Connecticut
Man granted new trial in 1994 baby killing freed
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut man whose convictions were overturned in connection with a 1994 shooting that killed a baby and paralyzed her grandmother has been freed from prison after nearly three decades.
Adam Carmon, 50, walked out of a state courthouse in New Haven late Monday afternoon and hugged relatives, after a judge set bail at $500,000 but allowed Carmon to go free without putting any money down.
Carmon, however, was ordered to stay at a halfway house under 24-hour GPS monitoring while he awaits a new trial. Murder and other charges have been returned to the court docket.
“I look forward to the day when I can finally put this nightmare behind me,” Carmon said, in a statement released by his lawyers. “Right now I am just looking forward to spending time with my son and family.”
Prosecutors have not decided yet whether to retry Carmon.
On Nov. 30, Judge Jon Alander overturned Carmon’s convictions and ordered a new trial. Alander said prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense and police failed to pursue other suspects — including one who recanted a confession.
Carmon was serving an 85-year sentence for the shooting that killed 7-month-old Danielle Taft and paralyzed her grandmother in New Haven.
Pennsylvania
Youth center had ‘dangerous’ lack of oversight, report says
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A southeastern Pennsylvania county ran a juvenile detention center where troubled teens were beaten up by guards, sexually harassed, locked in seclusion for long periods without a court order and treated like criminals, a state grand jury said in a report released Tuesday.
The 208-page report described what the state attorney general’s office called a “dangerous lack of oversight” over underpaid, overworked and poorly trained guards at the 66-bed Delaware County Juvenile Detention Center.
The system “failed to protect these children and provide them with the tools they needed to reform and grow, instead abandoning them in a dangerous environment with little to no oversight,” state Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a statement.
The grand jury issued a number of recommendations to prevent such conditions at other facilities.
The report did not recommend any criminal charges, in part because of time limits in state laws for prosecuting.
Still, the grand jury said the conduct they heard about at the facility could be criminal, and they “suspect that many more criminal acts may have occurred there at the hands of adults” who viewed the youths as “criminals or sex objects” rather than as troubled kids.
Most of the report focuses on the period between 2010 and 2021, when the facility was closed after counselors provided evidence to the county public defender’s office. That evidence spurred the state’s investigation.
A county spokesperson said officials are reviewing the report and have appointed a new juvenile detention board and a superintendent who has an extensive background in juvenile justice programs as they explore alternatives to detention.
Grand jurors said they heard accounts of staff punching, slapping, choking and threatening the teens, who had been sent to the facility to await the outcome of a criminal case.
The report said guards routinely covered up for each other, frequently changing incident reports, backing each other up when a guard was accused of abuse and retaliating against residents or counselors who accused guards of misconduct. Few were disciplined, it said.
Guards took advantage of blind spots in the facility’s coverage of video cameras, engaging in violent and inappropriate conduct off camera to prevent independent documentation of the abuse, the report said.
The county never approved the director’s repeated budget requests for additional funding to update the facility’s video surveillance system, it said. The county also never appointed a board to oversee the facility, despite being legally required to do so, the report said.
Sexually inappropriate conduct by some male detention officers toward female residents and staff members was “fairly pervasive,” the report said.
In other cases, staff — for their own convenience — often locked up the teens for extended periods, it said, flouting a law that required a judge to approve such detention for more than four hours.
North Carolina
State AG to weigh charges in Meadows voter fraud case
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation said it has submitted to state prosecutors the findings of its voter fraud probe into Mark Meadows, a former White House chief of staff to President Donald Trump, who was simultaneously registered to vote in North Carolina and two other states earlier this year.
The State Bureau of Investigation announced Tuesday that it has turned over the case file detailing its investigation into Meadows’ North Carolina voter registration and listed residence to Attorney General Josh Stein’s office. Prosecutors with the attorney general’s office will determine whether criminal charges are appropriate, the bureau said in a statement.
Meadows, a former Republican North Carolina congressman, was removed from the state’s voter rolls in April after Stein’s office asked the bureau to examine his voter registration records. He had listed a mobile home Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, that he never owned as his physical address weeks before casting an absentee by-mail ballot in the state for the 2020 presidential election. Trump won the Southern swing state that year by just over 1 percentage point.
A representative for Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Public records indicate Meadows registered to vote in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2021, a year after he registered in North Carolina and just weeks before Virginia’s pivotal gubernatorial election in which Gov. Glenn Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide office in a dozen years.
An outspoken proponent of Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Meadows also registered to vote in South Carolina in March 2022 after he and his wife purchased a $1.6 million home on Lake Keowee, according to records for the address listed on their South Carolina voter registration forms.
The Trump ally began arousing public suspicion of widespread voter fraud leading up to the 2020 general election as the polls showed Trump trailing President Joe Biden. He repeated those unfounded claims throughout the election cycle and in the aftermath of the race as Trump insisted the election was rife with fraud.
Election officials from both parties, as well as judges and Trump’s own attorney general, concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, noting only a few isolated incidents of intentional or unintentional voting violations common in every election.
Stein’s office, which received the final case file from state investigators in November, declined to comment on its progress.
