Illinois
Federal judge who presided over R. Kelly trial dead at 87 after battling lung cancer
U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber, who presided over singer R. Kelly’s trial on child sex abuse charges, has died. He was 87.
Leinenweber died Tuesday evening, the eastern division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said in a statement. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Leinenweber had been diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year and died at the Florida home he shared with his wife.
“Judge Harry D. Leinenweber was a friend, mentor and model jurist,” Northern District of Illinois Chief Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer said in the statement. “My colleagues and I are deeply saddened by Judge Leinenweber’s passing. We hope for comfort and peace for his family. We thank his family for sharing him with us for over 39 years.”
President Ronald Reagan nominated Leinenweber, a former state lawmaker, to the bench in 1985. He took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in 2002 but continued to work.
He presided over Kelly’s trial in 2022. Prosecutors accused the Grammy Award-winning singer of producing sexually explicit videos of children and enticing girls for sex. The trial went on for a month before jurors ultimately convicted Kelly of six of 13 counts against him.
The verdict came months after a federal judge in New York sentenced Kelly to 30 years in prison in June for racketeering and sex trafficking. Leinenweber sentenced the singer to 20 years in prison in the Illinois case.
Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonojean wrote in an email that she loved trying cases in front of Leinenweber.
“He allowed attorneys to do their jobs and never put his thumb on the scales of justice,” she wrote. “He was an honorable judge and an honorable man. The judiciary needs more judges like him.
He will be missed by attorneys from all sides of the aisle.”
Leinenweber also oversaw a trial last year that ended with four people convicted in a bribery conspiracy that provided an inside look at pay-to-play politics in Illinois. Prosecutors accused two former executives with utility ComEd, a former utility consultant and a longtime government insider of arranging contracts, jobs and money of then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s associates to ensure bills boosting ComEd profits became law. Madigan has been indicted in the case. His trial is set to begin next year.
Robert Gaines served as a juror in the ComEd trial. He told the Sun-Times that Leinenweber had “complete control of the courtroom.”
“He knew how to put his foot down, and then he knew how to let it up,” Gaines said. “He was so cool and level-headed. He was the coolest judge I’ve ever seen, on TV or off TV.”
Oklahoma
State Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit of last Tulsa Race Massacre survivors seeking reparations
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit of the last two survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dampening the hope of advocates for racial justice that the government would make amends for one of the worst single acts of violence against Black people in U.S. history.
The nine-member court upheld the decision made by a district court judge in Tulsa last year, ruling that the plaintiff’s grievances, although legitimate, did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.
The suit was an attempt to force the city of Tulsa and others to make recompense for the destruction by a white mob of the once-thriving Black district known as Greenwood. In 1921 — on May 31 and June 1 — the white mob, including some people hastily deputized by authorities, looted and burned the district, which was referred to as Black Wall Street.
As many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands of survivors were forced for a time into internment camps overseen by the National Guard. Burned bricks and a fragment of a church basement are about all that survive today of the more than 30-block historically Black district.
The two survivors of the attack, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, who are both now over 100 years old, sued in 2020 with the hope of seeing what their attorney called “justice in their lifetime.” A third plaintiff, Hughes Van Ellis, died last year at ag 102.
Hawaii
City tentatively agrees to $7M settlement with remaining Makaha crash victim
HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu has tentatively agreed to a $7 million settlement with a 17-year-old boy who was riding in the back seat of a Honda Civic when it crashed following a high-speed police pursuit in Makaha in 2021.
The settlement agreement, which was reached last week, is pending approval by the Honolulu City Council.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 on behalf of Dayten Gouveia, who was 14 at the time of the crash that left him partially paralyzed. He is the last of the crash victims to settle with the city. His lawyer,
Eric Seitz, said he will drop a federal lawsuit he filed in September accusing city officials of stalling.
In February, the City Council approved a $12.5 million settlement for the driver of the Honda Civic, Jonaven Perkins-Sinapati. It is the largest police-related settlement in city history.
Honolulu police arrested Perkins-Sinapati on May 4 on gun and drug charges. He was later forced to forfeit $750,000 bail after he failed to appear for an arraignment on May 20. He is now being held at the Oahu Community Correctional Center on $1 million bail, according to court records.
Perkins-Sinapati’s lawyer, Michael Green, did not respond to a request for comment.
The city settled with four other passengers of the Honda Civic for $4.5 million last year. All were critically injured.
Seitz said he was upset by how the city handled his client’s case and how long it took them to offer a settlement given how much they were willing to grant Perkins-Sinapati.
“The settlement is for far less than what the case really should’ve been settled for,” he said.
Honolulu spokesman Scott Humber said in a statement the city would not comment on the settlement agreement until the City Council had a chance to review the offer.
Seitz said the civil trial kept getting pushed off due to delays in the criminal case for the officers involved in the crash. He said he advised Gouveia’s family to accept the offer so that they could pay for some of the expensive medical care he requires, which includes intensive physical and occupational therapy.
“That was the best we could do,” he said. “I don’t like being put in that position. I feel that the city’s handling of this case was simply atrocious.”
The officers — Joshua Nahulu, Erik Smith, Jake Bartolome and Robert Lewis — had all been scheduled to stand trial June 3. It has been continued to Oct. 7.
Nahulu is charged with a collision involving death or serious injury. Smith, Bartolome and Lewis face counts of hindering prosecution and criminal conspiracy. All have pleaded not guilty.
HPD fired Nahulu, Smith and Bartolome in February, but all have filed grievances with the department. Lewis is still employed but was suspended for three days last year.
Seitz said he will continue to pursue claims against Perkins-Sinapati and his then-girlfriend, Brittany Miyatake, who owned the Honda Civic. Both are named as defendants in the original lawsuit Seitz filed against the city.
“He was an active participant in all of this,” Seitz said. “He could have stopped his car at any time. My client was merely a passenger.”
A trial in the civil case is set for May 26, 2025.
New York
Charity founder accused of embezzling $2.5 million to fund lavish lifestyle
NEW YORK (AP) — The charity was called Modest Needs but federal prosecutors who filed charges against its founder say his weren’t.
Rather, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan say, Modest Needs founder Keith Taylor had such expensive tastes that he embezzled more than $2.5 million from the charity between 2016 and May 2024 and spent it on meals at some of New York City’s priciest restaurants as well as cosmetic surgery and a luxury apartment.
Taylor, 56, was accused in a federal complaint unsealed Tuesday with embezzling funds intended to serve Modest Needs’ mission of helping the needy, evading more than $1 million in taxes and creating a fake board of directors who supposedly had approved his personal expenses.
“As alleged, Keith Taylor falsely claimed that donations to his charity would help working families with unexpected expenses that put them at risk of homelessness,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a news release. “Instead, Taylor allegedly took those donations to pay for his meals at upscale restaurants, rent for a luxury apartment in a Manhattan skyscraper, and even cosmetic surgery.”
Williams said Taylor “unconscionably took money from the pockets of those most in need, and he is now facing federal charges for his alleged crimes.”
Taylor’s attorney, Brian Ketcham, said his client “denies the charges and looks forward to clearing his name.”
Taylor founded Modest Needs in 2002 to help low-income families and individuals pay for expenses like medical bills or broken appliances.
The charity, which used crowdfunding to recruit donors, won praise for its small-scale philanthropy.
“Modest Needs is one of a new crop of Web not-for-profits that put a face on charity and give donors the sense that they’re fixing problems directly,” Forbes reported in 2008.
But federal prosecutors say that Taylor stole more than $2.5 million from Modest Needs and its donors and used the money on his own expenses such as $300,000 for his own rent on the 30th floor of a Manhattan high-rise and $320,000 on expensive restaurants including Per Se, Jean-Georges, Masa and Marea.
The menu at Marea lists a dry-aged ribeye at $240, and Per Se’s nine-course tasting menu is $390.
According to the complaint, Taylor tried to hide his embezzlement by falsely listing acquaintances as members of the charity’s board of directors and claiming that the board had approved his expenses.
The purported board members included a bartender at Jean-Georges, a friend and the friend’s house cleaner, none of whom knew that they had been listed on the charity’s website as board members, prosecutors said.
Additionally, prosecutors said, Taylor did not file personal income tax returns or pay income taxes on the money he had received from the charity for at least the calendars years of 2017 through 2022.
Taylor is charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. He appeared in court Tuesday and was released on bond.
It was unclear whether Modest Needs was still operating Wednesday. An email sent through its website seeking comment was not returned.
Federal judge who presided over R. Kelly trial dead at 87 after battling lung cancer
U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber, who presided over singer R. Kelly’s trial on child sex abuse charges, has died. He was 87.
Leinenweber died Tuesday evening, the eastern division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois said in a statement. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Leinenweber had been diagnosed with lung cancer earlier this year and died at the Florida home he shared with his wife.
“Judge Harry D. Leinenweber was a friend, mentor and model jurist,” Northern District of Illinois Chief Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer said in the statement. “My colleagues and I are deeply saddened by Judge Leinenweber’s passing. We hope for comfort and peace for his family. We thank his family for sharing him with us for over 39 years.”
President Ronald Reagan nominated Leinenweber, a former state lawmaker, to the bench in 1985. He took senior status, a form of semi-retirement, in 2002 but continued to work.
He presided over Kelly’s trial in 2022. Prosecutors accused the Grammy Award-winning singer of producing sexually explicit videos of children and enticing girls for sex. The trial went on for a month before jurors ultimately convicted Kelly of six of 13 counts against him.
The verdict came months after a federal judge in New York sentenced Kelly to 30 years in prison in June for racketeering and sex trafficking. Leinenweber sentenced the singer to 20 years in prison in the Illinois case.
Kelly attorney Jennifer Bonojean wrote in an email that she loved trying cases in front of Leinenweber.
“He allowed attorneys to do their jobs and never put his thumb on the scales of justice,” she wrote. “He was an honorable judge and an honorable man. The judiciary needs more judges like him.
He will be missed by attorneys from all sides of the aisle.”
Leinenweber also oversaw a trial last year that ended with four people convicted in a bribery conspiracy that provided an inside look at pay-to-play politics in Illinois. Prosecutors accused two former executives with utility ComEd, a former utility consultant and a longtime government insider of arranging contracts, jobs and money of then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s associates to ensure bills boosting ComEd profits became law. Madigan has been indicted in the case. His trial is set to begin next year.
Robert Gaines served as a juror in the ComEd trial. He told the Sun-Times that Leinenweber had “complete control of the courtroom.”
“He knew how to put his foot down, and then he knew how to let it up,” Gaines said. “He was so cool and level-headed. He was the coolest judge I’ve ever seen, on TV or off TV.”
Oklahoma
State Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit of last Tulsa Race Massacre survivors seeking reparations
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit of the last two survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dampening the hope of advocates for racial justice that the government would make amends for one of the worst single acts of violence against Black people in U.S. history.
The nine-member court upheld the decision made by a district court judge in Tulsa last year, ruling that the plaintiff’s grievances, although legitimate, did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.
The suit was an attempt to force the city of Tulsa and others to make recompense for the destruction by a white mob of the once-thriving Black district known as Greenwood. In 1921 — on May 31 and June 1 — the white mob, including some people hastily deputized by authorities, looted and burned the district, which was referred to as Black Wall Street.
As many as 300 Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands of survivors were forced for a time into internment camps overseen by the National Guard. Burned bricks and a fragment of a church basement are about all that survive today of the more than 30-block historically Black district.
The two survivors of the attack, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, who are both now over 100 years old, sued in 2020 with the hope of seeing what their attorney called “justice in their lifetime.” A third plaintiff, Hughes Van Ellis, died last year at ag 102.
Hawaii
City tentatively agrees to $7M settlement with remaining Makaha crash victim
HONOLULU (AP) — Honolulu has tentatively agreed to a $7 million settlement with a 17-year-old boy who was riding in the back seat of a Honda Civic when it crashed following a high-speed police pursuit in Makaha in 2021.
The settlement agreement, which was reached last week, is pending approval by the Honolulu City Council.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 on behalf of Dayten Gouveia, who was 14 at the time of the crash that left him partially paralyzed. He is the last of the crash victims to settle with the city. His lawyer,
Eric Seitz, said he will drop a federal lawsuit he filed in September accusing city officials of stalling.
In February, the City Council approved a $12.5 million settlement for the driver of the Honda Civic, Jonaven Perkins-Sinapati. It is the largest police-related settlement in city history.
Honolulu police arrested Perkins-Sinapati on May 4 on gun and drug charges. He was later forced to forfeit $750,000 bail after he failed to appear for an arraignment on May 20. He is now being held at the Oahu Community Correctional Center on $1 million bail, according to court records.
Perkins-Sinapati’s lawyer, Michael Green, did not respond to a request for comment.
The city settled with four other passengers of the Honda Civic for $4.5 million last year. All were critically injured.
Seitz said he was upset by how the city handled his client’s case and how long it took them to offer a settlement given how much they were willing to grant Perkins-Sinapati.
“The settlement is for far less than what the case really should’ve been settled for,” he said.
Honolulu spokesman Scott Humber said in a statement the city would not comment on the settlement agreement until the City Council had a chance to review the offer.
Seitz said the civil trial kept getting pushed off due to delays in the criminal case for the officers involved in the crash. He said he advised Gouveia’s family to accept the offer so that they could pay for some of the expensive medical care he requires, which includes intensive physical and occupational therapy.
“That was the best we could do,” he said. “I don’t like being put in that position. I feel that the city’s handling of this case was simply atrocious.”
The officers — Joshua Nahulu, Erik Smith, Jake Bartolome and Robert Lewis — had all been scheduled to stand trial June 3. It has been continued to Oct. 7.
Nahulu is charged with a collision involving death or serious injury. Smith, Bartolome and Lewis face counts of hindering prosecution and criminal conspiracy. All have pleaded not guilty.
HPD fired Nahulu, Smith and Bartolome in February, but all have filed grievances with the department. Lewis is still employed but was suspended for three days last year.
Seitz said he will continue to pursue claims against Perkins-Sinapati and his then-girlfriend, Brittany Miyatake, who owned the Honda Civic. Both are named as defendants in the original lawsuit Seitz filed against the city.
“He was an active participant in all of this,” Seitz said. “He could have stopped his car at any time. My client was merely a passenger.”
A trial in the civil case is set for May 26, 2025.
New York
Charity founder accused of embezzling $2.5 million to fund lavish lifestyle
NEW YORK (AP) — The charity was called Modest Needs but federal prosecutors who filed charges against its founder say his weren’t.
Rather, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan say, Modest Needs founder Keith Taylor had such expensive tastes that he embezzled more than $2.5 million from the charity between 2016 and May 2024 and spent it on meals at some of New York City’s priciest restaurants as well as cosmetic surgery and a luxury apartment.
Taylor, 56, was accused in a federal complaint unsealed Tuesday with embezzling funds intended to serve Modest Needs’ mission of helping the needy, evading more than $1 million in taxes and creating a fake board of directors who supposedly had approved his personal expenses.
“As alleged, Keith Taylor falsely claimed that donations to his charity would help working families with unexpected expenses that put them at risk of homelessness,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a news release. “Instead, Taylor allegedly took those donations to pay for his meals at upscale restaurants, rent for a luxury apartment in a Manhattan skyscraper, and even cosmetic surgery.”
Williams said Taylor “unconscionably took money from the pockets of those most in need, and he is now facing federal charges for his alleged crimes.”
Taylor’s attorney, Brian Ketcham, said his client “denies the charges and looks forward to clearing his name.”
Taylor founded Modest Needs in 2002 to help low-income families and individuals pay for expenses like medical bills or broken appliances.
The charity, which used crowdfunding to recruit donors, won praise for its small-scale philanthropy.
“Modest Needs is one of a new crop of Web not-for-profits that put a face on charity and give donors the sense that they’re fixing problems directly,” Forbes reported in 2008.
But federal prosecutors say that Taylor stole more than $2.5 million from Modest Needs and its donors and used the money on his own expenses such as $300,000 for his own rent on the 30th floor of a Manhattan high-rise and $320,000 on expensive restaurants including Per Se, Jean-Georges, Masa and Marea.
The menu at Marea lists a dry-aged ribeye at $240, and Per Se’s nine-course tasting menu is $390.
According to the complaint, Taylor tried to hide his embezzlement by falsely listing acquaintances as members of the charity’s board of directors and claiming that the board had approved his expenses.
The purported board members included a bartender at Jean-Georges, a friend and the friend’s house cleaner, none of whom knew that they had been listed on the charity’s website as board members, prosecutors said.
Additionally, prosecutors said, Taylor did not file personal income tax returns or pay income taxes on the money he had received from the charity for at least the calendars years of 2017 through 2022.
Taylor is charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. He appeared in court Tuesday and was released on bond.
It was unclear whether Modest Needs was still operating Wednesday. An email sent through its website seeking comment was not returned.
