Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who carried out an Islamic terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon April 15, 2013, has been found guilty of multiple charges.
The conviction included charges that can bring the death penalty such as conspiracy and use of a weapon of mass destruction.
The conviction was not unexpected as his lawyers admitted he participated in the attack. The defense had stated their goal was to put doubt in the minds of the jury regarding his motivations in an attempt to spare him the death penalty. The defense painted Dzhokhar as being brainwashed by his older brother Tamerlan into radical Islam.
“If not for Tamerlan, [the bombing] would not have happened,” Clarke told the jury during closing arguments.
The trial now moves to the punishment phase with the same jurors from the initial phase of the trial.
Prosecutors will be focusing on the fact that extremist Jihadi websites were found on both brother’s computers. They also showed the writings of Dzhokhar on the boat where he was captured that read “stop killing our innocent people and we will stop.”
Defense attorney Judy Clarke has worked with other high-profile clients to have them spared the death penalty. She worked to keep the Unabomber and Susan Smith, who drowned her children, from being sent to death row.
The lawyers representing Khartoum Bahri Evangelical Church in Sudan is appealing a court decision to close the church and seize their property.
On February 18th, police arrived at the church with an order from a local court demanding the church be locked and seized. The church’s lawyers say the order not specifically state what land or property was subject to seizure.
“In November 2014, congregants held a protest vigil in order to prevent NISS agents from gaining access to the land and illegally destroying and confiscating the property. In December 2014 the church was partially destroyed and 37 congregants arrested.”
The court is claiming the land was sold to a Muslim businessman by a church committee. It was later discovered that the government formed a committee they said was a committee of the church and sold the land. A lower court ruled in favor of the church that the committee was not associated with the church but a higher Muslim court said the Christians had to leave.
“The court order will effectively facilitate the illegal closure of yet another church at a time when the government has stated that the construction of new churches will no longer be permitted. We call upon the international community, and in particular the African Union, to hold Sudan to its obligations to protect the right to freedom of religion or belief and to guarantee the profession and free practice of religion as outlined in international statutes to which the nation is party,” Christian Solidary Worldwide said in a statement.
The first Islamic tribunal is now hearing cases and issuing rulings in North Texas.
The “court” is located in Irving, Texas and is being used to settle disputes between Muslims such as divorces and business disputes using Sharia Law rather than U.S. law as the basis for their decisions.
The judges claim that their decisions are nothing more than giving an “Islamic point of view” to situations that they are facing in their lives and participation is voluntary. The three men who run the tribunal say that they do not handle anything that involves criminal activity.
“All our decisions point back to the Koran and Sunna … and what the prophet Mohammed left to us,” Dr. Taher el-Badawi, Islamic Tribunal judge, told KEYE TV.
The restriction to not handle criminal cases allows the tribunal to avoid having to issue any rulings on situations where the Quran calls for stoning if someone commits adultery or the subjugation of women.
Critics say that the “court” sets a dangerous precedent and fear that would allow other foreign groups to use foreign law.
A judge on Wednesday denied attempts by lawyers for the Boston Marathon terrorism suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to delay the start of his trial.
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge George O’Toole, Jr. means that jury selection will begin Monday in Boston federal court.
Lawyers for Tsarnaev tried to make the case that it would impossible to find an impartial jury in Massachusetts because of the amount of publicity given to the case. They also said they needed more time to examine the large amounts of discovery turned over my prosecutors.
The lawyers tried to use the example of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh whose trial was moved to Denver because of media attention.
Tsarnaev has pleaded not guilty to 30 federal charges that could bring the death penalty if he is convicted.
Jury selection in the case is expected to take weeks because of the intense media coverage and the number of local residents impacted in some way because of the bombings. Also, jurors who object to the death penalty could also be excluded from the case.
A Canadian court has ruled that two Christians who had been banned from distributing materials at a university had their rights violated by officials.
Peter LaBarbera and Bill Whatcott were arrested in April and forced to leave the University of Regina after they refused to stop handing out information providing the truth about abortion and other issues about the Christian faith.
“We are a diverse campus. We are a welcoming campus,” University Vice President Tom Chase told reporters at the time. “We celebrate that diversity, and our staff felt that the material and some of the things they had with them simply contravened that policy and we asked them to leave.”
Judge Marylynne Beaton said that both men were not guilty of any crimes and that they had the right under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to distribute their information to anyone who wanted to read it.
“I find that the purpose of Mr. Whatcott and Mr. LaBarbera attending the University of Regina was to communicate information and their actions were passive and non-aggressive,” she wrote. “Therefore, notwithstanding that the university may be private property, I find that [the Charter] may be used as a defense to a finding of mischief by interfering with university property as they had the right to communicate in a peaceful manner on university property.”
“I do not accept that the accused’s removal, in order to protect students from the accused message, represented a minimal impairment on freedom of expression,” the judge continued. “In this case, the university’s response was disproportionate to the peaceful distribution of flyers and was not reasonable and demonstrably justified.”
Both men said they hope the judge’s ruling will help Christians across the country who have been silenced by government officials.
A Texas teenager is on trial after he beat, mutilated and killed a classmate in a satanic ritual.
Jose Reyes, 18, is facing a life sentence for the murder of Coriann Cervantes. The two attended Clear Path Alternative School in League City, TX.
Reyes invited Cervantes to an abandoned apartment in Houston for drinking and smoking marijuana along with Reyes friend Victor Alias. The two men then decided to use the 15-year-old girl for a sacrifice in a satanic ritual.
They beat the girl with the lid of a toilet tank and then stabbed her with a screwdriver before carving an upside down cross on her stomach. The two then proceeded to commit further mutilation of the body in connection with the ritual.
“They discussed the fact that Mr. Reyes had sold his soul to the devil, and if they ended up killing this teenager, that would also allow the 16-year-old to also sell his soul to the devil,” Assistant Harris County District Attorney John Jordan told reporters. “The teenager screamed, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ During that time, they stopped her. It became a kidnapping and, ultimately, she was killed.”
“What happened in that vacant apartment was sadistic,” Jordan said. “What will eventually happen in the… courtroom will be justice.”
The grand jury in St. Louis County Missouri has issued no indictments in the case of officer Darren Wilson.
The grand jury made up of nine whites and three blacks examined every piece of evidence collected by the local, state and federal investigators. They heard hours of testimony and were able to ask direct questions of those involved including officer Wilson.
The evidence showed the claims of supporters of Michael Brown did not know the facts of the case.
One witness said Brown charged at officer Darren Wilson in a manner that was “like a football player. Head down.”
Wilson said that Brown attempted to grab his gun while the officer sat inside his cruiser. When the officer fired a round through his car window in an attempt to back off Brown, the 18-year-old showed an “aggressive” posture.
“The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked,” Wilson told the grand jury. “He comes back toward me again with his hands up.”
“Just coming straight at me like he was going to run right through me,” Wilson said. “And when he gets about … 8 to 10 feet away … all I see is his head and that’s what I shot.”
The Justice Department says their investigation against Officer Wilson is still open and no decision has been made regarding charges.
The New York Court of Appeals has ruled that a marriage between an uncle and niece is not a violation of restrictions against incestuous marriage.
The court ruled that “parent-child and brother-sister marriages . . . are grounded in the almost universal horror with which such marriages are viewed . . . there is no comparably strong objection to uncle-niece marriages.”
The case focused on a Vietnamese citizen who married her uncle in what the government said was an illegal marriage in an attempt to not be deported. A judge in 2000 ruled the marriage invalid and ordered deportation.
The husband in the case was the half-brother of the girl’s mother.
“This really was an all-or-nothing issue for them,” lawyer Michael Marscalkowski commented. “If this would have been denied, she would have been deported and sent back to Vietnam.”
The lawyer argued that because they were only half-siblings, they only had at maximum 1/8th of the DNA like cousins, who are allowed to legally marry.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has sided with the IRS and thrown out lawsuits connected to the IRS targeting conservative and Christian groups.
Judge Reggie Walton ruled that the cases against the IRS for their actions were “moot” because the IRS claims they are no longer targeting conservative groups and because the IRS granted the tax-exempt statuses for the groups involved in the suit.
“After the plaintiff initiated this case, its application to the IRS for tax-exempt status was approved by the IRS. The allegedly unconstitutional governmental conduct, which delayed the processing of the plaintiff’s tax exempt application and brought about this litigation, is no longer impacting the plaintiff,” Walton said in his decision to throw out True the Vote’s lawsuit against the IRS.
This means that the IRS could begin targeting Christian or conservative groups again at any time because there is no legal prohibition to those actions.
“[T]he Court is satisfied that there is no reasonable expectation that the alleged conduct will recur, as the defendants have not only suspended the conduct, but have also taken remedial measures to ensure that the conduct is not repeated,” the judge wrote.
A Pakistani court has upheld a death sentence for a Christian woman who was accused of blaspheming the prophet Mohammed during an argument with a Muslim woman.
The Lahore High Court rejected the appeal of Asia Bibi on her sentence that was passed down by a lower court. Bibi’s lawyers say they will appeal the decision to the country’s Supreme Court.
Bibi was sentenced to death in 2010 for the accusation.
“The case against Asia Bibi is a great example of how Christians and other religious minorities are abused in Pakistan by fundamentalists wielding the controversial blasphemy laws. The blasphemy laws were originally written to protect against religious intolerance in Pakistan, but the law has warped into a tool used by extremists and others to settle personal scores and persecute Pakistan’s vulnerable religious minorities,” International Christian Concern’s Regional Manager for South Asia, William Stark told the Christian Post.
Stark said that many times accusations of blasphemy are used against Christians as weapons.
“Sadly, the vast majority of blasphemy accusations brought against Christians and others are false. Unfortunately, pressure from Islamic radical groups and general discrimination against Christians in Pakistan has transformed trial courts and now appeals courts into little more than rubber stamps for blasphemy accusations brought against Christians, regardless of the evidence brought to bear in the case.”
