Minnesota
Prosecutors drop appeals against 2 ex-cops in Floyd case
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A federal appeals court on Wednesday accepted the government’s request to drop its appeals of the sentences of two former Minneapolis police officers who were convicted of civil rights violations in the murder of George Floyd.
The one-page filings in the cases of ex-officers J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao gave few details. In July, Federal Judge Paul Magnuson sentenced Kueng to three years in prison and Thao to 3 1/2 years. Those sentences were lower than what federal prosecutors had sought. The court docket indicated there had been little activity in the case since prosecutors filed their notices of appeal in September.
Floyd, who was Black, died on May 25, 2020, when former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for 9 1/2 minutes. Kueng helped to restrain Floyd by leaning on his back, while Thao held back bystanders from intervening. A fourth officer, Thomas Lane, was convicted of federal charges in February and pleaded guilty to state charges in May.
The killing sparking worldwide protests, many of which were affiliated with Black Lives Matter, as part of a broader reckoning over racial injustice.
The federal civil rights cases were separate from the state charges that Thao and Kueng faced. Kueng pleaded guilty in October to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter, while Thao agreed only to what’s called a stipulated evidence trial on the aiding and abetting count in a deal that avoided a full-fledged trial. Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill is expected to rule on Thao’s guilt or innocence in the next few weeks, based on prosecution and defense filings.
Next Wednesday, The Minnesota Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Chauvin’s appeal of his conviction on a state charge of second-degree murder, which resulted in a 22 1/2-year sentence. Chauvin later pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and was sentenced to 21 years. He’s serving his federal sentence concurrently with his state sentence.
California
Investors mock Elon Musk’s bid to move Tesla buyout trial
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Lawyers for Tesla shareholders suing the electric vehicle maker’s CEO Elon Musk over a misleading tweet are urging a federal judge to reject the billionaire’s request to move an upcoming trial to Texas from California.
Musk contends he will be treated unfairly by potential jurors in the San Francisco federal court where the 4-year-old case was filed.
But in a Wednesday filing, the Tesla shareholders’ attorneys asserted there aren’t any legal grounds to move the upcoming trial that revolves around an Aug. 7, 2018 tweet in which Musk indicated he had lined up financing for a Tesla buyout — a deal that never materialized and resulted in a $40 million settlement with U.S. securities regulators.
The lawyers also argued Musk only has himself to blame for any negative perceptions, largely because of his frequent activity on Twitter, the social media platform that he now owns and runs.
“For better or worse, Musk is a celebrity who garners attention from the media around the globe,” the shareholders’ attorneys wrote in their 19-page opposition to the transfer request. “His footprint on Twitter alone is partially to blame for that. If ‘negative’ attention was all that was required to disqualify a jury pool, Musk would effectively be untriable before a jury given his knack for attracting ‘negative” coverage.”
The filing comes less than a week after Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, asked U.S. District Judge Edward Chen to transfer the case to Texas, the state where Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters in 2021 after spending nearly 20 years in its original Silicon Valley home. If the trial isn’t transferred, Spiro is pushing for a delay of the start of jury selection, currently scheduled for Tuesday.
The shareholders’ attorneys noted that their lawsuit, filed in 2018, would have never been allowed in a Texas federal court at that time because Musk’s buyout tweet occurred while Tesla was based in Palo Alto, California. What’s more, a list of witnesses includes several former Tesla executives living in California who would be improperly inconvenienced if the trial were moved to Texas.
Chen has scheduled a hearing for Friday to hear further arguments about Musk’s effort to move or delay the trial. The judge already has determined that Musk’s buyout tweet was false, leaving it to a jury to decide whether he acted recklessly by posting it and whether it caused financial harm to Tesla shareholders. After adjusting for two stock splits made since 2018, Tesla’s shares are now worth nearly six times more than at the time of Musk’s tweets about the bogus buyout.
Although Musk for years has been hailed in the San Francisco Bay Area as a technology visionary, Spiro believes his reputation has been badly tarnished throughout the region by negative media coverage since he completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October. Since then, Musk has laid off or pushed away more than half of Twitter’s workforce, while alienating the service’s users with policies that critics contend have dismantled the service’s guardrails against misinformation and hateful content.
The backlash to those actions, which Musk has defended as moves to pare Twitter’s losses and protect free-speech rights, increased the chances potential jurors will be biases against him, according to Spiro. Among other factors, Spiro cited the possibility that potential jurors drawn from the San Francisco Bay Area may have been recently laid off at Twitter or may know someone who lost their job after Musk’s takeover.
The shareholders’ attorneys cited the roughly 200 jury questionnaires that have been turned into Chen to rebut that argument. Only two or three of the potential jurors acknowledged knowing someone who works at Twitter, according to the attorneys.
New York
Election official pleads guilty to ballot fraud in 2021
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A former Republican county elections commissioner in upstate New York pleaded guilty Wednesday to applying for absentee ballots in the names of other registered voters.
Jason Schofield, who is from Troy, resigned last month from the Rensselaer County Board of Elections. He admitted that in 2021 he unlawfully used the names and birthdates of voters in connection with 12 absentee ballot applications he submitted electronically to the New York State Voter Absentee Ballot Application Request Portal, according to federal prosecutors.
Schofield, 43, admitted he falsely certified that he was the voter requesting each of the absentee ballots.
When Schofield was originally arraigned in September, his attorney said Schofield maintained he was innocent of the charges in the 12-count indictment.
Schofield is scheduled to be sentenced on May 12. He faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000 and supervised released of up to three years for each count.
