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Ex-owner of Pa. youth lockups gets 18 months
Headline News |
2011/11/04 12:54
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The former owner of two juvenile detention facilities was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in a kickback scheme that led the state Supreme Court to vacate the convictions of thousands of juveniles who appeared before a now-jailed Pennsylvania judge.
Robert Powell pleaded guilty in 2009 to concealing a felony and an accessory charge in the so-called "kids for cash" scandal.
Powell testified earlier this year that he was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to former Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan in return for their support of his two private juvenile detention facilities.
Powell said the judges extorted more than $725,000 from him after they shut down the county-run detention center and instead sent juveniles to his new lockup outside the city of Wilkes-Barre.
Sentencing guidelines call for a punishment of between 27 to 33 months in prison, but Powell was given credit for cooperating with the government.
When Powell became aware he was a target of the investigation, he approached prosecutors and offered to provide details of the scheme. |
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Appeals panel sides with CBS over Super Bowl fine
Lawyer Blog News |
2011/11/03 16:08
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In the latest court battle over the steamy 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that CBS should not be fined $550,000 for Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction."
The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals held its ground even after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a review in light of the high court's ruling in a related Fox television case. In that case, it said the Federal Communications Commission could threaten fines over the use of even a single curse word uttered on live TV.
But Circuit Judge Marjorie Rendell said the Fox case only "fortifies our opinion" that the FCC was wrong to fine CBS over the halftime show.
The three-judge panel reviewed three decades of FCC rulings and concluded the agency was changing its policy, without warning, by fining CBS for fleeting nudity.
"An agency may not apply a policy to penalize conduct that occurred before the policy was announced," Rendell wrote.
CBS argues that the FCC had previously applied the same decency standards to words and images — and excused fleeting instances of both.
Rendell said that long-standing policy appeared to change without notice in March 2004 — a month after the act at the Super Bowl, held in Houston. |
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Court takes up case on eyewitness identification
Court Feed News |
2011/11/03 15:09
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The Supreme Court appeared resistant Wednesday to increasing constitutional safeguards against the use of some eyewitness testimony at criminal trials, despite mounting evidence that eyewitness identification plays a crucial role in cases in which people were wrongly convicted.
The justices heard arguments in a case that deals with a narrow slice of the issue of eyewitness identification.
Judges already can bar testimony when the police do something to influence a witness to identify a suspect. In a case from New Hampshire, a man who was convicted of theft based on eyewitness testimony wants the court to extend the power of judges to exclude testimony when identifications are made under any suggestive circumstances, even when the police are not involved.
But taking the police out of the picture raised many questions among the justices across the bench.
Justice Antonin Scalia asked, "Why is unreliable eyewitness identification any different from unreliable anything else? So shouldn't we look at every instance of evidence introduced in criminal cases to see if it was reliable or not?"
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg peppered Richard Guerriero, the public defender representing Barion Perry at the Supreme Court, with questions about why the court should add to existing protections that include the ability to cross-examine a witness and ask the judge to tell jurors about problems with eyewitness identification. |
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Scientology church appeals French fraud conviction
Legal World News |
2011/11/03 11:10
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Lawyers for the Church of Scientology asked a French court on Thursday to throw out the group's fraud conviction because they say the investigation and trial in the decades-old case had taken too long.
The defense submitted the argument to a Paris appeals court, which is reviewing the 2009 conviction of the church's French branch, its bookstore and six of its leaders. The group was accused of pressuring members into paying large sums for questionable remedies and using "commercial harassment" against recruits.
The group and bookstore were fined euro600,000 ($830,000). Four leaders were given suspended sentences of between 10 months and two years. Two others were fined.
While Scientology is recognized as a religion in the U.S., Sweden and Spain, it is not considered one under French law.
In the original complaint, a young woman said she took out loans and spent the equivalent of euro21,000 ($29,000) on books, courses and "purification packages" after being recruited in 1998. When she sought reimbursement and to leave the group, its leadership refused to allow either. She was among three eventual plaintiffs. |
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Texas woman on death row gets new sentencing trial
Legal Career News |
2011/11/03 09:08
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Texas woman on death row gets new sentencing trial
A Texas appeals court says one of 10 women on the state's death row should get a new punishment hearing after her attorneys said prosecutors withheld evidence at her 2005 trial.
Chelsea Richardson was convicted of masterminding the slayings of her boyfriend's parents so her boyfriend could inherit their $1.56 million estate. She was 19 at the time of the December 2003 killings.
The now 27-year-old's attorneys argued she deserves a new punishment hearing because prosecutors withheld a psychologist's notes suggesting another woman, who took a plea deal in the case, masterminded the murder plot.
Richardson's trial judge and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed. The appeals court returned her case to Tarrant County on Wednesday. |
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Court upholds convictions of 5 in Fla. terror plot
Lawyer Blog News |
2011/11/02 15:43
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A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the convictions of five men accused of plotting to join forces with al-Qaida to destroy a landmark Chicago skyscraper and bomb FBI offices in several cities.
A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected numerous claims by ringleader Narseal Batiste and his followers, including questions about the sufficiency of the evidence, the FBI's use of an informant posing as an al-Qaida operative and the dismissal of a juror by a federal judge during deliberations.
Batiste, 37, and the other four were convicted in May 2009 of conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaida and wage war against the U.S. stemming from a plot to blow up the 110-story Sears Tower — now known as the Willis Tower — and bomb FBI offices in five cities, including Miami. The eventual goal, testimony showed, was to overthrow the U.S. government.
It took federal prosecutors three trials to obtain convictions; the first two ended in mistrials and two of the original "Liberty City Seven" were acquitted. One of those found not guilty, Lyglenson Lemorin, was nonetheless deported to his native Haiti.
The case was built on recordings of FBI conversations and the group never came close to staging an attack, although the FBI informant posing as a terrorist led them in a videotaped oath of allegiance to Osama bin Laden. They also videotaped the Miami FBI office and downtown courthouse buildings as potential targets. |
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