Court Digest

OHIO
Judge: State can’t stop nuclear bailout money from being paid
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s attorney general can’t block the state’s nuclear plants from collecting fees on electricity bills even though the law that authorized the bailout money is at the center of a $60 million federal bribery probe, a judge ruled Friday.

A Franklin County judge denied Attorney General Dave Yost’s attempt to stop Energy Harbor from receiving payments to the company’s two nuclear plants near Cleveland and Toledo that were bailed out through the now-tainted legislation.

The bailout is funded by a fee that will be added to every electricity bill in the state starting Jan. 1 — directing over $150 million a year, through 2026, to the two nuclear plants.

Energy Harbor is the former FirstEnergy Solutions, a onetime subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. The company said in a statement last week that the state’s lawsuit “unjustly targets the company for lawfully participating in the political process and advocating for policy that is consistent with our interests.”

The lawsuit also sought to freeze the assets of former House Speaker Larry Householder’s $1 million campaign fund and dissolve the dark money groups involved in the bribery scheme.

But Franklin County Common Pleas Court Judge Chris Brown noted in his ruling that blocking donations and other speech would be an infringement of the companies’ and individuals’ First Amendment rights.

“I don’t know that there’s any way, absent a judicial determination of criminal conduct, that I can prohibit future speech,” Brown wrote.

Yost said while he was disappointed in the outcome of the ruling, he appreciated the judge’s attention to the issues at hand.

The Republican attorney general brought the lawsuit last week, delivering on his promise to take the legal remedies necessary if the General Assembly could not do so in time.

The House created a committee in August to determine the fate of the legislation after federal prosecutors had accused Householder and four others of shepherding energy company money for personal and political use as part of an effort to pass the bailout bill, then kill any attempt to repeal it at the polls. All five men have pleaded not guilty.

The committee adjourned hearings Wednesday on the eve of the Oct. 1 deadline to repeal the law before 90% of the state’s electricity customers begin to see an added fee on their bills come Jan. 1.

However, Yost says the rejection of his preliminary injunction is not the end.

“The core of this complaint remains: the corrupt enterprise funded by First Energy that procured a billion-dollar money hose for its benefit,” Yost said in a statement. “Today was just a preliminary round. There’s a lot more yet to go.”


ALABAMA
Judge sentences man to 600 years in prison in child sex case
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — A man accused of getting two children to engage in sexual contact for years so he could record them was sentenced to 600 years in prison Friday, federal prosecutors said.

U.S. District Judge Scott Coogler sentenced Matthew Tyler Miller, 32, of Cottondale to what amounted to a life term a year after he pleaded guilty to multiple charges of sexually exploiting young children.

“The crimes for which Miller has admitted guilt are not only disturbing, they are sickening, and his actions robbed these children of their childhood,” FBI Special Agent Johnnie Sharp Jr. said in a statement.

Miller enticed children to have sexual contact between 2014 and February 2019, an indictment said. A statement from prosecutors said the two victims were as young as 4 when the incidents occurred.

An examination of electronic devices owned by Miller turned up 102 pornographic images that had produced of the children, prosecutors said. Miller pleaded guilty in October 2019.

Miller still faces a state sodomy charge that accuses him of having sex with a child younger than 12 last year, records show.


FLORIDA
Judge: Census violated order; demands mass text to workers
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge is ordering the Census Bureau to text every 2020 census worker by Friday, letting them know the head count of every U.S. resident is continuing through the end of the month and not ending next week, as the agency previously had announced in violation of her court order.

The new order issued late Thursday by U.S. District Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, instructs the Census Bureau to send out a mass text saying an Oct. 5 target data for finishing the nation’s head count is not in effect and that people can still answer the questionnaire and census takers can still knock on doors through Oct. 31.

The judge also ordered Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham to file with the court a declaration by the start of next week confirming his agency was following a preliminary injunction she had issued last week.

Judge Koh wrote in Thursday’s decision that the Census Bureau and Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, had violated her injunction “in several ways.” She threatened them with sanctions or contempt proceedings if they violated the injunction again.

“Defendants’ dissemination of erroneous information; lurching from one hasty, unexplained plan to the next; and unlawful sacrifices of completeness and accuracy of the 2020 Census are upending the status quo, violating the Injunction Order, and undermining the credibility of the Census Bureau and the 2020 Census,” the judge wrote. “This must stop.”

Koh’s injunction last week suspended a Sept. 30 deadline for ending the head count and also a Dec. 31 deadline for turning in numbers used to determine how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment. By doing this, the deadlines reverted back to a previous Census Bureau plan that had field operations ending Oct. 31 and the reporting of apportionment figures at the end of April.

By issuing the injunction, the judge sided with civil rights groups and local governments that had sued the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Commerce, arguing that minorities and others in hard-to-count communities would be missed if the counting ended in September.

Koh referred to a tweet by the Commerce Department and Census Bureau last Monday that they now were targeting Oct. 5 as the date to end the census as “a hasty and unexplained change to the Bureau’s operations that was created in 4 days.”

“The decision also risks further undermining trust in the Bureau and its partners, sowing more confusion, and depressing Census participation,” Koh wrote.

Besides deciding how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets, the census also determines how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed annually.

In court papers, attorneys for the federal government argued that the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau had been complying with the judge’s injunction.

“An agency may make a multitude of plans in light of competing obligations,” the government attorneys said. “Preventing the very formation of such plans would necessarily embroil the Court in the supervision of how the agency goes about its day-to-day activities and how it adjusts its operations from one day to the next.”

Earlier this week, Koh had told attorneys for the civil rights groups and local governments that she would be open to a contempt motion against the Trump administration.

While the court has the authority to find the Trump administration in contempt, the plaintiff attorneys said in a motion that they were not seeking a contempt finding at this time. Instead, they said they wanted full compliance with the judge’s order, arguing the Trump administration had violated it “several times over.”

“An unrushed, full and fair count is paramount to ensuring the accuracy of the 2020 Census,” said Melissa Sherry, one of the plaintiff attorneys. “This ruling brings us one step closer to realizing that important goal.”