By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

A federal appeals court has ordered two executives convicted in a $1.9 billion corporate fraud case to be resentenced.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said Wednesday the government hadn't proved Donald Ayers and Roger Faulkenberry were guilty of money laundering. Their convictions of conspiracy, securities fraud and wire fraud remain in place.

Faulkenberry is serving 10 years in prison, and Ayers is serving 15 years. They were convicted in 2008 with four other top executives from National Century Financial Enterprises, a Columbus health care financing company. Federal prosecutors likened the case to the Enron scandal.

The court said the government didn't prove that advances Faulkenberry and Ayers made to medical companies were designed to conceal the money's source.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

A South Texas man accused of beheading his common-law wife's three children was found guilty of capital murder Monday at his second trial.

A state appeals court had overturned John Allen Rubio's previous conviction and death sentence in 2007, saying the children's mother had wrongly been allowed to testify. A second jury deliberated for about three hours before convicting him again.

Rubio, 29, of Brownsville, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his defense attorneys had argued that the sheer brutality of the crime showed he was not in his right mind. Defense attorney Nat Perez described it during his closing argument as "overkill."

Evidence showed Rubio made increasingly ferocious attempts to kill the children, strangling and stabbing them, then finally cutting off their heads. Rubio initially said he killed the children, all under age 4, because they were possessed.

Police discovered the bodies of 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio on March 11, 2003, in a squalid Brownsville apartment.

Rubio was convicted on four counts of capital murder. Each death was covered by one count, and the fourth count included all of them.

The trial will now move to a punishment phase, in which prosecutors plan to again seek the death penalty.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

A former New Hampshire high school teacher charged with e-mailing nude photographs of herself to a 15-year-old student faces a court hearing.

Forty-one-year-old Melinda Dennehy of Hampstead is scheduled to appear Monday in Derry District Court on a felony charge of indecent exposure. She was arrested in March after the photos were found circulating around Londonderry High School. She resigned three weeks later.

Police also allege Dennehy also text-messaged the student, offering sex.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Republican Sen. Richard Lugar says he'll vote to confirm Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court justice.

The Indiana Republican is the second in the GOP to announce he's breaking with his party to back President Barack Obama's nominee to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens.

Lugar says he's carefully followed Kagan's confirmation hearing testimony and the debate about her nomination, including recommendations from his constituents, and concluded that she is clearly qualified to serve on the high court.

Democrats have more than enough votes to confirm Kagan. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on Tuesday became the first Republican to say he'll join them. A few others are expected to follow suit.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

A Virginia man who once threatened the creators of "South Park" will spend at least one more day in jail on separate charges of trying to join a Somali terror group linked to al-Qaida. Twenty-year-old Zachary Chesser of Oakton, Va., made an initial appearance Thursday in U.S. District Court on charges of providing material support to the group al-Shabab. Chesser requested a court-appointed lawyer. A detention hearing was set for Friday.

FBI agents say Chesser tried to travel to Somalia to join al-Shabab as a fighter. An FBI affidavit says he was stopped from flying once by his mother-in-law and the second time was told he was on the no-fly list.

He is not charged for an online posting saying the creators of the animated series "South Park" risked death by mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Former Seton Hall basketball coach Bobby Gonzalez has pleaded not guilty to a shoplifting charge.

Gonzalez is accused of taking a satchel worth about $1,400 from the Polo Ralph Lauren store in The Mall at Short Hills last month. Police say he removed the sensor device from the satchel and walked out of the store without paying for it.

Gonzalez was arraigned in Newark on Wednesday on criminal mischief and shoplifting charges. The shoplifting charge is punishable by up to five years in jail.

Gonzalez was fired in March after Seton Hall lost in the opening round of the NIT. He has sued the school over his dismissal.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Conrad Black, the brash former newspaper magnate who lived extravagantly before his 2007 federal conviction for defrauding shareholders, may soon be released from a Florida prison after a federal appeals court granted him bail Monday.

The ruling from the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court kicked Black's fraud conviction back to a lower court.

Black, who renounced his Canadian citizenship to become a member of the British House of Lords, was convicted along with three other former executives from the media empire Hollinger International of swindling the company's shareholders out of $6.1 million. He was acquitted of nine other charges.

It was not immediately clear when Black, 65, would be released from the low-security prison in Coleman, Fla., where he has served more than two years of a 6 1/2-year sentence. The conditions of his release will be determined by U.S. District Court judge in Chicago, according to an order from the three-judge panel.

Last month, the Supreme Court weakened the "honest services" law that was central to Black's fraud conviction. The justices left it up to a lower court to decide whether the conviction should be overturned. That decision has not yet been made.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

A 70-year-old civil rights lawyer was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison in a terrorism case by a judge who boosted her original sentence by nearly eight years after concluding she lied to a jury and lacked remorse.

"I'm somewhat stunned," Lynne Stewart told U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl after he announced the sentence for her conviction for letting a jailed Egyptian sheik communicate with his radical followers despite restrictions in place to prevent it.

The sentence, nearly four times longer than the two-year, four-month sentence she originally received in 2006, left Stewart sobbing in her prison uniform after Koeltl described his reasons for increasing the prison time significantly.

An appeals court had ordered a new sentencing, saying the terrorism component of the case needed to be considered, along with whether she committed perjury at her trial. The court said it had "serious doubts" whether her original sentence was reasonable.

The judge said public comments Stewart made after her first sentencing showed him that the "original sentence was not sufficient."

He said she showed "a lack of remorse for conduct that was both illegal and potentially lethal."

Outside court after her original sentence, Stewart said she could do the prison time standing on her head.

Koeltl found that Stewart "willfully testified falsely at the trial" on numerous points, including in telling jurors she did not make Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman available to his followers and did not violate government rules meant to silence the sheik because lawyers worked in a "bubble" in which the government understood the rules were relaxed.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

Lawyers for Dole Foods and six Nicaraguan plaintiffs suing them have accused each other of fraud in heated closing arguments as a judge ponders whether to dismiss a $2.3 million award to purported banana workers.

The Dole defense team noted Monday that plaintiffs' lawyer Steve Condie never called the six plaintiffs to testify in the current hearing and has not even met them. Condie accused Dole of bribing whistleblower witnesses and conspiring to remove plaintiffs' lawyers from the case. He acknowledged there was fraud but said his six clients were "clean."

Judge Victoria Chaney threw out a similar case after testimony that plaintiffs pretended to be banana workers and faked lab tests to falsely show they were rendered sterile by pesticides on Dole banana farms.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.

By Breaking Legal News, Breaking Legal News.

"Die Hard" director John McTiernan pleaded guilty Monday to lying to FBI agents and a judge during the investigation of Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano in a wiretapping case.

McTiernan, 59, entered his plea to two counts of making false statements to the FBI and one count of perjury for lying to a federal judge while trying to withdraw a guilty plea. He could face up to a year in prison.

Attorney S. Todd Neal, who represents McTiernan, said the plea will allow his client to appeal certain pretrial rulings made by a federal judge.

"We continue to believe that the charges against him were developed in an unfair way," Neal said. "The FBI should not be in the business of ambushing citizens with surprise phone calls in which they ask 'questions' for which they already know the answers."

McTiernan previously pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents in 2006 about the investigation of Pellicano. The director later withdrew that plea, arguing he didn't have adequate legal representation.

Pellicano was convicted in 2008 of wiretapping film producer Charles Roven for McTiernan and of bugging the phones of celebrities and others to get information for clients.

Originally posted at Breaking Legal News. Please visit http://www.breakinglegalnews.com/.