National Roundup

New Jersey
Authorities: Officer was running meth lab at his home

LONG BRANCH, N.J. (AP) — A domestic disturbance call at a veteran police officer’s home in a residential New Jersey town led to the discovery of a methamphetamine lab he was operating there, authorities said.

Christopher Walls, a 19-year veteran of the Long Branch force, was suspended without pay from his job following his arrest Saturday night. It wasn’t known Monday if he’s retained an attorney.

Police who had responded to the domestic disturbance call at the Long Branch home were told by someone there that Walls was operating the lab, according to the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office. A state police hazmat team responded and found equipment and substances commonly used to make meth in the home’s basement and in a shed on the property, along with books about making the drug, explosives and poison.

Authorities also found an open, unsecured gun safe with two long guns, four handguns, eight high-capacity magazines and ammunition inside. The safe was accessible to a child living in the home home, police said.

Walls, 50, was charged with maintaining or operating a narcotics production facility, manufacturing and possessing methamphetamine, risking widespread injury, child endangerment and a weapons charge.
He faces several decades in prison if convicted on all counts.

Nebraska
2 kids found dead, father arrested in California

BELLEVUE, Neb. (AP) — The father of two young children found dead in his eastern Nebraska home, where they had been staying for a court-ordered visitation with him, has been arrested four states away in California, police said.

Police in Bellevue, south of Omaha, said 5-year-old Emily Price and 3-year-old Theodore Price were found dead Sunday morning in 35-year-old Adam Price’s home, but he wasn’t there when the children were found.

Police have not said how the children died, but said the deaths were being treated as “suspicious.” Adam Price was arrested Sunday evening in Pacifica, near San Francisco, and he awaits extradition to Nebraska, police said.

He was held on a felony fugitive arrest warrant, but no charges had been logged into the online Nebraska court system as of Monday morning. It wasn’t immediately known if he had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf.

The children’s mother, Mary Nielsen, told reporters that she and Adam Price are in the process of getting divorced and that the children were at their father’s home for court-ordered visitation.

Nielsen, who had moved to Illinois with the children, called police more than once and went on social media to plead for information on her children’s whereabouts after not hearing from them since Thursday. Nielsen said her husband was under court order to provide her daily communication with the children during his visits.

Bellevue police twice went to Adam Price’s home — late Saturday night and early Sunday morning — at Nielsen’s request to check on the children, but left when no one answered the door. Bellevue police spokesman Capt. Andy Jashinske said in a news release that officers didn’t have sufficient reason to force an entry into the home.

A friend of Nielsen’s went to Price’s home around 11 a.m. Sunday at her request and went inside after finding the door unlocked. The friend called police after finding the children’s bodies.

Nielsen told  the Omaha World-Herald that her children had been “happy, sweet, loving,” and described Emily as exceptionally smart and Theodore as a typical little boy who liked playing with superheroes.

“I wish I could hold you one more time and tell you how much I love you,” she said in a Facebook post Monday. “Rest easy, my sweet babies.”


Texas
Ex-prosecutor disbarred after wrongful convictions

DALLAS (AP) — A former Dallas County prosecutor has surrendered his law license after the State Bar of Texas said he withheld evidence that led to the wrongful convictions of two men who spent 14 years in prison in the fatal stabbing of a pastor.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Richard E. “Rick” Jackson surrendered his law license last month. The State Bar concluded that he failed to inform Dennis Allen and Stanley Mozee’s defense attorneys about evidence that could have cleared them at their capital murder trials in 2000.

“This case is not about someone disbarred for making a mistake or a prosecutor who accidentally or even sloppily failed to turn over favorable evidence,” Nina Morrison, a lawyer with the Innocence Project in New York who worked to clear Allen and Mozee, told the newspaper.

“This is someone who repeatedly and intentionally hid favorable evidence from two defendants who were on trial for their lives.”

Allen and Mozee had been sentenced to life in prison in the slaying of the Rev. Jesse Borns Jr., who was stabbed 47 times at his leather and woodworking store in 1999.

Allen and Mozee were freed from prison in 2014 after the Dallas County district attorney’s office said they were wrongfully convicted based on prosecutorial misconduct.

They were declared innocent five years later after DNA testing helped clear them.

The district attorney’s office under former DA Craig Watkins had reopened the file and found evidence that defense lawyers said they’d never received, such as accounts from witnesses who saw two men argued with Borns outside the store the evening he was killed. Witnesses said one man was distinctly taller than the other and one had a noticeable scar across the side of his neck. Allen and Mozee are about the same height, around 6 feet. Neither had a scar.

The file also included previously undisclosed letters from people in jail who agreed to testify against Allen in exchange for favors in their cases.

Jackson was among prosecutors who were not invited to remain in the Dallas County district attorney’s office after Watkins won the 2006 election. Jackson, who had spent 17 years as a Dallas County prosecutor, sued Watkins in federal court, claiming that his termination was race based. Jackson is white and Watkins is Black. A judge tossed the suit.

The Innocence Project in New York and the Innocence Project of Texas filed a 196-page grievance with the State Bar in 2018 against Jackson.

Jackson’s lawyer, Bob Hinton, said Jackson has long maintained that he handed over the evidence to the defense and still believes that Allen and Mozee are guilty.

Jackson retired from practicing law in 2013 after he was fired from the Denton County district attorney’s office. Hinton said Jackson now spends his summers driving tour buses in Alaska.

Hinton said that against his advice, Jackson chose not to spend his retirement savings fighting the accusation at a disciplinary hearing where he faced losing his law license.

The person who killed Borns has not been caught.