Evansville Teachers Federal Credit Union is accepting applications for the Ted Hitch Scholarship, which annually awards ten $5,000 grants to graduating high school seniors.

This year’s deadline is March 1, 2019, with the application and information available at etfcu.org/scholarship. Completed applications can be mailed to 4401 Theater Drive, P.O. Box 5129, Evansville, IN 47716-5129 or dropped off at any of ETFCU’s 14 branch locations.

Winners last year came from nine different schools in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

The scholarships are named in honor of Theodore “Ted” Hitch Jr., a longtime mathematics teacher who championed education and became president of ETFCU after his retirement from teaching at Evansville Bosse High School. Mr. Hitch passed away in 2016.

Applicants must be members or related to a member of the credit union.

Indiana, Kentucky Join Planned Parenthood’s Western Alliance

Il for www.theindianalawyer.com

Planned Parenthood’s affiliate overseeing Hawaii and three western states announced Friday that it was adding Indiana and Kentucky, a first-of-its-kind consolidation based not on geography but on reallocating resources to fight new abortion restrictions in the Midwest and South.

The arrangement by the women’s health nonprofit places Indiana and Kentucky under a Seattle-based affiliate that currently oversees clinics in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, and western Washington.

Chris Charbonneau, the CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands, said her group has an annual budget of about $70 million. She said its donors wanted to help Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky.

In recent years, that Indianapolis-based group has faced the legal costs of challenging far-reaching limits on abortion rights sought by Republican lawmakers in both states — including a proposed bill before Kentucky’s Legislature that would ban abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

“They feel like other parts of the country have a tougher row to hoe and they’re looking forward to supporting this effect,” Charbonneau said of the donors. “… The political environments in Indiana and Kentucky have been particularly oppressive and they’ve made getting health care to low-income people in the states difficult.”

Planned Parenthood said the arrangement is the first such alliance for the health care organization. The boards of the two groups this week unanimously approved a “strategic alliance” that takes effect Saturday. Charbonneau will be the CEO of both groups.

She said the alliance will also help provide reproductive health care and other services in Indiana and Kentucky, with an expansion of services being eyed in both states.

Charbonneau said the new entity will have a combined annual budget of between $80 million and $90 million and will serve more 164,000 patients annually at 45 health centers across six states. Sixteen of those health centers are in Indiana and two are in Kentucky.

Planned Parenthood provides an array of health services, including Pap tests, breast and testicular exams, STD testing and treatment, birth control and pregnancy tests. It also provides abortion services, which has made it a target for anti-abortion and conservative groups.

Mike Fichter, the president and CEO of Indiana Right to Life, said in a statement that the alliance between the two Planned Parenthood groups “places a target on unborn children in Indiana and Kentucky by bringing in millions of dollars from far away states to influence policy and expand abortions.”

“… We believe this merger underscores Planned Parenthood’s intent to expand abortions which are central to its revenue stream,” he said.

Kentucky is embroiled in three abortion-related lawsuits. Two other abortion-related laws in the state have been struck down by the courts, including one that had required doctors to perform ultrasounds and show and describe the ultrasound images to pregnant women, who could avert their eyes. GOP Gov. Matt Bevin has appealed in both cases.

Legislation passed by Indiana lawmakers has also led to a series of court fights, including a law Vice President Mike Pence signed when he was governor that would ban abortions for fetal genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome. Another provision of that 2016 law would have required burial or cremation of aborted fetuses, but federal courts have blocked those provisions as unconstitutional.

In Indiana, Planned Parenthood offers abortion services at clinics in Indianapolis, Merrillville, Bloomington and Lafayette; it operates no abortion clinics in Kentucky — which has only one abortion clinic — but is seeking license to perform abortions at its Louisville and Lexington clinics, said Judi Morrison, the Indiana-Kentucky group’s vice president of education, human resources and training.

The Indiana and Kentucky affiliates merged nearly six years ago, part of an ongoing trend for Planned Parenthood. The national organization once had more than 200 affiliates, but there are now 53 nationwide due to consolidations, said Andrew Everett, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands.

Charbonneau said the growing costs of providing health care have driven the consolidations. She said the alliance will reduce the cost of electronic medical records, laboratory testing and other overhead costs for the two groups.

“It is radically expensive to provide health care in America today and everyone looks for every opportunity to shave costs out of their system in order to be able to continue to do their work,” she said.

Katie Stancombe for www.theindianalawyer.com

A northern Indiana man convicted of beating a gay Afghanistan war veteran to death lost his appeal of his conviction and sentence Monday when the Indiana Court of Appeals found that a delay in the production of cellphone records did not prevent the man from receiving a fair trial.

In June 2017, Jabreeh Davis-Martin was convicted of the murder of family friend Jodie Henderson, who was a war veteran and an openly gay man. While drinking with Davis-Martin’s mother at the home she shared with Davis-Martin, Henderson informed her that he had romantic feelings for her son.

The next morning, police responded to a call of an unresponsive man lying in the street across from Davis-Martin’s home. Upon arrival, the officers found Henderson lying face down in the street across from house, dead. Henderson was determined to have died from “blunt and chop injuries,” while several pieces of evidence were found in and around the house.

Davis-Martin was eventually charged with Henderson’s murder, and while incarcerated he confessed to his cellmate that he and Henderson had been in a relationship that was “going well until Jodie wanted to tell people about their relationship.” After Davis-Martin’s mother inquired him about the relationship, Davis-Martin confronted Henderson, hitting him with a gun. He said he planned to hit Jodie “only a few times,” but “he couldn’t stop himself” and beat him up “until he couldn’t move no more.” Then, while returning home from a party that same evening with two other individuals, Davis-Martin used a cellphone to call his mother and told her to get rid of a coat and clean blood off the porch.

A jury eventually found Davis-Martin guilty, and a judge sentenced him to the maximum 65 years. But not until after sentencing did the state turned over Davis-Martin’s cellphone records to the defense, prompting the defendant to file a motion to correct error on the grounds that the withheld records were in violation of Brady v. Maryland,373 U.S. 83. The motion was ultimately denied.

On appeal, Davis-Martin argued the St. Joseph Superior Court should have granted his motion to correct error because the state violated Brady “by failing to disclose Davis-Martin’s cellular phone records which were material.” But citing the instant case’s similarity to the case of Bates v. State, 77 N.E.3d 1223, 1226 (Ind. Ct. App. 2017), the appellate court found Davis-Martin’s Brady challenge failed for two reasons.

“First, Davis-Martin’s failure to request a continuance negates any claim of actual prejudice. A request for a continuance would have allowed the trial court and the parties to discuss this issue in real time — and not in a motion to correct error after trial,” Chief Judge Nancy Vaidik wrote in a 32-page opinion. “Second, Davis-Martin has failed to prove that the State’s late disclosure so prejudiced his preparation or presentation of his defense that he was prevented from receiving his constitutionally guaranteed fair trial.

“Davis-Martin claims that his cell-phone records — which do not show a call from his cell phone to his mother’s cell phone around 2 to 3 a.m. on January 16 — would have ‘dispel[led]’ (witness) testimony that he called his mother from the car and asked her to destroy evidence,” Vaidik continued. She also noted defense counsel had made that point during cross-examination and in her closing argument.

“Notably, Davis-Martin does not cite any additional information from his cell-phone records that he would have used,” Vaidik concluded. “In any event, Detective Cook testified that even if the cell-phone records did not contain such a call, a call still could have been made using the internet.”

The appellate panel also rejected Davis-Martin’s arguments that the trial court erred in instructing the jury and that his Fifth Amendment rights were violated when the state admitted evidence from his mother that he initially said he did not wish to speak to police. That evidence, Davis-Martins unsuccessfully argued, was a violation of his Fifth Amendment self-incrimination rights.

The court also found sufficient evidence to support the conviction, noting any weaknesses in the evidence were made known to the jury by the defense. And the panel also upheld his sentence, finding the trial court did not err in its consideration of mitigating factors.

Thus, the appellate court affirmed Davis-Martin’s conviction and sentence in Jabreeh Cash Davis-Martin v. State of Indiana, 71A05-1712-CR-2963.