SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri man who was shot by a son who was defending his mother has been sentenced to eight years in prison.
Hopkins -photo Greene Co.
Thirty-eight-year-old Wendell Hopkins was sentenced Friday for first-degree burglary and misdemeanor property damage.
In 2016, Hopkins was shot by his then 15-year-old son after Hopkins tried to break into the home of his ex-wife. Hopkins and his ex-wife had argued over the phone and he later showed up at the woman’s house.
Hopkins was shot twice by his son after forcing his way into the house.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — Ten Kansas nurses or nurse aides face charges stemming from a state investigation into allegations of Medicaid fraud, the theft of narcotic medications and the mistreatment of vulnerable adults.
Online records show that at least eight of those charged are still licensed to work in Kansas. Three health care workers from the Kansas City area were working at nursing homes when authorities say they committed the crimes, according to witness lists provided by the attorney general’s office.
Carol Moreland, executive director of the Kansas State Board of Nursing, declined to discuss the cases.
Lenexa resident Catherine Santaniello is charged with two felony counts of mistreatment of a dependent adult, including allegations of “knowing infliction of physical injury, unreasonable confinement or unreasonable punishment.” She also faces two misdemeanor charges for battery and making a false claim to Medicaid.
The charges were filed against Santaniello this week, but the incidents allegedly occurred in January 2017.
Santaniello didn’t respond to requests for comment. She’ll appear in court Oct. 24.
Erin Whitlow, the former nursing director at Parkway Care and Rehabilitation in Edwardsville, is charged with felony possession of morphine with the intent to distribute. The Leavenworth woman is also charged with felony mistreatment of two dependent adults by depriving them of “treatment, goods or services that were necessary to maintain” their physical or mental health.
The alleged incidents occurred in July and August 2017.
Whitlow’s attorney, Brian Costello, said she’s sought drug abuse treatment and is “willing to accept what she did.”
“We’ve been cooperating with the attorney general and she’s taking full responsibility for it,” Costello said.
———-
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — Ten Kansas nurses and nurse aides have been charged with Medicaid fraud, stealing narcotic medications and mistreating vulnerable adults.
The charges came after an enforcement sweep by the state’s attorney general. Online records show that eight of those charged are still licensed to work in Kansas.
State Board of Nursing Executive Director Carol Moreland declined to comment on pending litigation and questions about the licenses.
Witness lists show that three Kansas City area health care workers were working at nursing homes during the alleged crimes.
Lenexa resident Catherine Santaniello is charged with two felony counts of mistreatment of a dependent adult. She also faces two misdemeanor charges for battery and making a false claim to Medicaid.
Santaniello didn’t respond to requests for comment. She’ll appear in court Oct. 24.
This is the first commissioned bronze statue of him ever created. It is a gift to Washburn University from John Pinegar, BA ’82, and the Doug and Kathleen, BA ’84, Smith family.
Former U.S. senators Bob and Elizabeth Dole attended the unveiling with Jerry Farley, president, Washburn University, and other dignitaries including former senator Nancy Kassebaum.
Washburn conferred on Dole an honorary doctorate of laws in 1969 and an honorary doctorate of civil law in 1985. He received the Washburn Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award in 1966. The Washburn University School of Law Alumni Association honored him with the Distinguished Service Award in 1981 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.
Dole graduated from Washburn University in 1952 earning both a bachelor of arts and a juris doctorate in the same year because of credits he earned before enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II.
He has developed a worldwide reputation for public service, holding elected positions in the Kansas House of Representatives, as Russell County (Kan.) attorney and as a U.S. congressman before spending nearly 30 years as a U.S. senator. He was chair of the Republican National Committee, Senate Minority Leader and Senate Majority Leader, where he set a record as the longest-serving Republican leader. Dole was President Gerald Ford’s vice presidential running mate in 1976 and a Republican presidential candidate in both 1988 and 1996, earning the GOP nomination in 1996.
A World War II veteran, he served as national chair of the World War II Memorial Campaign and authored the autobiographical “One Soldier’s Story,” among other books.
Attorneys say their privileged meetings and phone calls with clients at the Leavenworth Detention Center were unlawfully recorded. Credit Google Map
Attorneys alleging their meetings and phone calls with clients at the Leavenworth Detention Center were unlawfully recorded can move forward with a class-action lawsuit, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Bough found that a class action was the best way to proceed because “(i)t would be judicially uneconomical for the Court to entertain hundreds if not thousands of individualized claims” over the same issue.
That issue is whether the private operator of the facility, CoreCivic, and its provider of telephone and recording services, Securus Technologies, unlawfully intercepted privileged attorney-client communications in violation of federal and state wiretap laws and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
“This has always been a real important case to us in terms of the underlying implications of constitutional rights and the American criminal justice system,” said Michael A. Hodgson, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit.
“We took this case because of the nature of the privileged conversations themselves and the importance of the attorney-client relationship,” he added. “So I would say we’re cautiously optimistic and encouraged by the court’s ruling. We’ve got a long ways to go … but this was a great first step in that process.”
In his ruling, Bough wrote that he “acknowledges the importance of the attorney-client privilege and recognizes the sanctity of what is at stake in the present controversy — public trust in the legal system and the administration of justice.”
Hodgson said the class certified by Bough could eventually number as many as 1,000 attorneys.
The case, which was filed in 2016, is one of two class-action lawsuits spawned by disclosures that privileged attorney-client phone calls and meetings were recorded at the Leavenworth facility. The other case was filed on behalf of detainees and is in the midst of settlement negotiations.
Both suits, which contend the recordings violated federal and state wiretap laws, have the potential to expose CoreCivic and Securus to millions of dollars in damages.
A spokeswoman for CoreCivic, the largest private operator of prisons and detention facilities in the United States, said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
CoreCivic owns and operates Leavenworth Detention Center, which houses pre-trial detainees and has more than 1,100 beds.
The company insists it did nothing wrong because it says outgoing calls subject to recording were preceded by a pre-recorded message to that effect. But in-person meetings were recorded as well, and neither clients nor their attorneys were warned that those might also be recorded.
The recordings first came to light in a criminal case alleging that guards, inmates and outside parties had smuggled drugs and contraband into the Leavenworth Detention Center.
U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson, who is overseeing that case, appointed a special master – an independent third party – to investigate the extent of the problem and whether the recordings were provided to law enforcement officials and prosecutors.
In court filings, David Johnson, the attorney who filed the class action case on behalf of attorneys who say they were unlawfully recorded, says that data provided by Securus show that nearly 19,000 calls to 567 attorneys on a list compiled by the special master were recorded. And Johnson says that probably understates the number, since calls were also made to attorneys not on the special master’s list.
JASPER COUNTY — One person died in an accident just before 1p.m. Friday in Jasper County.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2016 Mercedes Benz Sprinter 3500 driven by Caleb D. Brainard, 25, Blue Springs, was eastbound on Interstate 44 one mile east of Sarcoxie. The vehicle rear-ended a semi stopped in traffic due to heavy congestion ahead.
Brainard was pronounced dead at the scene. The semi driver from Florida was not injured. Brainard was wearing a seat belt at the time of the accident, according to the MSHP.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Missouri’s Republican Senate candidate Josh Hawley opposes a federal provision that bars religious organizations from political endorsements, and his upcoming appearance at a Baptist university may provide a test case for the future of the measure.
Hawley, the state’s attorney general, is scheduled to speak Wednesday during chapel at Hannibal-LaGrange University, a 900-student college in Hannibal, 115 miles north of St. Louis.
Hawley is facing incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill in a race that could help determine control of the Senate. She’s not invited to chapel, which is mandatory for full-time students and open to the public.
At issue is an Internal Revenue Service provision known as the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches and other religious organizations from candidate endorsements. Doing so could cost them their tax-exempt status and a fine.
Hawley favors repealing the amendment. He told conservative pastors in August that he hoped the IRS would “fine a pastor” to create a legal challenge.
During a campaign stop Thursday in St. Charles, Hawley said the amendment “punishes pastors and it punishes churches.” He said pastors have delivered some of the most important speeches in American history, citing Martin Luther King Jr. as an example.
“Thank goodness nobody silenced him from the pulpit,” Hawley said.
President Donald Trump said last year he wanted to get rid of the Johnson Amendment. A coalition of more than 4,000 faith leaders responded by writing to Congress urging members to retain it. Americans United for Separation of Church and State said the amendment “protects houses of worship from becoming centers of partisan politics.”
McCaskill supports the amendment.
HLGU president Anthony Allen was traveling Friday and unavailable for comment, the university said. Earlier this week, Allen told Word & Way, a Baptist publication, he was not concerned that inviting one candidate and not the other would put the university at odds with IRS guidelines.
Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty Executive Director Amanda Tyler said that only once has a religious organization lost its tax-exempt status for a Johnson Amendment violation — after an upstate New York church took out a full-page ad against Bill Clinton days before the 1992 election.
The bigger risk, Tyler said, is allowing partisanship to sow divisions.
Religious organizations “are some of the last community spaces that are not divided along partisan lines,” Tyler said. “That’s a good thing. We should be doing more to protect those spaces and not be divided based on how we vote.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans have sped legislation through the House to expand their massive new tax law, capping their session for the year as they rush out of town to face voters in the November elections. The new bill would make permanent the individual and small-business tax cuts in the law.
Legislative action on the U.S. House floor Friday -image C-Span
Friday’s vote was 220-191 in the Republican-led House to approve the legislation. It’s the second tax-cut proposal that Republican leaders have pushed in less than a year. The vote was mostly along party lines. Democrats continued their solid opposition to tax-cut legislation, asserting it favors corporations and wealthy individuals over middle-income Americans.
At the same time, 11 Republican House members, facing tough re-election fights in the high-tax, Democratic-leaning states of New York, New Jersey and California, voted against their party’s bill.
The GOP lawmakers are pushing to hold onto their seats in relatively affluent suburban districts where President Donald Trump is unpopular. Residents in those states could see substantial increases in their federal tax bills next spring because of the $10,000 cap on state and local deductions in the tax law. The new legislation would make the cap permanent.
Prospects for the legislation in the Senate are weak, given the slim Republican majority and concern over the potential for further blowing up the deficit with new tax cuts — without corresponding new revenue sources. The sweeping rewrite of the tax code that Republicans hustled through Congress late last year, signed into law by Trump as his signature legislative achievement, is expected to add about $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.
The bill approved Friday would add another $545 billion through 2028, according to an estimate by Congress’ bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation.
House Republicans portray the tax legislation as championing the middle class and small businesses.
In the eight months since the tax law took effect, “We’ve seen an economic turnaround with more jobs, bigger paychecks and historic Main Street optimism,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said before the vote.
With the midterm elections looming, polls have shown only lukewarm support among voters for the package of individual and corporate tax cuts that took effect Jan. 1. The new law provides steep tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans, and more modest reductions for middle- and low-income individuals and families.
Early this year, millions of working Americans got a boost from the tax law as they saw increases in their paychecks with less tax withheld by employers. But as Trump has undertaken trade wars with China and U.S. allies, trade tensions have overshadowed the tax cuts in economically vulnerable areas of the country that depend on exports.
In House debate on the bill, Democrats continued to denounce the existing tax law and new proposal, and repeatedly pounded on their impact on the mounting $21 trillion deficit. The Republicans will seek to fill the hole by cutting deeply into Medicare and Social Security, Democratic lawmakers warned.
“This is all borrowed money that will go to corporations and high-income earners,” said Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. The new legislation “is another reckless tax cut for the wealthy that leaves behind average, hardworking families.”
While the new law slashed the corporate tax rate permanently from 35 percent to 21 percent, its tax cuts for individuals and the millions of U.S. “pass-through” businesses expire in eight years. The “pass-through” businesses funnel their income to owners and other individuals, who then pay personal income tax on those earnings, not the corporate rate. They are allowed under the new law to deduct 20 percent of the first $315,000 of their earnings.
The legislation clearing the House on Friday would make the cuts for individuals and pass-through businesses permanent.
On Thursday, the House passed a pair of Republican-written companion bills that would add incentives for savings and startup businesses to the new tax law. The votes were 240-177 and 260-156, also mostly along party lines.
One of the measures would create a “universal savings account” for families that could be used for a range of purposes and would allow the tax-free earnings to be more easily withdrawn than is the case with existing retirement accounts. In addition, it would allow the popular, tax-free 529 college savings accounts to also be used to pay for apprenticeship fees and home schooling expenses, as well as to pay off student debt. Workers would be able to tap their retirement savings accounts without tax penalty to cover expenses from the birth of a child or an adoption.
The second measure would allow startup businesses to write off more of their initial costs against their federal taxes. New businesses would be permitted to deduct more of their expenses for setting up in the first year — up to $20,000, double the current maximum level.
Democrats said there were some positive elements in the legislation, but that overall it would not help average Americans. The new savings accounts would mainly benefit wealthy taxpayers, with about $100,000 in annual income needed to take full advantage of them, said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A coalition of nonprofit groups that has registered more than 87,000 new Missouri voters — most of them black residents — says it is not working for Sen. Claire McCaskill, but its effort could help her campaign against Republican challenger Josh Hawley.
The nonpartisan coalition called Missouri Black Votes wants to engage black voters because of a voter identification approved in 2016, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported . McCaskill, who captured 94 percent of the black vote in Missouri in 2012, is trying to increase her standing among black voters this year after being criticized by some who said she has taken them for granted.
The voter registration drive also could be important in elections involving raising Missouri’s minimum wage, legalizing medical marijuana, passing several ethics reforms and a redistricting proposal.
The effort by the coalition, including Missouri Faith Voices, Missouri Jobs with Justice and Shirley’s Kitchen Cabinet, is funded by the Black Progressive Action Coalition, which is affiliated with BlackPAC, a super PAC that backed now-Sen. Doug Jones, an Alabama Democrat, and Lucy McBath, a Georgia Democratic congressional candidate.
Angela Pearson, Missouri Black Votes project manager, said it’s important to ensure that people have access to democracy.
“And part of that access is making sure that we find them, let them know that voting is important and that we’re here to help them register to vote if they like,” Pearson said.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates about 414,000 black people were registered to vote in November 2016.
“I think no matter how you look at it it’s a pretty hefty figure,” said Dave Robertson, chairman of the political science department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He said that is true even if half of the registrants had been previously registered and moved.
The Missouri Secretary of State’s Office reported at the beginning of the month, the state had registered a total of nearly 68,300 new voters this year.
The registration comes after Missouri voters approved in 2016 a Constitutional amendment requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Critics of similar laws say they make voting burdensome for minority and low-income voters who can’t get an ID.
With that new requirement in place, Pearson said the coalition wanted to give Missourians a chance to register and participate.
“Part of our job is to help remove one barrier, at least, when it comes to voting,” Pearson said.
BONNER SPRINGS, Kan. (AP) — Authorities in northeastern Kansas are investigating the discovery of a body on a railcar in Bonner Springs.
Body found on a train car in the northeast Kansas community of Bonner Springs-photo courtesy KCTV
The body was found early Friday morning. Officials say they don’t yet know the name, age or even the gender of the person.
Police say the railcar had been parked at the Bonner Springs location since Sept. 19. Before then, police say, the railcar had been in Illinois and southeastern Missouri.
A police spokeswoman says the body was discovered by workers unloading a car containing a dry cement mix.
The FBI is helping in the investigation, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation says its crime scene response team was dispatched to help police.
———
BONNER SPRINGS, Kan. (AP) — Authorities are investigating the discovery of a body on a railroad car in Bonner Springs.
Police say employees at a quarry Friday as they unloaded a rail car, which is used to haul dry cement mix.
Bonner Springs police said the death is being investigated as a homicide.
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s crime scene response team helped with the investigation.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A former Missouri chiropractor who advertised himself as a massage therapist on Facebook is facing charges of sexual abuse.
67-year-old Karl Swope hasn’t been arrested on the misdemeanor sexual abuse charges filed against him this week in Boone County.
A probable cause statement shows that the victim visited Swope’s Columbia home in April for neck and shoulder pain. The woman told police that Swope inappropriately touched her during a massage and made her feel very uncomfortable.
Columbia Det. Patrick Corcoran says Rolla police informed them that Swope has been accused of similar behavior in the past.
The Board of Therapeutic Massage accused Swope in August of inappropriately touching three women and practicing massage therapy without a license.
