cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9769214

An Ohio woman who had sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage and passing her nonviable fetus in her bathroom now faces a criminal charge, her attorney told CNN.

Brittany Watts, 33, of Warren, has been charged with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show.

“Ms. Watts suffered a tragic and dangerous miscarriage that jeopardized her own life. Rather than focusing on healing physically and emotionally, she was arrested and charged with a felony,” her attorney, Traci Timko, told CNN in an email.

…

Though a coroner’s office report said the fetus was not viable and had died in the womb, Watts’ case highlights the extent to which prosecutors can charge a woman whose pregnancy has ended – whether by abortion or miscarriage.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11214131

At least 1,201 people were killed in 2022 by law enforcement officers, about 100 deaths a month, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit research group that tracks police killings. ProPublica examined the 101 deaths that occurred in June 2022, a time frame chosen because enough time had elapsed that investigations could reasonably be expected to have concluded. The cases involved 131 law enforcement agencies in 34 states.

In 79 of those deaths, ProPublica confirmed that body-worn camera video exists. But more than a year later, authorities or victims’ families had released the footage of only 33 incidents.

Philadelphia signed a $12.5 million contract in 2017 to equip its entire police force with cameras. Since then, at least 27 people have been killed by Philadelphia police, according to Mapping Police Violence, but in only two cases has body-camera video been released to the public.

ProPublica’s review shows that withholding body-worn camera footage from the public has become so entrenched in some cities that even pleas from victims’ families don’t serve to shake the video loose.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11111745

The 33-year-old Watts, who had not shared the news of her pregnancy even with her family, made her first prenatal visit to a doctor’s office behind Mercy Health-St. Joseph’s Hospital in Warren, a working-class city about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Cleveland.

The doctor said that, while a fetal heartbeat was still present, Watts’ water had broken prematurely and the fetus she was carrying would not survive. He advised heading to the hospital to have her labor induced, so she could have what amounted to an abortion to deliver the nonviable fetus. Otherwise, she would face “significant risk” of death, according to records of her case.

That was a Tuesday in September. What followed was a harrowing three days entailing: multiple trips to the hospital; Watts miscarrying into, and then flushing and plunging, a toilet at her home; a police investigation of those actions; and Watts, who is Black, being charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s a fifth-degree felony punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8092354

Republicans in Ohio want to undermine the will of voters who approved a measure enshrining reproductive freedom into the state’s constitution

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8181951

It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk He’s telling us what he will do to his political enemies if he’s president again. Is anyone listening?

I feel pretty safe in saying that we can now stop giving him the benefit of that particular doubt. His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7834962

Highlights: Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7727056

Two South Carolina jails where incarcerated people have died violently at the hands of employees or others held behind bars are under federal investigation, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday.

Officials said the civil rights probes will examine the conditions at detention centers in the southern state’s urban hubs of Charleston and Columbia. They cited the deaths of a mentally ill Black man stunned 10 times by two jail employees who kneeled on his back until he stopped breathing and another man beaten to death by five attackers locked in cells with unsecured doors.

“People confined in local jails across our country do not abandon their civil and constitutional rights at the jailhouse door,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke told reporters Thursday. “Incarceration should never carry with it the risk of death or serious harm.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7728425

The attorney hired by the city of Marion following the raids on a Kansas newsroom has blocked access to records that should be publicly available under state law.

The KSHB 41 News I-Team requested former police chief Gideon Cody's text messages, among other public officials in Marion.

In an email on Oct. 31, Jennifer Hill, an attorney hired by the city following the raids denied the request by writing: "The City has no custody over personal cell phones and KORA provides no enforcement mechanism to obtain text messages from personal cell phones. As such, obtaining text messages from the personal property of the listed individuals would place an unreasonable burden on the City and, to the extent any such records even exist, the City is under no obligation to produce such records."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7802947

Early in their roughly nine-minute encounter, the 45-year-old, who said she’d been visiting someone at the address, told the officer she was looking for her misplaced keys, footage from his body-worn camera shows. Then the woman, Teresa Gomez, and the officer discussed why she and the passenger were parked outside a public housing complex – a place he said the passenger was not supposed to be, his bodycam video shows; she was unaware of any visitor rules, she said several times.

After she was asked repeatedly to get out of her car, Gomez stood outside it for a while, answering some of the officer’s questions, the video shows. Her passenger was never asked to get out or questioned in a similar way.

The grandmother eventually found her car keys and, with the officer’s permission, sat back in the driver’s seat, according to the video and a federal lawsuit her family filed last week against the city, the police chief and three members of the police force.

Then a half-minute later, she engaged the engine and, with her car door still open, shifted into reverse, pulled back, then put it into drive, the video shows.

The officer, Felipe Hernandez, three times shouted, “Stop!”

Then, he fired multiple times, the video shows.

A fifth-grader reported being bullied by his principal. Five days later, he was handcuffed and detained.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/news@lemmy.world/t/571240

Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6786820

A new lawsuit filed in federal court last month alleges that the Baton Rouge Police Department ran a “torture warehouse” where members of its Street Crimes Unit strip searched, beat, and otherwise humiliated people and then released them, often without their being charged with a crime. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, the FBI opened a civil rights investigation into the allegations of misconduct at the now-shuttered warehouse known as “the BRAVE Cave.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/6994755

Lubbock County, Texas, joins a group of other rural Texas counties that have voted to ban women from using their roads to seek abortions.

This comes after six cities and counties in Texas have passed abortion-related bans, out of nine that have considered them. However, this ordinance makes Lubbock the biggest jurisdiction yet to pass restrictions on abortion-related transportation.

During Monday's meeting, the Lubbock County Commissioners Court passed an ordinance banning abortion, abortion-inducing drugs and travel for abortion in the unincorporated areas of Lubbock County, declaring Lubbock County a "Sanctuary County for the Unborn."

The ordinance is part of a continued strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade as the ordinances are meant to bolster Texas' existing abortion ban, which allows private citizens to sue anyone who provides or "aids or abets" an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.

The ordinance, which was introduced to the court last Wednesday, was passed by a vote of 3-0 with commissioners Terence Kovar, Jason Corley and Jordan Rackler, all Republicans, voting to pass the legislation while County Judge Curtis Parrish, Republican, and Commissioner Gilbert Flores, Democrat, abstained from the vote.