Idaho
Judge temporarily halts state’s plan to try a second time to execute a man on death row
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A federal judge has temporarily halted the planned execution of an Idaho man on death row whose first lethal injection attempt was botched earlier this year.
Thomas Eugene Creech was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Nov. 13 — roughly nine months after the state first tried and failed to execute him. Execution team members tried eight locations in Creech’s arms and legs on Feb. 28 but could not find a viable vein to deliver the lethal drug.
U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow issued the stay this week to allow the court enough time to consider Creech’s claims that prosecutors acted improperly during his clemency hearing. Creech’s defense team also has other legal cases underway seeking to stop him from being put to death.
The Idaho Department of Correction declined to comment on the postponement because the lawsuit is ongoing but said it will take at least until the end of the month for both sides to file the written copies of their arguments with the court.
“Per IDOC policy, Mr. Creech has been returned to his previous housing assignment in J-Block and execution preparations have been suspended,” department public information officer Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic said in a statement.
Creech, 74, is the state’s longest-serving person on death row. He has been in prison for half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He was already serving a life term when he beat another person in prison with him, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981 — the crime for which he was to be executed.
In the decades since, Creech has become known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as a generally well-behaved person who sometimes writes poetry. His bid for clemency before the last execution attempt found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.
After the last execution attempt failed, the Idaho Department of Correction announced it would use new protocols for lethal injection when execution team members are unable to place a peripheral IV line, close to the surface of the skin. The new policy allows the execution team to place a central venous catheter, a more complex and invasive process that involves using the deeper, large veins of the neck, groin, chest or upper arm to run a catheter deep inside a person’s body until it reaches the heart.
Alabama
Stewart wins election as Supreme Court chief justice
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Supreme Court Justice Sarah Stewart was elected as the state’s chief justice, becoming the first Republican woman to be elected to the position.
Stewart easily defeated Circuit Judge Greg Griffin, a Democrat from Montgomery, in the low-key election on Tuesday.
Stewart is the third woman to serve as Alabama chief justice. Former Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb, a Democrat, in 2006 became the first woman elected as chief justice. Former Chief Justice Lyn Stuart, a Republican, took over the position in 2016 when Roy Moore was suspended after an ethics panel ruled Moore urged probate judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court order allowing gays and lesbians to marry. Alabama Gov Kay Ivey in 2017 appointed Stuart as Moore’s replacement. Stuart ran for chief justice but was defeated in the primary.
Stewart was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2018. Before joining the high court, she served as a circuit judge in Mobile for 13 years. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School.
Stewart won the GOP nomination in March. She defeated Bryan Taylor, a former state senator and legal adviser to two governors, to secure the GOP nomination.
Stewart earlier this was among the justices who ruled couples could pursue lawsuits for the wrongful death of a minor child after their frozen embryos were destroyed in a fertility clinic accident. Stewart joined a concurring opinion written by Associate Justice Greg Shaw that the wrongful death law covers “an unborn child with no distinction between in vitro or in utero.”
The court’s decision touched off a furor and caused clinics to pause services because of concerns about civil liability. Alabama lawmakers approved legislation to shield clinics from legal liability in order to keep them open.
In Alabama, the chief justice serves on the state’s highest court, and also serves as the administrative head of the state court system.
Current Chief Justice Tom Parker cannot run again because state law prohibits judges from being elected or appointed after age 70.
The chief justice race was the only Supreme Court contest with two candidates on Tuesday. Republicans won the other seats up for election in uncontested races.
The Alabama Supreme Court has been all-Republican for several years. Justices run in statewide elections in the GOP-dominated state.
New York
Man who used legal loophole to live rent-free in NYC hotel found unfit to stand trial
NEW YORK (AP) — A man charged with fraud for claiming to own a storied Manhattan hotel where he had been living rent-free for years has been found unfit to stand trial, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Doctors examining Mickey Barreto deemed he’s not mentally competent to face criminal charges, and prosecutors confirmed the results during a court hearing Wednesday, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
Judge Cori Weston gave Barreto until Nov. 13. to find suitable inpatient psychiatric care, Bragg’s office said.
Barreto had been receiving outpatient treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues, but doctors concluded after a recent evaluation that he did not fully understand the criminal proceedings, the New York Times first reported.
Barreto dismissed the allegations of a drug problem to some “partying,” and said prosecutors are trying to have him hospitalized because they did not have a strong case against him. He does see some upside.
“It went from being unfriendly, ‘He’s a criminal,’ to oh, they don’t talk about crime anymore. Now the main thing is, like, ‘Oh, poor thing. Finally, we convinced him to go seek treatment,’” Barreto told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Brian Hutchinson, an attorney for Barreto, didn’t immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. But during Wednesday’s hearing, he said he planned to ask his client’s current treatment provider to accept him, the Times reported.
In February, prosecutors charged Barreto with 24 counts, including felony fraud and criminal contempt.
They say he forged a deed to the New Yorker Hotel purporting to transfer ownership of the entire building to him.
He then tried to charge one of the hotel’s tenants rent and demanded the hotel’s bank transfer its accounts to him, among other steps.
Barreto started living at the hotel in 2018 after arguing in court that he had paid about $200 for a one-night stay and therefore had tenant’s rights, based on a quirk of the city’s housing laws and the fact that the hotel failed to send a lawyer to a key hearing.
Barreto has said he lived at the hotel without paying any rent because the building’s owners, the Unification Church, never wanted to negotiate a lease with him, but they also couldn’t legally kick him out.
Now, his criminal case may be steering him toward a sort of loophole.
“So if you ask me if it’s a better thing, in a way it is. Because I’m not being treated as a criminal but I’m treated like a nutjob,” Barreto told the AP.
Built in 1930, the hulking Art Deco structure and its huge red “New Yorker” sign is an oft-photographed landmark in midtown Manhattan.
Muhammad Ali and other famous boxers stayed there when they had bouts at nearby Madison Square Garden, about a block away. Inventor Nikola Tesla even lived in one of its more than 1,000 rooms for a decade. And NBC broadcasted from its Terrace Room.
But the New Yorker closed as a hotel in 1972 and was used for years for church purposes before part of the building reopened as a hotel in 1994.
Texas
Appeals court orders new trial for man on death row over judge’s antisemitic bias
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial Wednesday for a Jewish man on death row — who was part of a gang of prisoners that fatally shot a police officer in 2000 after escaping — because of antisemitic bias by the judge who presided over his case.
Lawyers for Randy Halprin have contended that former Judge Vickers Cunningham in Dallas used racial slurs and antisemitic language to refer to him and some of his co-defendants.
Halprin, 47, was among the group of inmates known as the “ Texas 7,” who escaped from a South Texas prison in December 2000 and then committed numerous robberies, including the one in which they shot 29-year-old Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins 11 times, killing him.
By a vote of 6-3, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that Halprin’s conviction be overturned and that he be given a new trial after concluding that Cunningham was biased against him at the time of his trial because he is Jewish.
The appeals court found evidence showed that during his life, Cunningham repeated unsupported antisemitic narratives. When Cunningham became a judge, he continued to use derogatory language about Jewish people outside the courtroom “with ‘great hatred, (and) disgust’ and increasing intensity as the years passed,” the court said.
It also said that during Halprin’s trial, Cunningham made offensive antisemitic remarks outside the courtroom about Halprin in particular and Jews in general.
“The uncontradicted evidence supports a finding that Cunningham formed an opinion about Halprin that derived from an extrajudicial factor — Cunningham’s poisonous antisemitism,” the appeals court wrote in its ruling.
The court previously halted Halprin’s execution in 2019.
“Today, the Court of Criminal Appeals took a step towards broader trust in the criminal law by throwing out a hopelessly tainted death judgment handed down by a bigoted and biased judge,” Tivon Schardl, one of Halprin’s attorneys, said in a statement. “It also reminded Texans that religious bigotry has no place in our courts.”
The order for a new trial came after state District Judge Lela Mays in Dallas said in a December 2022 ruling that Cunningham did not or could not curb the influence of his antisemitic bias in his judicial decision-making during the trial.
Mays wrote that Cunningham used racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs to refer to Halprin and the other escaped inmates.
Cunningham stepped down from the bench in 2005 and is now an attorney in private practice in Dallas. His office said Wednesday that he would not be commenting on Halprin’s case.
Cunningham previously denied allegations of bigotry after telling the Dallas Morning News in 2018 that he has a living trust that rewards his children for marrying straight, white Christians. He had opposed interracial marriages but later told the newspaper that his views evolved.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office was appointed to handle legal issues related to Halprin’s allegations after the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, was disqualified.
In September 2022, Tarrant County prosecutors filed court documents in which they said Halprin should get a new trial because Cunningham showed “actual bias” against him.
Of the seven inmates who escaped, one killed himself before the group was arrested. Four have been executed. Another, Patrick Murphy, awaits execution.
Judge temporarily halts state’s plan to try a second time to execute a man on death row
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A federal judge has temporarily halted the planned execution of an Idaho man on death row whose first lethal injection attempt was botched earlier this year.
Thomas Eugene Creech was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Nov. 13 — roughly nine months after the state first tried and failed to execute him. Execution team members tried eight locations in Creech’s arms and legs on Feb. 28 but could not find a viable vein to deliver the lethal drug.
U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow issued the stay this week to allow the court enough time to consider Creech’s claims that prosecutors acted improperly during his clemency hearing. Creech’s defense team also has other legal cases underway seeking to stop him from being put to death.
The Idaho Department of Correction declined to comment on the postponement because the lawsuit is ongoing but said it will take at least until the end of the month for both sides to file the written copies of their arguments with the court.
“Per IDOC policy, Mr. Creech has been returned to his previous housing assignment in J-Block and execution preparations have been suspended,” department public information officer Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic said in a statement.
Creech, 74, is the state’s longest-serving person on death row. He has been in prison for half a century, convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He was already serving a life term when he beat another person in prison with him, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981 — the crime for which he was to be executed.
In the decades since, Creech has become known inside the walls of the Idaho Maximum Security Institution as a generally well-behaved person who sometimes writes poetry. His bid for clemency before the last execution attempt found support from a former warden at the penitentiary, prison staffers who recounted how he wrote them poems of support or condolence and the judge who sentenced Creech to death.
After the last execution attempt failed, the Idaho Department of Correction announced it would use new protocols for lethal injection when execution team members are unable to place a peripheral IV line, close to the surface of the skin. The new policy allows the execution team to place a central venous catheter, a more complex and invasive process that involves using the deeper, large veins of the neck, groin, chest or upper arm to run a catheter deep inside a person’s body until it reaches the heart.
Alabama
Stewart wins election as Supreme Court chief justice
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Supreme Court Justice Sarah Stewart was elected as the state’s chief justice, becoming the first Republican woman to be elected to the position.
Stewart easily defeated Circuit Judge Greg Griffin, a Democrat from Montgomery, in the low-key election on Tuesday.
Stewart is the third woman to serve as Alabama chief justice. Former Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb, a Democrat, in 2006 became the first woman elected as chief justice. Former Chief Justice Lyn Stuart, a Republican, took over the position in 2016 when Roy Moore was suspended after an ethics panel ruled Moore urged probate judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court order allowing gays and lesbians to marry. Alabama Gov Kay Ivey in 2017 appointed Stuart as Moore’s replacement. Stuart ran for chief justice but was defeated in the primary.
Stewart was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2018. Before joining the high court, she served as a circuit judge in Mobile for 13 years. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School.
Stewart won the GOP nomination in March. She defeated Bryan Taylor, a former state senator and legal adviser to two governors, to secure the GOP nomination.
Stewart earlier this was among the justices who ruled couples could pursue lawsuits for the wrongful death of a minor child after their frozen embryos were destroyed in a fertility clinic accident. Stewart joined a concurring opinion written by Associate Justice Greg Shaw that the wrongful death law covers “an unborn child with no distinction between in vitro or in utero.”
The court’s decision touched off a furor and caused clinics to pause services because of concerns about civil liability. Alabama lawmakers approved legislation to shield clinics from legal liability in order to keep them open.
In Alabama, the chief justice serves on the state’s highest court, and also serves as the administrative head of the state court system.
Current Chief Justice Tom Parker cannot run again because state law prohibits judges from being elected or appointed after age 70.
The chief justice race was the only Supreme Court contest with two candidates on Tuesday. Republicans won the other seats up for election in uncontested races.
The Alabama Supreme Court has been all-Republican for several years. Justices run in statewide elections in the GOP-dominated state.
New York
Man who used legal loophole to live rent-free in NYC hotel found unfit to stand trial
NEW YORK (AP) — A man charged with fraud for claiming to own a storied Manhattan hotel where he had been living rent-free for years has been found unfit to stand trial, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Doctors examining Mickey Barreto deemed he’s not mentally competent to face criminal charges, and prosecutors confirmed the results during a court hearing Wednesday, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
Judge Cori Weston gave Barreto until Nov. 13. to find suitable inpatient psychiatric care, Bragg’s office said.
Barreto had been receiving outpatient treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues, but doctors concluded after a recent evaluation that he did not fully understand the criminal proceedings, the New York Times first reported.
Barreto dismissed the allegations of a drug problem to some “partying,” and said prosecutors are trying to have him hospitalized because they did not have a strong case against him. He does see some upside.
“It went from being unfriendly, ‘He’s a criminal,’ to oh, they don’t talk about crime anymore. Now the main thing is, like, ‘Oh, poor thing. Finally, we convinced him to go seek treatment,’” Barreto told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Brian Hutchinson, an attorney for Barreto, didn’t immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment. But during Wednesday’s hearing, he said he planned to ask his client’s current treatment provider to accept him, the Times reported.
In February, prosecutors charged Barreto with 24 counts, including felony fraud and criminal contempt.
They say he forged a deed to the New Yorker Hotel purporting to transfer ownership of the entire building to him.
He then tried to charge one of the hotel’s tenants rent and demanded the hotel’s bank transfer its accounts to him, among other steps.
Barreto started living at the hotel in 2018 after arguing in court that he had paid about $200 for a one-night stay and therefore had tenant’s rights, based on a quirk of the city’s housing laws and the fact that the hotel failed to send a lawyer to a key hearing.
Barreto has said he lived at the hotel without paying any rent because the building’s owners, the Unification Church, never wanted to negotiate a lease with him, but they also couldn’t legally kick him out.
Now, his criminal case may be steering him toward a sort of loophole.
“So if you ask me if it’s a better thing, in a way it is. Because I’m not being treated as a criminal but I’m treated like a nutjob,” Barreto told the AP.
Built in 1930, the hulking Art Deco structure and its huge red “New Yorker” sign is an oft-photographed landmark in midtown Manhattan.
Muhammad Ali and other famous boxers stayed there when they had bouts at nearby Madison Square Garden, about a block away. Inventor Nikola Tesla even lived in one of its more than 1,000 rooms for a decade. And NBC broadcasted from its Terrace Room.
But the New Yorker closed as a hotel in 1972 and was used for years for church purposes before part of the building reopened as a hotel in 1994.
Texas
Appeals court orders new trial for man on death row over judge’s antisemitic bias
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A Texas appeals court ordered a new trial Wednesday for a Jewish man on death row — who was part of a gang of prisoners that fatally shot a police officer in 2000 after escaping — because of antisemitic bias by the judge who presided over his case.
Lawyers for Randy Halprin have contended that former Judge Vickers Cunningham in Dallas used racial slurs and antisemitic language to refer to him and some of his co-defendants.
Halprin, 47, was among the group of inmates known as the “ Texas 7,” who escaped from a South Texas prison in December 2000 and then committed numerous robberies, including the one in which they shot 29-year-old Irving police officer Aubrey Hawkins 11 times, killing him.
By a vote of 6-3, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that Halprin’s conviction be overturned and that he be given a new trial after concluding that Cunningham was biased against him at the time of his trial because he is Jewish.
The appeals court found evidence showed that during his life, Cunningham repeated unsupported antisemitic narratives. When Cunningham became a judge, he continued to use derogatory language about Jewish people outside the courtroom “with ‘great hatred, (and) disgust’ and increasing intensity as the years passed,” the court said.
It also said that during Halprin’s trial, Cunningham made offensive antisemitic remarks outside the courtroom about Halprin in particular and Jews in general.
“The uncontradicted evidence supports a finding that Cunningham formed an opinion about Halprin that derived from an extrajudicial factor — Cunningham’s poisonous antisemitism,” the appeals court wrote in its ruling.
The court previously halted Halprin’s execution in 2019.
“Today, the Court of Criminal Appeals took a step towards broader trust in the criminal law by throwing out a hopelessly tainted death judgment handed down by a bigoted and biased judge,” Tivon Schardl, one of Halprin’s attorneys, said in a statement. “It also reminded Texans that religious bigotry has no place in our courts.”
The order for a new trial came after state District Judge Lela Mays in Dallas said in a December 2022 ruling that Cunningham did not or could not curb the influence of his antisemitic bias in his judicial decision-making during the trial.
Mays wrote that Cunningham used racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs to refer to Halprin and the other escaped inmates.
Cunningham stepped down from the bench in 2005 and is now an attorney in private practice in Dallas. His office said Wednesday that he would not be commenting on Halprin’s case.
Cunningham previously denied allegations of bigotry after telling the Dallas Morning News in 2018 that he has a living trust that rewards his children for marrying straight, white Christians. He had opposed interracial marriages but later told the newspaper that his views evolved.
The Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office was appointed to handle legal issues related to Halprin’s allegations after the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, was disqualified.
In September 2022, Tarrant County prosecutors filed court documents in which they said Halprin should get a new trial because Cunningham showed “actual bias” against him.
Of the seven inmates who escaped, one killed himself before the group was arrested. Four have been executed. Another, Patrick Murphy, awaits execution.
