Court

LAS VEGAS — A former high school football coach and teacher from Florida was sentenced to three months in jail and ordered to pay a $5,000 fine Thursday after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the one-punch death of a Utah man at a Las Vegas casino.

Defense attorney Jack Buchanan said he didn’t believe a punitive stint in the Clark County Detention Center was appropriate for his client, 39-year-old Benjamin Gerard Hawkins, of Gainesville.

Hawkins has remained free following his November conviction in the death of 46-year-old John Massie, an occupational safety and health worker at Hill Air Force Base.

OGDEN — Esther Fujimoto’s screams could be heard 300 yards away when she was fatally struck by a powerboat, a 2nd District Court jury was told Tuesday.

SALT LAKE CITY — Wayne Ogden’s DEA handler testified to his major help in a large club drug bust, as well as the FBI’s indifference to his offers to do the same for mortgage fraud.

Gerald Kaphing of the DEA is a keystone in the defense’s case begun Tuesday at former Weber County swindler Ogden’s federal fraud trial. The trial began Jan. 23 and could go to the jury by the end of the week, although it is scheduled for several days next week before Judge Clark Waddoups.

Kaphing is currently a senior inspector in the DEA’s Washington, D.C., headquarters after 17 years as an agent working in numerous locations around the country, including five years in the Salt Lake office from 1999 to 2004.

SALT LAKE CITY — Two capital projects in Weber County, with a combined price tag of $90.1 million, drew the attention Friday of a legislative committee charged with oversight of state building projects.

OGDEN — The nearly seven years of litigation over a fatal car crash that followed a police chase continues with plaintiffs seeking to have Ogden city’s lawyers kicked off the case.

A faulty line of questioning by the city’s hired lawyers during a November 2009 trial caused the Utah Supreme Court last June to throw out the jury verdict that had acquitted the city.

The justices ordered a new wrongful death trial in the 2005 crash in which two people died.

FARMINGTON — A teenage couple who police say held a 50-year-old man hostage for 12 hours in his own home entered not guilty pleas to kidnapping and robbery charges.

FARMINGTON — A former charter school basketball coach and Weber State University adjunct anthropology professor charged with sexually abusing a child appeared in court on Friday.