Home

DENVER (AP) — Almost five years after Elijah McClain died following a police stop in which he was put in a neck hold and injected with the powerful sedative ketamine, three of the five Denver-area responders prosecuted in the Black man’s death have been convicted. Experts say the convictions would have been unheard of before 2020, when George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide reckoning over racist policing and deaths in police custody. But McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, said justice has not yet been served. Previously, she has said the two acquitted Aurora police officers, as well as other firefighters and police on the scene, were complicit in her 23-year-old son’s murder and that they escaped justice. “I’m waiting on heaven to hand down everybody’s judgment. Because I know heaven ain’t gonna miss the mark,” she told The Associated Press. She plans to speak on Friday at a sentencing hearing in a Denver suburb, at which Jeremy Cooper, a former Aurora Fire Rescue paramedic, faces up to three years in prison. He was convicted of criminally negligent homicide in December. Cooper’s sentencing hearing caps a series of trials that stretched over seven months and resulted in the convictions of a police officer and two paramedics. The paramedics’ conviction sent shock waves through the ranks of EMTs across the nation because of the rarity of criminal charges brought against medical professionals in their role, according to experts. McClain’s name became a rallying cry in protests over racial injustice in policing that swept the U.S. in 2020. “Without the reckoning over criminal justice and how people of color suffer at much higher rates from police use of force and violence, it’s very unlikely that anything would have come of this, that there would have been any charges, let alone convictions,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and expert on racial profiling. Harris added that the acquittals of the two officers following weekslong trials were unsurprising, since juries are often reluctant to second guess the actions of police and other first responders. “It’s still very hard to convict,” he said. The same judge who will preside over the hearing Friday sentenced ex-paramedic Peter Cichuniec in March to five years in prison for criminally negligent homicide and second-degree assault, the most serious of the charges faced by any of the responders. It was the shortest sentence allowed under the law. Previously, Judge Mark Warner sentenced officer Randy Roedema to 14 months in jail for criminally negligent homicide and misdemeanor assault. Prosecutors initially declined to pursue charges related to McClain’s death when an autopsy did not determine how he died. But Democratic Gov. Jared Polis ordered the investigation reopened following the 2020 protests against police brutality. The second autopsy said McClain died because he was injected with ketamine after being forcibly restrained. To Sheneen McClain, it doesn’t make sense that officer Nathan Woodyard, who stopped her son and put him in a neck hold, was acquitted, while officer Roedema received a lighter sentence than the paramedic Cichuniec. She thinks the paramedics’ role was to cover up what the police had done to her son. She plans to address the court at Friday’s sentencing hearing. “I raised him by myself and I will continue to stand there for my son, regardless of whether anybody listens to me or not,” she said. Since the killings of Floyd, McClain and others put a spotlight on police custody deaths, many departments, paramedic units and those that train them have reexamined how they treat suspects. It could take years though to collect enough evidence to show if those efforts are working, said Candace McCoy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Cooper injected McClain with ketamine after police stopped him as he was walking home. Officers later referenced a suspicious person report. McClain was not armed, nor accused of breaking any laws. Medical experts said by the time he received the sedative, McClain already was in a weakened state from forcible restraint that rendered him temporarily unconscious. He went into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital and died three days later. Cooper’s attorneys did not immediately respond to telephone messages and emails seeking comment on the sentencing. Since McClain’s death, the Colorado health department has told paramedics not to give ketamine to people suspected of having excited delirium, which had been described in a since-withdrawn emergency physicians’ report as manifesting symptoms including increased strength. A doctors group has called it an unscientific definition rooted in racism. The protests over McClain and Floyd also ushered in a wave of state legislation to curb the use of neck holds known as carotid restraints, which cut off circulation, and chokeholds, which cut off breathing. At least 27 states including Colorado have passed some limit on the practices. Only two had bans in place before Floyd was killed. To MiDian Holmes, a racial justice advocate who attended the trials against the first responders, change isn’t coming fast enough. “It’s the message that the life of Elijah mattered but it didn’t matter enough,” Holmes said. Brought to you by www.srnnews.com

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Harvey Weinstein’s landmark New York sexual assault conviction was thrown out by an appeals court Thursday, and most of the dozens of civil cases filed against him since he became a central target in the #MeToo movement in 2017 have either been settled or dismissed. That doesn’t mean the 72-year-old disgraced movie mogul and his lawyers don’t have plenty of court time ahead. Prosecutors in Manhattan say they plan to retry him, and several other cases remain unresolved. Here’s a look at those, and at some that have come and gone: Weinstein was found guilty in 2022 in Los Angeles of the rape and sexual assault of Italian actor and model Evgeniya Chernyshova, and his 16-year sentence in that case will keep him in prison despite the reversal of the New York verdict. Of the four women he was charged with assaulting in California, this was the only case that led to a conviction. Weinstein insisted at his sentencing that he never met her. An appeal looms there too, and Weinstein’s attorneys will make the same arguments as in the New York case about witnesses testifying to assaults he was not charged with. Los Angeles prosecutors said Thursday that the judge at their trial acted well within state law in the testimony she allowed. Weinstein’s lawyers must make their case in a filing by May 20. Weinstein could be brought to California to serve the sentence in that case, or he could remain behind bars in New York while awaiting retrial. Chernyshova also is the plaintiff in one of the last remaining civil lawsuits against Weinstein. Just weeks after the guilty verdict, she sued over emotional distress from her 2013 rape at a Beverly Hills hotel. Weinstein’s attorneys argued at his sentencing in the criminal case that the lawsuit constituted proof that she lied on the stand when she said she sought no financial gain from coming forward with her allegations. The civil case remains in its early stages. At a hearing Thursday, just a few hours after the New York decision was revealed, a judge tentatively granted Chernyshova’s request that it be put on hold while the California criminal appeal plays out. Like other actors including Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino, Julia Ormond, briefly a major star in the 1990s, has alleged in a lawsuit that Weinstein railroaded her career. Ormond, who appeared opposite Brad Pitt in “Legends of the Fall” and Harrison Ford in “Sabrina,” filed her suit in New York last October. In it she accused Weinstein of committing sexual battery against her in 1995 and then working to tarnish her reputation in Hollywood. The newest of the known lawsuits against Weinstein, it came years after most of the others. Ormond took advantage of New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which allowed a temporary window for people who allege sexual assault to file past the state’s normal deadlines. Weinstein’s lawyers denied her allegations. Judd, who became a hugely important figure in the takedown of Weinstein and larger #MeToo movement when she went on the record in the original New York Times story about his sexual misconduct, sued him in 2018. Like Ormond she alleged Weinstein did major damage to her career by smearing her to other filmmakers in retaliation for rejecting his sexual advances. Her lawsuit, which came after director Peter Jackson said Weinstein told him 20 years earlier that Judd was a “nightmare” to work with when Jackson was considering her for a major role in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, accused Weinstein of defamation, sexual harassment and violating California’s unfair competition labor law. A federal judge in 2019 threw out the sexual harassment claim, saying Weinstein and Judd, as a producer and actor discussing prospective projects, didn’t have the kind of employment relationship that the law covers. California lawmakers later expanded the statute to explicitly cover producers and directors. Judd’s lawsuit is now on long-term hold. A judge administratively closed it last year, but it can be reopened at any time if her legal team makes a motion. Some suits were thrown out, including one from actor Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most prominent accusers. She alleged he engaged in racketeering when he worked to silence her and harm her career before she publicly accused him of rape, which he has denied. McGowan served as her own attorney in the case after firing her lawyers. In 2021, a federal judge dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. The vast majority of lawsuits against Weinstein, by women from office assistants to successful actors, were brought to a close through a settlement in 2021 as part of the bankruptcy of his former film company, The Weinstein Co. The agreement included a victims’ fund of about $17 million for some 40 women who sued him. The amount was approved by a majority, but lawyers for some of them, including actor Dominique Huett, objected to it, calling the individual shares “pathetically meager” for the damage Weinstein did. Also part of the settlement was former actor and screenwriter Louisette Geiss, the lead plaintiff in a Manhattan class action suit. She sued Weinstein in 2017, accusing him of attempting to force her to watch him masturbate in a hotel bathroom in 2008. “In the end, you see that the judicial system is still not in the right place to take him down. It’s really society that takes him down,” she told The Associated Press the year after the settlement. The AP does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as all of the women named here have done. Brought to you by www.srnnews.com

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A dozen Utah Republicans vying to replace Mitt Romney in the U.S. Senate are set to square off Saturday for the party nomination in a race expected to reveal the brand of political conservatism that most appeals to modern voters in the state. Romney has long been the face of the party’s more moderate wing, but his retirement from the Senate opens a door for Utah’s farther-right faction. Observers are closely watching whether voters select a successor whose politics align more with Romney’s or with Utah’s other U.S. senator, conservative Mike Lee, who supports former President Donald Trump. The winner at Saturday’s state GOP convention, which tends to favor far-right candidates who appeal to the most zealous party members, may get a bump in the race. Some losing candidates still can qualify for the June 25 primary ballot by gathering signatures, so Republican voters will ultimately decide the party’s pick to succeed Romney. “Ultimately, the successful candidate in the primary election phase will be the candidate who shows they best connect with general Utah Republican values, rather than the person who’s able to stake out the furthest right position possible, even if that helps them to some extent with the delegates,” said Damon Cann, head of Utah State University’s political science department. The crowded race, which includes a congressman, a former state legislative leader and the lawyer son of a former senator, will not only set the tone for the post-Romney era of Utah conservatism, but likely will serve as a litmus test for Trump’s popularity in the Beehive State. Those most closely aligned with the embattled former president, namely former state House Speaker Brad Wilson, are expected to fare well at the convention. But political scientists, such as James Curry of the University of Utah, anticipate a more moderate candidate such as U.S. Rep. John Curtis will prevail in the primary. “This is a type of state where I think you actually have a slight advantage being more anti-Trump, if not decisively and vocally so, which is not something you’d find in most states where Republican voters are concerned,” Curry said. While Trump has made inroads in the state party, he has long been unpopular among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, who make up about half of the state’s 3.4 million residents. Curtis, 63, has actively tried to distance himself from Trump, and even Romney, promising to forge his own path in the Senate. However, his record of pushing fellow congressional Republicans to combat climate change — in much the same way Romney urged party members to part ways with Trump — has led many to draw parallels between the two. Even Wilson, 55, who endorsed Trump earlier this year, has made little mention of the former president on the campaign trail. The move represents a departure from many farther-right candidates in other states who have tried to leverage Trump’s political power to win their own races. Curry expects the party nomination will carry little weight in a state where Republican delegates are often not representative of the party’s broader membership. Romney himself was booed by delegates at a past convention and even lost the nomination in 2018, but he still won the statewide popular vote. The candidates notably have not sought Romney’s endorsement, which Cann said is unusual in races with a departing incumbent. Several have sought the support of his more conservative counterpart, who is popular among delegates, but Lee has not yet endorsed anyone in the Senate race. Curtis, Wilson and businessman Jason Walton already have guaranteed their spots on the primary ballot through signature gathering. Other candidates such as Brent Orrin Hatch, son of Utah’s longest serving U.S. senator, the late Orrin Hatch, could still make the primary if they earn at least 40% of delegate votes on Saturday. Wilson has raised about $2 million from supporters, and he loaned his campaign an additional $2.8 million, according to Federal Election Commission fillings. Curtis has raised about $3 million, which includes money left over from his former congressional bid. Republican nominees for governor, Congress and other prominent offices also will be selected at Saturday’s convention. Incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox faces some prominent challengers, but Cann and Curry expect the moderate Republican will win the primary even if he isn’t chosen as the party nominee. Brought to you by www.srnnews.com

The students at an encampment at Columbia University who inspired a wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country dug in for their 10th day Friday, as administrators and police at college campuses from California to Connecticut wrestle with how to address protests that have seen scuffles with police and hundreds of arrests. Officials at Columbia and some other schools have been negotiating with student protesters who have rebuffed police and doubled down. Other schools have quickly turned to law enforcement to douse demonstrations before they can take hold. After a tent encampment popped up Thursday at Indiana University Bloomington, police with shields and batons shoved into protesters and arrested 33. Hours later at the University of Connecticut, police tore down tents and arrested one person. And at Ohio State University, police clashed with protesters just hours after they gathered Thursday evening. Those who refused to leave after warnings were arrested and charged with criminal trespass, said university spokesperson Benjamin Johnson, citing rules barring overnight events. The clock is ticking as May commencement ceremonies near, putting added pressure on schools to clear demonstrations. At Columbia, protesters defiantly erected a tent encampment where many are set to graduate in front of families in just a few weeks. Columbia officials said that negotiations were showing progress as they neared the school’s deadline of early Friday to reach an agreement on dismantling the encampment. Nevertheless, two police buses were parked nearby and there was a noticeable presence of private security and police at entrances to the campus. “We have our demands; they have theirs,” said Ben Chang, a spokesperson for Columbia University, adding that if the talks fail the university will have to consider other options. Just past midnight, a group of some three dozen pro-Palestinian protesters handed out signs and started chanting outside of the locked Columbia University gates. They then marched away as at least 40 police officers assembled nearby. California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, has been negotiating with students who have been barricaded inside a campus building since Monday, rebuffing an attempt by the police to clear them out. Faculty members met with protesters Thursday to try to negotiate a solution as the campus remains shut down at least through the weekend. The protesters setting up encampments at universities across the country are demanding schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus, which has partly prompted the calls for police intervention. A dean at Cal Poly Humboldt, Jeff Crane, suggested during the meeting with protesters that the university form a committee that would include students to do a deep dive into the school’s investments. Crane also suggested faculty and students continue meeting every 24 hours to keep an open line of communication. The sides have yet to announce an agreement. The school’s senate of faculty and staff demanded the university’s president resign in a vote of no confidence Thursday, citing the decision to call police in to remove the barricaded students Monday. On the other end of the state, the University of Southern California announced the cancellation of the school’s May 10 graduation ceremony. The announcement was made a day after more than 90 protesters were arrested on campus. The university said it will still host dozens of commencement events, including all the traditional individual school commencement ceremonies. Tensions were already high after USC canceled a planned commencement speech by the school’s pro-Palestinian valedictorian, citing safety concerns. At the City College of New York on Thursday, hundreds of students who were gathered on the lawn beneath the Harlem campus’ famed gothic buildings erupted in cheers after a small contingent of police officers retreated from the scene. In one corner of the quad, a “security training” was held among students. The Los Angeles Police Department said 93 people were arrested Wednesday night during a campus protest for allegedly trespassing. One person was arrested on allegations of assault with a deadly weapon. At Emerson College in Boston, 108 people were arrested at an alleyway encampment by early Thursday. Video shows police first warning students in an alleyway to leave. Students link arms to resist officers, who move forcefully through the crowd and throw some protesters to the ground. “As the night progressed, it got tenser and tenser. There were just more cops on all sides. It felt like we were being slowly pushed in and crushed,” said Ocean Muir, a sophomore. Muir said police lifted her by her arms and legs and carried her away. Along with other students, Muir was charged Thursday with trespassing and disorderly conduct. Emerson College leaders had warned students that the alley was a public right-of-way and city authorities had threatened to take action if the protesters didn’t leave. Emerson canceled classes Thursday, and Boston police said four officers suffered injuries that were not life-threatening during the confrontation. The University of Texas at Austin campus was much calmer Thursday after 57 people were jailed and charged with criminal trespass a day earlier. University officials pulled back barricades and allowed demonstrators onto the main square beneath the school’s iconic clock tower. Thursday’s gathering of students and some faculty protested both the war and Wednesday’s arrests, when state troopers in riot gear and on horseback bulldozed into protesters, forcing hundreds of students off the school’s main lawn. At Emory University in Atlanta, local and state police swept in to dismantle a camp. Some officers carried semiautomatic weapons, and video shows officers using a stun gun on one protester they had pinned to the ground. The university said late Thursday in a statement that objects were thrown at officers and they deployed “chemical irritants” as a crowd control measure. Jail records showed 22 people arrested by Emory police were charged with disorderly conduct. Emory said it had been notified that 28 people were arrested, including 20 members of the university community, and some had been released as of nighttime. Since the Israel-Hamas war began, the U.S. Education Department has launched civil rights investigations into dozens of universities and schools in response to complaints of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Among those under investigation are many colleges facing protests, including Harvard and Columbia. ___ Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists in various locations including Aaron Morrison, Stefanie Dazio, Kathy McCormack, Jim Vertuno, Acacia Coronado, Sudhin Thanawala, Jeff Amy, Mike Stewart, Collin Binkley, Carolyn Thompson, Jake Offenhartz and Sophia Tareen. Brought to you by www.srnnews.com

NEW YORK (AP) — Rooting for Donald Trump to fail has rarely been this profitable. Just ask a hardy band of mostly amateur Wall Street investors who have collectively made tens of millions of dollars over the past month by betting that the stock price of his social media business — Truth Social — will keep dropping despite massive buying by Trump loyalists and wild swings that often mirror the candidate’s latest polls, court trials and outbursts on Trump Social itself. Several of these investors interviewed by The Associated Press say their bearish gambles using “put” options and other trading tools are driven less by their personal feelings about the former president (most don’t like him) than their faith in the woeful underlying financials of a company that made less money last year than the average Wendy’s hamburger franchise. “This company makes no money. … It makes no sense,” said Boise, Idaho, ad executive Elle Stange, who estimates she’s made $1,300 betting against Trump Media & Technology stock. “He’s not as great a businessman as he thinks. A lot of his businesses go belly up, quickly.” Says Seattle IT security specialist Jeff Cheung, “This is guaranteed to go to zero.” As of Friday morning, a month since Trump Media’s initial public offering sent its stock to $66.22, it has plunged to $38.49. An AP analysis of data from research firms FactSet and S3 Partners shows that investors using puts and “short selling” have paper profits so far of at least $200 million, not including the costs of puts, which vary from trade to trade. Still, amateur traders, mostly risking no more than a few thousand dollars each, say the stock is too volatile to declare victory yet. So they are cashing in a bit now, letting other bets ride and stealing a glance at the latest stock movements in the office cubicle, at the kitchen table or even on the toilet. There have been plenty of scary moments, including last week when DJT, the ex-president’s initials and stock ticker, jumped nearly 40% in two days. “I don’t know which direction the stock is going,” says Schenectady, N.Y., day trader Richard Persaud while checking his iPhone amid the surge. “It’s so unbelievably overvalued.” Many who spoke to the AP say knowing their bets have helped slash the value of Trump’s 65% stake in half is an added political benefit. If some of their predictions are right, they may able to someday push it to zero, making it impossible for him to tap it to pay his hefty legal bills or finance his GOP presidential campaign. They have a long way to go. Trump’s stake is still worth $4 billion. Normally, investors betting a stock will fall, especially a gutsy breed of hedge fund traders called “short sellers,” will do plenty of homework. They’ll pore over financial statements, develop expertise in an industry, talk to competitors, and even turn to “forensic accountants” to find hidden weaknesses in the books. No need in Trump Media’s case. It’s all there in the Sarasota, Florida-based company’s 100-page financial report: A firehose of losses, $58 million last year, on minuscule revenue of $4 million from advertising and other sources. The losses are so big, as Trump Media’s auditor wrote in the report, they “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.” A short seller’s dream? Or is it a nightmare? Amateur trader Manny Marotta has two computer screens at home, one for work, the other showing DJT stock’s movements where he can gauge how much he’s up or down. It wasn’t looking so good earlier this week. The legal writer from suburban Cleveland had been up about $4,000 on “put” options purchased over the past few weeks. But the screen that morning was showing investors, presumably rich ones, buying large volumes of DJT shares, pushing up the stock once again. “My options are worth less with every passing minute,” says Marotta, adding about DJT: “It’s being manipulated. It’s insane.” Waiting for the stock to drop is especially painful to “short sellers,” who pay a fee to borrow shares owned by others. The idea is to quickly sell them on a hunch then they will be able to buy the same number of them later for much cheaper before having to return them to the lender. That allows short sellers to pocket the difference, minus the fee, which is usually nominal. In DJT’s case, the fee is anything but nominal. It was costing 565% a year at one point earlier this month, meaning short sellers had only two months before any possible profits would be eaten up in fees, even if the stock went to zero. It’s a rate so off the charts, that only three other stocks in recent memory have exceeded it, according to data from Boston University’s Karl Diether and Wharton’s Itamar Drechsler, who have studied short selling back two decades. Add in massive buying by Trump supporters who see it as a way to support their candidate, and losses could multiply fast. “It’s scary,” says Drechsler, who likens buyers of Trump’s stock to unwavering sports fans. “It is everything that you hope that the stock market is not.” Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine said the company is in a “strong financial position” with $200 million in cash and no debt, and said the AP was “selecting admitted Trump antagonists.” Another danger to the stock is a “short squeeze.” If the price rises sharply, it could set off a rush by short sellers who fear they’ve bet wrongly to return their borrowed shares right away and limit their losses. And so they start buying shares to replace the ones they borrowed and sold, and that very buying tends to work against them, sending the price higher, which in turn scares other short sellers, who then also buy, setting off a vicious cycle of price hikes. “If DJT starts rallying, you’re going to see the mother of all squeezes,” says S3 Partners short-selling expert Ihor Dusaniwsky, who spent three decades at Morgan Stanley helping investors borrow shares. “This is not for the faint of heart.” And if that wasn’t enough, there is a final oddball feature of DJT stock that could trigger an explosion in prices, up or down. “Lock up” agreements prohibit Trump and other DJT executives from selling their shares until September. That leaves the float, or the number of shares that can be traded each day by others, at a dangerously tiny 29% of total shares that will someday flood the market. That means a big purchase or sale on any day that would barely move a typical stock can send DJT flying or crashing. The float is smaller than that of most other notoriously volatile stocks. At their smallest levels, AMC, GameStock and Shake Shack each had more than double the float. Seattle trader Cheung sees DJT’s freak characteristics as a reason to bet against the stock, not shy away. When the lock-up period ends, he predicts, the ex-president will indeed sell his shares, spooking the market and sending the price down sharply. And even if he doesn’t, other insiders whose lock-ups expire will fear he will do so and will move fast to get a good price before it falls. “The first one to sell out is going make to most, ” Cheung says. “Everyone is going to sell.” Still, he doesn’t want to lose money in the interim, so Cheung is offsetting some of his “put” bets with the purchase of “calls.” The latter are also derivatives, but they do the opposite, paying off when the stock rises. Cheung hopes that whichever makes money, the puts or the calls, he will make enough with one to more than make up for the loss of the other. If all of this seems too complicated, there is a far simpler way to make money betting against Trump. Offshore, casino-style betting sites are taking wagers on the 2024 election, and some have even made President Joe Biden the favorite. ___ Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/ Brought to you by www.srnnews.com