Court Digest

Wisconsin
Lawsuit against former high court justice dismissed after she turns over records
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — An open records lawsuit against former Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Roggensack was dismissed Tuesday after Roggensack turned over all records she had related to her work investigating possible impeachment of a sitting justice.

None of the records Roggensack produced earlier this month shed any light on the impeachment advice she actually gave to Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. Vos has said he spoke with Roggensack on the phone about impeachment of Justice Janet Protasiewicz and he has refused to say what her advice was. Roggensack has also not said what she told Vos.

Two other former justices Vos tapped for recommendations, David Prosser and Jon Wilcox, both advised against impeachment.

The liberal watchdog group American Oversight sued Vos, Prosser, Wilcox and Roggensack to get all of the records related to the possible impeachment. The group also alleged that the three former justices had broken the state’s open meetings law.

Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington in November dismissed the open meetings allegation, saying American Oversight filed its claim prematurely and should have given the district attorney time to decide whether to launch his own lawsuit. Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne decided against bringing charges.

Remington had previously dismissed the open records allegations against Prosser and Wilcox after they produced records. In November, he gave Roggensack 30 days to turn over whatever records she had. In a filing with the court on Dec. 8, Roggensack said she had no responsive records beyond what had already been made public.

Her attorney, Bob Shumaker, confirmed that again in court on Tuesday.

American Oversight’s attorney Ben Sparks agreed to drop the case against her and the judge dismissed it.

The open records claim against Vos remains. His attorney, Matthew Fernholz, said Tuesday that Vos has already produced all of the records he has. Vos in November released about 20,000 pages of documents. The judge set a status hearing for Jan. 25.

Vos originally said he was considering impeachment if Protasiewicz did not recuse herself from the redistricting case. She did not recuse. Vos did not move to impeach her, following the advice against impeachment from the former justices. But now he’s suggesting he may attempt to impeach her if she does not rule in favor of upholding the current Republican-drawn maps.

The Wisconsin Constitution reserves impeachment for “corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors.”

Republicans have argued Protasiewicz has pre-judged the case based on comments she made during the campaign calling the current maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

Protasiewicz, in her decision not to recuse from the case, said that while stating her opinion about the maps, she never made a promise or pledge about how she would rule on the case.

The court heard the redistricting case in November that could result in new maps being in place before the 2024 election. The court is expected to issue a ruling soon.

Mississippi
Judge overturns death penalty, says racial bias in picking jury wasn’t fully argued
GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP) — A federal judge has overturned the death penalty conviction of a Mississippi man, finding a trial judge didn’t give the man’s lawyer enough chance to argue that the prosecution was dismissing Black jurors for discriminatory reasons.

U.S. District Judge Michael P. Mills ruled Tuesday that the state of Mississippi must give Terry Pitchford a new trial on capital murder charges.

Mills wrote that his ruling is partially motivated by what he called former District Attorney Doug Evans ‘ history of discriminating against Black jurors.

A spokesperson for Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said Sunday that the state intends to appeal. Online prison records show Pitchford remained on death row Sunday at Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

Mills ordered the state to retry the 37-year-old man within six months, and said he must be released from custody if he is not retried by then.

Pitchford was indicted on a murder charge in the fatal 2004 robbery of the Crossroads Grocery, a store just outside Grenada, in northern Mississippi. Pitchford and friend, Eric Bullins, went to the store to rob it. Bullins shot store owner Reuben Britt three times, fatally wounding him, while Pitchford said he fired shots into the floor, court documents state.

Police found Britt’s gun in a car at Pitchford’s house. Pitchford, then 18, confessed to his role, saying he had also tried to rob the store 10 days earlier.

But Mills said that jury selection before the 2006 trial was critically flawed because the trial judge didn’t give Pitchford’s defense lawyer enough of a chance to challenge the state’s reasons for striking Black jurors.

To argue that jurors were being improperly excluded, a defendant must show that discriminatory intent motivated the strikes. In Pitchford’s case, judges and lawyers whittled down the original jury pool of 61 white and 35 Black members to a pool with 36 white and five Black members, in part because so many Black jurors objected to sentencing Pitchford to death. Then prosecutors struck four more Black jurors, leaving only one Black person on the final jury.

Prosecutors can strike Black jurors for race-neutral reasons, and prosecutors at the trial gave reasons for removing all four. But Mills found that the judge never gave the defense a chance to properly rebut the state’s justification.

“This court cannot ignore the notion that Pitchford was seemingly given no chance to rebut the state’s explanations and prove purposeful discrimination,” Mills wrote.

On appeal, Pitchford’s lawyers argued that some of the reasons for rejecting the jurors were flimsy and that the state didn’t make similar objections to white jurors with similar issues.

Mills also wrote that his decision was influenced by the prosecution of another Black man by Evans, who is white. Curtis Flowers was tried six times in the shooting deaths of four people. The U.S. Supreme Court found Evans had improperly excluded Black people from Flowers’ juries, overturning the man’s conviction and death sentence.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh called it a “relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of Black individuals.”

In reporting on the Flowers case, American Public Media’s “In the Dark” found what it described as a long history of racial bias in jury selection by Evans.

Mississippi dropped charges against Flowers in September 2020, after Flowers was released from custody and Evans turned the case over to the state attorney general.

Mills wrote that, on its own, the Flowers case doesn’t prove anything. But he said that the Mississippi Supreme Court should have examined that history in considering Pitchford’s appeal.

“The court merely believes that it should have been included in a ‘totality of the circumstances’ analysis of the issue,” Mills wrote.


Kentucky
Attorneys for woman seeking abortion withdraw lawsuit
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Attorneys for a Kentucky woman who sued demanding the right to an abortion withdrew the lawsuit after the woman learned her embryo no longer has cardiac activity.

In a court filing Sunday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky told a judge the attorneys will “voluntarily dismiss” the lawsuit that was filed Dec. 8.

Lawyers for the woman pointed to a Kentucky Supreme Court decision that said abortion providers cannot sue on behalf of their patients, limiting the legal actions to individuals seeking an abortion. The lawsuit had sought class-action status.

“The court’s decision has forced Kentuckians seeking abortion to bring a lawsuit while in the middle of seeking time-sensitive health care, a daunting feat, and one that should not be necessary to reclaim the fundamental right to control their own bodies,” the ACLU of Kentucky said in a release Monday. The attorneys said they would continue to look for possible plaintiffs.

The case — Jane Doe, et al. v. Daniel Cameron, et al. — was filed on behalf of an anonymous woman who was about eight weeks pregnant. Last week, just a few days after the suit was filed, lawyers sent notice that the embryo has no cardiac activity.

The flurry of individual women petitioning a court for permission for an abortion is the latest development since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Kentucky case was similar to a legal battle in Texas, where Kate Cox, a pregnant woman with a likely fatal condition, launched an unprecedented challenge against one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the nation.

While Cox is believed to be the first to make such a request, her legal team and other experts anticipate additional challenges among the dozen of other GOP-controlled states where abortion is largely prohibited at all stages of pregnancy.


Georgia
Man imprisoned for hiding death of teacher pleads guilty to rape
PERRY, Ga. (AP) — A man imprisoned for concealing the death of Georgia teacher Tara Grinstead has pleaded guilty to reduced charges in two unrelated rape cases in a deal that lets him avoid additional prison time.

Houston County Superior Court records show that Bo Dukes agreed to plea deals Nov. 13 to settle charges that he had raped women in 2017 and 2019 after threatening them with weapons. Prosecutors agreed to let Dukes plead guilty to aggravated assault with intent to rape in both cases. He also pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, while more than a dozen other counts were dismissed.

The sentences Dukes, 39, received won’t add to the 25-year prison term he is currently serving for his role in Grinstead’s death and disappearance, The plea deal was first reported by WALB-TV.

A high school teacher and former beauty queen, Grinstead vanished in 2005 from her home in rural Irwin County. Her fate remained a mystery for more than a decade until Dukes’ friend with a similar last name, Ryan Duke, told Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents that he strangled Grinstead and enlisted Dukes to help burn her body.

A jury convicted Dukes of concealing Grinstead’s death in 2019. After recanting his confession, Duke was convicted of the same charge in 2022, but acquitted of murder. Additional charges related to Grinstead’s death are still pending in a neighboring county where the men burned her body in a pecan orchard.

Dukes was also indicted in 2019 in two rape cases with no connection to Grinstead’s death and disappearance.

He was charged with raping a woman while threatening her with a knife on Jan. 19, 2017, just a few weeks before his arrest in the Grinstead case. Dukes was indicted for a second rape after two women accused him of sexually assaulting them at gunpoint on Jan. 1, 2019. Dukes was free on bond at the time, awaiting trial for hiding Grinstead’s death.

A judge last month sentenced Dukes to 10 years in prison for each reduced rape count, plus five years for illegally possessing a gun. According to court records, the plea deal allows the time Dukes serves for Grinstead’s death to also count toward those new sentences.