Court Digest

Rhode Island
Convicted drug dealer gets 7 years in prison
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A Rhode Island man with multiple drug trafficking convictions has been sentenced to seven years in prison for the latest guilty finding, federal prosecutors say.

Jessie Yanez, 34, of Pawtucket, was arrested by Cranston police last November following an investigation that included four controlled purchases of varying amounts of fentanyl and cocaine, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Rhode Island.

The deals included the sale of 50 grams of fentanyl for $2,750 and the sale of 50 grams of cocaine for $1,900, authorities said.

Yanez had three prior drug trafficking convictions, authorities said.

He previously pleaded guilty to fentanyl and cocaine distribution charges.

In addition to his prison sentence, Yanez was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Providence to four years of probation.

Missouri
Man sentenced to federal prison for ‘romance scam’
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A St. Louis man has been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for a “romance scam” that targeted two dozen elderly people, creating severe financial hardship for some of them.

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced 30-year-old Hammed Akande. He pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in St. Louis said romance scams involve targeting victims through online dating sites and social media. The criminals pretend to be interested in romantic relationships when the real goal is to get the victims to provide money and merchandise.

Federal prosecutors said Akande’s role was to receive mailings containing money and electronic devices. He would then forward a portion of the money and merchandise to Nigerian residents also involved in the scam.

All 24 victims were over the age of 60. Four of the victims had combined losses of nearly $575,000.

Massachusetts
2 former eBay employees plead guilty in scheme of harassment
BOSTON (AP) — Two former eBay Inc. employees pleaded guilty Thursday to their roles in a campaign to terrorize a publisher and editor of an online newsletter critical of the company with a scheme that included live spiders and other disturbing deliveries sent to their home.

Stephanie Popp, former senior manager of global intelligence; and Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in eBay’s Global Intelligence Center, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses. They are scheduled to be sentenced in February.

They are among seven former eBay employees charged in the scheme that involved other anonymous deliveries sent to the couple’s home, including a funeral wreath and a bloody pig Halloween mask. Three others are expected to plead guilty later this month

The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on them to their neighbor’s house, planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, and posted the couple’s names and address online, advertising things like yard sales and encouraging strangers to knock on the door if the pair wasn’t outside, officials said.

The couple was targeted after their newsletter published an article about a lawsuit filed by eBay accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers, investigators said.

Washington
Feds sue Yale for discrimination against applicants
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department sued Yale University on Thursday, weeks after prosecutors found the university was illegally discriminating against Asian American and white applicants, in violation of federal civil rights law.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Connecticut, alleges Yale “discriminates based on race and national origin in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.”

It comes about two months after the Justice Department publicly accused Yale of discrimination, saying its investigation found that Asian American and white students have “only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials.”

Yale called the lawsuit “baseless” and said its admissions practices are fair and lawful. A statement from the university president said Yale will not change its admissions practices as a result of the suit.

“As our country grapples with urgent questions about race and social justice, I have never been more certain that Yale’s approach to undergraduate admissions helps us to fulfill our mission to improve the world today and for future generations,” president Peter Salovey wrote.

The action from the Justice Department is the latest by the Trump administration in a long-running effort aimed at rooting out discrimination in the college application process, following complaints from students about the application process at some Ivy League colleges.

The Justice Department’s investigation — which stemmed from a 2016 complaint against Yale, Brown and Dartmouth — also found that Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes,” officials said.

“All persons who apply for admission to colleges and universities should expect and know that they will be judged by their character, talents, and achievements and not the color of their skin,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, who runs the department’s civil rights division. “To do otherwise is to permit our institutions to foster stereotypes, bitterness, and division.”

In August, the Justice Department demanded that Yale immediately stop and agree not to use race or national origin for upcoming admissions, but officials said the university refused.

The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity and should be limited in time. Schools also bear the burden of showing why their consideration of race is appropriate.

Yale has said its practices comply with decades of Supreme Court precedent and that it considers a multitude of factors and looks at “the whole person when selecting whom to admit among the many thousands of highly qualified applicants.”

Connecticut
New experts named for lawsuit challenging school mask rules
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — An epidemiologist and a child psychiatrist who say wearing masks is harmful to children are the new expert witnesses in a lawsuit challenging Connecticut’s mask requirements for schools, according to court documents filed Thursday.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including parents of schoolchildren and the Connecticut Freedom Alliance, filed disclosures in Hartford Superior Court naming epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski and child psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald as their experts.

A judge ordered the plaintiffs to produce new expert witnesses by Thursday, after ruling their original two witnesses — an ophthalmologist and a forensic psychiatrist — were not qualified to testify in support of their claims that masks harm children and do not prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Wittkowski is the founder and chief executive of the biostatistics firm ASDERA, and a former biostatistician and epidemiologist at Rockefeller University in New York. In April, Rockefeller University issued a statement saying Wittkowski’s opinions discouraging social distancing in order to hasten herd immunity to the coronavirus did not represent the views of the school, its leadership or its faculty.

Also earlier this year, YouTube removed a video of Wittkowski in which he advocates for herd immunity, telling the New York Post that it removes content that disputes health authorities’ guidance on social distancing.
McDonald is a child psychiatrist based in Los Angeles who was one of hundreds of doctors to sign a letter to President Donald Trump in May warning how virus-related shutdowns harm people’s health in terms of suicide, alcoholism and other problems.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction that would strike down requirements set by Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont and the state Department of Education that children must wear masks in school. A hearing on the emergency request is set to continue Oct. 14 before Judge Thomas Moukawsher.

The state argues that it is following federal guidelines and that studies show masks are important in helping prevent the virus from traveling into the air and spreading from one person to another.

State Attorney General William Tong’s office said in a statement Thursday that is reviewing the disclosures of the new experts and will file any necessary response with the court.

Doug Dubitsky, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and a Republican state representative from Chaplin, said the two new experts are highly qualified to testify in support of the lawsuit’s assertions that masks aren’t effective and can harm children.

“Over the last 40 years or so there have been multiple studies on the effectiveness of masks in the transmission of diseases and they almost universally show they just don’t work,” Dubitsky said in a phone interview Thursday.

He said studies have shown children can develop a variety of conditions from wearing masks including nasal infections, tooth infections, panic attacks, breathing problems and acne. He said many parents have pulled their children out of school because of mask-related problems.


Pennsylvania
Bill Cosby appeal set for Dec. 1 in state high court
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court will hear Bill Cosby’s appeal of his felony sex assault conviction on Dec. 1.

Cosby, 83, is serving a three- to 10-year prison term. A lower appeals court had upheld his conviction, but the state’s high court agreed this year to review two key issues in the case.

One involves the trial judge’s decision to let prosecutors call five other accusers to testify about long-ago encounters with Cosby at his 2018 trial. The defense calls their testimony remote and unreliable.

The high court will also consider whether the jury should have heard evidence that Cosby had given quaaludes to women in the past. The evidence came from Cosby’s own deposition testimony in a related lawsuit.

Cosby, a once-beloved comedian long known as “America’s Dad,” became the first celebrity convicted of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era when he was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his home near Philadelphia in 2004.

Cosby was arrested in December 2015, days before the statute of limitations would have run, after his deposition became public and prosecutors reopened the case. In his testimony, he acknowledged giving accuser Andrea Constand unidentified pills that night that she said knocked her out. Cosby’s lawyers called the encounter consensual.

Dozens of women have come forward over the years to accuse Cosby of sexual assault, and the trial judge deemed him a sexually violent predator.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are sexual assault victims without their permission, which Constand has granted.


Pennsylvania
Mother accused of taking, selling nude photos of daughters
NEW CASTLE, Pa. (AP) — A woman in western Pennsylvania is accused of taking nude photos of her young daughters and sending them to a man who, in some cases, paid for them, police said.

Police on Thursday charged the woman, the children’s father and the man who received and bought the photos.

The girls are between 11 and 13 years old, police said.

The mother was charged with conspiracy to commit sexual abuse/photographing or filming sexual acts and other counts. The father was charged with child endangerment because authorities said he had knowledge his children were being photographed.

Police decided not to release the names of the parents in order to protect the identities of their daughters, who have been placed into the custody of child welfare officials.

Police charged David Bates, 60, of Ellwood City, with six counts of conspiracy to commit sexual abuse of children/photographing or filming sexual acts, six counts of solicitation to commit sexual abuse of children/photographing or filming sexual acts and six counts of sexual abuse of children/child pornography. It could not be determined if he had retained a lawyer.