Arizona
Governor appoints first Latina and Black justice to state high court
PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed Maria Elena Cruz to the Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday, making the state appellate judge from Yuma County the first Latina and first Black person chosen for the state’s high court.
Hobbs’ selection of Cruz marks the first Supreme Court appointment by a Democratic governor since 2005. It also broadens the racial, geographic and political diversity of the seven-member, Republican-dominated court.
Since the establishment of the Arizona Supreme Court in 1912, no justice has identified as Black. Only one – Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice John Lopez – has been Latino. Cruz, a Democrat, will become the second person of Hispanic heritage and first person of African descent to preside on the bench.
Previous GOP governors Doug Ducey and Jan Brewer were responsible for selecting the other six justices, who all reside in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county that includes Phoenix.
The Oct. 31 retirement of Justice Robert Brutinel presented Hobbs the rare opportunity to fill the court’s vacancy with a selection of her own. The justices have ruled in recent years on cases concerning several hot-button issues, including abortion and elections, leading to accusations of political bias.
Under Arizona law, the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments is required to provide the governor no fewer than three names to pick from. On Dec. 9, the 16-member commission, chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Timmer, interviewed eight applicants. It ultimately sent a list of five names to Hobbs, who had 60 days to make her decision.
Born in New York to a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother, Cruz was 14 when she and her family relocated to Yuma County, the southwestern corner of Arizona where the state meets California and Mexico.
She was a student at Arizona Western College and an elementary school teacher when she was involved in a car accident that changed her life’s trajectory. After securing legal representation, she found herself sitting across from a lawyer and discussing her case. It was then she had an epiphany.
“Here is someone who is doing something really meaningful, someone who affects people’s lives with the work that he does,” Cruz once told an interviewer, reflecting on her thinking in that moment.
She inquired about his path into the legal profession. When he spoke of the importance of law school and the requirement to pass the bar exam, she said she was determined to be a lawyer.
Later that day, she told her employer she was resigning to pursue a law degree.
Cruz earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Arizona in 1998 and a juris doctorate from the university’s James E. Rogers College of Law in 2001. She was a law clerk for the Pima County Attorney’s Office, a prosecutor for the Yuma County Attorney’s Office and a criminal defense attorney in private practice.
She became a judge pro-tem for the Cocopah Indian Tribe in 2005. Between 2009 and 2017, she served as a judge for Yuma County Superior Court.
Since 2017, Cruz has served as a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. Appointed by Ducey, she was the Republican governor’s first selection of a Democrat to serve on a state appellate court.
Washington
Inmate dragged backward across cell floor by a rope sues Washington state sheriff’s office
A Black jail inmate who was slammed into bunkbeds, thrown facedown and then dragged backward across the concrete floor by a rope clipped to his handcuffed wrists is suing a Washington state sheriff’s office.
The lawsuit in federal court alleges deputies used excessive force during the 2021 encounter in the Clark County Jail, which was captured on three security cameras and left prisoner O’Neal Payne with what it described as cuts, bruises and emotional distress.
“Dragging a handcuffed Black man around the jail floor with a rope is inhumane and a vile abuse of power,” Payne’s lawyer Alicia LeDuc Montgomery said in a statement about the suit, which was filed last month in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Washington. “This lawsuit aims to shine a light on these cruel practices and demand accountability.”
The Clark County manager’s office — which assumed oversight of the jail from the sheriff’s office in 2023 — does not comment on pending litigation, spokesperson Joni McAnally, said in an email Monday.
At the time, then-Sheriff Chuck Atkins said his administration took the use of excessive force “very seriously and it will not be tolerated.”
“I viewed the video and was very troubled by what I observed,” Atkins said in a 2022 press release. He placed the most aggressive deputy, Robert Hanks, on administrative leave and asked prosecutors to look at the case for possible charges, followed by an internal affairs investigation.
The Vancouver City Attorney’s office declined to file charges and Hanks returned to work, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in 2023. The sheriff’s office did not respond to emails asking whether Hanks faced any discipline or if he was available to comment on the civil rights lawsuit.
Payne, who was in custody on a commercial sex abuse charge, was being housed in the jail’s maximum-security unit due to his history of being uncooperative, according to the internal affairs report. He was listed as requiring a 3-to-1 deputy ratio due to his previous behavior. He subsequently was convicted in the case.
When deputies came in to collect meal containers, Payne was standing in the middle of the cell with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to audio-free security camera video. He took small steps backward and then stood passively as a deputy appeared to repeatedly point for him to move back.
Hanks lunged past the other deputy and pushed Payne into the bunkbeds, up against a wall and then back into the bunkbeds, face-first on the frame of the upper bunk this time, according to the suit. The three deputies then took him to the floor, face-down, footage showed.
Two other deputies brought in a red rope, the video shows. They attached one end to Payne’s handcuffs and ran the other through the slot in the door — the food port — and all of the deputies left the cell. As Payne started to get up off the floor, they yanked the rope, jerking him backward toward the door, and pulled his arms through the slot up to the armpits.
They then unclipped the rope and cuffs and left him alone. Payne was not offered medical care, the lawsuit said.
The sheriff’s office referred the case to the county prosecutor in March 2022, and the county referred it to the city attorney’s office because the allegation was a gross misdemeanor, according to Anna Klein, chief criminal deputy prosecuting attorney. The city attorney’s office did not file charges, saying it found insufficient evidence of a crime.
The sheriff’s internal affairs division found that department reports of the incident “lacked detail and did not appear to accurately reflect the amount of force seen in the video.” It also said the force appeared excessive and possibly criminal.
Maine
Court strikes down removal of time limits on child sex abuse lawsuits
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s highest court on Tuesday ruled against a law that removed the statute of limitations for civil claims about child sexual abuse.
Lawmakers in the state approved the law in 2021, and it was later challenged by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland. The diocese has received many lawsuits alleging long-ago abuse by priests.
Lawyers for the diocese told the Maine Supreme Judicial Court during arguments that they felt the removal of time limits was unconstitutional. An attorney representing plaintiffs defended the law as a way to prevent past abuses from being swept away.
The court, in a lengthy ruling, stated that once a statute of limitations has expired for a claim “a right to be free of that claim has vested, and the claim cannot be revived. That means the law “is unconstitutional as applied to expired claims,” the court ruled. Two justices dissented.
It wasn’t immediately clear what would become of lawsuits filed against the diocese. Diocese elsewhere in the country have filed for bankruptcy due to the costs associated with lawsuits and settlements stemming from clergy abuse scandals.
Bishop James Ruggieri released a statement Tuesday that a “degree of uncertainty still remains and in the coming days, weeks, and months, in consultation with diocesan, parish, and lay advisors, I will prayerfully assess the path forward for the diocese.” He said he also wanted to “reach out to the victims and survivors to acknowledge the impact this past abuse has had on their lives.”
Washington
US copyright office report: AI-assisted works can get copyright with enough human creativity
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could help clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation’s copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office’s approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the “centrality of human creativity” in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
“Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection,” said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist’s handiwork is perceptible, or an AI-generated work includes a human’s “creative arrangements or modifications.”
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn’t give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. “Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ... would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright,” Perlmutter said.
Not addressed in the report is the debate over copyrighted human works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation. Visual artists, authors, news organizations and others have sued AI companies for copyright theft in cases that are still working through U.S. courts.
The copyright office doesn’t weigh in on those legal cases but says it is working on another report that “will turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of any liability.”
Governor appoints first Latina and Black justice to state high court
PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs appointed Maria Elena Cruz to the Arizona Supreme Court on Wednesday, making the state appellate judge from Yuma County the first Latina and first Black person chosen for the state’s high court.
Hobbs’ selection of Cruz marks the first Supreme Court appointment by a Democratic governor since 2005. It also broadens the racial, geographic and political diversity of the seven-member, Republican-dominated court.
Since the establishment of the Arizona Supreme Court in 1912, no justice has identified as Black. Only one – Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice John Lopez – has been Latino. Cruz, a Democrat, will become the second person of Hispanic heritage and first person of African descent to preside on the bench.
Previous GOP governors Doug Ducey and Jan Brewer were responsible for selecting the other six justices, who all reside in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county that includes Phoenix.
The Oct. 31 retirement of Justice Robert Brutinel presented Hobbs the rare opportunity to fill the court’s vacancy with a selection of her own. The justices have ruled in recent years on cases concerning several hot-button issues, including abortion and elections, leading to accusations of political bias.
Under Arizona law, the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments is required to provide the governor no fewer than three names to pick from. On Dec. 9, the 16-member commission, chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Ann Timmer, interviewed eight applicants. It ultimately sent a list of five names to Hobbs, who had 60 days to make her decision.
Born in New York to a Puerto Rican father and a Dominican mother, Cruz was 14 when she and her family relocated to Yuma County, the southwestern corner of Arizona where the state meets California and Mexico.
She was a student at Arizona Western College and an elementary school teacher when she was involved in a car accident that changed her life’s trajectory. After securing legal representation, she found herself sitting across from a lawyer and discussing her case. It was then she had an epiphany.
“Here is someone who is doing something really meaningful, someone who affects people’s lives with the work that he does,” Cruz once told an interviewer, reflecting on her thinking in that moment.
She inquired about his path into the legal profession. When he spoke of the importance of law school and the requirement to pass the bar exam, she said she was determined to be a lawyer.
Later that day, she told her employer she was resigning to pursue a law degree.
Cruz earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Arizona in 1998 and a juris doctorate from the university’s James E. Rogers College of Law in 2001. She was a law clerk for the Pima County Attorney’s Office, a prosecutor for the Yuma County Attorney’s Office and a criminal defense attorney in private practice.
She became a judge pro-tem for the Cocopah Indian Tribe in 2005. Between 2009 and 2017, she served as a judge for Yuma County Superior Court.
Since 2017, Cruz has served as a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. Appointed by Ducey, she was the Republican governor’s first selection of a Democrat to serve on a state appellate court.
Washington
Inmate dragged backward across cell floor by a rope sues Washington state sheriff’s office
A Black jail inmate who was slammed into bunkbeds, thrown facedown and then dragged backward across the concrete floor by a rope clipped to his handcuffed wrists is suing a Washington state sheriff’s office.
The lawsuit in federal court alleges deputies used excessive force during the 2021 encounter in the Clark County Jail, which was captured on three security cameras and left prisoner O’Neal Payne with what it described as cuts, bruises and emotional distress.
“Dragging a handcuffed Black man around the jail floor with a rope is inhumane and a vile abuse of power,” Payne’s lawyer Alicia LeDuc Montgomery said in a statement about the suit, which was filed last month in U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Washington. “This lawsuit aims to shine a light on these cruel practices and demand accountability.”
The Clark County manager’s office — which assumed oversight of the jail from the sheriff’s office in 2023 — does not comment on pending litigation, spokesperson Joni McAnally, said in an email Monday.
At the time, then-Sheriff Chuck Atkins said his administration took the use of excessive force “very seriously and it will not be tolerated.”
“I viewed the video and was very troubled by what I observed,” Atkins said in a 2022 press release. He placed the most aggressive deputy, Robert Hanks, on administrative leave and asked prosecutors to look at the case for possible charges, followed by an internal affairs investigation.
The Vancouver City Attorney’s office declined to file charges and Hanks returned to work, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in 2023. The sheriff’s office did not respond to emails asking whether Hanks faced any discipline or if he was available to comment on the civil rights lawsuit.
Payne, who was in custody on a commercial sex abuse charge, was being housed in the jail’s maximum-security unit due to his history of being uncooperative, according to the internal affairs report. He was listed as requiring a 3-to-1 deputy ratio due to his previous behavior. He subsequently was convicted in the case.
When deputies came in to collect meal containers, Payne was standing in the middle of the cell with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to audio-free security camera video. He took small steps backward and then stood passively as a deputy appeared to repeatedly point for him to move back.
Hanks lunged past the other deputy and pushed Payne into the bunkbeds, up against a wall and then back into the bunkbeds, face-first on the frame of the upper bunk this time, according to the suit. The three deputies then took him to the floor, face-down, footage showed.
Two other deputies brought in a red rope, the video shows. They attached one end to Payne’s handcuffs and ran the other through the slot in the door — the food port — and all of the deputies left the cell. As Payne started to get up off the floor, they yanked the rope, jerking him backward toward the door, and pulled his arms through the slot up to the armpits.
They then unclipped the rope and cuffs and left him alone. Payne was not offered medical care, the lawsuit said.
The sheriff’s office referred the case to the county prosecutor in March 2022, and the county referred it to the city attorney’s office because the allegation was a gross misdemeanor, according to Anna Klein, chief criminal deputy prosecuting attorney. The city attorney’s office did not file charges, saying it found insufficient evidence of a crime.
The sheriff’s internal affairs division found that department reports of the incident “lacked detail and did not appear to accurately reflect the amount of force seen in the video.” It also said the force appeared excessive and possibly criminal.
Maine
Court strikes down removal of time limits on child sex abuse lawsuits
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s highest court on Tuesday ruled against a law that removed the statute of limitations for civil claims about child sexual abuse.
Lawmakers in the state approved the law in 2021, and it was later challenged by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland. The diocese has received many lawsuits alleging long-ago abuse by priests.
Lawyers for the diocese told the Maine Supreme Judicial Court during arguments that they felt the removal of time limits was unconstitutional. An attorney representing plaintiffs defended the law as a way to prevent past abuses from being swept away.
The court, in a lengthy ruling, stated that once a statute of limitations has expired for a claim “a right to be free of that claim has vested, and the claim cannot be revived. That means the law “is unconstitutional as applied to expired claims,” the court ruled. Two justices dissented.
It wasn’t immediately clear what would become of lawsuits filed against the diocese. Diocese elsewhere in the country have filed for bankruptcy due to the costs associated with lawsuits and settlements stemming from clergy abuse scandals.
Bishop James Ruggieri released a statement Tuesday that a “degree of uncertainty still remains and in the coming days, weeks, and months, in consultation with diocesan, parish, and lay advisors, I will prayerfully assess the path forward for the diocese.” He said he also wanted to “reach out to the victims and survivors to acknowledge the impact this past abuse has had on their lives.”
Washington
US copyright office report: AI-assisted works can get copyright with enough human creativity
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could help clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation’s copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office’s approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the “centrality of human creativity” in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
“Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection,” said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist’s handiwork is perceptible, or an AI-generated work includes a human’s “creative arrangements or modifications.”
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn’t give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. “Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ... would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright,” Perlmutter said.
Not addressed in the report is the debate over copyrighted human works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation. Visual artists, authors, news organizations and others have sued AI companies for copyright theft in cases that are still working through U.S. courts.
The copyright office doesn’t weigh in on those legal cases but says it is working on another report that “will turn to the training of AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and allocation of any liability.”
