Court Digest

Arkansas
Sheriff convicted of oppressing 2 jail inmates
FORT SMITH, Ark. (AP) — A federal jury on Monday found an Arkansas sheriff guilty of violating the rights of two people in his custody by assaulting them.

The verdict came after trial evidence showed Franklin County Sheriff Anthony Boen used unreasonable force to punish pretrial detainees on two separate occasions.

Trial evidence showed that on Nov. 21, 2018, Boen pushed a detainee onto the floor and grabbed his hair beard during an interrogation. It also showed that on Dec. 3, 2018, he punched a detainee multiple times while he was shackled to a bench inside Franklin County jail and not resisting.

Boen was acquitted on a third count.

Boen faces up to 20 years in prison, but no sentencing date has been set. In an email, defense attorney Russell Wood said he and his client “are very disappointed in the verdict of the jury but respect the duty that each member of the jury performed.”

A message to Franklin County officials was not immediately returned.

California
Ex-LA officer charged in fatal shooting of mentally ill man
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California’s attorney general has filed manslaughter charges against a former Los Angeles police officer who was off duty when he fatally shot a mentally ill man who was shopping with his parents in 2019.

Officer Salvador Sanchez, who was a seven-year veteran of the LAPD at the time of the shooting, was arrested Monday in Riverside County. He faces one count of voluntary manslaughter and two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm.
The LAPD says he was terminated from the agency in July 2020, but it declined further comment on Sanchez’s arrest.

Sanchez was with his young son in a Costco in Corona when he was attacked from behind by 32-year-old Kenneth French. Sanchez was knocked to the ground and quickly opened fire, fatally wounding French and critically injuring French’s parents, Russell and Paola French.

Sanchez had told investigators he believed French had a gun and that his life and his son’s life were in immediate danger. Authorities said French was not armed and was moving away from Sanchez when the officer opened fire.

Kenneth French was nonverbal and had recently been taken off his medication for mental illness due to other health issues, the family’s lawyer previously said, adding that the change may have affected his behavior that night. French’s parents have filed a federal lawsuit against Sanchez and the city.

The charges filed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta came after the Riverside County district attorney declined to charge Sanchez criminally when a grand jury did not bring an indictment in September 2019.

Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin previously said Sanchez believed he had been shot in the head and that a gunman was on the loose in the store after he and his 1½-year-old son were knocked to the ground in French’s unprovoked assault.

David Winslow, Sanchez’s attorney, called his client’s arrest a “political stunt that does absolutely nothing to protect the public.”

“The arrest of Sal Sanchez is a product of the politically motivated program by the California Attorney General to prosecute police officers,” Winslow said in a statement Monday. “Sal was not acting as a police officer when he was attacked. He was off duty acting as a father in self-defense and protecting his child.”

Bonta’s office in July announced that state investigators would respond to police fatal shootings of unarmed civilians after lawmakers passed legislation last year amid civil unrest over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer.

“Where there’s reason to believe a crime has been committed, we will seek justice,” Bonta said Monday in a news release. “That’s exactly what these charges are about: pursuing justice after an independent and thorough review of the evidence and the law. Ultimately, any loss of life is a tragedy, and being licensed to carry a gun doesn’t mean you’re not accountable for how you use it. No matter who you are, nobody is above the law.”

The Riverside district attorney’s office said Monday it would assist Bonta’s office in the prosecution, but noted that its own investigation ended when the grand jury did not find enough probable cause to move forward with the case.

The Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners ruled last year that Sanchez had violated departmental policy in the shooting.

The French family’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New York
Ex-prosecutor sentenced to 5 years in suspect abuse scandal
CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) — A former Long Island prosecutor convicted of helping cover up the police beating of a prisoner accused to stealing sex toys from a police chief’s vehicle was sentenced Tuesday to 5 years in prison.

Thomas Spota and one his top aides in the Suffolk County district attorney’s office, Christopher McPartland, were convicted in December 2019 on counts of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and civil rights violations.

“I hope not to die in prison alone,” the 79-year-old Spota told U.S. District Judge Joan Azrack before hearing his penalty, Newsday reported.

The once-respected law enforcement official also called his conviction “the lowest point” in his life and said he feared and expected it would be his legacy, Newsday said.

Azrack also gave McPartland a 5 years behind bars, “This was not a momentary moral lapse but years of criminal coverup,” according to Newsday. In addition, the judge ordered Spota to pay a $100,000 fine.

In a statement, acting U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis said the defendants had undermined the public’s faith in the criminal justice system.

“Instead of serving the people of Suffolk County, these defendants brazenly abused their exceptional positions of power and public trust to protect their friends and hurt their enemies,” Kasulis said.

Prosecutors had argued the men deserved 8 years behind bars for doing “the exact opposite” of their jobs in the face of a scandal that eventually engulfed the county’s law enforcement power structure. Lawyers for Spoto and McPartland, 55, had said home confinement was a more appropriate sentence.

The police chief, James Burke, pleaded guilty in 2016 to charges accusing him of punching a handcuffed man suspected of stealing the sex toys, pornography and other items from his department SUV. At a later federal trial, jurors heard testimony that Spota and McPartland conspired to protect Burke by ensuring the silence of the three officers who committed the assault with Burke at a Hauppauge police precinct.

Burke was sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison and was released to home confinement after serving most of his sentence.

Missouri
Appeals court revives challenge to Arkansas ‘ag-gag’ lawsuit
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A federal appeals court revived a legal challenge Monday to an Arkansas law that farm organizations have used to shield themselves from undercover investigations by animal rights groups.

A three-judge panel of the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit. The Animal Legal Defense Fund and other animal rights organizations filed the suit in 2019 against Republican state Rep. DeAnn Vaught and her husband, who own a pig farm, and Peco Foods, an Alabama-based poultry farm with Arkansas facilities.

Vaught also sponsored the 2017 law. The suit argues that the law, which bars undercover investigations at private businesses like large farms, violates the First Amendment by banning a form of speech. So-called “ag-gag” laws have been approved by legislatures in states with animal agriculture industries.

A federal judge last year said the groups hadn’t shown they have suffered an actual injury because of the law. The Animal Legal Defense Fund and another plaintiff in the suit, Animal Equality, said they have plans to conduct undercover investigations of Peco’s facilities and the Vaughts’ pig farm but have refrained from doing so due to the law.


Advocates: Disparate sentences show sentencing change need
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Leaders of Black faith organizations, labor groups, current and former judges and social activists are highlighting two sentences handed down in Cuyahoga County Court last week as justification for changes to the state’s sentencing system.

In one case, a Black woman received 18 months in prison for stealing $42,000 from a suburban school where she was a secretary. In another case, a white woman received probation after stealing nearly $250,000 from the village where she worked as a clerk, cleveland.com reported.

“Are we satisfied with a system that would allow for two extremely different results like this?” said Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly, a proponent of a statewide sentencing database that’s currently under construction with a goal of more uniform sentences for defendants.

Judges weighing a sentence could enter multiple factors into the database, such as the number of victims in a crime or whether restitution was paid, and then draft a sentence by comparing it to those given in similar cases statewide.

Ten of 34 Cuyahoga County judges have agreed to participate in the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission project, as have all judges in Summit County, home to Akron. The majority of state judges have yet to sign on.


New Jersey
Court sides with sex offender seeking removal from registry
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — An amendment to Megan’s Law that tightens the rules on who can seek to be removed from a sex offender registry can’t be applied retroactively to crimes committed before the amendment was passed, New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The case involved a man, identified by the initials J.D.-F., who was working as a manager at a McDonald’s in Hillsborough in 2001 when he was accused of improperly touching two teenage boys who worked there. He was convicted in December 2002 of criminal sexual contact and child endangerment and sentenced to time in the county jail and probation.

Under Megan’s Law, he was required to publicly register with law enforcement as a sex offender. The law allows offenders to apply to be removed from the list if they are offense-free for 15 years and are no longer considered a safety threat to others.

Earlier in 2002, between when J.D.-F’s crimes were committed and his conviction, the state Legislature had amended Megan’s Law to prohibit those convicted of certain offenses or of more than one offense from applying to end their registration requirements.

After J.D.-F applied for removal from the registry in 2019, a trial court and, subsequently, an appeals court denied his request on the grounds that the amendment applied to him since it was passed before he was convicted.

In Monday’s 7-0 ruling, however, the Supreme Court reversed and wrote that the amendment couldn’t be applied retroactively to J.D.-F’s case since the crimes had occurred before it was passed, and the date of those actions “triggers the legal consequences from which a person seeks relief.”

The case now goes back to the trial court for reconsideration.

A message seeking comment was left Monday with the attorney general’s office, which argued on behalf of the state.


New Jersey
Court: Suspect’s police station call off-limits as evidence
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a suspect’s recorded phone call made from a police station can’t be used as evidence against him and a friend because they weren’t notified it was being monitored.

The case involved a Middlesex County man arrested in 2018 after fleeing a traffic stop. In a call from the Piscataway police station, he told his girlfriend to look for a weapon at his residence, according to police, who used the phone call to file charges against the two.

In a 7-0 ruling, the Supreme Court wrote Tuesday that the phone call can’t be used as evidence because no notice was given that it was being recorded.

“Few would dispute that an arrestee has a lesser expectation of privacy within the confines of a police station,” the court wrote. “A police station, however, is not a constitution-free zone.”

The state had argued that the two had no reasonable expectation of privacy because it’s common knowledge that police station phone calls are recorded.

Denise Alvarez, an attorney who argued as a friend of the court on behalf of the defendants, called the ruling “a privacy win” that reaffirms the right to be free from government officials “arbitrarily prying into our personal conversations.”