Pennsylvania
Retired detectives go on trial in perjury case
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Three long-retired Philadelphia detectives are standing trial in a perjury case that examines whether police should be held responsible for alleged misconduct in exoneration cases.
Opening statements began Tuesday. It’s a highly unusual case, given that the men are now between 75 and 80 years old and face prison time if convicted. They were all retired when a rape and homicide case from the early 1990s was retried in 2016. They were called back to testify, restarting the five-year clock to file perjury charges.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — who frequently sued police during his career as a civil rights lawyer — charged former detectives Martin Devlin, Manuel Santiago and Frank Jastrzembski in 2021, days before the statute of limitations was set to expire.
The case stems from an elderly woman’s rape and murder in 1991. A 20-year-old neighbor, Anthony Wright, spent two decades in prison before DNA testing seemed to clear him of the crime. His conviction was thrown out, but Krasner’s predecessor decided to retry him.
“That case was remarkable,” Maurice Possley, a senior researcher at The National Registry of Exonerations, said of the 2016 retrial. “There was a DNA exclusion, and they said they were going to try it anyway.”
The key piece of evidence remaining was Wright’s confession. His lawyers argued that it was coerced. Police denied it.
But asked to write down the nine-page confession in real time — as Devlin said he had done at the time — the once-famed homicide detective gave up after just a few words. The jury quickly acquitted Wright.
Krasner took office in 2018 with a focus on police accountability. He arrested the detectives just under the wire in August 2021.
Santiago and Devlin are accused of lying about the confession. Santiago and Jastrzembski are accused of lying when they denied knowing about the DNA problem. Jastrzembski is accused of lying about finding the victim’s clothes in Wright’s bedroom.
All three men have pleaded not guilty. Devlin is now 80, Jastrzembski is 77 and Santiago is 75. They face up to seven years in prison if convicted of perjury.
Their lawyers have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the case, but the court has so far declined to intervene. The defense says Krasner’s office tainted the grand jury that heard the case by telling the panel the detectives had a history of “committing perjury ... and beating statements out of people.”
Wright, who spent 25 years in prison, received a nearly $10 million settlement from the city.
Krasner has championed some 50 exonerations since taking office.
New York
US federal judge allows attorneys to subpoena financial records in yacht case
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A federal judge in New York granted the attorneys of a Russian woman permission Monday to issue subpoenas to access the financial records of Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister and other officials involved in the sale of a megayacht that her father had abandoned.
The attorneys must first notify Prime Minister Gaston Browne and others before serving subpoenas on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S.-based Clearing House Payments Co.
“The financial records will speak for themselves,” said Martin De Luca, with Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.
He is one of the attorneys for Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov, who claims she is the rightful owner of the Alfa Nero megayacht, which remained anchored off Antigua for a couple months before the local government seized and sold it last year.
Browne did not immediately respond to a message for comment regarding the judge’s ruling.
The attorneys for Guryeva-Motlokhov alleged in a March 11 filing in federal court that Browne’s administration has not released documents related to the $40 million sale of the yacht, once owned by Andrey Guryev, a Russian businessman who founded a fertilizer company and worked in the Russian government.
He was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in August 2022, and the megayacht was removed from the sanctions list in June 2023 so Antigua could liquidate it.
Antigua’s opposition leaders also have demanded details of how the proceeds from the yacht sale were spent.
Browne has said that details related to the yacht sale are public. On Sunday, he sent The Associated Press several documents he said showed those details.
“This is irrefutable evidence that the claim that $10M is missing from the proceeds is a fabrication,” he wrote in a message, referring to claims made in the March 11 filing.
However, key information was redacted in bank payment/transfer forms that made it difficult to confirm details of the loans and advances.
Browne also accused Guryeva-Motlokhov of defamation.
In July 2024, Browne’s wife, Maria Browne, Antigua’s Minister of Housing, told The Antigua Observer newspaper that the proceeds were used to pay off government debt. Days before the report was published, the prime minister had said his administration was considering using the money to build a resort.
Attorneys for Guryeva-Motlokhov are seeking documents and information related to wire transfers and other transactions involving the prime minister and six other people, as well as 12 entities, in the past five years.
The people targeted include Browne, one of his sons, his wife, Antigua’s general accountant and its port manager.
The entities include West Indies Oil Co. Ltd., an Antigua-based petroleum storage and distribution company of which the government is a majority shareholder, and Fancy Bridge Ltd., a Hong Kong-based investment firm that owns shares in the oil company, as does Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., known as PDVSA.
The institutions that the attorneys plan to subpoena are required to comply with the request for information unless Browne or someone else files a motion opposing the subpoenas.
Legal cases related to Alfa Nero also are ongoing in Russia and the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.
South Dakota
Airman charged in killing of Native American woman
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A 24-year-old airman has been charged with killing a Native American woman who went missing in South Dakota about seven months ago.
Quinterius Chappelle, 24, made his first court appearance Monday on one count of second-degree murder in the killing of Sahela Sangrait, 21. The court documents in the case are sealed, but authorities said Sangrait was killed in August on the Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota, where Chappelle was stationed as an active-duty airman.
Chappelle is being prosecuted in federal court, and court records show he is being represented by the federal defender’s office. A woman who answered the phone at that office declined to comment on his behalf. He is being held at the Pennington County Jail.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said he pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
Chappelle is an aircraft inspection journeyman assigned to the 28th Maintenance Squadron at the Ellsworth base, according to a statement from the base. He began serving in April 2019.
“First and foremost, our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family of Sahela,” Col. Derek Oakley, 28th Bomb Wing commander, said in a statement. “We hold Airmen accountable for their actions, and if service members are found in violation of military or civilian law, they will be punished.”
A hiker discovered Sangrait’s body on March 4 near the Pennington County and Custer County lines, according to a Facebook post from the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office. Sangrait was reported missing on Aug. 10, and her remains were badly decomposed, authorities said. Her cause of death was not made public.
Sangrait was from Box Elder, South Dakota, where the Ellsworth base is located. Officials did not share whether Sangrait knew Chappelle.
According to a missing person poster shared on Facebook, Sangrait was staying with a friend in Eagle Butte and was going to return to Box Elder to gather some of her things before heading to California. It is unknown whether she ever reached Box Elder.
Sangrait was Native American, according to the poster. There are 59 cases of missing Native Americans in South Dakota and more than half of them are women, according to the attorney general’s missing persons database. Federal and state task forces were created to investigate cases of missing and murdered indigenous people across the country.
New Mexico
Court puts a temporary hold on releasing records related to deaths of Hackman, wife
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A New Mexico court granted a temporary restraining order Monday against the release of certain records related to the investigation into the recent deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa.
The order is in response to a request by Julia Peters, a representative for the couple’s estate. She urged in a motion filed last week that the court seal records in the case to protect the family’s right to privacy in grief under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Peters emphasized the possibly shocking nature of photographs and video in the investigation and potential for their dissemination by media.
A hearing has been scheduled for later this month to argue the merits of the request. For now, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and the state Office of the Medical Investigator cannot release photographs and videos showing the couple’s bodies or the interior of their home, autopsy reports or death investigation reports.
Hackman and Arakawa were found dead in their Santa Fe home in late February. Authorities have confirmed that Hackman died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease about a week after hantavirus pulmonary syndrome — a rare, rodent-borne disease — took the life of his wife.
The request to seal the records notes that the couple placed “a significant value on their privacy and took affirmative vigilant steps” to safeguard their privacy over their lifetime, including after they moved to Santa Fe and Hackman retired. The state capital is known as a refuge for celebrities, artists and authors.
“The personal representative seeks to continue to preserve the privacy of the Hackmans following their tragic death and support the family’s constitutional right to remembrance and desire to grieve in peace,” the document states.
New Mexico’s open records law blocks public access to sensitive images, including depictions of people who are deceased. Experts also say that some medical information is not considered public record under the state Inspection of Public Records Act.
Still, the bulk of death investigations by law enforcement and autopsy reports by medical investigators are typically considered public records under state law in the spirit of ensuring government transparency and accountability.
Privacy likely will play a role as well as the couple’s estate gets settled. According to probate court documents filed earlier this month, Hackman signed an updated will in 2005 leaving his estate to his wife while the will she signed that same year directed her estate to him in the event of her death. With both of them dying, management of the estate is in the hands of Peters, a Santa Fe-based attorney and trust manager.
A request is pending to appoint a trustee who can administer assets in two trusts associated with the estate. Without trust documents being made public, it’s unclear who the beneficiaries are and how the assets will be divided.
Attorneys who specialize in estate planning in New Mexico say it’s possible more details could come out if there were any legal disputes over the assets. Even then, they said, the parties likely would ask the court to seal the documents to maintain privacy.
Retired detectives go on trial in perjury case
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Three long-retired Philadelphia detectives are standing trial in a perjury case that examines whether police should be held responsible for alleged misconduct in exoneration cases.
Opening statements began Tuesday. It’s a highly unusual case, given that the men are now between 75 and 80 years old and face prison time if convicted. They were all retired when a rape and homicide case from the early 1990s was retried in 2016. They were called back to testify, restarting the five-year clock to file perjury charges.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — who frequently sued police during his career as a civil rights lawyer — charged former detectives Martin Devlin, Manuel Santiago and Frank Jastrzembski in 2021, days before the statute of limitations was set to expire.
The case stems from an elderly woman’s rape and murder in 1991. A 20-year-old neighbor, Anthony Wright, spent two decades in prison before DNA testing seemed to clear him of the crime. His conviction was thrown out, but Krasner’s predecessor decided to retry him.
“That case was remarkable,” Maurice Possley, a senior researcher at The National Registry of Exonerations, said of the 2016 retrial. “There was a DNA exclusion, and they said they were going to try it anyway.”
The key piece of evidence remaining was Wright’s confession. His lawyers argued that it was coerced. Police denied it.
But asked to write down the nine-page confession in real time — as Devlin said he had done at the time — the once-famed homicide detective gave up after just a few words. The jury quickly acquitted Wright.
Krasner took office in 2018 with a focus on police accountability. He arrested the detectives just under the wire in August 2021.
Santiago and Devlin are accused of lying about the confession. Santiago and Jastrzembski are accused of lying when they denied knowing about the DNA problem. Jastrzembski is accused of lying about finding the victim’s clothes in Wright’s bedroom.
All three men have pleaded not guilty. Devlin is now 80, Jastrzembski is 77 and Santiago is 75. They face up to seven years in prison if convicted of perjury.
Their lawyers have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the case, but the court has so far declined to intervene. The defense says Krasner’s office tainted the grand jury that heard the case by telling the panel the detectives had a history of “committing perjury ... and beating statements out of people.”
Wright, who spent 25 years in prison, received a nearly $10 million settlement from the city.
Krasner has championed some 50 exonerations since taking office.
New York
US federal judge allows attorneys to subpoena financial records in yacht case
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A federal judge in New York granted the attorneys of a Russian woman permission Monday to issue subpoenas to access the financial records of Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister and other officials involved in the sale of a megayacht that her father had abandoned.
The attorneys must first notify Prime Minister Gaston Browne and others before serving subpoenas on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S.-based Clearing House Payments Co.
“The financial records will speak for themselves,” said Martin De Luca, with Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.
He is one of the attorneys for Yulia Guryeva-Motlokhov, who claims she is the rightful owner of the Alfa Nero megayacht, which remained anchored off Antigua for a couple months before the local government seized and sold it last year.
Browne did not immediately respond to a message for comment regarding the judge’s ruling.
The attorneys for Guryeva-Motlokhov alleged in a March 11 filing in federal court that Browne’s administration has not released documents related to the $40 million sale of the yacht, once owned by Andrey Guryev, a Russian businessman who founded a fertilizer company and worked in the Russian government.
He was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in August 2022, and the megayacht was removed from the sanctions list in June 2023 so Antigua could liquidate it.
Antigua’s opposition leaders also have demanded details of how the proceeds from the yacht sale were spent.
Browne has said that details related to the yacht sale are public. On Sunday, he sent The Associated Press several documents he said showed those details.
“This is irrefutable evidence that the claim that $10M is missing from the proceeds is a fabrication,” he wrote in a message, referring to claims made in the March 11 filing.
However, key information was redacted in bank payment/transfer forms that made it difficult to confirm details of the loans and advances.
Browne also accused Guryeva-Motlokhov of defamation.
In July 2024, Browne’s wife, Maria Browne, Antigua’s Minister of Housing, told The Antigua Observer newspaper that the proceeds were used to pay off government debt. Days before the report was published, the prime minister had said his administration was considering using the money to build a resort.
Attorneys for Guryeva-Motlokhov are seeking documents and information related to wire transfers and other transactions involving the prime minister and six other people, as well as 12 entities, in the past five years.
The people targeted include Browne, one of his sons, his wife, Antigua’s general accountant and its port manager.
The entities include West Indies Oil Co. Ltd., an Antigua-based petroleum storage and distribution company of which the government is a majority shareholder, and Fancy Bridge Ltd., a Hong Kong-based investment firm that owns shares in the oil company, as does Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., known as PDVSA.
The institutions that the attorneys plan to subpoena are required to comply with the request for information unless Browne or someone else files a motion opposing the subpoenas.
Legal cases related to Alfa Nero also are ongoing in Russia and the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.
South Dakota
Airman charged in killing of Native American woman
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A 24-year-old airman has been charged with killing a Native American woman who went missing in South Dakota about seven months ago.
Quinterius Chappelle, 24, made his first court appearance Monday on one count of second-degree murder in the killing of Sahela Sangrait, 21. The court documents in the case are sealed, but authorities said Sangrait was killed in August on the Ellsworth Air Force Base in western South Dakota, where Chappelle was stationed as an active-duty airman.
Chappelle is being prosecuted in federal court, and court records show he is being represented by the federal defender’s office. A woman who answered the phone at that office declined to comment on his behalf. He is being held at the Pennington County Jail.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said he pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
Chappelle is an aircraft inspection journeyman assigned to the 28th Maintenance Squadron at the Ellsworth base, according to a statement from the base. He began serving in April 2019.
“First and foremost, our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family of Sahela,” Col. Derek Oakley, 28th Bomb Wing commander, said in a statement. “We hold Airmen accountable for their actions, and if service members are found in violation of military or civilian law, they will be punished.”
A hiker discovered Sangrait’s body on March 4 near the Pennington County and Custer County lines, according to a Facebook post from the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office. Sangrait was reported missing on Aug. 10, and her remains were badly decomposed, authorities said. Her cause of death was not made public.
Sangrait was from Box Elder, South Dakota, where the Ellsworth base is located. Officials did not share whether Sangrait knew Chappelle.
According to a missing person poster shared on Facebook, Sangrait was staying with a friend in Eagle Butte and was going to return to Box Elder to gather some of her things before heading to California. It is unknown whether she ever reached Box Elder.
Sangrait was Native American, according to the poster. There are 59 cases of missing Native Americans in South Dakota and more than half of them are women, according to the attorney general’s missing persons database. Federal and state task forces were created to investigate cases of missing and murdered indigenous people across the country.
New Mexico
Court puts a temporary hold on releasing records related to deaths of Hackman, wife
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A New Mexico court granted a temporary restraining order Monday against the release of certain records related to the investigation into the recent deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa.
The order is in response to a request by Julia Peters, a representative for the couple’s estate. She urged in a motion filed last week that the court seal records in the case to protect the family’s right to privacy in grief under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Peters emphasized the possibly shocking nature of photographs and video in the investigation and potential for their dissemination by media.
A hearing has been scheduled for later this month to argue the merits of the request. For now, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office and the state Office of the Medical Investigator cannot release photographs and videos showing the couple’s bodies or the interior of their home, autopsy reports or death investigation reports.
Hackman and Arakawa were found dead in their Santa Fe home in late February. Authorities have confirmed that Hackman died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease about a week after hantavirus pulmonary syndrome — a rare, rodent-borne disease — took the life of his wife.
The request to seal the records notes that the couple placed “a significant value on their privacy and took affirmative vigilant steps” to safeguard their privacy over their lifetime, including after they moved to Santa Fe and Hackman retired. The state capital is known as a refuge for celebrities, artists and authors.
“The personal representative seeks to continue to preserve the privacy of the Hackmans following their tragic death and support the family’s constitutional right to remembrance and desire to grieve in peace,” the document states.
New Mexico’s open records law blocks public access to sensitive images, including depictions of people who are deceased. Experts also say that some medical information is not considered public record under the state Inspection of Public Records Act.
Still, the bulk of death investigations by law enforcement and autopsy reports by medical investigators are typically considered public records under state law in the spirit of ensuring government transparency and accountability.
Privacy likely will play a role as well as the couple’s estate gets settled. According to probate court documents filed earlier this month, Hackman signed an updated will in 2005 leaving his estate to his wife while the will she signed that same year directed her estate to him in the event of her death. With both of them dying, management of the estate is in the hands of Peters, a Santa Fe-based attorney and trust manager.
A request is pending to appoint a trustee who can administer assets in two trusts associated with the estate. Without trust documents being made public, it’s unclear who the beneficiaries are and how the assets will be divided.
Attorneys who specialize in estate planning in New Mexico say it’s possible more details could come out if there were any legal disputes over the assets. Even then, they said, the parties likely would ask the court to seal the documents to maintain privacy.
