Court Digest

Virginia
Parents who want governor’s transgender policies enacted sue school board
Two Virginia Beach parents have filed a lawsuit seeking to force their local school system to adopt Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new model policies for the treatment of transgender students.

The lawsuit, filed on the parents’ behalf by the conservative-leaning Cooper and Kirk law firm, alleges that local school boards must adopt the policies adopted earlier this year by the Youngkin administration. Those policies roll back many accommodations for transgender students urged by the previous Democratic administration.

Last month, the Virginia Beach School Board narrowly voted down a proposal that would have adopted the Youngkin administration’s policies.

School boards across the state have taken varied approaches to the issue. Some school boards with conservative majorities have adopted the policies. More liberal jurisdictions, especially in northern Virginia, have balked.

Youngkin and Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares have said school boards must adopt the new rules, which they say are designed to give parents a greater say in how their children are treated at school. But it has been unclear whether state law provides any mechanism to force counties to adopt the regulations, and opponents say the policies violate federal law by codifying discrimination against transgender students.

The new policies give teachers and students the right to refer to a transgender student by the name and pronouns associated with their sex assigned at birth. And they require teachers to use pronouns associated with that unless parents have agreed in writing to the student’s preferred gender.

The policies also call for school systems’ sports teams to be organized by the sex assigned at birth, meaning that transgender girls would be unable to participate on girls’ sports teams.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Virginia Beach Circuit Court, seeks a declaration that school boards must adopt regulations consistent with the Youngkin administration’s model policies, and an injunction requiring the Virginia Beach board to adopt them.

A state law passed in 2020 required the state to develop model regulations and county school boards to adopt them, but it included no enforcement mechanism. The model policies developed by Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration were greeted favorably by advocates for transgender students, but many school boards did not adopt them. At the time, the Department of Education told school districts failing to adopt the policies that they assumed all legal risks for noncompliance.

Opponents of Youngkin’s policies have said they violate federal law. They cite court rulings in favor of transgender student Gavin Grimm, the former Virginia high school student whose lawsuit over his district’s transgender bathroom ban led to a ruling that the policy was unconstitutional.


Illinois
Man gets life in prison for role in home invasion that killed 5
CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago man convicted of fatally shooting five people during a 2016 home invasion has been sentenced to life in prison.

A Cook County judge on Thursday sentenced Lionel Parks, 35, who was convicted in July in the December 2016 killings at a drug dealer’s home on the city’s South Side, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Four of the victims, Elijah Jackson, 36; his pregnant sister, Shacora Jackson, 40; Shacora Jackson’s daughter, Nateyah Hines, 19; and Scott Thompson, 46, were found fatally shot at the scene.

A fifth person, 19-year-old Shakeyah Jackson, died more than 10 months later of injuries suffered in the attack at the home. A family member who was 22 years old at the time of the attack was also shot but survived by playing dead, authorities said.

Prosecutors said Parks went to Elijah Jackson’s home in Chicago’s Fernwood neighborhood to socialize with him twice on Dec. 17, 2016, before returning a third time that day and forcing his way inside with an armed accomplice.

Parks and the second gunman ransacked the house looking for money and drugs before shooting the victims and fleeing, prosecutors said.

Only Parks was charged in connection with the killings.

Texas
Teen sentenced to 40 years after school shooting
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A 16-year-old who opened fire at a Dallas-area school earlier this year, killing one student and injuring another, was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison for capital murder and attempted capital murder, prosecutors said.

The teen, who was 15 at the time of the shooting, had admitted to being the shooter and asked a jury to determine his sentence, the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office said in a news release. Since he’s a minor, prosecutors withheld the teen’s name.

Before the first bell ever rang on March 20, the teen fired a shotgun into a group of students waiting for the doors to be unlocked at Lamar High School in Arlington, prosecutors said. Ja’Shawn Poirier, 16, was killed and a 16-year-old girl was hit in the face by shrapnel.

The teen will be sent to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department and before his 19th birthday, the judge will determine if he should go to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to serve the rest of his sentence.

Prosecutors had sought to certify the teen to stand trial as an adult, but the judge denied the request and kept him in the juvenile system.

The jury gave the teen the maximum sentence. The teen’s defense attorneys had asked for leniency, saying the teen had basically raised himself.

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors said the teen’s father was sentenced to over six years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm. They said following the school shooting, law enforcement searched the man’s apartment and found paperwork for the shotgun recovered from the shooting and other firearms.

New Mexico
Weapons charges dropped in raid on family compound
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Two firearms charges were dismissed Thursday amid preparations for a trial against an extended family arrested in a 2018 law enforcement raid on a ramshackle desert compound in northern New Mexico and the discovery of a young boy’s decomposed body.

The changes narrow the case to terrorism and kidnapping charges against five defendants in a trial scheduled to begin Monday with jury selection at U.S. District Court in Albuquerque.

Authorities had been searching for a sickly 3-year-old who had been reported missing by his mother in Georgia when, in August 2018, they burst into a ramshackle encampment in the remote desert surrounded by berms of used tires with an adjacent firing range.

Sheriff’s deputies and state agents initially found 11 hungry children and a small arsenal of ammunition and guns. After days of searching, they recovered the decomposed remains of the 3-year-old in an underground tunnel.

The trail was delayed repeatedly amid the logistical challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, examinations regarding the mental competency of defendants to stand trial and decisions by two defendants to serve as their own counsel with some access to legal assistance. All defendants currently maintain their innocence.

Authorities have said the deceased child, Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, suffered from untreated disabilities as father Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and his partner Jany Leveille performed daily prayer rituals over the boy — even as he cried and foamed at the mouth. Authorities also said Leveille believed medication suppressed the group’s Muslim beliefs.

Forensic specialists determined the child died several months prior to the recovery of his body.

All five defendants — including Subhanah Wahhaj, sister Hujrah Wahhaj and Lucas Morton — are charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, providing material support to each other as potential terrorists and conspiracy to kill U.S. government personnel amid tactical drills at the New Mexico compound.

Kidnapping charges are pending against four of the defendants but not Siraj Wahhaj because of his legal status as the father of the deceased boy. Morton also plans to act as his own legal counsel at trial.

A grand jury indictment alleges Leveille, a Haitian national, and her partner instructed people at the compound to be prepared to engage in jihad and die as martyrs, and that another relative was invited to bring money and firearms.

Louisiana
Judge blocks plan to scale back Gulf oil lease sale to protect whales
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal judge has ordered the Interior Department to expand next week’s scheduled sale of Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases by millions of acres, rejecting a scaled-back plan announced last month by the Biden administration as part of an effort to protect an endangered whale species.

As originally proposed in March, the Sept. 27 sale was would have made 73 acres (30 hectares) of offshore tracts available for drilling leases. That area was reduced to 67 acres (27 hectares) in August when Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced final plans for the sale. But U.S. District Judge James David Cain Jr. in Lake Charles restored the original coverage area in a Thursday night order.

BOEM’s revision also included new speed limits and requirements for personnel on industry vessels in some of the areas to be leased — also blocked by Cain’s order.

BOEM had adopted the reduced area and new rules for next week’s sale as part of an agreement the administration reached last month with environmentalists in efforts to settle a whale-protection lawsuit filed in federal court in Maryland.

Chevron, Shell Offshore, the American Petroleum Institute and the state of Louisiana sued to reverse the cut in acreage and block the inclusion of the whale-protecting measures in the lease sale provisions. They claimed the administration’s actions violated provisions of a 2022 measure, labeled the Inflation Reduction Act, that provided broad incentives for clean energy, along with creating new drilling opportunities in the Gulf. They also said the changes after the initial lease sale was proposed in March violate federal law because they were adopted arbitrarily, without sufficient explanation of why they are needed.

Meanwhile, rival litigation filed by Earthjustice and other prominent environmental groups seeks to halt the lease sale. The organizations say the lease sale violates the National Environmental Policy. They say the administration failed to account for health threats to Gulf Coast communities near oil refineries and didn’t adequately the effects of new fossil fuel development on the climate.

Energy industry representatives welcomed the ruling. “The injunction is a necessary and welcome response from the court to an unnecessary decision by the Biden administration,” Erik Milito, President of the National Ocean Industries Association, said in an emailed news release. “The removal of millions of highly prospective acres and the imposition of excessive restrictions stemmed from a voluntary agreement with activist groups that circumvented the law, ignored science, and bypassed public input.”

An Earthjustice attorney said the order blocks “baseline protections” to help protect the Rice’s whale from extinction.

“These oil companies are looking at the full glass after one sip and calling it empty,” the attorney, Steve Mashuda, said in an emailed statement.