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Man pleads not guilty in deadly DUI crash
Headline News |
2013/01/14 22:49
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A California man has pleaded not guilty to charges in a deadly drunken driving crash that killed a man and four dogs.
Prosecutors say 31-year-old Paul William Walden was drunk behind the wheel of car traveling down a Carmichael street at 80 mph with no lights when he blew through a stop sign.
The car struck 21-year-old Harison Long-Randall, his 23-year-old girlfriend Gemily West and her dogs. Long-Randall and the four dogs were killed.
Walden fled the scene and was captured a short time later.
The Sacramento Bee says Walden pleaded not guilty on Thursday to murder, vehicular manslaughter, driving under the influence and other charges in last July's crash.
A preliminary hearing is scheduled for March.
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Court won't stop embryonic stem cell research
Headline News |
2013/01/08 21:44
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The Supreme Court won't stop the government's funding of embryonic stem cell research, despite some researchers' complaints that the work relies on destroyed human embryos.
The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from two scientists who have been challenging the funding for the work.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia earlier this year threw out their lawsuit challenging federal funding for the research, which is used in pursuit of cures to deadly diseases. Opponents claimed the National Institutes of Health was violating the 1996 Dickey-Wicker law that prohibits taxpayer financing for work that harms an embryo.
Researchers hope one day to use stem cells in ways that cure spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's disease and other ailments. |
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Man who cut lawyer in San Diego court convicted
Law Firm News |
2012/12/25 23:19
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A man who slashed his lawyer in the face in a San Diego court last week, then delivered his own closing argument in handcuffs has been convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder and assault.
City News Service says a jury found 32-year-old Eduardo Macias and his 35-year-old co-defendant Geromino Polina guilty of the three counts Friday. They'll be sentenced Feb. 19.
The judge said Macias had forfeited his right to representation after he cut his lawyer, William Burgener, in front of the jury with a blade he'd hidden in his mouth, so Macias acted as his own attorney in the trial's final days. |
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Court fines woman in Berlusconi 'bunga bunga' case
Law Firm News |
2012/12/19 00:07
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A Milan court fined a Moroccan woman at the center of Silvio Berlusconi's sex-for-hire scandal €500 ($650) on Monday for failing to appear as a witness twice at the former premier's trial. It ordered her to testify in January.
Karima el-Mahroug, also known as Ruby, is the last witness to be called in the sensational trial that accuses Berlusconi of having paid for sex with el-Mahroug when she was 17, and then trying to cover it up. Both deny having had sex.
The court ordered el-Mahroug, who is in Mexico on vacation, to testify on Jan. 14, confirming the necessity of her testimony.
Prosecutors have accused the defense, which called el-Mahroug as a witness, of engaging in a strategy to delay a verdict — which has included calling witnesses who have failed to show. Italian law does not carry particularly strict penalties against witnesses who fail to appear, and in some cases the court may decide their participation is not essential. |
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High Court to decide how logging roads regulated
Headline News |
2012/12/10 23:02
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The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to switch gears on more than 30 years of regulating the muddy water running off logging roads into rivers.
At issue: Should the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency keep considering it the same as water running off a farm field, or start looking at it like a pipe coming out of a factory?
The case being heard Monday in Washington, D.C., was originated by a small environmental group in Portland, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center.
It sued the Oregon Department of Forestry over roads on the Tillamook State Forest that drain into salmon streams. The lawsuit argued that the Clean Water Act specifically says water running through the kinds of ditches and culverts built to handle storm water runoff from logging roads is a point source of pollution when it flows directly into a river, and requires the same sort of permit that a factory needs.
"We brought this out of a perceived sense of unfairness," said Mark Riskedahl, director of the center. "Every other industrial sector across the country had to get this sort of permit for stormwater discharge," and the process has been very effective at reducing pollution.
The pollution running off logging roads, most of them gravel or dirt, is primarily muddy water stirred up by trucks. Experts have long identified sediment dumped in streams as harmful to salmon and other fish.
The center lost in U.S. District Court in Portland, but won in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The Oregon Department of Forestry and Georgia Pacific-West appealed to the Supreme Court, and 31 states threw in with them. |
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Fed. court orders resentencing in Arkansas bombing
Topics |
2012/12/10 12:58
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An Arkansas doctor sentenced to life in prison for a 2009 bombing that nearly killed the head of the state medical board should be resentenced on some convictions, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
A jury convicted Randeep Mann, 54, in 2010 of conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and other charges. The Feb. 4, 2009, bomb attack took away Dr. Trent Pierce's sense of smell and left him blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.
Mann's attorneys appealed his convictions and sentences, arguing there wasn't enough evidence to convict him.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday that Mann shouldn't have received a sentencing enhancement based on allegations that he ordered the assault of an inmate. The panel said the allegation was never brought up in court and was improperly referenced in a pre-sentencing report.
"The only reference in the record to Mann ordering the assault of a federal inmate is contained in a bench conference that occurred at trial between the district judge and the attorneys," the appeals court opinion said. |
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