Florida Sentinel Bulletin

GARY – Karen Freeman-Wilson was elected the first Black female mayor in Indiana on Tuesday night.

“It’s great to make history,” the Gary attorney said just before the celebration began at the Genesis Convention Center in Gary for hundreds of her supporters.

Freeman-Wilson, a Gary native, received a law degree in 1985 from Harvard University. Ebony magazine named her one of the country’s 50 leaders of the future for the Black community a year after then-Gov. Evan Bayh named her director of the Indiana Civil Rights Commission, the first of many of her public responsibilities involving social and racial equality.

She became Gary city judge in 1994 and Indiana attorney general in 2000. She ran unsuccessfully for Gary mayor in 2003 and 2007.

She now must confront a city government hobbled by high tax rates, declining tax revenues and the need to provide services to a population in which a significant number of people are below the poverty line and unemployed.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether juveniles convicted of killing someone may be locked up for life with no chance of parole, a follow-up to last year’s ruling barring such sentences for teenagers whose crimes do not include killing.

The justices will examine a pair of cases from the South involving young killers who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed when they were 14.

Both cases were brought by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. The institute said that life without parole for children so young “is cruel and unusual” and violates the Constitution.

The group says roughly six dozen people in 18 states are under life sentences and ineligible for parole for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from a Texas death row inmate who won a last-minute reprieve from the high court in September.

The justices on Monday turned away the appeal of Duane Buck, who wanted them to consider whether race played an improper role in his sentencing.

Buck, who is black, was sentenced to death for the fatal shootings of his ex-girlfriend and a man in her apartment in July 1995.

Five other Texas death row inmates received new punishment hearings because of racially charged statements made during the sentencing phase. Each convict again was sentenced to die.

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — Republican presidential contender Herman Cain on Saturday vowed to answer no more questions about decade-old sexual harassment allegations and blamed journalists for the claims that have dogged his campaign.

Growing agitated with reporters after a one-on-one debate with rival Newt Gingrich, the former business executive suggested the reporters who asked questions about the allegations were unethical.

Asked if he planned to never answer questions about the incidents, he was certain. “You got it,” he snapped, even as the allegations leave plenty of doubts about Cain’s candidacy.

WASHINGTON — The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America’s unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent – a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America’s 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

Congress is expected to decide by year’s end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further.

One of five men sent to prison for the rape and murder of a middle school classmate two decades ago walked out of an Illinois prison Friday, exonerated by new DNA evidence that also has cleared at least two of the others, including his half-brother.

James Harden, now 36, stood outside the walls of Menard Correctional Center in Chester and said the taste of freedom was “like breathing new life in my body.”

His half-brother, Jonathan Barr, will have to wait while paperwork related to a decades-old juvenile conviction is worked out, his attorney said.

A judge on Thursday vacated the convictions of Harden, Barr and another man, Robert Taylor, after DNA evidence pointed to another suspect. Taylor was released Thursday from Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.

The other two, Robert Lee Veal and Shainne Sharp, served shorter sentences that ended years ago for the rape and shooting death of 14-year-old Cateresa Matthews in 1991 in Dixmoor, Ill.

Prosecutors say they plan to ask those convictions be vacated as well.

Sources inside the family of a missing 5-year-old Glendale, Ariz. girl say Jhessye Shockley wasn’t in school for a week and a half before she disappeared.

This and other revelations are slowly coming to the surface as Glendale homicide detectives  are now leading the investigation three weeks into the girl’s disappearance. Family members say Jhessye’s mother, Jerice Hunter, told the school Jhessye had ringworm.

Police said Monday the girl’s mother is not a suspect.

Thousands of inmates who have been incarcerated for possessing small amounts of cocaine will get a taste of freedom soon due to the Crack Cocaine Disparity Law.

The law changes the 100-to-1 disparity between minimum sentences for crack and powder cocaine to 18-to-1.

A Halloween-themed email from the Loudoun County, Va., Republican Committee was swiftly condemned by conservative and liberal groups for featuring an image of a ghoulish-looking President Obama with a bullet hole through his head.

The message, with the subject line “Halloween 2011,” invites supporters to a community parade where “we are going to vanquish the zombies with clear thinking conservative principles and a truckload of Republican candy.”  It also features a caricature of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a jack-o-lantern, and cartoons of zombies.

The email was first reported by the blog Too Conservative, which said the group had gone “way too far” and should be reported to the U.S. Secret Service.