NEWS OF THE DAY
From Across the Nation
_1 Prison release: A Michigan man whose murder conviction was thrown out after he spent 45 years in prison was released Thursday while prosecutors appeal a decision that grants him a new trial. Richard Phillips thanked God by raising his arm to the sunny sky outside a Detroit-area jail. His conviction was erased in August, but the 71-year-old had remained in custody until a judge said he could be freed on bond while wearing an electronic ankle device. He has long declared his innocence in the 1971 fatal shooting of Gregory Harris. In 2014, the Innocence Clinic at University of Michigan law school learned that a co-defendant said Phillips had absolutely no role.
_2 Charlottesville killing: The man accused of driving into a crowd protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., faces a new charge of first-degree murder after a court hearing Thursday in which prosecutors presented surveillance video and other evidence against him. Prosecutors announced at the start of a preliminary hearing for James Alex Fields that they were seeking to upgrade the second-degree murder charge he previously faced in the Aug. 12 collision in Charlottesville that left 32-yearold Heather Heyer dead and dozens injured. The judge agreed to that and ruled there is probable cause for all charges against Fields to proceed.
_3 Police shooting: A Minnesota prosecutor said he doesn’t yet have enough evidence to charge a Minneapolis police officer who killed an unarmed Australian woman this summer, blaming investigators who “haven’t done their job.” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman is still deciding whether to charge Officer Mohamed Noor, who shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond in the alley behind her home in July. Damond had called 911 to report a possible sexual assault. As she approached the squad car, Noor shot her.
_4 Bitcoin seizure: U.S. attorneys in Utah prosecuting a multimillion-dollar opioid drug ring are moving quickly to sell seized bitcoin that’s exploded in value to about $8.5 million since the alleged ringleader’s arrest a year ago. The U.S. attorney’s office in Salt Lake City cites the digital currency’s volatility in court documents pressing for the sale. The bitcoin cache was worth less than $500,000 when Aaron Shamo was arrested on drug charges, but the value of the digital currency has skyrocketed since then.
_5 Planet discovery: Scientists applying artificial intelligence to data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope have discovered an eighth planet around the star Kepler-90 — breaking the record for the star with the most exoplanets and, for the first time, tying with our own. The planet Kepler-90i, described at a briefing in Washington on Thursday and in a paper accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, demonstrates for the first time that other stars can host planetary systems as populous as our own solar system. The findings also establish the growing role that neural networks and other machine learning techniques could play in the hunt for more elusive planets outside our own solar neighborhood.
Chronicle News Services