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Perry's indictment in hands of top Texas criminal court
Legal Topics |
2015/11/20 05:55
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Attorneys for former Texas Gov. Rick Perry urged the state's highest criminal court Wednesday to dismiss felony abuse-of-power charges that the Republican blames in part for foiling his short-lived 2016 presidential run.
After two hours of arguments, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals gave no timetable for ruling whether Perry should face trial in the case that has dragged on since August 2014 — about five times longer than his second unsuccessful White House bid.
Perry didn't attend the crowded hearing in a courtroom behind his old Texas Capitol office, but his high-powered lawyers told judges that enough was enough.
"The danger of allowing a prosecutor to do this is mind-boggling," Perry attorney David Botsford said.
Perry is accused of misusing his power in 2013 when he vetoed funding for local prosecutors after Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, an elected Democrat, refused calls to resign following a drunken driving arrest. He was indicted a year later by a grand jury in liberal Austin and faces up to life in prison if convicted.
Perry has denounced the charges as a partisan attack. But in a lively back-and-forth with an eight-judge panel, all but one of whom is an elected Republican, Perry's legal team didn't raise claims of political retribution and instead framed the veto as a rightful constitutional power.
Special prosecutors say that's for a trial to determine — and not for the court to settle now. Judges met that with a tone of skepticism, with Republican Judge Kevin Yeary pressing at one point whether going through with a trial would be "wasting everyone's time."
Perry was originally indicted on two counts, but a lower court has already thrown out the other charge of coercion of a public servant. Prosecutors are asking the court to not only order a trial on the remaining charge but also reinstate the other one.
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Supreme Court considers if Pistorius guilty of murder
Legal Topics |
2015/11/04 16:24
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South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal grilled Oscar Pistorius' attorney and a prosecutor on Tuesday as it weighed whether to convict him of murder for killing his girlfriend, uphold a lower court's manslaughter conviction or order a retrial.
Prosecutors say the North Gauteng High Court erred in convicting Pistorius of the lesser charge, and that the double-amputee Olympian should have known that someone could be killed when he fired four times into a locked toilet cubicle in his home. In the trial last year, prosecutors said Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp as she sought shelter in the toilet cubicle during an argument on Valentine's Day 2013. The defense said Pistorius opened fire because he thought an intruder was about to burst out of the toilet.
One of the five appeals court judges noted during the session on Tuesday, broadcast across the country and around the world on live TV, that Pistorius could still be convicted of murder even if he didn't think it was Steenkamp in the cubicle but knew someone was in there. Under the concept of dolus eventualis in South African law, a person can be convicted of murder if they foresaw the possibility of someone dying through their actions and went ahead anyway.
"If you look at the photographs, there's room behind there for a toilet bowl and a person and just about nothing else," Justice Lorimer Leach said to defense lawyer Barry Roux. "There's nowhere to hide. It would be a miracle if you didn't shoot someone."
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Federal court programs aim to keep defendants out of prison
Legal Topics |
2015/10/19 21:31
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Angelique Chacon had emotionally girded herself to spend six years behind bars for selling methamphetamine when her attorney gave her a way out — a new rehabilitation program in U.S.
District Court in Los Angeles that might allow her to avoid prison.
Chacon, 31, a former methamphetamine user herself, accepted the pre-trial offer, got a part-time job, took classes at a technical school and graduated from the rehab program last year
with a sentence of probation instead of prison.
"I'm a totally different person," she said. "I'm sober. I'm more involved with my family. I'm really there mentally."
Chacon is among hundreds of federal defendants accused of low-level crimes such as smuggling or selling small amounts of drugs who have avoided prison time in recent years with the
help of court programs that focus on rehabilitation. Many of the programs offer counseling and treatment for addictions.
About a dozen federal district courts across the country have so-called pre-trial diversion programs — most launched within the past five years. The federal court system in California also
has such a program in San Diego and is getting ready to launch another in San Francisco.
"The trend has really taken off," said Mark Sherman, an assistant director with the Federal Judicial Center, the research and education agency of the federal judiciary. "There's a hunger in
our system to engage in meaningful criminal justice work, and this is one way of doing it."
Many of the programs function like state drug courts, where defendants with substance abuse problems receive treatment and counseling. Still others focus on young defendants with no
requirement that they have drug addictions. Regardless, judges, prosecutors and pre-trial service officers say the goals are the same: To help people overcome obstacles that contributed
to their crimes and save money by keeping them out of prison.
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Suspect in some Phoenix freeway shootings pleads not guilty
Legal Topics |
2015/10/09 16:00
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A man accused in some of the freeway shootings that put Phoenix drivers on edge for weeks pleaded not guilty Thursday as his defense lawyers questioned the strength of the evidence against him.
Attorneys for Leslie Allen Merritt Jr., 21, who was arraigned on 15 felony counts, including aggravated assault and carrying out a drive-by shooting, said outside court that the investigation by state police does not place him at the shooting scenes.
"We're going to work diligently to make sure that we investigate this fully, and we believe in his innocence," said Ulises Ferragut, one of Merritt's two attorneys.
Ferragut and attorney Jason Lamm also cited investigators' evolving timeline of the shootings. They plan to do their own investigation, looking into another person possibly admitting responsibility for any of the 11 shootings, Lamm said. They didn't identify that person or provide details.
"It's very, very early in the game to get hard confirmation on that," Lamm said.
Department of Public Safety investigators used ballistics tests to tie Merritt to four of the 11 shootings that occurred on Phoenix-area freeways between Aug. 22 and Sept. 10.
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Court strikes down possible payments to college athletes
Legal Topics |
2015/10/01 04:00
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A federal appeals court agreed Wednesday that the NCAA's use of college athletes' names, images and likenesses in video games and TV broadcasts violated antitrust laws but struck down a plan to allow schools to pay players up to $5,000.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the NCAA could not stop schools from providing full scholarships to student athletes but vacated a proposal for deferred cash payments.
"The difference between offering student-athletes education-related compensation and offering them cash sums untethered to educational expenses is not minor; it is a quantum leap," Judge Jay Bybee wrote. "Once that line is crossed, we see no basis for returning to a rule of amateurism and no defined stopping point."
A statement from NCAA President Mark Emmert said the organization agrees with the court that "allowing students to be paid cash compensation of up to $5,000 per year was erroneous."
"Since Aug. 1, the NCAA has allowed member schools to provide up to full cost of attendance; however, we disagree that it should be mandated by the courts," he said. |
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Court tosses Chicago inmate's $10M suit for escape
Legal Topics |
2015/09/26 03:59
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An inmate who escaped from a high-rise federal jail in Chicago has an unusual theory on who's to blame: He says the government was negligent in enabling the breakout, so he sued for $10 million for damages.
The 7th U.S. Court of Appeals said in a Friday ruling that Jose Banks "gets credit for chutzpah." But a three-judge panel at the Chicago-based court tossed his 2014 lawsuit.
"No one has a personal right to be better guarded or more securely restrained, so as to be unable to commit a crime," the ruling said.
In a 2012 jailbreak, Banks and a cellmate rappelled 17 stories down on a rope fashioned from bed sheets and dental floss, then hailed a cab. Banks, now 40, was caught within days and his cellmate within weeks.
Banks' suit says the damages he suffered from the escape included the trauma of dangling on the makeshift rope in fear of his life.
Authorities dropped the escape charges against him because he was going to prison for decades anyway on a bank robbery conviction.
But Banks, who represented himself in the civil case, alleged his cellmate forced him to participate in the escape, which took months to plan and execute. His suit says guards should have noticed the two were chiseling an escape hole in their cell and should have stopped them long before they fled.
Banks says he has had to endure tighter restrictions than fellow inmates at his current prison because of the escape from the Metropolitan Correctional Center three years ago.
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Indiana's high court to consider State Fair stage collapse
Legal Topics |
2015/09/24 04:47
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The Indiana Supreme Court is set to consider whether the state is responsible for some of the legal damages faced by a company that supplied stage rigging that collapsed at a state fair event in 2011, killing seven people.
The justices are scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday in the state's appeal of a March Court of Appeals ruling involving Mid-America Sound Corp.
That ruling found Indiana might be responsible for some legal damages faced by Mid-America, after high winds toppled the stage rigging onto fans awaiting the start of a concert by country duo Sugarland in August 2011.
Mid-America contends the state is financially responsible by contract for the cost of its defense and any judgments against it.
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