Kansas City, Mo., man convicted of raping 4 women (AP)

By MARIA SUDEKUM FISHER, The Associated Press Maria Sudekum Fisher, The Associated Press – Fri Jul 15, 7:27 pm ET

KANSAS CITY, Mo, – A 53-year-old man was convicted Friday in a string of sexual assaults and home invasions that terrorized a Kansas City, Mo., neighborhood in the 1980s.

Bernard Jackson stared straight ahead and gave no outward expression as Jackson County jurors declared him guilty of seven counts each of rape and sodomy, and four counts of robbery in attacks on four women in or near the midtown neighborhood of Waldo in 1983 and 1984.

"We are speaking with the victims right now," Assistant Jackson County Prosecutor Ted Hunt said. "From what I've heard, obviously they're very happy, very appreciative and very happy this is finally over."

Jackson was arrested in May 2010 after five sexual assaults were reported in the same area of the city from September 2009 through February 2010. He has been charged in two of those attacks, and has pleaded not guilty. No trial dates have been set for those charges.

Jackson's arrest triggered elation among residents of Waldo, a middle-class neighborhood with tree-lined streets and locally-owned restaurants and shops. Police touted the arrest as the resolution of cases that had long ago gone cold.

In all of the cases from the 1980s, the victims were 29 to 31 years old and lived alone. All of them had their hands bound behind their backs while they were being assaulted. The victims also said their assailant blindfolded them and initially told them he was going to rob them. None were able to identify Jackson in testimony this week as their attacker.

Jackson was charged with raping, sodomizing and robbing three of the victims and robbing the other, though the fourth victim testified that she was also raped, and prosecutors often referred to the four rape victims throughout the trial.

During the weeklong trial, prosecutors largely relied on witness testimony and DNA evidence taken from the crime scenes that they said linked Jackson to the attacks.

Defense lawyer Carie Allen, who appeared shaken after the verdict and left the courtroom without comment, maintained throughout the trial that Jackson is innocent. She said Jackson was "scared to death" of the accusations, and that the evidence collected nearly 30 years ago was unreliable.

Jackson first went to prison in 1977 at age 19 after pleading guilty to raping a Kansas City woman in her home. He served less than six years of a 15-year sentence and was paroled in April 1983. He was living at a prison work-release center in Kansas City at the time of the later rapes and was arrested May 5, 2010, after police tracked him to a friend's home.

Hunt said that because of Jackson's legal status as a persistent sex offender, he faces a minimum of 30 years without parole on each rape and sodomy count. He also faces between 10 and 30 years on the robbery counts, Hunt said. No sentencing date has been set.

At least one of the victims attended Friday's closing arguments, sitting behind the prosecution.

Jackson "attacked these four women," Hunt said, "and today they got some justice and that's what it's all about."

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Court Blocks Kansas Law Shutting Down Abortion Clinics (Time.com)

By KAREN BALL / KANSAS CITY, KAN. Karen Ball / Kansas City, Kan. – Sat Jul 2, 1:30 am ET

Kansas' efforts to shut down two abortion providers will have to wait as a federal judge temporarily blocked the state Friday from imposing tough new licensing restrictions.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia, reading from the bench, issued a preliminary injunction, saying providers and women would suffer "irreparable" injury if the regulations took effect Friday as scheduled. The injunction will hold until a trial determines the legality over rules that, among other things, mandate the size of janitors' closets and require lockers for patients.

"This is a tremendous victory," said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented a father-daughter team from Overland Park, Kan. who had been denied a license. (See TIME's special report on women's health.)

"The facts were clear," said Northup, "this licensing process had absolutely nothing to do with patient health or safety and everything to do with political shenanigans."

One other clinic, Aid for Women in Kansas City Kan., will also be able to reopen its doors. Planned Parenthood, after purchasing a "neo-natal crash unit" that it said was unnecessary, was able to meet the licensing requirements at the last-minute on Thursday. If not for the judge's Friday order, that clinic would have been the only provider left in the state.

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, says it was never the law's intent to shut down abortion clinics and notes that although South Carolina has a similar law, clinics there have survived. Abortion providers are "putting on a show," she says. "They're the ones who said if you make abortion legal, we'll keep women safe," she says. "Why wouldn't you want rooms big enough to get gurneys in and out of?"

But supporters of abortion rights said the Kansas law was part of a coordinated national campaign to chip away at a woman's right to reproductive freedom. "More like hack away," said Northup.

"Since the November elections," added Tait Sye of the national Planned Parenthood office in New York, "we've gone through the greatest legislative assault on women's health in a generation."

If the new regulations in Kansas are ultimately upheld, Planned Parenthood said its services will be strained. About 8,000 women a year seek abortions in Kansas; Planned Parenthood performed about 5,000 of them last year, the other two providers handling 3,000. That likely includes a large number of patients from across the state line, where Missouri already has tough restrictions in place and there are no clinics in the urban core of Kansas City. (See why Kansas tried to shut down abortion clinics.)

Dr. Herbert Hodes, who filed suit with his daughter, says abortion is just one of the services he and his daughter provide in their private ob-gyn practice. He delivers babies at nearby hospitals and performs other procedures, like tubal ligations, in his office. He says there's no reason to mandate patient lockers - he notes that hospitals usually just put a patient's belongings in a bag under the gurney when they go from pre-op to surgery to recovery.

"It's a joke and a sham," Hodes told TIME. "The only purpose is to shut down access to abortions." He says he complies with rules from the Kansas Board of Healing Arts and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists since "they're realistic regulations drawn up by doctors for doctors. We all know how much legislators know about health care for women - nothing," Hodes says.

Kansas legislators have tried to implement similar regulations before but gained traction only with the election of the conservative Brownback. Kansas is also one of the states where lawmakers are trying to block funding for Planned Parenthood. The state has long been a hotbed for the abortion issue; it's where Dr. George Tiller, who famously offered late-term abortions in Wichita, was murdered in 2009.

Jeff Pederson of Aid for Women echoes Hodes' complaints about unnecessary regulations, saying that one of the new codes mandates a two-hour recovery period. He says that when he accompanied his father to get his teeth pulled, his dad was sedated, yet they left 10 minutes after the procedure was complete. "The women don't want to stay here two hours, and they don't need to. They have a caregiver with them. They're drunk, but they're walking."

The majority of Pederson's clients are low-income or minorities, he says, and he fears folks will go back to pre–Roe v. Wade days of seeking home remedies or other means to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. "I can remember what it was like before."

See why teen pregnancy and abortions are on the rise.

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