicted the defendant of murder, attempted murder and assault with a firearm after an eight-day trial in 2018.
The appeals court said numerous errors in the testimony of the lead detective deprived the defendant of a fair trial. The judges also expressed concerns about initial recordings of two witnesses identifying the shooter, saying one recordin appears to indicate that another detective had spoken to them before the recording started.
The appeals court also said the defense at the waiver hearing didn’t submit evidence of disabilities that might have kept the case out of adult court.
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Austrian court restarts US extradition proceedings for Ukrainian
Headline Legal News |
2023/06/17 18:22
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An Austrian court said Friday that it has ruled in favor of Ukrainian businessman Dymitro Firtash in a years-long legal saga over a U.S. bid to have him extradited to face corruption charges, sending the extradition case back to square one.
Firtash faces a U.S. indictment accusing him of a conspiracy to pay bribes in India to mine titanium, which is used in jet engines. He denies any wrongdoing.
He was arrested in Austria in 2014 and then freed on 125 million euros ($136 million) bail, kicking off a still-unresolved legal saga. A Vienna court initially ruled against extradition on the grounds that the indictment was politically motivated.
A higher court in February 2017 rejected that reasoning as “insufficiently substantiated” and ruled that Firtash could be extradited. Austria’s Supreme Court of Justice upheld that ruling in 2019.
The country’s justice minister at the time approved the extradition, but a Vienna court judge ruled it could only take place after a decision on a defense call to reopen the case. Firtash backed that June 2019 motion with “numerous documents, including written witness statements,” Vienna’s upper state court said.
In March 2022, a Vienna court ruled against reopening the case. But the upper state court said Friday that it has now ruled in favor of Firtash and decided to allow reopening extradition proceedings, overturning the 2017 ruling. It pointed to new evidence.
Judges in Vienna will now have to consider anew whether Firtash can be sent to the United States.
In June 2019, a Chicago federal judge rejected a motion to dismiss the indictment against Firtash, who has argued that the U.S. has no jurisdiction over crimes in India. However, the judge ruled that it does, because any scheme would have impacted a Chicago-based company.
American aviation company Boeing, based in Chicago, has said it considered business with Firtash but never followed through. It is not accused of any wrongdoing.
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Federal court sides with lobster fishers in whale protection case
Attorney News |
2023/06/16 01:23
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A federal appeals court has sided with commercial fishermen who say proposed restrictions aimed at saving a vanishing species of whale could put them out of business.
The fishermen harvest lobsters and crabs off New England and oppose tough new restrictions on the way they fish that are intended to protect the North Atlantic right whale. The whale numbers only about 340 in the world and it’s vulnerable to lethal entanglement in fishing gear.
The fishermen and the state of Maine appealed their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit after losing in a lower court. The appeals court said Friday it disagreed with the lower court’s ruling.
The appeals court ruling could mean that the federal government must take another stab at crafting new rules to protect the whales. The restrictions would limit where lobster fishers can fish and what kind of gear they can use to try to prevent the whales from becoming entangled in fishing ropes.
The changes would represent a potential worst-case scenario for the lobster fishing industry, wrote Douglas H. Ginsburg, the senior judge of the appeals court, in Friday’s ruling.
“The result may be great physical and human capital destroyed, and thousands of jobs lost, with all the degradation that attends such dislocations,” Ginsburg wrote.
The fishers sued the National Marine Fisheries Service, an arm of the federal government. The service declined to comment on the lawsuit.
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Supreme Court rules in favor of Black Alabama voters
Headline Legal News |
2023/06/12 21:41
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The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting a Republican-led effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh aligned with the court’s liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black. The state now will have to draw a new map for next year’s elections.
The decision was keenly anticipated for its potential effect on control of the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives. Because of the ruling, new maps are likely in Alabama and Louisiana that could allow Democratic-leaning Black voters to elect their preferred candidates in two more congressional districts.
The outcome was unexpected in that the court had allowed the challenged Alabama map to be used for the 2022 elections, and in arguments last October the justices appeared willing to make it harder to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as section 2. But on Thursday, Roberts wrote that the court was declining “to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests.”
Roberts also was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021. |
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Texas court dismisses GOP donor’s defamation lawsuit
Legal Business |
2023/06/11 04:40
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A Texas appeals court on Friday dismissed a billionaire’s defamation lawsuit against Democrat Beto O’Rouke that was brought after O’Rourke criticized a $1 million campaign contribution to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
The ruling by the Third Court of Appeals in Austin comes more than a year after O’Rourke repeatedly made critical remarks about the donation during a failed run for governor, at one point saying that it “looks like a bribe to me.”
The contribution came from Kelcy Warren, chairman of pipeline company Energy Transfer, which reported about $2.4 billion in earnings related to the catastrophic February 2021 winter storm that sent natural gas prices soaring in Texas.
Warren, a major Republican donor, accused O’Rourke of trying to humiliate him and discourage other Abbott supporters from making campaign donations.
In the court’s opinion, Chief Justice Darlene Byrne wrote that a reasonable person would view O’Rourke’s statements as “the type of rhetorical hyperbole that is commonplace in political campaigns.”
Dean Pamphilis, an attorney for Warrren, said the decision would be appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.
Abbott’s campaign said at the time that it was not involved in the lawsuit. The governor went on to easily beat O’Rourke and win a third term.
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Southern Indiana man bolts from courtroom before capture
Legal Topics |
2023/06/07 17:08
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A man sentenced to 200 days in jail for a probation violation bolted from a southern Indiana courtroom and tried to escape before two shocks from a stun gun brought him down, police said.
Trevin Littlejohn, 35, of Columbus, faces a new charge of resisting law enforcement following the episode Monday.
After Littlejohn was read his sentence, he declared he would not go to jail and fled from the courtroom, using chairs to obstruct an officer in the court, said Sgt. Dane Duke of the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department.
Littlejohn escaped the grasp of another officer and was shocked with a stun gun but kept going, fleeing down a flight of stairs before a second shock floored him, Duke said. Officers then placed him in handcuffs.
After being treated at a hospital, Littlejohn was lodged in the Bartholomew County Jail in Columbus.
Littlejohn’s attorney J. Grant Tucker said he had no comment on the incident.
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Federal appeals court overturns 1991 death sentence in Fresno double murder
Legal Business |
2023/06/02 17:04
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A federal appeals court in a rare move overturned the death sentence of a man who was convicted of robbing and killing two people in Fresno in 1988, saying prosecutors knowingly presented false testimony from a key witness.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in its Wednesday ruling upheld Colin Dickey’s robbery conviction and said prosecutors could decide whether to retry him for murder. Dickey remains in prison.
“This is an exceptional case in which the prosecutor deliberately elicited, and then failed to correct, false and misleading testimony from the State’s star witness,” the court said in a ruling overturning Dickey’s 1991 death sentence.
The Fresno County prosecutor elicited the testimony from key witness Gene Buchanan, who told the jury he had not met with prosecutors or accepted any benefits from them. In fact, the court said, they had met a dozen times during the investigation, and the district attorney’s office had dismissed drug charges against him and helped him collect a $5,000 reward for implicating Dickey, one of his roommates.
Dickey was convicted in the murders of two neighbors, Marie Caton, 76, and Louis Freiri, 67, who were beaten and stabbed to death in November 1988 at Caton’s home in Fresno, where Freiri was a boarder, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Both Dickey and Buchanan lived with Caton’s grandson, Richard Cullumber, who according to witnesses was a drug user who frequently requested money from Caton. Five days after the attack, the court said, Cullumber fled police in a car, said he had “killed a woman,” was cornered after a high-speed chase and shot himself to death.
According to another roommate, Dickey said he had gone to Caton’s house with Cullumber to help him get the money but had nothing to do with the killings. But Buchanan testified that Dickey told him he was at the scene of the attacks, saw Freiri lying with his head slumped down, and decided that “if you kill one you might as well kill them both.”
Buchanan’s testimony “was the centerpiece of the state’s case” and without his dubious statements, “the state’s case against Dickey was weak” and lacked any direct evidence of intent to kill, Judge Morgan Christen said in the 3-0 ruling.
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