The U.S. Supreme Court will decide if a Georgia police officer working for the Drug Enforcement Administration can be sued in Nevada over the seizure of two gamblers' money.
The justices on Monday agreed to hear an appeal from Covington, Ga., police officer Anthony Walden, who was working with the DEA at the Atlanta airport in 2006.
Walden seized $97,000 from Gina Fiore and Keith Gipson, who live in Nevada and were returning there from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Walden said they could get their money back if they produced proper documentation. They said Walden gave a false affidavit to prosecutors showing he had probable cause for seizing the money.
They sued in Nevada after getting their money back in 2007, but a federal judge threw the case out, saying the incident happened in Georgia. A federal appeals court reinstated the case in Nevada.
The Supreme Court of Georgia has upheld the convictions and death sentence of a man who was 18 when he gunned down a gas station manager in the botched robbery of a Columbus service station in 1990.
The court's unanimous opinion upholding Ward Anthony Brockman's death sentence was released Monday morning.
Prosecutors say he killed Billy Lynn, the afternoon manager of the Premium Oil gas station on Forrest Road in Columbus.
Following his conviction, Brockman's attorneys argued that the trial court and state prosecutors committed more than 30 errors and that their client should not have been sentenced to death. The high court disagreed, saying the evidence was sufficient to find Brockman guilty of the crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.
—Compiled from
The Associated Press
