Court Digest

Connecticut
Court rejects appeal of killer of 3 in home invasion

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — The Connecticut Supreme Court rejected the appeal of a man convicted of murder, sexual assault and other crimes in the killings of a woman and her two daughters, ages 11 and 17, in a 2007 home invasion.

Justices issued a 7-0 decision Monday upholding the convictions against Joshua Komisarjevsky. He appealed on several arguments including that the state’s failure to move his trial out of New Haven to counter pretrial publicity denied him a fair trial.

Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes are serving life prison sentences for the killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters, 11-year-old Michaela and 17-year-old Hayley, in their Cheshire home. Hawke-Petit’s husband, Dr. William Petit, now a state representative, was severely beaten but survived the attack.

The two paroled burglars broke into the family’s suburban home in the middle of the night and terrorized them for hours. They forced Hawke-Petit to go to a bank the next morning and withdraw $15,000. Back at the house, Hayes strangled Hawke-Petit and the girls were tied to their beds when the intruders set the house on fire. The girls died of smoke inhalation. Hawke-Petit and Michaela were also sexually assaulted.

The crimes and their viciousness drew worldwide attention, drawing comparisons to the 1959 killings portrayed in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and becoming the subjects of TV shows, documentaries and books.

Both Komisarjevsky and Hayes were sentenced to death, but the punishments were changed to life in prison without the possibility of release after Connecticut abolished the death penalty in 2015.

Komisarjevsky’s appeal also claimed the state failed to disclose evidence, placed him in unconstitutionally strict prison conditions and failed to correct false expert testimony against him.

Alamogordo man loses high court appeal of murder conviction

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — An Alamogordo man serving life in prison for murder and other crimes has lost an appeal.

The New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the convictions Monday of Robert “Bob” Chavez in the 2011 killing of a man whose body was later burned.

Chavez’s attorneys had argued he should not have been tried in 2019 jointly with Matias Loza, who pleaded guilty to murder and other charges.

The state’s highest court unanimously found that a joint trial did not impact Chavez’s civil rights or his defense.

Prosecutors say Chavez, his brother Joe and Loza ran a drug-trafficking gang called the AZ Boys. It originated in the Phoenix area but they moved to Alamogordo.

All three were implicated in the death of Richard Valdez. According to prosecutors, Valdez was killed the day after an altercation at a restaurant. Chavez’s nephew testified he helped his uncle and Loza beat Valdez before Loza shot him to death. Valdez’s body was then set on fire inside a car. The nephew admitted that Chavez gave him matches to start the blaze. Other evidence included a recorded conversation of Chavez talking about a plan to kill the victim.

The Chavez brothers and Loza were also indicted in 2019 in the 2009 execution-style slayings of Max Griego Jr. and his girlfriend, Mary Hudson Gutierrez.

Arizona
Attorney General sues over Biden’s border policies

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona’s top state prosecutor sued the Biden administration Monday over what he calls “environmentally disruptive” decisions to halt border wall construction and change immigration policies.

The lawsuit filed by Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich in federal court in Arizona against officials in Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration says the reversals of previous policies violate the National Environmental Protection Act.

“Defendants have embarked on multiple environmentally disruptive policies without performing even cursory environmental analysis,” the lawsuit says.

The filing asks the U.S. District Court for now to void decisions to halt border wall construction and the “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring asylum seekers to wait south of the border for while their claims are processed.

Customs and Border Protection and the other U.S. agencies named in the suit do not comment on pending litigation.

It’s the latest example of how Brnovich and other conservative state officials are pushing back against Biden’s changes in the previous administration’s hardline policies.

Brian Segee, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the lawsuit “political grandstanding and an insult to border communities, wildlife and wild lands.”

The center is among environmental groups that opposed the wall.

“If Arizona’s attorney general truly cared about the environment he would’ve sued the Trump administration for ignoring environmental laws and tried to stop these destructive walls from being built,” Segee said.

Ohio
US court lifts hold on Down syndrome abortion law

A divided federal appeals court lifted the hold Tuesday on an Ohio law that prohibits doctors from performing abortions based on a fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome, a case considered nationally pivotal.

Judges of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals narrowly ruled to reverse a lower court’s stay on the 2017 law that was based on the likely success of overturning it as unconstitutional.

A majority of the court, which has moved rightward in recent years with six appointments by former President Donald Trump, said the law doesn’t impede a woman’s right to an abortion.

The majority said Planned Parenthood and several other abortion providers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union erred in basing their case on a woman’s “absolute right” to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, because that right is neither absolute nor germane to the case.

“In this case, Ohio does not rely on its interest in protecting potential fetal life,” the ruling said. Its interests in passing the law, instead, were to protect the Down syndrome community from “the stigma it suffers from the practice of Down-syndrome-selective abortions,” to protect women who suspect Down syndrome from coerced abortions and to protect the medical community from unethical doctors, they wrote.

The majority characterized dissenting judges who contend the law is intended to prevent abortions for their “hammer-on-anvil pounding.”

The ACLU had sued the state health department, state medical board and county prosecutors in 2018 on behalf of abortion providers, arguing the law infringes on a woman’s constitutional right to a procedure that is legal. The state argued the law does not ban the procedure but instead regulates doctors.

The 2017 law had been put on hold while the legal challenge is decided. It is one of several Ohio abortion restrictions tied up in court.

During a rare hearing before the entire 16-judge panel in March 2020, Jessie Hill, an attorney for the ACLU of Ohio, argued that the Down syndrome law unconstitutionally seeks to take “the ultimate decision” on abortion away from the woman.

This and similar proposals around the country have triggered emotional debate over women’s rights, parental love, and the trust between doctor and patient.

Hill said the law would “cut off communication between a woman and her doctor.”

Ohio Solicitor General Ben Flowers said the law seeks to prevent abortions that target and discriminate against those with Down syndrome, which would send them a message that people including some medical providers “do not think people like you are as valuable as others.”

That argument dovetailed with the contentions of anti-abortion groups, including Ohio Right to Life, which labeled the law an “anti-discrimination” measure during legislative debate.

Abortion rights groups were joined by some parents of children with Down syndrome in opposing that argument. They claimed the law was using the genetic disorder to gain sympathy for a new restriction. They call the law a “reason ban” that attempts to get into an abortion seeker’s decision-making process, which they argue is illegal.

In legal filings, attorneys for the government contend that the sidelined law does not infringe on a woman’s constitutional rights because it “does not prohibit any abortions at all.”

Dissenting judges rejected that notion outright.

“I will call it what it is: the long-arm of the state — wielding the threat of a class-four felony — forcefully reaching into a profoundly intimate conversation between doctor and patient and telling the patient to be silent about her medical history or worse, purposefully lie about it,” Judge Bernice Donald wrote in a dissent.

In his dissent, Judge Guy Cole wrote that the majority’s insistence that “the issue is not really about a woman’s right to an abortion” because its ban “merely restricts the information and opinions a woman may share with her doctor” is an “attempt to sidestep one constitutional problem” involving abortion rights that “only lands it in another” involving free speech.

The law specifically prohibits physicians from performing an abortion if they’re aware that a diagnosis of Down syndrome, or the possibility of such a diagnosis, is influencing the decision. Doctors could face a fourth-degree felony charge, be stripped of their medical license, and be held liable for legal damages. The pregnant woman faces no criminal liability under the law.

Alexander Maugeri, an attorney for then-President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, told the judges during oral arguments that the “Ohio law serves an important purpose” and lets people with Down syndrome know they “have lives that are worth living.”

Missouri
State on hook for $138K in legal fees

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri is on the hook for nearly $138,000 in legal fees and expenses after an appeals court upheld a ruling that the state “knowingly and purposefully” violated the open records law.

The Missouri Court of Appeals agreed with a judge’s finding that the state ran afoul of the Sunshine Law when the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services sought to charge a genealogy research group nearly $1.5 million for state birth and death records dating to 1910, KCUR-FM reported.

The dispute stems from open records request in early 2016 by Reclaim the Records, a California-based nonprofit whose mission is to make public records available online for genealogical and historical researchers. Reclaim the Records and its founder, Brooke Schreier Ganz, sued, claiming that even a revised $5,174 fee for the records was excessive.

The Missouri Attorney General’s Office declined comment.

Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia S. Joyce ruled that Missouri had violated the Sunshine Law and ordered it to pay $12,000 in penalties plus legal fees and expenses. In upholding her decision, the appeals court found that the attorneys’ fees sought by the group were not unreasonable.

The case will not only make a trove of records available to genealogy and history researchers, but also will enable medical researchers, epidemiologists, journalists and others to compare death records in 2020, the year the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States, with those of earlier years.