National Roundup

North Carolina
Jury awards man $8.3 million in excessive force case
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina jury has ordered three law enforcement officials to pay $8.3 million for violating a man’s civil rights when they beat and shot him while he was driving on his own property six years ago.

WRAL-TV reports the award is believed to be the largest excessive force verdict in a civil rights case in the state’s history.

Michael Morgan said three Wake County sheriff’s deputies improperly beat him and shot him during a traffic stop while he was unloading brush on an empty field he owned. Police said Morgan dragged a sheriff’s deputy along the side of his pickup truck before he was shot.

Morgan spent four months in jail on charges of assaulting a police officer. He was acquitted over questions about the veracity of the deputies’ accounts.

North Carolina
Member of secretive church gets probation in benefits scheme
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) — A member of a secretive North Carolina church has been sentenced to 10 months of home confinement for taking part in an unemployment fraud scheme benefiting businesses with ties to the congregation.

Diane McKinny also received three years of probation at the federal court hearing Thursday. She pleaded guilty in May to making a fraudulent claim for unemployment benefits for workers at a company run by a minister at Word of Faith Fellowship in Spindale.

Prosecutors have said the company, Diverse Corporate Technologies, laid off employees in 2008 so they could collect unemployment benefits. But prosecutors say the employees continued to work at the company, with government money replacing their salaries.

McKinny was the fourth person to plead guilty in a probe of the scheme involving multiple businesses linked to the church.
 
Mississippi
Man convicted in plot to kidnap, rape billionaire
POPLARVILLE, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man has been convicted in a plot to kidnap and extort a billionaire by filming the billionaire being raped and threatening to share the video online.

News outlets report Victor Mitchell was found guilty Thursday of conspiracy and attempted kidnapping, sexual assault and extortion. The jury recommended Mitchell serve life in prison for conspiring to kidnap a Hattiesburg businessman. He’s set to be sentenced later.

Mitchell and co-conspirators Glen Evans and Howard Cameron were arrested in November 2016. Cameron got a reduced sentence of 12 years in prison on similar charges in exchange for his testimony.

Mitchell testified that he had hired a man to haul work site materials. That man testified the job was code for kidnapping the businessman and that he notified and worked with police.

Iowa
Man gets 32 years for porn, enticing teen into prostitution
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) — A Cedar Rapids man has been sentenced to 32 years in prison for child porn and enticing a teenage girl into prostitution.

U.S. District Court records say 30-year-old Kevin Herring was sentenced Thursday in Cedar Rapids. He’d pleaded guilty to the enticement and to receipt of child pornography.

Prosecutors say Herring was at a halfway house in Cedar Rapids following his federal prison sentence for being a felon and domestic abuser in possession of a firearm. While out on a pass he met the runaway 14-year-old girl. He persuaded her to become a prostitute and send him sexually explicit images of herself.

Prosecutors say Herring told the girl she could live with him after he left the halfway house.

Georgia
Man gets prison after woman finds bullet in her skull
ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for shooting his girlfriend, who survived the bullet to the brain and only discovered the attack upon going to the hospital for headaches.

News outlets report 39-year-old Jerrontae Cain was sentenced Thursday on charges including being a felon in possession of a gun in the 2017 attack on his now former girlfriend, 42-year-old Nicole Gordon. Suffering from severe headaches and memory loss, Gordon was examined last year by doctors who found a bullet lodged in her skull.

Gordon told police she didn’t remember being shot, but did remember getting into an argument with Cain during which her car window shattered and she passed out. She thought the glass wounded her, and that’s why she was later patched up at Cain’s mother’s home.

Missouri
Man acquitted in wife’s death can’t sue prosecutors
ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) — A judge has dismissed a former prosecutor from a lawsuit alleging that a man was framed for killing his wife in a case in which his wife’s friend became embroiled in a complicated plot.

But a federal judge ruled Thursday that the case can proceed against three current and former sheriff’s investigators in Russell Faria’s lawsuit.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Faria claims in the suit that he was convicted of the 2011 killing of his wife, Betsy Faria, because the investigation was botched. He later was acquitted.

Faria and his lawyers blame the killing on Pamela Hupp, who entered a “no contest” plea to a murder charge this summer. She admitted through the plea that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her of fatally shooting a mentally disabled man in 2016 in what they say was her attempt to divert a reinvestigation of Betsy Faria’s killing.

Wisconsin
Police: Informant helped bust vape cartridge scam
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — A preliminary hearing for two Wisconsin brothers accused of running an illegal operation to manufacture vaping cartridges with THC oil has shed new light on how authorities cracked the case.

Detectives testified during Thursday’s hearing in Kenosha that they busted a man selling the illegal cartridges in Waukesha. He then became a confidential informant and led them to 20-year-old Tyler Huffhines, the alleged mastermind.

His 23-year-old brother, Jacob Huffhines, is also charged in the case. Their arrests this month came as authorities investigate hundreds of cases of a severe lung disease linked to vaping. No illnesses have been tied to the operation.

The brothers are expected to enter pleas at their next hearing Oct. 23.