Tennessee
Trial date set for man charged in kidnapping, killing of school teacher
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A judge on Monday set a trial date for a man charged in the kidnapping and killing of a school teacher while she was on an early morning run in Memphis, Tennessee.
Shelby County Judge Lee Coffee set Cleotha Abston’s trial on first-degree murder, especially aggravated kidnapping and other charges for Feb. 10, court records showed. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty if Abston is convicted of first-degree murder.
Abston, 40, has pleaded not guilty. Eliza Fletcher was grabbed from a street while she was jogging before dawn near the University of Memphis on Sept. 2, 2022, and forced into an SUV. Her body was found days later near a vacant duplex.
“We will be ready for trial,” Abston’s lawyer, Juni Ganguli, said in a text message.
Abston was sentenced to 80 years in prison May 17 for raping a woman a year before he was charged in Fletcher’s death. He was convicted in April of raping the woman while holding her at gunpoint in September 2021.
Abston, whose history of criminal charges dates back to the 1990s when he was a juvenile, received 40 years in prison for aggravated rape, 20 years for aggravated kidnapping and another 20 years for being a felon in possession of a weapon. The sentences will run consecutively, or one after the other.
Ganguli said Abston is appealing the rape verdict.
“I do not believe for a second that he raped or kidnapped or had a gun, that he put a gun to that woman,” Ganguli told reporters after the sentencing hearing.
Abston was not arrested on the rape charges before Fletcher’s killing because of a long delay in processing the sexual assault kit, authorities have said.
After Fletcher’s death, the Legislature passed a law requiring the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to issue a quarterly report on sexual assault kit testing times.
The killing of Fletcher, a 34-year-old kindergarten teacher and mother of two, shocked the Memphis community and led to a flood of support for her family. Runners in Memphis and several other cities held an early-morning running events in her honor a week after she was abducted. A second run honoring Fletcher was held last year.
Abston, who also has gone by the name Cleotha Henderson, was arrested after police detected his DNA on sandals found near the location where Fletcher was last seen, an arrest affidavit said. An autopsy report showed Fletcher died of a gunshot wound to the head.
California
LA to pay $300K to settle lawsuit against journalist over undercover police photos
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles has agreed to pay $300,000 to cover the legal fees of a local journalist and a technology watchdog group that had been sued by the city last year for publishing photos of names and photographs of hundreds of undercover officers obtained through a public records request, the journalist’s attorney said Monday.
The photos’ release prompted huge backlash from Los Angeles police officers and their union, alleging that it compromised safety for those working undercover and in other sensitive assignments, such as investigations involving gangs, drugs and sex traffickers. The city attorney’s subsequent lawsuit against Ben Camacho, a journalist for progressive news outlet Knock LA at the time, and the watchdog group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition drew condemnation from media rights experts and a coalition of newsrooms, including The Associated Press, as an attack on free speech and press freedoms.
Camacho had submitted a public records request for the LAPD’s roster — roughly 9,300 officers — as well as their photographs and information, such as their name, ethnicity, rank, date of hire, badge number and division or bureau. City officials had not sought an exemption for the undercover officers and inadvertently released their photos and personal data to Camacho. The watchdog group used the records to make an online searchable database called Watch the Watchers.
The city attorney’s office filed its lawsuit in April 2023 in an attempt to claw back the photographs, which had already been publicly posted. The settlement came after the city approached Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying last month to go into mediation over the case, said Camacho’s lawyer Susan Seager.
“It shows that the city is acknowledging that ... when the city gives a reporter some documents, they can’t turn around and sue the reporter and demand they give them back after the fact,” Seager said.
Seager said if the city had won the lawsuit, “any government agency would be suing reporters right and left to get back documents they claimed they didn’t mean to give them.”
The city attorney’s office did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on Monday. The LAPD declined to comment.
“This case was never just about photographs,” the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition said in a statement. “It was about the public’s relationship to state violence.”
The city will also have to drop demands for Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying to return the images of officers in sensitive roles, to take them off the internet, and to forgo publishing them in the future, according to the Los Angeles Times. The settlement now goes to the City Council and mayor for approval, according to court documents.
“This settlement is a win for the public, the first amendment and ensures we will continue to have radical transparency within the LAPD,” Camacho said Monday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Camacho still faces a second lawsuit filed by the city attorney’s office to force him and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition to pay damages to LAPD officers who sued the city after the photo release.
New York
Midwife pleads guilty to issuing fraudulent COVID-19 vaccine cards
NEW YORK (AP) — An upstate New York midwife pleaded guilty on Monday to federal fraud charges for her role in giving out thousands of COVID-19 immunization cards to people who never received the vaccine, prosecutors said.
Kathleen Breault, 66, of Cambridge, admitted in Brooklyn federal court that she destroyed more than 2,600 coronavirus vaccines and issued a corresponding number of fraudulent vaccination record cards while working at Sage-Femme Midwifery from 2021 to 2022.
The Albany facility was an authorized site for COVID-19 vaccine administration at a time when many government agencies and private companies were requiring their workers to be immunized against the virus.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace’s office said Breault and her co-conspirators also made over 2,600 false entries into a state database that tracked COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
Among those who were issued the fraudulent immunization records were minors ineligible at the time to be vaccinated, as well as Canadian citizens who were not present in the country when they were purportedly vaccinated, according to prosecutors.
Breault agreed to repay more than $37,000 in restitution for the destroyed vaccines and faces a maximum of five years in prison at her sentencing, Peace’s office said.
Breault’s lawyer said Monday that his client acted out of a “sense of profound concern” about the impacts of the vaccination requirements.
“She believes that her actions were justified by moral necessity though she knows that she violated the law by defrauding the government,” Michael Sussman said in an emailed statement.
Oregon
Nurse faces assault charges that she stole fentanyl and replaced IV drips with tap water
MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) — A former nurse at a southern Oregon hospital is facing criminal charges that she harmed nearly four dozen patients by stealing fentanyl and replacing it with non-sterile tap water in intravenous drips.
Many of the patients developed serious infections, and 16 of them died, but authorities said they did not pursue murder, manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide charges because investigators could not establish that the infections caused those deaths. The patients were already vulnerable and being treated in the hospital’s intensive care unit, the Medford Police Department noted.
Dani Marie Schofield, 36, a former nurse at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford, was arrested last week and instead charged with 44 counts of second-degree assault. She pleaded not guilty on Friday and was being held on $4 million bail, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.
“After review of hospital records, patient records and pathology reports, MPD consulted with multiple medical experts, who each agreed that questionable deaths associated with this case could not be directly attributed to the infections,” the police department said in a news release.
The investigation began late last year after hospital officials noticed a troubling spike in central line infections from July 2022 through July 2023 and told police they believed an employee had been diverting fentanyl, leading to “adverse” outcomes for patients.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that has helped fuel the nation’s overdose epidemic, but it is also used in legitimate medical settings to relieve severe pain. Drug theft from hospitals is a longstanding problem.
Schofield voluntarily agreed to refrain from practicing as a nurse and to suspend her nursing license pending the outcome of the criminal case, Clark R. Horner, Schofield’s civil attorney, said in response to a pending civil suit filed in February against Schofield and the hospital.
The lawsuit was filed by the estate of Horace Wilson, who died at the Asante Rogue Medical Center. He had sought care at the hospital on Jan. 27, 2022, after falling from a ladder. He suffered bleeding from his spleen and had it removed.
But doctors then noted “unexplained high fevers, very high white blood cell counts, and a precipitous decline,” the complaint said. Tests confirmed an infection of treatment-resistant bacteria, Staphylococcus epidermidis. Wilson died weeks later.
In response to the lawsuit, Schofield denied she was negligent or caused injury to Wilson.
David deVilleneuve, an Oregon attorney, said he has been in touch with about four dozen former patients or their representatives who are exploring whether to sue over their treatment by Schofield. Only 15 of them appeared on the list of victims authorities named in the indictment. He said he expects to file his first lawsuits within about three weeks.
DeVilleneuve said he was surprised that prosecutors did not charge Schofield with manslaughter. But he noted that proving she caused the deaths would be more difficult in a criminal case, where the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, than in a civil one, where it is a preponderance of the evidence.
“Their burden of proof is higher than mine,” he said.
Asante last December contacted Medford police regarding a former employee “that they believe was involved in the theft of fentanyl prescribed to patients resulting in some adverse patient outcomes,” the complaint said.
That month, hospital representatives “began contacting patients and their relatives telling them a nurse had replaced fentanyl with tap water causing bacterial infections,” it said.
Schofield for each charge faces a mandatory minimum of five years and 10 months in prison with a potential maximum sentence of 10 years.
Trial date set for man charged in kidnapping, killing of school teacher
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A judge on Monday set a trial date for a man charged in the kidnapping and killing of a school teacher while she was on an early morning run in Memphis, Tennessee.
Shelby County Judge Lee Coffee set Cleotha Abston’s trial on first-degree murder, especially aggravated kidnapping and other charges for Feb. 10, court records showed. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty if Abston is convicted of first-degree murder.
Abston, 40, has pleaded not guilty. Eliza Fletcher was grabbed from a street while she was jogging before dawn near the University of Memphis on Sept. 2, 2022, and forced into an SUV. Her body was found days later near a vacant duplex.
“We will be ready for trial,” Abston’s lawyer, Juni Ganguli, said in a text message.
Abston was sentenced to 80 years in prison May 17 for raping a woman a year before he was charged in Fletcher’s death. He was convicted in April of raping the woman while holding her at gunpoint in September 2021.
Abston, whose history of criminal charges dates back to the 1990s when he was a juvenile, received 40 years in prison for aggravated rape, 20 years for aggravated kidnapping and another 20 years for being a felon in possession of a weapon. The sentences will run consecutively, or one after the other.
Ganguli said Abston is appealing the rape verdict.
“I do not believe for a second that he raped or kidnapped or had a gun, that he put a gun to that woman,” Ganguli told reporters after the sentencing hearing.
Abston was not arrested on the rape charges before Fletcher’s killing because of a long delay in processing the sexual assault kit, authorities have said.
After Fletcher’s death, the Legislature passed a law requiring the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to issue a quarterly report on sexual assault kit testing times.
The killing of Fletcher, a 34-year-old kindergarten teacher and mother of two, shocked the Memphis community and led to a flood of support for her family. Runners in Memphis and several other cities held an early-morning running events in her honor a week after she was abducted. A second run honoring Fletcher was held last year.
Abston, who also has gone by the name Cleotha Henderson, was arrested after police detected his DNA on sandals found near the location where Fletcher was last seen, an arrest affidavit said. An autopsy report showed Fletcher died of a gunshot wound to the head.
California
LA to pay $300K to settle lawsuit against journalist over undercover police photos
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles has agreed to pay $300,000 to cover the legal fees of a local journalist and a technology watchdog group that had been sued by the city last year for publishing photos of names and photographs of hundreds of undercover officers obtained through a public records request, the journalist’s attorney said Monday.
The photos’ release prompted huge backlash from Los Angeles police officers and their union, alleging that it compromised safety for those working undercover and in other sensitive assignments, such as investigations involving gangs, drugs and sex traffickers. The city attorney’s subsequent lawsuit against Ben Camacho, a journalist for progressive news outlet Knock LA at the time, and the watchdog group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition drew condemnation from media rights experts and a coalition of newsrooms, including The Associated Press, as an attack on free speech and press freedoms.
Camacho had submitted a public records request for the LAPD’s roster — roughly 9,300 officers — as well as their photographs and information, such as their name, ethnicity, rank, date of hire, badge number and division or bureau. City officials had not sought an exemption for the undercover officers and inadvertently released their photos and personal data to Camacho. The watchdog group used the records to make an online searchable database called Watch the Watchers.
The city attorney’s office filed its lawsuit in April 2023 in an attempt to claw back the photographs, which had already been publicly posted. The settlement came after the city approached Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying last month to go into mediation over the case, said Camacho’s lawyer Susan Seager.
“It shows that the city is acknowledging that ... when the city gives a reporter some documents, they can’t turn around and sue the reporter and demand they give them back after the fact,” Seager said.
Seager said if the city had won the lawsuit, “any government agency would be suing reporters right and left to get back documents they claimed they didn’t mean to give them.”
The city attorney’s office did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on Monday. The LAPD declined to comment.
“This case was never just about photographs,” the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition said in a statement. “It was about the public’s relationship to state violence.”
The city will also have to drop demands for Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying to return the images of officers in sensitive roles, to take them off the internet, and to forgo publishing them in the future, according to the Los Angeles Times. The settlement now goes to the City Council and mayor for approval, according to court documents.
“This settlement is a win for the public, the first amendment and ensures we will continue to have radical transparency within the LAPD,” Camacho said Monday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Camacho still faces a second lawsuit filed by the city attorney’s office to force him and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition to pay damages to LAPD officers who sued the city after the photo release.
New York
Midwife pleads guilty to issuing fraudulent COVID-19 vaccine cards
NEW YORK (AP) — An upstate New York midwife pleaded guilty on Monday to federal fraud charges for her role in giving out thousands of COVID-19 immunization cards to people who never received the vaccine, prosecutors said.
Kathleen Breault, 66, of Cambridge, admitted in Brooklyn federal court that she destroyed more than 2,600 coronavirus vaccines and issued a corresponding number of fraudulent vaccination record cards while working at Sage-Femme Midwifery from 2021 to 2022.
The Albany facility was an authorized site for COVID-19 vaccine administration at a time when many government agencies and private companies were requiring their workers to be immunized against the virus.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace’s office said Breault and her co-conspirators also made over 2,600 false entries into a state database that tracked COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
Among those who were issued the fraudulent immunization records were minors ineligible at the time to be vaccinated, as well as Canadian citizens who were not present in the country when they were purportedly vaccinated, according to prosecutors.
Breault agreed to repay more than $37,000 in restitution for the destroyed vaccines and faces a maximum of five years in prison at her sentencing, Peace’s office said.
Breault’s lawyer said Monday that his client acted out of a “sense of profound concern” about the impacts of the vaccination requirements.
“She believes that her actions were justified by moral necessity though she knows that she violated the law by defrauding the government,” Michael Sussman said in an emailed statement.
Oregon
Nurse faces assault charges that she stole fentanyl and replaced IV drips with tap water
MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) — A former nurse at a southern Oregon hospital is facing criminal charges that she harmed nearly four dozen patients by stealing fentanyl and replacing it with non-sterile tap water in intravenous drips.
Many of the patients developed serious infections, and 16 of them died, but authorities said they did not pursue murder, manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide charges because investigators could not establish that the infections caused those deaths. The patients were already vulnerable and being treated in the hospital’s intensive care unit, the Medford Police Department noted.
Dani Marie Schofield, 36, a former nurse at Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center in Medford, was arrested last week and instead charged with 44 counts of second-degree assault. She pleaded not guilty on Friday and was being held on $4 million bail, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.
“After review of hospital records, patient records and pathology reports, MPD consulted with multiple medical experts, who each agreed that questionable deaths associated with this case could not be directly attributed to the infections,” the police department said in a news release.
The investigation began late last year after hospital officials noticed a troubling spike in central line infections from July 2022 through July 2023 and told police they believed an employee had been diverting fentanyl, leading to “adverse” outcomes for patients.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid that has helped fuel the nation’s overdose epidemic, but it is also used in legitimate medical settings to relieve severe pain. Drug theft from hospitals is a longstanding problem.
Schofield voluntarily agreed to refrain from practicing as a nurse and to suspend her nursing license pending the outcome of the criminal case, Clark R. Horner, Schofield’s civil attorney, said in response to a pending civil suit filed in February against Schofield and the hospital.
The lawsuit was filed by the estate of Horace Wilson, who died at the Asante Rogue Medical Center. He had sought care at the hospital on Jan. 27, 2022, after falling from a ladder. He suffered bleeding from his spleen and had it removed.
But doctors then noted “unexplained high fevers, very high white blood cell counts, and a precipitous decline,” the complaint said. Tests confirmed an infection of treatment-resistant bacteria, Staphylococcus epidermidis. Wilson died weeks later.
In response to the lawsuit, Schofield denied she was negligent or caused injury to Wilson.
David deVilleneuve, an Oregon attorney, said he has been in touch with about four dozen former patients or their representatives who are exploring whether to sue over their treatment by Schofield. Only 15 of them appeared on the list of victims authorities named in the indictment. He said he expects to file his first lawsuits within about three weeks.
DeVilleneuve said he was surprised that prosecutors did not charge Schofield with manslaughter. But he noted that proving she caused the deaths would be more difficult in a criminal case, where the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, than in a civil one, where it is a preponderance of the evidence.
“Their burden of proof is higher than mine,” he said.
Asante last December contacted Medford police regarding a former employee “that they believe was involved in the theft of fentanyl prescribed to patients resulting in some adverse patient outcomes,” the complaint said.
That month, hospital representatives “began contacting patients and their relatives telling them a nurse had replaced fentanyl with tap water causing bacterial infections,” it said.
Schofield for each charge faces a mandatory minimum of five years and 10 months in prison with a potential maximum sentence of 10 years.
