The Florida Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the state to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant, while also giving voters a chance to remove restrictions in November.

The court, which was reshaped by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, ruled 6-1 to uphold the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, meaning a ban on six weeks could soon take effect. But under a separate 4-3 ruling, the court allowed a ballot measure to go to voters that would enshrine abortion rights in Florida’s constitution.

The court’s decisions could be pivotal in the presidential race and congressional contests this year by driving abortion-rights supporters to the polls. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, voters in every state with an abortion-related ballot measure have favored the side backed by abortion rights supporters.

The 15-week ban, signed by DeSantis in 2022, has been enforced while it was challenged in court. The six-week ban, passed by the Legislature last year, was written so that it would not take effect until a month after the 2022 law was upheld.

Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union and others who challenged the law argued that the Florida Constitution’s unique privacy clause for more than 40 years has explicitly protected a right to abortion in the state and should remain in force.

Lawyers for the state, however, said when the privacy clause was adopted by voter referendum in 1980, few people understood it would cover abortion. They told the justices the clause was mainly meant to cover “informational privacy” such as personal records and not abortion.

The Florida justices agreed, saying that when voters approved the privacy clause, they didn’t know it would affect abortion laws.

“The debate — as framed to the public — overwhelmingly associated the Privacy Clause’s terms with concerns related to government surveillance and disclosure of private information to the public’” the court wrote. “Prolife and prochoice groups did not join in the fray. These groups are not politically bashful— not now, and not in 1980.”

DeSantis, who took office in 2019, appointed five of the court’s seven justices.

Republican House Speaker Paul Renner said the six-week ban is a good fit for Florida and noted the law includes exceptions for cases involving rape, incest and fetal abnormalities, as well as to save a mother’s life.

“It is a compromise that addresses where I think many Floridians are.”

Abortion rights proponents were disheartened by the ruling.

“This decision demonstrates how precarious our personal freedoms are in this state,” said Democratic Rep. Anna Eskamani. “It’s so extreme you’re going to see Floridians having to go out of state, probably to Virginia, to get care.”

The Florida Access Network plans to switch its strategy from finding abortion care for women in Florida to paying for their travel expenses to go out of state, said Stephanie Loraine Pineiro, the advocacy group’s executive director.

“People who can’t afford to travel, can’t afford to lose their jobs because they have to travel for abortion care, these are the people who are going to be forced to remain pregnant,” she said. “The collateral damage is all of us.”

The proposed constitutional amendment that will be on the November ballot says “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” It provides for one exception that is already in the state constitution: Parents must be notified before their minor children can get an abortion.

A northern Illinois man charged with killing four people and injuring seven others by stabbing, beating and driving over them is expected back in court on Tuesday.

A judge in the city of Rockford is expected to consider prosecutors' request that Christian Soto remain jailed pending trial. The 22-year-old appeared briefly in court on Thursday, a day after the attacks in Rockford and his arrest. His defense asked for more time to prepare for the hearing.

The Winnebago County Public Defender's office, listed as Soto's representative in court documents, has not returned messages from The Associated Press seeking comment on his behalf.

The Winnebago County coroner on Thursday identified those killed as 63-year-old Romona Schupbach; 23-year-old Jacob Schupbach; 49-year-old Jay Larson; and 15-year-old Jenna Newcomb.

Authorities last week described a series of frenzied attacks within minutes at multiple addresses in a Rockford neighborhood, but said they had not determined a motive.

Winnebago County State’s Attorney J. Hanley said Soto told police after his arrest that he had smoked marijuana with Jacob Schupbach and believed the drugs “were laced with an unknown narcotic" that made him paranoid.

Authorities have said Soto first stabbed Schupbach and his mother then violently attacked other people in the area and inside other homes. They said he beat, stabbed and used a truck to run over Larson, who was working as a mail carrier; wounded three people inside one home; and beat Newcomb, her sister and a friend with a baseball bat inside another home.

Authorities said Winnebago County sheriff deputies arrested Soto as he fled from another home where he had stabbed a woman and had been slowed down by a man driving by who stopped to intervene.

Dagrella Law Firm, PLC.

Jerry Dagrella, Attorney

I am often asked to take over cases from major L.A.-based firms.  Far too often, I uncover rampant billing abuses and outright fraud committed by the client’s former lawyers.  It has become so common that I decided to draft this article to better educate the public.

To be clear, this article is not intended to solicit cases: this firm does not specialize in legal malpractice (there is rarely enough money involved in such cases to justify hiring an expensive lawyer).  The aim is to educate others on how to protect themselves from bad lawyers.  As they say, “one bad apple spoils the bunch”; thus, all lawyers benefit when clients hold the bad apples accountable.

This chart identifies the most common abuses committed by lawyers as well as remedies for holding them accountable.  A more detailed discussion follows.

>> Read the full story

For maybe the last time, Alex Murdaugh, in a prison jumpsuit instead of the suit he used to wear, shuffled into a courtroom Monday in South Carolina and was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.

Murdaugh was punished — this time in federal court — for stealing from clients and his law firm. The 55-year-old disbarred attorney is already serving a life sentence without parole in a state prison for killing his wife and son.

A report by federal agents recommended a prison sentence between 17 1/2 and just under 22 years.

The 40-year sentence will be insurance on top of insurance. Along with the life sentence, Murdaugh pleaded guilty and was ordered to spend 27 years in prison in state court on financial crime charges. The federal sentence will run at the same time as his state prison term and he likely will have to serve all 40 years if his murder convictions are overturned on appeal.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel said he sentenced Murdaugh to a harsher punishment than suggested because Murdaugh stole from “the most needy, vulnerable people” like a client who became a quadriplegic after a crash, a state trooper who was injured on the job, and a trust fund meant for children whose parents were killed in a wreck.

“They placed all their problems and all their hopes on Mr. Murdaugh and it is from those people he abused and stole. It is a difficult set of actions to understand,” Gergel said.

The 22 federal counts are the final charges outstanding for Murdaugh, who three years ago was an established lawyer negotiating multimillion-dollar settlements in tiny Hampton County, where members of his family served as elected prosecutors and ran the area’s premier law firm for nearly a century.

Murdaugh will also have to pay nearly $9 million in restitution.

Prosecutors are asking to give Murdaugh a harsher sentence because FBI agents think he is not telling the whole truth about what happened to $6 million he stole and whether a so-far unnamed attorney helped his criminal schemes.

Murdaugh’s largest scheme involved the sons of his longtime housekeeper Gloria Satterfield. She died in a fall at the family home. Murdaugh promised to take care of Satterfield’s family, then worked with a lawyer friend who pleaded guilty on a scheme to steal $4 million in a wrongful death settlement with the family’s insurer.

In all, Murdaugh took settlement money from or inflated fees or expenses for more than two dozen clients. Prosecutors said the FBI found 11 more victims than the state investigation found and that Murdaugh stole nearly $1.3 million from them.

Murdaugh again apologized to his victims at his sentencing Monday, saying he felt “guilt, sorrow, shame, embarrassment, humiliation.”

Just like at his state sentencing, Murdaugh offered to meet with his victims so they can say what they want to say and “more closely inspect my sincerity.”

“There’s not enough time and I don’t possess a sufficient vocabulary to adequately portray to you in words the magnitude of how I feel about the things I did,” Murdaugh said.

Murdaugh blamed nearly two decades of addiction to opioids for his crimes and said he was proud is has been clean for 937 days.

Gergel scoffed at him blaming drugs.

“No truly impaired person could pull off these complex transactions,” the judge said of the maze of fake accounts, juggled checks and money passed from one place to another to hide the thefts for nearly 20 years.

The Illinois Supreme Court will hear an appeal of actor Jussie Smollett’s disorderly conduct conviction for staging a racist and homophobic attack against himself in 2019, then lying to Chicago police about it.

The court on Wednesday accepted the appeal from Smollett, formerly a cast member of the television drama “Empire.” It will review a December state appellate court ruling that upheld his 2021 conviction by a Cook County jury.

The case kicked up an international uproar and produced an intensive manhunt by Chicago police detectives.

There is no date set for the high court to hear arguments in the matter.

A special prosecutor refiled charges against Smollett after Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped the case and Smollett forfeited his $10,000 bond and conducted community service, which Smollett argues ended the case.

In a 2-1 decision, the state’s First District Appellate Court dismissed those claims, declaring that no one promised Smollett he wouldn’t face a fresh prosecution after accepting the original deal. Justice Freddrenna Lyle dissented, calling the refiled charges “fundamentally unfair.”

His attorneys have argued that Smollett, who is Black and gay, has been victimized by a racist and politicized justice system.

Smollett was found guilty of five counts of disorderly conduct for setting up the attack in which he claimed two men assaulted him on a Chicago street. He claimed they spouted slurs and an oath about being in “MAGA country” — an apparent reference to former President Donald Trump’s rallying credo — before tossing a noose around his neck.

Testimony at his trial indicated Smollett paid $3,500 to two men whom he knew from “Empire,” which was filmed in Chicago, to carry out the attack. But Smollett took the stand and told the jury, “There was no hoax.”

He was sentenced to 150 days in jail — six of which he served before he was freed pending appeal — 30 months of probation and ordered to pay $130,160 in restitution.

A requirement for Pennsylvania voters to put accurate handwritten dates on the outside envelopes of their mail-in ballots does not run afoul of a civil rights law, a federal appeals court panel said Wednesday, overturning a lower court ruling.

A divided 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to uphold enforcement of the required date on return envelopes, a technical mandate that caused thousands of votes to be declared invalid in the 2022 election.

The total number is a small fraction of the large state’s electorate, but the court’s ruling puts additional attention on Pennsylvania’s election procedures ahead of a presidential election in which its Electoral College votes are up for grabs.

A lower court judge had ruled in November that even without the proper dates, mail-in ballots should be counted if they are received in time. U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter said the envelope date is irrelevant in helping elections officials decide whether a ballot was received in time or if a voter is qualified.

In the court’s opinion, Judge Thomas Ambro said the section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that the lower court relied upon does not pertain to ballot-casting rules broadly, such as dates on envelopes, but “is concerned only with the process of determining a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot.”

“The Pennsylvania General Assembly has decided that mail-in voters must date the declaration on the return envelope of their ballot to make their vote effective,” Ambro wrote. “The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania unanimously held this ballot-casting rule is mandatory; thus, failure to comply renders a ballot invalid under Pennsylvania law.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which helped represent groups and voters who challenged the date mandate, said the ruling could mean thousands of votes won’t be counted over what it called a meaningless error.

“We strongly disagree with the panel majority’s conclusion that voters may be disenfranchised for a minor paperwork error like forgetting to write an irrelevant date on the return envelope of their mail ballot,” Ari Savitzky, a lawyer with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who argued the appeal, said in a statement. “We are considering all of our options at this time.”

State and national Republican groups defended the date requirement, and the Republican National Committee called the decision a “crucial victory for election integrity and voter confidence.”

In Pennsylvania, Democrats have been far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans under an expansion of mail-in ballots enacted in 2019.

The top United Nations court on Thursday ordered Israel to take measures to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including opening more land crossings to allow food, water, fuel and other supplies into the war-ravaged enclave.

The International Court of Justice issued two new so-called provisional measures in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of acts of genocide in its military campaign launched after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. Israel denies it is committing genocide and accused South Africa of trying to “undermine Israel’s inherent right and obligation to defend its citizens.”

Thursday’s order came after South Africa sought more provisional measures, including a cease-fire, citing starvation in Gaza. Israel, which had urged the court not to issue new orders, said it places no limits on aid entering Gaza and vowed to “promote new initiatives” to bring in even more assistance.

In its legally binding order, the court told Israel to take measures “without delay” to ensure “the unhindered provision” of basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, fuel and medical supplies.

It also ordered Israel to immediately ensure that its military does not take action that could that could harm Palestinians’ rights under the Genocide Convention, including by preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

The court told Israel to report back in a month on its implementation of the orders. The fighting has displaced over 80% of Gaza’s population, caused widespread damage and has sparked a humanitarian crisis. The U.N. and international aid agencies say virtually the entire Gaza population is struggling to get enough food, with hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine, especially in hard-hit northern Gaza.

South Africa welcomed Thursday’s decision, calling it “significant.”

“The fact that Palestinian deaths are not solely caused by bombardment and ground attacks, but also by disease and starvation, indicates a need to protect the group’s right to exist,” the South African president said in a statement.

Israel declared war in response to a bloody cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 others were taken hostage. Israel responded with a campaign of airstrikes and a ground offensive that have left over 32,000 Palestinians dead, according to local health authorities.

The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, but say roughly two-thirds of the dead are women, children and teens. Israel says over one-third of the dead are militants, though it has not provided evidence to support the claim, and it blames Hamas for civilian casualties because the group operates in residential areas.