Ohio
Court: Hospital can force chemo on Amish girl
An Ohio appeals court is again siding with a hospital that is seeking to force a 10-year-old Amish girl to resume chemotherapy after her parents decided to stop the treatments.
The court ordered that a registered nurse take over limited guardianship for the girl and decide whether she should continue treatments for leukemia.
The appeals court ruling issued last week says the wishes and beliefs of the parents can’t outweigh the rights of the state to protect the child. The decision says the guardian should be appointed right away.
The girl’s parents, who live in northeast Ohio’s Medina County, stopped chemotherapy because they say the effects were terrible. They say they opted for “natural” medicines.
Doctors at Akron Children’s Hospital say the girl will die without chemotherapy.
Rhode Island
Student appeals suspension for gun keychain
COVENTRY, R.I. (AP) — The family of a Rhode Island seventh-grader who was suspended for three days for having a small toy gun keychain at school is appealing the suspension.
WJAR-TV reports the family of 12-year-old Joseph Lyssikatos (lis-ih-KAH’-tos) is appealing Monday to the superintendent in the town of Coventry.
Joseph was suspended last month after bringing a 2-inch keychain he won at an arcade to Alan Shawn Feinstein Middle School. Another student found it and showed it off to classmates, and Joseph was suspended.
He has already served the suspension, but his parents hope to get it expunged from his record so Joseph can try for perfect attendance this year.
Connecticut
Sisters of chase victim dispute police account
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — The sisters of a Connecticut woman fatally shot by police in Washington after she tried to ram her car through a White House barrier said Monday she wasn’t delusional and suggest she may have been fleeing danger.
The two sisters of Miriam Carey, who was killed Thursday with her 13-month-old child in her car, disputed the accounts of officials and their sister’s one-time boyfriend that she was under the delusion that President Barack Obama was communicating with her.
“What I do see is that perhaps maybe my sister was a little afraid being surrounded by officers with their guns drawn,” Valarie Carey said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show. “My sister was fleeing. She was trying to figure out how to get out of there.”
The other sister, Amy Carey-Jones, suggests police overreacted or were negligent.
“I feel that things could have been handled a lot differently,” she said. “We still feel that there was maybe another story than what we’re being told.”
Valarie Carey said officials’ descriptions of her sister are “not the Miriam we knew.”
“She was not walking around delusional, which is what we really want the public to understand,” she said.
Police said Carey led Secret Service and police on a car chase from the White House past the Capitol, trying to penetrate the security barriers at both national landmarks.
In a CNN interview on Monday morning, Eric Sanders, the lawyer representing the two sisters, rejected the suggestion that Miriam Carey is partly responsible for her own death.
The issue is how police handled the matter, he said.
Police in Washington say they’re reviewing the encounter and the use of deadly force.
Virginia
Supreme Court won’t hear appeal over sodomy law
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that struck down Virginia’s anti-sodomy law.
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office appealed a March ruling by the a three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which declared Virginia’s law unconstitutional.
The appeals court’s ruling came in the case of 47-year-old William Scott MacDonald, who was convicted of criminal solicitation for allegedly demanding oral sex from a 17-year-old girl. His conviction came two years after the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision effectively struck down anti-sodomy laws in that state and several others. The appeals court cited that 2003 ruling in its 2-1 decision.
The attorney general argued that the Texas ruling did not apply to sex acts between adults and minors. The appeals court rejected that interpretation, saying the justices implied in Lawrence that a state could criminalize sodomy between an adult and a minor but that such decisions rest with legislatures, not the judiciary. Virginia does have such a law, but it applies to minors under the age of 15.
Cuccinelli, the Republican candidate for governor, has said Virginia prosecutors have used the law to prosecute child molesters. He said nearly 90 people convicted of sex crimes involving minors may be eligible to have their names removed from Virginia’s sex offender registry because of the appeals court’s ruling.
“The Supreme Court made it perfectly clear in 2003 that laws that broadly prohibit certain kinds of sexual acts are unconstitutional,” said Rebecca Glenberg, legal director of the ACLU of Virginia, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the MacDonald case. “Clearly sexual acts with children are not constitutionally protected and should be punished, but the General Assembly should enact laws specifically targeted to that behavior and not rely on an out-of-date, overly broad, unconstitutional law to prosecute those very serious crimes.”
Washington
Court may end Stanford Ponzi scheme lawsuits
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is considering shutting down class-action lawsuits from investors who lost billions in former Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford’s massive Ponzi scheme.
Justices listened to lawyers argue over whether lawsuit should proceed against individuals, law firms and investment companies that allegedly aided Stanford’s fraud. He was sent to prison after being convicted of what prosecutors termed a $7.2 billion Ponzi, or pyramid, scheme on investors.
A lawyer for the defendants in the class-action suits said the lawsuits are blocked by the federal Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act. But others argue the investment scheme is not covered by the law because the main part of the fraud involved certificates of deposit, not stocks and other securities.
Justices will make a ruling sometime next year.
