An Arkansas golf club is being accused of wrongfully withdrawing a prize after a player there says he won fairly by getting a hole-in-one on their golf course in the central part of the state.

Austin Clagett says he went to the tee box and made the hole-in-one shot to earn a truck provided by a local car dealership.

As Fox News reported, the Morrilton Country Club, which is reportedly one of the oldest facilities of its kind in Central Arkansas, said if a player got a hole-in-one on the 10th hole, they would win the keys and ownership of an F-150 truck courtesy of the dealership, Jay Hodge Ford.

KATV reported that "When it was Austin Clagett’s turn to try to get a hole-in-one, Austin Clagett hit the ball and it went in the hole on the first attempt."

"Afterward, Morrilton Country Club and Jay Hodge Ford of Morrilton refused to give Austin Clagett the keys or transfer him the title to the 2022 Ford F-150 4x4 Supercrew," the report said.

Andrew Norwood of Denton & Zachary PLLC has filed a civil suit on behalf of Clagett and said, "This is about doing what is right. Mr. Clagett lived up to his end of the deal when he got the hole-in-one and now Morrilton Country Club and Jay Hodge Ford of Morrilton want to crawfish out of the deal."

Norwood said, "If they didn’t want to pay up when Mr. Clagett got a hole-in-one, they shouldn’t have offered the deal."

The dealership said, "Without our knowledge, Morrilton Country Club promoted that this new truck would be available as a winning prize at the event despite our agreement that it would be for display purposes only," the company said.

"Jay Hodge Ford of Morrilton would like to extend its sincerest apologies to the community for this misunderstanding and we look forward to serving everyone in the future."

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk took the witness stand Friday to defend a 2018 tweet claiming he had lined up the financing to take Tesla private in a deal that never came close to happening.

The tweet resulted in a $40 million settlement with securities regulators. It also led to a class-action lawsuit alleging he misled investors, pulling him into court Friday.

The mercurial billionaire took the witness stand wearing a dark suit on the third day of a civil trial in San Francisco that his lawyer unsuccessfully tried to move to Texas, where Tesla is now headquartered, on the premise that media coverage of his tumultuous takeover of Twitter had tainted the jury pool.

The nine-person jury assembled earlier this week will be responsible for deciding whether a pair of tweets that Musk posted on Aug. 7, 2018 damaged Tesla shareholders during a 10-day period leading up to a Musk admission that the buyout he had envisioned wasn't going to happen.

A month later, Musk stepped down as Tesla's chairman while remaining CEO as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission settlement without acknowledging any wrongdoing.

In the first of those those two 2018 tweets, Musk stated “funding secured” for a what would have been a $72 billion buyout of Tesla at a time when the electric automaker was still grapping with production problems and was worth far less than it is now. Musk followed up a few hours later with another tweet suggesting a deal was imminent.

On the stand Friday, Musk — who last year bought Twitter for $44 billion — said tweeting is “most democratic way” to communicate with investors.

"I care a great deal about retail investors,” he said during questioning by shareholder attorney Nicholas Porritt.

But he acknowledged that investors can get more detail in a traditional corporate filing with securities regulators, given the character limits set on Twitter.

“I think you can absolutely be truthful" on Twitter, Musk said. “But can you be comprehensive? Of course not.”

Even before Musk took the stand, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen had declared that the jurors can consider those two tweets to be falsehoods, leaving them to decide whether Musk deliberately deceived investors and whether his statements saddled them with losses.

Musk has previously contended he entered into the SEC settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The trial over his Tesla tweets come at a time when he has been focusing on Twitter, which he acquired in October after trying to back out of that purchase.

Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition. Those concerns contributed to a 65% decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than $700 billion in shareholder wealth — far more than the $14 billion swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the Aug. 7-17, 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit.

Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making the $420 buyout price cited in his 2018 tweet worth $28 on adjusted basis now. The company's shares were trading around $133 Friday, down from the company’s November 2021 split-adjusted peak of $414.50.

After Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame its production problems, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and minted Musk as the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter.

HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, Ky. —

The victim in a deadly home invasion shooting in Madison County was a graduate of Northern Kentucky University's Chase College of Law and was a former assistant commonwealth attorney for Boone and Gallatin Counties.

32-year-old Jordan Morgan was shot and killed Tuesday at her parent's house.

"She came from a political family. Her father was a state legislator. She had a lot of access to the world of Kentucky politics," said NKU law professor, Ken Katkin. "She was working for congressman Massie part-time while she was going to Chase, and she was also working on Governor Bevin's campaign in 2015."

Katkin said Morgan just started a new job at an elite law firm in Lexington. He described Morgan as intelligent, resourceful and a natural leader.

"In the student organization, the Federal Society, they pretty much made her the president by acclimation. It wasn't even really seriously considered that anyone else could be the president. She was obviously presidential that she was the automatic choice for that," Katin said.

Kentucky State Police said Shannon Gilday, who is from Taylor Mill, Kentucky, forced his way into the home on Willis Branch Road around 4 a.m. armed with a rifle.

Police said once he was inside, he shot and killed Morgan while she was in bed.

Police then say Gilday allegedly confronted the homeowner, when gunshots were exchanged between the two.

The homeowner suffered non-life-threatening injuries, and Gilday left the scene in a 2016 white Toyota Corolla.

Former state Rep. Wesley Morgan owns the home, according to the Madison County property valuation administrator’s office.

Morgan told the Lexington Herald Leader that his daughter was killed.

Morgan served one term as a state representative for Richmond and Berea in Madison County.

Shannon's mother, Katie Gilday, said that she is saddened for the Morgan family's loss. She said her son has "not been of sound mind the last couple of weeks, distraught with the certainty a nuclear war is imminent."

The mother says her son spoke of building a bunker and the CIA following him. She said she tried to get him psychiatric help but was unsuccessful.

"I plead to Shannon to turn himself in so that he can get the help he so desperately needs. Meanwhile, I thank my family and friends for their love and support and ask for our privacy as we navigate through this unthinkable tragedy," the mother said.

Kentucky State Police told WLWT the bunker could be what led Gilday to the mansion. Online realtor postings show the $6.5 million home was built with a fallout shelter underneath.

KSP said until Gilday is located, they are looking at all possibilities.

Shannon Gilday has an active arrest warrant for murder, burglary, criminal mischief, assault and two counts of attempted murder.

He is considered armed and dangerous. He is believed to be driving a White 2016 Toyota Corolla with minor damage to the front grill, and a license plate of 379-VMJ.

Gilday is 6 feet tall and weighs 167 pounds. He has brown hair and blue eyes. Surveillance footage showed him wearing a camo or tactical style pants and jacket, dark-colored hooded sweatshirt, gloves and a light-colored face mask.

People are asked not to approach the vehicle or attempt to contact the driver for safety reasons. Anyone with additional information about the investigation is urged to call KSP Post 7 at 859-623-2404.

AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Facebook owner, Meta.

Paxton alleges that Meta illegally collected users’ biometric data, including facial recognition technology, without their consent.

The lawsuit goes on to accuse Meta of sending the information to others for profit.

According to the suit, Facebook violated a Texas law that requires people to get permission before capturing a person’s biometric information.

The suit also alleges that Facebook failed to destroy the data in a reasonable amount of time, which violates state law.

The Attorney General’s Office says Facebook violated state law billions of times.

Meta is also accused of violating Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act because it reportedly misled users.

There is a $25,000 penalty for each unlawful capturing of a biometric identifier.

The lawsuit asks for an additional $10,000 civil penalty for each violation.

Paxton estimates that the penalties could add up to billions of dollars.

This lawsuit out of Texas is similar to another suit out of Illinois in 2021, where Facebook was accused of using its Tag Suggestions tool to store users’ biometric data without their consent.

The suit ended with a class action privacy settlement.

Facebook was ordered to pay $650 million.

Meta has not commented on the recent lawsuit in Texas.

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Avenatti was convicted by a jury on charges that he cheated porn actor Stormy Daniels out of nearly $300,000 that she was supposed to get for writing a book about an alleged tryst with former president Donald Trump.

The verdict was returned Friday at a federal court in New York.

The result was the culmination of an unusual trial in which Avenatti acted as his own lawyer and got to cross-examine Daniels about her belief in ghosts.

Earlier Friday, the jury foreperson told Judge Jesse Furman that a juror was acting on feelings and emotions. The judge reminded jurors of his original legal instructions and their pledge to consider the evidence. A short time later, Avenatti was found guilty.

The disgraced lawyer now reportedly faces up to 22 years in prison for Friday's conviction of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Avenatti still faces other legal problems. He has yet to begin serving a 2 1/2 year prison sentence he received in 2020 for trying to extort up to $25 million from sportswear giant Nike.

Police reform has been at the forefront of protests the past few weeks, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The qualified immunity doctrine is getting a lot of attention.

“Qualified immunity is a doctrine that was created by the Supreme Court in 1967 in a case called Pierson v. Ray, and when the Supreme Court announced the existence of qualified immunity, they described it as a good faith defense,” Joanna Schwartz, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, said.

However, there have been debates on how this doctrine can be used.

In recent weeks, Congressman Justin Amash proposed the “Ending Qualified Immunity Act” (H.R. 7085).

“Qualified immunity is just another example of a justice system that is not working for people, and preventing people from getting the redress they deserve,” Representative Justin Amash (L-Michigan) said.

So, we dove into qualified immunity with Joanna Shwartz, a law professor who studies civil rights litigation, and Justin Smith, a sheriff in Larimer County, Colorado.

“Qualified immunity first of all has nothing to do with criminal immunity,” Sheriff Justin Smith said.

Smith has been with the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department for nearly three decades.

“Who in their right mind would build a career on running towards gun fire and confronting an armed suspect? Why would you do it without some type of civil protection?,” he explained.

We sat down with him as he explained why qualified immunity is important for his officers.

“I’d simply ask the question to the average American, is a police officer expected to be perfect in all of their actions in a split second?,” he asked.

Smith said without qualified immunity, one incorrect decision made by an officer could cost a lot.

“If you didn’t call that exactly right by one judges interpretation, that's a lawsuit,” he said.

“Every time the officer puts on the shirt, the badge, straps on the firearm, comes to work, every action they take responding to a case essentially is as if they went to Vegas and they walked up to the table, placed a five dollar bet, and in Colorado for example, would cost them up to $100,000. Who's going to make that bet?,” Smith explained.

However, those who want qualified immunity removed say the doctrine has changed over the years and it’s not necessary to protect officers who act in good faith when it comes to protection of rights.

“Concerns about split second decision making...are already protected from liability by the Supreme Court's construction of what the Fourth Amendment allows. Qualified immunity is unnecessary to do that,” Schwartz explained.

She went on to explain why she believes that qualified immunity isn’t necessary for the protection of money, either.

“I studied lawsuit payouts across the country over several years, I found that police officer personally contributed .02 percent of the total dollars paid to plaintiffs,” she said.

Schwartz said while the doctrine was originally created as a good faith defense, it has changed over the years to make it harder for people to file lawsuits against officers.

“In order to defeat qualified immunity, find a prior case with virtually identical facts in which a court announced that that conduct was unconstitutional,” she said.

Which has been an issue for James King from Michigan, who told a reporter he was assaulted by an officer in plain clothes in a mistaken identity case. The incident was caught on camera back in July 2014.

“The simple fact is the majority of this time this situation happens to anyone, they have no recourse,” King said.

Officers are often forced to make decisions in a split second.

“This is a risk taking profession,” Smith said. “We can say the criminal justice system isn't perfect and that's accurate. Nothing in society is perfect. I think it’s overall improved significantly over the years.”

But Schwartz thinks officers acting in good faith can be protected by other measures.

“Qualified immunity is not necessary or well suited to play that role in weeding out insubstantial cases,” she said.

Both Smith and Schwartz agree that when looking at proposed changes to qualified immunity on the federal and state level, it’s important to look at what officers the bill is including -- whether that be local, county, state, or federal officers.

“Congress’ bills at this moment only end qualified immunity for state and local officials,” Schwartz explained. “As we are thinking about state and local law enforcement, we should not overlook the role of federal law enforcement and other government officials.”

The New York attorney general is trying to break up the National Rifle Association over allegations of mismanagement and the abuse of member money.

Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who specializes in the Second Amendment, says this is just the start. The legal battle could go for another year or two.

If the NRA dissolves at that point, it would have a huge impact on American politics, but that doesn't mean the end of the gun debate.

“What happens is the resources of the NRA would be distributed in a way that is designed to match the donors' intent,” said Winkler. “And that means that money would go to gun rights organizations and would go towards fighting against gun control in most, most circumstances.”

Winkler says the NRA dissolving isn't the only potential outcome. The attorney general is also seeking less drastic repercussions, like removing certain in-house lawyers or board members. That includes Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president.

We don't yet know exactly what evidence there is. Winkler says the AG’s case has at least one advantage, the NRA’s former public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, is cooperating.

“And so, the attorney general is going to have on her side an insider who's seen everything that's happened in the NRA for the last three decades,” said Winkler. “I think the NRA is in big trouble.”

He says the lawsuit could also impact the November election by energizing pro-gun voters looking to support the NRA and the Republicans.

Winkler says it's also likely to mean less NRA spending compared to 2016.

More Americans are looking to religious exemptions to avoid getting the COVID-19 vaccine. But this influx of requests has been baffling some religious leaders.

“Recently, I’ve had a bunch of people ask me about religious exemptions,” said Muhammad Kolila, Imam at the Downtown Denver Islamic Center.

Kolila says he's seen an uptick in the number of people asking him questions about the COVID-19 vaccine.

“There is no such thing as an exemption from the vaccination,” he explained. “It’s encouraged because that's the best way to reach the people’s safety, and it’s part of our religion that we try as much as we can to protect our bodies and protect other people's bodies too.”

He said, specifically, the mRNA vaccine does not interfere with their beliefs.

“The only time the exemption happens is if the vaccine contains pork. That's the time we consider the vaccination is not permissible, because we don't eat pork or include anything in our bodies related to pork. Another is alcohol,” he said.

Kolila is not alone.

“People have asked me to give them exemptions, and I can’t think of any religious basis to do so,” said Rabbi Joseph Black, the Senior Rabbi at Temple Emanuel Denver.

He faces the same questions.

“Our top priority in every one of our Jewish values is an idea called 'pikuach nefesh,' which means 'preservation of life,' and according to Jewish tradition, saving a life trumps any other commandment,” he said. “We require all the students in our early learning center to be vaccinated.”

Churches across the country have been clarifying their stance. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America announced in a statement: “...there is no exemption in the Orthodox Church for Her faithful from any vaccination for religious reasons.”

Other entities, like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have released similar statements.

“What a religious exemption does is it allows a person on the basis of a religious belief to claim to be exempt from some general legal requirement,” said Leslie Francis, the Director of the University of Utah Center for Law and Biomedical Sciences.

She is a professor of law and philosophy.

“Part of what's worrying a lot of people in this discussion is, aren't we just gonna have a whole lot of people saying they have religious exemptions when maybe they don't?” she said.

That’s exactly what legal expert Christopher Jackson has been seeing as more employers implement mandates.

“Religious exemptions are kind of a thing in employment and constitutional law, but they haven't come up all that much. I think that there has been an uptick in the last few weeks, especially after the president announced a new OSHA rule mandating vaccines for most employers. It really has come up a lot more frequently,” said Jackson, an appellate partner at Holland & Hart LLP.

He said the line isn’t clear.

“The religious belief has to be a sincerely held one. But there isn't a great case for an employer to dive into that, or try to figure out if somebody has a sincerely held religious belief.”

Jackson said he sees multiple ways this could go.

“I could see this opening a floodgate of lawsuits, of seeing federal courts getting involved, or it may be in a few weeks that this mostly dies down. That they kind of sorted out who really should be exempted and who shouldn't and maybe it goes away, and I don’t really think anyone has a clear idea yet which way this is going to go,” he said.

For now, churches will make decisions based on their core beliefs.

“The value of saving life, the value of preserving community, the value of supporting one another, is more important,” Rabbi Black said.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Senate Bill 1 in Texas was signed into law by Governor Abbott on Tuesday. It was authored by Texas Republican State Senator Bryan Hughes.

“Everyone needs to know their vote is gonna count and be counted accurately," Sen. Hughes said. "Our goal is to make it easy to vote, and hard to cheat.”

According to Sen. Hughes, the law expands and standardizes in-person voting, requires an online portal to correct ballot mistakes and cracks down on people accused of misleading voters.

“Many of them in minority communities, many of them with limited English proficiency who have a hard time, sometimes with the voting process, they're the ones being taken advantage of being coerced, having their votes stolen," Sen. Hughes said. "But we're going to stand up for them.”

Republicans call it the voting integrity bill. Those opposed deem it a voting restriction bill, like Sophia Lin Lakin, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project.

“You have more and more states emboldened to ultimately enact the voter suppression bills that are being introduced across legislatures across the country," Lakin said. "We have more than 400 anti-voter bills that have been introduced just this past cycle, and it's a full-scale assault on voting rights in response to record levels of turnout that we saw in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Lakin says SB 1 in Texas restricts voters by taking away drive-through voting and mail-in ballots from populations that disproportionately used those methods this past election.

“States are going after Black and brown voters by targeting the kinds of ways and the tools that Black and brown voters are using in order to make their voices heard," Lakin said. "So, you see a tax on mail voting, for example, in Texas and in many other places as well.”

In order to vote by mail in Texas, Sen. Hughes says you need to be 65 or over, have a disability, or be out of the country to vote by mail.

"We like voting in person,” Sen. Hughes said.

Sen. Hughes says voting in person limits the potential for fraud. However, Alex Keyssar, Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, says there is extremely little voting fraud in the United States.

“These laws do not seem designed to really protect any compelling state interest in preventing fraud. They seem designed to make it harder for certain people to vote,“ Keyssar said. "We have significant populations that are known to vote Democratic. I mean, the African-American population votes overwhelmingly Democratic, poor people vote overwhelmingly Democratic. So if you can keep those people from voting, that's going to benefit the Republican Party.”

He says what you do see in our voting history, are rules that made it more difficult for certain populations to vote.

“You know, New York State, for example, passed an English language literacy requirement to vote in the early 1920s," Keyssar said. "And a lot of states passed laws, for example, that you had to bring your citizenship papers. They did not pass laws that say you can't vote because you're Black, because that would have been clearly unconstitutional, so they passed laws that made it difficult to vote if you were Black.”

Keyssar says the federal government tends to step in when it becomes clear that when left to their own devices, states will be discriminatory.

“My hope is that there will be a federal response here that we will see some federal action and in and as a result, we'll have many of the tools that we've had before and restored to their full robustness and that will bring a much more, much more close to closer to a democracy in which every person who is eligible to vote is able to vote without discrimination, without unnecessary obstacles, without being targeted,” Lakin said.

For Texas Republicans, the law which goes into effect next election cycle is a big success. Sen. Hughes says he wants to protect everyone’s vote.

“When more people show up, we all win,” Sen. Hughes said.