unlawful

Maurisio “Mauri” Tapia, the frontman of the popular SoCal indie rock act Los Retros, has been charged with four felony counts of unlawful acts with a child under the age of 10.

Tapia, a 26-year-old Moorpark resident was arrested on Oct. 8 and booked with bail set at $3 million. He was charged in Ventura County Superior Court on Monday, according to court records, and did not enter a plea.

The charges come with additional special allegations, around the victim’s vulnerability and that Tapia abused a trustworthy position. His next court date is Thursday.

Los Retros became an influential act in a wave of Latino bands drawing from vintage Mexican balladeers, American oldies and modern indie rock. Tapia played the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival this year, and singles like “Someone to Spend Time With” and “Amtrak” have millions of streams and monthly listeners.

The project was a prominent act on Stones Throw Records, which had initially booked Los Retros to co-headline its 30th anniversary festival.

In a statement posted to social media, Stones Throw said that “Yesterday we learned of extremely serious and disturbing allegations against Mauri Tapia, professionally known as Los Retros. We had previously announced the cancellation of his scheduled performance at Stones Throw 30 before we were aware of these circumstances. In light of this information, we are taking steps to disassociate ourselves from Tapia and his work. We take these allegations extremely seriously and will continue to assess the situation as more information becomes available.”

A federal judge ruled against the Justice Department’s use of voter data to cross-reference an immigration database.

A United States judge has ruled that the Justice Department unlawfully sought state voter rolls to cross-check against a federal immigration database and identify voters it considered ineligible.

US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s decision on Friday marks another setback for President Donald Trump’s efforts to expand federal oversight of elections ahead of the midterms, as Republicans seek to retain control of Congress.

In a 78-page ruling siding with watchdog group Common Cause, Sooknanan said the administration had understated the risk of wrongly removing eligible citizens from voter rolls because of inaccuracies in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.

“The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” Sooknanan wrote, adding that Congress had left that authority to the states.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the ruling.

Ming Cheung, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said the ruling made clear that the administration could not use the federal government to disrupt elections or put voters’ rights at risk.

“The Trump administration has repeatedly taken extreme measures to interfere with how elections are run, undermine confidence in the results, and create confusion,” Cheung said in a statement.

Last year, Trump directed the department to crack down on voting by ineligible people, despite research showing voter fraud is rare. The department subsequently demanded unredacted voter rolls from nearly all 50 states, including sensitive personal information.

Eighteen states, mostly Republican-led, complied. The department cross-checked their data against SAVE and flagged people identified as noncitizens for potential removal from voter rolls.

Sooknanan said the database could contain outdated citizenship records, potentially misidentifying naturalised US citizens.

The department has also sued 30 states and Washington, DC, over their refusal to provide voter data. Twenty-six cases have been dismissed.

In a separate case in June, Sooknanan blocked the expanded use of the SAVE database for voter roll checks, an order the US Supreme Court temporarily paused last month.

Federal law bars systematic voter roll purges in the 90 days before a federal election, which could limit the ruling’s practical effect before the November 3 vote.

The next stage in this legal dispute will be a behind-closed-doors hearing over whether the police can still retain material seized from Mountbatten-Windsor’s homes under alternative powers designed for situations like this.

The error that has led to Thames Valley Police accepting the search warrants were unlawful relates to the particular power the judge permitted the force to use when its officers raided the properties.

Strict legal safeguards on searches bar the police from automatically seizing sensitive material without thinking through in advance the need to take it.

Examples of that material include advice from a suspect’s lawyer or material which does not really belong to them, such as copies of confidential work-related papers from an employer.

In practice, if the police find such material during a search, they should return it rather than use it in their investigation.

The category of search warrant that was granted by the court in this instance did not take into account the possibility of such protected material being seized.

However, the law says police can in fact seize that kind of material – or potentially retain it in the event of an error – providing they pass some extra tests.

Thames Valley Police must now convince a judge that the material is likely to be of “substantial value” to their investigation into Mountbatten-Windsor and, ultimately, potential evidence to present to a court.

So while the force has conceded the search warrant was unlawful, a judge will have to decide whether this alternative search power, with its extra safeguards, justifies them keeping and using the material after all.