Nurse admits to fatally burning baby in scalding bath in plea deal
A Queens nurse admitted Wednesday to fatally burning a 23-month-old baby by dunking her in a scalding hot bath, getting a promise of just four years in prison for her plea.
Oluyemisi Adebayo, who was a 20-year licensed nurse practitioner, cruelly placed Naomi Mondesire in the bath at the child’s Rosedale home on April 21, 2015 and the baby succumbed to the burns days later.
The 58-year-old woman pleaded guilty to one count of attempted assault and is expected to receive the agreed upon sentence at her next court date on Sept. 24.
Adebayo — who was arrested in April 2015 as she was about to board a flight to Africa — will get credit for the three years she has been in jail since her arrest.
Judge Richard Buchter asked Adebayo, “Did you place the baby in hot water?” Adebayo responded, “yes.”
Adebayo, a Nigerian immigrant, could face deportation upon her release from prison.
She was originally charged with second-degree murder, which was dismissed as part of her plea deal, and she faced 25 years to life in prison if convicted at trial.
The child’s mother, Cynthia Mondesire, filed a negligence lawsuit in Queens in 2015 against Adebayo and the company she worked for, Harry’s Nursing registry. Adebayo settled with Mondesire but the multi-million dollar case against the company is still pending.
“The baby just melts in the bathtub, it’s tragic,” Mondesire’s lawyer, Eric Shaevitz, said adding, “It’s just a tragedy, an absolute tragedy that this woman has gotten away with murder. And especially horrifying, she had a record of child abuse and the company hadn’t vetted her at all.”
“She’s a monster,” Shaevitz said of Adebayo.
via: https://nypost.com/2018/09/05/nurse-admits-to-fatally-burning-baby-in-scalding-bath-in-plea-deal/
Cincinnati Cop tases 11 year old girl for shoplifting – then tells girl “That hurt my heart to do that to you”
“You know, sweetheart, this is why there aren’t any grocery stores in the black community.” That’s what Cincinnati police officer Kevin Brown told an 11-year-old African-American girl moments after tasing her for allegedly shoplifting $53 worth of food and clothing from a Kroger on Aug. 6.
Police say the 55-year-old off-duty officer, also African-American, was working security at the store when he tried to apprehend three girls. In violation of department policy, he used a Taser on one without warning and only turned on his body camera afterward, reports the Cincinnati Inquirer.
“That hurt my heart to do that to you,” he tells the girl in the video released Tuesday, before addressing store closures in black communities. An internal review took note of the latter comment, which comes a year after Brown was written up for using a homophobic slur.
Brown defended the comment, however, on his belief that “the closing of a number of Kroger stores in black communities … resulted from large amounts of theft losses,” the review states, per ABC News.
“This guy, from what I am hearing, has serious issues,” says Councilman Wendell Young, a former police officer. “He’s building a case that makes it difficult for us to continue with him as a member of the police department.” But it’s up to Police Chief Eliot Isaac to decide the officer’s fate, which could include counseling or termination.
While promising to review department policy relating to Taser use on children, Isaac on Tuesday described Brown’s use of the device as “unnecessary in this circumstance.” Police say the girl took a backpack, “candy and beef jerky, as well as infant clothing,” worth $53.81.
Theft charges have been dropped.
Minnesota State Fair announces $14 million expansion
Because the best way to deal with regular record-breaking numbers (and the increased congestion and longer lines that come with them)?
Get even bigger. Like, $14 million bigger. Which the folks behind the fair have announced they plan to do.
MPR reports that they’ll break ground on the expansion next month, in the northwest corner of the grounds. New attractions will include a performing arts space—which could mean even more than the 900 performances the fair hosted this year. (Deputy general manager Renee Alexander tells MPR that they’ve doubled the free entertainment budget over the last 12 years.)
The revamp will also introduce a traveling exhibit hall, which will be almost as big as the Dairy Building. And it should all be ready in time for next year’s fair, which kicks off August 22.
“You know, even on our biggest days, there’s plenty of room for people,” general manager Jerry Hammer—whose name sounds like it could be a State Fair show-of-strength game—tells MPR.
It’s why they’ve spent the last decade carefully making the grounds over: updating old buildings, re-imagining existing layouts, and adding new food and events spaces like the Hangar, which just debuted this year. Crucially, they’ve also added more bathrooms.
Hammer adds: “The fair was more crowded 30 years ago, 35 years ago.”
Painful to imagine—especially if you waited in this year’s record-setting lines for some of the new foods like we did.
Article via: Minnesota State Fair announces $14 million expansion
20th Century Fox Deletes The Predator Scene Featuring Registered Sex Offender
There’s helping out a friend, there’s forgiving a man who’s served his time, and then there’s describing the crimes for which that time was served—risk of injury to a child and enticing a minor by computer, both felonies—as the product of someone who was “caught up in a bad situation versus [doing] something lecherous.” Shane Black, who wrote the original Lethal Weapon and wrote/directed Iron Man 3, did all three of those things when he cast his friend Steven Wilder Striegel in a small role in his upcoming movie The Predator, and then explained this decision to press. Striegel was arrested in 2009 and pleaded guilty to the two felonies mentioned above—risk of injury to a child and enticing a minor by computer, both felonies—for which he served six months in prison.
The Los Angeles Times’ Amy Kaufman reports that The Predator star Olivia Munn discovered the information about Striegel’s convictions. In the movie, she shares a scene with Striegel. She contacted 20th Century Fox, the studio releasing The Predator, which ordered the excision of said scene. In a statement, a 20th Century Fox spokesperson said of Striegel: “We were not aware of his background during the casting process due to legal limitations that impede studios from running background checks on actors.”
Black told the Times in a written statement, “I personally chose to help a friend. I can understand others might disapprove, as his conviction was on a sensitive charge and not to be taken lightly.” Striegel told the Times he’s known Black for 14 years.
Read more via: 20th Century Fox Deletes The Predator Scene Featuring Registered Sex Offender
Police search home of couple who raised $400,000 for homeless man
Police executed a search warrant Thursday morning to comb through the home of the couple who raised $400,000 for a homeless Philadelphia man.
Article via: Police search home of couple who raised $400,000 for homeless man
India throws out ban on gay sex, but challenges remain
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s top court scrapped a colonial-era ban on gay sex on Thursday, in a landmark judgment that sparked celebrations across India and elsewhere in South Asia, where activists hope to push for similar reform.
Gay sex is considered taboo by many in socially conservative India, as well as in neighboring Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. It was reinstated as a criminal offense in India in 2013, punishable up to 10 years in prison, after four years of decriminalization.
A five-judge bench in India’s Supreme Court was unanimous in overturning the ban. But the ruling could face a legal challenge from groups that say gay sex erodes traditional values.
“Any consensual sexual relationship between two consenting adults – homosexuals, heterosexuals or lesbians – cannot be said to be unconstitutional,” said the Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, as he read out the judgment.
Read more via: India throws out ban on gay sex, but challenges remain
Safe-injection legal battle brewing in SF — health intervention or drug den?
Original article written September 2nd 2018
If Gov. Jerry Brown goes along, San Francisco plans to establish what could be the nation’s first legal, supervised safe injection site for drug users. But there’s a potentially serious legal obstacle: a 3-decade-old federal law that was directed at shutting down dens of crack cocaine dealers and users.
Legislation on Brown’s desk, passed by bare-majority votes in both houses, would authorize the city to set up one or more sites in a pilot program through January 2022. Drug users would have access to clean needles and syringes, medical care, counseling and social services. Similar programs are operating in 10 nations.
But a day after lawmakers approved AB186 last week, the Trump administration’s deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, in an opinion piece Tuesday in the New York Times, declared injection sites dangerous and illegal and pledged “swift and aggressive action” under a 1986 law known as the Crack House Statute.
“It is a federal felony to maintain any location for the purpose of facilitating illicit drug use,” Rosenstein wrote. He argued that the sites encourage addiction by sending a “powerful message to teenagers that the government thinks illegal drugs can be used safely.”
City officials and other advocates of the sites say their purpose is not to facilitate drug use, but to protect the users from overdoses and other lethal consequences while giving them a chance to get their lives under control and making the streets safer.
“Research has shown these programs reduce overdose mortality, public injection, litter from drug use … while increasing access to treatment, safe-use behaviors, and entrance into detoxification services,” said the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who lost a younger sister to a drug overdose in 2006, says she’s willing to fight the federal government in court to allow the injection sites.
“People are going to shoot up, and we don’t have control over that,” Breed said in July. “There’s a way to get it indoors so it’s not impacting our streets in a negative way. … These places provide a location for people to be when they’re going through what they’re going through.”
California has been down this road before. The state was the first to legalize the medical use of marijuana, in a 1996 initiative, and since then has battled a series of presidential administrations over enforcement of the federal ban on all uses of marijuana.
In 2005, the clash reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where California argued that pot dispensaries were not engaged in interstate commerce when they supplied marijuana that was grown entirely within the state, and thus were not subject to federal regulation. The court disagreed in a 6-3 ruling, leading to federal closures of hundreds of dispensaries in the state under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
The federal sweeps eventually prompted congressional action, in 2015, to prevent further shutdowns.
The federal government couldn’t rely on the same drug bans to go after safe injection sites, though, because — unlike the marijuana dispensaries — the city wouldn’t be supplying any drugs, said Marsha Cohen, a law professor at UC Hastings in San Francisco.
That’s where the Crack House Statute comes in.
The law prohibits anyone from “knowingly” opening, maintaining or managing a “place for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.”
The statute was passed at a time of rising crack cocaine use in inner cities and was directed at private criminal outposts, not public facilities seeking to provide safety for drug users. But a legislative staff analysis of AB128 said the law would “criminalize both the behavior of the clients using the (safe injection) facilities and the owners or operators of the facilities.”
Maximum penalties under the law include 20 years in prison, fines of $500,000 for individuals or $2 million for an organization, and loss of the property.
Brown has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto AB186, or let it become law without his signature. If it becomes law, federal courts will have to decide whether the broadly worded law passed by Congress in 1986 contains an implied exemption for a government-supervised facility whose ultimate goal is to reduce drug addiction.
“There’s no evidence of (congressional) intent that this would apply to legally permitted public health interventions, trying to prevent deaths and serious injuries,” said Lindsay LaSalle, an attorney with the advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance in Oakland.
Legal analysts who support the injection sites took a similar position in an article in the American Journal of Public Health in 2008.
The federal law “was never intended to interfere with a legally authorized public health intervention” under “states’ traditional authority in public health,” said a team of researchers led by Leo Beletsky, who teaches law and health sciences at Northeastern University. “These arguments are reasonable but are by no means certain to convince federal judges.”
Another 2008 legal commentary, by Michael Rayfield in the University of Chicago Law Review, said the law should be interpreted to apply only to a facility that “meaningfully contributes to the drug activity beyond simply providing a secluded location for it to occur.”
The law could be tested elsewhere. Seattle officials are deciding whether to equip a mobile van as a safe injection site. New York City is considering a proposal to operate one or more injection sites as a medical research program, an option that could sidestep the Crack House Statute but would still require approval from federal agencies.
New York would be following in the footsteps of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Sydney, where medical research programs eventually became government-run safe injection sites in two of the 10 nations that have legalized them.
In any event, as UC Hastings’ Cohen noted, U.S. courts have ruled on the application of the 1986 drug law in a variety of settings, but have not been asked to decide whether it applies to government-run injection centers.
“There seems to be considerable room for argument here,” Cohen said. “Not surprising given that none of these (federal) statutes was designed to deal with those who are in good faith trying to deal with the drug scourge.”
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Naked Intruder Arrested After Being Found Masturbating in Sleeping Girl’s Bedroom in Fontana
Police on Tuesday said they were searching for possible additional victims of a man accused of entering a Fontana home and masturbating in a 13-year-old girl’s bedroom.
Officers responded to the 14100 block of Stanislaus Court last Thursday after a resident called around 2:42 a.m. to report a male intruder in her home, according to a Fontana Police Department news release.
The woman told police that a naked man went into her teen daughter’s bedroom and started masturbating while she slept, the release stated.
The victim woke up to find the man hovering over her and screamed, causing the suspect to flee, according to police. He ran from the girl’s room, down the stairs and left the home.
Officers arrived at the home within minutes, but the man was gone by then.
However, they were able to obtain surveillance video from the residence that showed the naked man inside. At one point, he “looked directly into the camera and placed his finger over his lips as if signaling to be quiet,” the release said, describing what some of the footage showed.
Detectives quickly identified the suspect as 21-year-old Jonathan Emmanuel Ward of Fontana. He was arrested at his home in the 7000 block of Nebraska Street later that same day, authorities said.
When detectives interviewed Ward, they identified other potential victims — and believe there could be others who haven’t contacted police yet, according to the release.
Ward possibly focused on a dance studio in the Inland Empire, though they did not give the name or area where it was located. He allegedly “became infatuated with several young girls” at the studio, police said.
The suspect is accused of targeting girls through social media, using photos posted to their accounts to figure out where they lived.
“Ward would often enter the rear yards of the victim’s residence and on occasion, enter their homes when he would find an unlocked door,” the release stated.
He was booked into the West Valley Detention Center on suspicion of burglary, child annoyance and indecent exposure, according to inmate records.
Because of a similar arrest last year in Fontana, a $1 million bail enhancement was issued.
Police have scheduled a news conference for Wednesday morning where they are expected to release images and video of the suspect as they try to locate other possible victims.