Lawsuit stalled in fatal shooting
A 2011 lawsuit over the fatal police shooting of a 67-year-old Little Rock man has stalled at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Eugene Ellison died inside his Big Country Chateau apartment on Colonel Glenn Road after he was shot by Little Rock officer Donna Lesher, who was off duty and working as a security guard, on Dec. 9, 2010.
Ellison's family filed a civil-rights lawsuit over his death, but the city argued that Lesher and officer Tabitha McCrillis -- who was working alongside Lesher that night -- were entitled to "qualified immunity" on the suit's deadly force claim.
Such immunity shields officers from being sued for performing their duties unless their conduct violated a clearly established right.
On Sept. 11, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reconsider its Aug. 6 order that Lesher must face trial on the deadly force claim. A three-judge panel had upheld a federal court ruling that Lesher wasn't entitled to immunity but reversed an identical ruling pertaining to McCrillis.
The panel also said both women must face trial on allegations that they illegally entered Ellison's apartment after they found his door ajar and he told them to leave him alone.
Last week, the 8th Circuit notified Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Miller, in whose Little Rock courtroom the trial is set to be held, that the high court has received the city's appeal of the 8th Circuit's refusal to grant Lesher immunity.
The high court, which docketed the case Dec. 14, could decide whether to hear the petition at any time before its term ends in June. The court rejects the majority of such petitions.
The apartment complex and its owner, who hired the officers, remain defendants in the case, which was filed by Ellison's family, including his son, Troy, who is also a Little Rock police officer.
Sentencing set in bribery case
Steven B. Jones, former deputy director of the state Department of Human Services, is set to be sentenced Feb. 18 before U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson after an October 2014 guilty plea to a bribery conspiracy charge.
In a related case, businessman Theodore Suhl is scheduled for a jury trial before Wilson beginning July 12.
Suhl is accused in a separate but related indictment of paying bribes to Jones in exchange for receiving inside information from the state to benefit his businesses, two mental health service providers. His trial was previously set to begin Jan. 19.
A third defendant, former West Memphis City Councilman Phillip Wayne Carter, who pleaded guilty in September to participating in the bribery conspiracy, is to be sentenced Feb. 18 before Wilson.
Judge reschedules trial on 'pill mills'
A trial in which federal prosecutors want to present testimony from an expert witness on "pill mills" -- medical clinics that operate for the purpose of profiting from the unlawful sale of prescription medication -- was rescheduled Friday.
The case has 19 defendants, including doctors, physician's assistants, pharmacists, nurses and patients who live in the Eastern District of Arkansas. It is one of six indictments handed up in Little Rock as part of a national effort to target "rogue" doctors, pharmacists and others. The six Arkansas indictments name 113 defendants, and this was to be the first to go to trial.
The doctors named as defendants in the case are Shawn Michael Brooks, Jerry Scott Reifeiss and Felice Wyatt -- the last of whom is accused of being the "collaborative physician" with Aaron Paul Borengasser, a physician's assistant, and Kristin L. Raines, an advanced practical nurse, at Artex Medical Center, a pain-management clinic in Little Rock.
The clinic was managed by Christopher Dion Mason, another defendant, until it closed on Oct. 6, 2014.
The indictment says KJ Medical Clinic, owned by defendant Anthony Markeith King, then opened at the Artex location, and that Brooks and Reifeiss were prescribing physicians at KJ.
Attorney Jeff Rosenzweig filed a notice last month that Reifeiss plans to assert an insanity defense because he "is not mentally competent to stand trial and ... may not have been sane at the time of events for which he has been indicted."
In an order filed Friday, U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. cited Reifeiss' request for a psychiatric examination -- as well as three other defendants' motions to postpone the Jan. 25 trial -- in rescheduling it for May 23. Prosecutors later cited a conflict with that date and asked to move the trial to June 27.
Metro on 01/11/2016