Rhode Island
Judge dismisses lawsuit over deportation of Brown Medicine doctor
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the deportation of a doctor from Lebanon who was deported from Boston's Logan Airport earlier this year despite having a visa after immigration officials said she supported a Hezbollah leader and attended his funeral.
In March, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown Medicine, was detained for at least 36 hours in Boston's airport after arriving from Lebanon. The doctor was traveling with her family, and while traveling, she attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah.
Homeland Security officials say they reviewed her phone while Alawieh was detained and found photos of "Hezbollah fighters and martyrs." Alawieh responded that she was only interested in Nasrallah's spiritual beliefs, but she confirmed that some of her family supported his politics.
Alawieh's case quickly gained national attention as her family launched a legal campaign to keep her in the U.S. At one point, a federal judge ordered that she not be removed until a hearing could be held, but lawyers have said customs officials did not get word until after Alawieh was sent back to Lebanon.
Late last month, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin dismissed Alawieh's case, arguing that he did not have the authority to provide relief she sought — in particular, saying that he could not remove a five-year ban on returning to the U.S. as a result of her deportation.
"This Court simply cannot issue in this habeas action the orders Alawieh hopes to obtain," Sorokin wrote on Oct. 31.
Golnaz Fakhimi, Alawieh's attorney and legal director of Muslim Advocates, said her organization was assessing the court's decision and considering all options.
"Unchecked abuse of the administration's power means that vulnerable people will continue to go without highly specialized, life-saving care from Dr. Alawieh, who'd been one of only three transplant nephrologists in Rhode Island," she said in a statement. "The administration's actions against her reflect its broader goal of trying to eliminate the diversity that defines American society."
Sorokin pointed to Congress and a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2020 that upheld a fast-track deportation process and significantly limited federal district court judges from intervening.
"The five-year bar on her return is not a consequence of the detention she originally challenged as unlawful. It is a feature of the expedited removal order issued during that detention — an order which, ultimately, led to her release from detention into the cabin of a plane leaving the United States," the judge wrote.
South Carolina
Former House member indicted on federal charges of defrauding legal clients
A former South Carolina state lawmaker has been indicted on federal allegations that he schemed to defraud his legal clients.
According to court papers, a federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted former Rep. Marvin Pendarvis, a Democrat and attorney, on 10 charges including wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.
Federal prosecutors said that Pendarvis, between 2022 and 2024, negotiated financial settlements on behalf of his clients, but didn't tell them that he had received the funds. Instead, according to the government, Pendarvis — who was at the time serving as a lawmaker representing the Charleston area — allegedly pocketed the money himself, either not telling his clients the money had been obtained, or ultimately giving them lesser sums than what he had negotiated.
In all, according to prosecutors, Pendarvis deposited more half a million dollars into his law firm's trust fund account, from which he paid nothing to clients.
A message left Wednesday with Pendarvis was not immediately returned.
Pendarvis' law license was suspended last year after a former client accused him of forging his signature to reach a settlement in a lawsuit without his permission. The order issued then by the state Supreme Court didn't detail why the suspension had been recommended, but the former client — whose initials matched one of the alleged victims detailed in Wednesday's indictment — accused Pendarvis of sending him text messages asking him not to sue over the alleged forgery.
"Let's handle this (expletive). No need to try and hurt me man. I can help you," Pendarvis wrote Lewis in text messages filed with the state lawsuit, which is still pending.
First elected in a special election in 2017, he won three full terms before resigning from office about four months after the suspension of his law license.
According to court records, Pendarvis is slated to appear in federal court on Nov. 18.
New York
Key executive convicted of defrauding JPMorgan Chase is sentenced to over 5 years in prison
NEW YORK (AP) — A top executive at a startup company that eased the process for college students applying for financial aid was sentenced Wednesday to over five years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase in a $175 million acquisition of the company four years ago.
The Manhattan federal court sentencing of Olivier Amar came a month after Charlie Javice, the founder of the startup known as Frank, was sentenced to seven years in prison.
In sentencing Amar to five years and eight months in prison, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said Amar was "intimately involved in the fraud," including the creation of documents that falsely claimed the company had over 4 million young customers when it actually had fewer than 400,000.
"Although you were not the instigator of the fraud or the person who made the most misrepresentations, you were a key part of it," he said.
The pair was convicted by a jury in March of presenting fake records to the bank to convince it that Frank had millions of customers when the deal was being negotiated in the summer of 2021. At the trial, witnesses including bank employees testified that the number of customers was important because JPMorgan Chase hoped they would begin using the bank's financial services.
Before the sentence was announced, Amar got choked up as he spoke about the harm the scandal had caused his family, saying it was pain "that will haunt me forever."
He said he was "deeply saddened" that the company created to make it easier for students to apply for and obtain financial aid was no longer operating, especially since it helped students get to college and stay there.
"I'm heartbroken by the suffering caused in the aftermath of Frank's downfall," Amar said.
Besides the prison sentence, the judge also ordered Amar to pay $223 million in restitution. That number includes $54 million in legal fees that prosecutors said the bank was contractually required to pay on Amar's behalf because he and Javice worked for the company after the acquisition occurred.
Texas
Criminal case against Boeing over deadly 737 Max plane crashes is dismissed by a US judge
A federal judge in Texas has agreed to dismiss a criminal conspiracy charge against Boeing in connection with two 737 Max jetliner crashes that killed 346 people.
In a written decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor approved the federal government's request to dismiss its case against Boeing as part of a deal that requires the aircraft maker to pay or invest an additional $1.1 billion in fines, compensation for the crash victims' families, and internal safety and quality measures.
The ruling came after an emotional hearing in early September when relatives of some of the victims urged O'Connor to reject the deal and instead appoint a special prosecutor to take over the case.
All passengers and crew members died when the planes went down off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. Prosecutors had alleged that Boeing deceived government regulators about a flight-control system that was later implicated in the fatal flights.
The long-running case has taken many twists and turns since the Justice Department first charged the American aerospace company in January 2021 with defrauding the U.S. government, including a failed deal that would have required Boeing to plead guilty. That plea agreement fell through after O'Connor did not approve it.
Airlines began flying the Max in 2017. After the Ethiopia crash, the planes were grounded worldwide for 20 months while the company redesigned the flight-control software.
The Justice Department had said it believed the latest agreement served the public interest more effectively than taking the case to trial and risking a jury verdict that might spare the company further punishment. It also said the families of 110 crash victims either support resolving the case before it reaches trial or did not oppose the deal.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen relatives spoke at the Sept. 3 hearing, some of whom traveled to Texas from as far as Europe and Africa. They are among nearly 100 families who opposed the agreement.
Catherine Berthet, who traveled from France, had asked the judge to send the case to trial.
"Do not allow Boeing to buy its freedom," she said. Her daughter, Camille Geoffroy, died when a 737 Max crashed shortly after takeoff from Ethiopia's Addis Ababa Bole International Airport.
The yearslong case centers around a software system that Boeing developed for the 737 Max, which began flying in 2017.
In both of the deadly crashes, that software pitched the nose of the plane down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots flying for Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines were unable to regain control. After the Ethiopia crash, the planes were grounded worldwide for 20 months.
Investigators found that Boeing did not inform key Federal Aviation Administration personnel about changes it had made to the software before regulators set pilot training requirements for the Max and certified the airliner for flight.
South Carolina
Lawyers for Stephen Bryant make final appeal over brain damage to stop execution
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Lawyers for a man on South Carolina's death row are trying to stop his execution later this month by arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother's alcohol and drug use while pregnant.
Stephen Bryant, 44, is being put to death for killing Willard "TJ" Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen's eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted "catch me if u can" and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim's blood. Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to over five days that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.
Attorneys for the state argue that the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural county east of Columbia weren't impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.
But Bryant's lawyers are arguing in a final appeal to the state Supreme Court that while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn't stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn't detail how Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder had affected his ability to conform to the law.
Bryant's lawyers said he didn't get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.
They also submitted a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist wherein Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher's wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.
Prosecutors have pushed back, saying Bryant's attorneys shouldn't be allowed to make a different case to keep him from being put to death after the first one failed.
They argue that the number of crimes, their planning and Bryant's lingering Tietjen's home to desecrate his body, as well as taunting Tietjen's wife and daughter over the phone, were deliberate acts of evil — not impulses from a broken brain.
"Bryant was methodical, cunning, and took pleasure in deadly rampage including the gratuitous infliction of horror on Mr. Tietjen's family," they wrote in court papers.
They said the only way the legal system could fail is to delay his Nov. 14 execution by firing squad.
Beyond the appeal, Bryant can also ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won't be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.
Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.
Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that's often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America's Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.
Bryant's execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.
Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.
Judge dismisses lawsuit over deportation of Brown Medicine doctor
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the deportation of a doctor from Lebanon who was deported from Boston's Logan Airport earlier this year despite having a visa after immigration officials said she supported a Hezbollah leader and attended his funeral.
In March, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown Medicine, was detained for at least 36 hours in Boston's airport after arriving from Lebanon. The doctor was traveling with her family, and while traveling, she attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of Hezbollah.
Homeland Security officials say they reviewed her phone while Alawieh was detained and found photos of "Hezbollah fighters and martyrs." Alawieh responded that she was only interested in Nasrallah's spiritual beliefs, but she confirmed that some of her family supported his politics.
Alawieh's case quickly gained national attention as her family launched a legal campaign to keep her in the U.S. At one point, a federal judge ordered that she not be removed until a hearing could be held, but lawyers have said customs officials did not get word until after Alawieh was sent back to Lebanon.
Late last month, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin dismissed Alawieh's case, arguing that he did not have the authority to provide relief she sought — in particular, saying that he could not remove a five-year ban on returning to the U.S. as a result of her deportation.
"This Court simply cannot issue in this habeas action the orders Alawieh hopes to obtain," Sorokin wrote on Oct. 31.
Golnaz Fakhimi, Alawieh's attorney and legal director of Muslim Advocates, said her organization was assessing the court's decision and considering all options.
"Unchecked abuse of the administration's power means that vulnerable people will continue to go without highly specialized, life-saving care from Dr. Alawieh, who'd been one of only three transplant nephrologists in Rhode Island," she said in a statement. "The administration's actions against her reflect its broader goal of trying to eliminate the diversity that defines American society."
Sorokin pointed to Congress and a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 2020 that upheld a fast-track deportation process and significantly limited federal district court judges from intervening.
"The five-year bar on her return is not a consequence of the detention she originally challenged as unlawful. It is a feature of the expedited removal order issued during that detention — an order which, ultimately, led to her release from detention into the cabin of a plane leaving the United States," the judge wrote.
South Carolina
Former House member indicted on federal charges of defrauding legal clients
A former South Carolina state lawmaker has been indicted on federal allegations that he schemed to defraud his legal clients.
According to court papers, a federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted former Rep. Marvin Pendarvis, a Democrat and attorney, on 10 charges including wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.
Federal prosecutors said that Pendarvis, between 2022 and 2024, negotiated financial settlements on behalf of his clients, but didn't tell them that he had received the funds. Instead, according to the government, Pendarvis — who was at the time serving as a lawmaker representing the Charleston area — allegedly pocketed the money himself, either not telling his clients the money had been obtained, or ultimately giving them lesser sums than what he had negotiated.
In all, according to prosecutors, Pendarvis deposited more half a million dollars into his law firm's trust fund account, from which he paid nothing to clients.
A message left Wednesday with Pendarvis was not immediately returned.
Pendarvis' law license was suspended last year after a former client accused him of forging his signature to reach a settlement in a lawsuit without his permission. The order issued then by the state Supreme Court didn't detail why the suspension had been recommended, but the former client — whose initials matched one of the alleged victims detailed in Wednesday's indictment — accused Pendarvis of sending him text messages asking him not to sue over the alleged forgery.
"Let's handle this (expletive). No need to try and hurt me man. I can help you," Pendarvis wrote Lewis in text messages filed with the state lawsuit, which is still pending.
First elected in a special election in 2017, he won three full terms before resigning from office about four months after the suspension of his law license.
According to court records, Pendarvis is slated to appear in federal court on Nov. 18.
New York
Key executive convicted of defrauding JPMorgan Chase is sentenced to over 5 years in prison
NEW YORK (AP) — A top executive at a startup company that eased the process for college students applying for financial aid was sentenced Wednesday to over five years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase in a $175 million acquisition of the company four years ago.
The Manhattan federal court sentencing of Olivier Amar came a month after Charlie Javice, the founder of the startup known as Frank, was sentenced to seven years in prison.
In sentencing Amar to five years and eight months in prison, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said Amar was "intimately involved in the fraud," including the creation of documents that falsely claimed the company had over 4 million young customers when it actually had fewer than 400,000.
"Although you were not the instigator of the fraud or the person who made the most misrepresentations, you were a key part of it," he said.
The pair was convicted by a jury in March of presenting fake records to the bank to convince it that Frank had millions of customers when the deal was being negotiated in the summer of 2021. At the trial, witnesses including bank employees testified that the number of customers was important because JPMorgan Chase hoped they would begin using the bank's financial services.
Before the sentence was announced, Amar got choked up as he spoke about the harm the scandal had caused his family, saying it was pain "that will haunt me forever."
He said he was "deeply saddened" that the company created to make it easier for students to apply for and obtain financial aid was no longer operating, especially since it helped students get to college and stay there.
"I'm heartbroken by the suffering caused in the aftermath of Frank's downfall," Amar said.
Besides the prison sentence, the judge also ordered Amar to pay $223 million in restitution. That number includes $54 million in legal fees that prosecutors said the bank was contractually required to pay on Amar's behalf because he and Javice worked for the company after the acquisition occurred.
Texas
Criminal case against Boeing over deadly 737 Max plane crashes is dismissed by a US judge
A federal judge in Texas has agreed to dismiss a criminal conspiracy charge against Boeing in connection with two 737 Max jetliner crashes that killed 346 people.
In a written decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor approved the federal government's request to dismiss its case against Boeing as part of a deal that requires the aircraft maker to pay or invest an additional $1.1 billion in fines, compensation for the crash victims' families, and internal safety and quality measures.
The ruling came after an emotional hearing in early September when relatives of some of the victims urged O'Connor to reject the deal and instead appoint a special prosecutor to take over the case.
All passengers and crew members died when the planes went down off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia less than five months apart in 2018 and 2019. Prosecutors had alleged that Boeing deceived government regulators about a flight-control system that was later implicated in the fatal flights.
The long-running case has taken many twists and turns since the Justice Department first charged the American aerospace company in January 2021 with defrauding the U.S. government, including a failed deal that would have required Boeing to plead guilty. That plea agreement fell through after O'Connor did not approve it.
Airlines began flying the Max in 2017. After the Ethiopia crash, the planes were grounded worldwide for 20 months while the company redesigned the flight-control software.
The Justice Department had said it believed the latest agreement served the public interest more effectively than taking the case to trial and risking a jury verdict that might spare the company further punishment. It also said the families of 110 crash victims either support resolving the case before it reaches trial or did not oppose the deal.
Meanwhile, more than a dozen relatives spoke at the Sept. 3 hearing, some of whom traveled to Texas from as far as Europe and Africa. They are among nearly 100 families who opposed the agreement.
Catherine Berthet, who traveled from France, had asked the judge to send the case to trial.
"Do not allow Boeing to buy its freedom," she said. Her daughter, Camille Geoffroy, died when a 737 Max crashed shortly after takeoff from Ethiopia's Addis Ababa Bole International Airport.
The yearslong case centers around a software system that Boeing developed for the 737 Max, which began flying in 2017.
In both of the deadly crashes, that software pitched the nose of the plane down repeatedly based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots flying for Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines were unable to regain control. After the Ethiopia crash, the planes were grounded worldwide for 20 months.
Investigators found that Boeing did not inform key Federal Aviation Administration personnel about changes it had made to the software before regulators set pilot training requirements for the Max and certified the airliner for flight.
South Carolina
Lawyers for Stephen Bryant make final appeal over brain damage to stop execution
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Lawyers for a man on South Carolina's death row are trying to stop his execution later this month by arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother's alcohol and drug use while pregnant.
Stephen Bryant, 44, is being put to death for killing Willard "TJ" Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen's eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted "catch me if u can" and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim's blood. Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to over five days that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.
Attorneys for the state argue that the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural county east of Columbia weren't impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.
But Bryant's lawyers are arguing in a final appeal to the state Supreme Court that while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn't stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn't detail how Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder had affected his ability to conform to the law.
Bryant's lawyers said he didn't get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.
They also submitted a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist wherein Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher's wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.
Prosecutors have pushed back, saying Bryant's attorneys shouldn't be allowed to make a different case to keep him from being put to death after the first one failed.
They argue that the number of crimes, their planning and Bryant's lingering Tietjen's home to desecrate his body, as well as taunting Tietjen's wife and daughter over the phone, were deliberate acts of evil — not impulses from a broken brain.
"Bryant was methodical, cunning, and took pleasure in deadly rampage including the gratuitous infliction of horror on Mr. Tietjen's family," they wrote in court papers.
They said the only way the legal system could fail is to delay his Nov. 14 execution by firing squad.
Beyond the appeal, Bryant can also ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won't be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.
Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.
Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that's often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America's Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.
Bryant's execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.
Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.
