SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — A Georgia sheriff's deputy won't face criminal charges for fatally shooting a Black man during a 2023 traffic stop that spiraled into a violent struggle, the district attorney who examined body-camera video and other evidence in the killing said Tuesday.
Leonard Cure, 53, was killed just three years after Florida authorities had freed him from prison after serving 16 years for a crime he did not commit.
A white deputy in Camden County, Georgia, pulled Cure over for speeding on Interstate 95 near the Florida line on Oct. 16, 2023. The deputy ordered Cure to get out of his pickup truck and shocked him with a stun gun when Cure refused to put his hands behind his back. Body- and dash camera video showed Cure was fighting back and had a hand at the deputy's throat when he was shot point-blank.
“Use of deadly force at that point was objectively reasonable given that he was being overpowered at that time,” District Attorney Keith Higgins told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday.
Higgins, Georgia's top prosecutor for the coastal Brunswick Judicial Circuit, said he told Cure's family of his decision during a meeting Monday and also notified the deputy, Staff Sgt. Buck Aldridge.
Attorneys for Cure's family have insisted Aldridge used excessive force.
“This decision is a devastating failure of justice, sending the message that law enforcement officers can take a life without consequence," family attorneys Ben Crump and Harry Daniels said in a statement.
Aldridge still works for the Camden County Sheriff's Office, assigned to its administrative division, said Deputy Dalton Vernakes, a spokesman for Sheriff James Kevin Chaney. Aldridge had been placed on administrative leave while Cure's shooting was investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
"The GBI did a thorough investigation and the district attorney came to the right conclusion regarding Mr. Aldridge’s use of force in this instance," Aldridge's attorney, Adrienne Browning, said by email. “We’re happy he’ll be able to continue to serve the citizens of Camden County as he’s done for the past 12 years.”
Relatives have said Cure likely resisted because of psychological trauma from his long imprisonment in Florida for an armed robbery he didn’t commit. Officials exonerated and freed him in 2020.
Cure was killed after being pulled over on suspicion of reckless driving as he was traveling home to Atlanta after visiting his mother in Port St. Lucie, Florida.
The sheriff's office released Aldridge's body- and dash camera video of the traffic stop two days after the shooting. It showed the deputy ordering Cure to get out and stand with his hands on his pickup truck, telling Cure that he was going more than 100 mph (160 kph).
In the video, Aldridge shocks Cure with a stun gun after he ignores commands to put his hands behind his back. Cure then spins around, flailing his arms, and grabs the deputy as traffic speeds past.
The video shows both men grappling as Cure gets a hand on the deputy’s lower face and neck and begins forcing his head backward. The deputy strikes Cure in the side with a baton, but Cure maintains his grip.
“Yeah, bitch!” Cure says on the video. Then a single pop sounds and Aldridge can be seen holding his handgun as Cure slumps to the ground.
Lawyers for Cure’s family have said the Camden County sheriff should never have hired Aldridge, who was fired by the neighboring Kingsland Police Department in 2017 after being disciplined a third time for using excessive force. Personnel records show the sheriff hired him nine months later.
A year ago, Cure's family filed a federal lawsuit against Aldridge and then-Sheriff Jim Proctor in U.S. District Court, seeking $16 million. It accuses Aldridge of using excessive force and Proctor of ignoring the deputy's history of violence. Both have denied wrongdoing in court filings. The case is still pending in U.S. District Court.
FILE - Mary Cure speaks to reporters flanked by her family's attorneys, Harry Daniels, left, and Ben Crump, right, at a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023, in Woodbine, Ga., announcing their intention to file suit against the Camden County Sheriff's Office for the death of her son, Leonard Cure. (AP photo/Russ Bynum, File)
FILE - This still image provided by Camden County Sheriff's Office shows the police dash camera video of a traffic stop involving a sheriff's deputy and Leonard Cure on Monday, Oct. 16, 2023, in Camden County, Ga. (Camden County Sheriff's Office via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
