Tennessee Gov. Lee pauses executions after test oversight
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Gov. Bill Lee paused executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year Monday after revealing that the state had failed to ensure its lethal injection drugs were properly tested. The oversight forced Lee to halt the execution of Oscar Smith an hour before he was to die last month.
Lee didn’t initially disclose the reason for stopping Smith’s execution other than to say there was an oversight in the preparation of the lethal injection drugs. Tennessee’s execution protocols require any compounded drugs to be independently tested for potency, sterility and endotoxins.
In his Monday statement, Lee said the drugs for Smith’s execution were tested for potency and sterility, but not endotoxins.
Smith’s attorneys had called for a moratorium on executions and independent review of the problems last week. In a Monday statement, Federal public defender Kelley Henry said the Republican governor’s decision shows “great leadership.”
Lee appointed former U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to review circumstances that led to the failure. .
Smith was sentenced to death for fatally stabbing and shooting his estranged wife, Judith Smith, and her teenage sons, Jason and Chad Burnett, at their Nashville home Oct. 1, 1989. Christian flag ruling: A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that Boston violated the free speech rights of a conservative activist when it refused his request to fly a Christian flag on a flagpole outside City Hall.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court that the city discriminated against the activist, Harold Shurtleff, because of his “religious viewpoint,” even though it had routinely approved applications for the use of one of the three flagpoles outside City Hall that fly the U.S., Massachusetts and Boston flags.
Occasionally, the city takes down its own pennant and temporarily hoists another flag.
Shurtleff and his Camp Constitution wanted to fly a white banner with a red cross on a blue background in the upper left corner, called the Christian flag, to mark Constitution Day, Sept. 17, in 2017.
The city had approved 284 consecutive applications to fly flags, usually those of other nations, before it rejected Shurtleff ’s because it was a Christian flag.
Arrest warrant: Authorities issued an arrest warrant Monday for a jail official who they say helped an inmate awaiting trial on a murder charge to escape from an Alabama jail. A search was on for the pair.
Inmate Casey Cole White, 38, was shackled and handcuffed when he and Vicky White, the facility’s assistant director of corrections, left the Lauderdale County Detention Center in Florence, Alabama, on Friday morning.
They have not been seen since, although the patrol vehicle that the pair used when leaving the detention center was found at a nearby shopping center parking lot after their absence was discovered.
Authorities have no idea where they are, although the inmate should be recognizable by his size. He stands 6 feet, 9 inches tall and weighs
about 260 pounds.
Authorities warned that anyone seeing the pair should not approach them.
“We consider both of them dangerous and in all probability, both individuals are armed,” U.S. Marshal Marty Keely said at a news conference Monday.
Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said Monday that they had issued an arrest warrant for Vicky White, 56, on charges of permitting or allowing an escape. She is not related to White.
Jan. 6 panel: Three more House Republicans received requests Monday to voluntarily appear before the congressional committee investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection and answer questions about their involvement in the effort to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The committee sent letters to GOP Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ronny
Jackson of Texas — three members of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus that have in recent years aligned themselves with Trump.
Jackson ruled out cooperating.
The nine-member panel is asking for the members of Congress to testify about their involvement in meetings at the White House, direct conversations with then-President Trump as he sought to challenge his loss in the 2020 presidential election, and the planning and coordination of rallies on and before Jan. 6, 2021. Capitol riot verdict: A federal jury Monday convicted a New York Police Department veteran of assaulting an officer during the U.S. Capitol riot, rejecting his claim that he was defending himself when he tackled the officer and grabbed his gas mask.
Thomas Webster, a 20-year NYPD veteran, was the first Capitol riot defendant to be tried on an assault
charge and the first to present a jury with a self-defense argument.
Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before they convicted Webster of all six counts in his indictment, including a charge that he assaulted Metropolitan Police Department officer Noah Rathbun with a dangerous weapon, a metal flagpole.
Webster, 56, is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 2.
The cellphones of Spain’s prime minister and defense minister were infected last year with Pegasus spyware, which is available only to countries’ government agencies, authorities announced Monday.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s mobile phone was breached twice in May 2021, and Defense Minister Margarita Robles’ device was targeted once the following month, Cabinet Minister Félix Bolaños said.
The breaches, which
Spain spyware attack:
resulted in a significant amount of data being obtained, were not authorized by a Spanish judge, which is a legal requirement for national covert operations, Bolaños said at a news conference in Madrid.
The Socialist-led government was during those months under scrutiny over its handling of a foreign policy spat with Morocco and gripped by a domestic dispute over the release of jailed separatists from Spain’s Catalonia region.
Vaccines in Denmark: Danish health officials said Monday that 1.1 million excess COVID-19 vaccines will be discarded in the coming weeks because their expiration date is near, and efforts to donate them to developing countries have failed.
Around 81% of Denmark’s population of 5.8 million has received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, while nearly 62% have received a booster shot.