News

(OHIO) — An Ohio man pleaded guilty to raping a then-9-year-old girl who later sought an out-of-state abortion in a case that became a flashpoint in the national abortion rights debate after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Gerson Fuentes, 28, was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to two counts of rape of a child under 10. He has the possibility of parole after 25 years, Franklin County Judge Julie Lynch said.

Fuentes was arrested last year after the victim identified him as the assailant, according to the complaint. He reportedly confessed to the rape when detectives brought him to police headquarters for a saliva test, the complaint said.

Fuentes initially pleaded not guilty to the crime and a trial was scheduled to begin Wednesday when he appeared in court and changed his plea. Fuentes will be registered as a sex offender for life and will be on supervised release for five years if released.

Lynch said in court that the girl’s family agreed to the jointly recommended sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after a minimum of 25 years.

“This is a hard pill for this court to swallow, to take this joint recommendation,” Lynch said. “If that family hadn’t begged me to take this joint recommendation, this would never have happened.”

Defense attorney Zachary Olah told reporters in court that Fuentes was “anxious to get it resolved.”

“We’re pleased that we could get it resolved,” Olah said. “We’re happy that we were able to get it done today for everybody involved.”

ABC News did not immediately receive a comment from the Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office on the plea deal.

Fuentes was the live-in boyfriend of the mother at the time of the assault and was identified through DNA, prosecutors said in court Wednesday. He admitted to having sex with the girl two times while living with her in the Columbus home, prosecutors said.

Authorities said the victim was raped in mid-May 2022 and traveled to Indianapolis in neighboring Indiana the following month to undergo a medical abortion at the age of 10.

A ban on abortion about six weeks into pregnancy had recently gone into effect in Ohio, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe. The so-called heartbeat law has no exceptions in the case of rape or incest.

The case drew national attention following an Indianapolis Star report that included comments from the Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who performed the abortion, Dr. Caitlin Bernard.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican who opposes abortion, sought to suspend Bernard’s license, claiming that she violated federal and state law relating to patient privacy and reporting child abuse, sparking a yearlong dispute.

In May, the Indiana Medical Licensing Board decided to reprimand and fine Bernard $3,000 after ruling that she violated patient privacy laws by talking to a newspaper reporter about providing the abortion. The board refused to suspend Bernard’s license and dismissed Rokita’s allegations that Bernard violated state law by not reporting the child abuse to Indiana authorities.

In her testimony before the board, Bernard heavily criticized Ohio and Indiana politicians for politicizing the case.

“I think that if the Attorney General, Todd Rokita, had not chosen to make this his political stunt we would not be here today,” Bernard said. “I don’t think that anyone would have been looking into this story as any different than any other interview that I have ever given if it was not politicized the way that it was by public figures in our state and in Ohio.”

Abortion rights groups are now seeking to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio’s constitution. Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights said Wednesday they delivered more than 700,000 petition signatures — nearly double the amount needed — in a step toward placing a measure protecting abortion rights on the state’s November ballot. The signatures are now under review.

Currently, abortions are legal in Ohio through 22 weeks, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The “heartbeat bill” that bans abortions after cardiac activity can be detected — roughly six weeks into pregnancy — remains blocked as legal challenges play out.

ABC News’ Jeremy Edwards and Nadine El-Bawab contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(FLORIDA) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently said that if elected president in 2024 he would push for civics education about the founding principles of the United States to celebrate the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary.

DeSantis’ announcement, which he made during an interview with the Washington Examiner, comes amid the yearslong overhaul that DeSantis and state legislators have put Florida’s K-12 education system through, with civics taking center stage.

Florida’s America-focused education requirements
DeSantis signed several policies into law in 2021 that set off a wave of new educational requirements about the country and its founding.

One law, House Bill 5, requires implementation of “patriotic programs,” which includes teaching students about accepting “responsibility for preserving and defending the blessings of liberty inherited from prior generations and secured by the United States Constitution.”

It also requires “comparative discussion of political ideologies such as communism and totalitarianism, that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy essential to the founding principles of the United States.”

The “Portraits in Patriotism Act” within the law would create a curated oral history resource that includes “first-person accounts of victims of other nations’ governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States.”

Another law, House Bill 233, requires that colleges and universities be reviewed for “intellectual freedom” and “viewpoint diversity.”

Meanwhile, the state Department of Education has revised, removed or rejected other lessons based on the requirements of the so-called “Stop WOKE Act” and other legislation.

The law restricts lessons and training related to race and diversity in schools, though the law has been blocked in court from impacting colleges and universities.

This law is supplemented by the Parental Rights in Education law, which restricts curriculum or programs related to gender identity or sexual orientation, as well as Senate Bill 266, which bars state or federal funding from being used for programs or campus activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion or social activism in higher education.

The effects of these laws restricting classroom content have already been seen. DeSantis’ administration rejected an advanced placement African American history course, saying it is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value” in a statement to ABC News.

Lessons on the civil rights movement and Black history also have been changed. For example, discussion of Black social justice movements in the 2000s, including the anti-police brutality Black Lives Matter movement, have been removed from classroom materials.

What is civics education?
Civics education in the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics, refers to the knowledge and skills in “democratic citizenship, government, and American constitutional democracy.” Surveys on American civics knowledge often focus on whether respondents can name presidential candidates, the branches of government, what the Constitution does, and more.

According to the 2022 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey, less than half of respondents — 47% — could name all three branches of government. One in four respondents said they couldn’t name any of the First Amendment freedoms.

Over half of respondents — 51% — wrongfully believe that Facebook must let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment.

However, some educators and lawmakers say civics in education should play a larger role than being able to recite information about the government.

They argue it should teach students about how to be an active and knowledgeable member of one’s community, according to CivXNow, a bipartisan coalition of academics advocating for civics education expansion.

The group argues that civics education is about an understanding of the methods involved in civil discourse and civil engagement, such as protest, debate, voting, volunteering and more.

The National Education Association — the nation’s largest labor union which represents public school teachers, professors, institution staff members — argues that civics education should incorporate discussions about current political or social issues, as well as promote programs that allow students to apply lessons from the classroom into community service.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — President Joe Biden is launching another effort to forgive at least some federal student loan debt after the Supreme Court last week struck down his initial proposal to wipe away as much as $20,000 for borrowers.

The White House’s new approach is based on the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, which provides government-backed student loans and grants the U.S. Education Department the ability to “compromise, waive or release loans.”

Further details will be revealed during a rulemaking process: Implementing any changes will take multiple steps over months, the National Economic Council’s deputy director, Bharat Ramamurti, told reporters on Friday.

It’s unclear if any debt cancellation offered through HEA would be of a similar scope and scale as Biden’s first program, which the White House said covered 43 million borrowers — with 20 million expected to see their student loans entirely erased.

Conservatives had sharply criticized that loan forgiveness as a misuse of tax dollars and an excessive and unconstitutional “scam,” with some saying it didn’t address underlying cost problems in education.

Ramamurti said on Friday that “even a typical rulemaking process can take some amount of time. You have to do a proposal, it has to receive comments, it has to be finalized and so on.”

A negotiated rulemaking process is “even more complicated,” Ramamurti said, and will involve public hearings. The Education Department will hold one virtually on July 18.

“One of the things about the rulemaking process is that we can’t actually prejudge its outcome. Part of how we do this process is how we initiate it, we put a proposal on the table, we work with stakeholders to get their input. That ends up shaping the scope of the proposal. … You’ll hear more about that as we get to each state to the process going forward,” Ramamurti said.

The initial debt cancellation plan the Supreme Court rejected 6-3 as presidential overreach was based on the post-9/11 Higher Education Relief Opportunities For Students (HEROES) Act, which enabled the education secretary to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” and was later altered to include people affected by “a war or other military operation or national emergency.” The White House argued the COVID-19 pandemic qualified as such an emergency.

However, progressive Democratic lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York repeatedly called on the Biden administration to use the HEA rather than the HEROES Act in pursuing debt forgiveness.

Regardless of how much student loan debt Biden intends to cancel under his backup plan and whether there is an income cap for those whose debts get wiped away, his proposal is likely to face legal challenges, too — sparking questions over how big the White House will go and whether a Supreme Court that already overturned his first plan would be more amenable to an alternate strategy.

“My view is that the HEA’s settlement authorities are potentially quite broad, and so using them to forgive a lot of student debt is entirely legally defensible,” said Luke Herrine, an assistant law professor at the University of Alabama. “This would be their broadest use ever — many experts think it’s entirely justified, but the viability question is more a question of whether the administration can either convince a hostile court or avoid that court.”

“I expect the administration is likely seeing the previously enacted plan as a ceiling, so the most they’d do is just try to do the same thing again,” said Herrine, who also was a legal director of The Debt Collective, a debtors’ union. “But that’s not because of built-in limits to the statutory authority in question — it’s a combination of what they think is fair, politically viable and relatively likely to win in a skeptical court.”

Activists hope that Biden will go broader the second time around, noting that the HEA is not tied to a national emergency the way the HEROES Act was, suggesting the scope of the debt forgiven can now be larger.

“I think that the administration liked the idea that they were tying relief to the pandemic, they were saying very clearly to the public, ‘This is a onetime thing. Don’t worry, we’re not getting too out of hand with this debt relief stuff.’ But you know, both are totally legal, legitimate authorities. And in fact, the HEROES Act was sort of tailor-made for what we were in, which is a national emergency,” said Debt Collective co-founder Astra Taylor.

“So, I understand in a sense why they used it. But the Higher Education Act is broader, and the Debt Collective’s position has always been that it should be used to cancel all student debt,” she added. “Legally, they can wipe out every penny.”

Taylor also urged the administration to move swiftly, given that the White House has made a commitment to wiping out some debt.

“It would show that the Biden administration is serious. Sixteen million people got notifications from the federal government saying their applications were approved, 25-odd million people applied. People changed the course of their financial lives thinking, ‘Hey, the government has communicated with me this is something I can plan around.’ So, I think speed is really important on a practical level to honor that commitment,” she said.

Others, however, expressed caution at such a broad proposal, insisting that using the HEA could pass muster with the Supreme Court but with limits.

“Will this new Plan B, will it really be about the administration just waiving as much student loan debt as possible? Or will it be about it really looking at individual files or individual schools that have engaged in fraud or whatever it may be and setting income thresholds and debt relief thresholds that really are achieving the goals of the statute? If so, I think that survives,” said Derek Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of Law.

“I think the cost of higher education is astronomical, and I think a lot of people are making a lot of money off loans. But is it the case that all people making less than $120,000 are struggling to pay their student loans? That’s a tough case to make,” Black said. “The more nuanced it gets, the more survivable it is, whereas the prior iteration was not that case-specific. It wasn’t that nuanced to individual circumstances.”

Still, despite confidence from experts and activists that some debt forgiveness is legal under the HEA, it’s unclear how the court would rule on the issue a second time around.

“This court is deeply skeptical of broad interpretations of administrative authorities, of actions that improve the prospects of their political opponents and of legal interpretations that involve fiscal decisions that make working class folks’ lives better — let alone all three combined,” Herrine said. “So that’s a steep hill to climb.”

ABC News’ Anne Flaherty, Justin Gomez and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — It’s a conservative Supreme Court that has acted with confidence and conviction, but one that seems increasingly aware of its image problem.

Since the addition of the three justices nominated by President Donald Trump, the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority has set into motion the most significant changes in American law and society in a generation — overruling Roe v. Wade; expanding concealed carry gun rights; bolstering free speech and advancing religious liberty.

The biggest and most controversial decisions of this year effectively ended 45 years of affirmative action in higher education; struck down President Biden’s $400 billion student debt forgiveness plan; and, carved out an exception to anti-discrimination laws for opponents of same-sex marriage.

The major rulings were predictably praised by Republicans and condemned by Democrats. A majority of Americans say they believe the justices have ruled mainly on the basis of politics, not the law, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.

But while the headline-grabbing decisions and ideological divisions may define it, the nation’s highest court was significantly less divided in 2023 than it has been in recent years. In several cases where conservatives could have made big gains, the court showed surprising restraint.

Of the 58 opinions the court issued since October 2022, more than half were unanimous or near-unanimous, either 9-0 or 8-1. More than 9 out of 10 cases had one of the court’s liberal justices in the majority.

The justices forcefully rejected the independent state legislature theory for election law, embraced by Trump and his allies; rebuffed Texas’ challenge to the Biden administration’s immigration and deportation plan; upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, preserving protection against race discrimination in redistricting; and upheld the landmark Indian Child Welfare Act, celebrated by Native American tribes.

Perhaps most remarkable, only five cases were decided by a 6-3 ideological split — conservatives versus liberals. That’s down from 14 last term and the lowest number of straight ideological split decisions in the past six years, according to Adam Feldman at Empirical SCOTUS.

Many of these outcomes appear to reflect the extraordinary influence and strategy of Chief Justice John Roberts, who was pushed aside as a central power broker during the Trump years, but still wields significant power.

One year ago, Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to be emerging as the dominant influence on the court, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch in a project to push ahead on a maximalist approach to the law.

But this term, the tables appeared to turn, many veteran court watchers say.

Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh were the most common alignments of any pairing of justices in the decisions this term, according to Feldman. Kavanaugh was in the majority 96% of the time, Roberts 95% of the time.

Both Roberts and Kavanaugh have signaled publicly and in their writings a desire for a more incremental approach to the law – one that has an eye on bolstering legitimacy of the court as an institution in the public eye.

Near-record low public approval, compounded by growing concern over ethics and impartiality, has fed bipartisan debate about the state of the court and what steps may need to be taken from the outside to improve its credibility.

While the justices frequently insist that they do not decide cases based on public opinion, they are also not blind to it.

And through it all, the nine justices have shown surprising cohesion. In the midst of a partisan firestorm over alleged ethics lapses by two conservative justices — Thomas and Alito — the entire court released a signed public statement attesting to its ethical practices and unanimously rebuffing Democrat-led efforts to legislate “reform.”

One potential wild card at the center of it all was the court’s newest member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The nation’s first black woman justice publicly showed outsized engagement and impact from the start: She spoke during oral arguments more than any other new justice in history — and more than any justice sitting during this period, according to Feldman. Her influence behind the scenes will take years to come into focus.

Where does it all go from here?

The justices will take the summer to cool off — and hope the public disaffection with them does as well. Meantime, they have filled their docket with another list of blockbuster cases for the fall: on gun rights, social media censorship, government regulation and voting rights that will give them plenty to chew on heading into an election year.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.