COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A man was sentenced to life in prison Thursday after being convicted of killing a mail carrier who instead of delivering a large package of marijuana to his home left a note in the mailbox requiring him to come to a South Carolina post office to pick it up.
Trevor Raekwon Seward, 25, was found guilty of murder of a federal employee in the course of her duties & other crimes in the September 2019 shooting of 64-year-old Irene Pressley as she delivered mail in rural Williamsburg County.
After finding the note in his mailbox instead of the 2-pound package of marijuana from California he was expecting, Seward confronted Pressley a few minutes later demanding his package. The U.S. Postal Service mail carrier refused.
Seward then got a semi-automatic rifle & waited for Pressley to come down a street in Andrews, firing about 20 times into the back of her mail truck.
Several bullets hit Pressley. Seward then drove the mail truck into a ditch on an access road at a hunting club, searched through it to try to find his marijuana & anything else valuable & then left the Pressley’s body in her truck.
The marijuana package was later found on the street where Pressley was killed.
The co-defendant who helped Seward look for the mail carrier was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Jerome Terrell Davis, 31, pleaded guilty to robbery & conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute & to distribute marijuana.
Even when marijuana was illegal nationwide, the value of the package would not have exceeded $2,600.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A retired New York Police Department officer was sentenced on Thursday to a record-setting 10 years in prison for attacking the U.S. Capitol & using a metal flagpole to assault 1 of the police officers trying to hold off a mob of Donald Trump supporters.
Thomas Webster’s prison sentence is the longest so far among roughly 250 people who have been punished for their conduct during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The previous longest was shared by 2 other rioters, who were sentenced separately to 7 years & 3 months in prison.
Webster, a 20-year NYPD veteran, was the first Capitol riot defendant to be tried on an assault charge & the first to present a self-defense argument. A jury rejected Webster’s claim that he was defending himself when he tackled Metropolitan Police Department officer Noah Rathbun & grabbed his gas mask outside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Webster, 56, to 10 years in prison plus three years of supervised release. He allowed Webster to report to prison at a date to be determined instead of immediately ordering him into custody.
“Mr. Webster, I don’t think you’re a bad person,” the judge said. “I think you were caught up in a moment. But as you know, even getting caught up in a moment has consequences.”
“The other victim was democracy, and that is not something that can be taken lightly,” Mehta added.
NEW YORK (AP) — Disgraced R&B superstar R. Kelly was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in prison for using his fame to sexually abuse young fans, including some who were just children, in a systematic scheme that went on for decades.
Through tears & anger, several of Kelly’s accusers told a court, and the singer himself, that he had preyed on them & misled his fans.
“You made me do things that broke my spirit. I literally wished I would die because of how low you made me feel,” said one unnamed survivor, directly addressing a Kelly.
“Do you remember that?” she asked.
Kelly, 55, didn’t speak at his sentencing & showed no visible reaction on hearing his penalty, which also includes a $100,000 fine. The Grammy-winning, multi-platinum-selling songwriter was convicted last year of racketeering & sex trafficking at a trial that gave voice to accusers who had previously wondered if their stories were being ignored because they were Black women.
Victims “have sought to be heard & acknowledged,” another one of his accusers said at his sentencing. “We are no longer the preyed-on individuals we once were.”
A third woman, sobbing & sniffling as she spoke, said Kelly’s conviction renewed her confidence in the legal system.
“I once lost hope,” she said, addressing the court & prosecutors, “but you restored my faith.”
The woman said Kelly victimized her after she went to a concert when she was 17.
ORLANDO, Fla. – A known Orlando-area gang member was sentenced to more than seven years in a federal prison after pleading guilty to three weapons charges earlier this year.
Jacquavius Smith, known in rap music circles as Glokk9 or 9lokknin, was arrested last year for possessing a gun as a convicted felon.
An Orange County judge deemed him a danger to society and denied him bond.
In February, Smith was indicted on federal firearms charges.
He pleaded guilty to three counts in July, including possession of an unregistered firearm, using another person’s identity and committing a crime while on pretrial release.
According to court documents, Smith will serve 87 months in a federal prison, three years of supervised release and drug treatment.
He was also ordered to pay $10,416 in restitution.
Smith still faces racketeering charges in state court, where his trial is slated to begin in March 2022.
He also faces charges of attempted second-degree murder.
Investigators allege the rapper fired a gun into an Orlando home in July. A woman told detectives she was inside with her children at the time. No one was injured. Investigators said that Smith was targeting another rapper, with a witness telling detectives, “9IokkNine wants to be the only rapper coming from Orlando.”
Several months after the shooting, Orange County deputies said Smith was the target of a shooting between a rival gang outside the food court at the Mall at Millenia on Oct. 8, 2020.
DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. (WSB-TV) -- Former DeKalb County Police Officer Robert "Chip" Olsen was sentenced on Friday to 20 years, with 12 to serve in prison for shooting and killing a naked, unarmed, mentally ill military veteran.
Last month, a jury convicted Robert Olsen in the death of Anthony Hill but found him not guilty of murder. On Friday, Olsen learned his sentence.
Judge LaTisha Dear Jackson imposed the sentence after an emotion-packed hearing that lasted more than three hours. Her decision brings to a close a case that has lingered for more than four years and has been watched closely as a test of police accountability.
Olsen's defense lawyers had asked that the ex-cop serve five years behind bars; prosecutors had sought 30 years, with 25 to serve and five on probation.
Olsen, 57, was acquitted last month on two charges of felony murder for shooting and killing Hill on March 9, 2015. But the ex-cop was convicted on four lesser charges: aggravated assault, making a false statement to a police officer, and two counts of violating his oath of office.
At Friday's hearing, Hill's mother spoke of how Olsen's decision to shoot had shattered her family.
"I know Mr. Olsen didn't wake up that day and say I'm going to shoot Anthony Hill. But his decision to use lethal force is why I do not have my son. My only son," Carolyn Guimmo told the judge.
DeKalb prosecutor Pete Johnson said Olsen must be face the consequences for shooting an unarmed, naked man in broad daylight and then lying about it.
"That's appalling," Johnson told the judge.
But defense lawyer Don Samuel argued that Olsen represents no ongoing threat to the community and urged the judge to resist efforts to use the case to a make broader statement about police conduct.
"Think about mercy, compassion, forgiveness," Samuel said.
Hill, 26, had stopped taking his meds and had stripped off his clothes when he encountered Olsen in the parking lot of the Heights Chamblee apartment complex.
When Hill ran toward Olsen, ignoring his commands to stop, Olsen fired twice.
Olsen has maintained that he acted in self-defense.
NEW YORK (AP) — The Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has been sentenced to life behind bars in a U.S. prison, a humbling end for a drug lord once notorious for his ability to kill, bribe or tunnel his way out of trouble.
A federal judge in Brooklyn handed down the sentence Wednesday, five months after Guzman’s conviction in an epic drug-trafficking case.
The 62-year-old drug lord, who had been protected in Mexico by an army of gangsters and an elaborate corruption operation, was brought to the U.S. to stand trial after he twice escaped from Mexican prisons.
Before he was sentenced, Guzman, complained about the conditions of his confinement and told the judge he was denied a fair trial. He said U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan failed to thoroughly investigate claims of juror misconduct.
“My case was stained and you denied me a fair trial when the whole world was watching,” Guzman said in court through an interpreter. “When I was extradited to the United States, I expected to have a fair trial, but what happened was exactly the opposite.”
The harsh sentence was pre-ordained. The guilty verdict in February at Guzman’s 11-week trial triggered a mandatory sentence of life without parole .
The evidence showed that under Guzman’s orders, the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for smuggling mountains of cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors said in court papers re-capping the trial. They also said his “army of sicarios” was under orders to kidnap, torture and murder anyone who got in his way.
The defense argued he was framed by other traffickers who became government witnesses so they could get breaks in their own cases.
Guzman has been largely cut off from the outside world since his extradition in 2017 and his remarks in the courtroom Wednesday could be the last time the public hears from him. Guzman thanked his family for giving him “the strength to bare this torture that I have been under for the past 30 months.”
Wary of his history of escaping from Mexican prisons, U.S. authorities have kept him in solitary confinement in an ultra-secure unit at a Manhattan jail and under close guard at his appearances at the Brooklyn courthouse where his case unfolded.
Experts say he will likely wind up at the federal government’s “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” Most inmates at Supermax are given a television, but their only actual view of the outside world is a 4-inch window. They have minimal interaction with other people and eat all their meals in their cells.
While the trial was dominated by Guzman’s persona as a near-mythical outlaw who carried a diamond-encrusted handgun and stayed one step ahead of the law, the jury never heard from Guzman himself, except when he told the judge he wouldn’t testify.
But evidence at Guzman’s trial suggested his decision to stay quiet at the defense table was against his nature: Cooperating witnesses told jurors he was a fan of his own rags-to-riches narco story, always eager to find an author or screenwriter to tell it. He famously gave an interview to American actor Sean Penn while he was a fugitive, hiding in the mountains after accomplices built a long tunnel to help him escape from a Mexican prison.
There also were reports Guzman was itching to testify in his own defense until his attorneys talked him out of it, making his sentencing a last chance to seize the spotlight.
At the trial, Guzman’s lawyers argued that he was the fall guy for other kingpins who were better at paying off top Mexican politicians and law enforcement officials to protect them while the U.S. government looked the other way.
Prosecution descriptions of an empire that paid for private planes, beachfront villas and a private zoo were a fallacy, his lawyers say. And the chances the U.S. government could collect on a roughly $12.5 billion forfeiture order are zero, they add.
The government’s case, defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said recently, was “all part of a show trial.”
They met on a dating website for people with HIV and spent five not-entirely-blissful years together. Co-workers sometimes saw scratches on Mark van Dongen, courtesy of Berlinah Wallace’s jealous outbursts. Enraged during one fight, Wallace had poured boiling water on him.
By August 2015, van Dongen had had enough, the BBC reported. He wanted out of the relationship, he told Wallace. A little later, he told his ex that he was seeing someone else.
That’s when, prosecutors say, Wallace began researching sulfuric acid.
In all, she looked at 82 websites about the corrosive substance, prosecutors said. Some of the sites showed bodies scarred black by the acid. She bought a bottle from Amazon.
About a month after he announced that he was dating again, Wallace lured her ex to her home under the guise of rekindling their relationship. The breakup had been an on-again off-again roller coaster, and van Dongen wanted to reiterate that he was moving on with his new girlfriend. But he ended up staying the night anyway.
And as he lay in bed around 3 a.m. wearing nothing but boxer shorts, Wallace stood over him with a glass mug full of acid.
She told him, “If I can't have you, no one can,” laughed, then tipped the corrosive substance onto his face and exposed body, the BBC reported.
Calling the moment “an act of pure evil,” a British judge on Wednesday sentenced Wallace, 49, to a minimum of 12 years in prison for the attack. Last year, van Dongen ended his life.
Speaking via a translator, the victim’s father, Kees van Dongen, told reporters: “I’m very pleased she’ll be locked up for a minimum of 12 years, but really it’s too little, because we as a family have been sentenced to life.”
The acid attack left van Dongen with gruesome burns over 25 percent of his body, including most of his face.
After the attack, he ran into the streets of Westbury Park in Bristol, half-blind and wearing only his boxers, his screams attracting the attention of neighbors.
“My doorbell rang a few times and I knew there was something desperate going on, and it was him,” Nic White told the court, according to the BBC. “He looked like he was covered in a clay sort of mud, which I later realized was his skin melting.”
Rachel Oaten, who decontaminated the injured man at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, said he let out a bloodcurdling scream when he saw his reflection.
“He said: ‘Kill me now,’ ” Oaten recalled, according to the Sun. “ ‘If my face is going to be left looking like this I don’t want to live.’ ”
But it wasn't just his face. The attack ultimately left him paralyzed from the neck down. One leg had to be amputated. And he spent four months in a coma. The only thing he could move with any real precision was his tongue.
When detectives asked who had attacked him, he used the organ to spell out the word “Berlinah.”
On the night of the attack, detectives found her at her home, sitting on the sofa, the Sun reported. When they asked about van Dongen, she motioned to the glass mug on the floor.
She told conflicting stories on that night and in her trial. She said she bought the acid to distress some jeans and to deal with a bad smell emanating from her drains. And she painted van Dongen as the abusive one — and the aggressor that night. She told investigators, then the court, that he had tried to get her to drink the acid, saying it was water.
“You know like ‘come and take your medication and go to bed,’ ” she said in an interview, according to the Sun. “He wanted me to, to burn my insides.”
She claimed that he had tried to stop her from leaving the apartment and that she had thrown the acid in self-defense, the Sun reported.
But her sheets told the real story. They were blackened by acid on his side of the bed.
In the ensuing years, as Wallace awaited her trial, her ex-boyfriend's suffering spiraled.
He spent months in intensive care, then more months in the burn unit.
He endured recurrent septic chest infections, intense pain, post-traumatic stress disorder and night terrors, the Sun reported. The muscle in one of his arms was slowly eaten away by the acid. Paralyzed, he couldn’t scratch himself.
His father made an 800-mile road trip from Belgium each weekend to see him, sometimes sleeping in his car in the hospital’s parking lot. The older man’s marriage disintegrated under the strain and he went bankrupt, according to the BBC.
With the help of a family friend, van Dongen was transferred to a hospital in Belgium.
For him, there were two benefits: His father could be with him everyday, and assisted suicide is legal in Belgium.
Doctors had told him that he would need a third tracheotomy, his father said. It would help him breathe but take away his voice.
“He knew he’d lose his voice,” his father told Sky News. “So what would he have left? Just pain and itching and another ceiling to stare at all day long.”
Van Dongen applied for euthanasia, and a panel of three doctors ruled that his “unbearable physical and psychological suffering” meant he was eligible.
On Jan. 2, 2017, 15 months after the attack, van Dongen ended his life.
Misty Velvet Dawn Spann was 25 years old when she married her mother Patricia Spann, 42, in Sept. 2016, according to Oklahoma District Court records. Misty now faces a 10-year deferred sentence after pleading guilty to that incestual marriage, according to CBS affiliate KOTV in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The marriage was annulled six weeks later in the city of Duncan. Misty is now 26 years old.
Records show that the mother lost custody of her children -- who were adopted -- when they were little. KOTV writes that Patricia told investigators she and Misty "hit it off" when they were reconnected in 2014.
Records also state that Patricia thought the marriage was legal because her name was no longer on Misty's birth certificate.
KOTV points out that Patricia married her biological son in 2008, but that was annulled in 2010 after he called it "incestuous."
There is a trial set in January for Patricia. She's charged with incest.
"She forced my sister into this, there's a lot of people that know it," Cody Spann said. "For you to want to put your own daughter through this, what kind of person are you?"
I sometimes question the sanity of Fox talk show host, Glenn Beck.
He rants and raves and even once literally barked like a dog, So I think its best to just view him as a comedian.
This past week while poking fun at news competitor MSNBC for their low ratings he mocked Lindsay Lohan's not infamous courtroom appearance where the words "f*ck you" were painted on her fingernails.
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