A 28-year-old man in Missouri has been arrested for allegedly killing a 35-year-old pregnant woman and the child she was carrying, as five kids — all of whom were under the age of 10 — watched in horror.

Vanier J. Jones was taken into custody last week and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of 35-year-old Christina Lynn Rentchler and her unborn child, court records reviewed by Law&Crime show.

Jones is also facing charges of armed criminal action, first-degree assault, endangering the welfare of a child, and unlawful possession of a handgun.

According to a probable cause affidavit obtained by Law&Crime, officers with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department on April 23, 2025, responded to a call regarding a shooting at a residence located in the 4100 block of Farlin Avenue. Upon arriving at the address, first responders said they quickly located the victim, later identified as Rentchler, who appeared to be suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, including a single shot “in the back of the head.”

A subsequent autopsy performed by the county medical examiner concluded that the victim was in the second trimester of her pregnancy at the time of her death. The exam further concluded that Rentchler’s death was the direct cause of the death of her unborn baby.

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The affidavit also included a harrowing detail about the fatal shooting and who was forced to witness the alleged crime take place.

“In the house during the murder were five juveniles Victim 4, Victim 5, Victim 6, Victim 7 and Victim 8,” the affidavit states. “The juveniles’ ages ranged from ages of 2 to 10 years old. Some of these juveniles were [Rentchler’s] children.”

Following the shooting, investigators interviewed the eldest child at the hospital, who they said identified Jones as the shooter, adding that he had recently begun staying at the house with her and her family. The child also provided a brief description of what led to Rentchler’s tragic murder and how the child avoided suffering the same fate.

“She stated the Defendant had gotten angry and shot [Rentchler],” according to the document. “She stated that she then played dead, and heard the Defendant ask Victim 1’s children where their mother was prior to the Defendant killing Victim 1.”

After being taken into custody, Jones allegedly told police that he had nothing to do with Rentchler’s murder, claiming he was with an individual identified in the document as “Witness 1.” However, when police spoke to the witness in a taped interview, they stated that “not only was Witness 1 not with the Defendant when the homicide occurred, but that the Defendant admitted to Witness 1 that he had just killed a woman.”

Further investigation revealed that Jones had previously been convicted of multiple prior felonies and had “absconded from his federal supervised release at the time of the homicide.”

A Florida man will spend over a decade behind bars for brutally stabbing a woman who criticized his children at a supermarket.

Jammacar Rodkesh Gayle, 40, was convicted by a jury of his peers in March after a three-day trial in Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit.

On Monday, the defendant was sentenced to 12 years in prison on one count of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon or causing great bodily harm, the state’s attorney announced in a press release.

The knife attack occurred near the butcher’s counter at the Milan Supermarket on Tamiami Trail in Port Charlotte — a large, census-designated place some 30 miles northwest of Fort Myers.

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3. Climate change case that ‘ignited a movement’…

U.S. Supreme Court

Climate change case that ‘ignited a movement’ ends with Supreme Court’s cert denial

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 25, 2025, 2:01 pm CDT

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to revive a climate change lawsuit filed on behalf of 21 youths who contended that the government is a trustee of the environment and has a duty to preserve it.

The Supreme Court denied cert in Juliana v. United States, report Law360, Reuters, the New York Times, the Oregon Capital Chronicle and E&E News by Politico.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at San Francisco had tossed the case in a 2020 opinion that said the issue should be taken to the political branches of government, rather than the courts. In May, the appeals court said a revised suit had not cured standing issues that prevented courts from deciding the case.

The name plaintiff in the suit, filed in 2015, is Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, who is now 29 years old and a teacher in Oregon, according to the New York Times.

The U.S. Department of Justice said in a March 24 press release it has defended the case across three presidential administrations.

“The U.S. Supreme Court’s cert denial brings this long saga to a conclusion,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, in the press release.

The case was filed on behalf of the children by the nonprofit group Our Children’s Trust. Julia Olson, the group’s chief legal counsel, said in a March 24 statement the suit’s impact “cannot be measured by the finality of this case alone.”

“Juliana has ignited a movement and created a powerful legal framework for future generations to assert their constitutional rights in the face of the climate crisis,” she said.

In one success for the group in late 2024, the Montana Supreme Court struck down a state law banning consideration of greenhouse gas emissions in fossil-fuel-permitting decisions. The state supreme court cited a state constitutional provision that guarantees a “clean and healthful environment.” The case was Held v. Montana.

In a second case in 2024, Hawaii agreed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide in its transportation system in a settlement with Our Children’s Trust.

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An Ohio mother who was charged with killing her 8-year-old son in a house fire and injuring his 10-year-old stepbrother has pleaded guilty to endangering children and attempted endangering children, according to records out of Huron County.

In exchange, prosecutors dropped their involuntary manslaughter case against the defendant, Dakota Rae Jones, 33. She was sentenced on March 10 to five years of community control. The probation department also gets to decide how she will serve her 90 days in jail, with an option for her to be given house arrest.

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3. Supreme Court will review Colorado ban on…

U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court will review Colorado ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 10, 2025, 1:38 pm CDT

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether a Colorado ban on conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors—which aims to change sexual orientation or gender identity through counseling—violates the First Amendment.

The high court agreed to hear a case challenging a Colorado law that imposes professional discipline on licensed counselors who engage in such therapy, report SCOTUSblog and Law.com.

At issue is whether the ban censors counseling based on the viewpoint expressed in violation of the free speech clause or whether it is a permissible regulation of conduct, as the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Denver held in the case.

The plaintiff challenging the law, licensed counselor Kaley Chiles, is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group, according to a March 10 press release. She is a counselor with “Christian worldview” who helps clients with gender-identity issues, the press release said.

“Though Chiles never promises that she can solve these issues,” the cert petition said, “she believes clients can accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace.”

The press release said it is significant that the Colorado law “only prohibits counseling conversations in one direction. For example, it allows counseling conversations that aim to steer young people toward a gender identity different than their sex but prohibits conversations that aim to help them return to comfort with their sex when they desire that.”

Circuits are split on whether bans on conversion therapy regulate speech or conduct, according to the cert petition. The 11th Circuit at Atlanta and the 3rd Circuit at Philadelphia have ruled that the laws regulate speech, while the 10th Circuit and the 9th Circuit at San Francisco have determined that the laws regulate conduct.

Colorado’s brief opposing cert said its law was “based on overwhelming evidence that efforts to change a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity are unsafe and ineffective.”

The state argues that Supreme Court precedent “makes clear that the First Amendment allows states to reasonably regulate professional conduct to protect patients from substandard treatment, even when that regulation incidentally burdens speech.”

The case is Chiles v. Salazar.

The SCOTUSblog case page is here.

See also:

9th Circuit upholds ban on conversion therapy for minors in First Amendment challenge

Supreme Court declines to consider challenge to conversion-therapy ban; 3 justices would have heard case

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3. Florida considers exception to lawyer confidentiality…

Ethics

Florida considers exception to lawyer confidentiality rule to protect minor clients

By Debra Cassens Weiss

February 5, 2025, 3:59 pm CST

The Florida Bar’s board of governors could propose an ethics rule change as early as March that would allow lawyers to disclose confidential information to protect minor clients from harm.

The board of governors’ rules committee presented the proposed amendment to the ethics rule on lawyer confidentiality at a January board meeting, the Florida Bar News reports.

The proposed amendment adds a new section to Florida Bar Rule 4-1.6 “permitting a lawyer to disclose confidential information to protect a minor client from a substantial risk of danger or harm,” the article reports.

The rules committee acted after the Florida Supreme Court asked the board of governors to propose revisions by May 1, according to the article. In a Nov. 12 letter, the state supreme court referred to a 2013 appellate decision that quashed a judge’s order for attorneys ad litem to reveal the location of a minor client who ran away from foster care. The minor had requested confidentiality.

The Florida Third District Court of Appeal said in R.L.R. v. State it could not “carve out an altogether new exception to the attorney-client privilege,” which is a job for the legislature or possibly the Florida Bar, the appeals court said.

The Florida Supreme Court will make the final decision on a rule change, the Florida Bar News article reports.

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3. SCOTUS will decide whether schools can require…

U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS will decide whether schools can require LGBTQ-themed books at story time with no opt-outs

By Debra Cassens Weiss

January 21, 2025, 10:27 am CST

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether schools can require teachers to read storybooks to elementary-age children with LGBTQ characters and themes over parents’ objections.

At issue is whether the required instruction with no possibility of opting out violates parents’ First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.

SCOTUSblog, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters and the Volokh Conspiracy are among the publications with coverage of the cert grant in Mahmoud V. Taylor.

The SCOTUSblog case page is here.

One of the books, Pride Puppy, is about a puppy that gets lost during a gay pride parade, according to SCOTUSblog. Another, My Rainbow, is about a mother who makes a colorful wig for her transgender daughter.

Both books were removed from the curriculum after the lawsuit was filed, the Washington Post reported in October.

Other books remain, including Love, Violet, which is about a young girl trying to make a valentine for a female classmate.

The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled 2-1 against the parents in May, holding that the parents weren’t entitled to a preliminary injunction because they had not shown that they or their children were forced to change their religious beliefs or conduct.

According to the cert petition, five circuits now hold that Supreme Court precedent “essentially provides parents no protection once they place their children in the public system.” Only one circuit has found that forced instruction burdens parents’ free exercise rights under the precedent, the 1972 Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder, the petitioners say.

The defendants in the case are the Montgomery County, Maryland, superintendent of public schools, the school board and its members. They argue that there is no circuit split on the issue.

“Every single court of appeals that has considered the question has held that mere exposure to controversial issues in a public school curriculum does not burden the free religious exercise of parents or students,” their brief says.

The parents who challenged the policy are represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit public interest law firm, which issued a Jan. 17 press release here.

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Predictions for the coming year are always tempting, but in hindsight often seem foolhardy. No one in December 2019 could have anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. And in December 2023, no one could have envisioned the political roller coaster of 2024. Although there is much that cannot be anticipated, the following seem realistic questions as we anticipate the new year.

What will be legal challenges to Trump admin policies, and how soon will they reach the court?

Many of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises, if implemented, are sure to provoke legal challenges. Trump has pledged many changes in immigration law, including mass deportations, creating large detention camps and an effort to end birthright citizenship, where those born in the United States are deemed citizens.

As a candidate, Trump explicitly embraced controlling federal spending by impounding funds. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-directors of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, did so in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Musk has talked about cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, and Ramaswamy has said the federal workforce should be cut by 75%. Impoundment of funds is prohibited by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and is sure to be challenged as violating that law and infringing separation of powers. Musk and Ramaswamy, in their op-ed, boldly predict the U.S. Supreme Court will declare the Impoundment Control Act unconstitutional, which would dramatically change federal spending power.

The Trump administration is sure to try to repeal many Biden era rules and regulations. These shifts often will be challenged in court.

States with Democratic attorneys general are readying their efforts to challenge many Trump administration policies. During the last Trump presidency, the California attorney general brought 123 lawsuits against the administration.

Although the challenges to Trump administration policies will begin in federal district courts, preliminary injunctions—or denial of preliminary injunctions—will be immediately appealed. Some could quickly get to the Supreme Court on its emergency (“shadow”) docket. This occurred repeatedly in the first Trump term, and it seems certain to happen again. It is just a question of what issues, when they get to the high court and how they are decided.

How will the court approach the culture wars?

On Dec. 4, the court heard oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a challenge to the Tennessee law that prohibits gender affirming care for transgender youths. An interesting procedural wrinkle is that the petitioner is the United States government. The Trump administration is very likely on Jan. 20 to inform the court that the federal government now wishes to support, rather than oppose the Tennessee law. There are private parties who brought challenges and whose certiorari petitions were not granted but who have filed briefs in the court. Will the court simply substitute them for the United States as petitioners?

At the oral argument, the justices appeared ideologically divided. Five of the conservative justices expressed the view that there should be deference to the Tennessee legislature. Justice Neil Gorsuch was silent during the oral argument. The three liberal justices saw the Tennessee law as discrimination based on sex and gender identity, and likely violating equal protection.

Another case with implications for the culture wars will be heard on Jan. 15, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. It involves a Texas law requiring that internet websites and social media platforms do age verification if more than one-third of their content is sexual material that would be harmful to minors. The U.S Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the law, using rational basis review. The Supreme Court granted review as to whether that is the correct standard of review.

Supreme Court precedents are conflicting as to whether age verification requirements for access to sexually explicit material are allowed. In Ginsberg v. New York, in 1968, the court upheld a New York law that prevented the sale of sexually explicit material to minors under age 18. But in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, in 2004, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional provisions of the Child Online Protection Act that required age verification for websites with sexually explicit material. Underlying Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is the question of how far states can go in regulating the internet and social media, especially to prevent harm to children.

Will the court save TikTok in the United States?

A federal law provides that TikTok must stop operating in the United States on Jan. 19 if its owner, ByteDance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese company. On Dec. 6, in TikTok v. Garland, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the TikTok ban. On Dec. 18, the Supreme Court granted expedited review in the case and scheduled oral arguments for Jan. 10.

The free speech implications are enormous. The 170 million Americans who use TikTok to share and receive information no longer will be able to do so if the law goes into effect.

The D.C. Circuit accepted the government’s claim that national security justified the law. The court said China could use TikTok to “collect data of and about persons in the United States.” The court also said China could “covertly manipulate content on TikTok” to “undermine democracy” and “extend the PRC’s influence abroad.”

The Supreme Court will need to decide what level of scrutiny to use in evaluating the federal law and apply it to decide the constitutionality of the TikTok ban. Never before has the government banned a platform for communication.

Will the court impose additional limits on the administrative state?

In the last few years, the Supreme Court has dramatically changed administrative law. This has included holding that agencies cannot act on major questions of economic or political significance without clear guidance from Congress, overruling the Chevron doctrine, under which courts deferred to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, preventing agencies from imposing civil penalties for fraud and expanding the time within which a challenge to an agency action can be brought.

Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research, which will be argued in the spring, could be the most important of all the recent administrative law cases. It involves whether the Supreme Court will revive the nondelegation doctrine, which provides that Congress cannot delegate its legislative power. The Supreme Court last invalidated a federal law as an excessive delegation of powers in 1935. Since then, every nondelegation challenge has been rejected by the court, even for statutes with very broad delegations of authority to federal agencies.

In 2019, in Gundy v. United States, three justices—Gorsuch, Chief Justice John Roberts and Clarence Thomas—in a dissenting opinion urged the revival and application of the nondelegation doctrine. Justice Samuel Alito concurred in the judgment in the case and expressed sympathy with that position. Justice Elena Kagan’s plurality opinion, rejecting a challenge to a federal law as an excessive delegation of powers, spoke apocalyptically about the consequences of reviving the nondelegation doctrine. She wrote: If broad delegations are “unconstitutional, then most of government is unconstitutional—dependent as Congress is on the need to give discretion to executive officials to implement its programs. Consider again this court’s longtime recognition: ‘Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives.’”

There are now three justices who did not participate in the Gundy decision, including Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who have been in the majority in recent cases limiting administrative power, who have joined the court. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also is new, though she has been in dissent in these decisions.

Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research involves a federal program that offers discounted phone and internet service to public schools and libraries. The United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, in a 9-7 en banc ruling, found unconstitutional the delegations of power. It held that Congress had impermissibly delegated its taxing power to the FCC in giving the agency the power to set the fees that telecommunications providers must pay to the fund for internet availability. It also held that the FCC delegated too much policymaking authority to the private company that administers the fund, violating the principle that the government cannot delegate its powers to private entities.

If the court strikes down the law as an excessive delegation of power, it potentially will open the door to challenges to countless federal agencies and their actions. It will require that the court struggle with the difficult question of how to define what is too much of a delegation of power and where the line is to be drawn.

Will there be a vacancy on the court?

Justice Thomas, age 76, and Justice Alito, age 74, are the two oldest members of the court. Both are very conservative. There is much speculation that they might retire in the next two years while there is a Republican majority in the Senate and a Republican president to replace them. With 53 Republican senators and no possibility of a filibuster under Senate rules, President Trump can have almost any nominee confirmed. The result would be replacing these justices with much younger conservatives who will secure a conservative majority on the court for decades to come.

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Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. He is an expert in constitutional law, federal practice, civil rights and civil liberties, and appellate litigation. He’s also the author of many books, including No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States and A Court Divided: October Term 2023 (November 2024).

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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.

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3. In ‘monumental moment,’ Montana Supreme Court…

Environmental Law

In ‘monumental moment,’ Montana Supreme Court rules for youths claiming right to clean environment

By Debra Cassens Weiss

December 19, 2024, 9:01 am CST

The Montana Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a state law banning consideration of greenhouse gas emissions in fossil-fuel-permitting decisions, citing a state constitutional provision that guarantees a “clean and healthful environment.”

The Montana Supreme Court sided with 16 youths who alleged environmental harm. The decision is the first of its kind by a state supreme court, according to a press release by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit public interest law firm, and the Western Environmental Law Center, which represented the plaintiffs.

The lead counsel for the plaintiffs, Nate Bellinger, called the opinion “a monumental moment for Montana, our youth and the future of our planet” in the press release.

The state constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment” includes a stable climate system, the Montana Supreme Court said in the majority opinion by Chief Justice Mike McGrath. The alleged violation of that right gave the youth plaintiffs standing to sue, the state supreme court said in the Dec. 18 opinion.

Law360, the Hill and the Daily Montanan are among the publications with coverage.

The state had argued that delegates at the 1972 state constitutional convention didn’t intend to address climate change because it wasn’t discussed. Montana also argued that state efforts to address climate change wouldn’t have an impact without global action.

But the majority said constitutional delegates didn’t have to contemplate every constitutional harm that would be protected. Nor would they “grant the state a free pass to pollute the Montana environment just because the rest of the world insisted on doing so,” McGrath wrote.

A concurring judge agreed on the constitutional issue.

But the concurrence said solutions to global warming are in federal and international public policy choices, “rather than in a flashy headline-grabbing rights-based legal case in Montana.”

A dissenting judge argued that the plaintiffs did not have standing.

Chase Scheuer, the press secretary for the Montana Department of Justice, said the ruling was “disappointing but not surprising,” according to coverage by the Hill.

“The majority of the state supreme court justices yet again ruled in favor of their ideologically aligned allies and ignored the fact that Montana has no power to impact the climate,” Scheuer said.

The case is Held v. Montana.

See also:

Montana’s disregard of climate change violates right to clean environment, judge rules

Nation’s first youth climate lawsuits to go to trial