MIAMI (AP) – Deputies responding to a call about a disturbance at a Florida apartment complex burst into the wrong apartment and fatally shot a Black U.S. Air Force airman who was home alone once they saw him armed with a gun, a lawyer for the man’s family said Wednesday.

Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, who worked in the Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, was in his off-base apartment at Fort Walton Beach when the May 3 shooting occurred.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said in a statement that Fortson spoke on Facetime with the woman during the meeting.

According to Crump, the woman, whom Crump didn’t discover, said Fortson was alone in his apartment when he heard a knock on the door. He asked who was there, but received no answer. Just a few minutes later, Fortson heard a louder knock, but when he looked through the peephole, he saw nobody, Crump said, citing the woman’s account.

The woman stated that Fortson was concerned and went to retrieve the gun, which Crump said was her legal property.

Crump’s testimony states that as Fortson was returning to his lounge, deputies burst through the door and saw that Fortson was armed and shot him six times. The woman said Fortson was on the ground saying, “I can’t breathe” after he was shot, Crump said.

Authorities said Fortson died at the hospital. The deputy involved in the shooting has been placed on administrative leave pending the consequence of the investigation.

The woman stated that Fortson didn’t interfere with the Facetime call and believes deputies should have confused the apartment, Crump’s statement said.

“The circumstances of Roger’s death raise serious questions that require an immediate response from authorities, especially given disturbing witness testimony that police entered the wrong apartment,” Crump said.

“We call for transparency in the investigation into Roger’s death and the immediate release of body camera footage to the family,” Crump said. “His family and the public deserve to know what happened in the moments leading up to this tragedy.”

Crump is a nationally known attorney based in Tallahassee, Florida. He has been involved in quite a few high-profile cases involving law enforcement shootings of Black people, including those of Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Tire Nichols and George Floyd.

Crump and Fortson’s family plans to talk at a news conference in Fort Walton Beach on Thursday morning.

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The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office didn’t immediately reply to an email and voicemail from The Associated Press in search of comment on Crump’s claims. But on Wednesday afternoon, Sheriff Eric Aden posted a statement on Facebook expressing sadness over the shooting.

“At this time, we humbly ask our community for patience as we work to understand the facts that led to this tragic event,” Aden said.

The sheriff’s office said in a statement last week that a sheriff’s deputy responding to a disturbance call at an apartment complex responded in self-defense after encountering an armed man. The office didn’t provide details about what disturbances deputies were responding to or who called them.

The sheriff’s office also declined to right away discover the responding deputies or their race. Authorities said earlier this week that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the local state’s attorney’s office would investigate the case.

FDLE spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the agency was highly unlikely to offer any further comments until the investigation was accomplished.

Fortson was assigned to the 4th Special Operations Squadron as a special mission airman, where considered one of his roles as a crew member of the squadron’s AC-130J Ghostrider aircraft was to load the gunship’s 30mm and 105mm guns during a mission.

Fortson’s death bears striking similarities to the deaths of other Black people killed lately by police of their homes, in circumstances through which officers responded to the wrong address or responded to a service call with reckless use of deadly force.

In 2018, a white former Dallas police officer proposed fatally shooting Botham Jean, an unarmed black man, after mistaking his apartment for her own. Former officer Amber Guyger was found guilty of murder the following 12 months and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

In 2019, a white former Fort Worth, Texas, officer fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson through the rear window of her home after responding to a non-emergency call reporting that Jefferson’s front door was open. Aaron Dean, a former officer, was found guilty of manslaughter in 2022 and sentenced to almost 12 years in prison.

Crump represented the families in each cases as a part of his ongoing efforts to force accountability for police killings of black people.

“What I’m trying to do as much as I can, even sometimes on my own, is to increase the value of Black lives,” Crump told The Associated Press in 2021 after a former Minneapolis officer was convicted of George Floyd’s murder.

Fort Walton Beach is positioned between Panama City Beach and Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle.

ATLANTA (AP) — An appeals court in Georgia agreed Wednesday to review a lower court’s ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to proceed pursuing an election interference case she brought against former President Donald Trump.

Trump and a number of other other defendants within the case tried to remove Willis and her office from the case, claiming that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest. Supreme Court Justice Scott McAfee said in March that there was no conflict of interest that might force Willis to withdraw from the case, but he granted Trump and the opposite defendants’ request to appeal his ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals.

On Wednesday, the intermediate appellate court agreed to take up the case. Once the ruling is issued, the losing party may ask the Supreme Court of Georgia to hear an appeal.

Trump’s lead lawyer in Georgia, Steve Sadow, said in an email that the previous president looked forward to presenting arguments to the appeals court explaining why the case needs to be dismissed and why Willis “should be disqualified for her misconduct in this unwarranted, unwarranted political persecution.”

A spokesman for Willis declined to comment on the Court of Appeal’s decision to take up the case.

The appeals court’s decision to hear the case appears likely to delay the case and further reduce the likelihood that it’s going to go to trial before the November general election, when Trump is anticipated to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee.

In his order, McAfee said he plans to proceed to hear other pretrial motions “regardless of whether the petition is granted… and even if the appellate court advances any subsequent appeals.” Trump and others, nevertheless, could ask the Court of Appeals to put the case on hold until an appeal is heard.

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McAfee wrote in his March order that the charge “was burdened with an appearance of impropriety.” He said Willis would only be allowed to proceed working on the case if Wade left, and the special prosecutor resigned a number of hours later.

Allegations that Willis improperly profited from her affair with Wade led to tumultuous months within the case as intimate details of Willis and Wade’s personal lives emerged in court in mid-February. Serious charges in certainly one of 4 criminal cases against the previous Republican president were largely overshadowed by prosecutors’ love lives.

In August, Trump and 18 others were indicted on charges of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to make up for his narrow 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia.

All defendants were charged with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, an expansive anti-racketeering statute. Four people charged within the case pleaded guilty after reaching an agreement with prosecutors. Trump and others have pleaded not guilty.

Trump and the opposite defendants argued of their appeal motion that McAfee was mistaken not to remove each Willis and Wade, writing that “providing District Attorney Willis with the choice to simply remove Wade disrupts logic and is contrary to state law Georgia.”

The allegations against Willis first surfaced in a motion filed in early January by Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for former Trump campaign staffer and former White House adviser Michael Roman. The motion alleged that Willis and Wade were involved in an inappropriate romantic relationship and that Willis paid Wade large sums for his work after which profited by paying for lavish vacations.

Willis and Wade confirmed the connection, but said they didn’t start dating until spring 2022, when Wade was hired in November 2021, and their romance ended last summer. They also testified that they split travel expenses roughly equally, with Willis often covering expenses or reimbursing Wade in money.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is moving toward reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug. The Justice Department’s proposal would recognize the medical uses of cannabis but wouldn’t legalize it for recreational use.

The proposal would move marijuana from “Schedule I” to the less tightly regulated “Schedule III.”

So what does this mean and what are its consequences?

What actually modified? What happens next?

Technically nothing yet. The proposal should be reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget after which subjected to public discussion and review by an administrative judge, a potentially lengthy process.

Still, the shift is taken into account a “paradigm shift and is very exciting,” Vince Sliwoski, a cannabis and psychedelics lawyer in Portland, Oregon, who runs outstanding legal blogs on these topics, told The Associated Press when the federal Health and Wellness Commission Department of Social Services advisable the change.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important this news is,” he said.

This got here after President Joe Biden last 12 months asked each HHS and the attorney general, which oversees the DEA, to review marijuana classification. Schedule Legally, I put it on par with heroin, LSD, quaalude, and ecstasy, amongst others.

Biden, a Democrat, supports legalizing medical marijuana for use “where appropriate, consistent with medical and scientific evidence,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday. “That is why it is important that this independent review passes.”

If marijuana is reclassified, will it legalize recreational marijuana nationwide?

NO. Schedule III drugs – which include ketamine, anabolic steroids and a few combos of acetaminophen and codeine – are still controlled substances.

They are subject to varied laws that allow for certain medical uses and federal criminal prosecution of anyone who deals drugs and not using a license.

No changes are expected to medical marijuana programs currently licensed in 38 states or to legal recreational marijuana markets in 23 states, but they’re unlikely to satisfy federal requirements for production, recordkeeping, prescribing and other requirements for Scheduled drugs III.

There have not been many federal prosecutions for easy marijuana possession in recent times, even under marijuana’s current Schedule I status, but the reclassification would don’t have any direct impact on people already involved in the criminal justice system.

“Put simply, this move from Schedule I to Schedule III is not going to get people out of jail,” said David Culver, senior vp of public affairs at the U.S. Cannabis Board.

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However, the rescheduling itself would have some impact, particularly on research and marijuana taxes.

What would this mean for research?

Because marijuana is a Schedule I drug, it has been very difficult to conduct authorized clinical trials involving the administration of the drug. This has created something of a catch-22: requiring further research, but making it harder. (Researchers sometimes depend on people’s own reports of marijuana use.)

Schedule III drugs are easier to check, although changing the classification won’t immediately reverse all barriers to testing, Culver said.

What about taxes (and banking)?

Under the federal tax code, businesses that “trade” marijuana or another Schedule I or II drug cannot deduct rent, payroll, or various other expenses that other businesses can write off. (Yes, a minimum of some cannabis businesses, especially state-licensed ones, pay taxes to the federal government despite its marijuana prohibition). Industry groups say the tax rate often tops out at 70% or higher.

The deduction rule doesn’t apply to Schedule III drugs, so the proposed change would significantly reduce taxes on cannabis firms.

They say it might treat them like other industries and help them compete with illegal competitors that frustrate licensees and officials in places like New York.

“That’s how you strengthen these state legal programs,” says Adam Goers, director of medical and recreational marijuana giant Columbia Care. He co-leads a coalition of corporations and other players that’s pushing for the schedule change.

It could also mean more promotion and promoting of cannabis if those costs could possibly be deducted, based on Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Center.

The rescheduling would don’t have any direct impact on one other marijuana business issue: difficulty accessing banks, particularly for loans, as federally regulated institutions fear the drug’s legal status. Instead, the industry sought a measure called the SAFE Banking Act. It passed the House multiple times but stalled in the Senate.

Are there critics? What are they saying?

They do exist, including the national anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. President Kevin Sabet, a former Obama administration drug policy official, said the HHS suggestion “contradicts science, reeks of politics” and is a regrettable nod to an industry “desperate for legitimacy.”

Some legalization advocates say the marijuana reschedule is just too gradual. They wish to deal with removing it completely from the list of controlled substances, which doesn’t include items like alcohol or tobacco (they’re regulated, but they usually are not the same).

Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Marijuana Law Reform Organization, said simply reclassifying marijuana would “perpetuate the existing divide between state and federal marijuana policy.” Minority Cannabis Business Association President Kaliko Castille said she would only postpone the “rebranding ban,” relatively than giving full clarity to state licensees and definitively ending a long time of arrests that disproportionately attracted people of color.

“Schedule III will leave it in this amorphous, dirty middle where people won’t understand the danger that it will still be illegal at the federal level,” he said.