West Virginia
Corrections officers plead guilty to not intervening as colleagues fatally beat inmate
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Two West Virginia correctional officers accused of failing to intervene as their colleagues beat an incarcerated man to death in 2022 pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday.
Former Southern Regional Jail employees Jacob Boothe and Ashley Toney admitted to violating 37-year-old Quantez Burks’s civil rights by not protecting him from being physically assaulted by other correctional officers.
Toney and Boothe, who appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in Charleston, were among six former correctional officers indicted by a federal grand jury in November 2023.
Burks was a pretrial detainee at the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver who died less than a day after he was booked into the jail on a wanton endangerment charge in March 2022.
The case drew scrutiny to conditions and deaths at the Southern Regional Jail. In November 2023, West Virginia agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by inmates who described conditions at the jail as inhumane. The lawsuit filed in 2022 on behalf of
current and former inmates cited such complaints as a lack of access to water and food at the facility, as well as overcrowding and fights that were allowed to continue until someone was injured.
According to court documents, Burks tried to push past an officer to leave his housing unit. Burks then was escorted to an interview room where correctional officers are accused of striking Burks while he was restrained and handcuffed. He was later forcibly moved to a prison cell in another housing unit, where he was assaulted again.
The state medical examiner’s office attributed Burks’ primary cause of death to natural causes, prompting the family to have a private autopsy conducted. The family’s attorney revealed at a news conference last year that the second autopsy found the inmate had multiple areas of blunt force trauma on his body.
As part of their plea agreement, Toney and Boothe admitted to escorting Burks to an interview room, they watched as other officers struck and injured him while he was restrained, handcuffed and posed no threat to anyone. The two officers said officers struck Burks “in order to punish him for attempting to leave his assigned pod,” according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In her plea agreement, Toney further admitted to knowing that the interview room to which officers brought Burks was a “blind spot” at the jail with no surveillance cameras.
Toney also admitted that she conspired with other officers to provide false information during the investigation of Burks’ death.
Toney and Boothe each face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentencing hearings are scheduled for Nov. 4. Trial for the remaining four defendants is scheduled for Oct. 8.
Georgia
Delta facing class action lawsuit over tech outage
Delta Air Lines is facing a class action lawsuit, which claims the airline refused to give refunds following a global technology outage last month. The airline replied that it will go after the tech companies behind the snafu.
Among airlines, Delta was by far the hardest hit hard by the outage, having to cancel roughly 7,000 flights over five days, because key systems were crippled by the incident.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Georgia Atlanta Division on behalf of Delta customers impacted by the outage. In it, the customers allege that Delta refused or ignored their requests for prompt refunds for their canceled or delayed flights.
The complaint also claims Delta didn’t provide all impacted passengers with meal, hotel, and ground transportation vouchers and continues to refuse or ignore requests for reimbursements of those unexpected expenses.
“These unfair, unlawful, and unconscionable practices resulted in Delta unjustly enriching itself at the expense of its customers,” the lawsuit states.
The complaint states the plaintiffs are seeking refunds for all Delta customers whose flights were canceled or significantly affected due to the outage.
Delta, based in Atlanta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a regulatory filing, the carrier said it will spend $380 million in the third quarter on customer refunds and compensation related to the outage. Other expenses total an estimated $170 million, but quarterly fuel expense is estimated to be $50 million lower due to the cancelations.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating why Delta failed to recover as quickly as other airlines. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last month that the department would also examine Delta’s customer service, including “unacceptable” lines for assistance and reports that unaccompanied minors were stranded at airports.
On Tueday, Microsoft announced that it was joining cybersecurity software firm CrowdStrike in fighting back against Delta, which blames the companies for causing several thousand canceled flights following the July outage.
A lawyer for Microsoft said that Delta’s key IT system is probably serviced by other technology companies, not Microsoft Windows.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian previously said that the global technology outage that started with a faulty upgrade from CrowdStrike to machines running on Microsoft Windows cost the airline $500 million. Bastian raised the threat of legal action.
He confirmed that in Thursday’s filing. Bastian said, “We are pursuing legal claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft to recover damages caused by the outage, which total at least $500 million.”
On Tuesday, Delta said it has a long record of investing in reliable service including “billions of dollars in IT capital expenditures” since 2016 and billions more in annual IT costs. It declined further comment.
CrowdStrike has also disputed Delta’s claims. Both it and Microsoft said Delta had turned down their offers to help the airline recover from the outage last month. Microsoft’s lawyer said CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian during the outage, but the Delta CEO never replied.
Kansas
15 states sue to block Biden’s effort to help migrants in US illegally get health care coverage
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Fifteen states filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the Biden administration over a rule that is expected to allow 100,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to enroll next year in the federal Affordable Care Act’s health insurance.
The states are seeking to block the rule from taking effect Nov. 1 and providing people known as “Dreamers” access to tax breaks when they sign up for coverage. The Affordable Care Act’s marketplace enrollment opens the same day, just four days ahead of the presidential election.
The states filed suit in North Dakota, one of the states involved. All have Republican attorneys general who are part of a GOP effort to thwart Biden administration rules advancing Democratic policy goals.
The lawsuit argues that the rule violates a 1996 welfare reform law and the ACA. They also said it would encourage more immigrants to come to the U.S. illegally, burdening the states and their public school systems. Many economists have concluded that immigrants provide a net economic benefit, and immigration appears to have fueled job growth after the COVID-19 pandemic that prevented a recession.
The lawsuit comes amid Republican attacks on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, as weak on curbing illegal immigration. Border crossings hit record highs during the Biden administration but have dropped more recently.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is an immigration hardliner who began building a national profile two decades ago by urging tough restrictions on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, and he helped draft Arizona’s “show your papers” law in 2010. Besides Kansas and North Dakota, the other states involved in the lawsuit are Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials did not immediately respond Thursday to an email seeking comment about the lawsuit. But Biden said in May in outlining the rule that he was “committed to providing Dreamers the support they need to succeed.” The Biden administration is shielding them from deportation.
The “Dreamers” and their advocates have said they’re young people who had little or no choice in coming to the U.S. and years later are fully integrated into their communities. At least 25 states, including Kansas, Nebraska and Virginia, allow them to pay the lower tuition rates reserved for their residents, according to the National Immigration Law Center.
In May, Biden said: “I’m proud of the contributions of Dreamers to our country.”
The “Dreamers” have been ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition of having a “lawful presence” in the U.S. The states filing the lawsuit said declaring their lawful presence by rule is “illogical on its face,” given that they’d face deportation without Biden administration intervention.
“Subsidized health insurance through the ACA is a valuable public benefit that encourages unlawfully present alien beneficiaries to remain in the United States,” the lawsuit said.
In past lawsuits against the Biden administration, states have sometimes struggled to persuade judges that the harm they face from a new rule is direct, concrete and specific enough to give them the right to sue. Of the 15 states involved in the lawsuit, only Idaho and Virginia run their own health insurance marketplaces instead of relying on a federal one.
But the states argue that they all face higher costs from increased illegal immigration. They rely on a 2023 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which not only argues for stronger laws against illegal immigration but sharp curbs on legal immigration.
New York
NYC’s ice cream museum sued by man who says he broke his ankle jumping into the sprinkle pool
NEW YORK (AP) — A man who says he broke his ankle jumping into the sprinkle pool at the Museum of Ice Cream in New York City has filed a lawsuit alleging that the facility was negligent for not warning visitors that it is unsafe to jump into the sprinkle pool.
Plaintiff Jeremy Shorr says in his lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court in Manhattan that he visited the museum in SoHo with his daughter on March 31, 2023, and suffered “severe and permanent personal injuries” when he jumped into the sprinkle pool, a ball-pit-like installation full of oversized plastic sprinkles.
Shorr says in the lawsuit that the Museum of Ice Cream, which has four locations in the U.S., encourages patrons to jump into the sprinkle pool through its advertising and promotional materials, “creating the reasonable — but false — expectation that the Sprinkle Pool is fit and safe for that activity.”
Shorr’s lawsuit cites a 2019 post on the museum’s Instagram account that shows the sprinkle pool and asks prospective customers if they are “ready to jump in.”
The website of the museum, which offers ice cream-themed installations and all-you-can-eat ice cream, encourages visitors to “Dive into fun with our iconic sprinkle pool!” It shows photos of children and adults playing in the pool, which appears to be about ankle depth.
Shorr says his sprinkle pool encounter left him with injuries that required surgery and may require future surgeries as well as physical therapy and diagnostic testing. He is seeking unspecified damages to cover his medical and legal expenses.
Corrections officers plead guilty to not intervening as colleagues fatally beat inmate
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Two West Virginia correctional officers accused of failing to intervene as their colleagues beat an incarcerated man to death in 2022 pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday.
Former Southern Regional Jail employees Jacob Boothe and Ashley Toney admitted to violating 37-year-old Quantez Burks’s civil rights by not protecting him from being physically assaulted by other correctional officers.
Toney and Boothe, who appeared before U.S. District Court Judge Joseph R. Goodwin in Charleston, were among six former correctional officers indicted by a federal grand jury in November 2023.
Burks was a pretrial detainee at the Southern Regional Jail in Beaver who died less than a day after he was booked into the jail on a wanton endangerment charge in March 2022.
The case drew scrutiny to conditions and deaths at the Southern Regional Jail. In November 2023, West Virginia agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by inmates who described conditions at the jail as inhumane. The lawsuit filed in 2022 on behalf of
current and former inmates cited such complaints as a lack of access to water and food at the facility, as well as overcrowding and fights that were allowed to continue until someone was injured.
According to court documents, Burks tried to push past an officer to leave his housing unit. Burks then was escorted to an interview room where correctional officers are accused of striking Burks while he was restrained and handcuffed. He was later forcibly moved to a prison cell in another housing unit, where he was assaulted again.
The state medical examiner’s office attributed Burks’ primary cause of death to natural causes, prompting the family to have a private autopsy conducted. The family’s attorney revealed at a news conference last year that the second autopsy found the inmate had multiple areas of blunt force trauma on his body.
As part of their plea agreement, Toney and Boothe admitted to escorting Burks to an interview room, they watched as other officers struck and injured him while he was restrained, handcuffed and posed no threat to anyone. The two officers said officers struck Burks “in order to punish him for attempting to leave his assigned pod,” according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In her plea agreement, Toney further admitted to knowing that the interview room to which officers brought Burks was a “blind spot” at the jail with no surveillance cameras.
Toney also admitted that she conspired with other officers to provide false information during the investigation of Burks’ death.
Toney and Boothe each face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Sentencing hearings are scheduled for Nov. 4. Trial for the remaining four defendants is scheduled for Oct. 8.
Georgia
Delta facing class action lawsuit over tech outage
Delta Air Lines is facing a class action lawsuit, which claims the airline refused to give refunds following a global technology outage last month. The airline replied that it will go after the tech companies behind the snafu.
Among airlines, Delta was by far the hardest hit hard by the outage, having to cancel roughly 7,000 flights over five days, because key systems were crippled by the incident.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Georgia Atlanta Division on behalf of Delta customers impacted by the outage. In it, the customers allege that Delta refused or ignored their requests for prompt refunds for their canceled or delayed flights.
The complaint also claims Delta didn’t provide all impacted passengers with meal, hotel, and ground transportation vouchers and continues to refuse or ignore requests for reimbursements of those unexpected expenses.
“These unfair, unlawful, and unconscionable practices resulted in Delta unjustly enriching itself at the expense of its customers,” the lawsuit states.
The complaint states the plaintiffs are seeking refunds for all Delta customers whose flights were canceled or significantly affected due to the outage.
Delta, based in Atlanta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a regulatory filing, the carrier said it will spend $380 million in the third quarter on customer refunds and compensation related to the outage. Other expenses total an estimated $170 million, but quarterly fuel expense is estimated to be $50 million lower due to the cancelations.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is investigating why Delta failed to recover as quickly as other airlines. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last month that the department would also examine Delta’s customer service, including “unacceptable” lines for assistance and reports that unaccompanied minors were stranded at airports.
On Tueday, Microsoft announced that it was joining cybersecurity software firm CrowdStrike in fighting back against Delta, which blames the companies for causing several thousand canceled flights following the July outage.
A lawyer for Microsoft said that Delta’s key IT system is probably serviced by other technology companies, not Microsoft Windows.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian previously said that the global technology outage that started with a faulty upgrade from CrowdStrike to machines running on Microsoft Windows cost the airline $500 million. Bastian raised the threat of legal action.
He confirmed that in Thursday’s filing. Bastian said, “We are pursuing legal claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft to recover damages caused by the outage, which total at least $500 million.”
On Tuesday, Delta said it has a long record of investing in reliable service including “billions of dollars in IT capital expenditures” since 2016 and billions more in annual IT costs. It declined further comment.
CrowdStrike has also disputed Delta’s claims. Both it and Microsoft said Delta had turned down their offers to help the airline recover from the outage last month. Microsoft’s lawyer said CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian during the outage, but the Delta CEO never replied.
Kansas
15 states sue to block Biden’s effort to help migrants in US illegally get health care coverage
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Fifteen states filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the Biden administration over a rule that is expected to allow 100,000 immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to enroll next year in the federal Affordable Care Act’s health insurance.
The states are seeking to block the rule from taking effect Nov. 1 and providing people known as “Dreamers” access to tax breaks when they sign up for coverage. The Affordable Care Act’s marketplace enrollment opens the same day, just four days ahead of the presidential election.
The states filed suit in North Dakota, one of the states involved. All have Republican attorneys general who are part of a GOP effort to thwart Biden administration rules advancing Democratic policy goals.
The lawsuit argues that the rule violates a 1996 welfare reform law and the ACA. They also said it would encourage more immigrants to come to the U.S. illegally, burdening the states and their public school systems. Many economists have concluded that immigrants provide a net economic benefit, and immigration appears to have fueled job growth after the COVID-19 pandemic that prevented a recession.
The lawsuit comes amid Republican attacks on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, as weak on curbing illegal immigration. Border crossings hit record highs during the Biden administration but have dropped more recently.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is an immigration hardliner who began building a national profile two decades ago by urging tough restrictions on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, and he helped draft Arizona’s “show your papers” law in 2010. Besides Kansas and North Dakota, the other states involved in the lawsuit are Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials did not immediately respond Thursday to an email seeking comment about the lawsuit. But Biden said in May in outlining the rule that he was “committed to providing Dreamers the support they need to succeed.” The Biden administration is shielding them from deportation.
The “Dreamers” and their advocates have said they’re young people who had little or no choice in coming to the U.S. and years later are fully integrated into their communities. At least 25 states, including Kansas, Nebraska and Virginia, allow them to pay the lower tuition rates reserved for their residents, according to the National Immigration Law Center.
In May, Biden said: “I’m proud of the contributions of Dreamers to our country.”
The “Dreamers” have been ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition of having a “lawful presence” in the U.S. The states filing the lawsuit said declaring their lawful presence by rule is “illogical on its face,” given that they’d face deportation without Biden administration intervention.
“Subsidized health insurance through the ACA is a valuable public benefit that encourages unlawfully present alien beneficiaries to remain in the United States,” the lawsuit said.
In past lawsuits against the Biden administration, states have sometimes struggled to persuade judges that the harm they face from a new rule is direct, concrete and specific enough to give them the right to sue. Of the 15 states involved in the lawsuit, only Idaho and Virginia run their own health insurance marketplaces instead of relying on a federal one.
But the states argue that they all face higher costs from increased illegal immigration. They rely on a 2023 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which not only argues for stronger laws against illegal immigration but sharp curbs on legal immigration.
New York
NYC’s ice cream museum sued by man who says he broke his ankle jumping into the sprinkle pool
NEW YORK (AP) — A man who says he broke his ankle jumping into the sprinkle pool at the Museum of Ice Cream in New York City has filed a lawsuit alleging that the facility was negligent for not warning visitors that it is unsafe to jump into the sprinkle pool.
Plaintiff Jeremy Shorr says in his lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court in Manhattan that he visited the museum in SoHo with his daughter on March 31, 2023, and suffered “severe and permanent personal injuries” when he jumped into the sprinkle pool, a ball-pit-like installation full of oversized plastic sprinkles.
Shorr says in the lawsuit that the Museum of Ice Cream, which has four locations in the U.S., encourages patrons to jump into the sprinkle pool through its advertising and promotional materials, “creating the reasonable — but false — expectation that the Sprinkle Pool is fit and safe for that activity.”
Shorr’s lawsuit cites a 2019 post on the museum’s Instagram account that shows the sprinkle pool and asks prospective customers if they are “ready to jump in.”
The website of the museum, which offers ice cream-themed installations and all-you-can-eat ice cream, encourages visitors to “Dive into fun with our iconic sprinkle pool!” It shows photos of children and adults playing in the pool, which appears to be about ankle depth.
Shorr says his sprinkle pool encounter left him with injuries that required surgery and may require future surgeries as well as physical therapy and diagnostic testing. He is seeking unspecified damages to cover his medical and legal expenses.
