HUTCHINSON -A Hutchinson Correctional Facility inmate facing trial for attempted capital murder waived his jury trial, then entered a plea as charged and was sentenced all during the same hearing on Thursday.

Forty-three-year-old Corey Jeffery entered a plea for the September 2014 stabbing of a correction’s office.

The officer, Tim Russell, who was working in the C-2 cell house at the central unit, received multiple stab wounds and was transported to the Hutchinson Regional Medical Center by EMS for treatment.

Russell had testified at the preliminary hearing that he had met with Jeffery before the incident and Jeffery was upset because of issues over his toilet.

Russell apparently went about his business, but then later called to get someone to come look at his toilet.

About an hour later, he says he was letting inmates out of their cell so they could visit the canteen and that’s when the attack occurred.

He told the court that he was stabbed at least 13 times.

Jeffrey was sentenced to life in prison and won’t be eligible for parole for over 54-years.

This sentence runs consecutive to his current sentence, which is also life, according to Judge Trish Rose.

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Massachusetts has delayed the sentencing of an 80-year-old man who admitted running a sprawling multistate marijuana-dealing operation.

Marshall Dion was scheduled to be sentenced Thursday, but U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston put off the hearing until March 10 because she wanted prosecutors and Dion’s lawyer to submit sentencing briefs.

Dion’s lawyer, Hank Brennan, says the judge wants to know why the proposed sentence in Dion’s plea agreement is up to seven years in prison when federal sentencing guidelines call for 30 years.

A stop for speeding in 2013 in Junction City, Kansas, led authorities to Massachusetts and Arizona, where they found about $15 million in cash, nearly 400 pounds of marijuana and ledgers detailing drug deals going back to 1992.

————–

BOSTON (AP) — An 80-year-old man who admitted running a sprawling multistate marijuana-dealing operation faces sentencing in federal court in Massachusetts.

Marshall Dion faces up to seven years in prison under a plea agreement with prosecutors who say he has been selling marijuana for decades.

In 1985, Dion crashed a single-engine plane in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, and then crawled along a field with two broken ankles as cash floated in the air. He denied that the $112,000 recovered from the crash scene was his.

A stop for speeding in 2013 in Junction City led authorities to Massachusetts and Arizona, where they found about $15 million in cash, nearly 400 pounds of marijuana and ledgers detailing drug deals going back to 1992.

Sentencing is scheduled for Thursday afternoon in Boston.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Latest on the Kansas Supreme Court decision to toss the state’s stopgap school funding law (all times local):

12:30

Two Republican lawmakers are accusing the Kansas Supreme Court of trying to hold taxpayers and schoolchildren hostage with a ruling striking down an education funding law.

House Speaker Ray Merrick of Stillwell and state Sen. Jeff Melcher of Leawood decried the court’s ruling Thursday.

The court said the school funding law was unfair to poor districts and shorted their annual aid at least $54 million. The justices said if lawmakers don’t rewrite the law by June 30, the state’s schools must shut down.

Melcher called the decision “a temper tantrum.”

He said, “It’s kind of one of those things, ‘Give us the money, or the kid gets it.'”

Merrick told reporters that the timing of the ruling was fishy. It came just before the House voted on budget legislation.

——-

11:45 a.m.

A Democratic lawmaker has failed to delay a vote in the Kansas House on budget legislation following a Kansas Supreme Court decision invalidating a school funding law.

Rep. Jim Ward of Wichita said the House should have delayed the vote on the budget bill to allow legislators to react to the ruling. The Supreme Court said the law shorted poor school districts on their annual state aid by at least $54 million.

But the House voted 95-27 against his request to delay the vote.

It then passed the budget bill 68-56, sending it to the Senate.

The measure makes dozens of changes in the state’s $16.1 billion budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 to eliminate a deficit projected at nearly $200 million.

——-

10:50 a.m.

The leader of a conservative Kansas think tank and an attorney representing four school districts that sued the state disagree over the effects of Thursday’s Kansas Supreme Court ruling on education funding.

The court invalidated a school funding law enacted last year, saying it violated the Kansas Constitution and was unfair to poor school districts. The court said the law left poor districts $54 million short in their aid for the 2014-15 school year.

Dave Trabert is president of the influential and conservative Kansas Policy Institute. He says the ruling means the state can find a fairer way to distribute more than $4 billion a year in aid without increasing its overall spending.

But attorney John Robb, who’s representing the districts suing the state, says the court specifically said that shifting aid around isn’t sufficient.

___

10:15 a.m.

A Kansas Supreme Court ruling striking down the state’s law for funding its public schools says those schools won’t be able to open in the fall if legislators don’t write a new statute.

The high court’s ruling Thursday gave legislators until June 30 to enact a new law for distributing more than $4 billion a year in aid to the state’s 286 local school districts.

The justices said the law enacted last year is unfair to poor school districts and left them $54 million short in aid for the 2014-15 school year.

The court said in its unsigned opinion: “Without a constitutionally equitable school finance system, the schools in Kansas will be unable to operate beyond June 30.”

___

10 a.m.

The Kansas Supreme Court has struck down a stopgap law for funding the state’s public schools, saying it left poor districts $54 million short.

The justices ruled Thursday that the Republican-backed law enacted last year doesn’t comply with the Kansas Constitution. The court gave lawmakers until the end of June to write a new law.

The ruling came in a lawsuit that four districts have been pursuing since 2010. The Supreme Court has yet to decide on the larger question of whether Kansas must boost its education spending by at least $548 million a year.

Lawmakers approved the 2015 law as temporary fix. The law replaced a per-student formula for distributing more than $4 billion a year to school in favor of stable “block grants.”

___

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranians started nationwide celebrations Thursday to commemorate the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that ousted a pro-Western monarchy and brought Islamists to power.

State television aired footage of rallies in Tehran and other cities and towns across the country, many of them in frigid winter weather conditions.

The demonstrators chanted traditional slogans against the U.S. and Israel, and the streets in many cities were decorated with anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli banners and posters.

 

Scene of capturing #US sailors recreated in the rally for anniversary of #Iran‘s revolution in #Tehran. pic.twitter.com/nomRF5PNEl

— Abas Aslani (@abasinfo) February 11, 2016

 

Some protestors made a point of taunting the United States. At one rally, a group of demonstrators reconstructed a scene from last month of 10 American sailors kneeling in Iranian custody. The sailors were captured after two of their boats mistakenly entered Iranian territorial waters; they were released the next day.  

#Iran state TV publishes new pictures of #US sailors in which one sailor is crying after being detained. pic.twitter.com/Kl0WkN3QFG — Abas Aslani (@abasinfo) February 10, 2016

Authorities also displayed an array of weaponry and military hardware, including the Emad long-range ballistic surface-to-surface missile and a version of the Shahed drone which flew over a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf last month.

The rallies commemorate Feb. 11, 1979, when followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi. The United States helped orchestrate the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, which brought Pahlavi to power and set the stage for decades of mistrust between the countries.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — The estate of a University of Kansas graduate who helped develop the atomic bomb has donated $1.8 million to establish a new professorship in physics.

The Lawrence Journal World reports that the KU Endowment announced Wednesday that the gift comes from Ernest Klema and his late wife Virginia Klema, who also was a scientist. He died in 2008, and she died in 2015.

Ernest Klema earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the university in the early 1940s before beginning work on his doctorate at Princeton University. Ultimately, his project was transferred to Los Alamos in New Mexico, where he worked on the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb.

He later worked at several universities and labs before becoming a professor and dean of engineering at Tufts University.