Former Kentucky sheriff pleads not guilty in shooting death of judge
Leslie County Detention Center
(KENTUCKY) — A former Kentucky sheriff accused in the fatal shooting of a judge in September was arraigned on new charges Monday.
Monday’s arraignment hearing was held in the Letcher County Courthouse — the same courthouse where Shawn “Mickey” Stines is accused of gunning down Kentucky District Judge Kevin Mullins in his chambers on Sept. 19.
An attorney for Stines, 43, pleaded not guilty on his behalf Monday to a new charge of murder of a public official.
The judge denied Stines bond, citing concerns with security, community safety and the charges against him.
Stines previously pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder charges, for which a special judge appointed to preside over the case has said he could face the death penalty.
It is still not clear what led up to the alleged murder of Mullins, 54.
Just days before the shooting, Stines had been deposed in a lawsuit, which alleged he had failed to investigate one of his deputies who sexually abused a woman in Mullins’ chambers.
Kentucky State Police previously said the shooting occurred “following an argument inside the courthouse.” Letcher County Circuit Clerk Mike Watts said Stines and Mullins had lunch together earlier that day.
Mullins was found in his chambers with multiple gunshot wounds after a 911 caller reported gunfire inside the courthouse.
Stines was taken into custody without incident at the courthouse, police said. He retired from his position as sheriff shortly after his arrest.
(NEW YORK) — Snow is headed to the Midwest and the West ahead of Thanksgiving, while rain will target the East Coast on Thanksgiving Day.
Here’s your weather forecast for the holiday week:
Monday
Snow is headed to Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on Monday, while rain is possible from Chicago to Detroit to Indianapolis.
In the West, lots of snow will accumulate in the California mountains. Parts of the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range below the snow line could see 4 to 8 inches of rain through Monday night.
Throughout the South, temperatures will be above average — in the 70s or 80s — on Monday.
Tuesday
Rain is headed to the Northeast on Tuesday, potentially causing flight delays during this busy travel week.
In the West, snow will continue in the Sierra Nevadas and will target the Rockies.
Rain showers are possible from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay area.
Wednesday
The Midwest, including Chicago, will see a mix of rain and snow on Wednesday.
In the West, snow totals will reach 3 to 5 feet for parts of the southern Sierra Nevadas in California. Up to 7 feet of snow is possible at the highest elevations.
The Rocky Mountains in Colorado are forecast to get 1 to 3 feet of snow. Wind gusts may reach 35 to 50 mph.
Temperatures on Wednesday will return to potentially record-breaking highs for Houston and Austin, Texas, with highs in the mid-80s.
Thanksgiving
A storm is expected to bring rain to most of the East Coast on Thanksgiving.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City will be rainy and chilly, with temperatures in the 40s.
Snow is possible in upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and northern Maine.
Temperatures will be average or below average for most of the country on Thanksgiving. But temperatures will be above average for Phoenix; New Orleans; Jacksonville, Florida; and Raleigh, North Carolina.
(NEW YORK) — Schools in the U.S. remain deeply divided along racial, ethnic and economic lines, even as studies show that the K-12 public school population is becoming more diverse.
More than a third of students attend schools where 75% or more of those in attendance are of a single race or ethnicity, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s most recent investigation into K-12 education.
Saba Bireda and Ary Amerikaner co-founded Brown’s Promise, an initiative to combat racial segregation and honor the legacy of nine Arkansas students who suffered because of it.
In 1954, the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional. Three years later, the NAACP attempted to enroll nine black students at Little Rock Central High School. The ensuing chaos gripped the nation, with the media dubbing the students “Little Rock Nine.”
Then-Gov. Orval Faubus prevented the students from entering the racially segregated school, using his state’s National Guard for help. President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened after weeks of failed attempts to get the students through a full day of classes safely.
Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, students started getting bused into schools from different neighborhoods to promote integration. However, much of that has stopped in the decades since.
“Unfortunately, we have come away from our commitment to the spirit of Brown,” Bireda said. “Schools have been resegregating rapidly since the 1980s.”
At the start of that decade, expensive busing orders began to expire. With a history of housing discrimination leading many neighborhoods to be segregated by race, for millions of students, attending the public school closest to their home means it wouldn’t be racially diverse.
Despite the billions of dollars invested in desegregating public schools over the past few decades, school segregation has returned to the same level as it was in the 1960s.
New York high school student Ava Pittman begins her daily commute by taking the public bus, just like millions of other students. However, her journey through the city’s Queens borough starts long before first period — shortly after dawn breaks.
Every morning, Pittman makes the 14-mile, hour-and-a-half journey from the Far Rockaway neighborhood to Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in Elmhurst. She travels that far because she doesn’t think the schools near her are up to par.
“Schools in certain places like Far Rockaway, the resources are minimal,” Pittman said. “It’s just the quality of education. It’s different.”
Pittman’s opportunities are unique to her location, but the commute takes up most of her day. To her, it’s worth it because of everything she gets to do in that school.
“I co-founded an affinity group called BAM, which is ‘Black at Mel’s.’ ” Pittman said. “I’m also part of a group called ‘The Education Student Advisory Council.’ My speech and debate team is the most diverse in our league, [which is] the Brooklyn Queens Forensic League.”
According to data collected by the Department of Education between 2022 and 2023, among 100,000 public schools across the country, about 83% of all Black public school students and 82% of all Latino students attended a majority non-white school. At the same time, 75% of all white public school students were enrolled in a majority-white school.
At a recent conference in Baltimore, Bireda and Amerikaner met with education leaders to discuss solutions.
“We talk a lot about the importance of full integration to the health of our democracy,” Bireda said. “Students who continually are growing up in segregated environments or not interacting with people from different backgrounds.”
Even at a young age, Pittman advocates for diversity and integration in public schools. She is a youth advocacy director at Integrate NYC, a youth-led organization dedicated to created equity in New York City schools.
According to the Civil Rights Project, New York is one of the most diverse states in the nation. Despite this, it is one of the most segregated.
In a lawsuit against the state, Integrate NYC alleges that the city’s sorting and admission process forces students of color into the most overcrowded and under-resourced schools.
“We agree with plaintiffs that achieving those educational goals is made harder by the complex system of biases and inequities deeply rooted in this country’s history, culture, and institutions — a system that we also want to change,” the New York City Department of Education said in a statement sent to ABC News. “But this lawsuit is not the answer. We are prepared to defend against these claims in court.”
Unless something is done to improve school integration, Pittman and thousands of other students across the country will have to keep fighting for their education and the opportunities that come with it.
A school sign is seen on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, Calif., in August 2023. — Mike Levine/ABC News
(BERKELEY, Calif.) — Two weeks ago, as college students returned to campus at the University of California, Berkeley, some of the most senior officials in the FBI were huddling inside a nondescript conference room beneath the stands of the school’s football stadium.
“Here’s where the rubber meets the road,” one of the FBI officials told the group of law enforcement officials, academics, tech developers, venture capitalists, and crime victims.
The problem they’re trying to solve, according to officials, is that the FBI is losing its ability to fight some of the greatest threats facing Americans, because phones and other electronic devices are increasingly being designed with no way for authorities to access their contents when the law authorizes them to collect evidence regarding suspected crimes — including those committed by radical terrorists, fentanyl dealers and online child predators.
It’s hardly a new problem.
“[It’s] the same conversation we had yesterday, five years ago, and 10 years ago, and 15 years ago, and now 20 years ago,” a professor told the group. “There’s something depressing about that. … We keep making the same goddamn mistakes over and over again.”
That’s why the FBI has taken the unusual step of turning to an academic institution for help. And not just any academic institution, but Berkeley — considered to be the birthplace of the Free Speech and student protest movements of the 1960s.
“To their credit, they were willing to think outside the box,” former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who now runs a center at Berkeley focused on security, said of the FBI.
‘A historic milestone’
A generation ago, such a partnership would have seemed unthinkable. In the 1950s and ’60s, in the midst of the Cold War, the FBI reportedly targeted a wide swath of Berkeley professors and students with surveillance and other secret tactics, convinced that radical Communists were among them.
Now, however, the FBI is battling a very different set of threats — and a new generation of advanced technologies.
Last year, the FBI signed an agreement with Napolitano’s center, the Center for Security in Politics, vowing to exchange resources and technology related expertise in a shared effort to support the FBI’s mission.
In a press release at the time, Napolitano touted the arrangement as “the first collaboration of its kind” and “a historic milestone for both institutions.”
The meeting two weeks ago was one of the first in-person gatherings to come out of the agreement.
The gathering involved three sessions spread over two days, and ABC News was allowed to observe the closing session on the condition that it not name any of the speakers.
One FBI official framed the final session by noting that while the FBI brings “enormous resources to bear” in significant or high-profile cases, “we don’t have the people, we don’t have the financial resources to do that” in the many thousands of other cases the FBI pursues each day.
“[That] is why we need to work with our private sector partners to have a lawful-access solution for our garden-variety cases,” the FBI official said during the session.
Instead of trying to address the many types of threats investigated by the FBI, the summit focused on just one: finding ways to stop child exploitation and the spread of sexual abuse material online.
“I think there’s a universal recognition that that stuff is bad, and we need to figure out a way to better deal with it,” Napolitano told ABC News.
‘A really egregious trend’
More children than ever are being exploited online, as predators use newer technologies like live-streaming apps, online video games and advanced messaging platforms to solicit sexual material from them, according to Abbigail Beccaccio, who heads the FBI’s section focused on violent crimes against children.
Beccaccio told ABC News there’s been a significant shift in these cases as they’ve exploded in number.
While the FBI had long seen cases of “traditional sextortion,” when predators with a sexual interest in young girls trick them into sharing explicit images of themselves, the FBI has in recent years seen a “huge uptick” in so-called “financially motivated sextortion” targeting boys, Beccaccio said.
In such cases, the victims are tricked into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves — but “that’s where the scheme turns,” said Beccaccio. Armed with the compromising material, the perpetrator then threatens the victim with claims of, “If you don’t send me money, I will ruin your life, I will send this to all your friends and family,” Beccaccio said.
In less than 18 months, from October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI counted more than 12,600 victims of such schemes — a “huge” and “shocking number,” as Beccaccio put it.
She said she knows of cases where children even dipped into their college savings accounts to pay the criminals who targeted them. But worst of all, she said, “We began to see a really egregious trend in suicides.”
Beccaccio said that helps illustrate why she and her FBI colleagues are so adamant that law enforcement needs some way to access criminals’ devices when a judge authorizes it.
“Without lawful access, we lose the ability to obtain the information we need to prosecute the offenders and rescue these child victims,” she warned.
The public, she said, should find that “troubling.”
‘A very dark place’
A decade ago, as highly-encrypted phone apps became commonplace, the FBI tried to engage the public in a national conversation about the future of lawful access. Then-FBI director James Comey warned that “going dark” by losing lawful access to personal data would lead to law enforcement agencies “missing out” on chances to stop “some very dangerous people.”
“Criminals and terrorists would like nothing more than for us to miss out,” he warned during an October 2014 speech in Washington, D.C. “Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.”
The issue came to a head a year later, when for several months the FBI was unable to unlock an Apple iPhone left behind by one of ISIS-inspired terrorists who killed 14 people and injured nearly two dozen others during an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.
There were congressional hearings held on the issue, and the FBI even took the matter to federal court, seeking to force Apple to find a way for authorities to access the phone’s content. The case became moot after an Israeli security company found a way to unlock the perpetrator’s phone.
“It’s so seductive to talk about privacy as the ultimate value,” Comey told a House panel in March 2016. “[But] in a society where we aspire to be safe and have our families safe and our children safe, that can’t be. We have to find a way to accommodate both.”
But the FBI’s public campaign over lawful access appeared to lose steam after FBI leadership become engulfed in a controversy surrounding the 2016 presidential election and Comey was fired as the agency’s director in May 2017.
Now — more than seven years later — the FBI is trying to spark the conversation again.
Katie Noyes, the head of the FBI’s next-generation technology section, said that in a survey of the FBI’s field offices last year, the bureau identified nearly 17,000 active cases that were either stalled or missing key evidence due to “warrant-proof encryption.”
Just two months ago, as the FBI struggled to determine why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Abbate, the deputy director, told lawmakers that the shooter had used encrypted applications and that, more than two weeks after the shooting, the FBI was still unable “to get information back because of their encrypted nature.”
“We need a solution that provides lawful access to law enforcement,” Abbate implored lawmakers during a Senate hearing on the assassination attempt.
So the FBI is turning to Napolitano and her team at Berkeley for help.
‘Waiting for the market’
The summit at Berkeley was led by Napolitano’s team and an array of FBI officials, including deputy director Abbate; Jeff Fields, the head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s San Francisco field office; and members of the agency’s technology units.
Victims of online sexual exploitation, including a woman whose likeness appeared in a “deepfake” video that went viral, also shared their stories and perspectives.
“What was really wonderful about this convening was having really disparate points of view around the same table,” Noyes told ABC News, adding that some of the tech companies and venture capitalists there said they had never heard directly from victims before.
The group got into an impassioned debate over whether tech companies, especially global giants such as Apple and Meta — neither of whom participated in the summit — would ever voluntarily redesign their devices and platforms to ensure that law enforcement could access them with a court order.
One law enforcement official noted that the FBI spoke with the companies a decade ago, but they had little interest in having a conversation about changing their ways.
“Waiting for the market here is not going to get it done,” said another law enforcement official, insisting that the only thing that will bring change is Congress passing a new law.
Others rejected that view, saying that the point of holding the summit is to potentially find other ways to address the problem.
“There hasn’t been much movement at all, but on the other hand the technology has changed,” Napolitano told ABC News after the summit. “And so there may be better and more available ways for government — meaning law enforcement — to get around some of the traditional barriers to lawful access, and those were part of the discussions today.”
‘What’s next?’
Noyes emphasized that she and her colleagues at the FBI are “big fans of encryptions” for personal security and privacy — and that the FBI is not trying to expand or change what it’s legally allowed to do.
As she described it, the FBI just wants ensure that law enforcement maintains the type of access that it has long used to bring criminals to justice.
“There’s no discussion around a request for any additional authority,” she said. “In many cases we have had this access, and it has been removed or taken away over time” due to newer technology.
According to Noyes, the summit produced a number of ideas and proposed approaches.
Some participants suggested that an independent third party could hold a technology company’s access keys in “escrow,” so those keys would not be in the hands of law enforcement but could be used under court order.
There was also discussion about “homomorphic encryption,” a type of encryption that can keep data encrypted even as that data is processed or even shared.
Napolitano said the summit two weeks ago was just the beginning.
“The challenge for us is, ‘OK, now we’ve had these discussions, what’s next?'” she said.
NOTE: If your child is the victim of a predator or you know someone who is a victim, you can always call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit information online at tips.fbi.gov.
