Denver drops some pot penalties

Denver

Denver has become the first city in the United States to wipe out all criminal and civil penalties for adults caught possessing a small amount of marijuana.

About 54 percent of voters Tuesday supported a ballot measure legalizing possession of less than an ounce of pot by people 21 and over.

The ordinance is more radical than pro-pot measures approved over the years in San Francisco, Berkeley, Calif., Oakland, Calif., and half a dozen college towns around the country. Most of those initiatives decriminalized marijuana for medical use or directed police to make enforcement of marijuana laws a low priority. Denver, by contrast, erased adult possession as an offense.

State laws banning pot, however, still apply in Denver.

White Plains, N.Y.

Police chief's son arrested in drug case

The son of Miami's police chief was arrested for trying to buy 400 pounds of marijuana from an undercover federal agent, officials said Wednesday.

A court complaint said Sean Timoney, 25, of Philadelphia gave the agent a gym bag filled with about $450,000 in cash. He was arrested Tuesday night in a Spring Valley hotel and was charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute a controlled substance, said Elizabeth Jordan, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Manhattan.

A spokesman said Miami Police Chief John Timoney was "not going to comment on it publicly because it's a private family matter."

Newark, N.J.

Woman who hid body gets 25 years

A woman who admitted hiding the body of a 7-year-old relative in a basement storage bin was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison, and her son, who said he killed the child in a wrestling move, was sentenced to three.

Faheem Williams' decomposed body was found stuffed in a basement storage bin three years ago, and his twin and half brother were discovered living in squalor and filth. The case generated national outrage and led to an overhaul of New Jersey's child-welfare agency. The mother of the three boys had entrusted them to Murphy, her cousin, before going to serve a jail term.

Sherry Murphy pleaded guilty in September to criminal restraint, aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child. Her son Wesley, 19, pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter.

Sentence tossed in "Blind Faith" case

A federal appeals court Wednesday threw out a former insurance salesman's death sentence for arranging his wife's murder 22 years ago in a case that was the subject of a true-crime book and a TV miniseries.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia found that Robert O. Marshall's lawyer did not adequately represent him during the death-penalty phase that followed his 1986 conviction. The court ordered that he receive a new death-penalty hearing or a life sentence.

Marshall was convicted of hiring a hit man to kill his wife so he could continue an affair with another woman. His tale became the subject of a best-selling book by Joe McGinnis, "Blind Faith," and a miniseries of the same name.

Compiled from The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times