Welcome to Compliance Notes from Nossaman’s Government Relations & Regulation Group – a periodic digest of the headlines, statutory and regulatory changes and court cases involving.
TULSA The big break in a 1983 cold case came from testing a plastic cup found under a table in Room 26 at the Sandman Motel, a location known to police for illicit activities like prostitution.
In the room, Anthony T. Baltes had been bound, beaten and strangled during a robbery on Sept. 18, 1983. He was 39.
From DNA evidence on the cup, police identified a suspect Willie C. Moore of Wyoming.
Moore was indicted in September 2019 and extradited to Oklahoma. Last February, he was ordered to face trial for first-degree murder.
After that, things slowed down, in part because of the pandemic and in part for authorities to do more investigating. A jury trial scheduled for November was put off to March.
And,
Two well-known Oklahoma lobbyists will not face criminal charges for their involvement in a PAC that made illegal donations totaling $27,750.
Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater made the decision not to prosecute in light of their agreements with the Oklahoma Ethics Commission to pay substantial penalties to the state.
James Milner agreed to pay $65,000 to the state general revenue fund and never again to serve as an officer of a PAC.
James McSpadden agreed to pay $50,000 and not serve as an officer of a PAC for 10 years.
Milner was listed as the chair of the little-known PAC and Milner was listed as its treasurer.
As an Oklahoma County jail inmate was being beaten to death with his own walking boot, a witness from a nearby cell desperately called over and over on his wall phone for help.
No one ever answered.
The witness called his girlfriend, too, asking her to call the jail's main line and report the assault.
She said she was put on hold.
Finally, 40 minutes after the victim began screaming, a detention officer came to the pod on the jail's 13th floor to do a routine check.
It was too late. The victim, Brad Leon Lane, 40, of Oklahoma City, was already dead.
His cellmate, Shaquile D Shaun Brown, confessed after being taken to a hospital for a mental assessment, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation
President-elect Joe Biden's pick for attorney general was moved by his experience in Oklahoma City after the 1995 bombing.
Merrick Garland held a top position at the U.S. Justice Department at the time of the domestic terrorist attack and came to Oklahoma City to coordinate the investigation. He later oversaw the prosecution that led to the conviction of bomber Timothy McVeigh.
In an oral history for the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, he spoke of how the response of the people of Oklahoma City affected him.
He recalled in the 2013 interview how the Salvation Army had set up a chow line for law enforcement and rescue workers at a makeshift headquarters a few blocks north of the blast site.