Court Digest

Arizona
New education tax again survives, appeal pending
PHOENIX (AP) — A trial court judge on Tuesday threw out several legal challenges to a new voter approved tax on high-earning Arizonans, leaving just one additional issue raised by challengers to Proposition 208 in play while the state Supreme Court is considering whether the measure is constitutional.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah Jr.’s ruling dismissed three of four remaining legal challenges raised by business interests as well as Republicans, who control the Legislature. He said all three failed as a matter of law.

Hannah rejected a challenge to voters’ ability to raise taxes at the ballot box. Opponents claimed that only the Legislature can vote to raise taxes, that if voters did have that right the measure must get a 2/3 vote as is required of the Legislature and that a provision preventing the legislature from undoing the tax was illegal. Hannah said that argument was utterly without merit.

He then dismissed a challenge that argued that Proposition 208 should be blocked because it did not contain its own funding source. Hannah had ruled earlier that was clearly not the case and made that official on Tuesday.

Hannah also rejected the claim that the initiative usurped the Legislature’s authority to tax and spend money.

“The claim rests on the premise that the Arizona Constitution somehow places the Legislature on a higher or more powerful plane than the people acting by initiative,” Hannah wrote. “It doesn’t.”

The one issue in the case that still must be resolved in whether the new revenue will put the state’s K-12 schools above a constitutional spending limit. That will require more court proceedings.

Hannah had previously refused to issue preliminary injunctions blocking the new tax, and the Supreme Court held arguments in April that focused in large part on the school spending limit. It has yet to rule on the case and has no timeline for releasing its decision.

Proposition 208, which voters passed in November, imposes a 3.5% tax surcharge on income above $250,000 for individuals or above $500,000 for couples. Supporters say it could raise about $940 million a year for schools, although the Legislature’s budget analysts estimate it will bring in $827 million a year.

The measure was an outgrowth of a 2018 teacher strike that resulted in educators getting a 20% pay raise over three years — but did not meet their other demands.

Republican Gov. Doug Ducey opposed the measure and told a business group in March that he’s hoping that either the Supreme Court blocks it or the Legislature comes up with a way to sidestep the new tax.

The current budget proposal would largely shield the wealthy from having to pay the new tax by enacting a new 2.5% flat tax on all income and capping the top payment at 4.5% for those subject to the surcharge.
That is the current top rate in the state’s existing graduated income tax schedule.

The Legislature, however, has been deadlocked on the plan for weeks.

Georgia
Lawsuit: Health center cast patient out, endangering him
JONESBORO, Ga. (AP) — The family of a mentally disabled man is suing a Georgia behavioral health system, saying its employees forced him onto a bus to Atlanta where he wandered the streets and suffered from hypothermia.

The lawsuit was filed this week against Riverwoods Behavioral Health in Clayton County and the company that operates it.

Mario Scott went to a hospital in Jackson, Georgia, in January to have his medication refilled, and a doctor filled out paperwork that had him sent to Riverwoods, according to the lawsuit.

Staff members asked sheriff’s deputies to try and locate Scott’s mother, who cared for him, but she wasn’t home because she was hospitalized for COVID-19 at the time, the lawsuit states.

Workers at the center then forced him onto a bus bound for Atlanta, which dropped him off at a homeless shelter in the city. But Scott never checked into the shelter, and was instead “wandering the streets and was suffering from hypothermia,” the family’s lawyers, Stewart Miller Simmons Trial Attorneys, said in a statement.

“We were heartbroken because we couldn’t find him for days,” Scott’s sister-in-law, Tawanda Scott, told WXIA-TV.

A missing person report was filed, and Scott was eventually reunited with his mother after someone recognized him from news reports that he was missing.

Riverwoods did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on Wednesday.

New Jersey
High court orders new trial in slaying of cafe owner
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — The New Jersey Supreme Court has ordered a new trial for a man serving a 30-year term in the 2013 slaying of a Newark cafe owner, saying police should have read the then-teenage suspect his rights before taking his statement.

The state’s highest court on Tuesday reversed the conviction of 24-year-old Zakariyya Ahmad in the slaying of Joseph Flagg in October 2013, NJ.com reported. Authorities said Flagg was a father to four young children who worked as a contractor but ran the Chancellor Avenue breakfast joint on the side and often hired ex-convicts to help.

Authorities said Ahmad, who was 17, was one of three teens who tried to rob the cafe in October 2013. One of the other teens shot Flagg and inadvertently wounded Ahmad, authorities said. The case before the high court centered on Ahmad’s interactions with police after they found him at a hospital with gunshot wounds.

The state public defender’s office argued that Ahmad was in police custody when investigators prevented him from leaving the hospital with his family. They said he was put in the back of a marked police car and his mother was prevented from driving him home or to the police station herself.

Prosecutors argued that they had other evidence against Ahmad, and at the time of his statement he was viewed as a victim and possibly a witness. But the high court said Ahmad was in custody the moment he left the hospital and should have been read his Miranda rights.

“At that moment, looking objectively at the totality of the circumstances, it is difficult to conceive that any reasonable 17-year-old in defendant’s position would have felt free to leave; nor did any subsequent events do anything to lessen that impression,” the court said.

Ahmad was sentenced in 2017 to 30 years in state prison on convictions of felony murder and manslaughter as well as robbery and weapons offenses. He is currently incarcerated at Northern State Prison with a parole date in 2043.

New York
Ex-CIA worker seeks to represent himself at espionage trial
NEW YORK (AP) — A former CIA software engineer accused of leaking secrets to WikiLeaks notified a judge Tuesday that he wants to represent himself at an October retrial on espionage charges.

Joshua Schulte, 32, plans to proceed on his own behalf, defense attorney Sabrina Shroff told U.S. District Judge Paul A. Crotty during a court hearing.

The judge then directed prosecutors to submit legal papers on issues surrounding a hearing that would be conducted to ensure Schulte’s right to a fair trial is protected.

Shroff said the judge may have to decide if Schulte is fit to represent himself and then could assign his lawyers to assist him as what is known as “standby counsel.”

Schulte has pleaded not guilty in the 2017 release of secrets by WikiLeaks that resulted from what prosecutors have labeled the largest leak of classified information in CIA history.

The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

After a year-long investigation, authorities arrested Schulte, who had already left the CIA after falling out with colleagues and supervisors and moved to New York City to work at a news agency.

His lawyers argued at his first trial last year that the leak could have been made by many others. A jury then deadlocked on the espionage charges while convicting him of less serious charges of contempt of court and making false statements.

Prior to his arrest, Schulte worked as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where some of the CIA’s digital sleuths design computer code to spy on foreign adversaries.

In January, Schulte represented himself in a court filing in which he complained that he was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by being forced to await trial in solitary confinement in a vermin-infested cell of a jail unit where inmates are treated like “caged animals.”

After the October trial, Schulte will face child pornography charges in a separate trial.

New Hampshire
Judge rules in favor of hotel group in insurance dispute
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A judge has ruled in favor of a group of hotels whose owners sued their insurance carriers over lost business during the coronavirus pandemic.

Businessman Mark Stebbins of Schleicher & Stebbins Hotels, LLC, one of the plaintiffs, said the pandemic caused tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue for about two dozen hotels in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

The group had paid for $600 million in insurance. In April 2020, it filed an insurance claim to cover COVID-19-related losses. The insurance companies questioned “direct physical loss of or damage” to property and said the hotels didn’t provide enough details. The hotel owners said they hosted infected guests and staff. They sued the insurance companies; both sides asked for a court ruling.

“The court is satisfied that any requirement under the policies of ‘loss or damage’ or ‘direct physical loss of or damage to property’ is met where property is contaminated” by the COVID-19 virus, Merrimack County Superior Court Judge John Kissinger ruled on Tuesday.

Florida
Courtroom emotion as trial begins in double slaying
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — A death penalty trial in Florida began with the defendant, acting as his own lawyer, shouting at jurors that he did not attack his girlfriend and disabled daughter more than three years ago.

Ronnie Oneal III claimed in a dramatic opening statement that the evidence would reveal “some of the most vicious, lying, fabricating, fictitious government you ever seen.”

Gesturing and pacing, Oneal shouted at one point during Monday’s opening: “I look alone. But I am backed by a mighty God.”

He claimed the girlfriend, Kenyatta Barron, attacked their two children and that he killed her in self-defense. The killings happened March 18, 2018, in their home in Tampa’s Riverview area.

Assistant State Attorney Scott Harmon countered that prosecutors would prove Oneal wounded Barron with a shotgun, then beat her to death. Harmon also said Oneal used a hatchet to kill his 9-year-old daughter — who had cerebral palsy and could not speak — and wounded his son, then 8, with a knife.

Investigators say Oneal also set the house on fire after the attacks. The son, now 11, survived and is scheduled to testify by remote video against his own father, who could cross-examine the boy.

Investigators say the wounded boy came out of the burning house and described what had happened.

“The first words that came out of this brave boy’s mouth: ‘My daddy killed my mommy,’” Harmon told jurors.

Jurors also heard a 911 call from Barron in which she desperately sought help as Oneal yelled in the background.

“OK, Ronnie, I’m sorry,” she says on the recording. “I’m so sorry. Help me. I can’t move my arm. My arm is shot up, Ronnie. Please.”

Oneal contended that investigators fabricated evidence to implicate him and that his son was coached on what to say.

“The evidence is going to show that I love my children,” Oneal told jurors. “The evidence will not show you that my son witnessed me beat his mom to death, nor did he witness me shoot his mom. In fact, he didn’t witness much at all.”

The trial is expected to last through the end of next week. Oneal could get the death penalty if convicted.