METHUEN — Five years ago, Anthony Nunez-Romano faced five weapons charges in Lawrence District Court, four of which were felonies.
But for the 26-year-old Methuen resident now charged with murdering his mother, all five counts were dismissed in 2020, roughly a year after they were filed, court records reveal.
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SALEM — A Lynn man was arrested on three counts of distributing cocaine following a joint operation by Salem and Lynn police.
The Criminal Investigation Divisions of the Salem and Lynn police departments completed a lengthy joint investigation on Thursday with the arrest of Derrick Poe of 46 Mall St., Apartment 4, in Lynn on three counts of distributing a Class B substance.
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SALEM — A Lynn man was arrested on three counts of distributing cocaine following a joint operation by Salem and Lynn police last Thursday.
On Dec. 18, the Criminal Investigation Divisions (CID) of the Salem and Lynn police departments completed a lengthy joint investigation with the arrest of Derrick Poe of 46 Mall St., Apartment 4, in Lynn, on three counts of distributing a Class B substance.
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SALEM — A Lynn man was arrested on three counts of distributing cocaine following a joint operation by Salem and Lynn police last Thursday.
On Dec. 18, the Criminal Investigation Divisions (CID) of the Salem and Lynn police departments completed a lengthy joint investigation with the arrest of Derrick Poe of 46 Mall St., Apartment 4, in Lynn, on three counts of distributing a Class B substance.
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BOSTON — Sen. Ed Markey is renewing criticism of federal authorities for “inhumane” conditions at a Burlington ICE facility where people detained on immigration violations are held before being transferred to other locations.
In a letter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Boston acting Field Office Director David Wesling, Markey said after a meeting with him and other officials Dec. 11 he “continues to be alarmed by the allegations of overcrowding and inadequate conditions” at the Burlington facility, “as well as by ICE’s arrest dragnet.”
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WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Friday released 19 photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s private email server showing a collection of powerful men in politics, media and Hollywood in the convicted sex offender’s orbit.
The photographs — which were released without information on the timing, location or context of the events portrayed — do not reveal any wrongdoing or show sexual acts but offer more detail about Epstein’s well-known associations with prominent men.
The 19 images selected and released by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are a small slice of more than 95,000 photographs the committee received on Thursday from Epstein’s private estate, Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat in the committee, told reporters on Friday.
Garcia, of Long Beach, added that the release of the images is an exercise in transparency, and said it serves as an example of why Democrats want to keep the pressure on the Trump administration to release its Epstein files ahead of a Dec. 19 deadline mandated by a law passed by Congress in November.
“I think people should be able to make judgments on their own as to what they see in these photos,” Garcia said. “For us this is about transparency.”
Most of the images Democrats released on Friday further illustrate Epstein’s already well-known relationships with prominent men, many of whom have over the years faced questions about their ties to Epstein, who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019.
Some of the photos show Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump advisor, meeting with Epstein at an office; tech billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates standing by what appears to be Epstein’s private jet; former President Clinton with Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell; Epstein with filmmaker Woody Allen on a movie set; and, before he became president, Donald Trump with six unidentified women.
Other images show stand-alone images of sex toys and, in what appears to be an attempt at racy humor, a bowl filled with what a sign identifies as the “Trump condom” — condom packages emblazoned with a caricature of Trump and the words “I’M HUUUGE!”
An image released by a House committee shows former president Bill Clinton, center, with Jeffrey Epstein, right, and Ghislaine Maxwell, second from right.
(House Oversight Committee )
Trump has denied any involvement or knowledge of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations, but thousands of emails released last month have suggested the president may have known more about Epstein’s abuse than he had acknowledged.
Epstein was a convicted sex offender who is believed to have abused more than 200 women and girls. His longtime associate, Maxwell, is serving a 20-year sentence for her role in a sex-trafficking scheme to groom and sexually abuse underage girls with Epstein.
The 95,000 photographs released this week were turned over to the House committee in response to a set of subpoenas issued for records related to Epstein’s estate.
Garcia said Democrats on the panel are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release them to the public in the days and weeks ahead.
“These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world,” Garcia said. “We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all of the files, NOW.”
One of the images released by a House committee shows Stephen K. Bannon, left, with Jeffrey Epstein.
(House Oversight Committee )
Trump had tried to thwart the release of what have become commonly known as the “Epstein files” for several months but reversed course in November under growing pressure from his party.
The president then signed legislation that requires the Department of Justice to release its investigative files related to Epstein by Dec. 19. But his past resistance has led to skepticism among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who question whether the Justice Department may try to conceal information.
“The real test will be, will the Department of Justice release the files or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said in November. .
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters on Friday that if the Justice Department does not release its files by Dec. 19 it would be considered a crime.
“This is a new law with criminal implications if they don’t follow it,” Massie said.
Massie said he was “encouraged” by the Justice Department’s requests to unseal court records tied to the grand jury investigations into Epstein and Maxwell. Two judges granted the requests this week.
The Kentucky Republican said the Justice Department is required to release more than just the grand jury investigations, but also files that were not released to a grand jury.
“The FBI and DOJ probably have evidence that they chose not to take to the grand jury, because the evidence they are in possession of would implicate other people, not just Epstein or Maxwell,” Massie said. “What we want to see are the facts and evidence that the FBI and DOJ have never given to the grand jury.”
BOSTON — Immigrants would be allowed to sue federal authorities for “misconduct” under a proposal filed Monday by U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, which the Democrat named ostensibly after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The National Oversight and Enforcement of Misconduct Act, or NOEM Act, as filed Monday would update federal law to allow people “under federal immigration enforcement authority” to file lawsuits if they believe their “constitutional rights” have been violated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
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BURLINGTON — U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton is criticizing federal authorities for “inhumane” conditions at an ICE facility where people detained on immigration violations are held before being transferred to other locations.
On Monday, Moulton conducted an official “oversight” visit to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Burlington that included a tour of the building and meetings with ICE officials. The administrative building is one of 25 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operation facilities across the country.
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BOSTON — Beacon Hill lawmakers are moving to increase protections for health care workers in response to skyrocketing acts of violence against nurses and other hospital staff in recent years.
A proposal approved by the state House of Representatives last week would set new criminal charges specifically for violence and intimidation against health care workers and require hospitals and state public health officials to establish new standards for dealing with security risks at medical facilities.
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WASHINGTON — The Texas redistricting case now before the Supreme Court turns on a question that often divides judges: Were the voting districts drawn based on politics, or race?
The answer, likely to come in a few days, could shift five congressional seats and tip political control of the House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, who oversees appeals from Texas, put a temporary hold on a judicial ruling that branded the newly drawn Texas voting map a “racial gerrymander.”
The state’s lawyers asked for a decision by Monday, noting that candidates have a Dec. 8 deadline to file for election.
They said the judges violated the so-called Purcell principle by making major changes in the election map “midway through the candidate filing period,” and that alone calls for blocking it.
Texas Republicans have reason to be confident the court’s conservative majority will side with them.
“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote for a 6-3 majority last year in a South Carolina case.
That state’s Republican lawmakers had moved tens of thousands of Black voters in or out of newly drawn congressional districts and said they did so not because of their race but because they were likely to vote as Democrats.
In 2019, the conservatives upheld partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote, ruling that drawing election districts is a “political question” left to states and their lawmakers, not judges.
All the justices — conservative and liberal — say drawing districts based on the race of the voters violates the Constitution and its ban on racial discrimination. But the conservatives say it’s hard to separate race from politics.
For decades, the civil rights law has sometimes required states to draw one or more districts that would give Black or Latino voters a fair chance to “elect representatives of their choice.”
The Trump administration joined in support of Louisiana’s Republicans in October and claimed the voting rights law has been “deployed as a form of electoral race-based affirmative action” that should be ended.
If so, election law experts warned that Republican-led states across the South could erase the districts of more than a dozen Black Democrats who serve in Congress.
The Texas mid-decade redistricting case did not look to trigger a major legal clash because the partisan motives were so obvious.
In July, President Trump called for Texas Republicans to redraw the state map of 38 congressional districts in order to flip five seats to oust Democrats and replace them with Republicans.
At stake was control of the closely divided House after the 2026 midterm elections.
Gov. Greg Abbott agreed, and by the end of August, he signed into law a map with redrawn districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.
But last week federal judges, in a 2-1 decision, blocked the new map from taking effect, ruling that it appeared to be unconstitutional.
“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown in the opening of a 160-page opinion. “To be sure, politics played a role” but “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map.”
He said the strongest evidence came from Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. She had sent Abbott a letter on July 7 threatening legal action if the state did not dismantle four “coalition districts.”
This term, which was unfamiliar to many, referred to districts where no racial or ethnic group had a majority. In one Houston district that was targeted, 45% of the eligible voters were Black and 25% were Latino. In a nearby district, 38% of voters were Black and 30% were Latino.
She said the Trump administration views these as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” citing a recent ruling by the conservative 5th Circuit Court.
The Texas governor then cited these “constitutional concerns raised by the U.S. Department of Justice” when he called for the special session of the Legislature to redraw the state map.
Voting rights advocates saw a violation.
“They said their aim was to get rid of the coalition districts. And to do so, they had to draw new districts along racial lines,” said Chad Dunn, a Texas attorney and legal director of UCLA’s Voting Rights Project.
Brown, a Trump appointee from Galveston, wrote that Dhillon was “clearly wrong” in believing these coalition districts were unconstitutional, and he said the state was wrong to rely on her advice as basis for redrawing its election map.
He was joined by a second district judge in putting the new map on hold and requiring the state to use the 2021 map that had been drawn by the same Texas Republicans.
The third judge on the panel was Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee on the 5th Circuit Court, and he issued an angry 104-page dissent. Much of it was devoted to attacking Brown and liberals such as 95-year-old investor and philanthropist George Soros and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“In 37 years as a federal judge, I’ve served on hundreds of three-judge panels. This is the most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed,” Smith wrote. “The main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas.”
The “obvious reason for the 2025 redistricting, of course, is partisan gain,” Smith wrote, adding that “Judge Brown commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political.”
Most federal cases go before a district judge, and they may be appealed first to a U.S. appeals court and then the Supreme Court. Election-related cases are different. A three-judge panel weighs the facts and issues a ruling, which then goes directly to the Supreme Court to be affirmed or reversed.
Late Friday, Texas attorneys filed an emergency appeal and asked the justices to put on hold the decision by Brown.
The first paragraph of their 40-page appeal noted that Texas is not alone in pursuing a political advantage by redrawing its election maps.
“California is working to add more Democratic seats to its congressional delegation to offset the new Texas districts, despite Democrats already controlling 43 out of 52 of California’s congressional seats,” they said.
They argued that the “last-minute disruption to state election procedures — and resulting candidate and voter confusion —demonstrates” the need to block the lower court ruling.
Election law experts question that claim. “This is a problem of Texas’ own making,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
The state opted for a fast-track, mid-decade redistricting at the behest of Trump.
On Monday, Dunn, the Texas voting rights attorney, responded to the state’s appeal and told the justices they should deny it.
“The election is over a year away. No one will be confused by using the map that has governed Texas’ congressional elections for the past four years,” he said.
“The governor of Texas called a special session to dismantle districts on account of their racial composition,” he said, and the judges heard clear and detailed evidence that lawmakers did just that.
In recent election disputes, however, the court’s conservatives have frequently invoked the Purcell principle to free states from new judicial rulings that came too close to the election.
Granting a stay would allow Texas to use its new GOP friendly map for the 2026 election.
The justices may then choose to hear arguments on the legal questions early next year.
SALEM — Now that a wounded North Andover police officer has a 2026 trial date, her defense team is turning its attention to the culture of the North Andover Police Department and what transpired before the shooting nearly five months ago.
A jury trial has been set for Feb. 9 in Essex County Superior Court following a trial assignment conference on Tuesday for Kelsey Fitzsimmons, 29, who was shot by a responding officer and colleague in her North Andover home after being served with an abuse prevention order filed by her then-fiance, North Andover firefighter Justin Aylaian.
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BOSTON — A coalition of gun rights groups are asking a federal judge to strike down Massachusetts’ ban on the sale of handguns to anyone age 18 to 20 in response to a federal appeals court ruling that overturned a federal ban.
In a filing in U.S. District Court, the Las Vegas-based Firearms Policy Coalition and other groups ask the judge to grant an injunction blocking the state’s age-based prohibitions from being enforced. The groups argue that the 18 to 20 age group is protected by the Second Amendment and that there is “historical tradition” supporting the states restrictions.
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BOSTON — Beacon Hill lawmakers are moving to increase protections for health care workers in response to skyrocketing acts of violence against nurses and other hospital staff in recent years.
A proposal approved by the state House of Representatives last week would set new criminal charges specifically for violence and intimidation against health care workers and require hospitals and state public health officials to establish new standards for dealing with security risks at medical facilities.
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BOSTON — With her voter-approved audit of the Legislature stalled, State Auditor Diana DiZoglio is leading a new effort to pry open Beacon Hill’s secret legislative process.
The Methuen Democrat has launched a ballot initiative to make the House of Representatives, Senate and the governor’s office subject to the state’s public records law and she said supporters have cleared a major hurdle to the 2026 ballot by collecting more than 100,000 signatures from registered voters.
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In the days and weeks after the 2020 election, partisans across the country used lies and deceit to try to defraud the American people and steal the White House.
But it’s only old news if you believe that justice and integrity carry an expiration date, wrongdoing is fine with the passage of enough time and the foundational values of our country and its democracy — starting with fair and honest elections — matter only to the extent they help your political side prevail.
It bears repeating: “What we’re talking about here is an attempt to overturn the outcome of a presidential election,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, who heads the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy think tank at New York University. “If people can engage in that kind of conduct without consequence or accountability, then we have to worry about it happening again.”
Which is why punishment and deterrence are so important.
Last week, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the criminal case against six Republicans who signed certificates falsely claiming Trump had won the state’s electoral votes. Those charged include Nevada’s GOP chairman, Michael McDonald, and the state’s representative on the Republican National Committee, Jim DeGraffenreid.
The ruling focused on a procedural matter: whether the charges should have been brought in Douglas County, where the fake certificates were signed in the state capital — Carson City — or in Clark County, where they were submitted at a courthouse in Las Vegas. A lower court ruled the charges should have been brought in Douglas County and dismissed the case. The high court reversed the decision, allowing the prosecution on forgery charges to proceed.
As well it should. Let a jury decide.
Of course, the Nevada Six and other phony electors are but small fry. The ringleader and attempted-larcenist-in-chief — Donald “Find Me 11,780 Votes” Trump — escaped liability by winning the 2024 election.
But it was further evidence of his abundant contempt for the rule of law. (Just hours after taking office, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 defendants — including some who brutalized cops with pepper spray and wooden and metal poles — who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.)
Efforts around the country to prosecute even those low-level schemers, cheaters and 2020 election miscreants have produced mixed results.
In Michigan, a judge threw out the criminal case against 15 phony electors, ruling the government failed to present sufficient evidence that they intended to commit fraud.
In New Mexico and Pennsylvania, fake electors avoided prosecution because their certification came with a caveat. It said the documentation was submitted in the event they were recognized as legitimate electors. The issue was moot once Trump lost his fight to overturn the election, though some in Trump’s orbit hoped the phony certifications would help pressure Pence.
Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, looks askance at many of the cases that prosecutors have brought, suggesting the ballot box — rather than a courtroom — may be the better venue to litigate the matter.
“There’s a fine line between what’s distasteful conduct and what’s criminal conduct,” Muller said. “I don’t have easy answers about which kinds of things should or shouldn’t be prosecuted in a particular moment, except to say if it’s something novel” — like these 2020 cases — “having a pretty iron-clad legal theory is pretty essential if you’re going to be prosecuting people for engaging in this sort of political protest activity.”
Other cases grind on.
Three fake electors are scheduled for a preliminary hearing on forgery charges next month in Wisconsin. Fourteen defendants — including Giuliani and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — face charges in Georgia. In Arizona, the state attorney general must decide this week whether to move forward with a case against 11 people after a judge tossed out an indictment because of how the case was presented to grand jurors.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
The justices turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.
Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling.
Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who are on the court today.
Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not on the court in 2015, has said that there are times when the court should correct mistakes and overturn decisions, as it did in the 2022 case that ended a constitutional right to abortion.
But Barrett has suggested recently that same-sex marriage might be in a different category than abortion because people have relied on the decision when they married and had children.
Davis drew national attention to eastern Kentucky’s Rowan County when she turned away same-sex couples, saying her faith prevented her from complying with the high court ruling. She defied court orders to issue the licenses until a federal judge jailed her for contempt of court in September 2015.
She was released after her staff issued the licenses on her behalf but removed her name from the form. The Kentucky legislature later enacted a law removing the names of all county clerks from state marriage licenses.
President Trump said Sunday that most Americans would receive a $2,000 dividend payment as a result of his administration’s tariffs levied against foreign countries.
Trump announced the potential payments on his Truth Social platform, calling opponents of his tariffs “FOOLS” in a post.
“We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion,” the president wrote. “Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
Congressional approval would likely be necessary to provide the payments. There is no specific plan at this point for the dividends, which could cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars.
The post by Trump comes after a difficult week for the president.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that questions whether Trump exceeded his authority in levying tariffs against foreign nations without congressional support. Most of the justices on the bench, including conservative justices such as Chief Justice John G. Roberts, appeared skeptical of the president’s authority under the Constitution.
Most of the justices seemed to take the view that the Constitution gives Congress the power to raise taxes, duties and tariffs, not the president.
Since taking office, Trump has implemented steep tariffs on specific goods as well as particularly high tariffs on goods from specific countries such as India and Brazil.
Trump said in remarks on Thursday at the White House that revocation of the tariffs would be “devastating” for the U.S.
The New Hampshire Department of Justice is reviewing Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald and the personnel moves that netted his former assistant a $50,000 payout.
NHPR’s Todd Bookman broke the story last month that Dianne Martin was laid off from her job as the administrative director at the judicial branch in April, and then hired two days later by the Supreme Court as the general counsel to the Office of Bar Admissions. During her brief unemployment, Martin cashed out her accrued employment benefits, including unused vacation and sick time, valued at more than $50,000.
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