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Chinese woman pleads guilty in college test-taking scheme
Court Watch |
2015/11/01 16:31
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A Chinese woman pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to have two other women take college admissions examinations in her place to help her get accepted to Virginia Tech.
Yue Zou acknowledged having her boyfriend contact a China-based test-taking service.
After that happened, Zou, of Blacksburg, Virginia, supplied her passport information through an online network known as QQ Chat, which enabled people in China to create in her name phony passports that were shipped to her in the United States.
On the passports were the photos of two other Chinese women, who took tests in the Pittsburgh area while pretending to be her.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jimmy Kitchen told the judge that Zou forwarded results from the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, to Virginia Tech in November 2013 and results of a Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, taken by another Chinese impostor in March 2014.
Zou, from Hegang, a city in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, paid an unspecified sum for the TOEFL and $2,000 for the SAT, Kitchen told a judge in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh.
Zou, 21, faces up to five years in prison when she's sentenced in February. She could also be deported, though that will be handled by federal immigration officials in a separate proceeding.
Federal authorities haven't explained how they learned of the scheme.
Zou's attorney, Lyle Dresbold, told the judge that Zou will remain confined to her Blacksburg apartment with an electronic monitoring bracelet until she's sentenced. He told the judge she's still enrolled at Virginia Tech.
University spokesman Mark Owczarski said he could not comment on her status. But he said students found to have submitted work that is not their own to gain admission would face a range of possible sanctions, including expulsion, under the university's honor code.
Zou's TOEFL test was taken by Yunlin Sun, 24, of Berlin, Somerset County. She pleaded guilty in August and faces sentencing in December. Prosecutors say Ning Wei, from Taiyuan, in the Chinese province of Shanxi, took Zou's SAT. She hasn't been arrested, and prosecutors say they believe she returned to China.
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Court records: Ohio man on electronic monitor raped teen
Court Watch |
2015/10/17 06:21
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While an Ohio man was on electronic monitoring in an abduction case, he had a 14-year-old girl dropped off at his home by taxi, held her captive for months and raped her, according to criminal charges and court records.
Cody Lee Jackson, 20, fled the state without the girl after pleading guilty this summer in the abduction case to a charge of interference with custody; charges of abduction and kidnapping were dismissed, state court records show.
He was arrested last week in Utah when he tried to run away after giving a fake name to drug task force officers conducting a routine stop at a bus station, according to Salt Lake City jail documents. He is to be brought back to Ohio for sentencing on the interference conviction and to face numerous federal and state charges stemming from his alleged crimes while on electronic monitoring.
Court records don't list an attorney for Jackson.
State court officials didn't provide further details Thursday on monitoring Jackson earlier this year. Triffon Callos, a spokesman for the Hamilton County prosecutor's office, confirmed the state charges against Jackson and his guilty plea but referred calls about the monitoring system to the county sheriff's electronic monitoring division.
Sheriff's spokesman Michael Robison Thursday confirmed that Jackson wore the monitoring device from January 22 until July 31 this year.
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Virginia executes serial killer who claimed to be disabled
Court Watch |
2015/10/07 20:31
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A twice-condemned serial killer who claimed he was intellectually disabled was executed in Virginia on Thursday after a series of last-minute appeals failed.
Alfredo Prieto was pronounced dead at 9:17 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. The 49-year-old was injected with a lethal three-drug combination, including the sedative pentobarbital, which Virginia received from the Texas prison system.
Prieto, wearing glasses, jeans and a light blue shirt, did not resist and showed no emotion as he was strapped to the gurney.
"I would like to say thanks to all my lawyers, all my supporters and all my family members," he said, before mumbling, "Get this over with."
The El Salvador native was sentenced to death in Virginia in 2010 for the murder of a young couple more than two decades earlier. Rachael Raver and her boyfriend, Warren Fulton III, both 22, were found shot to death in a wooded area a few days after being seen at a Washington, D.C., nightspot.
Prieto was on death row in California at the time for raping and murdering a 15-year-old girl and was linked to the Virginia slayings through DNA evidence. California officials agreed to send him to Virginia on the rationale that it was more likely to carry out the execution.
He has been connected to as many as six other killings in California and Virginia, authorities have said, but he was never prosecuted because he had already been sentenced to death.
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Familiar, divisive social issues on Supreme Court agenda
Court Watch |
2015/10/02 20:31
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The Supreme Court is starting a new term that promises a steady stream of divisive social issues, and also brighter prospects for conservatives who suffered more losses than usual in recent months.
The justices are meeting in public Monday for the first time since a number of high-profile decisions in June that displayed passionate, sometimes barbed disagreements and suggested some bruised feelings among the nine judges.
The first case before the court involves a California woman who lost her legs in a horrific accident after she fell while attempting to board a train in Innsbruck, Austria. The issue is whether she can sue the state-owned Austrian railway in U.S. courts.
Even before the justices took the bench Monday, they rejected hundreds of appeals that piled up over the summer, including San Jose, California's bid to lure the Athletics from Oakland over the objection of Major League Baseball.
Future cases will deal with abortion, religious objections to birth control, race in college admissions and the power of public-sector unions. Cases on immigration and state restrictions on voting also could make it to the court in the next nine months.
The term will play out against the backdrop of the presidential campaign, in which some candidates are talking pointedly about the justices and the prospect of replacing some of them in the next few years. Four justices are in their 80s or late 70s, led by 82-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Commentators on the left and right say the lineup of cases suggests that conservatives will win more often than they will lose over the next few months, in contrast to the liberal side's success last term in gay marriage, health care and housing discrimination, among others.
"This term, I'd expect a return to the norm, in which the right side of the court wins the majority, but by no means all of the cases," said Georgetown University law school's Irv Gornstein.
One reason for the confidence is that, as Supreme Court lawyer John Elwood said: "This is a term of sequels." Affirmative action and union fees have been at the court in recent terms and the justices' positions are more or less known.
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Court rejects ex-NY Fed employee's retaliation claim lawsuit
Court Watch |
2015/09/24 06:21
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A New York-based federal appeals court has rejected claims of a former employee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who says she was fired for her probe into the banking firm Goldman Sachs.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Wednesday upheld a lower-court ruling dismissing Carmen Segarra's lawsuit.
She claimed the New York Fed interfered with her examination of Goldman Sachs' legal and compliance divisions and directed her to change findings.
The appeals court was particularly dismissive of Segarra's effort to hold three New York Fed employees responsible. It said the effort was "speculative, meritless, and frankly quite silly."
The Federal Reserve oversees Wall Street's biggest financial institutions.
Last year, Senate Democrats accused the Fed of being too close to big banks it regulates.
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