New York
State’s top court rules in favor of fantasy sports bets
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York’s highest court ruled Tuesday that fantasy sports contests like those run by FanDuel and DraftKings are allowed under the state constitution, turning back a challenge to the popular games.
The state Court of Appeals reversed an appeals court’s decision last year that found interactive fantasy sports violated the state constitution’s ban on gambling. The games allow players to assemble a roster of athletes in a sport, using individuals performance statistics to determine the winner. They annually bring in hundreds of millions in entrance fees statewide.
The lawsuit was bought several years ago and did not target mobile sports betting, which began in New York earlier this year.
In a 4-3 ruling, New York’s top court clarified the scope of that the state’s constitutional prohibition on gambling. Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote that the gambling prohibition doesn’t include skill-based competitions in which players who win a prize exercise “substantial influence” over the contest’s outcome.
DiFiore wrote that the outcome of a interactive fantasy sports contest “turns — not on the performance of real-life athletes, as it would with respect to a bet or wager — but on whether the participant has skillfully composed and managed a virtual roster so as to garner more fantasy points than rosters composed by other participants.”
The fantasy sports measure signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2016 cleared the way for companies like DraftKings and FanDuel to operate and be regulated in New York. DraftKings and FanDuel both said they were pleased with the decision.
“New York state is FanDuel’s home and our New York customers have enjoyed playing daily fantasy for years. We are pleased that New Yorkers will continue to have access to fantasy sports contests,” FanDuel spokesperson Kevin Hennessy said in a prepared statement.
The lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law was coordinated by the group Stop Predatory Gambling on behalf of four plaintiffs who had suffered personal or family harm from gambling debts.
An attorney for the group, Neil Murray, said he was disappointed that the court did not apply “the ordinary, commonsense definition of gambling” in the majority decision.
In a scathing dissent, Judge Rowan Wilson wrote that the court’s majority “effectively amends” the state constitution.
Wilson wrote that the majority’s explanation of why “something everyone knows is gambling is not actually gambling” recalled the scene in the classic film Casablanca in which police Capt. Renault said he was “shocked, shocked” to find there was gambling at a nightclub immediately before being handed his winnings.
Wisconsin
Grandmother asks judge to OK charges against cop
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A woman has asked a judge to authorize homicide charges against a white Madison police officer who shot and killed her biracial grandson seven years ago.
Tony Robinson’s grandmother, Sharon Irwin-Henry, filed a petition Monday asking a judge to find that probable cause exists to charge Officer Matt Kenny and to appoint to the case a special prosecutor who has no ties to law enforcement, such as a lawyer who specializes in criminal defense or some other area of the law, the Wisconsin State Journal reported Tuesday.
The petition falls under Wisconsin’s so-called John Doe law, which allows citizens to ask judges to approve charges if prosecutors initially refuse to file any.
Kenny shot and killed Robinson in a darkened stairwell in a home on Madison’s east side in 2015. Kenny responded to reports that Robinson had allegedly assaulted two people.
Kenny said he encountered Robinson in the stairwell leading up to the home’s second-floor apartment and that Robinson punched him in the head, forcing him to fire to protect himself.
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who is Black, announced in May 2015 that Kenny would not face charges in the case. Robinson’s mother, Andrea Irwin, settled a federal civil rights lawsuit with the city of Madison in February 2017 for $3.3 million.
Robinson’s grandmother, Irwin-Henry, contends that Kenny lied about what happened in the stairwell and questioned his decision to enter the home without backup. She said in a statement filed with her petition that she waited seven years to seek charges because she wasn’t aware of the John Doe law and didn’t have money to hire an attorney.
The family of Jay Anderson Jr., who was killed by then-Wauwatosa Police Officer Joseph Mensah in 2016, has used the same John Doe maneuver in hopes of forcing charges. Prosecutors declined to charge Mensah after Mensah said Anderson reached for a gun. Special prosecutors reviewing that case expect to announce a charging decision within the next six weeks.
New York
Woman, 26, charged in shoving death of singing coach, 87
NEW YORK (AP) — A 26-year-old woman charged in the death of an 87-year-old Broadway singing coach hurled an epithet at her before shoving her to the ground and walking away while the older woman lay bleeding on the sidewalk, prosecutors said at an arraignment Tuesday.
Lauren Pazienza, of Port Jefferson, Long Island, turned herself in earlier Tuesday to face a manslaughter charge in the death of Barbara Maier Gustern, which police said was the result of “an unprovoked, senseless attack” between two strangers.
Gustern hit her head and was critically injured March 10 after she was shoved to the ground on West 23rd Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. She died March 15.
Friends told The New York Times that Gustern had just left her apartment to catch a student’s performance after hosting a rehearsal for a cabaret show in her apartment.
At the arraignment, prosecutors said an eyewitness went to help Gustern, and that she was able to give police an account of what happened before losing consciousness.
A message seeking comment was sent to Pazienza’s attorney. Her next court date is scheduled for March 25.
Prosecutors said authorities used video surveillance to identity a suspect, and in the time since the attack, Pazienza tried to avoid being arrested. They said she deleted social media, as well as a web site for her upcoming wedding, and stopped using her cell phone.
Police received a tip that she was at her parents’ home on Long Island, prosecutors said, but were turned away when they went there on Monday. Her attorney reached out Tuesday to arrange for her to turn herself in, prosecutors said.
Gustern had been known in the theater world for decades.
She worked with singers ranging from the cast members of the 2019 Broadway revival of the musical “Oklahoma!” to experimental theater artist and 2017 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Taylor Mac, who told the Times she was “one of the great humans that I’ve encountered.”
Her late husband, Joe Gustern, was also a singer, with credits including “The Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway.
Washington
Part of city’s tenant protection law struck down by appeals court
SEATTLE (AP) — A Seattle policy meant to reduce evictions after the end of the city’s eviction moratorium has been struck down by the Washington State Court of Appeals.
The Seattle Times reports an ordinance the City Council passed in May 2020 said tenants who fell behind on rent and faced eviction could, for six months following the end of the moratorium, assert a defense in court if they self-certified that they suffered financial hardship and couldn’t pay the rent.
City leaders pointed to the rule as one key to the city’s emergence from a nearly two-year ban on almost all evictions. As they allowed the eviction moratorium to expire Feb. 28, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Seattle City Council members cited a suite of city tenant protections including the six-month rule as ways of helping vulnerable tenants stay housed as evictions resumed.
In a written decision Monday, the Court of Appeals upheld other city protections, but said the six-month eviction defense “deprives the landlords of their property interest without due process by not affording them the opportunity to test the veracity of a tenant’s self-certification of financial hardship.”
The lawsuit also challenged the city’s ban on evictions during winter months and a law allowing tenants to repay pandemic debt in installments. A King County Superior Court judge last year upheld all but one small portion of the laws. The Court of Appeals affirmed that lower court ruling but added the decision against the six-month rule.
The Rental Housing Association of Washington, which represents landlords and sued the city over the rental regulations, said in a statement: “We are grateful for the Court’s decision, which stops the cycle of debt for housing providers and residents trapped in Seattle’s ongoing COVID-19 eviction ban.”
The city attorney’s office did not immediately say whether it plans to seek a review of the case from the state’s highest court.
The Rental Housing Association said it would “continue to examine our issues with Seattle’s winter eviction ban.”
Maryland
Dentist charged with murder in overdose death of girlfriend
GAITHERSBURG, Md. (AP) — A Maryland dentist has been charged with murder after a former patient with whom he had been in a relationship died of a drug overdose.
Montgomery County Police say James Ryan was arrested Tuesday morning and charged with second-degree murder in the death of Susan Harris. She died in January after overdosing on drugs including ketamine and diazepam, which is sometimes sold under the brand name Valium, police said.
Police say Ryan, 48, an oral surgeon whose practice was based in Germantown, Maryland, first met Harris, 25, when she was a patient in 2020.
According to police, Ryan later offered Harris a job and the two began dating. She eventually moved in with him at a home in Clarksburg.
At a press conference Tuesday, Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones said investigators found text messages in which Harris requested illicit drugs from Ryan, and he gave her instructions on how to increase their potency.
The second-degree murder charges does not mean that prosecutors assert Ryan intended to kill Harris, but that he acted with “extreme indifference” to her life by supplying her with deadly drugs, The Washington Post reported.
Online court records show Ryan is scheduled for a bond hearing Wednesday. No attorney was listed.
Vermont
Ex-emergency room doctor gets 100 months in child porn case
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — A former emergency room doctor at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington was sentenced Tuesday to more than eight years in prison after his guilty plea to a federal child pornography charge.
Eike Blohm, 39, of South Burlington, was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Burlington to serve 100 months in prison. The federal sentence will run concurrently with an 80- to 82-month state sentence on a related conviction.
Blohm was charged in state court in April 2020 with setting up a hidden video camera in a staff bathroom at the Burlington hospital. Investigators later discovered images of child pornography at his home.
State investigators discovered approximately 1,300 videos on the camera. Approximately 900 videos depicted hospital employees in at least two bathrooms at the Burlington hospital.
Blohm was fired from his job at the hospital.
Blohm’s attorney didn’t respond Tuesday to a request for comment.
