National Roundup

Colorado
Planned Parenthood shooting suspect faces federal charges
DENVER (AP) — A man who has been ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial in state court in the killing of three people at a Colorado Planned Parenthood Clinic in 2015 is now facing federal charges.

U.S. Attorney Jason Dunn in Denver announced the federal grand jury indictment Monday against Robert Dear in the shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic.

Three people died, including a police officer, and eight others were injured in the Nov. 27, 2015, attack. Dear has publicly acknowledged killing the people, but a judge ruled him to be incompetent to stand trial in state court. His mental health status is reviewed every 90 days.

The new federal charges include 68 counts, including use of a firearm during a crime resulting in death and violating a law ensuring access to clinic entrances. Dunn said in a statement that, if convicted of the counts announced Monday, Dear could face up to the death penalty.

Dear, 61, told a Denver federal magistrate judge on Monday that he understood his rights. The judge postponed the remainder of the advisement hearing until Friday after Dear insisted he be allowed to represent himself.

Dear declared, “I’m not crazy. I’m just a religious zealot,” KMGH-TV reported.

Dear was in federal custody after being taken from a state mental hospital in Pueblo, where he has been held since the shooting.

Dear is charged with 179 state counts, including murder and attempted murder.

He was first found legally incompetent in May 2016.

Dunn cited that delay as a factor in pursuing the federal case against Dear. He said there is a five-year statute of limitations involving violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
The 1994 act makes it a crime to injure or intimidate clinic patients or employees.

Dunn said he consulted with local prosecutors.

“The dozens of victims of this heinous act, as well as the Colorado Springs community itself, deserve justice,” Dunn said in his statement.

Dan May, the district attorney handling the state case from Colorado Springs, said he supported the federal case even as the state case remains open. Dear’s next appearance in state court is set for Jan. 9.

Dear could face a minimum of 10 years in prison if convicted of the federal charges, Dunn said . No decision has been made on whether to seek the death penalty.

Dear was accused of fatally shooting a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs police officer who tried to stop the attack, an Iraq war veteran and a mother of two inside the clinic.

Maryland
Lawsuit: State prisons ignore Americans with Disabilities Act 
Six former inmates claim in a federal lawsuit that Maryland’s prison system fails to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Baltimore Sun cited allegations in the lawsuit on Tuesday that included prison guards making a one-legged man walk into the showers with no support.

The case was filed in October in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The inmates allege a culture of noncompliance with the ADA and indifference by prison guards. The inmates are suing the Maryland Depart­ment of Public Safety and Correctional Services and a number of prison officials.

The Attorney General’s Office is defending the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services along with its employees. A spokeswoman declined to comment to The Sun, citing the ongoing nature of the case.

The suit was filed before more than two dozen corrections officers were charged last week with running a “criminal enterprise” inside the state’s prisons. Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office alleged that guards assaulted inmates and retaliated against those who spoke out.

Allen Honick, an attorney who is representing the plaintiffs, said the civil suit and criminal charges involving Maryland’s prisons illustrate a deeper problem with state’s corrections system.

Mississippi
New site for bail hearing of man tried 6 times
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A judge has set a new site for next week’s bail hearing for a Mississippi man who has been tried six times for murder in the 1996 shooting deaths of four people in a furniture store.

The Administrative Office of Courts said Monday that Curtis Flowers’ hearing will take place Dec. 16 at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Winona.

Last seek, Circuit Judge Joseph Loper said the hearing would be held on that date at the Webster County Courthouse in Walthall. Court officials said Loper was set to take care of other business in Webster County that day, but his schedule has changed and he moved Flowers’ hearing to the county where Flowers is charged.

Prosecutors accuse Flowers, now 49, of killing four people on July 16, 1996, in the north Mississippi town of Winona. Those slain in the Tardy Furniture business were 59-year-old store owner Bertha Tardy and three employees — 45-year-old Carmen Rigby, 42-year-old Robert Golden and 16-year-old Derrick “Bobo” Stewart.

Four convictions for Flowers in the case have been overturned, and two ended in mistrials.

During the sixth trial in 2010, Flowers was sentenced to death. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that conviction in June, finding that prosecutors had shown a pattern of improperly excluding African American jurors in the trials of Flowers, who is black.

Lawyer Rob McDuff is asking Loper to free Flowers on bail. McDuff cites prosecutorial misconduct as he seeks to have the murder charges dismissed. Evans has not said whether he intends to try Flowers a seventh time.

McDuff argues that Mississippi law requires bail after two capital murder mistrials. Flowers’ fourth and fifth trials ended in mistrials.

Flowers is  jailed in the central Mississippi town of Louis­ville.

In mid-November, four black voters and a branch of the NAACP filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to permanently order Evans and his assistants to stop using peremptory challenges to remove African American residents as potential jurors because of their race.

The lawsuit cites an analysis of jury strikes by Evans from 1992 to 2017 by American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast. It found Evans office used peremptory strikes, which lawyers typically don’t have to explain, to remove 50% of eligible black jurors, but only 11% of eligible white jurors. The analysis was performed as part of a series of episodes questioning Flowers’ conviction in his sixth trial.