Court Digest

Indiana
Appeals court restores several state abortion restrictions
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana’s ban on telemedicine consultations between doctors and women seeking abortions and several other abortion restrictions are back in force after a federal appeals court set aside a judge’s ruling that they were unconstitutional.

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel issued a 2-1 ruling Wednesday that allows Indiana to continue enforcing those laws while the court considers a full appeal of the case.

It said District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker’s ruling last month was inconsistent with previous Supreme Court decisions and reinstated Indiana’s telemedicine ban, along with state laws requiring in-person examinations by a doctor before medication-induced abortions can be performed and a prohibition on second-trimester abortions outside of hospitals or surgery centers.

“Plaintiffs contend, and the district court found, that developments in videoconferencing make it possible to dispense with in-person meetings, that improvements in medicine make the use of hospitals or surgical centers unnecessary, and that nurses are competent to approve and monitor medication-induced abortions,” the ruling said. “The district court concluded that these findings permit it to depart from the holdings of earlier cases. Yet the Supreme Court insists that it alone has the authority to modify its precedents.”

Barker, who was nominated as a federal judge in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, had ruled that the state didn’t have the constitutional authority to restrict the use of virtual telemedicine services to women seeking medication abortions without providing evidence that it benefitted the women’s health.

The Indiana attorney general’s office argued in its appeal of Barker’s decision that “the Constitution does not require state legislatures constantly to update state statutes to keep up with ever-advancing technologies just because those technologies may make abortion more convenient.”

Drug-induced abortions made up 55% of those performed in Indiana last year, according to the state health department.

Appeals court Judge Diane Wood wrote in her dissent that the “benefits of Indiana’s law are illusory, while its burdens are very tangible.”

Wood wrote that the laws” impose an undue burden on the set of women for whom the law makes a difference — Indiana women of limited means who cannot leave their jobs, pay for extensive travel, obtain access to cars, and potentially go out of state, simply to obtain a lawful abortion.”

The Indiana abortion restrictions were challenged in a broad lawsuit filed by Virginia-based Whole Woman’s Health Alliance and other abortion rights supporters in 2018 as Whole Woman’s Health fought the state’s denial of a license to open an abortion clinic in South Bend.

Rupali Sharma, a lawyer for Whole Woman’s Health, said the court’s decision was being reviewed and all legal options were under consideration.

The state’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, hailed the appeals court decision.

“We would expect our commonsense laws to be upheld as the appeal continues,” Rokita said in a statement. “Protecting the culture of life is the top priority of my office, and we will continue fighting for every life alongside our legislative partners.”

Ohio
Fire analyst testifies in Akron arson suspect’s murder trial
AKRON, Ohio (AP) — A prosecution witness in the latest trial of a man accused of killing nine people in separate arson fires in his Akron neighborhood says surveillance video shows a man making repeated attempts to start a fire at one of the residences.

Bradley Barkhurst, an analyst with the Ohio state fire marshal’s office, testified Wednesday at the trial of Stanley Ford, who could be sentenced to death if convicted on multiple aggravated murder charges. He is accused of killing a couple in 2016 and two adults and five children in 2017 .

Summit County prosecutors have said Ford, 62, set the fires because of disputes with his neighbors.

In his testimony, Barkhurst discussed surveillance video footage that showed a man crossing a street, throwing liquid onto a house and attempting to light it on fire. The first two attempts failed, and each time the man ran back across the street, but the blaze ignited on the third try and quickly consumed the home.

Prosecutors are seeking to tie together the surveillance footage and security alarm records from a nearby home Ford owns in an attempt to link him to the fatal fires. Defense attorney Scott Rilley has said Ford cannot be identified in the surveillance videos and added that other potential suspects were identified.

Ford’s initial trial began in March 2020. After a week of testimony and several delays, Summit County Judge Christine Croce declared a mistrial the following June at the request of Ford’s attorneys, who cited concerns about Ford’s ability to get a fair trial during the coronavirus pandemic.


Kansas
Man gets 30-year sentence for murder of emaciated mother
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A suburban Kansas City man has been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison in the death of his 75-year-old mother, who was emaciated and riddled with infected bed sores when she died at home in 2019.

Raymond McManness, 54, was sentenced Wednesday to 374 months, the Kansas City Star reported. McManness, of Olathe, pleaded no contest in July to second-degree murder and physical mistreatment of his mother. Police said McManness didn’t seek medical care for Sharon McManness before she died.

The medical examiner’s office found  she died in January 2019 from an infection due to open bed sores and that she was severely malnourished, weighing just 58 pounds (26.3 kilograms).

Police said when they found her, she was “very emaciated and had large open bedsores,” including one sore that was “open to the bone.”

Police found no medications, no clean clothing, no working telephones and minimal food when they searched the home. Dog feces and urine was found throughout the house. And soiled clothes, that appeared to have been cut off the victim, were found in a trash can, court records said.

McManness told police at the time that he checked on his mother twice a day, but that he had moved out six months earlier because his mother kept him awake at night. Authorities say he admitted he stopped taking his mother, who had dementia, to the doctor when her physical and mental health declined.

Alabama
Drops lawsuit challenging Census privacy method
The state of Alabama on Thursday asked to dismiss its lawsuit challenging the U.S. Census Bureau’s use of a controversial statistical method aimed at keeping people’s data private in the numbers used for redrawing congressional and legislative districts.

Alabama and three Alabama politicians had sued the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, in an effort to stop the statistical agency from using the method known as “differential privacy.” They also wanted to force the bureau to release the redistricting numbers earlier than planned. Normally, the data are released at the end of March, but the Census Bureau pushed the deadline to August because of delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Alabama originally claimed the delay was caused by the bureau’s attempt to implement differential privacy, which the state’s attorneys said would result in inaccurate redistricting numbers. A three-judge panel in June refused to stop the Census Bureau from using the statistical method. In July, Alabama and the Commerce Department asked that the lawsuit be put on hold so that the state could decide how to proceed after the redistricting data were released in mid-August.

The dismissal request filed Thursday didn’t provide a reason, and Mike Lewis, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office in Montgomery, didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Differential privacy adds intentional errors to the data to obscure the identity of any given participant in the 2020 census while still providing statistically valid information. The Census Bureau says more privacy protections are needed than in past decades as technological innovations magnify the threat of people being identified through their census answers, which are confidential by law.


South Carolina
Man gets 20 years for burglaries during hurricane evacuation
GEORGETOWN, S.C. (AP) — A man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for breaking into six South Carolina homes during the 2018 mandatory evacuation for Hurricane Florence.

Coleman Jack Tudor’s DNA was found in one of six Pawley Island homes he burglarized and stolen items from the houses were found in a storage unit he was renting, prosecutors said in a news release.

Tudor, 35, pleaded guilty to looting under a state of emergency, four counts of second-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree burglary, last month on the day his trial was supposed to start, prosecutors said.

Tudor was sentenced to 20 years in prison on the first-degree burglary charges and will have to serve at least 17 years because under the law it is considered a violent, most serious offense.

About 1 million people evacuated along the South Carolina coast for Hurricane Florence in September 2018. It was the third evacuation for some of them in three years.

North Carolina
Man gets 13 years for human trafficking
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A federal judge has sentenced a North Carolina man to 13 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor and for aiding and abetting, authorities said.

Antoine Lamar Wallace of Garner, was sentenced on Wednesday to for sex trafficking of a minor and aiding and abetting, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina said in a news release.

According to court records and evidence presented at the trial of co-defendant, Jonathan Lynn Jenkins, Wallace and Jenkins prostituted women between November 2014 and October 2015, including minors. After luring the victims with promises of food and shelter, Wallace and Jenkins isolated and abused the women, then kept the money they had earned.

Wallace and Jenkins were arrested in January 2016. Jenkins, the ringleader of the two, was convicted of multiple human trafficking charges at a federal trial in February and was given three consecutive life sentences.

Illinois
New life for suit over Chicago police stop-and-frisk policy
CHICAGO (AP) — A federal judge has granted class-action status in a lawsuit filed six years ago that alleged the Chicago Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy targeted Black and Hispanic people who hadn’t committed any crime.

Attorneys involved in the lawsuit announced Tuesday that the case’s six original plaintiffs are now part of a class of more than 1 million people. The plaintiffs’ lawyers say some 2 million unconstitutional stops occurred in Chicago between 2010 and 2017 in which officers allegedly had no “reasonable suspicion” that a crime had been or was about to be committed.

The decision was handed down by U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood on Aug. 31.

The ruling, which could lead to a trial, comes at a difficult time for a police department that has long been plagued by a legacy of excessive force and racism and has scrambled to restore public trust.

“This practice has to stop — and elevating this issue to a class action provides a way to make significant change and make our community better,” Antonio Romanucci, an attorney who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement.

In fact, the judge limited her ruling only to the possibility of a change in policy, according to Jennifer McGuffin, a spokeswoman for Romanucci’s firm.

“The judge only certified the class for injunction relief that would require the CPD to change its practices and training,” she said.

McGuffin said it remains an open question whether the original six plaintiffs from the 2015 case might receive a monetary award, but the others involved in the 2 million stops would not be in line for any money.

But the judge seemed to suggest that the city and the police department would be wise to make significant changes, pointing out that the lawsuit was a strong one.

She noted, for example, that the attorneys had “made a sufficient showing that the City knew, or should have known, that its stop and frisk program was associated with a risk of widespread” violations of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

What those changes might look like is also an open question. The police department referred questions to the city’s law department, which in an email said, “The City does not comment on ongoing litigation.”

But in her ruling, Wood said that not only did the department make hundreds of thousands more stops before Garry McCarthy’s tenure as superintendent between 2011 and late 2015, but that after he left the department, “stops plummeted.”

McCarthy was fired by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel shortly after the release of a video that showed a Chicago police officer fatally shooting Black teenager Laquan McDonald.  McCarthy could not be reached for comment.