Interior: $580M headed to 15 tribes to fulfill water rights

Fifteen Native American tribes will get a total of $580 million in federal money this year for water rights settlements, the Biden administration announced Thursday. The money will help carry out the agreements that define the tribes’ rights to water from rivers and other sources and pay for pipelines, pumping stations, and canals that deliver it to reservations. “Water rights are crucial to ensuring the health, safety and empowerment of Tribal communities,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement Thursday that acknowledged the decades many tribes have waited for the funding. Access to reliable, clean water and basic sanitation facilities on tribal lands remains a challenge across many Native American reservations. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that tribes have rights to as much water as they need to establish a permanent homeland, and those rights stretch back at least as long as any given reservation has existed. As a result, tribal water rights often are senior to others’ in the West, where competition over the dwindling resource is often fierce. But in many cases, details about those water rights were not specified and have had to be determined in the modern era. Many tribes opted for settlements because litigation over water can be expensive and drawn out, with negotiations involving states, cities, private water users, local water districts and others that can take years, if not decades. Of the funding announced Thursday, $460 million comes from the $2.5 billion set aside for Native American water rights settlements in the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill. A federal fund created by Congress in 2009 to pay for water rights settlements will contribute the other $120 million. About $157 million will go to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana. The federal government signed the tribes’ water rights compact in 2021 and promised over the following decade to fund the rebuilding of an irrigation project on the Flathead Indian Reservation constructed in the 1900s.

California Supreme Court dumps triple-slaying death sentence

The California Supreme Court on Monday overturned the murder convictions and death sentence for a man who killed three people and committed a series of other crimes in San Diego in 1985. The court ordered a new trial for Billy Ray Waldon, ruling unanimously that a lower court judge improperly allowed Bill Ray Waldon to represent himself at trial despite testimony at an earlier competency hearing that he suffered from paranoia and a thought disorder impairing his ability to think clearly. The judge overturned a previous decision by another judge who had found Waldon wasn’t competent to represent himself. Authorities said that over a two-week period in December 1985, Waldon shot and killed Dawn Ellerman and set her home on fire, killing her teenage daughter, Erin Ellerman, by smoke inhalation. He also broke into an apartment and robbed and raped the resident, robbed four women of their purses, shot and killed Gordon Wells as he worked on a car and wounded a neighbor who had heard the shots and went to help Wells, authorities said. Waldon was finally arrested six months later. At trial, Waldon claimed federal agents had framed him for the crimes “to thwart his efforts to promote world peace, spread new languages, and advance Cherokee autonomy,” according to the Supreme Court’s ruling. He also claimed CIA agents had monitored him.

Top Brazil court greenlights probe of Bolsonaro for riot

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday authorized adding former President Jair Bolsonaro in its investigation into who incited the Jan. 8 riot in the nation’s capital, as part of a broader crackdown to hold responsible parties to account. According to the text of his ruling, Justice Alexandre de Moraes granted the request from the prosecutor-general’s office, which cited a video that Bolsonaro posted on Facebook two days after the riot. The video claimed President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wasn’t voted into office, but rather was chosen by the Supreme Court and Brazil’s electoral authority. Prosecutors in the recently formed group to combat anti-democratic acts argued earlier Friday that although Bolsonaro posted the video after the riot, its content was sufficient to justify investigating his conduct beforehand. Bolsonaro deleted it the morning after he first posted it. Legal analysts consulted by The Associated Press said investigating Bolsonaro was overdue and justified. “Bolsonaro’s positioning, in general, is being investigated as an incitement method. The fact that the video was published after the attacks doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved previously in inciting the acts,” said Georges Abboud, a constitutional law professor at Sao Paulo’s Pontifical Catholic University.

State seeks long prison term for accused NYC subway gunman

Prosecutors plan to seek a decades-long prison sentence for a man who is expected to plead guilty this week to opening fire in a subway car and wounding 10 riders in an attack that shocked New York City. Frank James, 63, is scheduled to enter a guilty plea on Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court, admitting that he was responsible for the April 12 attack. It set off a massive 30-hour manhunt that ended when he called the police on himself. Prosecutors told Judge William F. Kuntz II in a letter late last week that they plan to ask him to go beyond the roughly 32-year to 39-year sentence that federal sentencing guidelines would recommend. James planned the attack for years and endangered the lives of dozens of people, prosecutors said in the letter. Defense attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, when courts were closed to observe the New Year’s holiday. James had been scheduled to stand trial in late February. His lawyers informed the judge on Dec. 21 that James wanted to plead guilty. Prosecutors say he plans to plead guilty to 11 charges without a plea agreement. Ten of those charges — each one corresponding to a specific victim — accuse him of committing a terrorist attack against a mass transportation system carrying passengers and employees. The 11th charge accuses James of discharging a firearm during a violent crime. Kuntz issued an order last week instructing the U.S. Marshals Service to use “all necessary force” to ensure that James shows up at Tuesday’s plea proceeding, noting that James has refused to appear at past hearings. James, who is being held in a federal jail, balked at being taken to a court date in October but then appeared later that day, after Kuntz issued a similar order for him to be forced to court if necessary. In the subway attack, the shooter set off a pair of smoke grenades and then fired a barrage of random shots inside the train, bloodying passengers as it moved between stations. Before the shooting, James, who is Black, posted dozens of videos online in which he ranted about race, violence and his struggles with mental illness. In some, he decried the treatment of Black people and talked about how he was so frustrated, “I should have gotten a gun and just started shooting.”

FTX founder could be sent to US after extradition hearing

Sam Bankman-Fried is back in a Bahamian court Wednesday for an extradition hearing that could clear the way for the one-time billionaire to be sent to the U.S. to face criminal charges related to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In a court in Nassau, Bahamas, on Monday, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers said he had agreed to be extradited to the U.S., but the necessary paperwork had not yet been written up. If approved, Bankman-Fried could be on a plane to the U.S. as early as Wednesday afternoon. Bahamian authorities arrested Bankman-Fried last week at the request of the U.S. government. U.S. prosecutors allege he played a central role in the rapid collapse of FTX and hid its problems from the public and investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Bankman-Fried illegally used investors’ money to buy real estate on behalf of himself and his family. The 30-year-old could potentially spend the rest of his life in jail. Bankman-Fried was denied bail Friday after a Bahamian judge ruled that he posed a flight risk. The founder and former CEO of FTX, once worth tens of billions of dollars on paper, is being held in the Bahamas’ Fox Hill prison, which has been has been cited by human rights activists as having poor sanitation and as being infested with rats and insects. Once he’s back in the U.S., Bankman-Fried’s attorney will be able to request that he be released on bail.

Supreme Court weighs ‘most important case’ on democracy

The Supreme Court is about to confront a new elections case, a Republican-led challenge asking the justices for a novel ruling that could significantly increase the power of state lawmakers over elections for Congress and the presidency. The court is set to hear arguments Wednesday in a case from North Carolina, where Republican efforts to draw congressional districts heavily in their favor were blocked by a Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court because the GOP map violated the state constitution. A court-drawn map produced seven seats for each party in last month’s midterm elections in highly competitive North Carolina. The question for the justices is whether the U.S. Constitution’s provision giving state legislatures the power to make the rules about the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections cuts state courts out of the process. “This is the single most important case on American democracy — and for American democracy — in the nation’s history,” said former federal judge Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative who has joined the legal team defending the North Carolina court decision.

Judge denies 19-year-old’s ask to attend father’s execution

A federal judge has denied a request from a 19-year-old woman to allow her to watch her father’s death by injection, upholding a Missouri law that bars anyone under 21 from witnessing an execution. Kevin Johnson is set to be executed Tuesday for killing Kirkwood, Missouri, Police Officer William McEntee in 2005. Johnson’s lawyers have appeals pending that seek to spare his life. His daughter, Khorry Ramey, had sought to attend the execution, and the American Civil Liberties Union had filed an emergency motion with a federal court in Kansas City. The ACLU’s court filing said the age requirement served no safety purpose and violates Ramey’s constitutional rights. But U.S. District Judge Brian C. Wimes ruled late Friday that Ramey’s constitutional rights would not be violated by the law. “I’m heartbroken that I won’t be able to be with my dad in his last moments,” Ramey said in a statement. “My dad is the most important person in my life. He has been there for me my whole life, even though he’s been incarcerated.” While the judge acknowledged that the law would cause emotional harm for Ramey, he found that was just one part of the court’s consideration and the law did not violate her constitutional rights. Ramey said she was praying that Gov. Michael Parson would grant her father clemency. Johnson’s lawyers have filed appeals seeking to halt the execution. They don’t challenge his guilt but claim racism played a role in the decision to seek the death penalty, and in the jury’s decision to sentence him to die. Johnson is Black and McEntee was white. Johnson’s lawyers also have asked the courts to intervene for other reasons, including a history of mental illness and his age — he was 19 at the time of the crime. Courts have increasingly moved away from sentencing teen offenders to death since the Supreme Court in 2005 banned the execution of offenders who were younger than 18 at the time of their crime. In a court filing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office stated there were no grounds for court intervention.