Miranda Cásarez, seen in the courtroom, was sentenced in the starvation death of her stepson, Benjamin “Benji” Cervera Jr., inset. (Courtroom and victim screenshots from KSAT 12/YouTube) A Texas mother was sentenced to 25 years in prison for deliberately starving to death her 4-year-old stepson, who’d been forced to drink urine, hand sanitizer and hot sauce and was found unresponsive and weighing 28 pounds. Related Coverage: Miranda Cásarez learned her fate on Thursday in the Aug. 17, 2021, death of her stepson, Benjamin “Benji” Cervera Jr. She was convicted on charges of injury to a child w ..read more

Background: Leigh High School in Santa Clara, Calif., where a former student says she was sexually assaulted and forced to have an abortion (via Google Maps). Inset: Shawn Thomas (via the law firm of Cerri Boskovich & Allard LLP). A California high school teacher is accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old student and, after impregnating her, forcing her to get an abortion. According to a lawsuit filed Wednesday, a woman identified only as “Jane Doe” has sued Shawn Thomas, a teacher at Leigh High School, for allegedly sexually abusing her when she was a 15-year-old student there in 2 ..read more

Christian Doran Walker, inset, was declared dead on April 15, 2023, in a Nevada prison. (Inset photos of the victim from the family’s lawyer; Prison photo from State of Nevada Department of Corrections.) A lawsuit alleges a cover-up by authorities in Nevada after a prisoner who allegedly died at the hands of corrections officers was found naked in a pool of blood on a prison cell floor. Christian Doran Walker, 44, was declared dead on April 15, 2023, after a prison porter delivering his dinner found him moaning in a fetal position in his cell at the High Desert State Prison outside Las Vegas ..read more

Inset: Devin Hansen booking photo Pinellas County Sheriffs Office. Background: YouTube screengrab from ABC affiliate WFTS-TV depicts the Hansen’s Cadillac on April 17, 2024 following his arrest. In a bizarre twist of events in Florida this week, St. Petersburg resident Devin Hansen is charged with murder in the first degree after police say he shot his wife at his parent’s house, battered his mother, and then, as his spouse was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, chased the emergency vehicle down in his Cadillac before later crashing his car. Hansen, 28, is also charged with domest ..read more

Former President Donald Trump appears at Manhattan criminal in New York, Friday, April 19, 2024. (Sarah Yenesel/Pool Photo via AP) As anticipated by at least one lawyer, a federal judge roundly rejected Donald Trump’s bid to indefinitely stay Jan. 6 civil lawsuits from current and former members of Congress as well as police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, telling him there was “no reason to wait on the Supreme Court” to resolve his question of so-called total presidential immunity nor to wait on the results of his prosecution by special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, D ..read more

Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani talks to reporters as he leaves after his defamation trial in Washington, Friday, Dec. 15, 2023. A jury awarded massive damages on Friday to two former Georgia election workers who sued Giuliani for defamation over lies he spread about them in 2020 that upended their lives with racist threats and harassment. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File) Rudy Giuliani is requesting a new addition to his legal team while emphasizing it is “imperative” he has a successful appeal of the recently upheld $146 million Georgia election workers defamation judgment that sent ..read more

Victim Brandon Rasberry (left inset in a photo from his Facebook page), (right) an aerial view of the Lazy J Ranch and RV Park as seen in a video posted on its Facebook page in 2018. A now 10-year-old child in Texas facing a charge for threatening to kill a fellow student during a school bus altercation separately admitted to school officials after the incident that he fatally shot a sleeping stranger years ago at an RV park in Nixon, just one week before he turned 8, authorities allege. According to the Gonzales County Sheriff’s Office, the shocking development in the unsolved January 2022 ..read more

Background: The West Bradenton, Florida, neighborhood where Nicholas Koontz shot and killed Timothy Andricks in 2021 (screengrab via The Bradenton Herald). Inset: Nicholas Koontz (via Florida State’s Attorney’s Office). A Florida man fatally gunned down a driver who allegedly attacked him — with a paper cup of ice from McDonald’s. Nicholas Koontz, 35, was convicted of manslaughter with a firearm after a three-day trial in Manatee County that ended Wednesday, according to a press release from the Florida State Attorney’s Office for the 12th Judicial Circuit. According to prosecutors, Koontz a ..read more

Background: Schechter School of Long Island (YouTube screengrab from introduction video); Inset: David Ostrove (Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office). For more than a decade, David Ostrove skimmed roughly $8.4 million from a private school in New York where he worked as a chief executive, using the ill-gotten gains to prop up his lavish lifestyle which included buying beach houses — and then renting them out for a tidy profit — while also going on shopping sprees for luxury items like a classic 1965 Mustang, jewelry and more. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office issued a statem ..read more

Judge Aileen Cannon (left); Carlos de Oliveira (center); Waltine Nauta and Donald Trump. (U.S. Senate; AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell; U.S. Department of Justice) The judge in Donald Trump’s Espionage Act prosecution has rejected two separate dismissal bids brought by the former president’s Mar-a-Lago property manager and valet co-defendants, revealing that she’s been monitoring the Jan. 6 obstruction case argued this week before the Supreme Court and reading up on conservative judges’ views on the meaning of the term “corruptly.” While Carlos De Oliveira and Walt Nauta both fell short in their ..read more