National Roundup ...

KENTUCKY
Condemned inmate seeks new murder trial
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A death row inmate from eastern Kentucky has asked a federal judge to throw out is conviction and sentence, saying a judge erred in accepting his guilty plea.
In a petition filed in federal court in Lexington, 47-year-old Donald Herb Johnson says a judge in Floyd County didn’t recount all the rights he’d be giving up by admitting to stabbing Helen Madden to death on Oct. 30, 1989. Johnson also claims he may not have been competent at the time to enter the plea.
Madden was attacked at the Bright and Clean Laundry in Hazard where she worked. Johnson entered the guilty plea on Oct. 1, 1997.
Johnson’s attorneys claim their client wasn’t properly medicated as recommended by a psychologist in 1994. The attorneys said Johnson abruptly ended interviews with the doctor several times. After being medicated, Johnson later said he stopped talking about Madden’s death because “he had been told not to by ‘the voices’.”
Kentucky is currently under a court order suspending all executions in the state. A judge in Frankfort is planning to hold a trial about how the state evaluates the mental capacity of condemned inmates in the days leading up to an execution.
Kentucky has executed three people since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.

PENNSYLVANIA
DA: Defense attorneys have conflict in slaying 
UNIONTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A prosecutor is asking a judge to disqualify lawyers representing a father and son charged in the stabbing death of a man in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Forty-two-year-old Robert Daniels Jr. and 18-year-old Robert Daniels III are charged in Fayette County in the June 2011 stabbing death of 56-year-old David Gida following a party in the victim’s apartment in Connellsville, about 55 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
The defendants are represented by different attorneys working at the same law firm. Assistant District Attorney Anthony Iannamorelli argues in motions filed this week that having attorneys from the same firm representing clients with different interests is a conflict of interest because it could limit their representation of their clients.

INDIANA
Judge: Residents can’t sue over foul hog smells
WINCHESTER, Ind. (AP) — A judge has ruled state law protects four large hog farms from lawsuits filed by residents of an eastern Indiana county who complained about waste and foul smells from their operations.
Special Judge Marianne Vorhees found that Indiana’s right-to-farm law is constitutional and the residents didn’t present evidence needed to allow the lawsuits to proceed against the Randolph County farms run by Goldsboro, North Carolina-based Maxwell Foods, The Star Press of Muncie reported.
The four farms all started hog production in 2007 or 2008 — and the county between Muncie and the Indiana-Ohio state line has seen its number of hogs more than triple in five years to nearly 178,000 in 2012, according the to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Rich Hailey, an attorney representing those who filed the lawsuits, said an appeal of the judge’s ruling is likely.
“These are industrialized facilities. They are not family farms,” he said. “The uncontroverted truth is all the plaintiffs were living in those areas first (before the hog operations). Many had owned these properties for generations. These are people who grew up in the country. One day they looked out and had 4,000 to 8,000 hogs putting out 3 million gallons of untreated waste.”
The lawsuits accuse Maxwell and other defendants of allowing hog waste to accumulate and “noxious fumes and odors to discharge from and be sensed beyond the boundaries of their property.”
Indiana’s right-to-farm law protects the rights of farmers to use “generally accepted” practices, including “the use of ever-changing technology.”
Vorhees ruled that the law covered Maxwell Foods since the properties had been used continuously as farms since at least the 1950s and that a switch from crop production to hog production “does not constitute a significant change.”
Vorhees called the suit can proceed, “only if they produce evidence that defendants were negligent, and defendants’ negligence was the cause of the odors,” Vorhees wrote, adding that the residents admitted they had no such evidence.
Joe Baldwin, operations manager for Maxwell Farms, said its operations are common among Midwestern hog producers.
“We find it unfortunate that a few individuals have attempted to discredit our industry despite the fact that Maxwell Farms maintains an excellent environmental record in the state of Indiana and establishes high standards that our contract grower families are expected to meet,” he said in a statement.

MASSACHUSETTS
New state law would bar shark finning practice
BOSTON (AP) — The practice of shark finning would be outlawed in Massachusetts under a bill set to receive Gov. Deval Patrick’s signature.
Advocates for the ban say shark fins are often removed for use in soup while the rest of the shark is thrown back in the sea, still alive. They call the practice inhumane.
The impetus for the legislation came from a 9-year-old Lowell boy. Sean Lesniak, who took a keen interest in the subject of shark finning, passed out stuffed sharks to lawmakers during a Statehouse visit in May.
Patrick is scheduled to sign the bill on Thursday at the New England Aquarium. The measure would ban the possession, sale or distribution of shark fins. Violators could face up to 60 days in jail or fines of up to $1,000 per fin.

WISCONSIN
State High Court upholds pho­ne tracking cases
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court has sided with police in two separate cases where cellphone data was used to track suspects.
The court’s rulings Thursday came in a pair of homicide cases in Milwaukee and Kenosha counties. Police in both cases used data from the suspects’ cellphone providers to track them down. They arrested the suspect in the Milwaukee case, Bobby Tate, in his mother’s apartment. They arrested the Kenosha suspect, Nicolas Subdiaz-Osorio, in Arkansas.
In Tate’s case, police obtained a judge’s order authorizing the tracking of his phone. Tate argues that detectives didn’t have enough evidence to justify the order. Subdiaz-Osorio contends the search of his phone was illegal.
But the Supreme Court in each case said police were within their rights.