Court Digest

Iowa
Judge: School leader improperly kept children out of school
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The leader of Iowa’s largest school district violated his duty by not complying with a law intended to ensure students could learn in classrooms during the pandemic, an administrative law judge ruled, without specifying how he should be punished.

Administrative Law Judge David Lindgren said during an Iowa Board of Educational Examiners hearing Thursday that Des Moines Superintendent Thomas Ahart “violated an ethical duty to comply with all laws applicable to the fulfillment of this professional obligations as alleged.”

However, the Des Moines Register reported that the judge gave no timeline for when he would decide how or even if Ahart should be punished.

Ahart is facing potential sanctions because the Des Moines school board violated a state mandate early in the 2020-2021 academic year that districts must offer at least half-time in-person learning. For two weeks to start the school year, Des Moines offered only virtual instruction.

After complaints were filed with the Board of Educational Examiners, the panel in March found that Ahart should surrender his administrators license or agree to a lesser sanction. Members of the board are appointed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, who throughout the pandemic has called for districts to offer classroom learning and has been critical of districts that hesitated to reopen schools because of high COVID-19 infection rates.

Ahart appealed the board’s decision.

Ahart’s attorney Dustin Zeschke told the judge it was wrong to punish the superintendent for carrying out the school board’s instructions.

School board vice chairman Rob Barron made a similar argument to Lindgren, saying Ahart kept the board informed and carried out its decisions.

“I don’t know if I can say this, but he shouldn’t be here in this position right now,” Barron said. “Everything he did was what me and my colleagues told him to do. I should be over there at that table and not him.”

Jesse Ramirez, an assistant attorney general, told the judge that Ahart should be punished but doesn’t think his license should be revoked.

Kansas
Man, 71, faces 155 charges for child pornography
EMPORIA, Kan. (AP) — A Chase County man is jailed on 155 counts of sexual exploitation of a child after child pornography was found at his home, authorities said.

Leland Zachariah Taylor, 71, of Cedar Point, was arrested May 8 after Chase County Sheriff’s deputies were called to his home.

A court affidavit written by Deputy Tylor Preeo said Taylor’s son and the son’s girlfriend were cleaning out Taylor’s home when they found the child pornography on his laptop and a flash drive. The couple called the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the county sheriff’s department.

At the time, Taylor has been hospitalized for several weeks recovering from injuries suffered in a car crash, The Emporia Gazette reported.

The images include photos of male and female children between the ages of 4 months to age 15 naked by themselves and engaged in various sex acts, according to the affidavit.

Leland Taylor is being held in the Chase County Detention Center in Cottonwood Falls. His next court appearance is scheduled for May 28.

Iowa
Jury awards DHS employee $790K in sexual harassment suit
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A jury has awarded an Iowa Department of Human Services employee $790,000 in damages in her lawsuit accusing the department of fostering sexual harassment.

The jury handed down the award Thursday at the conclusion of the nearly two-week-long trial in a lawsuit brought in 2019 by Tracy White, the Des Moines Register reported.

White started working at the department in 2000 and has been a social work administrator and senior manager since 2008. She said in her lawsuit that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and physical ailments brought on by a workplace rife with sexual references and lewd, inappropriate behavior. That included including explicit comments from a male boss and IT worker about her and other employees, discrimination against female and LGBTQ workers, and hiring and promotion decisions based on attractiveness, she said.

Iowa Assistant Attorney General Kayla Burkhiser Reynolds, who represented the department, argued that state officials made an effort to respond to White’s complaints and that White had made too much of the comments.

“They’re spaced out,” Burkhiser Reynolds said. “It wasn’t as though Tracy was going to work and having things happen every single day where people make pervasive sexual comments, sex jokes in the office.”

Many of the complaints in White’s lawsuit centered on the behavior of her former boss, who was fired in 2019 after White complained directly to Gov. Kim Reynolds. Another DHS supervisor accused of grabbing an employee’s breast and making jokes about interracial sex was also fired in a separate investigation.

Wisconsin
Wrongful death lawsuit in police shooting is dismissed
GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — A lawsuit against the City of Green Bay, Brown County and law enforcement officials, filed by the estate of a man shot and killed by a police officer, has been dismissed.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach dismissed the wrongful death lawsuit this week, WLUK-TV reported.

Jonathon Tubby was handcuffed and unarmed when Green Bay Officer Erik O’Brien shot him five times and killed him at the Brown County Jail in October 2018. Authorities had arrested Tubby on a warrant during a downtown traffic stop.

After an investigation by the state Department of Justice, Brown County District Attorney David Lasee ruled O’Brien acted within the law, and would not face charges. O’Brien maintained he believed Tubby was armed and therefore was justified in shooting him.

The city asked that the lawsuit be dismissed, noting that the use of force was ruled justified.


North Carolina
Man sues over fumes from South Carolina mill
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — A pulp and paper mill in South Carolina emits fumes that smells like rotten eggs and which nearby residents say have caused headaches and sore throats, a North Carolina homeowner says in a lawsuit.

Kenny White, who lives in the Ballantyne area of Charlotte not far from the South Carolina border, filed the private-nuisance, class-action lawsuit against New-Indy Containerboard of Catawba, South Carolina, in federal court in Rock Hill on Tuesday, The Charlotte Observer reported.

The plant, a joint venture that involves New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, is specifically accused in the lawsuit of polluting areas of the Carolinas with “noxious and harmful hydrogen sulfide emissions.”

Hydrogen sulfide is a colorless and flammable gas known for its pungent “rotten egg” odor at low concentrations, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It is highly toxic, OSHA says, and is used or produced in several industries, including oil and gas refining, and pulp and paper processing.

New-Indy intentionally stopped using pollution-control devices and instead sent “all foul condensate to open-air lagoons,” according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit cites various government agencies that have found New-Indy responsible for the emissions wafting into neighborhoods in both states.

Residents in areas along the state line have said the pungent odor has infiltrated their homes, causing headaches and sore throats, according to posts on a Facebook page dedicated to the odor.
The lawsuit seeks at least $5 million in compensation for the harm the mill has wreaked on residents.

A company spokeswoman didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment by The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday afternoon.

Florida
Death row inmate to get DNA tests in 1975 killings
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A Florida prosecutor has agreed to allow DNA testing on evidence that helped convict a man for the 1975 murders of his wife, in-laws and an acquaintance at the family’s furniture store and landed him on death row.

Monique H. Worrell, who was elected state attorney for the Orlando area in November, has agreed to allow testing that Tommy Zeigler and his many supporters believe will show he is innocent of gunning down the four on Christmas Eve. Previous prosecutors have contended Zeigler staged the massacre as a robbery to collect his wife’s life insurance policy.

The Tampa Bay Times reports  that Worrell’s office recently agreed to give all evidence in the case to Zeigler’s attorneys for testing at a lab certified by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. The agreement will now go before a judge, but is expected to be approved.

In particular, Zeigler’s attorney wants to test his clothing to see if it has the victims’ blood on it and the fingernail clippings of his father-in-law, who fought his killer before being shot. A previous test in 2001 failed to detect any DNA from the victims on four small patches of his clothing, but prosecutors blocked attempts to do a full test, saying other evidence ties Zeigler to the murders.

“I am hoping and praying that the test results come back with enough evidence to force the court to grant me a new trial!” Zeigler wrote in a Thursday email to the Times.

Worrell reviewed the case when she lead the office’s conviction integrity unit and concluded Zeigler had not received a fair trial.

“Can the state of Florida legally decline to support additional DNA testing? Absolutely,” Worrell wrote in a 2019 memo to her predecessor. “Can the state of Florida morally justify a decline to support additional testing? Absolutely not.”

Her predecessor rejected her recommendation, but now the final decision was hers.

The killings happened at W.T. Zeigler Furniture in Winter Garden.  Prosecutors contended at Zeigler’s 1976 trial that he lured his wife, Eunice, to the store to kill her, and her parents, Perry and Virginia Edwards, got in the way. A fruit picker Zeigler knew named Charlie Mays was killed, too. They had all been shot. They said Zeigler then shot himself in the stomach to make it appear that he, too, was a victim. They say he staged the robbery so he could collect on a $500,000 life insurance policy he took out on his wife just months before.

Zeigler said then and now that he went to the store to make some last-minute Christmas deliveries. Unbeknownst to him, his wife and in-laws, who had come to look at a recliner that was to be her father’s Christmas present, were already dead in various places in the store.

After finding the lights shut off at the breaker box, he was hit over the head and beaten by two men. He lost his glasses but managed to find and fire one of the guns he kept in the store. He believes Mays -- who had cash from the store stuffed in his pocket -- was one of the attackers and was killed in the gunfight. Zeigler says that when he came to after being knocked out, he was the only one left alive in the store. Whoever else attacked him had fled.

Zeigler was found guilty on July 2, 1976, amid allegations of juror misconduct. One of the jurors, now dead, said in media interviews after the trial that she believed Zeigler was innocent and that she was harassed and coerced into voting guilty by other jurors who wanted to finish up in time for the nation’s Bicentennial celebration two days later. The jury then voted to recommend a life sentence, but the judge -- in an exceedingly rare move in Florida -- overruled the panel and sentenced him to death.

Zeigler has twice been scheduled to die, but the execution was stopped — once with less than a day to spare.

“The entire process has not been handled as it should have been,” David Michaeli, one of Zeigler’s attorneys, told the Times earlier this year. “And if you don’t have a criminal justice system that works for Tommy Zeigler, you don’t have one that works for me or you, either.”


Nebraska
High court rejects appeal in murder
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday rejected the postconviction appeal of a man serving life in prison for the brutal stabbing death of his girlfriend in 2017.

Lucio Munoz, 69, had argued in his postconviction motion that his trial and direct appeal attorneys were so ineffective that it violated his right to fair trial. When a lower court rejected his motion without an evidentiary hearing, Munoz appealed.

On Friday, the state’s high court ruled that the lower court was right to dismiss the appeal without a hearing, saying Munoz failed to show he had any new evidence or information that would have changed the outcome of his conviction.

Munoz was found guilty of killing 48-year-old Melissa May, whose body was found in her Scottsbluff apartment Jan. 3, 2017, after officers went to check on her. Authorities said she had been stabbed 37 times, most likely on Dec. 31, 2016.

By the time May’s body was found, Munoz had already left town. He was arrested several days later in Bradley, Illinois.