Florida
Justice Thomas hails U.S. Constitution as common bedrock in divided America
MIAMI (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged Americans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence not with fireworks or empty platitudes, but by standing up for their deeply held beliefs, with the comforting knowledge that the U.S. Constitution protects free speech and serves as a common bedrock in a society otherwise beset by deep divisions.
“We can disagree on all sorts of things, but we’ve got to have something in common or we don’t have a country,” Thomas said at a judicial conference near Miami. “These documents, our founding documents, our founding history, whether we think it’s perfect or it shouldn’t be amended, or we might disagree about how far it goes, but we can say this is something that we all treasure.”
Thomas’ remarks came in response to an interview with one of his former Supreme Court clerks, Kasdin Mitchell, who was nominated this month by President Donald Trump to serve on the federal bench in Dallas.
Thomas — who recently became the second longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history — looked back on his upbringing in the segregated South and his more than three decades on the high court.
But he gave no indication that, at age 77, he is looking to retire anytime soon and give President Trump the opportunity to further cement his influence on the Supreme Court and nominate his fourth justice, the most of any president in almost a century.
“Justice Marshall said you take a job for life, you do it for life,” referring to Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first African American justice, who Thomas replaced on the high court.
But he said his long tenure had given him a unique perspective on the cynicism that pervades so much of society and contributes to Americans’ distrust in government.
He spoke about the example set by his grandfather, the son of a freed slave with barely any formal education, who nonetheless believed in America’s promise of a more perfect union, to describe his judicial philosophy in a limited form of government.
“One of the rods in this society versus so many of the others where the rights are parceled down by a government is that we were taught from the cradle that we were equal in God’s eyes, that was self-evident,” said Thomas. “If you look at Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, they all speak in terms of these transcendent rights beyond the ability of man to take away even though man had the power to infringe upon them.”
Illinois
Jury awards $49.5M to the family of a woman killed in 2019 Boeing Max crash
A federal jury has awarded $49.5 million to the family of a 24-year-old global nonprofit worker killed in the 2019 crash of a Boeing 737 Max jet in Ethiopia while traveling to her first major assignment.
The verdict, reached Wednesday after a trial in federal court in Chicago, resolves one of the last remaining wrongful death lawsuits filed in connection with the disaster that killed all 157 people aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
Samya Stumo, who grew up in Sheffield, Massachusetts, had recently joined a nonprofit focused on strengthening health systems in developing countries. A 2015 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was traveling to Uganda for what would have been her first major project with the organization when the plane crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019.
A spokesperson for UMass after the crash described her as someone known “for engaging others by earning their respect, friendship and trust.”
Jurors awarded $21 million for the pain and suffering and emotional distress that Stumo experienced aboard the doomed flight, $16.5 million for the loss of companionship suffered by her family and $12 million for their grief, according to attorneys representing her estate.
“We are gratified for the opportunity to try the compensatory damages case,” attorneys Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford said in a statement Wednesday evening announcing the verdict.
It is the second verdict tied to the crash. Boeing has reached confidential pre-trial settlements in most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits filed in connection with the Ethiopian Airlines disaster and a similar 737 Max crash five months earlier off the coast of Indonesia that together killed 346 people.
The fatal crashes became a defining crisis for Boeing and the 737 Max program. Investigators found that a flight-control system repeatedly forced the nose of the then-new planes downward based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots in both crashes were unable to regain control.
The verdict follows a November 2025 jury award of $28.45 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental consultant who also died in the 2019 crash. That case marked the first civil jury trial stemming from the disaster, with jurors similarly tasked only with calculating damages because Boeing has accepted liability.
“We are deeply sorry to all who lost loved ones on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. While we have resolved nearly all of these claims through settlements, families are entitled to pursue their claims through the court process, and we respect their right to do so,” a Boeing spokesperson said Thursday in a statement.
The Ethiopian Airlines crash prompted a worldwide grounding of the 737 Max that lasted more than a year and triggered multiple investigations into Boeing’s safety culture and regulatory oversight.
Federal prosecutors later charged Boeing with misleading regulators about the Max’s flight-control system, though in November, the federal judge in Texas overseeing the long-running criminal case approved a Justice Department request to dismiss it. Prosecutors reached an agreement with Boeing, requiring the company to invest an additional $1 billion in fines, family compensation and safety improvements.
Stumo’s family has been among the most outspoken relatives seeking accountability from Boeing and changes to federal aviation oversight. Her father, Michael Stumo, has publicly pressed Boeing, regulators and Congress over what families viewed as failures that allowed the 737 Max to keep flying after the first crash off the coast of Indonesia.
Ohio
A $620 property tax debt cost him his house. State Supreme Court will decide if the county owes him
After Angelo Craig failed to pay his $620 property tax bill, Cuyahoga County officials began the legal process of seizing his house.
The same was true when Angela Taylor owed $4,655 against her house in Shaker Heights, and Abraham David’s $3,384 debt in Cleveland, court records show.
The county eventually won title to all three homes via legal actions in county court. The three homeowners are now leading a class action lawsuit against the county treasurer’s office, claiming the county unconstitutionally took their money.
They aren’t challenging the foreclosures themselves. Rather, they say the county won title to houses that are worth more than the tax debts, yet the ex-homeowners aren’t being compensated.
The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to take up their challenge – meaning arguments about a hot-button political issue of property taxes could come before the court in an election year.
“This practice of taking ‘surplus equity’ violates both the Takings Clause and the Excessive Fines Clause of the Ohio Constitution,” wrote Ben Flowers, an attorney for the plaintiffs and a former solicitor general for the Ohio attorney general.
“Yet this unconstitutional (and unconscionable) practice is widespread in Ohio. And courts, including the Eighth District below, allow it to persist.”
State law allows counties to foreclose on homeowners who fail to pay their property taxes. From there, they can auction the houses, take the money they’re owed, and pass on any surplus.
But in all three plaintiffs’ cases, the houses didn’t sell. The auctions – cash-only affairs – failed to clear the modest legal minimum sale amounts of between $12,000 and $27,000.
Jennifer Ciaccia, a county spokesperson, declined to comment on pending litigation or provide data on the county’s home forfeiture practices. The plaintiffs say the county has seized “thousands” of homes in similar fashion.
Property records show Craig, of Cleveland, bought the house for $5,500 in August 2021 (the median sale price that year was $155,000 ). County officials by that point had already filed a case in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas to foreclose on the property.
According to figures provided in his lawsuit, he fell behind on paying the property taxes, to the point where Mr. Craig owed $12,400 on the property. The fair market value of the property, however, was approximately $45,000 in 2022-23.
For Taylor, who lost her house in 2011, she said she fell behind on paying the property taxes and owed about $14,000. The fair market value of the property, however, was about $90,000, and she didn’t receive any proceeds from the surplus.
The plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in June 2024. They lost in trial court and again at the Eighth District Court of Appeals. From here, justices will determine the timing of written and oral arguments before making a ruling.
Utah
Officer accused of shooting unarmed man charged with manslaughter
Prosecutors on Thursday charged a Salt Lake City-area police officer with manslaughter, alleging he violated police department policy and law enforcement standards when he shot an unarmed man through the back window of a pickup truck.
An expert who reviewed the Oct. 9, 2024, shooting concluded that Taylorsville police officer Jimmy Jeremy Haas did not use a reasonable amount of force, Salt Lake County prosecutors allege in their information supporting the second-degree felony manslaughter charge.
The shooting happened about half a mile (1 kilometer) outside the Taylorsville city limits in suburbs a few miles (5 kilometers) south of downtown Salt Lake City.
Prosecutors in court documents didn’t identify the man shot but said that Haas, driving an unmarked police spot-utility vehicle, had followed the pickup truck into a parking lot.
Earlier, a different Taylorsville officer had taken note of the pickup for carrying the license plates of a different vehicle that had fled from Salt Lake City police earlier in the day.
Once in the parking lot, the pickup parked between two other vehicles. Haas pulled up behind it, turned on his police lights, got out, and activated his body-worn video camera.
A woman got out of the pickup, which then backed up and began ramming Haas’s police SUV. Haas yelled multiple times, “Let me see your hands,” prosecutors allege in the documents.
The Taylorsville officer who’d first seen the pickup truck then arrived and used his vehicle to pin the pickup against a building.
As Haas’s flashlight shone on the driver through the pickup’s back window, Haas fired once, prosecutors allege. The wounded man fled and was later found unresponsive in a nearby garage.
He died later. No weapons were found in the pickup truck or on his body, prosecutors allege.
Haas, 36, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
Haas was placed on paid leave for several months during the initial shooting investigation. He was reinstated and is now back on paid leave pending further proceedings, City of Taylorsville spokesperson Kim Horiuchi said by email.
“We have confidence in the system and we believe every person is innocent until they are proven guilty at trial,” Horiuchi wrote.
Haas intends to address the allegations against him in court, his attorney, Blake Hamilton, said in a statement.
Justice Thomas hails U.S. Constitution as common bedrock in divided America
MIAMI (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged Americans to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence not with fireworks or empty platitudes, but by standing up for their deeply held beliefs, with the comforting knowledge that the U.S. Constitution protects free speech and serves as a common bedrock in a society otherwise beset by deep divisions.
“We can disagree on all sorts of things, but we’ve got to have something in common or we don’t have a country,” Thomas said at a judicial conference near Miami. “These documents, our founding documents, our founding history, whether we think it’s perfect or it shouldn’t be amended, or we might disagree about how far it goes, but we can say this is something that we all treasure.”
Thomas’ remarks came in response to an interview with one of his former Supreme Court clerks, Kasdin Mitchell, who was nominated this month by President Donald Trump to serve on the federal bench in Dallas.
Thomas — who recently became the second longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history — looked back on his upbringing in the segregated South and his more than three decades on the high court.
But he gave no indication that, at age 77, he is looking to retire anytime soon and give President Trump the opportunity to further cement his influence on the Supreme Court and nominate his fourth justice, the most of any president in almost a century.
“Justice Marshall said you take a job for life, you do it for life,” referring to Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first African American justice, who Thomas replaced on the high court.
But he said his long tenure had given him a unique perspective on the cynicism that pervades so much of society and contributes to Americans’ distrust in government.
He spoke about the example set by his grandfather, the son of a freed slave with barely any formal education, who nonetheless believed in America’s promise of a more perfect union, to describe his judicial philosophy in a limited form of government.
“One of the rods in this society versus so many of the others where the rights are parceled down by a government is that we were taught from the cradle that we were equal in God’s eyes, that was self-evident,” said Thomas. “If you look at Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, they all speak in terms of these transcendent rights beyond the ability of man to take away even though man had the power to infringe upon them.”
Illinois
Jury awards $49.5M to the family of a woman killed in 2019 Boeing Max crash
A federal jury has awarded $49.5 million to the family of a 24-year-old global nonprofit worker killed in the 2019 crash of a Boeing 737 Max jet in Ethiopia while traveling to her first major assignment.
The verdict, reached Wednesday after a trial in federal court in Chicago, resolves one of the last remaining wrongful death lawsuits filed in connection with the disaster that killed all 157 people aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302.
Samya Stumo, who grew up in Sheffield, Massachusetts, had recently joined a nonprofit focused on strengthening health systems in developing countries. A 2015 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was traveling to Uganda for what would have been her first major project with the organization when the plane crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019.
A spokesperson for UMass after the crash described her as someone known “for engaging others by earning their respect, friendship and trust.”
Jurors awarded $21 million for the pain and suffering and emotional distress that Stumo experienced aboard the doomed flight, $16.5 million for the loss of companionship suffered by her family and $12 million for their grief, according to attorneys representing her estate.
“We are gratified for the opportunity to try the compensatory damages case,” attorneys Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford said in a statement Wednesday evening announcing the verdict.
It is the second verdict tied to the crash. Boeing has reached confidential pre-trial settlements in most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits filed in connection with the Ethiopian Airlines disaster and a similar 737 Max crash five months earlier off the coast of Indonesia that together killed 346 people.
The fatal crashes became a defining crisis for Boeing and the 737 Max program. Investigators found that a flight-control system repeatedly forced the nose of the then-new planes downward based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots in both crashes were unable to regain control.
The verdict follows a November 2025 jury award of $28.45 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental consultant who also died in the 2019 crash. That case marked the first civil jury trial stemming from the disaster, with jurors similarly tasked only with calculating damages because Boeing has accepted liability.
“We are deeply sorry to all who lost loved ones on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. While we have resolved nearly all of these claims through settlements, families are entitled to pursue their claims through the court process, and we respect their right to do so,” a Boeing spokesperson said Thursday in a statement.
The Ethiopian Airlines crash prompted a worldwide grounding of the 737 Max that lasted more than a year and triggered multiple investigations into Boeing’s safety culture and regulatory oversight.
Federal prosecutors later charged Boeing with misleading regulators about the Max’s flight-control system, though in November, the federal judge in Texas overseeing the long-running criminal case approved a Justice Department request to dismiss it. Prosecutors reached an agreement with Boeing, requiring the company to invest an additional $1 billion in fines, family compensation and safety improvements.
Stumo’s family has been among the most outspoken relatives seeking accountability from Boeing and changes to federal aviation oversight. Her father, Michael Stumo, has publicly pressed Boeing, regulators and Congress over what families viewed as failures that allowed the 737 Max to keep flying after the first crash off the coast of Indonesia.
Ohio
A $620 property tax debt cost him his house. State Supreme Court will decide if the county owes him
After Angelo Craig failed to pay his $620 property tax bill, Cuyahoga County officials began the legal process of seizing his house.
The same was true when Angela Taylor owed $4,655 against her house in Shaker Heights, and Abraham David’s $3,384 debt in Cleveland, court records show.
The county eventually won title to all three homes via legal actions in county court. The three homeowners are now leading a class action lawsuit against the county treasurer’s office, claiming the county unconstitutionally took their money.
They aren’t challenging the foreclosures themselves. Rather, they say the county won title to houses that are worth more than the tax debts, yet the ex-homeowners aren’t being compensated.
The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to take up their challenge – meaning arguments about a hot-button political issue of property taxes could come before the court in an election year.
“This practice of taking ‘surplus equity’ violates both the Takings Clause and the Excessive Fines Clause of the Ohio Constitution,” wrote Ben Flowers, an attorney for the plaintiffs and a former solicitor general for the Ohio attorney general.
“Yet this unconstitutional (and unconscionable) practice is widespread in Ohio. And courts, including the Eighth District below, allow it to persist.”
State law allows counties to foreclose on homeowners who fail to pay their property taxes. From there, they can auction the houses, take the money they’re owed, and pass on any surplus.
But in all three plaintiffs’ cases, the houses didn’t sell. The auctions – cash-only affairs – failed to clear the modest legal minimum sale amounts of between $12,000 and $27,000.
Jennifer Ciaccia, a county spokesperson, declined to comment on pending litigation or provide data on the county’s home forfeiture practices. The plaintiffs say the county has seized “thousands” of homes in similar fashion.
Property records show Craig, of Cleveland, bought the house for $5,500 in August 2021 (the median sale price that year was $155,000 ). County officials by that point had already filed a case in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas to foreclose on the property.
According to figures provided in his lawsuit, he fell behind on paying the property taxes, to the point where Mr. Craig owed $12,400 on the property. The fair market value of the property, however, was approximately $45,000 in 2022-23.
For Taylor, who lost her house in 2011, she said she fell behind on paying the property taxes and owed about $14,000. The fair market value of the property, however, was about $90,000, and she didn’t receive any proceeds from the surplus.
The plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in June 2024. They lost in trial court and again at the Eighth District Court of Appeals. From here, justices will determine the timing of written and oral arguments before making a ruling.
Utah
Officer accused of shooting unarmed man charged with manslaughter
Prosecutors on Thursday charged a Salt Lake City-area police officer with manslaughter, alleging he violated police department policy and law enforcement standards when he shot an unarmed man through the back window of a pickup truck.
An expert who reviewed the Oct. 9, 2024, shooting concluded that Taylorsville police officer Jimmy Jeremy Haas did not use a reasonable amount of force, Salt Lake County prosecutors allege in their information supporting the second-degree felony manslaughter charge.
The shooting happened about half a mile (1 kilometer) outside the Taylorsville city limits in suburbs a few miles (5 kilometers) south of downtown Salt Lake City.
Prosecutors in court documents didn’t identify the man shot but said that Haas, driving an unmarked police spot-utility vehicle, had followed the pickup truck into a parking lot.
Earlier, a different Taylorsville officer had taken note of the pickup for carrying the license plates of a different vehicle that had fled from Salt Lake City police earlier in the day.
Once in the parking lot, the pickup parked between two other vehicles. Haas pulled up behind it, turned on his police lights, got out, and activated his body-worn video camera.
A woman got out of the pickup, which then backed up and began ramming Haas’s police SUV. Haas yelled multiple times, “Let me see your hands,” prosecutors allege in the documents.
The Taylorsville officer who’d first seen the pickup truck then arrived and used his vehicle to pin the pickup against a building.
As Haas’s flashlight shone on the driver through the pickup’s back window, Haas fired once, prosecutors allege. The wounded man fled and was later found unresponsive in a nearby garage.
He died later. No weapons were found in the pickup truck or on his body, prosecutors allege.
Haas, 36, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
Haas was placed on paid leave for several months during the initial shooting investigation. He was reinstated and is now back on paid leave pending further proceedings, City of Taylorsville spokesperson Kim Horiuchi said by email.
“We have confidence in the system and we believe every person is innocent until they are proven guilty at trial,” Horiuchi wrote.
Haas intends to address the allegations against him in court, his attorney, Blake Hamilton, said in a statement.
