National Roundup

Iowa
Christian colleges win suit against abortion-pill mandate
SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — A federal judge has ruled in favor of Christian colleges in Michigan and Iowa that sued the government to avoid paying for abortion- and contraception-related health care under an Obama-era requirement.

U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett issued a permanent injunction Tuesday, blocking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from enforcing the 2011 mandate. It required employers, regardless of their religious or moral beliefs, to provide health insurance coverage for contraception, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization.

Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, and Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sued in October 2013. They argued that the requirement to provide coverage for morning-after or week-after pills violated their religious freedoms. They said many Christians consider the pills to be abortion drugs.

Interim Department of Health and Human Services rules abandoned the mandate last year.

Virginia
Thrice-deported felon sentenced to 8 years in federal prison
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A federal judge has sentenced a Mexican citizen to eight years in prison for an immigration conviction — more than double the recommended term — citing his lengthy criminal history and the fact that he’s already been deported three times.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that 45-year-old Victor Santos-Ochoa pleaded guilty to illegal re-entry after his latest arrest, on charges of assault and battery of a 5-year-old family member.

U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson told Sanchez-Ochoa on Thursday that he’s “the type of individual U.S. immigration policy is intended to keep out of the United States.”

Prosecutors say Santos-Ochoa has 18 misdemeanor convictions in California, Georgia and Virginia and spent eight years in state and federal prisons.

Illinois
Judge tosses conviction in murder of officers
CHICAGO (AP) — The conviction of a man for the murder of two Chicago police officers 40 years ago was overturned Thursday by a Cook County judge who cited alleged police torture in the case.

Judge William Hooks tossed out the confession of Jackie Wilson that he fatally shot officers Richard O’Brien and William Fahey in 1982 and order a new trial. Wilson, 57, alleged former police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his subordinates tortured him into confessing to the shootings.

Wilson had been serving a life sentence in prison.

“Your life matters, and yes, even a guilty person’s life matters,” the judge said in his ruling. “All rights matter, the rights of the good, bad and ugly all count.”

Special Prosecutor Michael O’Rourke has said he would try Wilson again. It would be the third time Wilson is tried in the case.

Hooks’ decision means prosecutors would be unable to use Jackie Wilson’s confession as evidence in a new trial.

A team of special prosecutors opposed Wilson’s bid for a new trial, saying the evidence didn’t show he was beaten as was proven in the case of his brother, Andrew Wilson. A member of the team noted photographs taken after his interrogation show Jackie Wilson smiling, with no visible injuries. However, Wilson’s lawyers say he smiled because one of his interrogators ordered him to and he was terrified to disobey.

During the hearings, Hooks asserted the special prosecutors were acting more like defense lawyers for police than prosecutors. A former lawyer on the special prosecutors’ team moved on to represent Burge in a civil suit brought by another alleged torture victim.

Burge has never faced criminal charges for abuse. He was fired from the police department in 1993 over the 1982 beating and burning of Andrew Wilson. Andrew Wilson died in prison in 2007, having been tried and convicted twice in the deaths of O’Brien and Fahey.

Burge was convicted in 2010 of lying about whether he ever witnessed or participated in the torture of suspects and served a term in federal prison.

Texas
Abortion clinics file lawsuit to undo laws dating back decades
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Texas abortion providers who won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2016 that blocked a new wave of anti-abortion efforts are now using that decision to try to undo laws on the books for decades in a lawsuit filed Thursday.

In suing over anti-abortion measures that stretch back 20 years in some cases, Texas clinics are putting a new spin on what has become a recurring cycle in GOP-controlled states — legislatures passing new abortion laws, followed by opponents rushing to court before they can take effect.

Mississippi, which has just one abortion clinic, was similarly sued in April over a slate of longstanding abortion laws.

Abortion providers say the Supreme Court opened the door when it struck down a sweeping 2013 Texas law that put stricter demands on doctors and clinics, ruling that the benefits didn’t justify the obstacles to access. The abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health, in a new lawsuit filed in Austin, now wants that same standard applied to older laws.

More than half of Texas’ abortion clinics shuttered under the 2013 law, and five years later, only three have reopened, Whole Woman’s Health CEO Amy Hagstrom Miller said.

“This is a different strategy,” Hagstrom Miller said. “Some of the things we’re challenging are 10, 20 years old.”

Among the old Texas laws being newly challenged are requirements that only doctors and not clinic staff can perform abortions, licensing standards, required ultrasounds in which the image of the fetus is shown to the patient and 24-hour waiting periods.

A spokesman for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the Supreme Court has already upheld similar requirements and called the lawsuit part of a “radical pro-abortion agenda.” Earlier this year, Paxton’s office asked lawmakers to consider expanding the attorney general’s office to enforce abortion laws.

“Abortion providers have been complying with the laws being challenged in this case for years. They are common-sense measures necessary to protect Texas women from unhygienic, unqualified clinics that put women’s lives and reproductive health at risk,” Paxton spokes­man Marc Rylander said.

The Texas lawsuit joins a flurry of challenges to abortion laws in federal courts nationwide. Last week, Planned Parenthood asked a federal judge to block an Arkansas law that restricts how abortion pills are administered, arguing the restrictions make the state the first in the U.S. to effectively ban that form of abortion.