Alabama
Couple drops lawsuit that led to frozen embryo high court ruling
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A judge last week dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit that led the Alabama Supreme Court to rule that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children,” a decision that drew national attention and temporarily halted in vitro fertilization services in the state.
A couple, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit over the accidental destruction of their last frozen embryo, asked to drop the suit. A judge granted the request and dismissed the case Friday, according to state court records. Two other couples had dropped similar lawsuits in August.
The court order did not detail the reason for dropping the lawsuit or if a settlement had been reached. Trip Smalley, a lawyer representing the couple, did not immediately return an email and telephone message seeking comment.
The three couples had their embryos destroyed in 2020 when a hospital patient wandered into the storage area. The patient opened the container, picked up embryos and dropped them to the floor.
The Alabama Supreme Court in February ruled that the three couples could pursue wrongful death claims for the destruction of the embryos. Justices, citing anti-abortion language in the Alabama Constitution, ruled that an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the death of a minor child, “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
The decision became a flashpoint in the national debate over abortion and raised liability concerns for fertility clinics as they create, store and work with frozen embryos. Three large IVF providers in Alabama paused services in the wake of the ruling. Facing a public backlash to the decision, Alabama lawmakers approved immunity legislation to shield doctors from lawsuits and get IVF services restarted in the state.
The couple, who had turned to IVF to have children, said in their 2021 lawsuit that the accident destroyed their final frozen embryo, which was being stored at the facility. Even though they had chosen not to implant it, “they considered this embryo a human being or life,” their lawyer wrote in the lawsuit.
Vermont
Military contractor to pay $426,000 settlement for using foreign parts in its products
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — A Vermont military contractor will pay nearly half a million dollars to settle allegations that it used some foreign-sourced materials in certain protective eyewear it sold when it was required to use all domestic parts, according to the office of the U.S. attorney for Vermont.
Revision Military Ltd., in Essex Junction, Vermont, used a foreign source of carrying pouches, cases and straps for particular eyewear sold through a defense program that requires textile components be sourced in the United States, federal prosecutors said on Monday. The foreign parts were used between Jan. 1, 2016, and Dec. 31, 2020, and the company will pay $426,000 in the settlement, prosecutors said Monday.
A federal law known as the Berry Amendment requires the government to give preference to products made and sourced in America.
“In selling products that it knew to be non-compliant, Revision violated the trust placed in government contractors in furtherance of its own bottom line,” said Nikolas Kerest, U.S. attorney for Vermont, in a statement.
Revision, which sold its protective eyewear business in 2019, denied liability and said there were no damages to the government because the eyewear products performed as intended. It said in a statement that it takes such compliance issues seriously.
“In this spirit, the settlement agreement formally documents the government crediting Revision’s new ownership and management team for self-initiating improved compliance measures, for replacing former employees who were responsible for overseeing such compliance issues, and for cooperating with the government investigation,” the company said in a statement.
Florida
New charges target ex-Miami congressman for lobbying on behalf of sanctioned Venezuelan tycoon
MIAMI (AP) — A federal grand jury in Washington has returned an indictment against former Congressman David Rivera for failing to register as a foreign agent of a sanctioned Venezuelan media tycoon on whose behalf the Miami Republican allegedly lobbied the Trump administration.
The indictment is the second set of criminal charges to examine Rivera’s relationship to Raúl Gorrín, a billionaire businessman charged in 2018 and again in 2024 with bribing senior Venezuelan officials in corrupt deals to embezzle state funds from Nicolas Maduro’s administration.
The indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that Rivera, between June 2019 and April 2020, lobbied U.S. officials, including an unnamed senior official in the executive branch, to remove sanctions against Gorrín. He was aided in that effort by another unnamed individual described as a former U.S. official and resident of New York, prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department’s National Security Division said.
Rivera allegedly received over $5.5 million for these activities and failed to register under Foreign Agents Registration Act, as required when contacting U.S. officials on behalf of foreign individuals and companies. He was also charged with money laundering in connection to the undeclared lobbying work.
To promote his criminal activities, Rivera allegedly created fake shell companies registered in Delaware using names associated with a law firm and with the unnamed official, as well as the official’s hometown, to give the false appearance that the shell companies were legitimate, according to the indictment. Prosecutors said the official was unaware the companies were using his or her name and hometown.
Ed Shohat, a Miami defense attorney who represents Rivera, declined to comment, saying he hadn’t had time to discuss the indictment with his client.
Rivera was arrested in 2022 in another illegal lobbying case, out of federal court in Miami, tied to a $50 million consulting contract his firm, Interamerican Consulting, signed with a U.S. affiliate of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA. Prosecutors say the 2017 contract was a ruse to hide a secret campaign by Maduro’s government to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration.
The Maduro outreach, facilitated by Trump’s current incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles when she worked as a Washington lobbyist on behalf of Gorrín’s TV network Globovision, ultimately failed. In 2019, Trump recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and imposed stiff oil sanctions on the OPEC nation in a bid to unseat Maduro.
But before the charm offensive unraveled, Gorrín, with the help of Rivera and others, managed to get his photo taken shaking hands with then-Vice President Mike Pence at an event in Florida. Rivera and Gorrín also met with Trump’s pick to become Secretary of State, Sen. Marco Rubio, who was once Rivera’s roommate when both were state lawmakers in Tallahassee.
Rivera also looked to set up a possible flight and meeting on Gorrín’s jet for a female campaign adviser turned White House “counselor” on June 27, 2017 — the same day Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was in Miami for a fundraising dinner with Miami Republicans, according to court records in the earlier criminal complaint and a parallel lawsuit filed against Rivera by Maduro’s opponents who now control the U.S. subsidiary of PDVSA.
Rivera also roped in Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas to try and set up a meeting for Venezuela’s foreign minister with executives from Exxon, which was headquartered in Sessions’ district at the time.
Pennsylvania
Lawsuit: Jail confiscated inmates’ soap and toilet paper, cut power and heat
A Pennsylvania jail retaliated against inmates suspected of smoking synthetic marijuana by punishing entire cell blocks — confiscating legal paperwork, withholding necessities like toilet paper, soap and warm clothing, and cutting power and heat, inmates allege in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Top jail officials waged an escalating, monthlong campaign of collective punishment, imposing “near-total deprivation” and violating the constitutional rights of people incarcerated at Dauphin County Prison, a 1,000-person lockup outside the state capital of Harrisburg, the lawsuit says.
“For DCP to launch this campaign of mass torture is abominable. Their actions violate the Constitution and basic human decency,” said Margo Hu, staff attorney for the Abolitionist Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs. “People in Dauphin County Prison have been advocating against the facility’s depraved conditions for years. It is past time Dauphin County be held responsible for the harm they have been inflicting.”
A message seeking comment was sent to the Dauphin County Prison Board.
County Commissioner Justin Douglas, who took office after the 2023 jail crackdown, said Tuesday he has been “deeply disturbed” by the allegations since they first surfaced in local media reports several months ago.
“I believe it is essential to let this process play out fully. If any inappropriate actions occurred, it is important that there are appropriate consequences,” he said.
The abuses described in the lawsuit took place in November and December 2023 in the jail’s restricted housing unit, where inmates are typically held for breaking jail rules and where jail officials believed synthetic drugs were being used.
The jail responded by confiscating inmates’ tablet computers, eliminating their access to religious texts, legal mail and other materials, and shutting off communications with anyone outside the jail, the lawsuit says. Jail officials are accused of seizing personal hygiene products and locking detainees in their cells nearly round-the-clock, permitting only one 15-minute shower every three days. Power and heat were cut, and some inmates sliced open their mattresses to keep warm as temperatures outside dipped below freezing, the suit alleges.
Most of the affected people were pretrial detainees. When one of the inmates, 27-year-old Kani Little, complained about the conditions, a dozen guards in riot gear assaulted him, slamming him to the ground and spraying him with chemical irritant, the lawsuit asserts.
Little and two other plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages on behalf of all detainees kept in the restricted housing unit at any time between Nov. 16 and Dec. 19, 2023. Dauphin County, the warden, the chief deputy warden and other jail officials and guards are named as defendants.
Dauphin County has a “widespread and well-earned reputation as a troubled prison facility,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in the filing. More than 20 people have died in custody at the jail since 2019, the lawyers said, and the rate of overdoses is disproportionately high.
“I’ve seen so many people die in DCP that I was scared I was next,” one of the plaintiffs, James Patterson, said in a statement released by the Abolitionist Law Center. “I kept talking to staff and no one wanted to listen. They all had their hands in this, none of them protected us, and they all need to go.”
Couple drops lawsuit that led to frozen embryo high court ruling
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A judge last week dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit that led the Alabama Supreme Court to rule that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children,” a decision that drew national attention and temporarily halted in vitro fertilization services in the state.
A couple, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit over the accidental destruction of their last frozen embryo, asked to drop the suit. A judge granted the request and dismissed the case Friday, according to state court records. Two other couples had dropped similar lawsuits in August.
The court order did not detail the reason for dropping the lawsuit or if a settlement had been reached. Trip Smalley, a lawyer representing the couple, did not immediately return an email and telephone message seeking comment.
The three couples had their embryos destroyed in 2020 when a hospital patient wandered into the storage area. The patient opened the container, picked up embryos and dropped them to the floor.
The Alabama Supreme Court in February ruled that the three couples could pursue wrongful death claims for the destruction of the embryos. Justices, citing anti-abortion language in the Alabama Constitution, ruled that an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the death of a minor child, “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
The decision became a flashpoint in the national debate over abortion and raised liability concerns for fertility clinics as they create, store and work with frozen embryos. Three large IVF providers in Alabama paused services in the wake of the ruling. Facing a public backlash to the decision, Alabama lawmakers approved immunity legislation to shield doctors from lawsuits and get IVF services restarted in the state.
The couple, who had turned to IVF to have children, said in their 2021 lawsuit that the accident destroyed their final frozen embryo, which was being stored at the facility. Even though they had chosen not to implant it, “they considered this embryo a human being or life,” their lawyer wrote in the lawsuit.
Vermont
Military contractor to pay $426,000 settlement for using foreign parts in its products
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — A Vermont military contractor will pay nearly half a million dollars to settle allegations that it used some foreign-sourced materials in certain protective eyewear it sold when it was required to use all domestic parts, according to the office of the U.S. attorney for Vermont.
Revision Military Ltd., in Essex Junction, Vermont, used a foreign source of carrying pouches, cases and straps for particular eyewear sold through a defense program that requires textile components be sourced in the United States, federal prosecutors said on Monday. The foreign parts were used between Jan. 1, 2016, and Dec. 31, 2020, and the company will pay $426,000 in the settlement, prosecutors said Monday.
A federal law known as the Berry Amendment requires the government to give preference to products made and sourced in America.
“In selling products that it knew to be non-compliant, Revision violated the trust placed in government contractors in furtherance of its own bottom line,” said Nikolas Kerest, U.S. attorney for Vermont, in a statement.
Revision, which sold its protective eyewear business in 2019, denied liability and said there were no damages to the government because the eyewear products performed as intended. It said in a statement that it takes such compliance issues seriously.
“In this spirit, the settlement agreement formally documents the government crediting Revision’s new ownership and management team for self-initiating improved compliance measures, for replacing former employees who were responsible for overseeing such compliance issues, and for cooperating with the government investigation,” the company said in a statement.
Florida
New charges target ex-Miami congressman for lobbying on behalf of sanctioned Venezuelan tycoon
MIAMI (AP) — A federal grand jury in Washington has returned an indictment against former Congressman David Rivera for failing to register as a foreign agent of a sanctioned Venezuelan media tycoon on whose behalf the Miami Republican allegedly lobbied the Trump administration.
The indictment is the second set of criminal charges to examine Rivera’s relationship to Raúl Gorrín, a billionaire businessman charged in 2018 and again in 2024 with bribing senior Venezuelan officials in corrupt deals to embezzle state funds from Nicolas Maduro’s administration.
The indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that Rivera, between June 2019 and April 2020, lobbied U.S. officials, including an unnamed senior official in the executive branch, to remove sanctions against Gorrín. He was aided in that effort by another unnamed individual described as a former U.S. official and resident of New York, prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department’s National Security Division said.
Rivera allegedly received over $5.5 million for these activities and failed to register under Foreign Agents Registration Act, as required when contacting U.S. officials on behalf of foreign individuals and companies. He was also charged with money laundering in connection to the undeclared lobbying work.
To promote his criminal activities, Rivera allegedly created fake shell companies registered in Delaware using names associated with a law firm and with the unnamed official, as well as the official’s hometown, to give the false appearance that the shell companies were legitimate, according to the indictment. Prosecutors said the official was unaware the companies were using his or her name and hometown.
Ed Shohat, a Miami defense attorney who represents Rivera, declined to comment, saying he hadn’t had time to discuss the indictment with his client.
Rivera was arrested in 2022 in another illegal lobbying case, out of federal court in Miami, tied to a $50 million consulting contract his firm, Interamerican Consulting, signed with a U.S. affiliate of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA. Prosecutors say the 2017 contract was a ruse to hide a secret campaign by Maduro’s government to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration.
The Maduro outreach, facilitated by Trump’s current incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles when she worked as a Washington lobbyist on behalf of Gorrín’s TV network Globovision, ultimately failed. In 2019, Trump recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and imposed stiff oil sanctions on the OPEC nation in a bid to unseat Maduro.
But before the charm offensive unraveled, Gorrín, with the help of Rivera and others, managed to get his photo taken shaking hands with then-Vice President Mike Pence at an event in Florida. Rivera and Gorrín also met with Trump’s pick to become Secretary of State, Sen. Marco Rubio, who was once Rivera’s roommate when both were state lawmakers in Tallahassee.
Rivera also looked to set up a possible flight and meeting on Gorrín’s jet for a female campaign adviser turned White House “counselor” on June 27, 2017 — the same day Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was in Miami for a fundraising dinner with Miami Republicans, according to court records in the earlier criminal complaint and a parallel lawsuit filed against Rivera by Maduro’s opponents who now control the U.S. subsidiary of PDVSA.
Rivera also roped in Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas to try and set up a meeting for Venezuela’s foreign minister with executives from Exxon, which was headquartered in Sessions’ district at the time.
Pennsylvania
Lawsuit: Jail confiscated inmates’ soap and toilet paper, cut power and heat
A Pennsylvania jail retaliated against inmates suspected of smoking synthetic marijuana by punishing entire cell blocks — confiscating legal paperwork, withholding necessities like toilet paper, soap and warm clothing, and cutting power and heat, inmates allege in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Top jail officials waged an escalating, monthlong campaign of collective punishment, imposing “near-total deprivation” and violating the constitutional rights of people incarcerated at Dauphin County Prison, a 1,000-person lockup outside the state capital of Harrisburg, the lawsuit says.
“For DCP to launch this campaign of mass torture is abominable. Their actions violate the Constitution and basic human decency,” said Margo Hu, staff attorney for the Abolitionist Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs. “People in Dauphin County Prison have been advocating against the facility’s depraved conditions for years. It is past time Dauphin County be held responsible for the harm they have been inflicting.”
A message seeking comment was sent to the Dauphin County Prison Board.
County Commissioner Justin Douglas, who took office after the 2023 jail crackdown, said Tuesday he has been “deeply disturbed” by the allegations since they first surfaced in local media reports several months ago.
“I believe it is essential to let this process play out fully. If any inappropriate actions occurred, it is important that there are appropriate consequences,” he said.
The abuses described in the lawsuit took place in November and December 2023 in the jail’s restricted housing unit, where inmates are typically held for breaking jail rules and where jail officials believed synthetic drugs were being used.
The jail responded by confiscating inmates’ tablet computers, eliminating their access to religious texts, legal mail and other materials, and shutting off communications with anyone outside the jail, the lawsuit says. Jail officials are accused of seizing personal hygiene products and locking detainees in their cells nearly round-the-clock, permitting only one 15-minute shower every three days. Power and heat were cut, and some inmates sliced open their mattresses to keep warm as temperatures outside dipped below freezing, the suit alleges.
Most of the affected people were pretrial detainees. When one of the inmates, 27-year-old Kani Little, complained about the conditions, a dozen guards in riot gear assaulted him, slamming him to the ground and spraying him with chemical irritant, the lawsuit asserts.
Little and two other plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages on behalf of all detainees kept in the restricted housing unit at any time between Nov. 16 and Dec. 19, 2023. Dauphin County, the warden, the chief deputy warden and other jail officials and guards are named as defendants.
Dauphin County has a “widespread and well-earned reputation as a troubled prison facility,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote in the filing. More than 20 people have died in custody at the jail since 2019, the lawyers said, and the rate of overdoses is disproportionately high.
“I’ve seen so many people die in DCP that I was scared I was next,” one of the plaintiffs, James Patterson, said in a statement released by the Abolitionist Law Center. “I kept talking to staff and no one wanted to listen. They all had their hands in this, none of them protected us, and they all need to go.”
