Court Digest

Georgia
Court rules governor naming judge was legal, no election needed
WAYNESBORO, Ga. (AP) — A court has ruled that Gov. Brian Kemp legally appointed a former state senator as a superior court judge, rejecting a lawsuit by an attorney who said there should have been an election and that Kemp waited too long.

Senior Judge Michael Karpf ruled Thursday that Jesse Stone can remain a judge in the Augusta Judicial Circuit.

Former judge Michael Annis retired in Febuary 2020, but the Republican governor didn’t name Stone to the bench until Feb. 21 of this year.

Lawyer Maureen Floyd filed suit in Burke County claiming that Kemp had waited too long because Annis’ term expired at the end of 2020.

Karpf ruled that Kemp had not violated the state constitution’s requirement that Kemp fill the vacancy “promptly” and wrote that it didn’t matter that Annis’ term had run out because previous caselaw stated that judicial terms of office are eliminated when judges resign.

The judge also rejected Floyd’s claims that Kemp manipulated the appointment process to give Stone a longer period in office before he had to face voters.

Karpf noted that Stone will face voters in a nonpartisan election next year, the same time he would have gone before voters even if Kemp had appointed him in February 2020, because state law requires at least a six-month delay before an appointed judge faces voters. Judicial elections generally take place in May, not on the November ballot that includes partisan elected officials.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled last year that Kemp had not violated state law when he appointed a successor to resigning Justice Keith Blackwell. The justice announced his resignation in February, but did not make it effective until Nov. 18, six weeks before his term expired. The decision prompted heated dissents that said it invited abuse of the system by letting judges resign late in their terms without a competitive election to replace them. Sitting judges rarely lose election bids in Georgia.


Washington
Man sentenced to 70 years in fatal  shooting of man
VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — The primary defendant in the April 2017 beating and fatal shooting of a man at a Hockinson property was sentenced Friday to about 70 years in prison.

A Clark County Superior Court jury found Neil Alway guilty last month of first- and second-degree murder, and two counts each of kidnapping and robbery in the death of Raymond C. Brandon, The Columbian reported.

Three co-defendants who agreed to testify against Alway at trial were sentenced earlier. John West and Traci Mendez received about 18 years for second-degree murder, and Ashley Wideman received a suspended sentence and credit for time served for unlawful imprisonment and rendering criminal assistance.

A fourth co-defendant, Ashley Barry, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced in 2019 to about 13 years in prison.

Prosecutors say Alway and West were beating Brandon when Alway decided to kill him.

Mendez had conspired with the others to lure Brandon, 34, and his girlfriend, Allison Fields, to her residence to settle a debt over a Subaru Forester that Brandon was driving, according to prosecutors.

The couple arrived on the morning of April 20, 2017, and were ambushed by the group.

Brandon was attacked and fatally shot in the chest. Fields was forced to stay with the group or risk being killed herself, court records say.

Afterward, Mendez drove the group and Fields in her SUV to a farm and Fields eventually escaped, court records say.

Defense attorney Tony Lowe told the court Alway went to trial because he did not commit Brandon’s murder and he plans to appeal.

California
First Latino justice on state’s high court dies
OROVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Cruz Reynoso, a son of migrant workers who worked in the fields as a child and went on to become the first Latino state Supreme Court justice in California history, has died. He was 90.
Reynoso died Friday at an elder care facility in Oroville, according to his son Rondall Reynoso. The cause of death was not disclosed.

In a legal career that spanned six decades, Reynoso played a prominent role in the movement to uplift the poorest workers in California, especially farmworkers from Mexico like his parents, and guided many minority students toward the law.

As director of California Rural Legal Assistance — the first statewide, federally funded legal aid program in the country — in the late 1960s he led efforts to ensure farmworkers’ access to sanitation facilities in the fields and to ban the use of the carcinogenic pesticide DDT.

One of the biggest cases won by CRLA while Reynoso was its director centered on Spanish-speaking students who were incorrectly assessed by their schools and placed into classes for the mentally challenged when, in reality, they were simply new English learners. The 1970 class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Latino students in the Monterey County town of Soledad ended the practice of giving Spanish-speaking students IQ tests in English.

After leaving CRLA in 1972, Reynoso taught law before he was appointed to the state’s 3rd District Appellate Court in Sacramento. In 1982, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Reynoso to the state Supreme Court, the first Latino to be named to the state’s high court.

He earned respect for his compassion during his five years on the state Supreme Court but became the target of a recall campaign led by proponents of the death penalty who painted him, Chief Justice Rose Bird, and Associate Justice Joseph Grodin as being soft on crime. The three were removed in 1987.

After leaving the bench, he practiced and taught law at the University of California in Los Angeles and in Davis and served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 2000.

“Cruz Reynoso was a giant for the judiciary and the legal profession in California and across the country,” Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, a justice on the California Supreme Court, said in a statement.

“His accomplishments were as remarkable as his humility. His memory and deeds will continue to inspire so many of us across California and the rest of our country.”

Born in Brea on May 2, 1931, Reynoso was one of 11 children and spent summers with his family working the fields of the San Joaquin Valley.

After graduating from Pomona College in 1953, he served two years in the Army before attending law school at UC Berkeley.

He was married to Jeannene Reynoso for 52 years until her death in 2007. He married his second wife, Elaine Reynoso, in 2008. She died in 2017.

He is survived by four children and two stepchildren.

Kansas
Widow of lead plaintiff in landmark case turns 100
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The widow of the lead plaintiff in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that led to school desegregation has turned 100.

The Topeka Capital-Journal  reports that Leola Brown Montgomery celebrated her birthday on Friday.

Montgomery’s husband, Oliver Brown, became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit after attempting to enroll their daughter, Linda, in an all-white elementary school near the family’s Topeka home in 1951. Oliver Brown was told she had to instead attend the all-Black Monroe School two miles away.

As a result, the NAACP filed a legal challenge to segregated schooling in Kansas. Cases from the District of Columbia and three other states were consolidated into Brown v Board of Education.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1954 that “separate but equal” schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Oliver Brown died in 1961. Linda Brown died at age 75 in 2018.


Oregon
Judge nixes reduced Klamath River flows for sucker fish
KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. (AP) — A judge has ruled against the Klamath Tribes in a lawsuit that accuses federal regulators of violating the Endangered Species Act by letting water levels fall too low for sucker fish to spawn in a lake that also feeds an elaborate irrigation system along the Oregon-California border.

The ruling, reported  Friday by the Herald and News in Klamath Falls, comes as the region confronts one of the driest years in memory. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation last month announced that farmers who irrigate from its Klamath Project water-management area will get so little water that farming may not even be worthwhile this summer.

At the same time, the drought has brought to a head a conflict between the water needs of two protected fish species in the region after decades of instability. The Klamath Tribes consider the federally endangered sucker fish central to their creation story and culture, while the Yurok hold the federally threatened coho salmon in the lower Klamath River sacred and rely on them as a critical food source.

With scarce water in the Klamath Basin, the tribes are left to try to use the courts to secure enough of the precious liquid for the respective fish species.

The Klamath Tribes sued the bureau earlier this year, arguing it had violated the Endangered Species Act by allowing the Upper Klamath Lake to dip below a certain level in 2020 and 2021 that is necessary for successful sucker fish spawning.

The tribes asked the judge to order the bureau to reduce downriver water releases from the lake while the rest of the case worked through the courts, but U.S. District Judge Michael McShane declined. If granted, the order would have meant less water in the Klamath River to combat disease outbreaks downstream that are a huge concern for the Yurok and Karuk tribes and a threat to coho salmon.

The bureau argued it wasn’t liable for harm done to sucker fish this year because of the extreme drought and has no control over how much water enters Upper Klamath Lake in dry times.

“The Bureau cannot control the current hydrologic conditions; they can only work within these natural limitations,” McShane wrote. “The Bureau is not responsible for the unprecedented drought this year.”

Jay Weiner, the Klamath Tribes’ lawyer, said his clients were still reviewing the ruling and were not able to comment on the specifics.

The situation in the Klamath Basin was set in motion more than a century ago, when the U.S. government began drawing water from a network of shallow lakes and marshlands and funneling it into the dry desert uplands. Homesteads were offered by lottery to World War II veterans who grew hay, grain and potatoes and pastured cattle.

The project turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse — some of its potato farmers supply In ‘N Out burger — but permanently altered an intricate water system that spans hundreds of miles from southern Oregon to Northern California.

In 1988, two species of sucker fish were listed as endangered under federal law. Less than a decade later, coho salmon that spawn downstream from the reclamation project, in the lower Klamath River, were listed as threatened.

The water necessary to sustain the coho salmon downstream comes from Upper Klamath Lake — the main holding tank for the farmers’ irrigation system. The sucker fish in the same lake need at least 1 to 2 feet (30 to 60 centimeters) of water covering the gravel beds that they use as spawning grounds.

The salmon in the lower Klamath River periodically suffer from a disease outbreak because of lower-than-needed water flows. The Yurok Tribe says the river needs enough water flowing down it to “flush” out worms that host disease spores that infect and kill salmon.


California
Woman charged in alleged $6M Medicare fraud
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California woman faces criminal charges after she created fake home health care certifications leading to more than $6 million in fraudulent Medicare billings, federal authorities said.

Lilit Gagikovna Baltaian, 58, of Porter Ranch, was arrested Thursday after authorities said she fraudulently certified patients to receive care from four separate home health agencies — two in Glendale and two in Panorama City — between January 2012 to July 2018, the Daily News reported.

Police said the agencies would then file claims for reimbursement with Medicare for services that were not provided or unnecessary, and Baltaian would receive cash benefits from the home health agencies for the referrals. Authorities said Baltaian also submitted her own claims for reimbursement.

Physicians, registered nurses or qualified therapists can certify patients for home care from home health agencies if they are confined to their home because of illness or injury. The agencies file claims with Medicare for reimbursement.

Home health services could include changing wound dressings, giving injections or teaching patients’ family members to properly care for their loved one.

Prosecutors claim Baltaian and the home health agencies knew the certifications were false, or not necessary, before the agencies submitted claims to Medicare. Baltaian faces four charges of health care fraud and could receive up to 40 years in prison if convicted.

It was not immediately known how many claims were submitted by the agencies or if the agencies could face charges for their alleged involvement in the fraudulent scheme.