Louisiana
$4.8M settlement reached over traffic stop death
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana officials have agreed to a tentative $4.8 million settlement with the family of Ronald Greene, a Black motorist who died during a violent 2019 roadside arrest carried out by five white officers, two people with knowledge of the agreement told The Associated Press.
The settlement would end a federal wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Greene, whose death drew national attention after the AP in 2021 obtained footage showing Louisiana State Police officers punching, kicking and using stun guns outside the city of Monroe.
The settlement is subject to approval by the Louisiana Legislature, said two people with direct knowledge of the lawsuit who were not authorized to publicly discuss the agreement.
Louisiana State Police spokesperson Capt. Russell Graham said the agency could not comment on the terms of the settlement because the process “has not yet been finalized.”
Mona Hardin, Greene’s mother, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Last year, federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against the troopers involved in Greene’s fatal arrest.
For two years after Greene’s death, the circumstances of the traffic stop following a high-speed chase remained shrouded in secrecy. State police refused to release footage of the arrest, initially claiming Greene, 49, died after crashing into a tree during the pursuit.
Video later obtained by AP showed that troopers had used stun guns on the unarmed Greene as he apologized for leading them on the chase. Troopers wrestled Greene to the ground, placed him in a chokehold and punched him.
They dragged him facedown on the ground while his hands were cuffed and his legs were shackled then left him lying on the ground without providing aid.
Troopers had initially sought to pull Greene over for an unspecified traffic violation.
In the final days of President Joe Biden’s administration in January 2025, the Justice Department found that Louisiana State Police engaged in a statewide pattern of excessive force during arrests and vehicle pursuits. Several months later, the DOJ under President Donald Trump rescinded these findings.
The investigation was launched in 2022 after an investigation by the AP exposed a series of brutal beatings by troopers.
Colorado
Federal judge rules ICE violated order limiting use of warrantless arrests in state
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that immigration officers in Colorado have violated his order limiting when they can arrest people without a warrant.
U.S. District Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have violated his November order that barred them from arresting anyone without a warrant unless they had probable cause to believe a person is in the country illegally and likely to escape before officers can get a warrant. Since then, Jackson said ICE agents have violated the order by continuing to make warrantless arrests “without individualized, pre-arrest probable cause determinations of flight risk.”
The judge also ordered immigration agents who are authorized to make warrantless arrests to undergo training on the court’s orders and for the government to turn over records of such warrantless arrests. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado over so-called collateral arrests of people accidentally caught up in immigration enforcement actions.
The ACLU accuses U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of indiscriminately arresting Latinos to meet enforcement goals amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts and ignoring legal restrictions on who should be detained.
In his latest ruling, Jackson concluded ICE had failed to adequately train its deportation officers on the requirements of his November court order and is now requiring such instruction within 45 days.
He also found ICE had “uniformly failed” to follow documentation requirements for warrantless arrests under his court order.
ICE, which has appealed Jackson’s November decision, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.
“This is a profoundly important decision for the rule of law and the people of Colorado,” Tim Macdonald, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, said in a statement. “The court made clear that ICE is not above the law and cannot continue to violate the law.”
In the last year, federal judges in Oregon, California and Washington, D.C., also have ordered immigration officers in their districts not to conduct arrests without a warrant unless there is a likelihood of escape.
Immigration officers generally get administrative warrants, which are documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize an arrest, before looking for someone targeted for arrest and deportation. At issue in the court cases is the arrest of other people without legal status that officers find, including while looking for the targeted people.
Such collateral arrests were banned during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
South Carolina
Court overturns Alex Murdaugh’s convictions in shooting deaths of wife and son
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the murder convictions and life sentence of disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh in the shooting deaths of his wife and younger son.
In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the conduct by the court clerk “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility” by suggesting to jurors his testimony could not be trusted. They also said the trial judge went too far in allowing evidence of Murdaugh’s financial crimes into his murder trial
But Murdaugh won’t be getting out of prison. The 57-year-old pleaded guilty to stealing around $12 million from his clients and currently is serving a 40-year federal sentence.
Still, the state Supreme Court ruling is a win for Murdaugh, who admits to being a thief, liar, insurance cheat and bad lawyer, but has adamantly denied killing his wife Maggie and younger son Paul since he found their bodies outside their home in 2021.
Prosecutors didn’t immediately say if they planned to retry Murdaugh for the murders in light of his long sentence for financial crimes. The original trial took six weeks.
The justices ruled Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill, assigned to oversee the evidence and the jury during the trial, influenced jurors to find Murdaugh guilty. She hoped to improve sales of a book she was writing about the case.
The name of the book was “Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders.” It was pulled from publication after plagiarism allegations were made.
“As her book’s title suggests, it turns out Hill was quite busy behind the doors of justice, thwarting the integrity of the justice system she was sworn to protect and uphold,” the justices wrote in an unsigned 27-page ruling.
Hill has since pleaded guilty to lying about what she said and did to a different judge.
Murdaugh’s lawyers also argued before the high court that the judge at his 2023 trial made rulings that prevented a fair trial, such as allowing in evidence of Murdaugh stealing from clients that had nothing to do with the killings but biased jurors against him.
They detailed the lack of physical evidence — no DNA or blood was found splattered on Murdaugh or any of his clothes, even though the killings were at close range with powerful weapons that were never found.
Prosecutors argued that the clerk’s comments were fleeting and the evidence against Murdaugh was overwhelming. His lawyer said that didn’t matter because the comments a juror said she made — urging jurors to watch Murdaugh’s body language and listen to his testimony carefully — removed his presumption of innocence before the jury ever deliberated.
Murdaugh’s legal drama continues to captivate. There have been streaming miniseries, best selling books and dozens of true crime podcasts about how the multimillionaire Southern lawyer whose family dominated and controlled the legal system in tiny Hampton County ended up in a maximum security South Carolina prison.
The justices in their ruling praised prosecutors, the defense team and the judge for outstanding work, heaping all the blame for having to try Murdaugh again on Hill.
Hill’s attorney in her criminal case didn’t return a phone call or email seeking comment.
Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice, thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury,” the justices wrote. “Our justice system provides — indeed demands — that every person is entitled to a fair trial.”
Texas
Men wrongly accused of grisly yogurt shop murders reach $35M settlement with city of Austin
The city of Austin will pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused of the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop, a case that initially sent one of the men to death row and another to life in prison, under a tentative settlement reached Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had all insisted they were innocent of one of the city’s most notorious crimes. They were finally declared innocent by a judge in February after investigators determined the crime was committed by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement must still be approved by the city council at a later date. Details of the payments to the men and their families were not released.
“This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.”
Scott and his attorney Tony Diaz said in a joint statement they are hopeful the settlement will help improve investigation practices and safeguards against wrongful convictions.
“Discussions and negotiations are ongoing regarding police reforms that would help ensure that nothing like what occurred in this case ever happens again,” they said.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 and the previous trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators determined in 2025 that new DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
$4.8M settlement reached over traffic stop death
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana officials have agreed to a tentative $4.8 million settlement with the family of Ronald Greene, a Black motorist who died during a violent 2019 roadside arrest carried out by five white officers, two people with knowledge of the agreement told The Associated Press.
The settlement would end a federal wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Greene, whose death drew national attention after the AP in 2021 obtained footage showing Louisiana State Police officers punching, kicking and using stun guns outside the city of Monroe.
The settlement is subject to approval by the Louisiana Legislature, said two people with direct knowledge of the lawsuit who were not authorized to publicly discuss the agreement.
Louisiana State Police spokesperson Capt. Russell Graham said the agency could not comment on the terms of the settlement because the process “has not yet been finalized.”
Mona Hardin, Greene’s mother, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday.
Last year, federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against the troopers involved in Greene’s fatal arrest.
For two years after Greene’s death, the circumstances of the traffic stop following a high-speed chase remained shrouded in secrecy. State police refused to release footage of the arrest, initially claiming Greene, 49, died after crashing into a tree during the pursuit.
Video later obtained by AP showed that troopers had used stun guns on the unarmed Greene as he apologized for leading them on the chase. Troopers wrestled Greene to the ground, placed him in a chokehold and punched him.
They dragged him facedown on the ground while his hands were cuffed and his legs were shackled then left him lying on the ground without providing aid.
Troopers had initially sought to pull Greene over for an unspecified traffic violation.
In the final days of President Joe Biden’s administration in January 2025, the Justice Department found that Louisiana State Police engaged in a statewide pattern of excessive force during arrests and vehicle pursuits. Several months later, the DOJ under President Donald Trump rescinded these findings.
The investigation was launched in 2022 after an investigation by the AP exposed a series of brutal beatings by troopers.
Colorado
Federal judge rules ICE violated order limiting use of warrantless arrests in state
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that immigration officers in Colorado have violated his order limiting when they can arrest people without a warrant.
U.S. District Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have violated his November order that barred them from arresting anyone without a warrant unless they had probable cause to believe a person is in the country illegally and likely to escape before officers can get a warrant. Since then, Jackson said ICE agents have violated the order by continuing to make warrantless arrests “without individualized, pre-arrest probable cause determinations of flight risk.”
The judge also ordered immigration agents who are authorized to make warrantless arrests to undergo training on the court’s orders and for the government to turn over records of such warrantless arrests. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado over so-called collateral arrests of people accidentally caught up in immigration enforcement actions.
The ACLU accuses U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of indiscriminately arresting Latinos to meet enforcement goals amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts and ignoring legal restrictions on who should be detained.
In his latest ruling, Jackson concluded ICE had failed to adequately train its deportation officers on the requirements of his November court order and is now requiring such instruction within 45 days.
He also found ICE had “uniformly failed” to follow documentation requirements for warrantless arrests under his court order.
ICE, which has appealed Jackson’s November decision, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.
“This is a profoundly important decision for the rule of law and the people of Colorado,” Tim Macdonald, legal director for the ACLU of Colorado, said in a statement. “The court made clear that ICE is not above the law and cannot continue to violate the law.”
In the last year, federal judges in Oregon, California and Washington, D.C., also have ordered immigration officers in their districts not to conduct arrests without a warrant unless there is a likelihood of escape.
Immigration officers generally get administrative warrants, which are documents issued by immigration authorities that authorize an arrest, before looking for someone targeted for arrest and deportation. At issue in the court cases is the arrest of other people without legal status that officers find, including while looking for the targeted people.
Such collateral arrests were banned during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
South Carolina
Court overturns Alex Murdaugh’s convictions in shooting deaths of wife and son
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the murder convictions and life sentence of disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh in the shooting deaths of his wife and younger son.
In a unanimous ruling, the justices said the conduct by the court clerk “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility” by suggesting to jurors his testimony could not be trusted. They also said the trial judge went too far in allowing evidence of Murdaugh’s financial crimes into his murder trial
But Murdaugh won’t be getting out of prison. The 57-year-old pleaded guilty to stealing around $12 million from his clients and currently is serving a 40-year federal sentence.
Still, the state Supreme Court ruling is a win for Murdaugh, who admits to being a thief, liar, insurance cheat and bad lawyer, but has adamantly denied killing his wife Maggie and younger son Paul since he found their bodies outside their home in 2021.
Prosecutors didn’t immediately say if they planned to retry Murdaugh for the murders in light of his long sentence for financial crimes. The original trial took six weeks.
The justices ruled Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill, assigned to oversee the evidence and the jury during the trial, influenced jurors to find Murdaugh guilty. She hoped to improve sales of a book she was writing about the case.
The name of the book was “Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders.” It was pulled from publication after plagiarism allegations were made.
“As her book’s title suggests, it turns out Hill was quite busy behind the doors of justice, thwarting the integrity of the justice system she was sworn to protect and uphold,” the justices wrote in an unsigned 27-page ruling.
Hill has since pleaded guilty to lying about what she said and did to a different judge.
Murdaugh’s lawyers also argued before the high court that the judge at his 2023 trial made rulings that prevented a fair trial, such as allowing in evidence of Murdaugh stealing from clients that had nothing to do with the killings but biased jurors against him.
They detailed the lack of physical evidence — no DNA or blood was found splattered on Murdaugh or any of his clothes, even though the killings were at close range with powerful weapons that were never found.
Prosecutors argued that the clerk’s comments were fleeting and the evidence against Murdaugh was overwhelming. His lawyer said that didn’t matter because the comments a juror said she made — urging jurors to watch Murdaugh’s body language and listen to his testimony carefully — removed his presumption of innocence before the jury ever deliberated.
Murdaugh’s legal drama continues to captivate. There have been streaming miniseries, best selling books and dozens of true crime podcasts about how the multimillionaire Southern lawyer whose family dominated and controlled the legal system in tiny Hampton County ended up in a maximum security South Carolina prison.
The justices in their ruling praised prosecutors, the defense team and the judge for outstanding work, heaping all the blame for having to try Murdaugh again on Hill.
Hill’s attorney in her criminal case didn’t return a phone call or email seeking comment.
Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice, thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury,” the justices wrote. “Our justice system provides — indeed demands — that every person is entitled to a fair trial.”
Texas
Men wrongly accused of grisly yogurt shop murders reach $35M settlement with city of Austin
The city of Austin will pay $35 million to three men and the family of a fourth who were wrongly accused of the 1991 rape and murder of four teenage girls at a yogurt shop, a case that initially sent one of the men to death row and another to life in prison, under a tentative settlement reached Tuesday.
Robert Springsteen, Michael Scott, Forrest Welborn and Maurice Pierce had all insisted they were innocent of one of the city’s most notorious crimes. They were finally declared innocent by a judge in February after investigators determined the crime was committed by a suspect who died in 1999.
The settlement must still be approved by the city council at a later date. Details of the payments to the men and their families were not released.
“This settlement closes the final chapter of a devastating story in Austin’s history,” Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with those who were wrongly accused and wrongly convicted in this case and hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to everyone affected by this horrific event.”
Scott and his attorney Tony Diaz said in a joint statement they are hopeful the settlement will help improve investigation practices and safeguards against wrongful convictions.
“Discussions and negotiations are ongoing regarding police reforms that would help ensure that nothing like what occurred in this case ever happens again,” they said.
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men, who were teenagers when the girls were killed, were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed. He died in 2010 in a confrontation with police after a traffic stop.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 and the previous trials revealed another male suspect.
Investigators determined in 2025 that new DNA science and reviews of old ballistics evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the sole killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 killing.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
