An Arizona mother who murdered her two kids, ages 7 and 9, using a meat cleaver “designed to cut the bones of animals” will die behind bars after being handed two consecutive life sentences on Friday for her heinous crimes.

Yui Inoue, 44, was sentenced by Maricopa County Superior Judge Jeffrey Rueter, according to AZFamily, and he didn’t mince words when speaking to her.

“Words can’t adequately describe what occurred,” Rueter said, per AZFamily.

“I can’t imagine what those children went through in their last minutes,” he told the court. “The fear, the pain, the suffering. It’s incomprehensible.”

Inoue, who spoke through a Japanese interpreter, said that she believed her children were not dead. She was given the two life sentences plus two 20-year sentences to be served consecutively.

“They are spending time with my parents,” Inoue reportedly said. “I love my children very much so it’s very strange. My children are with my parents.”

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Inoue, who lived in Tempe, was accused of killing her two kids in a heinous 2021 murder case that wrapped up in February with her conviction.

“Mia and Kai Inoue were sleeping soundly in their beds when their own mother came into their bedroom holding a knife, a meat cleaver … and she attacked them with it,” prosecutors said during closing arguments, according to AZFamily. “She had to think. She had to act. And there’s nothing unclear or speculative about any of that.”

A Maricopa County jury found Inoue guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of child abuse in connection to a prior investigation by the Arizona Department of Child Safety and the May 2021 murders of her children Mia and Kai Inoue, who were identified by local officials.

Prosecutors say Inoue set upon her two children after claiming to hear “voices telling her to kill” them. She called 911 afterward and then went to flag down officers at a police substation on East Apache Boulevard near Arizona State University. The distraught mother was primarily speaking Japanese, police said, and she reportedly confessed to the officers on the spot about the slayings. Authorities went up to her apartment in response and found the mutilated bodies of Inoue’s kids.

“[S]he was hearing voices telling her to kill her children,” charging documents said.

Inoue later told police that she woke up with blood on her hands around 4:30 a.m. to find her children dead and also covered in blood near a doorway. After that, she said she took a bath and finally “woke up” to the reality of the violence she committed. Her lawyers claim Inoue had no memory of carrying out the killings. According to local ABC affiliate KNXV, Tempe police said a blood-soaked meat cleaver was discovered inside the vehicle Inoue drove to the police substation.

“We are here because this woman tried to decapitate two souls,” said Maricopa County prosecutor Shaylee Beasley during her closing arguments in February, according to the Arizona Republic.

Beasley described in detail how Inoue “delivered chop after chop” to the children while they both “tried to protect their heads.” She reportedly showed close-up photos of the children’s horrific injuries to the jury and claimed their deaths were connected to a bitter divorce she was having with their father.

Inoue’s attorney, Rebecca Felmly, had previously said that she believed there was enough reasonable doubt presented at Inoue’s trial for the jury to deliver a verdict of not guilty. During her first court appearance in 2021, Inoue told the judge “I did not kill anybody” through her interpreter.

“(The medical examiner) likened the amount of force to a guillotine,” Felmly said, according to AZFamily. “She is a very tiny, very slightly-built woman. She doesn’t have the energy, the power, or the strength to cause that type of injury to those kids.”

The child abuse case that Inoue was convicted of stemmed from a report made by Inoue’s husband in March 2021 — just months before the killings — saying Inoue “took Kai” and their whereabouts were unknown. “Police eventually located Ms. Inoue and Kai behind a convenience store,” DCS officials said in a May 2021 statement. “Ms. Inoue was taken to a psychiatric hospital and Kai was returned to his father.”

DCS investigators said they did not observe any “visible signs of abuse or neglect on the children” and the kids claimed “they felt safe with their parents.” The investigation did not find any evidence to warrant removal from the home, according to DCS officials.

Colin Kalmbacher contributed to this report.

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Immigration Law

‘It’s Time for You to Leave’: More immigration lawyers get notices to self-deport

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 25, 2025, 9:32 am CDT

Immigration lawyers outside Massachusetts are also receiving notices to self-deport, despite their U.S. citizenship.

Among the lawyers receiving notices are Austin, Texas, lawyer Hubert Montoya and Salt Lake City lawyer Carlos Trujillo, according to Fortune, KTVX and the Utah News Dispatch.

“It’s time for you to leave,” the notices said.

Immigration lawyers in Ohio, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania have also reported receiving the notices, according to the Utah News Dispatch.

Montoya told Fortune that he laughed when he received the notice.

“I just thought it was absurd,” he said.

Trujillo told the Utah News Dispatch that he has advocated for the immigrant community, but he refuses to think that it is the reason for the notice.

“It probably was a mistake, and I love this country so much that I think my first inclination is just to believe that and leave it at that,” he said.

The notices are part of a what appears to be a mass email campaign telling immigrants that the immigration parole allowing them to temporarily live in the United States has been revoked, according to the Utah News Dispatch.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is canceling paroles that allowed people who entered the United States using an online appointment app to remain in the country for two years, according to previous reporting by the Associated Press. The Trump administration has suspended use of the app.

The Department of Homeland Security sent notices to email addresses provided by the immigrants, including, in some cases, email addresses of U.S. citizens they listed as contacts, according to a statement by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Some of the notices may have been sent to lawyers and other unintended recipients, the agency told Fortune.

The notices being sent are not limited to people who used the appointment app, according to a Customs and Border Protection statement cited by the Utah News Dispatch.

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An Arizona man is facing felony aggravated assault charges for an “unprovoked” attack he allegedly unleashed on a stranger, with cops saying he grabbed an individual from behind and “completely removed” their eyeball from the eye socket after the victim walked by and asked the suspect, “How are you doing?”

“The victim stated that during this incident he was in fear for his life and safety, believing that Daniel could have killed him,” police allege in court documents obtained by local Fox affiliate KSAZ, which outline the charges against Daniel Lanks, 39, who is accused of carrying out the attack on Monday, April 14, near 48th Street and Broadway Road, the station reports.

“The attack was completely unprovoked, and he did not threaten Daniel, challenge him, and did not have any form of weapons to be perceived as a threat,” the documents say, according to KSAZ. Lanks allegedly pummeled the victim with punches to his face after removing his eyeball, causing a fractured jaw.

Bold. Innovative. Visionary. At a time when many courts are losing the battle to provide access to justice, especially in low-income communities, the Arizona Supreme Court has brought fresh ideas to bridge the justice gap.

Vice Chief Justice John Lopez, at the invitation of the ABA Crossroads Caucus, discussed innovations his court has recently put in place in a conversation with moderator Mark Martin, dean of High Point University School of Law at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Phoenix in February.

As reported by the Legal Services Corporation in its most recent Justice Gap Study in 2022, low-income Americans do not get any or enough legal help for 92% of their substantive civil legal problems. To address this issue, Lopez and his colleagues have focused on improving access to legal services by lowering costs and increasing options. For lower income citizens, the court approved several programs, including the Legal Paraprofessional Program, the Lawyer Apprentice Program, the Legal Advocate Program and the Government Law Admission Program.

The Legal Paraprofessional Program, to highlight a very successful program, has been in operation since early 2021. It grants a license that allows nonlawyers to offer limited legal services, including legal advice; drafting and filing legal documents, opinions and strategies; and representing clients in court. The first licenses were granted in November 2021, and Arizona has 65 licensed LPs. The program improves access to justice by allowing trained nonlawyers to represent clients in criminal, family, civil, administrative and juvenile law matters. The University of Arizona and Arizona State University offer a Master of Legal Studies that prepares students for the legal paraprofessional licensure exam.

To address the problem of Arizona’s “legal deserts,” a term coined by the ABA to describe counties with few or no lawyers (i.e., fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents), the Arizona Supreme Court approved a Lawyer Apprentice Program. The program encourages aspiring lawyers to stay in Arizona, creates a pathway to licensure for law graduates with lower bar scores and increases the number of lawyers in the state. In a state that ranks 49th of 50 states in lawyers per capita, such a program is a necessity, but it’s a very disciplined necessity: Applicants must (1) be graduates of an ABA-accredited law school (2) score 260-269 on the Uniform Bar Exam (3) and commit to practice under the supervision of a qualified Arizona attorney for at least two years in rural Arizona or a public law practice.

More controversial are the Arizona Supreme Court-approved “Alternative Business Structures.” The ABS program allows nonlawyers to partner with lawyers in businesses that provide legal services. The program was created to encourage innovation in legal services and make them more affordable. ABS are subject to the Rules of the Arizona Supreme Court regulating the practice of law, including the requirement that the ABS employ a member of the Arizona Bar who supervises the practice of law. While such arrangements are common in the United Kingdom and Australia, they are actively debated in the U.S.

When Big Four accounting firm KPMG was approved on Feb. 27 to own a law firm under the ABS program, some skeptics asked whether such a step would actually bridge the justice gap or lower costs for lower-income citizens. Lopez acknowledges that some have also raised concerns that the “one-stop shop” model may put traditional firms out of business.

As part of the Arizona Judiciary’s Five-Year Plan, Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer, a 2021 ABA Journal Legal Rebel, has made public trust and confidence in the judiciary a foundational goal. Lopez strongly supports this goal, and the court has put in place several initiatives to address the problem.

He told his audience: “Much of the public’s distrust in our courts is driven by inaccurate media coverage of our cases. Too often, media coverage centers on a case result and often fails to accurately identify the issue, if at all. Inaccurate framing of judicial decisions is then used to drive a narrative that judicial opinions are invariably political decisions. To that end, too many media reports on judicial opinions are limited to the party affiliation of the judge, the case result and its political significance or palatability. This coverage encourages public cynicism and distrust of courts.”

To counter objectively inaccurate characterizations of judicial opinions, the Arizona Supreme Court recently adopted a practice of releasing a brief summary of the judicial opinion that identifies the issues and sets out the reasoning and the decision in the case. Lopez observed that the initial results seem to be positive, noting that coverage of judicial decisions has been more accurate. He said the purpose and effect is not to diminish critical reporting of decisions, but to increase the likelihood that the criticisms and coverage accurately reflect the actual issues, reasoning and conclusions in the case.

Lopez’s final topic was retention elections. Arizona adopted a merit selection system in 1974 that applies to Arizona’s appellate judges and trial court judges in Arizona’s four most populous counties, where a nonpartisan commission of lawyers and citizens investigates and evaluates candidates for judicial positions. The commission then submits the names of the most highly qualified applicants to the governor, who makes the appointment from that list.

Once appointed, judges are subject to retention through regularly scheduled retention elections, by which a majority of votes in favor of a judge results in retention for another term. During judges’ terms, beginning in 1992, a commission of citizens and lawyers, known as “Judicial Performance Review,” assessed judges’ performances and issued recommendations to the voters prior to an election.

From 1974 to 2020, no endorsed judge had ever been removed by voters. In fact, most judges recommended for removal by JPR were retained by voters. Moreover, during those nearly 50 years, only three judges were removed by voters in retention elections; all were embroiled in legal scandal or were otherwise deemed unfit by the JPR Commission.

But, Lopez said, “Something began to change about Arizona’s retention elections in 2020. For the first time, a major political party targeted judges for nonretention. All were retained. But in 2022, voters failed to retain three Maricopa County Superior Court judges. In other words, as many judges were removed by voters in one election as had been removed over the previous 48 years. Notably, two of the three judges had been recommended for retention by the JPR Commission—a first in the history of Arizona’s merit selection system. One of the judges was targeted not for his judicial performance, but rather for his prior associations and his work as an assistant A.G. in Arizona.”

In 2024, the merit selection system, including the retention election, became a major political issue. One side of the partisan/ideological divide cited an unpopular abortion decision, while the other side of the divide expressed dissatisfaction with the court’s election decisions. These political forces culminated in two primary events: (1) a significant campaign was marshaled to remove two members of the Arizona Supreme Court (2) and Proposition 137 was placed on the ballot to eliminate routine retention election for judges unless they committed various crimes, filed personal bankruptcy or were not recommended for retention by JPR. This proposition was rejected by nearly 80% of voters.

Lopez concluded his presentation by questioning the wisdom of politicizing the merit selection process. He quoted the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who called the prospect of jettisoning the merit selection system “a great step backwards.”

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Jo Ann Engelhardt is a member of the ABA Board of Governors representing District 8, a member of the board of the American Bar Foundation and a founding member of the ABA Crossroads Caucus.

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This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

An Arizona inmate already serving 16 life sentences for raping and taking guards hostage during a 15-day standoff two decades ago is now accused of murdering three fellow inmates.

It happened Friday morning at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry facility in Tucson, the agency said in a press release. The suspect was identified as Ricky Wassenaar, who has been in and out of prison since the 1980s. He’s accused of killing inmates Saul Alvarez, Thorne Harnage and Donald Lashley.

More from Law&Crime: Mom found stabbed 14 times at VRBO property as police search for daughter who allegedly ‘wanted to kill her’ for months

Officials have yet to say what led up to the slayings, nor have they given a motive other than saying Wassenaar “acted with an intent to harm” the three victims. He has yet to be formally charged. Per the press release, Alvarez was a convicted murderer while Harnage and Lashley were sentenced for sexual conduct with a minor. Lashley also was convicted of molestation of a child.

The agency’s Office of Inspector General will investigate the deaths.

“The ADCRR takes situations involving violence seriously and will pursue prosecution against any suspects believed to be involved in the case,” the press release says.

Wassenaar gained notoriety in 2004 when he led a hostage situation at the Lewis facility. Local CBS affiliate KOLD reported that Wassenaar used a homemade weapon and overpowered a guard in the kitchen before stealing his uniform. He then went to the watchtower with a fellow inmate where he tricked the guard inside to let them inside.

The other inmate struck the male guard in the head and they held him and a female guard hostage. They let the male guard go after six days but held the woman guard for the duration. The guard, Lois Fraley, did an interview with KOLD about a year after the incident.

“I considered myself dead from the beginning,” she said.

The man charged with killing his attorney brother allegedly returned to the crime scene with family,  and cops arrested him in front of a media outlet.

Christopher Eaves, 49, is currently held on a $1.5 million bond, and if he manages to get out of custody pending trial, he cannot communicate with his own and his brother’s family, according to AZ Family.

Police in Phoenix, Arizona, claim that he carried out the shooting Friday, according to Fox affiliate KSAZ. Surveillance footage from next door recorded gunshots.

“The defendant went over to the victim’s house early yesterday morning and shot the victim, fired multiple shots,” prosecutors reportedly said. “He returned to his house with his parents, and Phoenix Police found multiple loaded weapons in the defendant’s car.”

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Law Firms

KPMG’s bid to deliver legal services delayed as top Arizona court seeks more information

By Debra Cassens Weiss

January 29, 2025, 3:21 pm CST

The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday pushed back a decision on whether to allow a new subsidiary of accounting company KPMG to practice law in the state.

KPMG Law US is seeking to operate through Arizona’s alternative business structure program, which allows nonlawyers to own or invest in law firms. The state supreme court has requested “additional information or clarification on aspects of the application” before reaching a decision, a court spokesperson told Bloomberg Law and Law.com.

The Arizona Supreme Court’s Committee on Alternative Business Structures had unanimously recommended approval of KPMG’s application earlier this month. The committee acted after a KPMG representative answered questions, including a query about how the firm would provide legal services in other states without violating ethics rules.

The new firm plans to work with staffing agencies and local lawyers to serve clients in other jurisdictions, KPMG compliance lawyer David Rizzo told the committee.

KPMG, which has more than 3,750 employees, already has legal practices in more than 80 jurisdictions.

Law360 recently spoke with Christian Athanasoulas, a U.S. tax partner and head of tax services at KPMG, about the accounting company’s plans.

KPMG Law US plans to hire Arizona-licensed lawyers who will deliver legal services in the state. The new firm does not intend to offer legal services to audit clients but will seek opportunities with clients served by its tax and advisory businesses.

“We’ve recognized that there is a need for services related to legal that are very much adjacent to the services we deliver today,” Athanasoulas said. “That’s not a full portfolio of legal services but rather a handful of pinpointed legal services that address client pain points and are adjacent to our existing portfolio and service offerings.”

Athanasoulas noted that Arizona wants to bring innovation to the legal profession. KPMG has already “invested incredible resources in technology, including AI,” and that investment could help KPMG Law US deliver “a better work product in a faster, more efficient way,” he said.

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A man who helped his son hide the bodies of four murder victims in a Wisconsin cornfield after the younger man “snapped” has learned his fate.

Darren Osborne, 59, was sentenced Thursday to 16 years in prison, online court records show. He was found guilty in October of four counts of hiding a corpse involving the deaths of Jasmine Sturm, 30; her brother, Matthew Pettus, 26; her boyfriend, Loyace Foreman III, 35; and her friend, Nitosha Flug-Presley, 30.

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Practice Management

KPMG asks Arizona to OK alternative business license for subsidiary law firm

By Debra Cassens Weiss

January 9, 2025, 8:51 am CST

A subsidiary of accounting company KPMG US is applying to operate as an alternative business structure in Arizona under state ethics rules that permit nonlawyers to own or invest in law firms.

If approved by the Arizona Supreme Court, KPMG Law US would complement the services of traditional firms, a spokesperson told Law.com, Bloomberg Law and Reuters.

Legal teams “face substantial and wide-ranging process challenges that can benefit from legal expertise and technology at scale,” KPMG said in a statement emailed to Law.com. “We aim to solve those pain points, especially on tight timelines.”

The aim is to “bring legal capabilities to managed services, such as contract lifecycle management,” the spokesperson told Bloomberg Law.

Approval would be “a game changer,” according to Law.com.

KPMG Law already offers legal services globally in more than 80 jurisdictions and has more than 3,750 employees. But bans on nonlawyer ownership of firms in most states have prevented companies such as KPMG from offering legal advice with its law-related services in the United States.

The Arizona Supreme Court’s Committee on Alternative Business Structures will consider the proposal Jan. 14. The state supreme court has the final say on approval.

Arizona has already approved more than 100 alternative business structures, but they “have largely been granted to firms practicing personal injury, mass torts and products liability law, as well as trusts, estates and probate law,” according to Law.com.

See also:

KPMG aims to employ 3,000 lawyers within the next few years

Pilot project allowing nonlawyer legal providers gets OK in Washington