A former Cornell University fraternity member accused of participating in the alleged gang rape of a fellow student is seeking to have New York Attorney General Letitia James removed from the case, arguing that she cannot serve as an impartial special prosecutor.

The dispute follows Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s announcement last week that she had signed an executive order appointing James to lead the investigation into allegations stemming from an October 19, 2024 incident at the Chi Phi fraternity house.

Hochul said she had complete faith that James would approach the matter by reviewing the evidence and following the facts.

“That is precisely what will happen in this case,” the governor said.

However, James appeared to express sympathy for the woman at the center of the allegations only three days before her appointment was announced.

“What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” James wrote on X on September 28. “I’m holding her in my heart and in my prayers.”

Lawyers representing defendant Gillio Lopes contend in a petition filed with Albany County Supreme Court that James’s public remarks “unequivocally demonstrated a bias and presumption of guilt against the Defendants named in the civil case,” NBC News reports.

The attorneys argue that the post shows James had already developed a view of the allegations and had effectively determined that Lopes and the other defendants were responsible.

Lopes’s legal team is asking the court to replace James with a prosecutor who has no actual or apparent conflict of interest and is not viewed as biased.

The Article 78 petition, submitted Wednesday, also lists Governor Hochul as a defendant.

“As Governor Hochul has said, the public needs to have confidence in the person directing this investigation,” Stuart Bernstein, one of Lopes’s attorneys, said in a statement.

“Attorney General James, based on her very public statements validating Jane Doe, certainly does not inspire confidence in a fair investigation,” Bernstein added.

Bernstein’s comments came a day after another member of Lopes’s defense team, Andrew Miltenberg, said he supported Cornell’s decision to appoint former Acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates to conduct an independent review.

Miltenberg said the firm’s experience was that Cornell investigations had generally been detailed and thorough.

He also said the defense had encountered due-process concerns affecting respondents and had taken such matters to federal court on at least two occasions.

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“In this case, we do not agree with the outcome as to Mr. Lopes,” Miltenberg said.

Lopes and the other former members of the Chi Phi fraternity have denied any wrongdoing, and were never charged with any crimes after the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office concluded there was not enough evidence to convict. 

But the case drew renewed attention after the accuser, only referred to in court documents as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit on September 16.

It alleges that she arrived at the fraternity house on October 19, 2024, already heavily intoxicated following a night of drinking in Ithaca.

Doe also alleges she was pressured to take ketamine and given marijuana and high-proof alcohol before being repeatedly sexually assaulted as additional fraternity members entered the room, including Lopes – whom she said kissed her and sexually assaulted her

The complaint goes on to claim seven men eventually participated and that Doe became ‘completely incapacitated.’ She says the ordeal continued until around 5.45am, when she lost consciousness.

It further alleges that during the assault, one fraternity member posted to a ‘Chi Phi Actives’ Snapchat group that there was ‘free p***y’ upstairs, referring to Doe. 

‘Like you can walk in and whip it out,’ another member allegedly responded, according to a screenshot described in the filing. 

Doe reported the allegations to Cornell University Police on November 8 after friends encouraged her to come forward, according to the lawsuit.

Cornell temporarily suspended the fraternity in the aftermath, and Lopes was handed a three-semester suspension with two years of probation.

He has since returned to campus, but his lawyers say he is now considering leaving the school as he faces harassment from other students, The New York Times reports. 

A video on Instagram showed a woman approaching Lopes in a hallway on campus and telling him: ‘I just wanted to let you know personally that I’m ashamed to be on the same campus as you.’

Students have also participated in massive protests against the school’s response to the alleged rape, and the Cornell faculty senate said it plans to vote on a no-confidence resolution against the school’s administrators.

The Daily Mail has reached out to both James’ and Hochul’s office for comment.

Death row inmate Christa Pike woke in a Tennessee hospital feeling “angry and confused” after surviving a botched execution at the state prison.

Pike, 50, was scheduled to die last week for the 1995 murder of her classmate, Colleen Slemmer. Officials administered two lethal doses of pentobarbital during the attempted execution.

She survived and was taken to a local hospital, where she remains conscious and shackled to her bed.

“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” her lawyer, Randy Spivey, said on Wednesday. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”

Pike, who had spent 30 years on death row, now faces an uncertain future. Tennessee law does not specify what should happen if a prisoner survives two doses of pentobarbital during an execution.

May Martinez, Slemmer’s mother, suggested that the state may not make another attempt to execute her daughter’s killer, WSMV reports.

Asked what outcome she wanted for Pike, Martinez replied: “It doesn’t matter what I think. They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

Martinez watched in horror at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville as Pike continued snoring despite being given the lethal injection.

“It was a mess,” Martinez told NBC News after the failed execution. “They went to try to execute her and she didn’t die.”

In the days after the execution attempt, Martinez stopped eating and was unable to speak through her tears, her granddaughter, Morgan Seeley, told WSMV.

“She wanted to get justice,” Seeley said of her grandmother. “[Pike] serving, being in prison was not justice.”

In January 1995, Pike and her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, lured Slemmer into a wooded area before torturing her to death.

Police evidence showed that an accomplice, Shadolla Peterson, acted as a lookout while the pair carved a pentagram into the teenager’s chest.

Investigators said Pike also removed part of Slemmer’s skull and kept it as a souvenir.

Slemmer tried to escape, but the couple caught her and resumed the brutal attack, which Pike later estimated lasted between 30 minutes and an hour.

Pike and Shipp were convicted of first-degree murder. Pike received a death sentence, while Shipp was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

But Pike’s future now remains unclear, as Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has yet to respond to repeated requests from the killer’s attorneys and death penalty objectors to commute her sentence to life in prison.

Lee, who is set to step down from his position later this month, has instead only reaffirmed his support for capital punishment.

‘My responsibility is to uphold the sentences that Tennessee juries have handed down, even when it’s difficult, and that is exactly what we intend to do in the days ahead,’ the governor said.

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In the meantime, Pike remains on a ventilator, handcuffed to a bed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, where her attorneys said she is awake and ‘speaking limitedly.’

She now has a ‘long road to recovery,’ her lawyer Randy Spivey said Wednesday. 

‘She has a blood clot in one of her arms. She has pneumonia. She is not able to swallow yet, so she has not eaten,’ he said.

Spivey continued: ‘She cannot move either of her arms. Both of her arms and hands are tremendously swollen, and we do not know what, if any, function she will regain.’

The lawyers made the remarks as they fought to retain evidence from the failed execution attempt.  

‘The state has made no promises that Ms Pike will not be subject to future execution,’ lawyer, Luke Ihnen, said at the court hearing.

‘The evidence that we are seeking to preserve now is relevant to any future challenge that she makes. We don’t know what they have, because they won’t tell us.

‘We are frustrated that the information that the state has is repeatedly and deliberately secreted away.’ 

Assistant Attorney General John Ayers, however, claimed there is no pending execution order for Pike after Governor Lee paused all further executions in the state.

Ayers also claimed that the Department of Corrections has already preserved the evidence from Pike’s attempted execution, including log books, observation logs, medical waste and products, and electrocardiogram readouts have been saved.

Judge I’Ashea Myles has since ordered Tennessee officials to also preserve all of the syringes, ⁠drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints used in the execution attempt.

Pike had been injected by at least seven needles as medical staff attempted to give her two lethal doses of pentobarbital that left her arms ‘swollen, burned, and blistered,’ her attorneys previously revealed.

According to a motion filed after the botched execution, ‘At one point, Ms Pike herself offered guidance on where the IV team could attempt access; one needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.’

Her lawyers stated she was administered two sets of syringes of the lethal drug and could be heard crying, whimpering and breathing loudly throughout the process.

During the procedure, she said: ‘My arm feels like it’s about to burst open,’ and at another point, asked: ‘Does this happen like that?’

Pike’s attorneys now say they believe problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.

‘Apparently at no point did any member of the execution team realize that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike’s body,’ the lawyers wrote in the court filing.

Instead of ‘remedying this failure,’ they prepared and administered a backup set of pentobarbital syringes, they wrote.

The governor has since ordered an independent investigation into Pike’s case. 

The Justice Department has launched an accelerated effort to strip citizenship from 40 Americans over a six-week period, in what officials describe as an early phase of a campaign expected to grow substantially in the coming days and weeks.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the 40 cases filed by the DOJ between August 28 and October 2 amount to the “largest denaturalization effort in modern history.”

The department is racing to file 250 denaturalization cases by the end of October. That would be more than twice the 120 cases brought between President Donald Trump’s return to office on January 20, 2025, and late August.

The ambitious target has alarmed immigration attorneys and advocates, who are questioning both the strain on government resources and the strength of some of the cases.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice will continue to employ the denaturalization process to maintain our national security and protect the American people,” Blanche said Tuesday.

The people targeted in the latest denaturalization cases are accused of crimes across 19 federal districts, officials said. They originally came to the United States from countries including Mexico, China, Iran, Pakistan and the Philippines.

“From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the US government and represent serious criminal offenders,” Blanche said in a press release.

Many of the cases now pending involve allegations that defendants lied on government forms or left out information about their conduct. The DOJ says those details would have made them ineligible for US citizenship.

It remains unclear whether, or how many, of the alleged errors and omissions may have been accidental.

The rapid pace of the campaign and its ambitious filing goal have nonetheless drawn concern from immigration lawyers and advocates. They fear some of the people involved may not receive a meaningful opportunity to present their cases in federal court.

The administration’s efforts already far exceed the pace seen under previous administrations.

Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of only 11 denaturalization cases each year, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute.

By comparison, the Biden administration filed just 24 denaturalization cases over four years.

“The Trump administration’s second-term approach on denaturalization aligns with much of the rest of its immigration policy agenda: more enforcement, less legal immigration, and harder-to-access citizenship,” MPI researchers Muzaffar Chishti and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh said in a report.

The researchers also said the campaign’s immediate objective may be to create a climate of fear, particularly because some denaturalization proceedings can take years to resolve.

“Creating a climate of hostility is much more achievable than large-scale denaturalizations, as history has shown,” they said.

Since returning to office last year, Trump and his administration have made a sweeping immigration crackdown a central priority.

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So far, the administration has revoked hundreds of thousands of visas held by migrants and green card holders authorized to live and work temporarily in the United States. It has also ended so-called TPS, or Temporary Protected Status, designations for most countries.

rump has also sought to end so-called ‘birthright citizenship’ protections for babies born on US soil via multiple executive orders, despite Supreme Court’s rejection of the effort earlier this year. 

His agenda has faced continued push back.  

Earlier this week, a federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration from imposing ‘astronomical’ fines up to $1.8 million on illegal migrants who fail to leave the US after receiving final deportation orders. 

US District Judge George O’Toole, a Bill Clinton appointee, called Trump’s fines – issued to tens of thousands of migrants – unlawful in an order on Monday.

The fines included maximum penalties of $1.8 million, which would push the migrants into financial ruin, he said.

The judge called Trump’s fines ‘exorbitant’ and said they would hurt migrants, who already ‘live in an economically precarious position.’

DHS did not immediately respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment. A spokesperson said DOJ is ‘reviewing’ the decision. 

The fines are part of the president’s hard-line immigration crackdown, and the administration’s broader push for migrants to ‘self-deport.’

As part of the effort, DHS sent notices last July to thousands of migrants who had final deportation orders.

It notified them of the new financial penalties – which included daily fines of $998 – and gave them just 30 days to contest them. 

The plan also allowed DHS to retroactively impose fines on migrants for a period of up to five years, for a maximum of $1.8 million.

DHS said earlier this year that it had issued more than 100,000 such fines to migrants in the US, bringing the total amount of civil fines to a whopping $84 billion. 

A group of migrants brought a class action lawsuit against DHS last November to challenge the fines.

Lawyers for the group argued that the fines violate the Administrative Procedure Act as well as the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and other protections under the US Constitution.