Court Digest

Georgia
Federal charges added for jail escapee and woman accused of helping him
MACON, Ga. (AP) — Federal prosecutors have filed new charges against one of four men who escaped from a central Georgia jail last month and a woman accused of helping him.

Johnifer Dernard Barnwell was arrested Sunday after authorities said they found him in a home where police also found large quantities of drugs. Bibb County Sheriff David Davis said last month that Joey Fournier, Marc Kerry Anderson, Johnifer Dernard Barnwell and Chavis Demaryo Stokes escaped through a damaged window and a cut fence at the county jail on Oct. 16.

Bibb County authorities on Tuesday arrested Janecia Green, 30, and another woman and charged them with aiding Barnwell’s escape. In addition to those state charges, a federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted Green on a federal charge of assisting escape of a person committed to custody.

Authorities have not said what the women are accused of doing to help Barnwell.

Barnwell was being held in the Bibb County jail on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service after he was convicted by a federal jury on Oct. 2 on drug charges that carry a possible life sentence and was awaiting sentencing. A federal grand jury on Tuesday added a charge of escape from custody for him.

Barnwell was in custody after his Sunday arrest. An attorney who represented him on his original federal charges did not immediately respond to an email Thursday seeking comment on the new charge.

Green was being held without bond pending a Nov. 21 detention hearing. A lawyer listed for her in online court records did not immediately respond to an email Thursday seeking comment on the federal charge.

Chavis Demaryo Stokes was caught on Oct. 26 and Marc Kerry Anderson was captured Nov. 3. Authorities continue to search for Fournier.

Washington
Judge hands down sentence in attack on congresswoman
WASHINGTON (AP) — A man who pleaded guilty to assaulting Democratic Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota in the elevator of her Washington apartment was sentenced to more than two years behind bars Thursday.

Kendrid Khalil Hamlin, 27, apologized to Craig and said he wants to get mental health and substance abuse treatment. He was sentenced to 27 months for the February assault.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg acknowledged Hamlin’s difficult upbringing and “frequently unaddressed” mental illness was behind much of his behavior. Still, “some of this conduct has been extremely problematic,” he said.

Craig said Hamlin trapped her in the elevator, then grabbed her neck, slammed her against a steel wall and punched her before she fought him off by throwing her coffee at him.
Afterward, she was targeted with death threats and forced to move amid public commentary about her assault, she said in court papers.

“While my physical recovery was days, my mental and emotional recovery has taken much longer and is ongoing,” she wrote.

Hamlin, for his part, decided to plead guilty quickly and wants to get treatment for his schizophrenia and substance abuse, his attorney Kathryn D’Adamo Guevara said.

“I really do apologize to Angie Craig for putting my hands on her, and also the officers,” he said. His mother and father also spoke tearfully to the judge, calling the attack “horrifying” and detailing their decades-long, unsuccessful efforts to get him effective treatment, including searching the streets for him while he was homeless.

Defense attorneys had asked for a sentence of a year and a day with inpatient treatment, while prosecutors had pushed for 39 months. Boasberg said he would recommend the sentence be served in a Bureau of Prisons medical facility.

Craig was getting coffee in the lobby of her building in February when she noticed Hamlin pacing, police wrote in court papers. He came into the elevator with her and said he needed to go to the bathroom and was coming into her apartment, the agent wrote.

After she said he couldn’t, he punched her in the side of her face and grabbed her neck before she escaped by throwing her cup of hot coffee over her shoulder at him, according to court papers.

Hamlin had numerous previous convictions, including for assaulting a police officer, prosecutors said in court papers. There was no evidence the attack was politically motivated, Craig’s chief of staff has said.

Craig represents the suburban-to-rural 2nd District south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. She won a third term last year for a hotly contested seat the GOP had hoped to flip in what was one of the most expensive House races in the country.

New York
Raids net knockoff bags, apparel
NEW YORK (AP) — Raids on storage facilities in New York City turned up a huge haul of counterfeit handbags, shoes and other luxury merchandise that could have been worth more than $1 billion if the knockoffs had been real, federal authorities announced.

Roughly 219,000 items were seized from Manhattan storage facilities in recent enforcement actions by U.S. Homeland Security investigators and city police, authorities said Wednesday.
Two people were charged with trafficking counterfeit goods.

Photographs released by prosecutors showed shelves stacked with wallets and bags in one location and handbags hanging from hooks from floor to ceiling in another.

U.S. Attorney Damian Wil­liams called the raids, “the largest-ever seizure of counterfeit goods in U.S. history.”

The two men charged could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted. Indictments accuse them of distributing counterfeit goods since at least January.

Counterfeit luxury goods have been a staple of the underground New York City shopping experience for generations, with some savvy shoppers actually seeking out inexpensive knockoffs that look identical to designer goods but can be bought for hundreds or even thousands of dollars less.

Law enforcement officials, often working in conjunction with investigators from luxury brands, have taken a more aggressive approach to cracking down on counterfeiting in recent decades, targeting both the retailers who sell them and the importers and distribution centers.

The actual street value of the items seized in the raids is likely well under $1 billion, federal authorities said. That price was based on the manufacturer’s suggested retail price for the real versions of the seized fakes.

Massachusetts
Boston pays $2.6M to Black police officers who alleged racial bias in hair tests for drug use
BOSTON (AP) — The city of Boston has paid $2.6 million to several Black police officers to settle a longstanding federal discrimination lawsuit over a hair test used to identify drug use, lawyers for the officers said Thursday.

The city eliminated the test in 2021 and has now paid damages to three Black officers and a cadet who lost their jobs or were disciplined as a result of the test, their attorneys said in a news release.

The case file noted that a settlement had been reached, but the details had not been filed yet. Messages seeking comment were left with the Boston Police Depart­ment and the lead attorney representing them.

The officers sued the city in 2005, claiming its hair test is discriminatory because black people’s hair is more susceptible to false positives. The city and the company that performed testing for Boston police rejected any suggestion that the tests are racially biased.

The case was twice considered by the First Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2014, the court agreed that the hair test fell disproportionately on Black officers. Two years later, the court found evidence sufficient to show that the city had continued to use the hair test even after having been informed of a less discriminatory alternative.

The case went to trial in 2018, and the parties subsequently entered into mediation, resulting in the settlement.

The Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers also was a plaintiff.

“The city is still trying to make up for the loss of diversity on the police force that resulted from use of the hair test,” Jeffrey Lopes, association president, said in a statement.

Missouri
Hearing will take place in religious leaders’ lawsuit challenging state abortion ban
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A St. Louis judge on Thursday will hear arguments in a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s abortion ban on the grounds that lawmakers who passed the measure imposed their own religious beliefs on others who don’t share them.

The lawsuit was filed in January on behalf of 13 Christian, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist leaders who support abortion rights. It seeks a permanent injunction barring the state from enforcing its abortion law, and a declaration that provisions of the law violate the Missouri Constitution.

It is among 38 lawsuits filed in 23 states challenging restrictive abortion laws enacted by conservative states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The landmark ruling left abortion rights up to each state to decide.

The lawsuit states the Missouri Constitution “does not tolerate this establishment into law of one particular religious view at the expense of others’ religious freedom and of the health and lives of millions of Missourians.”

Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, a Republican, has called the lawsuit “foolish” and said lawmakers “were acting on the belief that life is precious and should be treated as such,” not a religious belief.

Within minutes of last year’s Supreme Court decision, then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Gov. Mike Parson, both Republicans, filed paperwork to immediately enact a 2019 law prohibiting abortions “except in cases of medical emergency.” That law contained a provision making it effective only if Roe v. Wade was overturned.

The law makes it a felony punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison to perform or induce an abortion. Medical professionals who do so also could lose their licenses. The law says that women who undergo abortions cannot be prosecuted.

Missouri already had some of the nation’s more restrictive abortion laws and had seen a significant decline in the number of abortions performed, with residents instead traveling to clinics just across the state line in Illinois and Kansas.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the faith leaders by Americans United for Separation of Church & State and the National Women’s Law Center, said sponsors and supporters of the Missouri measure “repeatedly emphasized their religious intent in enacting the legislation.”

It quotes the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Nick Schroer, as saying that “as a Catholic I do believe life begins at conception and that is built into our legislative findings.” A co-sponsor, Republican state Rep. Barry Hovis, said he was motivated “from the Biblical side of it,” according to the lawsuit.

Lawsuits in other states take similar approaches.

In Indiana, lawyers for five anonymous women — who are Jewish, Muslim and spiritual — and advocacy group Hoosier Jews for Choice argued that state’s ban infringes on their beliefs.
Their lawsuit specifically highlights the Jewish teaching that a fetus becomes a living person at birth and that Jewish law prioritizes the mother’s life and health. A state appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments Dec. 6.

In Kentucky, three Jewish women sued, claiming the state’s ban violates their religious rights under the state’s constitution and religious freedom law. They allege that Kentucky’s Republican-dominated legislature “imposed sectarian theology” by prohibiting nearly all abortions.