Digest

Third teenager, arrested in June gang rape

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 13, 2007

WEST PALM BEACH - A third teenager was arrested in the gang rape and assault of a mother and her 12-year-old son in a housing project, police said Thursday. Fingerprints in the woman's house linked 15-year-old Jakaris Sansay Taylor to the June 18 attack, West Palm Beach police spokesman Ted White said. Taylor was arrested at his home in the housing project. He will be transferred to a juvenile detention center once investigators finish questioning him, police said. Two other teenagers, Avion Lawson, 14, and Nathan Walker, 16, were being held without bail in the assault and gang rape. Up to 10 masked teenagers raped and sodomized the woman and beat her son, police have said. They also forced her at gunpoint to perform oral sex on the boy, she told a TV station. The state attorney's office will be seeking a grand jury indictment for all defendants in the case to ensure they are charged as adults, spokesman Mike Edmondson said.

LAKE WALES - Farmer fined for disparate wages A farmer paid more than $200,000 in fines and back wages after federal authorities found he paid U.S. workers less than foreign laborers, according to the Labor Department. Kenneth Hyatt of Hyatt Farms in Lake Wales paid $163,788 in back pay to more than 300 American workers and an additional penalty of $36,620, the agency said Monday.

New trial ordered in 1991 slaying

TALLAHASSEE - The state Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a new trial for a man sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of a Miami Springs police officer. The court said Merrit A. Sims' lawyers did not do enough to counter the state's argument that he killed to avoid drugs being detected in his car, which would have sent him back to prison, and was what the state gave as his motive for the crime.

High court throws out confession

A closely divided state Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a new trial for a man convicted of attempted murder because police kept questioning him after he clearly asserted that he wished to remain silent, a violation of the federal and state constitutions. In a 4-3 decision the Supreme Court ruled that the trial court should not have allowed a confession by Juan Raul Cuervo in an attempted murder and assault in Osceola County in 2003.

High-ranking NASA officials to leave

CAPE CANAVERAL - Two top NASA officials, including the man in charge of developing spacecraft for future missions to the moon and Mars, plan to leave the space agency, a spokeswoman said Thursday. Former astronaut Scott "Doc" Horowitz, who heads NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, will leave by October, and Associate Administrator Rex Geveden will leave at the end of July. The timing of both decisions was coincidental, and neither was asked to leave by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, said NASA spokeswoman Beth Dickey. Horowitz leaves at a critical time for the development of next-generation spacecraft as NASA finishes signing development contracts and works around a funding squeeze that forced the agency to push back the first manned flight of the new Orion spacecraft to 2015. Horowitz said he wants to move back to Utah.

[Last modified July 12, 2007, 22:25:26]