National Roundup

Georgia
Deputy demoted after police dog’s death in hot car
FORSYTH, Ga. (AP) — A sheriff’s deputy in Georgia has been demoted after the death of a police dog he was handling.

Monroe County Sheriff Brad Freeman said Sgt. Willie Barkley, now a deputy, was working overnight May 13 when he left K-9 officer Khan asleep in the car while he was working on reports. Barkley then went home and left Khan in the car. When he awoke the next day, he found Khan dead in the car, WMAZ-TV reported.

Freeman called the dog’s death “an avoidable accident.”

Freeman said Barkley was demoted to deputy and moved from field operations to working at the jail. He was also suspended for five days without pay.

“There were no health issues with the dog. Dog was healthy. Although it wasn’t a hot day, the temperature was around 79 that day. A lot of people don’t realize it might be 79 outside, which is not hot for us, but in the car, it can go up 20 degrees. It could be 90+ degrees in that car. Therefore, no one can handle that -- human or animal,” Freeman told the station.

Monroe County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Anna Lewis said Barkley has been with the department since 2018. Khan was 4 years old, she said.

The Internal Affairs Division of the sheriff’s office determined the dog’s death was an accident.

New Jersey
Woman’s conviction upheld in death of young son 30 years ago
A deeply split New Jersey Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the conviction of a Florida woman found guilty of killing her young son in New Jersey three decades ago, with the justices divided on whether the state presented enough evidence to justify the jury’s verdict.

Michelle Lodzinski’s attorneys called the decision “a travesty of justice” and said they would consider appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The death of 5-year-old Timothy Wiltsey was one of New Jersey’s most infamous cold cases after his disappearance in May 1991 and the discovery of his body several months later.

Lodzinski, his mother, was convicted in 2016 and is serving  a 30-year prison sentence. Wednesday’s 3-3 ruling, in which Chief Justice Stuart Rabner did not participate, upheld the conviction.

Lodzinski had been a suspect from the outset after she told investigators the boy disappeared while they were at a carnival in Sayreville but gave varying accounts describing strangers who could have kidnapped him.

Lodzinski went on with her life and had two other children, and was living in Port St. Lucie, Florida, in 2014 when authorities in New Jersey charged her with killing Wiltsey. Investigators said a break in the case had come when one of Wiltsey’s former babysitters identified a blue blanket, found near the boy’s body 11 months after he disappeared, as belonging to Lodzinski.

During her 2016 trial and on appeal, Lodzinski’s lawyers argued that no forensic evidence tied her to the blanket and that prosecutors didn’t produce enough evidence to show Lodzinski purposely caused the boy’s death. A cause of death couldn’t be determined because Wiltsey’s body had deteriorated.

Prosecutors argued the totality of the evidence was enough to prove Lodzinski’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. An appeals court agreed in 2019 when it upheld Lodzinski’s conviction.

In an opinion Wednesday, Justice Anne Patterson wrote that the sum of the circumstantial evidence presented by the state was sufficient for a jury to reach a guilty verdict. Two justices joined Patterson’s opinion.

In a stinging dissent joined by two other justices, Justice Barry Albin wrote that the state presented “absolutely no evidence that (Lodzinski) purposely or knowingly caused his death.”

“In the modern annals of New Jersey legal history” Albin wrote, “to my knowledge, no murder conviction has ever been upheld on such a dearth of evidence.”

In an email Wednesday, Lodzinski’s attorneys Gerald Krovatin and David Fassett wrote, “Simply put, this case never should have been charged, much less allowed to proceed to trial and verdict. To permit this completely unsupported verdict to stand — and Ms. Lodzinski to remain in prison, having already served almost seven years for a crime she did not commit — is a travesty of justice.”

The Supreme Court rejected defense attorneys’ arguments that the dismissal of the jury foreman during deliberations should have merited a mistrial. The juror was dismissed after it was revealed he had done Internet research on FBI crime-scene guidelines and shared his findings with other jurors. An alternate stepped in and the panel reached a guilty verdict several hours later.

Montana
High court dismisses challenges of campus carry law
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — The Montana Supreme Court dismissed Wednesday two lawsuits seeking to block a law that will allow firearms to be carried on university campuses in the state, instead directing the suing parties to file their claims in the lower District Court.

The law, which passed the Republican controlled Legislature and was signed by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte earlier this year, is set to go into effect Tuesday.

The lawsuits sought for the court to stop the law from going into effect until it determines whether it is constitutional. The state Supreme Court stated in dismissing the lawsuits that there are no “urgency or emergency factors” and that the parties should file their claims in District Court instead.

Opponents of the law have raised concern that it overstepped the regents’ authority to manage public university campuses in the state, which is enshrined in the state constitution. Supporters of the new law questioned whether the Board of Regents could infringe upon the right to bear arms guaranteed in the state and federal constitutions.

Two separate lawsuits were filed earlier this month by the university Board of Regents and a coalition of former regents, a former commissioner of higher education, the Montana Federation of Public Employees, faculty groups, and students.

The latter lawsuit also challenged laws passed earlier this year that prohibit transgender athletes from participating on women’s sports teams at colleges and universities; restrict the ability of student organizations to register fellow students to vote in dorms and dining halls; and require campuses to provide meeting places and other resources to religious, political and ideological student organizations even if they hold views that others find offensive.