National Roundup

Connecticut
Woman charged with robbing her own limo driver
WILLIMANTIC, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut woman celebrating her 50th birthday in style has been charged with robbing the limousine driver she hired to chauffeur her around town.

Willimantic police say the Melanie Roberts had a dispute with the driver over how much she owed him just after midnight Monday.

Police say she removed the keys from the vehicle and ran to her home where she grabbed a loaded 9mm pistol. Police allege she threatened to “shoot out” the limo’s tires, then reached inside and removed a GPS device and a clipboard with money.

The driver called 911, and Roberts was arrested at the scene.

She was detained on $100,000 bond on six charges, including larceny and carrying a firearm under the influence. It’s not clear if she has a lawyer.

Ohio
Slain pastor’s brother arrested in fatal shooting
DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — The brother of a slain southwest Ohio pastor was expected to be charged Monday in the fatal shooting that occurred at the pastor’s church office as services were winding down, police said.

Dayton police said Sunday that the Rev. William B. Schooler, 70, was shot around 12:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Peter’s Missionary Baptist Church.

The pastor’s brother, 68-year-old Daniel Gregory Schooler, was arrested at the church and taken to the Montgomery County jail. . He was facing an expected murder charge on Monday, said Sgt. Richard Blommel. Calls to police Monday morning weren’t immediately returned.

Jail records didn’t list an attorney for Schooler.

"We heard pow, pow," church member Beulah Booker-Robertson said, recounting the shooting to the Dayton Daily News.

"The usher at the door said ‘everybody get down, everybody get out.’ "

Police said they did not know Sunday what led to the shooting, but said the pastor was the only intended victim.

The brothers’ niece, Joyce Napier, told the newspaper that Daniel Schooler has a history of mental illness.

"I would think it has to be something’s going on in his head to do something like that, because we were raised to love,’” she told the newspaper.

William Schooler also was a past interim president of the Dayton school board and current president of the local Baptist ministers union.

He taught in the Dayton school district in the 1970s and served as a principal in the Jefferson Township district for nearly two decades, according to the Daily News. He also held other positions with community organizations and local governments, including serving as a certified city of Dayton mediator.

‘“He had deep roots in the community,” a friend, Ronnie Moreland, told the newspaper.

Dayton City Commissioner Joey Williams told the Daily News he had discussed with Schooler ways to reduce violence in the community.

“For him to be a victim of violence is just extremely saddening,” Williams said.

Washington
Judge awards $13 million to exonerated man
WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge has awarded $13.2 million to a man who was convicted of murder in Washington based on forensic hair analysis that was later discredited.

The Washington Post reports that D.C. Superior Court Judge John Mott awarded the money on Friday to 55-year-old Santae Tribble, who spent 28 years in prison for the 1978 slaying of a taxi driver. He was exonerated in 2012 and released after DNA analysis revealed that hairs found in a stocking near the scene of the crime were not his.

Tribble is the third District of Columbia man who’s received a multimillion-dollar judgment in his favor after being wrongly convicted based on hair analysis. The D.C. Public Defender Service uncovered a pattern in which prosecutors exaggerated claims about the reliability of forensic hair testing.

Arizona
Polygamous cities case resumes trial
PHOENIX (AP) — A civil rights trial against two polygamous cities along the Arizona-Utah line has resumed after a one-week hiatus that was called after the case’s judge fell ill.

U.S. Judge Russel Holland returned to the bench Monday in the U.S. Justice Department’s discrimination case against Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah.

The communities are accused of functioning as agents of a polygamous sect.

Holland raised concerns with lawyers about whether jurors heard about last week’s indictment of some church leaders on food-stamp fraud charges.

Once jurors came into court, they said they hadn’t heard news about the communities or church in the last week.

Closing arguments are expected Wednesday.

The communities are accused of discriminating against nonbelievers by denying them housing, water services and police protection. They deny the allegations.

Washington
Supreme Court rejects appeal over pension fund
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court refused on Monday to disturb a ruling from New Jersey’s top court that sided with Gov. Chris Christie in a legal fight with public worker unions over pension funds.

The justices did not comment in rejecting the unions’ appeal. The high court order came less than three weeks after Christie ended his run for the Republican presidential nomination.

New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled last year that the state is obligated to pay individual retirees their pensions, but it overturned a lower court ruling that would have forced the state to come up with billions to pay promised pension benefits. New Jersey’s pension fund has nearly $75 billion in unfunded liabilities, stemming from under payment by previous governors, both Democratic and Republican.

That ruling allowed Christie to propose making a roughly $1.9 billion payment to the pension fund in his 2017 fiscal year budget, well below the roughly $3.8 billion payment he and the Legislature agreed to in 2011 legislation.

Christie backed away from those payments after revenues dropped below projections in the previous two fiscal years. After public worker unions sued, the state Supreme Court declined to force him to make the payments in the exact amounts called for in the statute.

Democrats welcome the payment because they’re including a version of Christie’s payment schedule in a proposed constitutional amendment to require quarterly payments.

A commission empaneled by Christie last year recommended another overhaul and said that unions and Democrats are missing an opportunity to rework a system that could be depleted for public school teachers and state employees by the next decade.