Tuesday State News Briefs: Person convicted in Walker probe to have sentencing delayed

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MILWAUKEE - The only person convicted in the John Doe probe of Governor Scott Walker’s former Milwaukee County aides was expected to have her sentencing delayed this afternoon.

61-year-old Darlene Wink pleaded guilty in February to a pair of misdemeanor charges. Defense lawyer Peter Wolff tells the AP that a deferred prosecution agreement is still being worked out – so the judge will most likely delay Wink’s sentencing. Wink admitted raising money and writing public praises about Walker’s campaign for governor while she was supposed to be working as Milwaukee County’s constituent services coordinator when Walker was the county executive. Four other Walker staffers and associates still face charges filed as a result of the two-year-old John Doe investigation by the Milwaukee district attorney’s office. Earlier reports said prosecutors would only recommend a fine for Wink – in exchange for information about an undisclosed destruction of digital evidence, plus other matters being pursued in the John Doe probe.

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A national search will begin this fall for the new chancellor at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison. UW System President Kevin Reilly said today he will form a search-and-screen committee to find the new person. Former chancellor David Ward has been serving on an interim basis since last June, when Biddy Martin left to become the new president of Amherst College in Massachusetts. Ward’s interim appointment was supposed to last for a year – but it was soon extended for two years, until the summer of 2013. Reilly said the search panel would have members from all parts of the campus and community, in line with the UW’s commitment to shared governance. Reilly said the panel would recommend a slate of finalists to him and a special Board of Regents’ committee, which will then hold public forums and job interviews. The full Board will make the final appointment.

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Thousands of Milwaukee area residents left home before dawn today, to find one of two-thousand lawn ornaments given away by the Brewers. Last year, the team spread thousands of Bernie Brewer lawn ornaments around town – and some fans hoarded large numbers of them and made fast profits on E-Bay. This time, the ornament featured the Chorizo racing sausage – and they were all hidden just outside Miller Park, so the Brewers could enforce a limit of one-per-person. The Brewers put out the word overnight about the hunt for the Chorizo law ornaments. Fans could get start picking them up at five a-m – and by 6:45, they were all gone. An hour later, one fan had an asking price of $350 on E-Bay. This is the second year of the lawn ornament event. It promotes the Brewers’ “Spring Madness” event for three games next Monday through Wednesday against San Francisco at Miller Park – which includes discounts on certain tickets, hot dogs, and small sodas. Each lawn ornament had tickets to one of the games.

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Wisconsin has been given more time to meet the federal government’s conditions for Family-Care, the program aimed at keeping the elderly and disabled out of nursing homes. A new deadline of July 23rd has been set. The state lifted its nearly one-year-old enrollment limit on Family-Care April third, at the insistence of the federal government. And the state was getting close to a deadline for meeting other federal conditions when Washington granted a 70-day extension. Federal Medicaid officials want the state to tell beneficiaries that the enrollment cap has been lifted – identify those who should have been getting Family-Care had it not been for the cap, and let them know they could get compensation. But State Health Services Secretary Dennis Smith says Wisconsin does not need to pay anyone retroactively – because last year’s enrollment cap complied with the federal health reform law. Family-Care is part of the state-and-federal Medicaid program – and Medicaid said in March that the federal share of funding could be in jeopardy if the state didn’t follow Washington’s rules. State Democrats said the federal government provided 897-million dollars last year. Six Democratic lawmakers had asked the Joint Finance Committee to have Smith explain the situation to them. Smith contends that the state is complying.

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A Madison couple is due back in court on Friday on charges that they tortured and starved the man’s 15-year-old daughter. Attorneys will ask Dane County Circuit Judge Julie Genovese to drop the various charges that include false imprisonment, causing mental harm, and neglect, and reckless endangerment. Also, the judge will be asked to order a psychological exam for the victim – and to move the man’s trial out of Madison due to heavy pre-trial publicity. The girl escaped from the house in mid-February and told police she was forced to scrounge for food while being held in the basement of her family’s home. The woman’s son is also charged with sexually assaulting the teenager. Innocent pleas have been entered for all three defendants.

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Hostess Brands says it hopes to emerge from Chapter-11 bankruptcy as a growing company with a strong future. And despite a recent Wheeler News Service report, the firm says it is not planning 184 layoffs in Wisconsin. The company said it mailed conditional notices to all 18,500 of its employees around the country, stating that a sale or a “wind down” is possible in the future. And Hostess said it was just fulfilling its government requirements by issuing the employee notices. In Wisconsin, Hostess told state workforce development officials that plans in nine cities could face cut-backs or shut-downs – but the firm says it’s not in the cards for now. The Wisconsin plants to be possibly affected are in Brookfield, Greenfield, Madison, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, De Pere, Oshkosh, and Sheboygan.

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An 18-year-old woman is due in court May 29th, after she allegedly threw her keys at her husband during an argument in Appleton – and their baby suffered a skull fracture. Ci Lee is charged in Outagamie County with child abuse and obstructing police officers. The incident happened last Christmas Eve. Prosecutors said Lee originally claimed that that the baby boy fell from a bed while her husband was changing his diaper. But a doctor said the injuries were way too severe to back up that story. Lee then reportedly told investigators that she threw a set of three keys at her husband as they argued about going shopping. Prosecutors said the keys missed the husband and hit the infant in the face – and one of the keys was stuck in the child’s forehead.

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Testimony begins today in the trial of two men who claim the Green Bay Catholic Diocese committed fraud, by not warning parishioners about a priest who molested them. It took most of the day yesterday for attorneys in Appleton to pick 15 jurors. Twelve of them will rule on a civil suit filed by Todd and Troy Merryfield. They’re seeking unspecified damages, after they were molested in 1978 by former priest John Patrick Feeney when he was at a church in Freedom. The Merryfields were 12-and-14 at the time. They said Feeney was moved to 14 parishes, and the diocese never warned parishioners that he was a pedophile. Feeney was criminally-convicted in the assaults, and he served almost eight years in prison. Several potential jurors were sent home yesterday, after they said their Catholic faith could not make them impartial. One man said he’d have to give the priest the benefit of the doubt. Attorneys on both sides will make their opening arguments this morning. The trial is expected to last for two weeks.

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Milwaukee Public School officials confirmed yesterday that Tom Barrett’s wife violated an employee policy last year, by sending three political e-mails from school computers. Kris Barrett was laid off as a Milwaukee teacher last June. She now works in the suburban Wauwatosa school system. Rosanne Saint Aubin of the Milwaukee district said officials normally discipline those caught using the schools’ e-mail accounts for political matters. But they didn’t know about Kris Barrett’s e-mails until they were posted yesterday by the conservative group Media Trackers. Saint Aubin says her district routinely checks school e-mail accounts for policy violations – but with 10-thousand employees, they can’t catch everybody. Barrett’s husband is running in the recall election against Republican Governor Scott Walker three weeks from today. She sent two of her e-mails last March to Democratic lawmakers, urging them to vote against the bill that virtually ends most public union bargaining. One e-mail said quote, “Keep up the good fight. We are all under attack.” The third e-mail was about an effort to derail Republican Jeff Stone’s unsuccessful campaign for Milwaukee County executive.

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A weekend murder victim in Milwaukee was identified yesterday as 34-year-old Carlos Santos-Rivera. Police said he was shot-to-death early Saturday on the city’s south side. Officials did not say anything about suspects or a possible motive.

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Sheriff’s deputies in north central Wisconsin ran into a bear-of-a-case recently. Lincoln County authorities said a bear broke into a man’s garage and stole a 50-pound bag of sunflower seeds. The victim thought a human might have done it, and called 911. An investigating officer found claw marks next to a window that was broken to enter the garage. And the evidence appears that a bear dragged the sunflower seeds into the nearby woods. The offending bear was never found.

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A Milwaukee man suspected of killing a witness to another crime will not be punished for the incident. 28-year-old Randy “Diesel” Johnson was never charged with the 2007 shooting death of Maurice Pulley Junior. But Johnson was charged with illegally possessing a gun as a convicted felon. And prosecutors recently dropped that charge when he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of illegally obtaining prescription drugs. The 24-year-old Pulley was murdered a few days after he testified against another defendant who shot-and-wounded him during a dispute in a parking lot. Authorities said Pulley had been bribed into keeping quiet. District Attorney John Chisholm helped launch a witness protection program in Milwaukee County as a result of Pulley’s death – and he has directly handled a number of cases which resulted from the murder. Yesterday, Chisholm said new forensic evidence made it difficult to win a conviction against Johnson on the gun charge. But he said an investigation continues into the Pulley slaying – and his office is checking other leads. Johnson had consistently denied being involved in the killing.

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Green Bay Packers’ receiver Donald Driver had the third-highest score among last night’s four contestants on “Dancing With the Stars.” Driver and Peta Murgatroyd scored 28-of-a-possible-30 with a waltz from “Romeo and Juliet.” And they earned 29 in the second on a samba to the song “Mister Big Stuff.” Packers’ coach Mike McCarthy was in the audience, along with Driver’s teammates Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews. And it was apparent that Cheeseheads would have vote in big numbers to send Driver to the final-three. When the viewers started voting, Maria Menounos was the leader with 59. William Levy had 58, Driver 57, and Katherine Jenkins 56. One dancer will be voted off tonight before next week’s finals.

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Dredging resumed yesterday on the Fox River near Green Bay, after a federal appeals court turned down a request by the NCR paper firm to keep delaying the work. An ongoing project to remove cancer-causing PCB’s from the river was halted last year during a court battle over which paper companies should pay for the work. Actually, it was another firm – Appleton Papers – which ordered the work stoppage with the goal of getting other paper companies to chip in. But Green Bay district judge William Griesbach (grees-bock) recently ruled that Appleton Papers should not take on any more financial liability. That’s after it paid hundreds-of-millions of dollars to get the project going – and current contracts force Appleton to cover 60-percent of NCR’s expenses. Griesbach ordered NCR to resume the dredging work – even as it seeks financial help from other companies whose parent firms dumped PCB’s into the Fox River before they were banned by the 1970’s. State and federal environmental agencies convinced the appellate court to have the sediment removal continue 24-hours-a-day and five days a week at least through November ninth. At least 660,000 cubic yards of sediment will be cleaned up this summer.

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Wisconsin’s education department says it’s confident that the federal government will give the state flexibility under the No Child Left Behind Act. States are being allowed to seek waivers from parts of the Bush-era education law, if they develop their own systems to make public schools more accountable. But federal officials wrote last week that the state’s application needs more details – and its goals are not ambitious enough to make students improve. But assistant state superintendent Lynette Russell said Washington’s letter was similar to what some other states have received. She said many of the concerns have already been addressed during the state’s weekly discussions with federal officials. Education Week said it reviewed the federal letters. Among other things, it said Wisconsin was strong at helping special types of youngsters, but it needs more ambitious types of goals in some of those areas. Russell said she’s fully confident the state’s application will be approved – and Wisconsin will have a much more comprehensive accountability system for its schools than it’s had under the No Child Left Behind Act. Eleven states have received waivers, and 26 other states – including Wisconsin – are now going for the same status.

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The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation unit said yesterday that the death of an Appleton soldier in Afghanistan was caused by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 25-year-old Garrick Eppinger died September 17th while on desk duty. His family said he was working as a supply specialist for a munitions post at the time. Eppinger was promoted to staff sergeant after he died. He was buried with full military honors last October, after receiving a number of awards for his service.

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Tags: news, wisconsin