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Supreme Court considers if Pistorius guilty of murder
Court Line News |
2015/11/03 09:32
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South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal grilled Oscar Pistorius' attorney and a prosecutor on Tuesday as it weighed whether to convict him of murder for killing his girlfriend, uphold a lower court's manslaughter conviction or order a retrial.
Prosecutors say the North Gauteng High Court erred in convicting Pistorius of the lesser charge, and that the double-amputee Olympian should have known that someone could be killed when he fired four times into a locked toilet cubicle in his home. In the trial last year, prosecutors said Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp as she sought shelter in the toilet cubicle during an argument on Valentine's Day 2013. The defense said Pistorius opened fire because he thought an intruder was about to burst out of the toilet.
One of the five appeals court judges noted during the session on Tuesday, broadcast across the country and around the world on live TV, that Pistorius could still be convicted of murder even if he didn't think it was Steenkamp in the cubicle but knew someone was in there. Under the concept of dolus eventualis in South African law, a person can be convicted of murder if they foresaw the possibility of someone dying through their actions and went ahead anyway.
"If you look at the photographs, there's room behind there for a toilet bowl and a person and just about nothing else," Justice Lorimer Leach said to defense lawyer Barry Roux. "There's nowhere to hide. It would be a miracle if you didn't shoot someone."
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Chinese woman pleads guilty in college test-taking scheme
Court Line News |
2015/11/01 09:33
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A Chinese woman pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to have two other women take college admissions examinations in her place to help her get accepted to Virginia Tech.
Yue Zou acknowledged having her boyfriend contact a China-based test-taking service.
After that happened, Zou, of Blacksburg, Virginia, supplied her passport information through an online network known as QQ Chat, which enabled people in China to create in her name phony passports that were shipped to her in the United States.
On the passports were the photos of two other Chinese women, who took tests in the Pittsburgh area while pretending to be her.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jimmy Kitchen told the judge that Zou forwarded results from the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, to Virginia Tech in November 2013 and results of a Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, taken by another Chinese impostor in March 2014.
Zou, from Hegang, a city in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, paid an unspecified sum for the TOEFL and $2,000 for the SAT, Kitchen told a judge in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh.
Zou, 21, faces up to five years in prison when she's sentenced in February. She could also be deported, though that will be handled by federal immigration officials in a separate proceeding.
Federal authorities haven't explained how they learned of the scheme.
Zou's attorney, Lyle Dresbold, told the judge that Zou will remain confined to her Blacksburg apartment with an electronic monitoring bracelet until she's sentenced. He told the judge she's still enrolled at Virginia Tech.
University spokesman Mark Owczarski said he could not comment on her status. But he said students found to have submitted work that is not their own to gain admission would face a range of possible sanctions, including expulsion, under the university's honor code.
Zou's TOEFL test was taken by Yunlin Sun, 24, of Berlin, Somerset County. She pleaded guilty in August and faces sentencing in December. Prosecutors say Ning Wei, from Taiyuan, in the Chinese province of Shanxi, took Zou's SAT. She hasn't been arrested, and prosecutors say they believe she returned to China.
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'Whitey' Bulger's lover heads to court on contempt charge
Court Line News |
2015/10/19 15:47
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The longtime girlfriend and fugitive companion of James "Whitey" Bulger is expected in federal court to face a contempt charge for refusing to tell whether other people helped the Boston mobster during his 16 years on the run.
Catherine Greig is scheduled to make an initial appearance on the new charge Monday in U.S. District Court.
Greig, 64, already is serving an eight-year sentence for conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, identity fraud and conspiracy to commit identity fraud.
The indictment alleges that from December 2014 until last month, Greig disobeyed a judge's order to testify before a grand jury in an investigation into "third parties" who assisted and harbored Bulger.
Bulger, now 86, fled Boston just before being indicted in early 1995. He was one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives until he was captured in Santa Monica, California, in 2011. He and Greig had been living together in a rent-controlled apartment.
When Greig was sentenced on the original charges in 2012, her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said Greig was in love with Bulger when she fled with him and did not believe that Bulger was capable of murder.
In 2013, Bulger was convicted of playing a role in 11 murders and other charges in a sweeping racketeering indictment.
Prosecutors said Greig had numerous opportunities to leave Bulger during their time on the run. Instead, they said she helped him remain a fugitive by using false identities and posing as his wife so she could pick up his prescriptions.
The couple posed as married retirees from Chicago. After they were captured, authorities found a stash of more than $800,000 in cash and 30 weapons in their apartment.
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Lawyer tried to keep Somali rape victim in Australia
Court Line News |
2015/10/19 15:47
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A lawyer for a pregnant Somalia refugee rape victim said Monday that he wanted to seek a court order keeping her in Australia before the government suddenly flew her to Nauru without providing the abortion she had requested.
The case of the 23-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Abyan, has amplified criticisms of the government's tough policy of refusing to allow asylum seekers who arrive by boat to settle in Australia under any circumstances.
Asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australian shores are transferred to Australia-run immigration detention camps on the impoverished Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
Abyan alleges she became pregnant at a detention camp on Nauru when she was raped in July.
She requested an abortion and the Australian government flew her to Sydney on Sunday last week on a commercial flight from the tiny atoll for the 14-week pregnancy to be terminated. But she was flown the 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) back to Nauru on Friday in a chartered private jet, in what some critics suspect was a hastily arranged bid to beat a potential court order allowing her to stay.
Government officials said she was sent back because she had decided to not proceed with the termination. Abyan said in a statement from Nauru she had not changed her mind, but had been denied an interpreter and counselling.
"I have been very sick," she wrote in a signed statement. "I have never said thate (sic) I did not want a termination."
Lawyer George Newhouse said Monday that he had started preparing an application for a temporary court injunction keeping her in Australia when he discovered Abyan was to be sent back to Nauru. She was gone before he could make the application.
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Court again considers fate of seized gold coins worth $80M
Court Line News |
2015/10/16 00:27
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A federal appeals court is again considering the fate of 10 rare gold coins possibly worth $80 million or more that the government says were illegally taken from a Philadelphia mint and wound up in a jeweler's hands.
A lawyer for jeweler Israel Switt's heirs told the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday that authorities erred by seizing the coins without filing a required civil forfeiture action.
A jury found the seizure legal because the coins hadn't been circulated and must therefore have been stolen, but a three-judge appellate court reversed that decision in April. Federal prosecutors then asked for Wednesday's hearing before the full appeals court.
They say returning the rare $20 Double Eagles to Joan Langbord and her two sons would reward the family of a thief.
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Supreme Court declines to review insider trading case
Court Line News |
2015/10/06 14:19
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The Supreme Court said Monday it won't hear the Obama administration's appeal of a lower court ruling that made it tougher to prosecute people for trading on leaked inside information.
The justices let stand a decision by the federal appeals court in New York last year that threw out insider trading convictions of two high-profile hedge fund managers.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the convictions of Anthony Chiasson, of Manhattan, and Todd Newman, of Needham, Massachusetts, after finding they were too far removed from inside information to be prosecuted.
Prosecutors warned the ruling could hinder the government's campaign to curb insider trading on Wall Street, a crackdown that has resulted in more than 80 arrests and 70 convictions over several years.
Chiasson, who co-founded Level Global Investors based in Greenwich, Conn., and Newman, who had worked for Diamondback Capital Management based in Stamford, Conn., traded on tips from insiders on stock in technology companies Dell Inc. and Nvidia Corp. that generated $72 million in profits. The former portfolio managers were both convicted in December 2012.
The appeals court said prosecutors failed to present enough evidence the men willfully engaged in insider trading or conspired to break the law. It ruled that the government must show a person receiving a tip knew that an insider disclosed confidential information and that the tipster passed the information expecting a personal benefit.
In legal briefs filed with the court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said leaving the appeals court ruling in place would "hurt market participants, disadvantage scrupulous market analysts and impair the government's ability to protect the fairness and integrity of the securities markets."
Both men have denied insider trading. Their lawyers argued that they believed they were making trades based on legitimate research.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan told reporters on a conference call Monday that the Supreme Court's decision means "that there's a category of conduct that arguably will go unpunished going forward."
"If you have a CEO who has access to material, non-published information about earnings or anything else of a very sensitive nature and decides he wants to tip a relative or a buddy or a crony, knowing that person is going to trade on it to the tune and profit of millions of dollars, we would have to think long and hard, given Newman, whether to prosecute a person like that," Bharara said.
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