The Legal Arena

Chief Counsel Raphael Sanchez for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Seattle was arrested for stealing immigrants’ identities and then paying his bills with the stolen information.
Sanchez resigned on Monday and had his first court appearance on Thursday.

Chief Counsel Raphael Sanchez for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Seattle was arrested for stealing immigrants’ identities and then paying his bills with the stolen information.
Sanchez resigned on Monday and had his first court appearance on Thursday.

A Texas cop remains on the job after the department he works for settled the third excessive force lawsuit against him Thursday.
Austin police officer Eric Copeland was sued three times for using excessive force between April of 2011 to April of 2015.
Austin City Council members approved the latest $150,000 settlement November 9 for unnecessarily tasering Adrian Aguado, 20, after removing him from handcuffs and telling him to exit the police cruiser.
Video from inside the patrol car shows Copeland tasering Aguado immediately as he slowly exits the vehicle.

Salt Lake City has agreed to pay nurse Alex Wubbels a $500,000 settlement just two weeks after the detective who arrested her for refusing to allow a blood draw on her unconscious patient filed an appeal to get his job back, claiming had it not been for a camera he would still have a job.
Now Wubbels plans to use a portion of the settlement to help other police abuse victims obtain access to body cam footage.

A lawsuit was filed Monday against three doctors and 11 nurses who work at a prison in Kansas as well as the company contracted to provide medical services for inmates throughout the state’s prison system after medical staff ignored an inmate who told them, “it feels like something is eating my brain.”
Even after Marques Davis, 27, became so confused he drank his own urine, employees for Corizon Correctional Healthcare neglected his cries for help at Hutchinson Correctional Facility in Kansas.

A Florida man received a $37,500 settlement after police arrested him, mistaking Krispy Kreme doughnut glaze in his car for meth.
A series of roadside drug tests yielded positive results for the street drug, landing him in jail for ten hours.
But another test determined it was only glaze from a Krispy Kreme doughnut.
Dan Rushing, 65, was arrested in December 2015 following a traffic stop after Orlando cop Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins observed flakes on his floorboard, which she first suspected was crack, then crystal meth.

The Los Angeles City Council has agreed to pay $1.9 million after LAPD officers shot and killed a mentally ill, wheelchair-bound man.
After his death on April 21, 2015, the police department claimed Luis Molina Martinez, 35, lunged at them with a knife, which made them fear for their lives, prompting them to shoot him four times.

A federal judge in Virginia’s Eastern district court has ruled that a Loudon County elected official censored a citizen by blocking them on Facebook in a First Amendment protected public forum.
Brian Davison is trying to keep the Loudoun County School Board accountable but has faced a prolonged campaign of censorship and retaliatory claims by Board Members with serious financial conflicts of interest in the charter school industry and who have voted on issues that impact pay for family members.

A Florida man won the right to surreptitiously record police officers while making internal affairs complaints without the threat of prosecution when he defeated the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office (SAO) in a federal appeals court ruling.
Prosecutors tried to censor the citizen, who published his incriminating recording of a police chief.

The City of Homestead has a torrid reputation and a pattern of willfully refusing to comply with the public records law. Homestead is a little town at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, rarely receiving the scrutiny it deserves as a cesspool of public corruption and maleficence.
I have used the records request process, as a pre-discovery method for investigating my civil rights claims. Homestead has failed to comply with the public records law on the majority of the nearly one hundred requests I have filed.