Wisconsin
Gag order for man charged with false absentee requests
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin man charged with election fraud for fraudulently requesting absentee ballots was ordered by a judge Thursday to stop talking about the case.
Harry Wait, 68, has acknowledged requesting the ballots in other people’s names in what he said was an effort to expose vulnerabilities in the state’s election system.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Wait, speaking to reporters, compared himself to founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He also declared that his actions were lawful “under organic law of the nation.”
At Wait’s first court appearance Thursday, Racine County Judge Robert Repischak ordered prosecutors and Wait, who is representing himself, not to talk to reporters about the case.
Wait is charged with two misdemeanor counts of election fraud and two felony counts of identity theft. Convictions on all four counts could mean up to 13 years behind bars.
Idaho
Legislature asks judge to reconsider abortion ruling
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — The Idaho Legislature has asked a federal judge to reconsider his decision blocking the state from enforcing a strict abortion ban in medical emergencies.
In court documents filed Wednesday, attorneys for the Legislature said Senior U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill incorrectly followed the guidance of President Joe Biden’s administration rather than using the standards set by Congress when he found that Idaho’s ban appeared to violate a federal law governing emergency health care services at Medicare-funded hospitals.
“Congress drew its line to protect both the mother and the unborn child in an emergency medical situation,” the legislature’s attorneys, Daniel Bower and Monte Neil Stewart, wrote in court documents. “By contrast, the Administration draws its line to eliminate all protection for the unborn child in such situations.”
The Idaho law makes performing an abortion in any “clinically diagnosable pregnancy” a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, but says that physicians can defend themselves in court by showing that the procedure was necessary to avert the pregnant person’s death.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Idaho last month, saying the ban violates the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA). The law requires Medicare-funded hospitals to providing stabilizing care to patients experiencing medical emergencies, and the Justice Department says that include abortions in cases where the health of the pregnant patient is in jeopardy or when continuing the pregnancy could seriously harm the pregnant patient’s organs or body parts.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued the EMTALA guidance in July, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a lawsuit between a Mississippi abortion clinic and Mississippi state health officer Thomas Dobbs that abortion is not a constitutional right.
The Justice Department asked Winmill to temporarily stop the state from enforcing the abortion ban in emergency medical situations, and late last month Winmill agreed. The ban is still enforceable for all other abortions, however.
Attorneys for the state Legislature said EMTALA doesn’t supercede Idaho’s law when it comes to the issue of abortions, and that it also lacks clarity on the issue of abortion procedures. The Biden Administration’s guidance was an effort to find its way around the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case pitting
“The people of Idaho enjoy constitutional authority to govern themselves with respect to abortion, and no federal statute, however overread by an Administration committed to countering Dobbs, can lawfully diminish that authority,” the attorneys wrote.
The U.S. Department of Justice has not yet responded to the Legislature’s request.
Louisiana
20 years, $25,000 to kids for moving, burning mom’s body
DERIDDER, La. (AP) — Three men who pleaded guilty to obstructing justice by driving a woman’s body across parish lines and setting it and the car she had been using on fire have been sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison.
State District Judge C. Kerry Anderson also ordered Morgan Douglas, Dixon Fife and Michael Roberts to pay $25,000 each to benefit Lexie Doga’s children, news agencies report. Her obituary said she has two daughters.
They were arrested after agents with the State Fire Marshal’s Office found a burned car and body in DeQuincy on Nov. 20, 2020.
An autopsy found that she was dead when her body was set on fire, and that she had taken a lethal level of methamphetamine, but could not determine what caused her death. Investigators believe she took the drug at a Calcasieu Parish home where she met with the men.
Assistant District Attorney Robert Morton called the men’s actions “beyond despicable” in a sentencing memorandum, the American Press reported. He wrote that they provided a lethal amount of methamphetamine to Doga.
“When they discover her apparently deceased, rather than calling 911 or calling for an ambulance or the police or bringing her to the nearest medical facility, instead they put her in a vehicle, purchased gasoline, then burned her and the car in the remote woods of Beauregard Parish,” he wrote. “They directly or indirectly caused her death and did nothing to help her in her dying moments.”
During sentencing on Friday, the judge said the men can get credit for time served, for good behavior in prison, and for completing educational and rehabilitation programs in prison.
They could be out of prison in three to four years, news agencies reported.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” Doga’s mother, Jamie Cooley, told KPLC-TV. She said prosecutors couldn’t charge the men with a more serious crime “because there’s no evidence because her body was burned so bad.”
Missouri
Lawsuit on recreational pot nears end
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Lawyers for a Missouri woman suing to block a recreational marijuana ballot measure panned the top state election official’s involvement and claimed the proposal is unconstitutionally broad during Thursday court arguments.
At issue is a proposal to allow those age 21 and older to buy and grow marijuana for personal consumption and automatically erase records of some past marijuana-related crimes.
In Missouri, proponents of constitutional amendment need to gather a certain number of signatures from registered voters to get initiatives on the ballot. Local election authorities typically check to make sure signees are registered voters and report signature counts to the Secretary of State’s Office.
This year the Secretary of State’s Office also reviewed signatures following complaints from the pro-recreational-marijuana campaign, Legal Missouri 2022, that some voters were wrongly discounted as unregistered by local authorities.
Attorneys for the plaintiff, Jefferson City woman Joy Sweeney, told Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker that local election authorities are better trained and equipped to review signatures for accuracy. They said the Secretary of State’s Office should have trusted the local review and not interfered by double checking signatures and said the proposal should not go on the ballot.
Lawyers for the recreational marijuana campaign and the secretary of state said there’s no proof that the Secretary of State counted invalid signatures, so the measure should go to a public vote as planned.
Sweeney’s lawyers also said the measure deals with too many policies in violation of the state constitution.
Aside from legalizing recreational marijuana and expunging non-violent marijuana-related convictions, the proposed amendment includes policies to tax recreational marijuana.
Marc Ellinger, a Legal Missouri 2022 attorney, said the proposal only deals with one subject because all of the provisions, though sweeping, deal with marijuana.
Ellinger and the Secretary of State’s attorney asked the judge to toss the case completely, arguing that the case is meritless and that Sweeney does not have the right to sue because she’s not a Missouri resident.
Sweeney said she has a home in Jefferson City and is registered to vote in Missouri, although she also has a home in Alexandria, Virginia and testified remotely from there Thursday.
Walker said he plans to rule on whether the proposal will be on the Nov. 8 ballot shortly after attorneys file a final set of briefs Friday.
Indiana
Officials appeal ruling against trans sports law
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The Indiana attorney general’s office has asked a federal appeals court to overturn a judge’s order against a state law that prohibits transgender females from competing in girls school sports.
The appeal filed this week argues that U.S. District Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson in Indianapolis was wrong in granting a preliminary injunction against the law and allowing a 10-year-old transgender girl to rejoin her school’s all-girls softball team.
The judge ruled in July that the girl had “a strong likelihood” of prevailing in arguments that the Indiana law violated federal Title IX protections against discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities.
Indiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature approved the law in May over the veto of GOP Gov. Eric Holcomb as opponents argued it was a bigoted response to a problem that doesn’t exist.
The judge’s ruling only applied to the Indianapolis student as the law took effect July 1.
The attorney general’s office argued to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals that upholding the judge’s ruling “would throw open girls’ sports to members of the male sex with all the advantages being born male confers, depriving women of equal opportunities to compete fairly and safely in sports.”
Federal lawsuits are also underway against similar laws in Utah and other states.
Florida
Former prison guard sentenced in scheme to smuggle drugs
FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — A former Florida state prison guard has been sentenced to three years and five months in federal prison for participating in a scheme to smuggle drugs into a facility.
Troy Alexander Cole, 28, Fort Myers, was sentenced Tuesday in Fort Myers federal court, according to court records. He pleaded guilty in April to attempted distribution of methamphetamine and MDMA.
According to court documents, Cole worked as a correctional officer at the Charlotte Correctional Institution in Punta Gorda. In June 2021, on three separate occasions, Cole agreed to smuggle methamphetamine or MDMA into the prison and provide the contraband to an inmate, officials said. He agreed to do so in exchange for payments of $400, $1,000 and $4,000, respectively.
On each occasion, Cole picked up a package containing what he believed were the controlled substances and then entered the prison, prosecutors said. Cole would then conceal the packages containing the purported controlled substances and notify the inmate that they were available for retrieval.
