Last month, a federal judge dismissed mortgage fraud charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James based on what the court determined was the improper appointment of Acting United States Attorney Lindsay Halligan. Prosecutors pursued a new indictment last week, but a grand jury declined to charge James. This week, the Government tried again with a different grand jury, which also refused to issue charges. Defense attorney Abbe Lowell promptly proclaimed that “[a]ny further attempt to revive these discredited charges would be a mockery of our system of justice.” ABC News has the story here.
Stabbing on commuter train in Charlotte. CBS News reports here that the event took place last “Friday after 33-year-old Oscar Solarzano allegedly entered the Charlotte Area Transit System’s Blue Line light rail train and got into an argument with another passenger.” The victim survived. Solarzano has been charged with attempted murder and is being held without bond. The case has attracted national attention because Solarzano is reported to be an immigrant without legal status, and because of the similarity to the tragic fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train earlier this year.
Michigan football coach fired, jailed. Sherrone Moore is having a bad week. When the week started, the 39-year-old was making $5.5 million per year as the head coach of the University of Michigan Wolverines, the winningest college football team in history. Then he was fired for cause, based on what the school says was an “inappropriate relationship with a staff member.” Then he was arrested and jailed, and “remains in custody as a suspect in an alleged assault,” according to ESPN. One reflection on the situation is that while things didn’t go well for the UNC football coach this year, clearly they could have been worse!
Supreme Court hears arguments on intellectual disability and the death penalty. On Wednesday, the Court heard Hamm v. Smith, a capital case from Alabama that is the latest in a line of cases about how to implement the Court’s command that intellectually disabled individuals may not be sentenced to death. The new case raises questions about how courts should consider the results of multiple IQ tests when some are consistent with intellectual disability and some are higher; about the extent to which deficits in adaptive functioning may be used to offset test scores higher than those normally associated with intellectual disability; and about the extent to which states must follow changing clinical diagnostic standards. SCOTUSblog’s summary of the argument is here, but it seems that “[a]fter roughly two hours of oral argument, the justices were divided.”
Domestic violence deaths up, GPS tracking may help. WECT has this story up, citing SBI data and reporting that a record 155 North Carolinians were killed in domestic violence incidents in 2024. The piece highlights “a growing program called the Criminal Justice Information Network [that] is using a GPS monitoring system” to track defendants. According to the story, “[a] judge can order a defendant to wear an ankle monitor. The monitor has off-limit zones that may include the victim’s home or place of work. The ankle monitor is equipped with a tracking system that can be connected to a device the victim carries with them.” Both law enforcement and the victim may be notified when the offender approaches an exclusion zone. The story does not contain many legal details, but I believe that the program in question was first funded by the General Assembly as a nine-district pilot program, see S.L. 2020-80, and can now provide pretrial GPS monitoring in domestic violence cases in many counties across the state under S.L. 2021-180.
Life imitates fiction – ChatGPT sued for wrongful death. Not long ago, I read The Proving Ground, a new Lincoln Lawyer novel by Michael Connelly. The book is about a lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company alleging that the company was responsible for encouraging a young man to murder his girlfriend. Today, I read this AP story, reporting that “[t]he heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son’s ‘paranoid delusions’ and helped direct them at his mother before he killed her.” The story indicates that ChatGPT told the son that “he [wasn’t] mentally ill, affirm[ed] his suspicions that people [were] conspiring against him and [said] he ha[d] been chosen for a divine purpose.” It also reportedly “affirmed [the son’s] beliefs that a printer in his home was a surveillance device; that his mother was monitoring him; and that his mother and a friend tried to poison him with psychedelic drugs through his car’s vents.” The son and the chatbot allegedly “also professed love for each other.”
Understanding the frauds committed by Minnesota Somalis. President Trump and other prominent individuals have recently highlighted several massive frauds perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s Somali community. The crimes have become political talking points. I’ll leave that aspect to others, but readers interested in a basic understanding of the nature of the frauds and the criminal prosecutions that resulted may want to check out this local story that explains the three principal criminal schemes at issue.
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