Press Releases

The Department announced a comprehensive agreement with King County, Wash., regarding the conditions of confinement at the King County Correctional Facility in Seattle. The agreement follows the Department’s investigation of the facility, which found substantial civil rights violations.

The Department has reached a settlement with the State of Georgia regarding the conditions at Georgia’s seven psychiatric hospitals. The Department opened its investigation of Georgia’s psychiatric hospitals in 2007 and issued findings regarding Georgia Regional Hospital at Atlanta on May 30, 2008.

Executives from LG Display Co. Ltd. and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd. have agreed to plead guilty and serve jail time in the United States for participating in a global conspiracy to fix prices in the sale of Thin Film Transistor-Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) panels.

Five people have been indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami relating to the individuals’ participation in a fraudulent business opportunity sales operation. A sixth individual was also charged in a criminal information.

Jarrod Anthony Yates, a former Sequoyah County, Okla., corrections officer, was sentenced to 21 months in prison for violating the civil rights of an arrestee.

A second former State Department employee pleaded guilty today to illegally accessing hundreds of confidential passport application files.

Seven U.S. defendants charged for their activity in a global child pornography trafficking enterprise were convicted today in the Northern District of Florida following a six-day jury trial before Senior U.S. District Judge Lacey A. Collier.

A Highland Falls, N.Y., woman was arrested today and charged in a criminal complaint for her role in a scheme to defraud the U.S. government by authorizing nearly $3 million in payments to a non-existent corporation for staff training that she knew never occurred at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

AT&T Inc. has agreed to pay more than $2 million as part of a civil settlement with the Department that resolves AT&T’s alleged violations of two court orders entered in connection with AT&T’s acquisition of Dobson Communications Corporation.

KIK (Virginia) LLC pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Virginia to a misdemeanor violation of the Clean Water Act and agreed to pay a $75,000 criminal fine and $25,000 in community service payments for negligent discharges of bleach to the sanitary sewer system in Salem, Va.

Peter Zavell, a medical doctor in Florence, S.C., pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false tax return for the year 2000. Zavell was scheduled to begin trial in Florence before Judge R. Bryan Harwell today.

"Today’s report describes troubling conduct by a former supervisor in the Civil Rights Division prior to his departure from the Division nearly three years ago. The mission of the Justice Department is the evenhanded application of the Constitution and the laws enacted under it, and that mission has to start with the evenhanded application of the laws within our own Department. As today’s report makes clear, Mr. Schlozman deviated from that strict standard."