Wyoming
First of six trials to determine if boys’ school abused youth
After more than two years of litigation, the first trial concerning allegations of abuse at the Wyoming Boys’ School began Monday in Casper with two decidedly different views of the case.
Attorneys for the boy who says he suffered abuse at the state-run facility argue the case is about a child who needed help, but who was instead mistreated. Attorneys for the state contend the proceeding is “about difficult decisions made in difficult circumstances.”
The trial in U.S. District Court concerns the case of Blaise Chivers-King, one of six former boys’ school residents who lodged complaints against the facility in 2024. The school, which detains delinquent boys ages 12 to 21, is a 38-acre residential facility near Worland that’s overseen by the Wyoming Department of Family Services.
Chivers-King, who spent time at the boys’ school between 2020 and 2022, alleged school staff violated his 14th Amendment rights by placing him in isolation, using excessive force and infringing on due process. The defendants in this particular case are Wyoming Boys’ School staffers Thad Shaffer, Mike Nelson and Dale Weber, the school’s superintendent. The three sat in the courtroom Monday.
Facing eight jurors, Ciara Boerman, one of the attorneys representing Chivers-King, described him as a child who struggled with anxiety, anger and other emotions that he didn’t always know how to handle. She acknowledged that he was “a difficult child, but still a child.”
“Instead of helping him manage his emotions, they locked him away,” Boerman said of defendants Nelson and Weber. At some points, Chivers-King no longer wanted to live, she said.
Meanwhile, Catherine Young, an attorney for the defense, asserted her clients “responded to safety concerns, and did their best to keep everyone, including Blaise, safe.” Those decisions weren’t always easy, Young said. But the defendants didn’t violate Chivers-King’s constitutional rights.
Staffers isolated Chivers-King eight times, with one of those stints lasting 15 days. Boerman referred to Chivers-King’s isolation as “solitary confinement,” though defendants contest that label.
Throughout her opening statements, Boerman showed images of the room where Chivers-King, who is expected to testify Tuesday, was isolated. The room contained one window in the door, which staffers sometimes covered with a magnet, according to Boerman. When Chivers-King attempted to look under the door, a staff member covered the crack with a mattress, Boerman said.
Staff members kept Chivers-King isolated even after he had calmed down, according to Boerman. At times, he hurt himself to get human interaction, Boerman said. She showed the jury photos of Chivers-King with an injury to his head after he had hit it against the wall in the room where he was isolated. Staff members’ reaction to this, according to Boerman, was to make Chivers-King clean his blood from the wall.
Young asserted that staffers attended to Chivers-King when he was isolated. “It was far more work when Blaise was on detention status,” she said. That’s because he required more individual attention, according to Young. “You’ll see that it was not solitary confinement,” the attorney said.
Boerman played a video for the jury of Shaffer, whom Chivers-King accused of using excessive force, holding a riot shield as he and several other staffers entered a room where Chivers-King was isolated. Chivers-King backed up as Shaffer pushed him against the wall and the group restrained him.
Young said the altercation followed repeated problematic behavior from Chivers-King that staffers tried to stop. Shaffer had to enter Chivers-King’s detention room with a riot shield to keep them both safe, and it was safer for multiple staff members to be involved in the encounter, according to Young. Nursing also got involved to check Chivers-King afterward. “And he was OK,” Young said. She noted that Chivers-King was over 6 feet tall and weighed about 270 pounds. “You’ll hear that he was capable of hurting people, and sometimes did,” she said.
Chivers-King continues to struggle with mental health issues related to his time at the boys’ school, Boerman concluded. “Blaise left the boys’ school, but the boys’ school has not left him.” Chivers-King is “more reclusive” and hardly leaves his room, according to Boerman. A doctor diagnosed Chivers-King with PTSD that, in the medical professional’s opinion, is directly related to his treatment at the boys’ school.
But Chivers-King’s mental health struggles, including PTSD, preceded his placements at the Wyoming Boys’ School, according to Young, who described his early childhood as marked by repeated abuse and neglect. “In short, for much of Blaise’s childhood, chaos was his normal experience,” Young said.
The school actually did good for Chivers-King, Young contended. He developed relationships with staffers, including the defendants, she said. Young showed a photo of Chivers-King outside walking a dog. Staff had arranged for him to visit an animal shelter off campus, she explained. Being with animals kept him calm and helped him deescalate.
The trial, which began after attorneys spent the morning choosing jurors, is expected to take five to seven days.
New York
Advocacy groups sue AI tech giants to halt further development
NEW YORK (AP) — A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups on Thursday sued five of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies to halt further development, alleging the tech giants can’t prevent their own creations from causing “catastrophic” harm.
The lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court follows a midterm election that could bring a moment of reckoning for the fast-moving AI industry, as Democrats who won back control of Congress stress the need to regulate the technology.
The filing, first reported on by The Associated Press, asks a judge to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing or deploying new AI models, pointing to documented examples of cyberattacks and other harmful actions by AI systems and the companies’ own alarming acknowledgments that their technology has the potential to someday destroy humanity.
“No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products — much less ones that could kill us all — as inevitable,” reads the complaint from the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and the Alliance for Secure AI. “Plaintiffs bring this suit to stop Defendants from continuing their unlawful path to disaster.”
The AI industry has generated excitement and stock market gains, but also deep fears that the technology could go rogue and escape human control. Recent incidents of AI agents hacking government websites and companies — including when OpenAI’s ChatGPT hacked into another AI company on its own in July — have accelerated those concerns.
President Donald Trump, a proponent of rapid AI development to keep the U.S. ahead of foreign competitors like China, has so far encouraged the companies to police themselves on matters of safety, though he has expressed openness to more guardrails. Congress also has stopped short of regulating the technology, but that may change with its Democratic takeover.
Some CEOs of major AI companies, meanwhile, have voiced support for slowing development of the technology to give safety measures a chance to catch up. They also haven’t held back in recognizing the risks. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, for example, last year said he thinks there’s a 1 in 4 chance AI’s future goes “really, really badly,” compared with a 3 in 4 chance it goes well. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, told Fox News in 2023 that AI could lead to “civilization destruction.”
The plaintiffs, all nonprofits, allege that the companies named in the lawsuit have violated a California unfair competition law by endangering public health and interfering with the use of property such as computer systems. They claim they’ve had to divert resources away from other planned work to address the acute harms threatened by each of the companies’ advancing AI models.
They also warn that the companies’ goals of creating AI systems that are broadly as smart as humans and can increasingly manage tasks and learn things autonomously could result in a permanent loss of control of the technology and heighten existential risks to humanity.
The companies named in Thursday’s lawsuit didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Illinois
Richard Posner, prolific legal scholar and outspoken appeals court judge, dies at 87
Richard Posner, a prodigious legal scholar and outspoken former federal appeals court judge who pioneered the use of economic theory to resolve legal questions, has died. He was 87.
Posner’s opinions have been cited extensively in textbooks that have educated generations of lawyers.
The University of Chicago Law School, where he served as a senior lecturer and one of his sons, Eric Posner, is a professor, said Posner died Tuesday.
Over a nearly 40-year career on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Posner developed a reputation as an acerbic and witty writer and tough questioner.
He was appointed to the court in 1981 by Republican President Ronald Reagan, but his legal opinions ran from conservative to liberal, and Posner described his approach to judging as pragmatic.
Posner was a leading figure in the use of economic theory to analyze legal rules and institutions. His 1973 textbook, The Economic Analysis of Law, was foundational and remains in print today.
As a judge, he wrote thousands of legal opinions, including in a seminal 2017 ruling that found the 1964 Civil Rights Act also barred discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers.
“I don’t see why firing a lesbian because she is in the subset of women who are lesbian should be thought any less a form of sex discrimination than firing a woman because she’s a woman,” Posner wrote.
Outside the court, he authored hundreds of academic articles and dozens of books, and did not withhold his opinions about American institutions. In 2016, he called the Supreme Court “highly politicized,” saying that “probably only” a couple of the justices were qualified, and even they were “not great.”
As a legal scholar, Posner was uniquely “prolific, influential, and endlessly curious,” University of Chicago Law School Dean Adam Chilton said.
“He was a giant whose influence on our legal system, the field of law and economics, and on our law school cannot be overstated,” Chilton said in a statement.
First of six trials to determine if boys’ school abused youth
After more than two years of litigation, the first trial concerning allegations of abuse at the Wyoming Boys’ School began Monday in Casper with two decidedly different views of the case.
Attorneys for the boy who says he suffered abuse at the state-run facility argue the case is about a child who needed help, but who was instead mistreated. Attorneys for the state contend the proceeding is “about difficult decisions made in difficult circumstances.”
The trial in U.S. District Court concerns the case of Blaise Chivers-King, one of six former boys’ school residents who lodged complaints against the facility in 2024. The school, which detains delinquent boys ages 12 to 21, is a 38-acre residential facility near Worland that’s overseen by the Wyoming Department of Family Services.
Chivers-King, who spent time at the boys’ school between 2020 and 2022, alleged school staff violated his 14th Amendment rights by placing him in isolation, using excessive force and infringing on due process. The defendants in this particular case are Wyoming Boys’ School staffers Thad Shaffer, Mike Nelson and Dale Weber, the school’s superintendent. The three sat in the courtroom Monday.
Facing eight jurors, Ciara Boerman, one of the attorneys representing Chivers-King, described him as a child who struggled with anxiety, anger and other emotions that he didn’t always know how to handle. She acknowledged that he was “a difficult child, but still a child.”
“Instead of helping him manage his emotions, they locked him away,” Boerman said of defendants Nelson and Weber. At some points, Chivers-King no longer wanted to live, she said.
Meanwhile, Catherine Young, an attorney for the defense, asserted her clients “responded to safety concerns, and did their best to keep everyone, including Blaise, safe.” Those decisions weren’t always easy, Young said. But the defendants didn’t violate Chivers-King’s constitutional rights.
Staffers isolated Chivers-King eight times, with one of those stints lasting 15 days. Boerman referred to Chivers-King’s isolation as “solitary confinement,” though defendants contest that label.
Throughout her opening statements, Boerman showed images of the room where Chivers-King, who is expected to testify Tuesday, was isolated. The room contained one window in the door, which staffers sometimes covered with a magnet, according to Boerman. When Chivers-King attempted to look under the door, a staff member covered the crack with a mattress, Boerman said.
Staff members kept Chivers-King isolated even after he had calmed down, according to Boerman. At times, he hurt himself to get human interaction, Boerman said. She showed the jury photos of Chivers-King with an injury to his head after he had hit it against the wall in the room where he was isolated. Staff members’ reaction to this, according to Boerman, was to make Chivers-King clean his blood from the wall.
Young asserted that staffers attended to Chivers-King when he was isolated. “It was far more work when Blaise was on detention status,” she said. That’s because he required more individual attention, according to Young. “You’ll see that it was not solitary confinement,” the attorney said.
Boerman played a video for the jury of Shaffer, whom Chivers-King accused of using excessive force, holding a riot shield as he and several other staffers entered a room where Chivers-King was isolated. Chivers-King backed up as Shaffer pushed him against the wall and the group restrained him.
Young said the altercation followed repeated problematic behavior from Chivers-King that staffers tried to stop. Shaffer had to enter Chivers-King’s detention room with a riot shield to keep them both safe, and it was safer for multiple staff members to be involved in the encounter, according to Young. Nursing also got involved to check Chivers-King afterward. “And he was OK,” Young said. She noted that Chivers-King was over 6 feet tall and weighed about 270 pounds. “You’ll hear that he was capable of hurting people, and sometimes did,” she said.
Chivers-King continues to struggle with mental health issues related to his time at the boys’ school, Boerman concluded. “Blaise left the boys’ school, but the boys’ school has not left him.” Chivers-King is “more reclusive” and hardly leaves his room, according to Boerman. A doctor diagnosed Chivers-King with PTSD that, in the medical professional’s opinion, is directly related to his treatment at the boys’ school.
But Chivers-King’s mental health struggles, including PTSD, preceded his placements at the Wyoming Boys’ School, according to Young, who described his early childhood as marked by repeated abuse and neglect. “In short, for much of Blaise’s childhood, chaos was his normal experience,” Young said.
The school actually did good for Chivers-King, Young contended. He developed relationships with staffers, including the defendants, she said. Young showed a photo of Chivers-King outside walking a dog. Staff had arranged for him to visit an animal shelter off campus, she explained. Being with animals kept him calm and helped him deescalate.
The trial, which began after attorneys spent the morning choosing jurors, is expected to take five to seven days.
New York
Advocacy groups sue AI tech giants to halt further development
NEW YORK (AP) — A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups on Thursday sued five of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies to halt further development, alleging the tech giants can’t prevent their own creations from causing “catastrophic” harm.
The lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court follows a midterm election that could bring a moment of reckoning for the fast-moving AI industry, as Democrats who won back control of Congress stress the need to regulate the technology.
The filing, first reported on by The Associated Press, asks a judge to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing or deploying new AI models, pointing to documented examples of cyberattacks and other harmful actions by AI systems and the companies’ own alarming acknowledgments that their technology has the potential to someday destroy humanity.
“No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products — much less ones that could kill us all — as inevitable,” reads the complaint from the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and the Alliance for Secure AI. “Plaintiffs bring this suit to stop Defendants from continuing their unlawful path to disaster.”
The AI industry has generated excitement and stock market gains, but also deep fears that the technology could go rogue and escape human control. Recent incidents of AI agents hacking government websites and companies — including when OpenAI’s ChatGPT hacked into another AI company on its own in July — have accelerated those concerns.
President Donald Trump, a proponent of rapid AI development to keep the U.S. ahead of foreign competitors like China, has so far encouraged the companies to police themselves on matters of safety, though he has expressed openness to more guardrails. Congress also has stopped short of regulating the technology, but that may change with its Democratic takeover.
Some CEOs of major AI companies, meanwhile, have voiced support for slowing development of the technology to give safety measures a chance to catch up. They also haven’t held back in recognizing the risks. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, for example, last year said he thinks there’s a 1 in 4 chance AI’s future goes “really, really badly,” compared with a 3 in 4 chance it goes well. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, told Fox News in 2023 that AI could lead to “civilization destruction.”
The plaintiffs, all nonprofits, allege that the companies named in the lawsuit have violated a California unfair competition law by endangering public health and interfering with the use of property such as computer systems. They claim they’ve had to divert resources away from other planned work to address the acute harms threatened by each of the companies’ advancing AI models.
They also warn that the companies’ goals of creating AI systems that are broadly as smart as humans and can increasingly manage tasks and learn things autonomously could result in a permanent loss of control of the technology and heighten existential risks to humanity.
The companies named in Thursday’s lawsuit didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Illinois
Richard Posner, prolific legal scholar and outspoken appeals court judge, dies at 87
Richard Posner, a prodigious legal scholar and outspoken former federal appeals court judge who pioneered the use of economic theory to resolve legal questions, has died. He was 87.
Posner’s opinions have been cited extensively in textbooks that have educated generations of lawyers.
The University of Chicago Law School, where he served as a senior lecturer and one of his sons, Eric Posner, is a professor, said Posner died Tuesday.
Over a nearly 40-year career on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Posner developed a reputation as an acerbic and witty writer and tough questioner.
He was appointed to the court in 1981 by Republican President Ronald Reagan, but his legal opinions ran from conservative to liberal, and Posner described his approach to judging as pragmatic.
Posner was a leading figure in the use of economic theory to analyze legal rules and institutions. His 1973 textbook, The Economic Analysis of Law, was foundational and remains in print today.
As a judge, he wrote thousands of legal opinions, including in a seminal 2017 ruling that found the 1964 Civil Rights Act also barred discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers.
“I don’t see why firing a lesbian because she is in the subset of women who are lesbian should be thought any less a form of sex discrimination than firing a woman because she’s a woman,” Posner wrote.
Outside the court, he authored hundreds of academic articles and dozens of books, and did not withhold his opinions about American institutions. In 2016, he called the Supreme Court “highly politicized,” saying that “probably only” a couple of the justices were qualified, and even they were “not great.”
As a legal scholar, Posner was uniquely “prolific, influential, and endlessly curious,” University of Chicago Law School Dean Adam Chilton said.
“He was a giant whose influence on our legal system, the field of law and economics, and on our law school cannot be overstated,” Chilton said in a statement.
