Texas
Former Dallas officer convicted of killing Black man in his apartment granted parole
A white Dallas police officer convicted of killing a Black man in his apartment that she mistook for her own was granted parole Thursday after serving seven years of her 10-year sentence.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, which is appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, rejected Amber Guyger’s initial parole request in 2024, but approved her case over the objections of victim Botham Jean ‘s family the first time she was eligible to ask again.
Guyger, 38, was convicted of murder in the 2018 killing of 26-year-old Jean, an accountant from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, who had been eating a bowl of ice cream when Guyger entered his home and shot him. Guyger was arrested three days after the shooting and was fired before her murder trial.
She had faced up to life in prison or as little as two years. Prosecutors initially asked the jury for a sentence of 28 years.
The shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of Black men by white police officers. Guyger’s sentencing hearing also included a stunning courtroom scene when Jean’s brother and the Black judge presiding over the case embraced the sobbing Guyger.
At trial, Guyger said that after a long shift at work and still in uniform, she walked up to Jean’s apartment — which was on the fourth floor, directly above hers on the third — and found the door unlocked. She said she thought the apartment was her own and that Jean was an intruder when she drew her service weapon and entered.
Civil rights attorney Lee Merritt said Thursday that Jean’s family “strongly opposed this parole.”
“They stood up again and again to ask that the full sentence be served. A 10-year sentence was already a fraction of what was lost. Releasing Ms. Guyger after seven years makes that loss feel even smaller in the eyes of the system. It is not smaller,” Merritt said.
In 2024, a jury ordered Guyger to pay Jean’s family nearly $100 million in a federal civil trial.
In granting her release, the board said it reviewed a “plethora” of information in her case.
The board said Guyger’s record did not include a documented pattern of violent or assaultive arrests or convictions, and showed she completed programs in her prison treatment plan to get and keep a job when she is released.
The board said the state prison system will determine when she is released. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Guyger’s legal defense team did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Dallas police said the department played no role in Guyger’s request for parole or the decision to release her.
“The Dallas Police Department understands this decision may bring renewed attention and emotion surrounding the tragic death of Botham Jean. Our thoughts remain with the Jean family and all those impacted by his loss,” the department said.
Vermont
State’s Roman Catholic Diocese seeks to dismiss its 2-year-old bankruptcy case
Vermont’s Roman Catholic Diocese is marking this week’s second anniversary of its request for a Chapter 11 financial reorganization plan by asking a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge to dismiss its case, which so far has cost $2 million in legal fees “with no end in sight,” church lawyers said.
The state’s largest religious denomination had filed its initial call for help on Sept. 30, 2024, when it said a past series of nearly 70 priest misconduct settlements had reduced its monetary holdings by half — to about $35 million — with more than 100 other abuse claims dating as far back as 1950 yet to be resolved.
Two years later, attorneys for the church and its creditors — who include more than 100 claimants of clergy abuse — held private mediation sessions on Monday and Tuesday. At the end of those meetings, the diocese offered creditors a proposed $29.4 million collective settlement that would average $247,000 per claimant, it wrote in a court filing.
An official committee representing creditors declined the diocese’s offer, its lawyers said, having learned over the weekend that the court was set to consider the claimants’ related lawsuit seeking access to an additional estimated $500 million in local parish assets the church sheltered in trusts in 2006.
On Wednesday, the diocese responded by requesting dismissal of the Chapter 11 case, for which it has spent $2 million for its attorneys and, as required by federal law, counsel for creditors, court records show.
Burlington-based Judge Heather Cooper has set a hearing on the diocese’s request for Dec. 8.
“The diocese does not believe continued mediation in this case will be productive or successful,” church counsel wrote in its filing.
“Dismissal,” it continued, “will preserve (church) resources and allow the diocese and the survivors to pursue resolution through alternative means, free from the mounting costs of Chapter 11 administration.”
In response, creditors said they would oppose the move.
“The diocese is not being forced to litigate,” committee counsel Brittany Michael said in a statement. “It is choosing to litigate every issue the hard way and then blaming the bill on everyone else.”
Daniel Stack is one of several committee members whose clergy abuse claims were put on hold when the diocese filed for Chapter 11 protection.
“Two years ago, the diocese avoided accountability on the eve of my trial and said bankruptcy was necessary for survivors to be treated fairly,” Stack said in a statement. Now, “the diocese wants to leave the process altogether. That is not the conduct of an institution acting in good faith, it is a second attempt to avoid accountability.”
Under federal law, any financial reorganization plan requires approval by both the court and creditors. Ending the bankruptcy court proceedings without an agreement won’t erase the diocese’s challenging financial picture. Instead, it will revive the abuse lawsuits sidelined by the Chapter 11 filing and send the church and abuse claimants into a series of individual civil trials.
The judge had aimed to draw the case to a close this summer when she threatened to reject the church’s bid to reorganize its finances if a viable plan wasn’t submitted by this week’s two-year anniversary of requesting help.
“My concern is that I don’t want it all going to the professionals,” Cooper said of church funds paying for lawyers. “I do think that the survivors probably would like to have something left over at the end of the day.”
Then this past weekend, the judge signaled she was set to hear a lawsuit by creditors seeking access to not only the diocese’s state-level bank and building assets but also an estimated half-billion dollars in local parish property and possessions.
“Unless settled,” the judge has written of the contested assets of nearly 70 parishes, “there may be years of litigation ahead and millions of dollars spent in attorneys’ fees and costs that could have paid (for) valid abuse claims.”
The court also had scheduled an evidentiary hearing for November on the diocese’s request to sell its flagship Rice Memorial High School in South Burlington to supporters for $4.3 million — or 14% of a church-commissioned appraisal of $30.5 million.
Both the lawsuit over local parish assets and request to sell Rice remain on the court calendar.
The Vermont church is one of 44 U.S. Catholic entities to spend time and money seeking Chapter 11 protection since news of a nationwide priest misconduct scandal broke in 2002.
The Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York has reported the highest legal fees for such a case, at more than $100 million over four years before resolution in 2024, according to news reports. The Archdiocese of New Orleans is second at nearly $60 million over five years before resolution in 2025, while the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is third at $23 million over 4½ years before resolution in 2015.
Washington
Supreme Court denies Arizona’s bid to delay start of takeover of healthcare in state prisons
PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an eleventh-hour bid by the state of Arizona to block the upcoming start of a court-ordered takeover of healthcare operations in its prisons after the state was found to have provided constitutionally inadequate care to incarcerated people and dragged its feet for over a decade in making required improvements.
The state’s request to delay the start date was denied Thursday by Justice Elena Kagan, leaving an outside corrections professional to take over healthcare management for 25,000 incarcerated people on Oct. 19.
Arizona had asked the courts to delay the start date while it appealed both the takeover decision and the appointment of former Ohio corrections director Annette Chambers-Smith as the leader of the effort. Arizona officials brought the delay request to the Supreme Court after it was rejected by lower courts.
Over the last 14 years, Arizona has been dogged by complaints that its healthcare operation for prisoners was run shoddily and callously and that it repeatedly failed to improve a system that was found to have exposed prisoners to harm and preventable deaths.
The state vowed to overhaul medical and healthcare services for prisoners in a 2014 settlement, but was soon accused of failing to keep its promises to improve care. That led to over $2 million in contempt of court fines against the state and, eventually, the revocation of the agreement by U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver, who explained corrections officials had shown little interest in making the changes.
The judge then ruled against the state after a 2021 trial, issuing an injunction that required corrections authorities to fix the constitutional violations. Earlier this year, Silver ordered the takeover after concluding the state hadn’t gotten a semblance of compliance with court-ordered changes and the U.S. Constitution after more than a decade of litigation and that prisoners remained exposed to grave threats of harm and suffering because of systematic deficiencies in providing health care.
The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s decision.
The lawsuit over healthcare for incarcerated people covers Arizona’s nine state-run prisons but not the nearly 10,000 Arizona inmates doing time in private prisons.
Former Dallas officer convicted of killing Black man in his apartment granted parole
A white Dallas police officer convicted of killing a Black man in his apartment that she mistook for her own was granted parole Thursday after serving seven years of her 10-year sentence.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Parole, which is appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, rejected Amber Guyger’s initial parole request in 2024, but approved her case over the objections of victim Botham Jean ‘s family the first time she was eligible to ask again.
Guyger, 38, was convicted of murder in the 2018 killing of 26-year-old Jean, an accountant from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, who had been eating a bowl of ice cream when Guyger entered his home and shot him. Guyger was arrested three days after the shooting and was fired before her murder trial.
She had faced up to life in prison or as little as two years. Prosecutors initially asked the jury for a sentence of 28 years.
The shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of Black men by white police officers. Guyger’s sentencing hearing also included a stunning courtroom scene when Jean’s brother and the Black judge presiding over the case embraced the sobbing Guyger.
At trial, Guyger said that after a long shift at work and still in uniform, she walked up to Jean’s apartment — which was on the fourth floor, directly above hers on the third — and found the door unlocked. She said she thought the apartment was her own and that Jean was an intruder when she drew her service weapon and entered.
Civil rights attorney Lee Merritt said Thursday that Jean’s family “strongly opposed this parole.”
“They stood up again and again to ask that the full sentence be served. A 10-year sentence was already a fraction of what was lost. Releasing Ms. Guyger after seven years makes that loss feel even smaller in the eyes of the system. It is not smaller,” Merritt said.
In 2024, a jury ordered Guyger to pay Jean’s family nearly $100 million in a federal civil trial.
In granting her release, the board said it reviewed a “plethora” of information in her case.
The board said Guyger’s record did not include a documented pattern of violent or assaultive arrests or convictions, and showed she completed programs in her prison treatment plan to get and keep a job when she is released.
The board said the state prison system will determine when she is released. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Guyger’s legal defense team did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Dallas police said the department played no role in Guyger’s request for parole or the decision to release her.
“The Dallas Police Department understands this decision may bring renewed attention and emotion surrounding the tragic death of Botham Jean. Our thoughts remain with the Jean family and all those impacted by his loss,” the department said.
Vermont
State’s Roman Catholic Diocese seeks to dismiss its 2-year-old bankruptcy case
Vermont’s Roman Catholic Diocese is marking this week’s second anniversary of its request for a Chapter 11 financial reorganization plan by asking a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge to dismiss its case, which so far has cost $2 million in legal fees “with no end in sight,” church lawyers said.
The state’s largest religious denomination had filed its initial call for help on Sept. 30, 2024, when it said a past series of nearly 70 priest misconduct settlements had reduced its monetary holdings by half — to about $35 million — with more than 100 other abuse claims dating as far back as 1950 yet to be resolved.
Two years later, attorneys for the church and its creditors — who include more than 100 claimants of clergy abuse — held private mediation sessions on Monday and Tuesday. At the end of those meetings, the diocese offered creditors a proposed $29.4 million collective settlement that would average $247,000 per claimant, it wrote in a court filing.
An official committee representing creditors declined the diocese’s offer, its lawyers said, having learned over the weekend that the court was set to consider the claimants’ related lawsuit seeking access to an additional estimated $500 million in local parish assets the church sheltered in trusts in 2006.
On Wednesday, the diocese responded by requesting dismissal of the Chapter 11 case, for which it has spent $2 million for its attorneys and, as required by federal law, counsel for creditors, court records show.
Burlington-based Judge Heather Cooper has set a hearing on the diocese’s request for Dec. 8.
“The diocese does not believe continued mediation in this case will be productive or successful,” church counsel wrote in its filing.
“Dismissal,” it continued, “will preserve (church) resources and allow the diocese and the survivors to pursue resolution through alternative means, free from the mounting costs of Chapter 11 administration.”
In response, creditors said they would oppose the move.
“The diocese is not being forced to litigate,” committee counsel Brittany Michael said in a statement. “It is choosing to litigate every issue the hard way and then blaming the bill on everyone else.”
Daniel Stack is one of several committee members whose clergy abuse claims were put on hold when the diocese filed for Chapter 11 protection.
“Two years ago, the diocese avoided accountability on the eve of my trial and said bankruptcy was necessary for survivors to be treated fairly,” Stack said in a statement. Now, “the diocese wants to leave the process altogether. That is not the conduct of an institution acting in good faith, it is a second attempt to avoid accountability.”
Under federal law, any financial reorganization plan requires approval by both the court and creditors. Ending the bankruptcy court proceedings without an agreement won’t erase the diocese’s challenging financial picture. Instead, it will revive the abuse lawsuits sidelined by the Chapter 11 filing and send the church and abuse claimants into a series of individual civil trials.
The judge had aimed to draw the case to a close this summer when she threatened to reject the church’s bid to reorganize its finances if a viable plan wasn’t submitted by this week’s two-year anniversary of requesting help.
“My concern is that I don’t want it all going to the professionals,” Cooper said of church funds paying for lawyers. “I do think that the survivors probably would like to have something left over at the end of the day.”
Then this past weekend, the judge signaled she was set to hear a lawsuit by creditors seeking access to not only the diocese’s state-level bank and building assets but also an estimated half-billion dollars in local parish property and possessions.
“Unless settled,” the judge has written of the contested assets of nearly 70 parishes, “there may be years of litigation ahead and millions of dollars spent in attorneys’ fees and costs that could have paid (for) valid abuse claims.”
The court also had scheduled an evidentiary hearing for November on the diocese’s request to sell its flagship Rice Memorial High School in South Burlington to supporters for $4.3 million — or 14% of a church-commissioned appraisal of $30.5 million.
Both the lawsuit over local parish assets and request to sell Rice remain on the court calendar.
The Vermont church is one of 44 U.S. Catholic entities to spend time and money seeking Chapter 11 protection since news of a nationwide priest misconduct scandal broke in 2002.
The Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York has reported the highest legal fees for such a case, at more than $100 million over four years before resolution in 2024, according to news reports. The Archdiocese of New Orleans is second at nearly $60 million over five years before resolution in 2025, while the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is third at $23 million over 4½ years before resolution in 2015.
Washington
Supreme Court denies Arizona’s bid to delay start of takeover of healthcare in state prisons
PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an eleventh-hour bid by the state of Arizona to block the upcoming start of a court-ordered takeover of healthcare operations in its prisons after the state was found to have provided constitutionally inadequate care to incarcerated people and dragged its feet for over a decade in making required improvements.
The state’s request to delay the start date was denied Thursday by Justice Elena Kagan, leaving an outside corrections professional to take over healthcare management for 25,000 incarcerated people on Oct. 19.
Arizona had asked the courts to delay the start date while it appealed both the takeover decision and the appointment of former Ohio corrections director Annette Chambers-Smith as the leader of the effort. Arizona officials brought the delay request to the Supreme Court after it was rejected by lower courts.
Over the last 14 years, Arizona has been dogged by complaints that its healthcare operation for prisoners was run shoddily and callously and that it repeatedly failed to improve a system that was found to have exposed prisoners to harm and preventable deaths.
The state vowed to overhaul medical and healthcare services for prisoners in a 2014 settlement, but was soon accused of failing to keep its promises to improve care. That led to over $2 million in contempt of court fines against the state and, eventually, the revocation of the agreement by U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver, who explained corrections officials had shown little interest in making the changes.
The judge then ruled against the state after a 2021 trial, issuing an injunction that required corrections authorities to fix the constitutional violations. Earlier this year, Silver ordered the takeover after concluding the state hadn’t gotten a semblance of compliance with court-ordered changes and the U.S. Constitution after more than a decade of litigation and that prisoners remained exposed to grave threats of harm and suffering because of systematic deficiencies in providing health care.
The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s decision.
The lawsuit over healthcare for incarcerated people covers Arizona’s nine state-run prisons but not the nearly 10,000 Arizona inmates doing time in private prisons.
