Wednesday Writs: Murder Most Foul Edition
Photo by Phil Roeder via Wikimedia Commons
L1: The US attorney for the Northern District of West Virginia announced that after a two year investigation into suspicious deaths at the Clarksburg, West Virginia VA hospital, nursing assistant Reta Mays agreed to plead guilty by information to seven counts of murder. Mays admitted to purposely injecting elderly patients with insulin, causing their deaths. As a nursing assistant, which requires no licensing in WV, she was not authorized to access or administer insulin. She killed veterans George Shaw, 81; William Holloway, 96; Archie Edgell, 84; John Hallman 87, Felix McDermott, 82; and 2 other men whose families requested anonymity. The prosecutor said there were additional suspicious deaths, but they were unable to prove Mays was responsible for them. The government will seek consecutive life sentences. Lawsuits against the VA by surviving family members are pending.
L2: The term is over but the SCOTUS work is never done. A 5-4 court removed the last roadblock to allow the federal government to execute its first citizen in 17 years. The Court lifted a stay by the DC Circuit in an order released at 2 a.m. Convicted triple murderer Daniel Lewis Lee was put to death hours later. Watch this space soon for an analysis of Furman v Georgia, in which the Court banned capital punishment, and the subsequent reinstatement of the practice
L3: Vaping company JUUL has taken legal action to protect their patent against black market cartridges for its e-cigarette devices.
L4: Ghislaine Maxwell pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in connection with her longtime boyfriend, Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell requested bail, suggesting she spend her pretrial days at a luxury hotel in New York. The court opted to remand her into custody without bond.
L5: I was never really into Seinfeld, but this Seinfeld-based Law School Class About Nothing at Yada Yada Law School looks interesting.
L6: The first women to hold high staff positions at the US Supreme Court are retiring.
L7: Justice Ginsburg was hospitalized this week with a suspected infection and underwent a procedure to clean out a bile duct stent. She’s said to be resting comfortably but will remain in the hospital for a few days.
L4: Hopefully they learned from the last time and they make sure the cameras are broken well before she’s left ‘alone’ in her cell.Report
The masks are a nice touch.
In high school, we had Matt. Matt was one of those guys who had a full beard at 15. He was built like a shed. The kind of guy who would move a picnic table across a park by picking it up and putting it where he wanted it. We also had Nick. Nick was what used to be called a “late bloomer”. Most guys had puberty kick in somewhere between grades 7 and 9. Nick’s was finally kicking in around grade 11.
Matt and Nick would go into a liquor store. Matt would go up to the counter with a case of beer. Nick would ask “Dad, can I have a Snickers?” and Matt would throw the candy bar on top of the case of beer.
Matt did not get carded.Report
I preferred to use a “cut out”. I’d go visit a person, who I was introduced to by a friend, who would buy the beer. I’d tell her how much I wanted, and for a small tax, like a pack of cigarettes, or some groceries, she’d get it. Paying a 20 or 30% premium for easy access to booze was something I’d willingly afford, and the transfer took place not in public.Report
I grew up in a college town and finding someone who had just turned 21 was as easy as getting an afterschool job.
Then again, I don’t think I got carded after about 19. You just had to know who was working where.Report
Well, this was in high school 🙂Report
I’m not a racist but…
Anyway, we would buy booze in the nearby black neighborhood. It turned out that, when a few crazy white kids with green mohawks* showed up at the little corner store in the one black neighborhood of Pompano Beach, they would sell us beer — and MD 20/20.
Damn I drank a lot of MD 20/20. And cough syrup.
My normie, suburban friends would ask me, “Aren’t you scared you’re going to get robbed?”
(It turns out white suburban kids in the 80’s had some really weird ideas of what black neighborhoods were like.)
Actually it’s kind of fun to imagine a bunch of black kids in the 80’s in Pompano Beach watching a gaggle of punks with green mohawks ride by on their skateboards on their way to buy beer (and MD 20/20 and sometimes cough syrup). I imagine they thought some variation of, “Okay, what the fuck are white people doing these days? Are they okay?”
* Technically we didn’t all have green mohawks, but I did. In any case, we were all good little suburban punkers with convincing punker costumes.Report
I stopped getting carded at 16, thanks to a full beard.Report
Jurisdictional issues in space murder: https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/arctic-t3-murder-space.htmlReport
L5: Required reading includes Bob Lawlaw’s law blog.Report