BY SAM TYSON AND STACY JACOBSON MONDAY, JULY 18TH 2016
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CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — In what one attorney called a victory for jurors during a trial that is expected to last months – through the holiday season – and possibly into next year, a U.S. District Court judge agreed with Dylann Roof’s defense team to pick a jury from the greater Charleston area.
That means some 1,500 people will be called on jury duty in Roof’s federal hate crimes trial in November, and they will all come from an area of the state south of Georgetown.
“It’s a win for the jurors,” said attorney Andy Savage, who is serving as a counselor to the survivors and victims’ families during Roof’s state and federal trials.
“Everybody is going to have heard about this case,” Savage said. “The issue is if… they can set that aside in this case and look at facts and circumstances presented in the courtroom.”
Tyrone Sanders, the father of one of the victims and husband of one of the survivors of the Emanuel AME attack, said he’s satisfied with the decision.
“Since it happened here, I think people here would feel more inclined to make sure this guy gets what he deserves,” Sanders said.
The defense also agreed not to file for a change of venue later this year.
Judge Richard Gergel also settled several ongoing issues in the case, including how much access the government can have to Roof’s mental health history and the details of his mental evaluation.
Roof’s chief counsel David Bruck, who defended Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston bomber trial, asked to have the case-specific jury questionnaire handled by attorneys, but Gergel said in the South Carolina federal district it’s court-directed. That means Gergel will put together a list of specific questions that attorneys will use to disqualify potential jurors in November before arguments begin.
Still hanging out there waiting for a decision is whether the defense will be allowed to have someone in the room during Roof’s mental evaluation conducted by the government’s expert.
The defense wants to be present, but the U.S. government is pushing for something less, like an audio or video recording of the interaction.
Gergel said he wanted to hear more from the attorneys on the matter and told them to file more specific arguments within the next five days.
Read Full Article – http://abcnews4.com/news/emanuel-ame-shooting/jury-will-come-from-charleston-area-in-dylann-roofs-federal-trial
U.S. Attorney David Hickton said his office is looking into whether a federal civil law on organized crime can be applied to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown in the wake of a state grand jury report that said it had a history of clergy sexual abuse and coverup.
The report found that much of the abuse by diocesan priests dated back several decades, and neither the abuse nor any alleged coverup could be prosecuted under the statute of limitations.
But federal laws allow U.S. prosecutors to bring a civil case against an organization and seek an injunction or a consent decree to shape its future behavior, and such cases do not have a statute of limitations, he said.
Mr. Hickton said his office is looking into the case because it prosecuted one Altoona-Johnstown priest, Joseph Maurizio, who last month was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for sexually abusing boys at a Honduras orphanage between 2004 and 2009.
U.S. Attorney David Hickton said his office is looking into whether a federal civil law on organized crime can be applied to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown in the wake of a state grand jury report that said it had a history of clergy sexual abuse and coverup.
The report found that much of the abuse by diocesan priests dated back several decades, and neither the abuse nor any alleged coverup could be prosecuted under the statute of limitations.
But federal laws allow U.S. prosecutors to bring a civil case against an organization and seek an injunction or a consent decree to shape its future behavior, and such cases do not have a statute of limitations, he said.
Mr. Hickton said his office is looking into the case because it prosecuted one Altoona-Johnstown priest, Joseph Maurizio, who last month was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for sexually abusing boys at a Honduras orphanage between 2004 and 2009.
Sourced From – http://www.post-gazette.com/news/state/2016/04/02/Federal-prosecutor-reviews-possible-use-of-RICO-law-for-Altoona-Johnstown/stories/201604020025
A Berea pharmacist conspired with others to distribute drugs “outside the scope of professional practice” and “not for legitimate medical purposes,” according to a federal indictment unsealed Friday.
Lonnie W. Hubbard, who operated Rx Discount of Berea, was named in the 38-count indictment returned on Dec. 3, according to court records.
The indictment says Hubbard, 40, was also “aided and abetted by others” in the distribution of pseudoephedrine, which may be used in the manufacture of methamphetamine.
Hubbard also distributed and dispensed, outside the scope of professional practice and not for a legitimate medical purpose, oxycodone and a quantity of pills containing suboxone, the indictment says.
The drug distribution began in 2010 and continued into this month, the indictment says. Rx Discount of Berea was organized in 2009, according to online records with the Kentucky Secretary of State’s office.
The indictment says Hubbard and Meggan Ashley Hubbard, 30, used money from drugs to buy a 1971 Corvette for $22,909, a boat for $31,800, a GMC Sierra Denali for $25,000, and a down payment on property in Pulaski County for $40,000. They also allegedly used money from drugs to write a cashier’s check for $315,000 to buy a five-bedroom, four-bath house overlooking Lake Cumberland.
Others named in the indictment are Joseph A. McKinney, Charles McKinney and Darryl Jones.
The McKinneys, aided and abetted by Jones and Lonnie Hubbard, distributed oxycodone, the indictment says.
An unredacted indictment shows that another co-defendant, Jody Earl Gabbard, was aided and abetted by Lonnie Hubbard in distributing oxycodone in Garrard County.
Portions of the indictment remain redacted, indicating that possibly other defendants will be made public at a later date.
Lonnie Hubbard and Gabbard’s initial appearances and arraignments are scheduled Monday before U.S. Judge Magistrate Robert Wier in Lexington.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Prosecutors in the Los Angeles suburb responsible for a huge share of the nation’s wiretaps almost certainly violated federal law when they authorized widespread eavesdropping that police used to make more than 300 arrests and seize millions of dollars in cash and drugs throughout the USA.
The violations could undermine the legality of as many as 738 wiretaps approved in Riverside County, Calif., since the middle of 2013, an investigation by USA TODAY and The Desert Sun, based on interviews and court records, has found. Prosecutors reported that those taps, often conducted by federal drug investigators, intercepted phone calls and text messages by more than 52,000 people.
Federal law bars the government from seeking court approval for a wiretap unless a top prosecutor has personally authorized the request. Congress added that restriction in the 1960s, when the FBI had secretly monitored civil rights leaders, to ensure that such intrusive surveillance would not be conducted lightly.
In Riverside County — a Los Angeles suburb whose court and prosecutors approved almost one of every five U.S. wiretaps last year — the district attorney turned the job of reviewing the applications over to lower-level lawyers, interviews and court records show. That practice almost certainly violated the federal wiretapping law and could jeopardize prosecutors’ ability to use the surveillance in court.
“A district attorney is playing with gunpowder if he ignores the potential implications of letting somebody else handle the entire process. That’s potentially catastrophic,” said Clifford Fishman, a Catholic University of America law professor who studies wiretapping.
That also creates a legal problem for Riverside’s massive wiretapping operation, which had come under scrutiny from Justice Department lawyers. Last week, USA TODAY and The Desert Sun reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had secretly helped turn the county into the nation’s wiretap capital, even though federal prosecutors repeatedly warned that the surveillance orders violated a separate part of the wiretapping law and would not withstand a legal challenge.
Federal drug agents used information from Riverside wiretaps to make arrests as far away as Kentucky and Virginia, sometimes concealing the surveillance from judges and defense lawyers.
Wiretaps in Riverside more than quadrupled under the county’s former district attorney, Paul Zellerbach, who left office in January. Despite a federal court ruling that only the district attorney himself should usually approve wiretaps, Zellerbach said in two interviews over the past month that he could not recall having reviewed or personally authorized any of the county’s wiretap applications and said he was unaware of the details of the requests. Instead, he said, he delegated that job to one of his assistants.
“I didn’t have time to review all of those,” Zellerbach said. “No way.”
Because wiretap applications are secret, it is difficult to gauge how often they were approved by other lawyers. A report based on information Zellerbach’s office submitted to federal court administrators lists an assistant, Jeffrey Van Wagenen, as the person who authorized nearly all of the county’s wiretap applications. Van Wagenen’s signature appears on a sealed wiretap application approved last year by a Riverside County judge and obtained by USA TODAY. Van Wagenen, who left the office last year, said it would be inappropriate for him to comment.
Delegating that job poses a legal problem because federal law — which regulates wiretap applications even in state courts — carefully restricts who must approve a surveillance request. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that those restrictions were serious enough that it threw out wiretap evidence in a drug case because the surveillance had been approved by the wrong senior official at the U.S. Justice Department.
The federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reiterated that point in 2013 after federal prosecutors sought to use evidence from a wiretap police obtained from a state court in San Bernardino County, just north of Riverside. The prosecutor who signed off on the wiretap was not the county’s district attorney, Mike Ramos, but one of his deputies. That, the appeals court ruled, wasn’t good enough: Wiretaps had to be signed by the district attorney himself unless he had turned over all of his powers to someone else while he was away from the office.
