Court Digest

West Virginia
Lawsuit alleging abuse at former boarding school settled for $52M
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A lawsuit alleging widespread abuse at a now-closed northern West Virginia boarding school has been settled for $52 million.

The lawsuit was filed by 29 students of the former Miracle Meadows School in Salem in 2017. It was settled late last month in Kanawha County Circuit Court, news outlets reported.

The lawsuit alleged adults who ran the boarding school carried out the abuse over decades, according to a statement from Forbes Law Office of Charleston, one of the law firms that handled the case on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Miracle Meadows shut down after its state-recognized education status was revoked in August 2014.

Susan Gayle Clark, the school’s former director and a defendant in the lawsuit, was sentenced in 2016 to six months in jail and five years on probation after pleading guilty to child neglect charges.

Among the abuse alleged in the lawsuit by the former students, who are now adults, included being chained and shackled to beds, being kept in isolation rooms for long periods, routine beatings, sexual assault, starvation, and being forced to perform manual labor, the statement said.

“The abuse suffered by these children would shock the conscience of any West Virginian,” Charleston attorney Jesse Forbes said. “This is the stuff straight from a horror movie.”

Kansas
State Supreme Court: Consent to search can be non-verbal
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — An individual’s conduct can be relevant in determining whether a person has expressed valid consent to search, the Kansas Supreme Court said in a decision reversing a lower court ruling suppressing evidence.

The ruling Friday came in the case of Gianni Massimo Daino, who allowed police to enter his apartment when he opened the door and stood aside for them to come in.

The appeals court reversed a Johnson County District Court ruling suppressing evidence after the warrantless search led to the discovery of marijuana and other incriminating evidence.

The Supreme Court said valid consent requires a showing that an individual freely expressed consent and was not merely acquiescing to lawful authority. It ruled that an individual’s nonverbal conduct can be relevant because a person may express valid consent through words, acts, or conduct.

The court remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings.

New York
Judge: DHS head didn’t have authority to suspend DACA
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge in New York ruled Saturday that Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf assumed his position unlawfully, a determination that invalidated Wolf’s suspension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields young people from deportation.

“DHS failed to follow the order of succession as it was lawfully designated,” U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote. “Therefore, the actions taken by purported Acting Secretaries, who were not properly in their roles according to the lawful order of succession, were taken without legal authority.”

Wolf issued a memorandum in July effectively suspending DACA, pending review by DHS. A month earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that President Donald Trump failed to follow rule-making procedures when he tried to end the program, but the justices kept a window open for him to try again.

About 650,000 people are part of DACA, which allows young immigrants who were brought to the country as children to legally work and shields them from deportation.

Karen Tumlin, an attorney who represented a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits that challenged Wolf’s authority, called the ruling “another win for DACA recipients and those who have been waiting years to apply for the program for the first time.”

In August, the Government Accountability Office, a bipartisan congressional watchdog, said Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were improperly serving and ineligible to run the agency under the Vacancies Reform Act. The two have been at the forefront of administration initiatives on immigration and law enforcement.

In Garaufis’ ruling Saturday, the judge wrote that DHS didn’t follow an order of succession established when then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen resigned in April 2019. Kevin McAleenan, who succeeded Nielsen until he resigned in October 2019, also didn’t have statutory authority to hold the position, Garaufis wrote.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling. The department has maintained that Wolf’s appointment was legal even without Senate confirmation, which is still pending in the final weeks of the Trump administration.

President-elect Joe Biden plans to reinstate DACA and is expected to use executive orders to reverse some of Trump’s other immigration actions.


Mississippi
Curtis Flowers defense team receives human rights award
OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — A human rights award has been presented to the defense team for a Mississippi man who was freed from prison in December after more than 20 years and this year had all charges dropped against him.

The Curtis Flowers defense team, which includes the George C. Cochran Innocence Project at the University of Mississippi, won the 2020 Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award, The Southern Center for Human Rights announced Friday.

Flowers was convicted multiple times in a slaying and robbery at a small-town furniture store in 1996. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out the most recent conviction in June 2019, citing racial bias in jury selection.

The award was presented online at the 24th Annual Frederick Douglass Awards ceremony, which featured remarks from members of the defense team and from Flowers.

“I will never forget the day the judge granted bail and I walked out of jail,” Flowers said, according to a University of Mississippi news release. “I will never forget the day, some months later, when my lawyers told me and my family that the charges had been dropped, and I was truly a free man again.”

Four people were shot to death on July 16, 1996, in the Tardy Furniture store in Winona. Flowers was convicted four times in the slayings: twice for individual slayings and twice for all four killings. Two other trials involving all four deaths ended in mistrials.

Each of Flowers’ convictions was overturned. In June 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the conviction and death sentence from Flowers’ sixth trial, which took place in 2010. Justices said prosecutors showed an unconstitutional pattern of excluding African American jurors in the trials of Flowers, who is Black.

The Supreme Court ruling came after American Public Media’s “In the Dark” investigated the case.

The Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award recognizes people and organizations that have made significant contributions to the enhancement of human rights in the justice system, said Sara Tonochi, SCHR executive director.

“With this award, SCHR honors their bold advocacy, unshakable commitment to speaking truth to power and the palpable compassion that they express for those whom society would discard,” Tonochi said of Flowers’ defense team.

Previous honorees include U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery and Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.”

Iowa
Justices toss murder conviction over jury instructions
The Iowa Supreme Court on Friday tossed out a murder conviction and ordered a new trial for a man accused of the gruesome 2017 stabbing death of his girlfriend.

In a split decision, the state’s high court ordered a new trial for Gregory Michael Davis, 30, after finding his trial attorney’s failure to object to confusing jury instructions cost Davis a fair trial.

Davis was convicted in 2018 of first-degree murder and other counts in the September 2017 death of 29-year-old Carrie Davis, whose body was found rolled in a blanket inside a trailer in Marion. Investigators determined she had been stabbed 26 times days before her body was found.

Gregory Davis never denied killing her but argued an insanity defense. His lawyers said he had a long history of mental illness and drug abuse and that he believed at the time of the stabbing that killing his girlfriend would free her from evil forces.

On appeal, Gregory Davis’ attorneys argued that his trial lawyer failed to object when the court adopted a set of jury instructions. In the instructions, the jurors were given the option of finding him not guilty by reason of insanity on each count except for the first-degree murder charge.

The high court found the omission “materially misleading,” considering the cross-reference was included in all nine of the other lesser offenses.

“The instructional error allowed the jury to conclude the insanity defense didn’t apply to first-degree murder,” Justice Thomas D. Waterman wrote for the court. “This error undermines our confidence in the verdict.”

In a dissent, Justices Christopher McDonald, Edward Mansfield and Dana Oxley questioned the majority’s finding that jurors would have been confused by the instructions, given that Davis’ insanity defense was “squarely and unequivocally” presented to the jury during trial.

“This is contrary to the relevant law, the record, and common sense,” McDonald wrote.

The Iowa Attorney General’s Office said in a written statement that it agreed with the dissenting justices, but “we accept that the majority disagrees.”

Davis’ appeal attorney, Alfredo Parrish, called the court case a “long, hard battle,” and said he and his client looked forward to a new trial.

Maryland
Baltimore to pay about $8M in police corruption settlement
BALTIMORE (AP) — Baltimore officials are set to approve a roughly $8 million settlement to two men who went to prison after drugs were planted on them a decade ago during an encounter with members of a rogue police unit that brutalized, robbed and falsely arrested residents.

The city’s spending board is scheduled to take up the settlement Wednesday, news outlets reported. The Board of Estimates has approved several settlements in recent weeks stemming from the misconduct of members of the Gun Trace Task Force, a once-lauded group that was supposed to take guns off the streets of Baltimore.

The settlement for Umar Burley and Brent Matthews is the largest settlement in connection with the task force and surpasses the amount paid in 2015 to the family of Freddie Gray, a young Black man who died a week after he was critically injured in police custody and whose death lead to civil unrest.

The proposed payment includes $6.3 million for Burley and Matthews as well as $1.8 million to pay off a lien due to the estate of Elbert Davis, which sued Burley. Burley and Matthews encountered task force members in 2010 during an illegal traffic stop that led to a high-speed chase. Burley crashed with another vehicle, killing Davis.

Burley spent seven years in prison, while Matthews served two-and-half years behind bars. Their convictions were vacated in 2017 after officers cooperating in the federal investigation into the task force told authorities that a member of the unit had spoken of drugs being planted in the incident.

“Mr. Burley and Mr. Matthews were overtly and undeniably framed by a conspiracy of at least four police officers,” the men’s attorneys, Steve Silverman, said in a statement. “It should not take an army of lawyers litigating for years to right wrongs like this.”

The investigation into the task force has led to the convictions of more than a dozen officers. Hundreds of criminal cases based on their work have been dropped or vacated.


Texas
Man sentenced for death of 2 carnival vendors
GREAT BEND, Kan. (AP) — A Texas man has been sentenced to life in prison for his role in the slayings of a Kansas couple who were killed after a carnival worker ordered their deaths as part of a fictitious carnival mafia.
Rusty Frasier, 37, of Aransas Pass, Texas, was sentenced Friday to life without parole for 50 years on each of two counts of first-degree murder.

He is one of several people charged in the July 2018 deaths of Alfred and Pauline Carpenter, who were working as vendors at the Barton County, Kansas, fair.

Prosecutors said the Carpenters were killed at the fair and their bodies were taken to Arkansas, where they were buried in a national forest near Van Buren, Arkansas.

Investigators said one suspect posed as a carnival mafia boss and ordered the other suspects to kill the couple. Police have said the “carnival mafia” does not exist.

Barton County District Court Judge Mike Keeley on Friday also sentenced Christine Tenney, 40, of La Marque, Texas, to 59 months for aggravated robbery and eight months for obstructing apprehension for her role in the deaths.

Michael Fowler, Jr., 56, of Sarasota, Florida, was previously sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 100 years. Kimberly Younger, of McIntosh, Florida, has pleaded not guilty to several charges, including capital murder, in the Carpenters’ deaths.