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Tag: Legal proceedings

  • Kansas county agrees to pay $3 million over law enforcement raid on town newspaper

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    TOPEKA, Kan. — A rural Kansas county has agreed to pay a little more than $3 million and apologize over a law enforcement raid on a small-town weekly newspaper in August 2023 that sparked an outcry over press freedom.

    Marion County was among multiple defendants in five federal lawsuits filed by the Marion County Record’s parent company, the paper’s publisher, newspaper employees, a former Marion City Council member whose home also was raided, and the estate of the publisher’s 98-year-old mother, the paper’s co-owner, who died the day after the raid. An attorney for the newspaper, Bernie Rhodes, released a copy of the five-page signed agreement Tuesday.

    Eric Meyer, the paper’s editor and publisher, told The Associated Press he is hoping the size of the payment is large enough to discourage similar actions against news organizations in the future. Legal claims against the city and city officials have not been settled, and Meyer said he believes they will face a larger judgment though he doesn’t expect those claims to be resolved for some time.

    “The goal isn’t to get the money. The money is symbolic,” Meyer said. “The press has basically been under assault.”

    The raid triggered a national debate about press freedom focused on Marion, a town of about 1,900 people set among rolling prairie hills about 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan, lived with him and died of a heart attack that he blamed on the stress of the raid.

    Three days after the raid, the local prosecutor said there wasn’t enough evidence to justify it. Experts said Marion’s police chief at the time, Gideon Cody, was on legally shaky ground when he ordered the raid, and a former top federal prosecutor for Kansas suggested that it might have been a criminal violation of civil rights, saying: “I’d probably have the FBI starting to look.”

    Two special prosecutors who reviewed the raid and its aftermath said nearly a year later that the Record had committed no crimes before Cody led the raid, that the warrants signed by a judge contained inaccurate information from an “inadequate investigation” and the searches were not legally justified. Cody resigned as police chief in October 2023.

    Cody is scheduled to go to trial in February in Marion County on a felony charge of interfering with a judicial process, accused by the two special prosecutors of persuading a potential witness to withhold information from authorities when they later investigated his conduct. He had pleaded not guilty and did not respond to a text message Tuesday seeking comment about the county’s agreement.

    Attorneys for the city and the county and the county administrator did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

    Sheriff Jeff Soyez issued an apology that mentioned the Meyers by name, along with former council member Ruth Herbel and her husband.

    “The Sheriff’s Office wishes to express its sincere regrets to Eric and Joan Meyer and Ruth and Ronald Herbel for its participation in the drafting and execution of the Marion County Police Department’s search warrants on their homes and the Marion County Record,” the sheriff’s statement said.

    The Marion County Commission approved the agreement Monday after discussing it in private for 15 minutes.

    A search warrant tied the raid — which was led by Marion’s police chief — to a dispute between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner who had accused the Marion County Record of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record.

    Meyer has said he believed the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and issues played a role and that his newsroom had been examining the police chief’s past work history.

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  • South Carolina court rejects death row appeal days before execution

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina’s highest court has refused to stop the execution of a man who killed three people over five days more than 20 years ago while leaving taunting messages for police in the blood of one of his victims.

    Stephen Bryant, 44, is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Friday by firing squad at a Columbia prison.

    Lawyers for Bryant made a last ditch appeal arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother’s alcohol and drug use while pregnant.

    But the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected that appeal late Monday writing that even if Bryant’s defense had done more investigation into whether he had Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, it simply would have given a different reason for his problems while not changing the outcome of a death sentence.

    “By any stretch, (Bryant) demonstrated a high level of planning, decision making, and calculation,” the justices wrote in Monday’s unanimous decision.

    Bryant is being executed for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood.

    Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to as they stepped out of his truck to urinate over five days that terrorized Sumter County.

    In what may be their final appeal. Bryant’s lawyers said while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn’t detail how that abuse had affected his ability to conform to the law.

    Bryant’s lawyers said he didn’t get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.

    They also included what they said was newly uncovered evidence including a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist where Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.

    The justices sided with prosecutors who said the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural Sumter County east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

    Bryant can still ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won’t be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.

    Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.

    Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that’s often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

    Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

    Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.

    Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

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  • California Republicans sue over new US House map approved by voters

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    SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Republicans filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday to block a new U.S. House map that California voters decisively approved at the ballot.

    Proposition 50, backed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, is designed to help Democrats flip as many as five congressional House seats in the midterm elections next year. The lawsuit claims the map-makers improperly used race as a factor to favor Hispanic voters “without cause or evidence to justify it,” and asks the court to block the new boundaries ahead of the 2026 elections. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is funded by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

    California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during an election night press conference at a California Democratic Party office Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

    The Supreme Court has ruled that “states may not, without a compelling reason backed by evidence that was in fact considered, separate citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race,” the lawsuit says.

    There have been two analyses showing there were no voting rights problems that warranted the redrawing of the map, it adds.

    The complaint was filed by The Dhillon Law Group, the California-based firm started by Harmeet Dhillon, who is now an assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice.

    The lawsuit also alleges that state lawmakers and a mapmaking consultant admitted in public statements that they intentionally redrew some districts to have a Latino majority. In one of the press releases from state Democrats, lawmakers said that the new map “retains and expands Voting Rights Act districts that empower Latino voters” while making no changes to Black majority districts in the Oakland and Los Angeles areas, the lawsuit says.

    “The map is designed to favor one race of California voters over others,” Mike Columbo, whose plaintiffs include a state Republican lawmaker and 18 other voters, said at a news conference Wednesday. “This violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, and the right under the 15th Amendment.”

    Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, speaks to reporters during a press conference announcing a federal lawsuit challenging Proposition 50, Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

    Corrin Rankin, chairwoman of the California Republican Party, speaks to reporters during a press conference announcing a federal lawsuit challenging Proposition 50, Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

    The mapmaking consultant Paul Mitchell declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

    Newsom’s office said on a social media post that the state hasn’t reviewed the lawsuit but is confident the challenge will fail.

    “Good luck, losers,” the post reads.

    Democrats said the measure is their best chance to blunt Texas Republicans’ move to redraw their own maps to pick up five GOP seats at Trump’s urging.

    It’s unclear whether a three-judge panel convened to hear such cases would grant a temporary restraining order before Dec. 19, the date when candidates can start collecting voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. It’s essentially the first step in officially running in the 2026 midterm elections. Columbo said he’s hoping to get a decision in the upcoming weeks and predicted the case to reach the Supreme Court.

    Republicans have filed multiple lawsuits in California to block Democrats’ plan with little success so far.

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  • OpenAI faces 7 lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide, delusions

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    OpenAI is facing seven lawsuits claiming ChatGPT drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues.

    The lawsuits filed Thursday in California state courts allege wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter and negligence. Filed on behalf of six adults and one teenager by the Social Media Victims Law Center and Tech Justice Law Project, the lawsuits claim that OpenAI knowingly released GPT-4o prematurely, despite internal warnings that it was dangerously sycophantic and psychologically manipulative. Four of the victims died by suicide.

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    EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

    ___

    The teenager, 17-year-old Amaurie Lacey, began using ChatGPT for help, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco Superior Court. But instead of helping, “the defective and inherently dangerous ChatGPT product caused addiction, depression, and, eventually, counseled him on the most effective way to tie a noose and how long he would be able to “live without breathing.’”

    “Amaurie’s death was neither an accident nor a coincidence but rather the foreseeable consequence of OpenAI and Samuel Altman’s intentional decision to curtail safety testing and rush ChatGPT onto the market,” the lawsuit says.

    OpenAI called the situations “incredibly heartbreaking” and said it was reviewing the court filings to understand the details.

    Another lawsuit, filed by Alan Brooks, a 48-year-old in Ontario, Canada, claims that for more than two years ChatGPT worked as a “resource tool” for Brooks. Then, without warning, it changed, preying on his vulnerabilities and “manipulating, and inducing him to experience delusions. As a result, Allan, who had no prior mental health illness, was pulled into a mental health crisis that resulted in devastating financial, reputational, and emotional harm.”

    “These lawsuits are about accountability for a product that was designed to blur the line between tool and companion all in the name of increasing user engagement and market share,” said Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, in a statement.

    OpenAI, he added, “designed GPT-4o to emotionally entangle users, regardless of age, gender, or background, and released it without the safeguards needed to protect them.” By rushing its product to market without adequate safeguards in order to dominate the market and boost engagement, he said, OpenAI compromised safety and prioritized “emotional manipulation over ethical design.”

    In August, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that ChatGPT coached the California boy in planning and taking his own life earlier this year.

    “The lawsuits filed against OpenAI reveal what happens when tech companies rush products to market without proper safeguards for young people,” said Daniel Weiss, chief advocacy officer at Common Sense Media, which was not part of the complaints. “These tragic cases show real people whose lives were upended or lost when they used technology designed to keep them engaged rather than keep them safe.”

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  • Maryland sues Trump administration over location of FBI headquarters

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    ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Maryland officials sued President Donald Trump’s administration Thursday for blocking the previously-approved construction of new FBI headquarters just outside the nation’s capital.

    Gov. Wes Moore joined other Maryland leaders to criticize the plan to move the FBI’s headquarters several blocks from its current home in Washington to the Ronald Reagan Building complex, instead of to Greenbelt, Maryland, which had been selected by the Biden administration for a modern building after years of planning.

    The FBI announced the change over the summer after a yearslong battle over the location. But Moore, a Democrat, described that building as “too old, too small and too exposed.”

    “The big problem with the current FBI building is that it lacks the modern security provisions and protections that the bureau needs in 2025,” the governor said at a news conference with other Maryland officials.

    The suburban Washington location chosen by the Biden administration was selected over nearby Virginia following an intense competition between the two states.

    Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said the Trump administration illegally discarded years of planning by Congress.

    “What we’re really seeing is an administration that doesn’t like the decision Congress made, so they’re trying to undo it without going back to Congress,” Brown said. “That violates federal law. It violates congressional directives. It harms Marylanders who were promised jobs and opportunities. That’s why we took action.”

    Brown, a Democrat, said the Trump administration is “attempting to unlawfully reprogram and transfer over $1 billion in funds that Congress designated specifically for the Greenbelt project.”

    “They violated explicit congressional directives that limited site selection to the three authorized locations. They ignored federal requirements to consult with state and local government, and they acted arbitrarily and capriciously by abandoning years of careful planning without explanation or justification,” Brown said.

    In the federal lawsuit, Maryland is asking the court to “stop the unlawful selection of the Reagan Building, prevent the diversion of congressionally appropriated funds and ensure the Trump administration follows the law,” Brown said.

    The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit.

    U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks said the Greenbelt site was chosen after a thorough and transparent selection process that found it was “the site best for a new FBI headquarters that meets the Bureau’s security and mission needs.”

    “The Trump Administration has no grounds to ignore this selection, or redirect even one penny that Congress specifically appropriated for construction of the competitively selected site,” the senators said in a joint statement.

    Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy said building the headquarters in Greenbelt would be the largest economic development project in the history of the county, creating more than 7,500 jobs and add about $4 billion in economic benefit to the county and the state.

    The FBI’s current Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, was dedicated in 1975. Proponents of moving the headquarters have said the Brutalist-style building, where nets surround the facility to protect pedestrians from falling debris, has fallen into disrepair. Discussions have been underway for years to relocate it.

    The FBI and General Services Administration announced in a joint statement in July that moving the headquarters just a few blocks away to an existing property would avert the need to construct a brand-new building in suburban Washington, which they said would have taken years and been costly for taxpayers.

    The Reagan Building houses, among other tenants, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

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  • Lawyers for Stephen Bryant make final appeal over brain damage to stop South Carolina execution

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    COLUMBIA, S.C. — Lawyers for a man on South Carolina’s death row are trying to stop his execution later this month by arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother’s alcohol and drug use while pregnant.

    Stephen Bryant, 44, is being put to death for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood. Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to over five days that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.

    Attorneys for the state argue that the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural county east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

    But Bryant’s lawyers are arguing in a final appeal to the state Supreme Court that while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn’t detail how Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder had affected his ability to conform to the law.

    Bryant’s lawyers said he didn’t get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.

    They also submitted a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist wherein Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.

    Prosecutors have pushed back, saying Bryant’s attorneys shouldn’t be allowed to make a different case to keep him from being put to death after the first one failed.

    They argue that the number of crimes, their planning and Bryant’s lingering Tietjen’s home to desecrate his body, as well as taunting Tietjen’s wife and daughter over the phone, were deliberate acts of evil — not impulses from a broken brain.

    “Bryant was methodical, cunning, and took pleasure in deadly rampage including the gratuitous infliction of horror on Mr. Tietjen’s family,” they wrote in court papers.

    They said the only way the legal system could fail is to delay his Nov. 14 execution by firing squad.

    Beyond the appeal, Bryant can also ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won’t be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.

    Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.

    Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that’s often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

    Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

    Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.

    Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

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  • Epic Games and Google say they’re settling 5-year legal fight over Android app store

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    SAN FRANCISCO — Video game maker Epic Games has reached a “comprehensive settlement” with Google that could end its 5-year-old legal crusade targeting Google’s Play Store for Android apps.

    Epic and Google revealed the settlement agreement in a joint legal document they filed in a San Francisco federal court Tuesday.

    They said it “would allow the parties to put their disputes aside while making Android a more vibrant and competitive platform for users and developers.”

    Epic, which makes the hit online game Fortnite, won a victory over the summer when a federal appeals court upheld a jury verdict condemning Google’s Android app store as an illegal monopoly. The unanimous ruling cleared the way for a federal judge to enforce a potentially disruptive shake-up that’s designed to give consumers more choices.

    The specific terms of the settlement agreement remain under seal and must be approved by U.S. District Judge James Donato, but the two companies broadly outlined some of their agreements in their joint filing.

    They said the settlement closely follows Donato’s October 2024 ruling ordering Google to tear down the digital walls shielding its Android app store from competition. That included a provision that will require its app store to distribute rival third-party app stores so consumers can download them to their phones, if they so desire.

    Google had hoped to void those changes with an appeal, but the ruling issued in July by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a legal blow for the tech giant, which has been waylaid in three separate antitrust trials affecting different pillars of its internet empire.

    Epic Games filed lawsuits targeting Google’s Play Store as well as Apple’s iPhone app store in 2020 in an attempt to bypass exclusive payment processing systems that charged 15% to 30% commissions on in-app transactions. The settlement agreement proposed Tuesday calls for Google to limit those payments to between 9% and 20%, depending on the transaction.

    Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the settlement an “awesome proposal” in a social media post. A hearing is set for Thursday.

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  • Stability AI largely wins UK court battle against Getty Images over copyright and trademark

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    LONDON (AP) — Artificial intelligence company Stability AI mostly prevailed against Getty Images Tuesday in a British court battle over intellectual property.

    Seattle-based Getty had accused Stability AI of infringing its copyright and trademark by scraping 12 million images from its website, without permission, to train its popular image generator, Stable Diffusion.

    The closely followed case at Britain’s High Court was among the first in a wave of lawsuits involving generative AI as movie studios, authors and artists challenged tech companies’ use of their works to train AI chatbots.

    Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images. Tuesday’s ruling provides some clarity but still leaves big unanswered questions over copyright and AI, experts said.

    According to the judge’s written ruling, Getty narrowly won its argument that Stability had infringed its trademark, but lost the rest of its case.

    Both sides claimed victory.

    “This is a significant win for intellectual property owners,” Getty Images said in a statement.

    Shares of Getty dipped 3% before the opening bell in the U.S.

    Stability, based in London, said it was pleased with the ruling.

    “This final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue,” Stability’s General Counsel Christian Dowell said.

    Getty had accused Stability of both primary and secondary copyright infringement.

    Legal experts said the first one involves the act of reproducing something without permission — similar to a dodgy factory churning out counterfeit Chanel handbags or pirated CDs — while the second involves importing those copies from another country.

    In this case, Getty said Stability’s use of its image library to train and develop Stable Diffusion’s AI model amounted to breach of primary copyright. Stability responded that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the AI model’s training technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon.

    During the three-week trial in June, Getty dropped its primary copyright allegations, in a sign that it didn’t think they would succeed. But it still pursued the secondary infringement claims. Even if Stability’s AI training happened outside the U.K., Getty said offering the Stable Diffusion service to British users amounted to importing unlawful copies of its images into the country.

    Justice Joanna Smith rejected Getty’s claims, ruling that Stable Diffusion’s AI didn’t infringe copyright because it doesn’t “store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so).”

    Getty also sued for trademark infringement because its watermark appeared on some of the images generated by Stability’s chatbot.

    The judge sided with Getty but added that the case only partially succeeded, and that her findings are “both historic and extremely limited in scope.”

    “While I have found instances of trademark infringement, I have been unable to determine that these were widespread,” she said.

    Experts said Getty’s move to drop part of its copyright case means AI training is still in legal limbo.

    “The decision leaves the U.K. without a meaningful verdict on the lawfulness of an AI model’s process of learning from copyright materials,” said Iain Connor, an intellectual property partner at law firm Michelmores.

    Smith said there was “very real societal importance” in deciding how to strike a balance between the creative and tech industries. But she added that the court can only rule on the “diminished” case that remained and couldn’t consider “issues that have been abandoned.”

    A Getty spokeswoman declined to say whether there would be an appeal.

    Getty is also pursuing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States against Stability. It originally sued in 2023 but refiled the case in a San Francisco federal court in August.

    The Getty lawsuits are among a slew of cases that highlight how the generative AI boom is fueling a clash between tech companies and creative industries.

    AI companies are now fighting more than 50 copyright lawsuits — so many that a tech industry lobby group has called on President Donald Trump for help stop the court fights, saying they threaten AI innovation.

    Among the cases, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by authors while a federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit from 13 authors against Meta Platforms. Warner Bros. has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, as have Disney and Universal in seperate lawsuits, alleging that its image generator creates copyrighted characters.

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    AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.

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  • 2 charged in Harvard Medical School explosion

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    BOSTON — Two men who were in the Boston area for college Halloween parties last weekend set off fireworks inside an empty Harvard Medical School building, authorities said Tuesday in announcing their arrests.

    Logan David Patterson, 18, and Dominick Frank Cardoza, 20, were taken into custody Tuesday on federal charges of conspiracy to damage by means of fire or an explosive.


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    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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    By MICHAEL CASEY and LEAH WILLINGHAM – Associated Press

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  • Stability AI largely wins court battle against Getty Images over copyright, trademark

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    LONDON — Artificial intelligence company Stability AI mostly prevailed against Getty Images Tuesday in a British court battle over intellectual property.

    Seattle-based Getty Images, which owns an extensive online library of images and video, had filed suit against Stability AI in a widely watched case that went to trial at Britain’s High Court in June.

    The case was among a wave of lawsuits filed by movie studios, authors and artists challenging tech companies’ use of their works to train AI chatbots.

    According to a judge’s ruling released Tuesday, Getty narrowly won its argument that Stability had infringed its trademark, but lost its claim for secondary infringement of copyright.

    Both sides claimed victory.

    “This is a significant win for intellectual property owners,” Getty Images said in a statement.

    Shares of Getty dipped 3% before the opening bell in the U.S.

    Stability said it was pleased with the ruling.

    “This final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue,” Stability General Counsel Christian Dowell said.

    Getty argued that the development of Stability’s AI image maker, called Stable Diffusion, was a “brazen infringement” of its library of images “on a staggering scale.”

    While Getty accused Stability of infringing both its copyright and trademark, the company dropped its primary copyright allegations during the trial, indicating that it didn’t think its arguments would succeed.

    Getty also sued for trademark infringement because its watermark appeared on some of the images generated by Stability’s chatbot.

    Justice Joanna Smith said in her ruling that Getty’s trademark claims “succeed (in part)” but that her findings are “both historic and extremely limited in scope.”

    Stability argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the AI model’s training technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon. It also argued that “only a tiny proportion” of the random outputs of its AI image-generator “look at all similar” to Getty’s works.

    Tech companies have long argued that “fair use” or “fair dealing” legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images.

    Getty is also still pursuing a claim of “secondary infringement” of copyright, saying that even if Stability’s AI training happened outside the U.K., offering the Stable Diffusion service to British users amounted to importing unlawful copies of its images into the country.

    Smith dismissed Getty’s argument, saying that Stable Diffusion’s AI didn’t infringe copyright because it doesn’t store “store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so).”

    Getty is also pursuing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States against Stability. It originally sued Getty in 2023 but refiled the case in a San Francisco federal court in August.

    The Getty lawsuits are among a slew of cases that highlight how the generative AI boom is fueling a clash between tech companies and creative industries.

    Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

    Separately, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from a group of 13 authors who made similar accusations against Facebook owner Meta Platforms in training its AI system Llama.

    Warner Bros. has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, alleging that its image generator enables subscribers to create AI-generated images and videos of copyrighted characters like Superman and Bugs Bunny.

    Disney and Universal also sued Midjourney earlier in a separate, joint copyright lawsuit, alleging the San Francisco-based startup pirated the libraries to generate and distribute unauthorized copies of famed characters like Darth Vader and the Minions.

    ___

    AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.

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  • Judge rejects plea deal for funeral home owner accused of stashing nearly 190 bodies

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    DENVER — A Colorado judge rejected the plea deal of a funeral home owner accused of stashing nearly 190 decaying bodies in a bug-infested building Monday after family members of the deceased argued that the deal’s 15- to 20-year sentence was too lenient.

    Carie Hallford and her husband, Jon Hallford, owned Return to Nature Funeral Home and are accused of dumping the bodies in a building in a rural town between 2019 and 2023, giving families fake ashes and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000.

    Jon and Carie Hallford both pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse last year, and State District Judge Eric Bentley has now rejected both of their plea deals after family members asked for a more severe punishment.

    A judge rejecting a plea deal is very unusual, and Carie Hallford can now either withdraw her guilty plea or continue without the deal, meaning she could get a higher sentence.

    Jon Hallford withdrew his guilty plea and is scheduled for trial.

    After the discovery of the bodies, families learned that their relatives’ remains weren’t in the urn or the ashes they ceremonially spread, but instead were languishing with nearly 190 other bodies. Some said they had nightmares of what their loved one must have looked like in that building; others wondered about their relatives’ souls.

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  • Driver convicted of murder after his truck plowed into July 4 BBQ in NYC, killing 4

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    NEW YORK — A driver who crashed his pickup truck into a July Fourth barbecue and killed four people was convicted Monday of murder in the 2024 wreck in a New York City park.

    A Manhattan judge delivered the verdict in Daniel Hyden’s trial, where victims’ relatives, survivors and witnesses described how a holiday gathering of friends and relatives suddenly became a horrific scene when the truck jumped a curb, tore through a chain-link fence and barreled into the group.

    Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a statement that said he hoped the conviction “can bring at least some measure of comfort” to the victims’ friends and families.

    Hyden, 46, of Monmouth, New Jersey, also was convicted of assault and aggravated vehicular homicide, Bragg’s office said.

    Text and email messages seeking comment were sent to Hyden’s attorney.

    Ana Morel, 43; Emily Ruiz, 30; Lucille Pinkney, 59; and a relative, Herman Pinkney, 38, were killed, and seven other people were injured in the crash in Corlears Hook Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

    Less than an hour earlier, Hyden was refused entry to a nearby party boat and clashed with security, according to testimony from police who responded to the boat scuffle. At that point, they walked Hyden to a park bench and departed.

    He subsequently got behind the wheel of a Ford F-150.

    Prosecutors argued that Hyden — who wrote a 2020 book about coping with addiction — was drunk, was speeding and didn’t hit the brakes until far too late, trapping four people beneath the truck. Prosecutors said he then tried to put the vehicle in reverse, but witnesses grabbed the keys to stop him.

    Hyden’s lawyer suggested that the man had a foot injury that complicated his driving.

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  • Trump administration pledges to speed some student loan forgiveness after lawsuit

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    NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has agreed to resume student loan forgiveness for an estimated 2.5 million borrowers who are enrolled in certain federal repayment plans following a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers.

    Under the agreement reached Friday between the teachers union and the administration, the Education Department will process loan forgiveness for those eligible in certain repayment plans that offer lower monthly payments based on a borrower’s earnings. The government had stopped providing forgiveness under those plans based on its interpretation of a different court decision.

    The agreement will also protect borrowers from being hit with high tax bills on debt due to be forgiven this year.

    “We took on the Trump administration when it refused to follow the law and denied borrowers the relief they were owed,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “Our agreement means that those borrowers stuck in limbo can either get immediate relief or finally see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

    The Education Department said the Trump administration is reviewing forgiveness programs to identify ones that were not affected by court rulings that blocked much of the Biden administration’s efforts to cancel student debt.

    “The Administration looks forward to continuing its work to simplify the student loan repayment process through implementation of the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the department said in a statement.

    Several forgiveness programs are included

    According to the deal, the Trump administration must cancel student debt for eligible borrowers enrolled in the following plans: income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, income-contingent repayment plans, Pay As You Earn (PAYE), and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) plans.

    If borrowers have made payments beyond what was needed for forgiveness, those payments will be reimbursed. The Education Department must also continue to process IDR and PSLF “buyback” applications. Balances forgiven before Dec. 31 will not be treated as taxable income, as they will in 2026 due to a recent change in tax law.

    The administration must also file progress reports every six months with the court to show the pace of application processing and loan forgiveness, according to the AFT.

    How many borrowers are waiting for forgiveness?

    An estimated 2.5 million borrowers in IDR plans will be affected by the agreement, and another 70,000 are waiting for forgiveness through the PSLF program.

    Even with the agreement in place, mass layoffs at the Education Department could factor into processing times for forgiveness, said Megan Walter, senior policy analyst at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

    If borrowers continue to make payments while their application is pending forgiveness, that will be refunded to them if they are successful, Walter said. “But keep really good records,” she said.

    What are the PSLF and buyback forgiveness programs?

    Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which has been in place since 2007, forgives federal student loans for borrowers who have worked at non-profit organizations or in public service after 120 payments, or 10 years. The Biden administration also created an option for borrowers to “buy back” months of payments they missed during forbearance or deferment in 2023, to allow more people to qualify for that forgiveness.

    To determine if you qualify for a buy-back under the PSLF program, consult this page at the Education Department.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.

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  • After mistaken deportation, Abrego Garcia fights smuggling charges

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    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose mistaken deportation helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, has hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday in the human smuggling case against him in Tennessee.

    U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw will hear evidence on motions from the defense asking him to dismiss the charges and throw out some of the evidence.

    Here’s what to know about the latest developments in the case:

    Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years. He immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager to join his brother, who had become a U.S. citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, where he faces danger from a gang that targeted his family.

    While he was allowed to live and work in the U.S. under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision, he was not given residency status. Earlier this year, he was mistakenly deported and held in a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.

    Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, Trump’s Republican administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked Crenshaw to dismiss them.

    Abrego Garcia is charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling, with prosecutors claiming he accepted money to transport within the United States people who were in the country illegally.

    The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.

    A Department of Homeland Security agent testified at an earlier hearing that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the U.S. Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring back Abrego Garcia.

    Abrego Garcia has asked Crenshaw to dismiss the smuggling charges on the grounds of “selective or vindictive prosecution.”

    In a recent ruling, Crenshaw found “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive” and said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern.” Crenshaw specifically cited a statement by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, on a Fox News Channel program, that seemed to suggest the Justice Department charged Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful-deportation case.

    The two sides have been sparring over whether senior Justice Department officials, including Blanche, can be required to testify in the case.

    Acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Rob McGuire has argued in court filings that it doesn’t matter what members of the Trump administration have said about Abrego Garcia.

    “The relevant prosecutorial decision-maker, the Acting U.S. Attorney, has explained on the record that this prosecution was not brought for vindictive or discriminatory reasons,” McGuire writes in a court filing. He adds that any public statements by senior Trump administration officials about Abrego Garcia reflect public safety concerns that are “plainly consistent with a legitimate motivation to prosecute him.”

    Another motion from Abrego Garcia asks the judge to suppress evidence in the case. It claims the 2022 traffic stop that ultimately led to the smuggling charges was illegal, so evidence from that stop should not be used at trial.

    In support, court filings say the state trooper who pulled him over stated that the speed limit was 65 mph (105 kph) when it was actually 70 mph (113 kph). The trooper accused him of driving at 75 mph (120 kph), but there is no record that the trooper used a radar gun or pacing to gauge the speed. Abrego Garcia said he was driving at 70 mph, correctly noting the speed limit.

    Attorneys for the government argue that the trooper made an honest mistake. The speed limit decreases to 65 mph about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) farther down the interstate. The attorneys also note that Abrego Garcia was driving in the left lane “consistent with an individual traveling in excess of the posted speed limit.” And the trooper, they said, had “no reason or motivation to manufacture a traffic violation against him.”

    Abrego Garcia currently can’t be deported to El Salvador thanks to the 2019 settlement that found he had a “well founded fear” of danger there. However, the Trump administration has said he cannot stay in the U.S. Over the past couple of months government officials have said they would deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and, most recently, Liberia.

    The administration’s deportation agreements with so-called third countries have been contested in court by advocacy groups, which have noted that some immigrants are being sent to countries with long histories of human rights violations. But in June, a divided Supreme Court allowed the swift removal of immigrants to countries other than their homelands and with minimal notice.

    Abrego Garcia sued the Trump administration in a Maryland court over his earlier deportation, and the judge in that case has temporarily barred his removal. If the judge decides to lift that order, government attorneys have said they are ready to deport him right away.

    Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia has applied for asylum in the U.S. in immigration court.

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  • Judge to weigh plea deal of funeral home owner accused of stashing decaying bodies

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    A Colorado funeral home owner accused of stashing nearly 190 decaying bodies in a bug-infested building took a plea deal last year for abusing corpses, but on Monday, family members of the deceased will argue that the deal’s 15- to 20-year sentence isn’t enough.

    Carie Hallford and her husband, Jon Hallford, owned Return to Nature Funeral Home and are accused of piling the bodies in the building in a rural town between 2019 and 2023, giving families fake ashes and defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000.

    Families, who believed they had honored their loved ones’ wishes with a cremation, learned that their son’s, husband’s or mother’s remains weren’t in the urn or the ashes they ceremonially spread, but instead languishing with nearly 190 other bodies.

    The scene inside the building in Penrose, Colorado, about a two-hour drive south of Denver, was horrific, officials said. Decomposition fluid covered the floor, bugs swarmed and bodies were stacked atop each other in various states of decay — some had been there for four years.

    Last year, both Jon and Carie Hallford pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse, but State District Judge Eric Bentley rejected Jon Hallford’s plea deal in August after victims argued the sentencing was too lenient. After that, Jon Hallford withdrew his guilty plea, and he is scheduled for trial.

    Now, Carie Hallford’s plea deal will face victims’ objections. It’s unclear if the judge will accept or reject the deal on Monday, or at a later date.

    Both Hallfords also admitted in federal court to defrauding the U.S. Small Business Administration out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era aid and taking payments from customers for cremations the funeral home never did. Officials said the two spent lavishly, buying a GMC Yukon, laser body sculpting, vacations, jewelry and cryptocurrency.

    After pleading guilty in federal court, Jon Hallford was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Carie Hallford’s sentencing in the federal case is scheduled for December.

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  • AI song generator Udio offers brief window for downloads after Universal settlement upsets users

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    Artificial intelligence song generation platform Udio said it would give its frustrated users 48 hours starting Monday to download their songs before the company shifts to a new business model to comply with a legal settlement.

    The short reprieve comes after Udio on Wednesday said it had settled copyright infringement claims brought by Universal Music, a label with artists including Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake and Kendrick Lamar.

    AI companies are now fighting so many copyright lawsuits that a tech industry lobby group, the Chamber of Progress, last week called on President Donald Trump to sign an executive order directing federal attorneys “to intervene in legal cases” to defend the industry’s practice of building generative AI tools by feeding them on copyrighted works.

    Citing more than 50 pending federal cases, the group asked for help stopping court fights leading to “potentially company-killing penalties” that threaten AI innovation. But artists have warned that AI tools built on their works also threaten their livelihoods.

    In the biggest settlement so far, AI company Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion — or $3,000 per book — to settle claims from authors who alleged the company illegally pirated nearly half a million of their works to train its chatbot.

    Udio and Universal didn’t disclose the financial terms of their new music licensing agreements. They also said they will team up on a new streaming platform.

    As part of the agreement, Udio immediately stopped allowing people to download songs they’ve created, which sparked a backlash and apparent exodus among paying users.

    “We know the pain it causes to you,” Udio later said in a post on Reddit’s Udio forum, where users were venting about feeling betrayed by the platform’s surprise move and complained that it limited what they could do with their music.

    Udio said it still must stop downloads as it transitions to a new streaming platform next year. But over the weekend, it said it will give people 48 hours starting at 11 a.m. Eastern time Monday to keep their “past creations.”

    “Udio is a small company operating in an incredibly complex and evolving space, and we believe that partnering directly with artists and songwriters is the way forward,” said Udio’s post.

    The settlement deal was the music industry’s first since Universal, along with Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Records, sued Udio and another AI song generator, Suno, last year over copyright infringement.

    Udio and Suno pioneered AI song generation technology, which can spit out new songs based on prompts typed into a chatbot-style text box. Users, who don’t need musical talent, can merely request a tune in the style of, for example, classic rock, 1980s synth-pop or West Coast rap.

    Record labels have accused the platforms of exploiting the recorded works of artists without compensating them.

    In its lawsuit filed against Udio last year, Universal sought to show how specific AI-generated songs made on Udio closely resembled Universal-owned classics like Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and holiday favorites like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “Jingle Bell Rock.”

    A musician-led group, the Artist Rights Alliance, said Friday that the Universal-Udio settlement represents a positive step in creating a “legitimate AI marketplace” but raised questions about whether independent artists, session musicians and songwriters will be sufficiently protected from AI practices that present an “existential threat” to their careers.

    “Licensing is the only version of AI’s future that doesn’t result in the mass destruction of art and culture,” the group said. “But this promise must be available to all music creators, not just to major corporate copyright holders.”

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  • Turkish court sentences hotel owner and 10 others to life for deadly fire that killed 78

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    ANKARA, Turkey — A Turkish court on Friday sentenced the owner of a ski resort hotel and 10 others to life in prison after convicting them of severe negligence in connection with a deadly fire that swept through the property, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

    The blaze hit the 12-story Grand Kartal Hotel at the Kartalkaya ski resort in the province of Bolu on Jan. 21 during the winter school break, killing 78 people and injuring 133 others. A total of 34 children taking family vacations were among the victims.

    The court convicted hotel owner Halit Ergul, along with his wife, two daughters, hotel managers, a deputy mayor and a deputy fire chief of negligence with “probable intent to kill.” They were each sentenced to life imprisonment for the deaths of the children, and received an additional 25 years in prison for the 44 other fatalities.

    The defendants, who have rejected responsibility for the deaths, were expected to appeal the decision. The courtroom broke into applause after the verdicts were read, with families welcoming the sentence, Haberturk news channel reported.

    The disaster forced terrified guests and hotel staff to leap from windows or dangle bedsheets to escape rooms engulfed in smoke and flames. It sent shockwaves across Turkey, sparking widespread calls for accountability over negligence and safety violations.

    Family members and friends of the victims staged demonstrations outside the courthouse during each hearing, holding up posters of their loved ones and demanding justice.

    According to the indictment, the fire began at 3:17 a.m. when a spark from an electric grill ignited a garbage bin and ruptured a liquefied petroleum gas hose, triggering the blaze. Staff noticed the flames seven minutes later, but within two minutes, the fire had spread beyond control. Air from an open door accelerated the flames, which quickly engulfed the wooden ceiling.

    Poor safety measures — including lack of smoke extraction, faulty alarms, inadequate staff training and missing sprinkler systems — allowed fumes to fill upper floors. Stairwells and elevator shafts acted like chimneys, and the absence of emergency lighting, signage and alternative exits prevented the safe evacuation of the hotel’s 238 guests, the indictment said.

    The hotel first opened in 1999, and has been operated by Ergul’s company since 2007.

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  • Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs seeks speedy appeals court hearing while he serves a 4-year sentence

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    NEW YORK — Hip-hop producer Sean “Diddy” Combs wants a federal appeals court to quickly consider the legality of his conviction on prostitution-related charges and his more than four-year prison sentence.

    His lawyers filed papers with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday, asking that oral arguments in his appeal occur in April.

    The lawyers noted that Combs has already served 14 months of his 50-month sentence and that he may earn reductions in time behind bars because of his participation in a substance abuse treatment program and a program established by the First Step Act to improve an inmate’s return to society.

    Combs wants his appeal to be considered soon enough that he can benefit from a reduction of time spent in prison if the appeals court reverses his conviction, his lawyers said.

    Combs, 55, was convicted in July of flying his girlfriends and male sex workers around the country to engage in drug-fueled sexual encounters in multiple places over many years. However, he was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering charges that could have put him behind bars for life.

    Apologetic at his sentencing for what he described as his “disgusting, shameful” behavior, the Bad Boy Records founder was sentenced to four years and two months in prison by a judge who praised the courage of the women who testified against him.

    Combs is scheduled to be released from prison on May 8, 2028, assuming he gets credit for good behavior behind bars. He has been incarcerated since his arrest in September 2024, when he was taken into custody at a Manhattan hotel.

    In a letter to the judge before he was sentenced, Combs said he has gone through a “spiritual reset” in jail and was “committed to the journey of remaining a drug free, non-violent and peaceful person.”

    His lawyers told the judge that Combs’ arrest and conviction have destroyed his businesses, forcing the layoffs of more than 100 employees who struggled to find new jobs because of their past association with the music mogul.

    He also still faces dozens of lawsuits filed against him since his arrest.

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  • A man who spent 43 years in prison before his conviction was overturned now faces deportation

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    PHILADELPHIA — After waiting more than four decades to clear his name in a friend’s 1980 killing, Subramanyam Vedam was set to walk free from a Pennsylvania prison this month.

    Vedam and Thomas Kinser were the 19-year-old children of Penn State University faculty. Vedam was the last person seen with Kinser and was twice convicted of killing him, despite a lack of witnesses or motive.

    In August, a judge threw out the conviction after Vedam’s lawyers found new ballistics evidence that prosecutors had never disclosed.

    As his sister prepared to bring him home on Oct. 3, the thin, white-haired Vedam was instead taken into federal custody over a 1999 deportation order. The 64-year-old, who legally came to the U.S. from India when he was 9 months old, now faces another daunting legal fight.

    Amid the Trump Administration’s focus on mass deportation, Vedam’s lawyers must persuade an immigration court that a 1980s drug conviction should be outweighed by the years he wrongly spent in prison. For a time, immigration law allowed people who had reformed their lives to seek such waivers. Vedam never pursued it then because of the murder conviction.

    “He was someone who’s suffered a profound injustice,” said immigration lawyer Ava Benach. “(And) those 43 years aren’t a blank slate. He lived a remarkable experience in prison.”

    Vedam earned several degrees behind bars, tutored hundreds of fellow inmates and went nearly half a century with just a single infraction, involving rice brought in from the outside.

    His lawyers hope immigration judges will consider the totality of his case. The administration, in a brief filed Friday, opposes the effort. So Vedam remains at an 1,800-bed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in central Pennsylvania.

    “Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email about the case.

    After his initial conviction was thrown out, Vedam faced an unusual set of questions at his 1988 retrial.

    “Mr. Vedam, where were you born?” Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar asked. “How frequently would you go back to India?

    “During your teenage years, did you ever get into meditation?”

    Gopal Balachandran, the Penn State law professor who won the reversal, believes the questions were designed to alienate him from the all-white jury, which returned a second guilty verdict.

    The Vedams were among the first Indian families in the area known as “Happy Valley,” where his father had come as a postdoctoral fellow in 1956. An older daughter was born in State College, but “Subu,” as he was known, was born when the family was back in India in 1961.

    They returned to State College for good before his first birthday, and became the family that welcomed new members of the Indian diaspora to town.

    “They were fully engaged. My father loved the university. My mother was a librarian, and she helped start the library,” said the sister, Saraswathi Vedam, 68, a midwifery professor in Vancouver, British Columbia.

    While she left for college in Massachusetts, Subu became swept up in the counterculture of the late 1970s, growing his hair long and dabbling in drugs while taking classes at Penn State.

    One day in December 1980, Vedem asked Kinser for a ride to nearby Lewisburg to buy drugs. Kinser was never seen again, although his van was found outside his apartment. Nine months later, hikers found his body in a wooded area miles away.

    Vedam was detained on drug charges while police investigated, and was ultimately charged with murder. He was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to life without parole. To resolve the drug case, he pleaded no contest to four counts of selling LSD and a theft charge. The 1988 retrial offered no reprieve from his situation.

    Although the defense long questioned the ballistics evidence in the case, the jury, which heard that Vedam had bought a .25-caliber gun from someone, never heard that an FBI report suggested the bullet wound was too small to have been fired from that gun. Balachandran only found that report as he dug into the case in 2023.

    After hearings on the issue, a Centre County judge threw out the conviction and the district attorney decided this month not to retry the case.

    Benach, the immigration lawyer, often represents clients trying to stay in the U.S. despite an earlier infraction. Still, she finds the Vedam case “truly extraordinary” given the constitutional violations involved.

    “Forty-three years of wrongful imprisonment more than makes up for the possession with intent to distribute LSD when he was 20 years old,” she said.

    Vedam could spend several more months in custody before the Board of Immigration Appeals decides whether to reopen the case. ICE officials, in a brief Friday, said the clock ran out years ago.

    “He has provided no evidence nor argument to show he has been diligent in pursuing his rights as it pertains to his immigration status,” Katherine B. Frisch, an assistant chief counsel, wrote.

    Saraswathi Vedam is saddened by the latest delay, but said her brother remains patient.

    “He, more than anybody else, knows that sometimes things don’t make sense,” she said. “You have to just stay with stay the course and keep hoping that truth and justice and compassion and kindness will win.”

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  • 2 men face sentencing in plot to kill Iranian American journalist

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    NEW YORK — A plot to assassinate Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad at her Brooklyn home came “chillingly near success,” prosecutors told a judge who will sentence two purported Russian mobsters.

    Prosecutors are seeking 55-year prison terms for Rafat Amirov, 46, and Polad Omarov, 41, at their sentencing on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court. Prosecutors said Amirov, of Iran, and Omarov, of Georgia, were crime bosses in the Russian mob.

    Lawyers for Amirov say he should not spend more than 13 years behind bars. Omarov’s attorneys called for a 10-year prison sentence.

    The men were convicted in a two-week March trial that featured dramatic testimony from a hired gunman and Alinejad, an author, activist and contributor to Voice of America.

    Alinejad said in a message to supporters Tuesday that she planned to be in court to face the men prosecutors say were high-ranking members of the Gulici, a faction of the Russian Mob that carried out murders, assaults, extortions, kidnappings, robberies, and arsons in the United States and abroad.

    “They’ll receive their sentence, and I’ll speak my truth in my impact statement,” she said.

    Alinejad, 49, led online campaigns encouraging women in Iran to record videos of themselves exposing their hair to protest edicts for head coverings in public.

    Prosecutors said Iranian intelligence officials first plotted in 2020 and 2021 to kidnap Alinejad in the U.S. and move her to Iran to silence her criticism.

    Iran offered $500,000 in a July 2022 attempt to kill Alinejad after efforts to harass, smear and intimidate her failed, prosecutors said.

    Prosecutors said in court documents that Alinejad was targeted by the Iranian government after she “dedicated her life to exposing the cruelty, corruption, and tyranny of the Islamic Republic.”

    When Alinejad, Amirov and Omarov were offered the $500,000 bounty, they “appeared completely incurious about who they were plotting to murder and why,” prosecutors wrote.

    “Amirov and Omarov were interested in one thing only: their own power and wealth,” they said.

    Prosecutors said the plot “came chillingly near success,” interrupted only by the luck that Alinejad was out of town while a hired gunman tried persistently to locate her and because of the “diligence and tenacity of American law enforcement, which detected and disrupted the plot in time.”

    Lawyers for Amirov said in court documents ahead of sentencing that no one was physically hurt and their client’s involvement in the plot was “minimal, if not non-existent.”

    Lawyers for Omarov said he deserved leniency because his life had been threatened after a relative who was a reputed leader of the “thieves-in-law” criminal organization in Russia and Azerbaijan was killed in 2020. Omarov was extradited to the U.S. in February 2024, a year after he was detained in the Czech Republic.

    Alinejad testified at the March trial that she came to the United States in 2009 after she was banned from covering Iran’s disputed presidential election and the newspaper where she worked was shut down.

    Establishing herself in New York City, she built an online audience of millions and launched her “My Stealthy Freedom” campaign to encourage Iranian women to expose their hair when the morality police were not around.

    Prosecutors have kept the investigation open. In October 2024, they announced charges against a senior Iranian military official and three others, none of whom are in custody.

    Alinejad said she has moved nearly two dozen times since the assassination plot was discovered.

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