Court Digest

Kentucky
Senate votes to make it a crime to taunt police
FRANKFORT, Ky (AP) — It could become a crime to taunt a police officer in Kentucky, under a bill that passed the state Senate on Thursday.

The measure was filed months after Louisville, the state’s largest city, became the site of huge protests in the wake of the police killing of Breonna Taylor. The bill passed the Republican-dominated Senate 22-11 and now awaits House input.

Under the legislation, anyone who “accosts, insults, taunts, or challenges a law enforcement officer with offensive or derisive words, or by gestures or other physical contact, that would have a direct tendency to provoke a violent response” would be guilty of a misdemeanor and face up to 90 days in jail and fines.

The proposal also increases penalties for rioting. For instance, those charged with rioting would be required to be held for a minimum of 48 hours. Another provision would criminalize aiming “a light, a laser pointer, an activated horn or other noise-making device towards the head” of a first responder.

Several Republican senators who voted against the bill shared concerns that some parts of it would violate First Amendment rights and strain the judicial system. Nevertheless, they signaled support for the bill if some parts of it were amended in the House.

State Sen. Danny Carroll, a Republican who sponsored the bill, said he filed the proposal in response to last summer’s Louisville protests against police brutality and racial injustice. Demonstrations — some of which turned violent — were a frequent occurrence, as protesters called for charges to be brought against the officers involved in Taylor’s death. Many gathered peacefully in Jefferson Square Park in downtown Louisville for weeks. Dubbed “Injustice Square” by protesters, it became an impromptu hub during months of demonstrations.

Taylor, a Black woman, was shot in her Louisville home multiple times by police during a botched drug raid. A grand jury indicted one officer on wanton endangerment charges in September for shooting into a neighbor’s apartment, but no officers were charged in connection with her death.

Police had a no-knock warrant but said they knocked and announced their presence before entering Taylor’s apartment, a claim some witnesses have disputed. No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment.

Republicans hold supermajorities in both the House and Senate.

Democratic lawmakers warned that the proposal could be used to unfairly target peaceful protesters. State Sen. Gerald Neal, a Democrat who represents Louisville, called the legislation “unnecessary” and “unreasonable.”
“This is a hammer on my district,” Neil said. “I personally resent it. This is beneath this body.”

Washington
Woman sentenced for concealing evidence in murders
EVERETT, Wash. (AP) — A Mukilteo woman must serve a year in prison for helping conceal evidence in a pair of torture murders in 2018, a Snohomish County judge ruled this week.

Anika St. Mary, 21, was the final defendant charged in the killings of Mohamed Adan, 21, and Ezekiel Kelly, 22, whose bodies were discovered in July 2018. St. Mary helped clean blood from the back of a Saturn sedan, where both young men were tortured in separate abductions hours apart, the Everett Herald reported.

Yet St. Mary “acted shocked” when detectives told her Kelly was dead, and she asserted that her then-boyfriend, Hassani Hassani, had been home the entire night of July 2, when in truth her boyfriend and his friend, Anthony Hernandez-Cano, kidnapped and murdered Kelly, according to charging papers.

St. Mary’s plea deal called for no prison time if she served what’s known as a parenting sentencing alternative. She is the mother of two young children.

Snohomish County Superior Court Judge George Appel rejected the agreement, citing her troubling “lack of insight” about herself, while noting she reportedly gave up the primary caretaker role for her second child within days of birth in 2020.

Prosecutors held off on filing formal charges against St. Mary until September 2020. She pleaded guilty to first-degree rendering criminal assistance.

Hernandez-Cano is serving a life sentence for two counts of aggravated murder. St. Mary’s then-boyfriend, Hassani Hassani, 22, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder with a firearm and first-degree kidnapping. A Snohomish County judge sentenced him to 35 years behind bars.

Illinois
Cartel figures accused in plot to bring cocaine into Chicago
CHICAGO (AP) — Five alleged members of a Mexican drug cartel have been charged in Chicago with conspiracy to transport cocaine into the city in 2018, the U.S. attorney’s office announced Thursday.

Three of those charged are believed to be in Mexico, but Louis Reyes Velez was arrested earlier this week in Cicero. Prosecutors say Velez was in Chicago in 2018 to arrange the $2.5 million cocaine shipment by the Sinaloa cartel, unware two of the people he was dealing with were working with federal law enforcement.

Also in custody is Roberto Velazquez Martinez, 36, who was extradited to Chicago last year after being arrested in Peru. A criminal complaint filed in Chicago alleges he masterminded the narcotics transaction, which involved flying about 375 kilograms of cocaine via private jet from Honduras to Mexico. Corrupt police officers were to escort the shipment to the U.S. border, court records show.

Informants working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration recorded meetings with Martinez in Honduras in November 2018 where he allegedly bragged about being connected to top cartel bosses, according to the complaint against him.

“I work with a friend who is the third most wanted (by the DEA),” Martinez allegedly said, according to the complaint. “First was El Chapo, then the second, and he is the third.”

In addition to Martinez and Velez, 44, of Stickney, others charged with conspiracy were identified as Camilo Alvarez, 44, of Durango, Mexico; Jose Hernandez Ramirez, 36, of Tamaulipas, Mexico; Ines Chavez Rodriguez, 36, of Santiago Papasquiaro, Mexico.

New Hampshire
Woman’s claim of firing over breastfeeding remains dismissed
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The New Hampshire Supreme Court was split 2-2 Friday over a woman’s nearly nine-year battle to challenge her firing from the state Department of Health and Human Services over breastfeeding, meaning a lower court’s decision to dismiss her case stands.

When the court heard the case in January 2020, it lacked a fifth member after its chief justice stepped down the previous summer. Former Attorney General Gordon MacDonald was sworn in as chief justice last week, well over a year after the case was argued.

“I wasn’t expecting a tie,” said Kate Frederick, who has since worked on legislation in New Hampshire strengthening breastfeeding rights. She added, “It’s telling women and families, ‘New Hampshire, we don’t even acknowledge you, we don’t even care about your issues, we’re not going to decide this.’”

Last year, a lawyer for Frederick argued before the state Supreme Court that she was wrongfully discharged from her job in 2012.

Frederick had worked as a child support officer in the department’s office in Conway and was fired that September over, she said, whether, when and where she could breastfeed her newborn son, Devon, now 8.

The department said Frederick was terminated after she failed to return to work after exhausting her leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Frederick, who now lives in Strafford, Vermont, filed a wrongful discharge lawsuit against the department in 2014 in federal court. Her case was dismissed in 2017 after a judge ruled that the department was immune from the lawsuit.

Frederick refiled her lawsuit in the New Hampshire Superior Court in 2018, and the department challenged it again. A judge initially ruled that the case should go forward. The state moved for reconsideration. A judge ended up dismissing the lawsuit, saying it was barred by a three-year statute of limitations.

The attorney general’s office also argued that as a state employee protected by a collective bargaining agreement, Frederick would not have the ability to bring such a claim. It said she was limited in her remedies to asking her union to file grievances and to bringing a charge of unfair labor practices before the state Public Employee Relations Board.

“In this case, the court is evenly divided,” the state Supreme Court wrote in its ruling Friday. “Two members of the court agree that the plaintiff’s claim should be dismissed; two members of the court would reverse the trial court’s dismissal and remand for further proceedings.”

In such a situation, the court follows the practice established by the U.S. Supreme Court that “the judgment of the court below therefore stands in full force,” the decision said.

Frederick’s lawyer, Benjamin King, said in a statement, “No avenue exists for further appeal. Disappointingly, a jury will never determine whether the State Department of Health and Human Services acted illegally when it fired Kate for insisting on the right to breastfeed her infant during the workday, because her infant depended on breastfeeding for his nutrition.”

Frederick is a student at the Vermont Law School, where she worked on a policy advancing breastfeeding rights on campus. In New Hampshire, she founded the New Hampshire Breastfeeding Rights Coalition, worked on several bills and testified at legislative hearings this year on the protection of breastfeeding from discriminatory employee practices. She has authored a guide for legislators on pregnancy and lactation rights in the workplace.

Vermont
High court upholds conviction in wrong-way crash death of 5
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — The Vermont Supreme Court on Friday upheld the conviction of the man who drove the wrong-way on Interstate 89 in Richmond in 2016, killing five teenagers.

The court rejected the argument by attorneys for Steven Bourgoin that prosecutors had failed to prove he intended to kill the teenagers and that the trial court admitted undisclosed testimony at the trial.

“We conclude that this evidence was sufficient for the jury to find that defendant knowingly disregarded his subjective awareness of the very high risk of death or serious bodily injury that his actions posed to other persons driving on the interstate at that time,” said the decision, written by Associate Justice Harold Eaton.

Bourgoin was convicted in 2019 of five counts of second-degree murder for the 2016 crash that killed five teenagers from the Mad River Valley. He was sentenced to 26-years-to-life in prison.

Prosecutors had argued that Bourgoin had a history of intense anger issues and intentionally drove the wrong way in a fit of rage. His defense attorneys argued he was insane at the time of the crash and he was under the delusion that he was carrying out a secret mission for the government.

The crash killed Mary Harris, 16, of Moretown; Cyrus Zschau, 16, of Moretown; Liam Hale, 16, of Fayston; Janie Cozzi, 15, of Fayston; and Eli Brookens, 16, of Waterbury. Four of the teenagers attended Harwood Union High School in Duxbury. Cozzi attended Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire.

Nebraska
Omaha man’s postconviction appeal rejected by high court
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday rejected the postconviction appeal of an Omaha man serving life in prison for the 2017 shooting death of another man.

Malik Stelly had argued in his appeal that a lower court wrongly rejected his appeal without first holding an evidentiary hearing. But the state’s high court agreed with the lower court that Stelly’s claims of prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective representation by his trial and appeal lawyers were either filed too late to consider or lacked factual evidence and had already been proven wrong in court.

Stelly was convicted of first-degree murder for the Jan. 11, 2017, shooting death of 28-year-old D’Angelo Branch in northeast Omaha.

Prosecutors had said the shooting was particularly callus, noting that Stelly did not know Branch, who was described as developmentally disabled. Prosecutors said Stelly was carrying out “target practice” in shooting Branch.