Oregon
Murder conviction of ex-cop in wife's killing reversed
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The murder conviction of a former police sergeant in the death of his estranged wife has been reversed by the Oregon Court of Appeals.
Lynn Benton was found guilty by a jury in 2016 of aggravated murder, criminal conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and attempted murder in connection with the 2011 death of Debbie Higbee-Benton. Higbee-Benton was found dead in her Gladstone salon on May 28, 2011. Authorities said an autopsy determined she had been shot in the back and had been strangled.
Benton was found guilty of arranging the killing.
The Oregon Court of Appeals found Wednesday that a jail informant was acting as a state agent after coming to authorities with information about the case, KOIN-TV reported.
Prosecutors said Benton had his wife killed because he was afraid he could lose his job if she disclosed domestic abuse.
Prosecutors with the Clackamas County District Attorney's Office are now considering whether to appeal that decision to the Oregon Supreme Court or retry the case.
Arkansas
Judge dismisses Duggar sister’s lawsuit over records’ release
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit four sisters of Josh Duggar filed over the release of records from a police investigation that concluded the former reality television star fondled them.
U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks dismissed the lawsuit against Springdale and Washington County officials over the records’ release. The sisters had sued claiming invasion of privacy and outrage.
Duggar and his sisters are part of a large Arkansas family that starred on TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” until the network canceled the show in 2015 following revelations that Duggar as a juvenile molested four of his sisters and a babysitter. Authorities began investigating the abuse in 2006 after getting a tip but concluded that the statute of limitations had expired.
Jill Dillard, Jessa Seewald, Jinger Vuolo and Joy Duggar filed the lawsuit in 2017 claiming officials improperly released redacted police investigation documents to a magazine. Their attorneys say the documents made it easy to identify them.
Josh Duggar was convicted in December of one count each of receiving and possessing child pornography and is awaiting sentencing. His attorneys last month asked a judge to toss out his conviction or order a new trial.
In his ruling, Brooks ruled there was no evidence the officials intended to inflict emotional distress.
Texas
2 of 6 Boeing Max test fraud counts against pilot dropped
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A judge has tossed two of six fraud counts against a former Boeing pilot involved in evaluating the troubled Boeing 737 Max jetliner.
A federal judge in Fort Worth on Tuesday dismissed, on technical grounds, counts that accused Mark A. Forkner of making and using “a materially false writing ... concerning an aircraft part,” in violation of federal law.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor denied, however, Forker’s attorneys’ request for dismissal of four other wire fraud counts for not stating a case.
Forkner, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, is scheduled to go on trial March 7.
A federal indictment accuses Forkner, 50, of deceiving regulators about a critical system that played a role in two crashes of Boeing 737 Max jets that killed 346 people.
Prosecutors said that because of Forkner’s alleged deception, pilot manuals and training materials did not mention the system because of Forkner’s alleged deception.
The flight-control system in question activated erroneously and pushed down the noses of Max jets that crashed in 2018 in Indonesia and 2019 in
Ethiopia. The pilots tried unsuccessfully to regain control, but both planes went into nosedives minutes after taking off.
Forkner was Boeing’s chief technical pilot on the Max program. Prosecutors said that Forkner learned about an important change to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System flight-control system in 2016 but withheld the information from the FAA. That led the agency to delete reference to MCAS from a technical report and, in turn, it didn’t appear in pilot manuals. Most pilots didn’t know about MCAS until after the first crash.
Prosecutors suggested that Forkner downplayed the system’s power to avoid a requirement that pilots undergo extensive and expensive retraining, which would increase training costs for airlines. Congressional investigators suggested additional training would have added $1 million to the price of each plane.
Forkner told another Boeing employee in 2016 that MCAS was “egregious” and “running rampant” when he tested it in a flight simulator, but he didn’t tell that to the FAA.
“So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” Forkner wrote in a message that became public in 2019.
Forkner, who lives in a Fort Worth suburb, joined Southwest Airlines after leaving Boeing but left the airline about a year ago.
Chicago-based Boeing agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement to end a Justice Department investigation into the company’s actions. The government agreed to drop a criminal charge of conspiracy against Boeing after three years if the company carries out terms of the January 2020 settlement. The settlement included a $243.6 million fine, nearly $1.8 billion for airlines that bought the plane, and $500 million for a fund to compensate families of the passengers killed.
Dozens of families of passengers are suing Boeing in federal court in Chicago.
Crash investigations highlighted the role of MCAS but also pointed to mistakes by the airlines and pilots. Max jets were grounded worldwide for more than a year and a half. The FAA approved the plane to fly again in late 2020 after Boeing made changes to MCAS.
Illinois
Court: No pension for ex-officer convicted in attack
CHICAGO (AP) — A former Chicago police officer convicted of battery for attacking a bartender in 2007 during a drunken rage captured on video cannot collect his pension, a state court of appeals has ruled.
The ruling issued Monday overturns a Cook County judge’s 2019 finding that Anthony Abbate was entitled to his pension because there was no clear link between his job and the bartender’s beating, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Though Abbate was off-duty when he kicked and punched Karolina Obrycka, the three-judge appellate panel found that he felt his status as an officer gave him impunity to act as he pleased and that he used his police connections to try to avoid arrest following the attack.
Abbate was convicted of aggravated battery in 2009 and sentenced to probation for the beating, which was captured on security video. He was fired from the Chicago Police Department.
A federal jury awarded Obrycka $850,000 in 2012 from the city, finding that Abbate’s fellow officers tried to protect him during the criminal investigation and that a code of silence among officers encouraged misconduct.
Abbate filed paperwork with the pension board to collect his pension in 2018, when he turned 50. The board ruled the following year that he was disqualified from receiving benefits, but was entitled to a refund of pension contributions made during his slightly more than 12 years on the force.
Abbate would have been eligible for payments of $539 per month.
Cook County Judge Anna M. Loftus ruled in 2019 that the pension board had not established a clear link between the crime that cost Abbate his job and his status as a police officer.
But in Monday’s decision the appellate panel called that ruling “erroneous.”
“Looking at the totality of the evidence presented before the (pension) board, Abbate’s felony conviction for aggravated battery was related to or connected with his service as a policeman,” Appeals Court Judge Aurelia Pucinski wrote.
She cited evidence introduced in Abbate’s federal civil rights trial, including that he assaulted two different bar patrons in separate incidents before he attacked Obrycka, and that no one contacted police.
“While he was at the bar, he announced that he was a Chicago police officer and repeatedly displayed his ‘muscles’ to the other bar patrons. After these two physical assaults, no one called the police to report Abbate’s misconduct. When he was beating Obrycka, he announced that ‘nobody tells me what to do,’” Pucinski wrote.
The Associated Press left a message Wednesday seeking comment from Ralph Licari, the attorney who handled Abatte’s appeal.
Obrycka’s lawyer, Terry Ekl, said in an email that the appeals court’s ruling “corrects the erroneous decision in the trial court to provide Abbate with a taxpayer-funded pension.”
“A tremendous amount of evidence was presented in the federal civil rights case to demonstrate his use of his position as a police officer to attempt to cover-up his beating of Ms. Obrycka,” Ekl added.
Florida
Woman convicted of killing her kids seeks new trial
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — A woman serving two life terms for killing her teenage children in 2011 while her husband was deployed overseas is seeking a new trial.
A Tampa jury rejected the insanity defense for Julie Schenecker, 61, and convicted her in the shooting deaths of her 16-year-old daughter Calyx and 13-year-old son Beau.
Schenecker is seeking a new trial in an appeal she filed herself, the Tampa Bay Times reported. She contends that the public defenders who represented her were ineffective. She argues that they should have sought to move the trial away from Tampa because of extensive local news coverage and that they didn't call certain witnesses who could have bolstered her insanity claim.
State prosecutors said a hearing is necessary to address some of the 20 claims she made.
Judge Michelle Sisco ordered that Schenecker return to court for the March 10 hearing with a new attorney appointed to represent her. She has been brought to the Hillsborough County Jail from Lowell Correctional Institution Annex, a women's prison near Ocala.
Hillsborough Public Defender Julianne Holt suggested that claims of ineffective lawyering are routine.
"I'm confident the work we did was good work. And I think the testimony of my attorneys will clearly show how much work and effort went to the defense of Ms. Schenecker," she told the newspaper.
Officers said Schenecker was dazed from the effects of drugs when they found the children's bodies in the family's home on Jan. 28, 2011.
She told detectives that she shot the children, but also asked, "Are my kids coming in later?"
Army Col. Parker Schenecker returned home from duty and was granted a quick divorce.
During the 2014 trial, Schenecker's attorneys presented testimony about her mental health history and use of antidepressants and mood stabilizers.
Prosecutors acknowledged her history of mental illness, but also pointed to a spiral notebook where she had written plans to kill the children as evidence she knew what she was doing.
Jurors later told news outlets her writings convinced them she was guilty. An appeals court affirmed her conviction and sentence in 2016.
In her new appeal, Schenecker said she wanted to testify during the trial but was urged not to do so. She claims one of her lawyers warned that the prosecutor would "eat her alive." She said jurors would have had a better understanding of her state of mind had she been allowed to take the stand.
