cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
While this is a mostly great post, I’d point out one error:
The charges were pressed as felonies, meaning that they were considered illegal at the federal level
Felonies exist at both the Federal and State level. Just because something is a felony, does not mean it moves to Federal jurisdiction. And this case appears to have been filed in the Madison County District Court which is part of the Nebraska Judicial Branch. The cases themselves can be found on the District Court’s Calendar though you have to put the details in yourself. The cases IDs are CR220000175 and CR220000132 against the woman and her mother respectively. Getting the court documents themselves appears to require paying a fee to do the search and I don’t care enough about a random comment on the internet to pay for it.
There seems to be one document uploaded here which shows the charges against the woman. And this shows the sections of Nebraska State law under which the woman is being charged. Of the three charges, only the first is a felony. Specifically it’s a Class IV felony under Section 28-1301 of Nebraska State Law. And that law concerns moving buried human remains. The other two charges are misdemeanors for concealing the death of another person and lying to a peace officer.
tl;dr - Felonies exist at both the State and Federal level and jurisdiction is dependent on which laws (State or Federal) are at issue.
Thanks, that was a gap in my knowledge. I’ve edited my post to redact that element.
I had meant to do that much earlier today when I first saw your comment, but the fallout from our instance’s recent oopsie appeared to have been preventing me from editing/writing comments. Hope late is better than never.
