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A controversial collection of criminal cases from around the country surfaced, one on each newscast. CBS' Sandra Hughes brought us the prosecution of Hootan Roozrokh, a physician at the California Transplant Donor Network. Dr Roozrokh was sent to the deathbed of Ruben Navarro, an unconscious 25-year-old nursing home patient, to collect his organs. Unfortunately, Navarro took eight hours to die. Roozrokh stands accused of prescribing an overdose of painkillers and sedatives in order to speed his harvest. "His lawyer says prosecutors have singled him out even though he did nothing to hasten Navarro's death," Hughes recounted.
For NBC's In Depth report, Mike Taibbi traveled to Louisiana, where local high school football phenom Mychal Bell faces 22 years in prison for fighting with fellow student Justin Barker. Taibbi told us about an ancient shade tree in the small town of Jena. Its cool had always been reserved for white folk--this is "a town that once gave white supremacist David Duke more than 60% of its vote"--so when black students made use of it, lynching nooses appeared in its branches next day. The high school responded with a brief suspension, but no expulsion, of three white students. Next an arson fire destroyed a high school classroom. Then a fight started between Bell and five of his friends, who are black, and Barker, who is a white. Bell's prison sentence for assault followed a guilty verdict by an all-white jury. The shade tree "was cut down so the town could make a new start--easier said than done."
On ABC's Investigates feature, Brian Ross followed bounty hunter William Staubs's manhunt for a discharged army veteran named Christopher Riendeau. Staubs, who styles himselfCobra, tracked Riendeau down to a motel in Kentucky near Fort Campbell, where, Ross reported, was a "cleaned and pressed US military dress uniform" lying side by side with "an array of Nazi paraphernalia." Cobra showed us what he said he found in Riendeau's storage shed: 16 fully-functional pipebombs, 2lbs of C-4 plastique explosive, 60 firearms, ammunition and grenade fuses. Ross speculated that Riendeau might be a so-called "lone wolf…Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is a classic example." Ross failed to report on Riendeau's side of the story.
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