Tag Archives: U.S. Department of Justice

White House says DOJ will defend government’s authority to promote vaccine requirement

By Nandita Bose

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The White House said on Wednesday the U.S. Department of Justice “will vigorously defend” the government’s authority to promote its vaccine requirement in federal contracting after courts blocked the Biden administration from enforcing two vaccine mandates.

A U.S. District Judge in Louisiana on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from enforcing its vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.

A U.S. District Judge in Kentucky blocked the administration from enforcing a regulation that new government contracts must include clauses requiring that contractors’ employees get vaccinated.

The legal setbacks, spurred by Republican state attorneys general, conservative groups and trade organizations that have sued to stop the regulations, added to a string of court losses for the Biden administration over its COVID-19 policies.

They also come amid concerns that the Omicron coronavirus variant could trigger a new wave of infections and curtail travel and economic activity around the world.

The administration’s most sweeping regulation – a workplace vaccine-or-testing mandate for businesses with at least 100 employees – was temporarily blocked by a federal appeals court in early November.

“We know vaccine requirements work…We are confident in the government’s authority to promote economy and efficiency in federal contracting through its vaccine requirement and the Department of Justice will vigorously defend it in court,” a White House spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the Biden administration said a total of 92% of U.S. federal workers have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

President Joe Biden unveiled regulations in September to increase the U.S. adult vaccination rate beyond the current 71% as a way of fighting the pandemic, which has killed more than 750,000 Americans and has weighed on the economy.

Earlier this week, the White House told federal agencies they could delay punishing thousands of federal workers who failed to comply with a Nov. 22 COVID-19 vaccination deadline.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Heinrich)

U.S. settles suits over 2015 massacre at historic South Carolina church

By Tyler Clifford

(Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday said it settled civil cases brought by survivors and families of victims of a massacre in 2015, in which nine Black people were killed at a historic South Carolina church.

The agreement settles more than a dozen claims that blamed the FBI for failing to prevent a gun from being sold to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who said he wanted to start a “race war” when he opened fire inside the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015.

Five survivors will receive $5 million, while the families of those killed in the shooting will each receive between $6 million and $7.5 million, according to a news release.

“The mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church was a horrific hate crime that caused immeasurable suffering for the families of the victims and the survivors,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “Since the day of the shooting, the Justice Department has sought to bring justice to the community, first by a successful hate crime prosecution and today by settling civil claims.”

Families and survivors argued in lawsuits that the FBI’s background check system did not flag that Roof was banned from having a firearm before he purchased a handgun that was used in the mass shooting.

In December 2016, a jury found Roof guilty of 33 federal charges for the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose congregation dates back two centuries. The same jury sentenced him to death in January 2017.

(Reporting by Tyler Clifford; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bernadette Baum)

U.S. government executes woman for first time in nearly seven decades

By Bhargav Acharya and Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – The United States executed Lisa Montgomery, a convicted murderer and the only woman on federal death row, early on Wednesday, making her the first female prisoner to be executed by the federal government since 1953.

Montgomery was convicted in 2007 in Missouri of kidnapping and strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then eight months pregnant. Montgomery cut Stinnett’s fetus from the womb and tried to pass off the child as her own.

After Montgomery was strapped to a gurney in the government’s death chamber, a female executioner asked if she had any last words. Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice, “No,” according to a reporter who served as a media witness.

Federal judges in multiple courts had delayed her execution to allow for hearings on whether she was too mentally ill to understand her punishment and whether the government had given insufficient notice of her execution date under law.

But around midnight the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority summarily dismissed the final obstacles, and Montgomery was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. EST (0631 GMT) at the Department of Justice’s execution chamber at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Some of Stinnett’s relatives attended as witnesses but declined to speak with the media, the Justice Department said.

Montgomery’s execution was opposed by United Nations human rights experts, several dozen former prosecutors, and multiple groups against violence to women, prompting debate over the role past trauma can play in some of the most horrific crimes prosecuted by the justice system.

Montgomery was the 11th person executed on federal death row since the practice was resumed last year under President Donald Trump, a Republican and an outspoken proponent of capital punishment. Before Trump, there had been only three federal executions since 1963.

Kelley Henry, Montgomery’s lawyer, called the execution “vicious, unlawful, and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power.” Some doctors who examined Montgomery testified that her brain was structurally damaged and she suffered from psychosis, auditory hallucinations and other mental illness, exacerbated by the abuse and rapes she suffered at the hands of her mother and stepfather.

“No one can credibly dispute Mrs. Montgomery’s longstanding debilitating mental disease — diagnosed and treated for the first time by the Bureau of Prisons’ own doctors,” Henry said in a statement. “Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution.”

Until this week, she had been held for many years at FMC Carswell in Texas, a federal hospital prison for female inmates with mental illness.

It was one of three executions the U.S. Department of Justice had scheduled for the final full week of Trump’s administration. Two other executions scheduled for Thursday and Friday have been delayed, for now at least, by a federal judge in Washington, to allow the condemned murderers to recover from COVID-19.

(Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell and Howard Goller)

Texas men charged with trying to sell 50 million bogus N95 masks to foreign government

(Reuters) – Two Houston-area men have been criminally charged with trying to fraudulently sell 50 million N95 respirator masks they did not actually possess to a foreign government at an inflated $317.6 million price, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Tuesday.

Paschal Eleanya, 46, and Arael Doolittle, 55, were accused of negotiating to sell the masks at five times the list prices set by the manufacturer, 3M Co.

According to a Nov. 19 indictment, the defendants expected to personally collect as much as $275 million from the transaction, with the remaining money going to their “broker” and the government’s own representatives.

The U.S. Secret Service broke up the transaction before it was completed, according to the indictment, which includes text messages from both defendants.

Eleanya and Doolittle were charged with two counts of wire fraud, each of which carries a maximum 20-year prison term, and conspiracy.

The Justice Department did not identify the foreign government. It said Eleanya turned himself in to authorities, while Doolittle is scheduled to be arraigned on Wednesday.

A lawyer for Doolittle did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Eleanya’s lawyer could not immediately be identified. The Justice Department had no immediate additional comment.

Doolittle was separately charged last month with trying to defraud 21 investors out of $1.2 million in oil and gas transactions. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

3M, the world’s largest maker of N95 masks, has filed at least 19 civil lawsuits to stop price-gouging, counterfeiting and other improper sales practices for its masks.

Most of 3M’s N95 masks cost less than $2, and the St. Paul, Minnesota-based company has pledged not to raise prices because of the coronavirus pandemic.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Alleged Islamic State militants known as ‘Beatles’ headed to U.S. to face charges

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two alleged Islamic State militants known as the ‘Beatles’ will arrive in the United States on Wednesday to face trial on U.S. charges for their alleged involvement in beheadings of American hostages in Syria, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The alleged militants, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, have been in U.S. military custody abroad since they were captured in 2019. They grew up in Britain and were UK citizens, but the British government withdrew their citizenship.

The pair are suspected of membership in a four-strong Islamic State cell known as the ‘Beatles’ because of their British accents. The group is alleged to have detained or killed Western hostages in Syria, including U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.

“These charges are the product of many years of hard work in pursuit of justice for our citizens slain by ISIS. Although we cannot bring them back, we can and will seek justice for them, their families, and for all Americans,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement.

In order to secure British help in obtaining evidence on the pair, Barr agreed that U.S. prosecutors would not seek the death penalty in any cases against them and would not carry out executions if they were imposed.

The pair were held in Iraq by the U.S. military for around a year and are now in FBI custody, Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers told a news conference.

“As for their ringleader, Mohamed Emwazi (infamously known as Jihadi John), he faced a different type of American resolve – the mighty reach of our military, which successfully targeted him in an airstrike several years ago,” Demers said.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said Islamic State is still trying to radicalize people in the United States and elsewhere.

“Their goal is to motivate people to launch attacks against Western targets wherever they are, using any means available,” Wray said.

Wray and Demers said the support of the British government was critical to moving the investigation and prosecution forward.

The families of Foley, Kassig, Mueller and Sotloff welcomed the news.

“James, Peter, Kayla and Steven were kidnapped, tortured, beaten, starved, and murdered by members of the Islamic State in Syria,” they said in a joint statement.

“Now our families can pursue accountability for these crimes against our children in a U.S. court.”

If convicted, Kotey and Elsheikh could face up to life in prison. The two are expected to appear in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Wednesday afternoon, officials said.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Idrees Ali; Editing by Mary Milliken and Rosalba O’Brien)

Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s book earnings should go to U.S. government, court rules

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is entitled to more than $5.2 million from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s book royalties, a federal court ruled this week, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a statement, the department said the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on Tuesday also ruled in favor of setting up a trust for the government for any future earnings from Snowden’s book, which had been the subject of a federal lawsuit.

A lawyer for Snowden did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In September 2019, the U.S. government sued Snowden, who resides in Russia, over his publication of “Permanent Record”, a book which the United States says violated non-disclosure agreements he signed when working for both NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The United States alleges that Snowden published the book without first submitting it to U.S. agencies for pre-publication review, in violation of agreements he signed when working for the agencies. U.S. authorities did not seek to block publication of Snowden’s book but rather to seize all proceeds.

Last December, a federal court in Virginia found that Snowden did breach his obligations to the CIA and NSA but reserved judgment on possible remedies. In an order issued on Tuesday, the court entered a judgment in the U.S. government’s favor for more than $5.2 million.

The civil litigation over the book is separate from criminal charges prosecutors filed against Snowden under a 1917 U.S. espionage law.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Mark Hosenball, Editing by Franklin Paul and Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. government plans to end week with third execution after 17-year hiatus

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – A week that marked the return of capital punishment by the U.S. government after a 17-year hiatus was due to end on Friday with a third planned execution of a federal prisoner.

If President Donald Trump’s administration faces no legal obstacle in putting Dustin Lee Honken, a convicted murderer, to death by lethal injection at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT), it will have completed as many executions in a few days as happened in the preceding 57 years.

Lawyers for the condemned men have amassed legal challenges, which include arguments that the U.S. Department of Justice’s new one-drug lethal-injection protocol breaches a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

These arguments have been rejected twice this week in overnight rulings by a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court.

Dustin Honken was a dealer in illegal methamphetamine when he and his girlfriend murdered five people in Iowa in 1993, including two girls aged 10 and 6. He was convicted in 2004.

He is one of several inmates on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, who have said the new one-drug protocol, which replaces a three-drug protocol the government last used in 2003, would cause an unnecessarily painful death.

The litigation will continue in the U.S. District Court in Washington with the surviving inmates. Since last year, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the cases, has ordered injunctions on three occasions delaying the scheduled executions to allow the legal challenges to play out. All three were overruled by the Supreme Court.

Two other men convicted of murdering children were executed in Terre Haute earlier this week: Daniel Lee on Tuesday, and Wesley Purkey on Thursday.

Families of the killers’ victims have been divided, reflecting broader public disagreement over capital punishment, which has been abolished by most other countries. Relatives of Lee’s victims pleaded for Trump to scrap Lee’s execution. The father of the 16-year-old girl murdered by Purkey told reporters that Purkey’s death brought some resolution to his grief.

Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, called it “a truly dark period for our country.” She joined the condemned men’s lawyers in criticizing higher courts in what they called a rush to short-circuit their legal rights.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority wrote that it had established that lethal injection was a constitutional method, some of the liberal justices complained new problems raised by the changed protocol were being dismissed too hastily.

“I remain convinced of the importance of reconsidering the constitutionality of the death penalty itself,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissenting opinion on Thursday.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

U.S. executes Wesley Purkey, second federal execution in 17 years

(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice executed convicted murderer Wesley Purkey on Thursday, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman said, in the second federal execution in a week after a 17-year pause, over objections by his lawyers that he had dementia and no longer understood his punishment.

The execution had been blocked by a federal court, but the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday overruled it, just as it had done in another case on Tuesday, once again putting the federal government back in the business of executing prisoners.

Purkey, 68, was convicted in 2003 in Missouri of raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl before dumping her dismembered and burned remains in a septic pond.

Purkey was pronounced dead at 8:19 a.m. EDT (1219 GMT) at the Justice Department’s execution chamber at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, the spokeswoman, Kristie Breshears said by phone.

His lawyers had argued he has brain damage and dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease. They said that although he had accepted responsibility for his crime, he no longer understood the reason for his execution and that killing him would breach the U.S. Constitution.

Before Tuesday, when the Justice Department executed convicted killer Daniel Lee in Terre Haute, the federal government had only executed three people since 1963, all from 2001 to 2003.

Lee had joined Purkey and other death row inmates in lawsuits challenging the legality of the government’s new one-drug lethal-injection protocol using pentobarbital, a barbiturate, which the Justice Department announced a year ago, replacing its three-drug protocol.

A federal judge agreed with a medical expert cited by the condemned men’s lawyers that the drug was likely to breach a constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” by causing a painful drowning sensation as bloody fluid filled their lungs before they lost consciousness.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely and Jonathan Allen in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

U.S. judge delays first federal executions in 17 years

By Jonathan Allen

(Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge issued an injunction on Monday stopping what would have been the first federal execution in 17 years, scheduled for later in the day, to allow the continuation of legal challenges against the government’s lethal-injection protocol.

Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. district court in Washington ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to delay four executions the department had scheduled for July and August until further order of the court.

Efforts to resume capital punishment at the federal level were underway within a few months of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, ending a de facto moratorium that began under his predecessor, Barack Obama, while long-running legal challenges to lethal injections played out in federal courts.

Judge Chutkan has been overseeing cases brought by inmates on death row who argue that the Justice Department’s new one-drug protocol breaks various administrative and drug-control laws and is unconstitutional.

The Justice Department had planned to execute Daniel Lewis Lee on Monday in Terre Haute, Indiana, using lethal injection of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, for his role in the murders of three members of an Arkansas family, including an 8-year-old child, in 1996.

Some relatives of Lee’s victims opposed him receiving the death sentence while his accomplice in the murders, Chevie Kehoe, was sentenced to life in prison.

The department had scheduled two more executions for later in the week and a fourth in August, of Wesley Purkey, Dustin Honken and Keith Nelson, all convicted of murdering children.

The coronavirus pandemic has prevented some of the lawyers of inmates on death row from visiting their clients. At least one employee involved in the executions tested positive for COVID-19, the Justice Department said over the weekend.

On Sunday, an appeals court rejected an argument by some relatives of Lee’s victims, who sued for a delay saying they feared that attending his execution could expose them to the coronavirus.

FEDERAL EXECUTIONS RARE

While Texas, Missouri and other states execute multiple condemned inmates each year, federal executions are rare: only three have occurred since 1963, all from 2001 to 2003, including the 2001 execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

There are currently 62 people on federal death row in Terre Haute.

Opposition to the death penalty has grown in the United States, although 54 percent of Americans said they supported it for people convicted of murder, according to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center.

In announcing the planned resumption of executions, Attorney General William Barr said last year: “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

A European Union ban on selling drugs for use in executions or torture has led to pharmaceutical companies refusing to sell such drugs to U.S. prison systems.

The Justice Department spent much of 2018 and 2019 building a secret supply chain of private companies to make and test its drug of choice, pentobarbital, which replaces the three-drug protocol used in previous executions. Some of the companies involved said they were not aware they were testing execution drugs, a Reuters investigation found last week.

As with Texas and other states, the Justice Department has commissioned a private pharmacy to make the drug.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Peter Cooney and Dan Grebler)

 

U.S. authorities seek to question UK’s Prince Andrew over Epstein

WASHINGTON/LONDON (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to question Britain’s Prince Andrew as part of its investigation into possible co-conspirators of deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. law enforcement official said.

U.S. investigators want to interview Andrew, Queen Elizabeth’s second son, about his friendship with Epstein, who was found dead in prison last year while awaiting charges of trafficking minors, the official, who has direct knowledge of the investigation, said on condition of anonymity.

Britain’s Sun newspaper reported earlier on Monday that the DOJ had sent British authorities a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) request, used in criminal investigations to gather material from other states which cannot readily be obtained on a police cooperation basis.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment. Buckingham Palace declined to comment. Britain’s Home Office (interior ministry) said it did not comment on the existence of any MLAT requests.

Andrew, 60, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, said in a public statement in November that he was stepping down from public duties because of the furor over his links to Epstein and would be willing to help “any appropriate law enforcement agency with their investigations if required”.

In March, Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said that despite the British royal publicly stating he would cooperate with the inquiry, the prince had “shut the door on voluntary cooperation and our office is considering its options”.

“Legal discussions with the DOJ are subject to strict confidentiality rules, as set out in their own guidelines,” a source close to the prince’s legal team said in response to the Sun report.

“We have chosen to abide by both the letter and the spirit of these rules, which is why we have made no comment about anything related to the DOJ during the course of this year. We believe in playing straight bat.”

If the MLAT request was granted, U.S. prosecutors could ask for Andrew to voluntarily attend an interview to give a statement or potentially force him to attend a court to provide evidence under oath.

A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation probe is focusing on British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate of Epstein’s, and others who facilitated the wealthy financier’s alleged trafficking of underage girls, law enforcement sources told Reuters in December.

Ghislaine, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, has denied the allegations against her.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington and Michael Holden in London; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Nick Tattersall)