New York
Sotomayor axes appeal of school vaccine plan
NEW YORK (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Friday denied an emergency appeal from a group of teachers to block New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for public school teachers and other staff from going into effect.
The teachers had filed for the injunction with Sotomayor on Thursday, in an effort to keep the mandate from going into effect Friday.
Under the mandate rules, the roughly 148,000 school employees had until 5 p.m. Friday to get at least their first vaccine shot. Those who didn’t face suspension without pay when schools open on Monday.
In a statement, Georgia Pestana, the city’s corporation counsel, said, “We are gratified by Justice Sotomayor’s decision. She made the right call on the law and in the best interest of students and educators.”
Vinoo Varghese, an attorney for the teachers, said in an email, “We are disappointed, but the fight for our clients’ due process and those similarly situated will go on.”
An original deadline earlier this week was delayed after a legal challenge, but a federal appeals panel said Monday that New York City could go ahead with the mandate in the country’s largest school district.
In August, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied an emergency appeal from students at Indiana University to block that institution’s vaccine mandate.
Missouri
Lawmakers, pope ask governor to halt execution
Pope Francis has joined the chorus of people calling on Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to grant clemency to a death row inmate who is set to be executed for killing three people during a 1994 convenience store robbery.
In a letter last week, a representative for Pope Francis wrote that the pope “wishes to place before you the simple fact of Mr. Johnson’s humanity and the sacredness of all human life,” referring to Ernest Johnson, who is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the state prison in Bonne Terre, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of St. Louis.
Parson, a Republican, has been considering whether to reduce the 61-year-old Johnson’s sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Johnson’s attorney, Jeremy Weis, has said executing him would violate the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits executing intellectually disabled people. He said multiple IQ tests and other exams have shown that Johnson has the intellectual capacity of a child. He also was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and in 2008, he lost about 20% of his brain tissue to the removal of a benign tumor.
Racial justice activists and two Missouri members of congress — Democratic U.S. Reps. Cori Bush of St. Louis and Emmanuel Cleaver of Kansas City — have also called on Parson to show Johnson mercy.
The Missouri Supreme Court in August refused to halt the execution, and on Friday declined to take the case up again.
Johnson admitted to killing three workers at a Casey’s General Store in Columbia on Feb. 12, 1994 — manager Mary Bratcher, 46, and employees Mabel Scruggs, 57, and Fred Jones, 58. The victims were shot and attacked with a claw hammer. Bratcher also was stabbed in the hand with a screwdriver.
At Johnson’s girlfriend’s house, officers found a bag containing $443, coin wrappers, partially burned checks and tennis shoes matching bloody shoeprints found inside the store.
Johnson previously asked that his execution be carried out by firing squad, but Missouri doesn’t allow that method of execution. His lawyers argued that Missouri’s lethal injection drug, pentobarbital, could trigger seizures due to the lost brain tissue.
Johnson was sentenced to death in his first trial and two other times. The second death sentence, in 2003, came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that executing the mentally ill was unconstitutionally cruel. The Missouri Supreme Court tossed that second death sentence and Johnson was sentenced for a third time in 2006.
If the execution takes place as scheduled, it would be the seventh in the U.S. this year but the first not involving either a federal inmate or a prisoner in Texas.
The peak year for modern executions was 1999, when there were 98 across the U.S. That number had gradually declined and just 17 people were executed last year — 10 involving federal prisoners, three in Texas and one each in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Missouri, according to a database compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center.
Ohio
Trial set for cop charged in fatal shooting of Hill
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The Ohio police officer who shot and killed Andre Hill will stand trial next spring, a judge decided Monday.
Hill, 47, who was Black, was fatally shot by Officer Adam Coy, who is white, on Dec. 22 as Hill emerged from a garage holding up a cellphone. Coy has since been fired from the Columbus police department.
Coy, 44, has pleaded not guilty to murder and reckless homicide. Franklin County Judge Stephen McIntosh set Coy’s trial for March 7.
In August, McIntosh denied a request by Coy’s attorneys to move the trial out of concern that extensive local and national publicity — including news coverage, posts on social media and billboards around Columbus — would make it impossible to assemble an impartial jury for Coy in Franklin County.
McIntosh sided with prosecutors, who argued there was no reason to believe that people elsewhere were less likely to have read about the case than were Franklin County residents.
In May, the city reached a $10 million settlement, the largest in Columbus history, with Hill’s family.
New York
Plastics plant settles claim over polluted drinking water
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A plastics company in upstate New York agreed to pay $23.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it knowingly polluted well water with a toxic chemical.
The Times Union reports the proposed settlement, agreed to by Taconic Plastics, would benefit hundreds of residents in Rensselaer County whose drinking water was contaminated with a manufacturing chemical.
The settlement would establish funds to pay Petersburgh property owners and to set up a 15-year medical monitoring program for individuals who had a certain level of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, detected in their blood.
Exposure to PFOA has been linked to cancer and other illness.
Taconic's president issued a statement Friday saying he was pleased the case had been settled.
