Virginia
State asks U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate removals of 1,600 voter registrations
WASHINGTON (AP) — Virginia on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to allow the state to remove roughly 1,600 voters from its rolls that it believes are noncitizens.
The request comes after a federal appeals court unanimously upheld a federal judge’s order restoring the registrations of those 1,600 voters, whom the judge said were illegally purged from the rolls under an executive order by the state’s Republican governor.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin says he ordered the daily removals in an effort to keep noncitizens from voting.
But on Friday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles said Youngkin’s program was illegal under federal law because it systematically purged voters during a 90-day “quiet period” ahead of the November election.
The Justice Department and a coalition of private groups sued to block Youngkin’s removal program earlier this month. They argued that the quiet period is in place to ensure that legitimate voters aren’t removed from the rolls by bureaucratic errors or last-minute mistakes that can’t be rectified in a timely manner.
Youngkin said he was simply upholding a state law that requires Virginia to cancel noncitizens’ registration.
On Sunday, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, sided with the judge who ordered the restoration of voters’ registrations.
The appeals court said Virginia is wrong to assert that it is being forced to restore 1,600 noncitizens to the voter rolls. Instead, the appeals court ruled that Virginia’s process for removing voters established no proof that those purged were actually noncitizens.
Youngkin’s executive order, issued in August, required daily checks of data from the Department of Motor Vehicles against voter rolls to identify noncitizens.
State officials said any voter identified as a noncitizen was notified and given two weeks to dispute their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form attesting to their citizenship, their registration would not be canceled.
The plaintiffs said that, as a result of the program, a legitimate voter and citizen could have his or her registration canceled simply by checking the wrong box on a DMV form. The plaintiffs presented evidence showing that at least some of those removed were in fact citizens.
A similar lawsuit was filed in Alabama, and a federal judge there last week ordered the state to restore eligibility for more than 3,200 voters who had been deemed ineligible noncitizens. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that roughly 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were made inactive were actually legally registered citizens.
The opinion was written by Toby Heytens, a Biden appointee, and joined by Chief Judge Albert Diaz and Judge Stephanie Thacker, both Obama appointees.
The panel emphasized, as Giles did in her initial ruling, that the state is within its rights to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, even during the 90-day quiet period, but must do so in an individualized process rather than the systematic process relying on data transfers from the DMV.
Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.
Washington
Supreme Court allows national horse racing safety rules to stay in effect
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is allowing national medication and anti-doping rules for horse racing to remain in effect while a court fight likely to wind up with the justices continues.
The court on Monday kept on hold a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found Congress gave too much power to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, the private entity that administers the rules.
Other appellate courts have rejected similar challenges and the justices are likely to step in to resolve the conflicting rulings.
The authority, backed by the Biden administration, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and others, sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court.
Texas, as well as racetracks in the state and in neighboring Louisiana, opposed the emergency appeal.
The anti-doping program, which took effect in the spring of 2023, is an attempt to centralize the drug testing of racehorses and manage the results and dole out uniform penalties to horses and trainers instead of the previous patchwork rules in the 38 racing states.
The program has led to a 50% drop in horse deaths at racetracks that are participating, lawyers for the authority told the court. Meanwhile, death rates have gone up at other tracks, they wrote in their legal filing.
Legislation to dismantle the new authority has been introduced in the House of Representatives but hasn’t gone anywhere.
Florida
Woman found guilty of murder for leaving man to die in a suitcase
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A woman accused of leaving her boyfriend to die after he was zipped into a suitcase in their home was found guilty of second-degree murder by a jury in central Florida.
Four years after Sarah Boone was arrested in the death of Jorge Torres, jurors handed down the verdict against her on Friday evening after deliberating for about 90 minutes. Boone had pleaded not guilty.
Boone initially told detectives with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office that she and Torres had been playing hide-and-seek on Feb. 23, 2020, in their Winter Park, Florida, residence when they thought it would be funny for Torres to get into the suitcase.
They had been drinking and she decided to go to sleep, thinking her boyfriend could get out of the suitcase on his own, she told detectives, according to an arrest report.
When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t find Torres but then remembered he was in the suitcase. She unzipped the suitcase and found him unresponsive, the arrest report said.
Detectives charged Boone with murder after they found videos on her cellphone showing Torres yelling from inside the suitcase that he couldn’t breathe and repeatedly calling out Boone’s name, according to the arrest report.
During her trial, Boone testified that past violent incidents between her and Torres caused her to perceive a threat of imminent harm and that she acted in self-defense by keeping him in the suitcase.
“Yeah that’s what you do when you choke me,” Boone said in one of the cellphone videos from that night, according to the arrest report. “Oh, that’s what I feel like when you cheat on me.”
An autopsy report said Torres had scratches on his back and neck and contusions to his shoulder, skull and forehead from blunt force trauma, as well as a cut near his busted lip.
Boone had gone through several attorneys since her arrest, contributing to the delay in her trial, which lasted 10 days.
She is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 2 and faces up to life in prison.
Massachusetts
Jury awards a family $5M and says football coach caused son’s suicide
BOSTON (AP) — The family of a teenager who died by suicide was awarded $5.4 million this week after a jury found his football coach and several school administrators were negligent in the way they responded before the 15-year-old’s death.
Nathan Bruno killed himself in 2018 after his family alleges Portsmouth High School’s then-football coach Ryan Moniz pressured the boy to reveal the names of other students involved in sending harassing text messages and phone calls to the coach. The family also alleges Moniz had football players pressure Bruno to provide the names.
The jury’s decision Wednesday said Moniz was both negligent and that his actions caused Bruno’s suicide — meaning he alone was responsible for the jury award, which would be paid out by the school district. The boy’s father, Richard Bruno, declined to comment Friday on the jury’s decision. Moniz did not immediately respond to a message sent to his school email.
It’s not the first time a school district has been ordered to pay after a student takes their own life. A Utah school district in 2023 agreed to pay $2 million to the family of a Black, autistic 10-year-old girl who killed herself after being harassed by her classmates.
Bruno’s suicide led to the School Committee to remove Moriz as football coach, although he is still listed on the district’s website as a teacher. Rhode Island’s legislature passed a law in 2021 named in honor of Bruno that requires all public school districts to adopt suicide prevention policies and train school personnel in suicide awareness and prevention.
The lawsuit filed by Bruno’s family alleges the coach, the town of Portsmouth and several school administrators “breached their duties” to Bruno which “placed mental and emotional stress upon” him in the weeks before his death. They say the defendants failed to tell Bruno’s parents about a police investigation involving him, reassigned him to another physical education class without telling his parents, allowed Moriz to pressure him and failed to meet with the student, who had offered to apologize for making the calls.
Jamestown Detective Derek Carlino, who investigated the case after Moniz filed a complaint, was also accused of sharing confidential police information about Bruno with Moniz. The jury found a former principal and assistant principal at Portsmouth High School as well as Carlino negligent.
“It was just an utter failure, pressuring a boy,” Peter Cerilli, who represented the parents with John Foley, told The Providence Journal. “There was basically bullying by the coach.”
“We have tremendous respect for Judge Licht and the jury system,” Marc DeSisto, who represented the town, told The Associated Press on Friday. “There are fundamental legal issues still pending in the Superior Court and potentially the Rhode Island Supreme Court impacting the determination of whether someone should be held responsible for the suicide of another.”
Melody Alger, who represented Carlino and Jamestown, said her clients were “grateful” not to be found liable for Bruno’s death.
“While Detective Carlino and the Town of Jamestown were disappointed with the finding of negligence, my clients are pleased to have prevailed and grateful that the jury agreed that the Jamestown defendants did not cause Nathan Bruno’s tragic death,” she said in a statement.
The jury awarded the family $3.1 million which, with interest since the boy’s death, would increase to $5.4 million.
State asks U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate removals of 1,600 voter registrations
WASHINGTON (AP) — Virginia on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to allow the state to remove roughly 1,600 voters from its rolls that it believes are noncitizens.
The request comes after a federal appeals court unanimously upheld a federal judge’s order restoring the registrations of those 1,600 voters, whom the judge said were illegally purged from the rolls under an executive order by the state’s Republican governor.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin says he ordered the daily removals in an effort to keep noncitizens from voting.
But on Friday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles said Youngkin’s program was illegal under federal law because it systematically purged voters during a 90-day “quiet period” ahead of the November election.
The Justice Department and a coalition of private groups sued to block Youngkin’s removal program earlier this month. They argued that the quiet period is in place to ensure that legitimate voters aren’t removed from the rolls by bureaucratic errors or last-minute mistakes that can’t be rectified in a timely manner.
Youngkin said he was simply upholding a state law that requires Virginia to cancel noncitizens’ registration.
On Sunday, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, sided with the judge who ordered the restoration of voters’ registrations.
The appeals court said Virginia is wrong to assert that it is being forced to restore 1,600 noncitizens to the voter rolls. Instead, the appeals court ruled that Virginia’s process for removing voters established no proof that those purged were actually noncitizens.
Youngkin’s executive order, issued in August, required daily checks of data from the Department of Motor Vehicles against voter rolls to identify noncitizens.
State officials said any voter identified as a noncitizen was notified and given two weeks to dispute their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form attesting to their citizenship, their registration would not be canceled.
The plaintiffs said that, as a result of the program, a legitimate voter and citizen could have his or her registration canceled simply by checking the wrong box on a DMV form. The plaintiffs presented evidence showing that at least some of those removed were in fact citizens.
A similar lawsuit was filed in Alabama, and a federal judge there last week ordered the state to restore eligibility for more than 3,200 voters who had been deemed ineligible noncitizens. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that roughly 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were made inactive were actually legally registered citizens.
The opinion was written by Toby Heytens, a Biden appointee, and joined by Chief Judge Albert Diaz and Judge Stephanie Thacker, both Obama appointees.
The panel emphasized, as Giles did in her initial ruling, that the state is within its rights to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, even during the 90-day quiet period, but must do so in an individualized process rather than the systematic process relying on data transfers from the DMV.
Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.
Washington
Supreme Court allows national horse racing safety rules to stay in effect
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is allowing national medication and anti-doping rules for horse racing to remain in effect while a court fight likely to wind up with the justices continues.
The court on Monday kept on hold a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found Congress gave too much power to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, the private entity that administers the rules.
Other appellate courts have rejected similar challenges and the justices are likely to step in to resolve the conflicting rulings.
The authority, backed by the Biden administration, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and others, sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court.
Texas, as well as racetracks in the state and in neighboring Louisiana, opposed the emergency appeal.
The anti-doping program, which took effect in the spring of 2023, is an attempt to centralize the drug testing of racehorses and manage the results and dole out uniform penalties to horses and trainers instead of the previous patchwork rules in the 38 racing states.
The program has led to a 50% drop in horse deaths at racetracks that are participating, lawyers for the authority told the court. Meanwhile, death rates have gone up at other tracks, they wrote in their legal filing.
Legislation to dismantle the new authority has been introduced in the House of Representatives but hasn’t gone anywhere.
Florida
Woman found guilty of murder for leaving man to die in a suitcase
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A woman accused of leaving her boyfriend to die after he was zipped into a suitcase in their home was found guilty of second-degree murder by a jury in central Florida.
Four years after Sarah Boone was arrested in the death of Jorge Torres, jurors handed down the verdict against her on Friday evening after deliberating for about 90 minutes. Boone had pleaded not guilty.
Boone initially told detectives with the Orange County Sheriff’s Office that she and Torres had been playing hide-and-seek on Feb. 23, 2020, in their Winter Park, Florida, residence when they thought it would be funny for Torres to get into the suitcase.
They had been drinking and she decided to go to sleep, thinking her boyfriend could get out of the suitcase on his own, she told detectives, according to an arrest report.
When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t find Torres but then remembered he was in the suitcase. She unzipped the suitcase and found him unresponsive, the arrest report said.
Detectives charged Boone with murder after they found videos on her cellphone showing Torres yelling from inside the suitcase that he couldn’t breathe and repeatedly calling out Boone’s name, according to the arrest report.
During her trial, Boone testified that past violent incidents between her and Torres caused her to perceive a threat of imminent harm and that she acted in self-defense by keeping him in the suitcase.
“Yeah that’s what you do when you choke me,” Boone said in one of the cellphone videos from that night, according to the arrest report. “Oh, that’s what I feel like when you cheat on me.”
An autopsy report said Torres had scratches on his back and neck and contusions to his shoulder, skull and forehead from blunt force trauma, as well as a cut near his busted lip.
Boone had gone through several attorneys since her arrest, contributing to the delay in her trial, which lasted 10 days.
She is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 2 and faces up to life in prison.
Massachusetts
Jury awards a family $5M and says football coach caused son’s suicide
BOSTON (AP) — The family of a teenager who died by suicide was awarded $5.4 million this week after a jury found his football coach and several school administrators were negligent in the way they responded before the 15-year-old’s death.
Nathan Bruno killed himself in 2018 after his family alleges Portsmouth High School’s then-football coach Ryan Moniz pressured the boy to reveal the names of other students involved in sending harassing text messages and phone calls to the coach. The family also alleges Moniz had football players pressure Bruno to provide the names.
The jury’s decision Wednesday said Moniz was both negligent and that his actions caused Bruno’s suicide — meaning he alone was responsible for the jury award, which would be paid out by the school district. The boy’s father, Richard Bruno, declined to comment Friday on the jury’s decision. Moniz did not immediately respond to a message sent to his school email.
It’s not the first time a school district has been ordered to pay after a student takes their own life. A Utah school district in 2023 agreed to pay $2 million to the family of a Black, autistic 10-year-old girl who killed herself after being harassed by her classmates.
Bruno’s suicide led to the School Committee to remove Moriz as football coach, although he is still listed on the district’s website as a teacher. Rhode Island’s legislature passed a law in 2021 named in honor of Bruno that requires all public school districts to adopt suicide prevention policies and train school personnel in suicide awareness and prevention.
The lawsuit filed by Bruno’s family alleges the coach, the town of Portsmouth and several school administrators “breached their duties” to Bruno which “placed mental and emotional stress upon” him in the weeks before his death. They say the defendants failed to tell Bruno’s parents about a police investigation involving him, reassigned him to another physical education class without telling his parents, allowed Moriz to pressure him and failed to meet with the student, who had offered to apologize for making the calls.
Jamestown Detective Derek Carlino, who investigated the case after Moniz filed a complaint, was also accused of sharing confidential police information about Bruno with Moniz. The jury found a former principal and assistant principal at Portsmouth High School as well as Carlino negligent.
“It was just an utter failure, pressuring a boy,” Peter Cerilli, who represented the parents with John Foley, told The Providence Journal. “There was basically bullying by the coach.”
“We have tremendous respect for Judge Licht and the jury system,” Marc DeSisto, who represented the town, told The Associated Press on Friday. “There are fundamental legal issues still pending in the Superior Court and potentially the Rhode Island Supreme Court impacting the determination of whether someone should be held responsible for the suicide of another.”
Melody Alger, who represented Carlino and Jamestown, said her clients were “grateful” not to be found liable for Bruno’s death.
“While Detective Carlino and the Town of Jamestown were disappointed with the finding of negligence, my clients are pleased to have prevailed and grateful that the jury agreed that the Jamestown defendants did not cause Nathan Bruno’s tragic death,” she said in a statement.
The jury awarded the family $3.1 million which, with interest since the boy’s death, would increase to $5.4 million.
