Verdict

By Patrick Meehan Imagine yourself a victim of sexual assault. After finally summoning the courage to speak out and report your attacker to authorities, you're forced to relive the attack through months of depositions, testimony, and questioning by defense attorneys hoping to discredit you. Next, a jury returns a guilty verdict against your attacker. But then, weeks later, that verdict is suddenly and irreversibly overturned, without any justification or rationale. Your attacker is set free, and you're not even told why. That's exactly what happened to an American woman working in Italy.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Kenya's Supreme Court on Saturday upheld the election of Uhuru Kenyatta as the country's next president, and the loser accepted that verdict, ending an election season that riveted the nation amid fears of a repeat of the 2007-08 postelection violence. Jubilant Kenyatta supporters flooded the streets of downtown Nairobi, honking horns, blowing plastic noise-makers, and chanting. But supporters of defeated Prime Minister Rail Odinga were angry, and shortly after the verdict, police fired tear gas at them outside the Supreme Court.

A Philadelphia Common Pleas jury awarded a $20 million verdict to a Chester County man whose left leg was crushed by a 10-year-old boy allowed to operate a five-ton machine at a work site. Ruick Rolland was working as a contractor at the estate of Bruce Irrgang on a project to replicate the Hogan Bridge from Augusta National Golf Course in 2009 when his leg was injured by a track loader operated by the 10-year-old son of Steven Senn, a construction company owner. Rolland's leg was amputated above the knee.

NEWARK, N.J. - A once-prominent defense lawyer whose clients included rap stars and other entertainers was convicted Monday of operating a racketeering enterprise that involved the murder of a witness and engaged in prostitution, drugs, and witness tampering. A federal jury deliberated for a full day and parts of two others before coming back with guilty verdicts on all 23 counts against Paul Bergrin. The former federal prosecutor once represented an Army reservist charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in addition to celebrities Queen Latifah and Lil' Kim and the group Naughty by Nature.

OUTRAGED with this week's acquittal of a former cop who was caught on video hitting a woman after a parade last fall, about 60 protesters swarmed the east side of City Hall on Friday and briefly shut down traffic on Penn Square. "This is about justice," Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez told the crowd. "I don't want to be the next Aida Guzman. " Members of the city's Puerto Rican community showed up to rally support for Guzman, who was hit by then-Lt. Jonathan Josey after the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

A Philadelphia jury will resume deliberations Monday in the trespass trial of 12 Occupy Philadelphia demonstrators charged in a 2011 foreclosure sit-in at a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Center City in 2011. The Common Pleas Court jury deliberated for three hours Friday before telling Judge Nina N. Wright Padilla it wanted to break for the weekend. The demonstrators were arrested Nov. 18, 2011, when they staged a protest in the bank, 17th and Market Streets, and refused to leave.

A jury in Atlantic City ordered Johnson & Johnson on Thursday to pay $7.8 million in punitive damages to a former hospice nurse for the pain and suffering she endured after using a vaginal mesh implant sold by J&J's Ethicon subsidiary. The verdict follows a $3.35 million award for compensatory damages, delivered Monday. The Gynecare Prolift implant was supposed to help support muscles and sagging internal organs near the pelvis, a condition, referred to as prolapse, that affects some women in years after giving birth.

WE'RE NOT STUPID. We know what we saw. And what we saw was a big, muscular cop cold-cock a small, unarmed woman who was moving away from him. Lt. Jonathan Josey slugged Aida Guzman in the face with her back turned to him. As she fell to the ground, he hit her in the back, too. The video, shot by a bystander after last September's Puerto Rican Day Parade, caught it all, including Guzman's bloodied mouth as she was cuffed and led away. We also saw the context of Josey's actions: He and other officers are trying to disperse a crowd that had surrounded a car whose driver was being arrested.

Prosecutors want a judge to keep reputed Philadelphia mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi in jail pending a retrial, arguing that the mixed verdicts this month against him and others only bolstered their claims about the crime family and its leaders. Brushing aside the jury's acquittals on 46 counts and deadlock on 11 others, the trial team from the U.S. Attorney's Office noted that 10 of the original 15 defendants in the case had pleaded to or been found guilty of felonies, and that the evidence that led to the convictions showed the mob and its leaders ran bookmaking, loan-sharking, and other rackets.

A day after a split verdict in the first major Philadelphia mob trial in a decade, a judge Wednesday jailed two defendants, denied a bid to release a third, and waited to see if reputed boss Joseph Ligambi would ask to be freed on bail. Ligambi, 73, has been imprisoned since his May 2011 indictment. After 21 days of deliberations, the jury Tuesday deadlocked on the racketeering conspiracy charge and three others against him, and cleared him of five lesser crimes. Defense lawyer Edwin Jacobs Jr. had called the verdicts "a failure" for the government and said he would ask U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno to release Ligambi on bail immediately.