UNITED STATES

A Texas board has rejected a clemency request for a man facing execution over a case of “shaken baby syndrome” despite doubts over the evidence in the case. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted against Robert Roberson’s death sentence being commuted to life in prison or that his execution, set for Thursday, be delayed. Roberson, 57, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection for the 2002 killing of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, in the East Texas city of Palestine. Roberson has long maintained his innocence.The parole board’s decision came a day after an East Texas judge last week denied requests by Roberson’s attorneys to stop his lethal injection by vacating the execution warrant and recusing the judge who had issued the warrant.Roberson’s scheduled execution has renewed debate over shaken baby syndrome, which refers to a serious brain injury caused when a child’s head is hurt through shaking or some other violent impact.Roberson’s lawyers and a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers, medical experts and others have urged Gov. Greg Abbott to stop Roberson’s execution. They say his conviction was based on faulty and outdated scientific evidence related to shaken baby syndrome. IDAHO PROSECUTORS REJECT STUDENT MURDERS SUSPECT’S LONGSHOT BID TO HAVE DEATH PENALTY TAKEN OFF TABLEAbbott can only grant clemency after receiving a recommendation from the board. But Abbott does have the power to grant a one-time 30-day reprieve without a board recommendation. Roberson’s supporters say doctors misdiagnosed Curtis’ injuries as being related to shaken baby syndrome and that new evidence has shown the girl died not from abuse, but from complications related to severe pneumonia.”We urge Governor Abbott to grant a reprieve of 30 days to allow litigation to continue and have a court hear the overwhelming new medical and scientific evidence that shows Robert Roberson’s chronically ill, two-year-old daughter, Nikki, died of natural and accidental causes, not abuse,” said Gretchen Sween, one of Roberson’s attorneys, in a statement to Fox News Digital. “A reprieve will also give Texas legislators time to investigate why Texas’s vaunted ‘changed science’ habeas law, which allows prisoners to challenge convictions based on science that turns out to be disproven or wrong, is not being applied as intended in the courts.” The American Academy of Pediatrics, other medical organizations and prosecutors say the diagnosis is valid, and that doctors look at everything – including any illnesses – when determining if injuries were attributable to shaken baby syndrome.The Anderson County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Roberson, has said in court documents that after a 2022 hearing to consider the new evidence in the case, a judge rejected the theories that pneumonia and other diseases caused Curtis’ death.Prosecutors maintain Roberson’s new evidence does not disprove their case that Curtis died from injuries inflicted by her father.



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Publish date : 2024-10-16 21:14:25

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CBS News has been accused of “significant and intentional news distortion” in a formal complaint the Center for American Rights filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Wednesday. CBS News has taken heat in recent days for airing two different answers to the same question in its “60 Minutes” interview last week with Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris was mocked by conservatives when footage of her offering a lengthy “word salad” was aired by CBS’ “Face the Nation” to promote the “60 Minutes” sit-down, when Bill Whitaker asked why it seemed like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t listening to the U.S. However, the vice president’s lengthy answer didn’t make the version that aired on Monday night on “60 Minutes” and a shorter, more focused answer to the same question was shown instead. CBS ‘60 MINUTES’ AIRS TWO DIFFERENT ANSWERS FROM VP HARRIS TO THE SAME QUESTIONThe Center for American Rights, also known as CAR, argued that the discrepancies “amount to deliberate news distortion — a violation of FCC rules governing broadcasters’ public interest obligations.”The complaint insisted CBS release the unedited transcript of the interview to set the record straight, which echoes calls from former President Trump and many others. “This isn’t just about one interview or one network,” CAR president Daniel Suhr said in a statement. “This is about the public’s trust in the media on critical issues of national security and international relations during one of the most consequential elections of our time,” Suhr continued. “When broadcasters manipulate interviews and distort reality, it undermines democracy itself. The FCC must act swiftly to restore public confidence in our news media.”CBS NEWS IN TURMOIL AS MULTIPLE CONTROVERSIES ERUPT AT THE NETWORKThe complaint, which has been obtained by Fox News Digital, cites long-standing FCC precedent that broadcasters “may not engage in intentional falsification or suppression of news” and urged the FCC to “direct CBS to release the complete transcript.” “The need for the Commission’s action is strengthened by CBS’s refusal thus far to release the transcript, which it has done in similar interviews in the past,” the complaint said. CBS News did not immediately respond when asked about the CAR complaint. The ordeal began when CBS teased the Harris interview earlier this month on “Face the Nation.” “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris responded to Whitaker in the “Face the Nation” version.  PRESSURE MOUNTS ON CBS NEWS TO RELEASE FULL KAMALA HARRIS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTWhen CBS aired the interview the following night, it showed a different answer to the exact same question.”We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said. The Harris campaign has distanced itself from the notion that it asked for the answers to be swapped and directed questions to CBS. CBS News has not offered an on-the-record explanation or responded to requests to release the unedited video. The Center for American Rights describes itself as a “nonprofit, public interest law firm dedicated to protecting Americans’ most fundamental, constitutional rights,” according to its website. 



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Publish date : 2024-10-16 19:51:51

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly updated its 2022 crime data to show an increase in violent crimes, despite previous data showing violent crimes had fallen that year, which was touted as a victory for the Biden-Harris administration. “For some reason, the media, they did pick the crime data that they think goes and makes the Democrats look as good as possible. And then even when the crime data that they’ve relied on turns out by the very source of that data to be wrong, none of them fix it,” Lott, the founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview this week. The FBI released its annual crime in the nation data for 2022 last year, which found a 2.1% decrease in violent crimes compared to 2021, Lott explained. The data was lauded by Democrats and the media as part of a turning point for crime woes in the U.S., following the crime wave of 2020, when defund the police protests and riots swept the nation and the pandemic’s stay at home orders upended day to day life.Now, the data reflects a net increase of 80,029 violent crimes in 2022 over 2021. Lott found that under the umbrella of violent crime, there were an additional 1,699 murders; 7,780 rapes; 33,459 robberies and 37,091 aggravated assaults that year. VIOLENT CRIMES HAVE INCREASED UNDER BIDEN-HARRIS ADMIN DESPITE DEMS’ DENIALS: EXPERT”To give people an idea of the size of the change, when the 2022 data came out in September 2023, they initially reported that violent crime had fallen by 2.1% in 2022. … That’s the final data, supposedly, for 2022. The revision of that final data that came out last month, now claims that rather than the 2.1% drop, that there was actually a 4.5% increase in violent crime that occurred in 2022. That’s a 6.6 percentage point change there,” Lott told Fox News Digital. “It’s from a drop to an increase. And, you know, the bizarre thing to me is for a year after the 2022 data was put out, we were having headlines, news articles after news articles saying ‘Violent crime is falling, people mistakenly or erroneously believe that it’s increasing.’ And, you know, and they were relying on this data. But you don’t see any corrections in the news. Saying, ‘oops, the FBI data that we relied on was wrong, that rather than a drop, there was actually an increase that had occurred,’” he added. ‘WEAK-ON-CRIME LIBERAL’: TRUMP CAMPAIGN HITS BACK AFTER HARRIS BLAMES HIM FOR ‘VIOLENT CRIME WAVE’President Biden and the Harris campaign have touted that violent crimes have fallen under their leadership, with Biden calling the reported violent crime drops “historic” while citing the FBI’s most recent data. “This year, the homicide and violent crime rates have continued their rapid decline from their peaks during the last administration,” Biden said in an official White House statement late last month. “…. Communities across our country are safer now than when I took office.””Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office. We can’t stop now,” Biden added in a separate White House statement in August touting crime data from an independent organization of police chiefs across the nation. The Trump campaign, when asked about the revised data, took a victory lap, saying “President Trump was right …. AGAIN!””The federal government lied about Biden’s cognitive decline, lied about the job numbers, and now we learn they lied about crime numbers too,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. “Kamala Harris must admit she’s wrong and address how she plans to bring down the rising crime crisis. Every mainstream media reporter who was quick to correct President Trump must cover this new revelation if they have any shred of integrity left.”Trump has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that “crime in this country is through the roof” under the Biden-Harris administration, despite the previous figures promoted by the FBI showing violent crime was allegedly on a downward trend. When asked about the revision, the White House argued that following the passage of the American Rescue Plan in 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration, violent crime is “at a near 50 year low.” “Under the previous administration, our country saw the biggest increase in murder rates on record. President Biden and Vice President Harris immediately got to work to turn it around and passed the American Rescue Plan which led to the largest ever federal investment in public safety. As a result, violent crime is at a near 50 year low, and is continuing to decline this year according independent data from police chiefs in the nation’s largest cities,” White House spokesperson Robyn Patterson told Fox News Digital on Wednesday. An administration official added in comment to Fox Digital that the “FBI often adjusts crime estimates as more data is reported.””During the prior administration, the FBI upwardly adjusted crime data during its last three years: in 2018, 2019, and 2020. These adjustments are standard practice,” the official continued before citing an article Lott on the data this week. “Real Clear Investigations fails to mention that, in 2021, there was a sharp decline in the number of agencies participating in FBI data collection because the FBI temporarily disallowed an earlier collection method. The FBI switched back to its prior method in 2022.”Lott explained he noticed the quiet update when the FBI released its 2023 crime data set last month, adding: “It was pretty easy to see that things had changed.””For 2022 and 2021 in particular, they had some changes for a few of the previous years, but they were very small. The changes for 2021 and 2022 were very large. You know, I looked through the press release that the FBI had put out, there was no mention of them having changed the data for earlier years. And surely no mention of the large change that had occurred. I looked through the Uniform Crime Report summary report that the FBI puts out, and there was no mention of the size of the change. There’s one footnote there that vaguely mentions that they had updated the data for 2022. No mention about updating it for 2021 or any other time,” he said, calling the discovery “shocking.” 2ND AMENDMENT STEPS IN AFTER COPS STEP BACK IN WAKE OF DEFUND MOVEMENT IN CHICAGOThe data update is akin to when the Bureau of Labor Statistics overestimated the number of jobs created in the U.S. by 818,000 between March 2023 and March 2024, Lott said. Lott authored an article on the data for Real Clear Investigations this week, which argued the updates to 2022 stats opens the door to questioning if the 2023 stats showing an estimated 3% drop in violent crimes compared to 2022 are legitimate. “Without the increase, the drop in violent crime in 2023 would have been less than half as large – only 1.6% instead of the reported drop of 3.5%,” Lott wrote.While FBI data has shown alleged drops in violent crimes in recent years, other government data sets have shown crime has increased in the last few years. BIDEN-HARRIS ADMIN SAYS CRIME IS DOWN, BUT INDEPENDENT DATA SHOWS VIOLENT CRIME UP ACROSS 66 CITIESCrimes such as rape or sexual assault, aggravated assault, and robbery increased from 2020 to 2023, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed last month as part of its National Crime Victimization Survey. Across the board, the survey found total instances of reported violent crimes increased from 5.6 per 1,000 individuals aged 12 and over in 2020, when Trump was still in office, to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023. PUBLIC SAFETY GROUP FINDS FBI VIOLENT CRIME DATA IS HIGHER THAN INITIALLY REPORTEDLott, who also served as a senior adviser for research and statistics at the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, authored an op-ed for Real Clear Politics last month and detailed that the DOJ survey found that total violent crimes are 55.4% higher in 2023 than in 2020, the end of Trump’s tenure, while rape crimes increased by 42%, robbery by 63%,and aggravated assault by 55%. The DOJ survey does not include surveys on murder, but that category is almost always reported to police departments, and subsequently to the FBI, he noted, and makes up about 1% of the U.S.’ total violent crimes.Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI and Harris campaign regarding the 2022 data but did not immediately receive replies. Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.



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Publish date : 2024-10-16 19:19:37

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FIRST ON FOX: Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita is appealing a federal judge’s decision to allow an inmate – incarcerated for murdering his 11-month-old stepchild – sex reassignment surgery following the inmate’s lawsuit against the state’s correctional facility.”We were very clear that we disagreed with the judge’s decision in this case, and now we are officially appealing,” Rokita told Fox News Digital. “Prisoners like the convicted baby murderer in this case don’t have a constitutional right to gender transition surgeries, much less to have taxpayers foot the bill.””We will continue doing our duty to defend Indiana’s commonsense laws,” he said. INDIANA JUDGE RULES PRISON MUST PROVIDE TRANSGENDER SURGERY FOR INMATE WHO KILLED BABYFox News Digital first learned that Rokita filed the intent to appeal notice on Wednesday morning.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Indiana Department of Corrections last year on behalf of a transgender inmate, Jonathan C. Richardson, also known as Autumn Cordellionè, who was convicted of strangling his 11-month-old stepdaughter to death in 2001.Indiana law, however, prohibits the Department of Corrections from using taxpayer dollars to fund sex reassignment surgeries for inmates. However, the ACLU argues in the lawsuit, filed on Aug. 28, 2023, that the law is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”ACLU SUES INDIANA OVER DENIAL OF SEX REASSIGNMENT SURGERY FOR INMATE WHO STRANGLED 11-MONTH-OLD TO DEATHThe surgery for Cordellioné, who is serving out a 55-year prison sentence for reckless homicide, “is a medical necessity,” according to the ACLU lawsuit.Judge Richard Young agreed with the ACLU’s claims and ruled in favor of Cordellioné last month.”Specifically, Ms. Cordellioné has shown that her gender dysphoria is a serious medical need, and that, despite other treatments Defendant has provided her to treat her gender dysphoria, she requires gender-affirming surgery to prevent a risk of serious bodily and psychological harm,” the ruling states.In a separate lawsuit last year, Cordellioné filed a civil lawsuit against the prison chaplain for allegedly prohibiting him from wearing a hijab outside his immediate bed quarters, despite identifying as a Muslim woman. TRANS INMATE WHO KILLED BABY AND IDENTIFIES AS MUSLIM WOMAN SUES CHAPLAIN FOR ALLEGEDLY NOT ALLOWING HIJABAccording to court documents, Cordellioné strangled his then-wife’s 11-month-year old daughter to death while she was at work on Sept. 12, 2001. During Cordellioné’s initial interview with one of the detectives, he was calm and “unemotional” when recounting what happened, court documents from Indiana’s Court of Appeals show. 



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Publish date : 2024-10-16 18:11:39

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A former Las Vegas-area Democratic politician convicted of killing an investigative journalist who had written critical stories about him was told by a judge Wednesday that he must spend at least 28 years behind bars before he is eligible for parole. The judge invoked sentencing enhancements to add eight years to the minimum 20 years to life sentence that a jury set in August after finding Robert Telles guilty of killing Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German outside German’s home during Labor Day weekend in 2022.German, 69, spent 44 years covering crime, courts and corruption in Las Vegas. At the time of German’s death, Telles, 47, was the elected administrator of a Clark County office that handles unclaimed estate and probate property cases. “We lost a brother, we lost an uncle, a friend, a leader. We are still in shock and it’s been two years. It’s going to take a long time to recover from this,” German’s brother Jay told the courtroom just prior to Telles’ sentencing. “We have a lot of anxiety about the future safety of our family… if Robert Telles were to be released after just 20 years’ incarceration.” TELLES’ OWN TESTIMONY UNDERMINED HIS DEFENSE IN JOURNALIST’S MURDER CASE, JUROR SAYS Telles, who also spoke Wednesday, denied any responsibility for German’s death.”The family has my deepest condolences, Mr. German was very impactful in the community, he made a difference, and we know from testimony by the family that he was a good brother and a good uncle. And I understand the desire to seek justice and have somebody accountable for this,” Telles said. “But I did not kill Mr. German. And unfortunately the people who should be held responsible, who should be brought to justice, the chances of that happening now — right this minute — are slim to none. That said, again my deepest sympathies to the family and I wish them well as they navigate the rest of this tragedy.”Telles lost his primary for a second term in office after German’s stories in May and June 2022 described turmoil at the Clark County Public Administrator/Guardian office. In one of them, German wrote that “a half-dozen current and former employees interviewed by the Review-Journal are alleging the hostile work environment was fueled by the elected administrator of the office, Robert Telles, carrying on an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a staffer that has harmed the office’s ability to deal with the public in overseeing the estates of those who have died.” Prosecutor Christopher Hamner said during closing arguments of the murder trial that German wasn’t finished in his work of exposing Telles, which ultimately led the politician to taking out the veteran journalist. “And he did it because Jeff wasn’t done writing,” Hamner said. “It’s like connecting the dots. He murdered him because Jeff’s writing destroyed his career. It destroyed his reputation. It threatened probably his marriage. Exposed things that even he admitted he did not want the public to know.” TELLES HAD HUNDREDS OF PHOTOS OF GERMAN’S HOME AND NEIGHBORHOOD, JURY IS TOLD Telles testified for several hours at his trial, admitting for the first time that reports of the office romance were true, according to The Associated Press. He denied killing German and said he was “framed” by a broad conspiracy involving a real estate company, police, DNA analysts, former co-workers and others. He also told the jury he was victimized for crusading to root out corruption. However, the evidence included Telles’ DNA being found beneath German’s fingernails. German was found slashed and stabbed to death in a side yard outside his home, where Telles is accused in a criminal complaint of “lying in wait” for German to come outside.Telles’ attorney, Robert Draskovich, has said Telles intends to appeal his conviction. Fox News’ Michael Dorgan and The Associated Press contributed to this report. 



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Publish date : 2024-10-16 16:59:09

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