Kansas
Inmate sues private prison operators over his 2021 stabbing
LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — An inmate is suing one of the nation’s largest private prison operators over his 2021 stabbing inside a now-defunct maximum security federal facility in Kansas.
Joshua Braddy, who is now incarcerated in Illinois, amended his suit Monday to add CoreCivic, alleging the company was negligent in how it ran the Leavenworth Detention Center, prioritizing “profit over safety.” Also added were prison staff and the prison’s health care contractor.
The suit initially named as defendants three former Leavenworth detainees accused of stabbing Braddy.
Just a few weeks after the attack on Braddy, civil rights advocates and federal public defenders urged the White House in a letter to shutter the facility. The letter cited a host of other problems, including suicides and an attack on a correctional officer.
CoreCivic responded at the time that the claims were “false and defamatory.” But with President Joe Biden already calling on the U.S Marshal’s Office to end its reliance on private prisons, the contract for the facility was ended in December 2021.
The private prison was separate from Leavenworth’s better-know federal penitentiary, where infamous mobsters and, more recently, former football star Michael Vick, were held.
Florida
Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against CNN dismissed
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against CNN in which the former U.S. president claimed that references in news articles or by the network’s hosts to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election as “the Big Lie” were tantamount to comparing him to Adolf Hitler.
Trump had been seeking punitive damages of $475 million in the federal lawsuit filed last October in South Florida, claiming the references hurt his reputation and political career. Trump is a candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in what is his third run for the presidency as a major-party candidate.
U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal, who was appointed by Trump, said Friday in his ruling that the former president’s defamation claims failed because the references were opinions and not factual statements. Moreover, it was a stretch to believe that, in viewers’ minds, that phrase would connect Trump’s efforts challenging the 2020 election results to Nazi propaganda or Hitler’s genocidal and authoritarian regime, the judge said.
“CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people,” the judge wrote in his decision.
Email messages seeking comment were sent to Trump’s attorneys in South Florida and Washington. CNN declined to comment on Sunday.
South Carolina
Marine found not guilty in 2021 death of recruit
A staff sergeant who oversaw Marine training at South Carolina’s Parris Island has been cleared of criminal responsibility in the death of a 19-year-old recruit in 2021.
A military jury on Friday found Staff Sgt. Steven Smiley not guilty of negligent homicide and four other counts in the death of Pfc. Dalton Beals, The Hilton Head Island Packet reported.
The defense argued with the help of medical experts that an existing heart condition contributed to Beals’ death. The prosecution had asserted Beals was suffering from heat stroke after Smiley pushed him too hard.
The jury did, however, find Smiley guilty of violating an order that forbids drill instructors from calling recruits names. Smiley called recruits “pig” and “war pigs” and “sweet bacon” during training. The jury was still deliberating on a sentence Friday night, the Island Packet reported.
Beals died on June 4, 2021, during a strenuous exercise known as “The Crucible” that caps a 13-week training course at Parris Island, one of two Marine training depots in the country.
Beals graduated in 2020 from Pennsville Memorial High School in Pennsville, New Jersey, the school noted in a Facebook post.
Several days before Beals began The Crucible, his mother posted on Facebook about the details of the grueling exercise, which she called “the final leg of my baby’s journey to becoming a Marine!” The 54-hour effort, during which recruits are allowed limited food and sleep, includes 48 miles (77 kilometers) of hiking, loaded with heavy gear.
As Smiley’s verdict was read Friday, his wife wept from her seat behind him in the front row of the courtroom, the Island Packet reported. The recruit’s mother, Stacie Beveridge Beals, told the newspaper she was not ready to comment.
Smiley became emotional as he read a statement to Beals’ family: “I’m sorry what happened to your son,” he said, adding that if something similar happened to his family, he “wouldn’t know what to do.”
Smiley, who joined the Marines in 2009 and has now completed his enlistment, said he plans to move to Wisconsin and be a firefighter and emergency first responder.
There have been a number of recruit deaths over the years at Parris Island, which has been training Marines since 1915 on the island off South Carolina’s coast. At least four Marine recruits have died in recent years with 10 total deaths since 2000, the Island Packet reported.
In 2018, a judge dismissed a lawsuit from the family of Raheel Siddiqui, a 20-year-old recruit from Michigan who killed himself in 2016 after a confrontation with a Parris Island drill instructor.
Siddiqui’s family disputed his suicide, saying he was targeted because of his Islamic faith. Several Marines were ultimately convicted for abuse, following evidence that drill instructors beat, choked and kicked recruits.
Ohio
Man convicted of abuse of corpse in case of missing teen a decade ago
BATAVIA, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio man has been convicted of abuse of a corpse and evidence tampering in the case of a Kentucky teenager whose body was found in Ohio a decade after she disappeared.
Jurors in Clermont County deliberated for more than nine hours over two days before convicting 35-year-old Jacob Bumpass last week of both charges he faced in the death of 17-year-old Paige Johnson of Florence, Kentucky. Defense attorneys immediately vowed to appeal the verdict and seek a new trial.
Johnson’s remains were found in 2020 by a hiker in East Fork State Park, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of Cincinnati, near the area investigators had searched after the teen disappeared in September 2010. A cause of death was never determined.
Authorities had questioned Bumpass, a friend, at the time and believed he was the last person to have seen her alive. Prosecutors cited DNA evidence and records indicating that the defendant’s phone was pinged by a cell tower just over a mile away from where the body was found and then by one near a bridge leading back to northern Kentucky.
Defense attorney Louis Sirkin posed the idea that Johnson’s body was planted in the East Fork Lake area sometime after her disappearance, saying that if her remains were there all along they would have been spotted by workers at a nearby farm and people who used the area for illegal dumping.
Paige Johnson’s mother, Donna Johnson, said after the verdict that it had been “a long wait and that part has been very hard,” since her daughter’s remains have been held in evidence pending the trial. Now, she said, “I get to bring my baby home and give her the dignity she has deserved this whole time and has had to wait for.”
“I will always want to know what happened. I don’t think he’s ever gonna tell us,” Johnson said. “This sadness will stay with me forever.”
Bumpass is scheduled for sentencing Sept. 7.
Arkansas
Judge blocks law allowing librarians to be criminally charged
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday.
U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.
A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.
The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case.
The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.
“The question we had to ask was — do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials? Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties,” Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU in Arkansas, said in a statement.
The lawsuit comes as lawmakers in an increasing number of conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books. The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.
Laws restricting access to certain materials or making it easier to challenge them have been enacted in several other states, including Iowa, Indiana and Texas.
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in an email Saturday that his office would be “reviewing the judge’s opinion and will continue to vigorously defend the law.”
The executive director of Central Arkansas Library System, Nate Coulter, said the judge’s 49-page decision recognized the law as censorship, a violation of the Constitution and wrongly maligning librarians.
“As folks in southwest Arkansas say, this order is stout as horseradish!” he said in an email.
“I’m relieved that for now the dark cloud that was hanging over CALS’ librarians has lifted,” he added.
Cheryl Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, said the organization is “thrilled” about the decision. She said enforcing this law “is likely to limit the free speech rights of older minors, who are capable of reading and processing more complex reading materials than young children can.”
The Arkansas lawsuit names the state’s 28 local prosecutors as defendants, along with Crawford County in west Arkansas. A separate lawsuit is challenging the Crawford County library’s decision to move children’s books that included LGBTQ+ themes to a separate portion of the library.
The plaintiffs challenging Arkansas’ restrictions also include the Fayetteville and Eureka Springs Carnegie public libraries, the American Booksellers Association and the Association of American Publishers.
