Free Republic

Wichita police release more details about an officer-involved shooting that left one man dead and an officer hurt. Interim Chief Nelson Mosley said the driver who was killed was 26-year old Nicholas Garner and described the chain of events beginning Saturday at 10:10 p.m. He said that is when the officer made a traffic stop on a silver Prius on W. Kellogg Drive. Mosley said the officer was speaking through an open door of the Prius, when the driver put the vehicle in drive. "Investigators believe that the officer may have tried to stop Mr. Garner from driving to leave...

A two-time convicted felon and politically connected Mandeville businessman described by a prosecutor as a “serial fraudster” and “flim-flam con artist” was sentenced Wednesday to more than 11 years in federal prison for billing a group of south Louisiana car dealerships more than $1.2 million for advertising purchases he never made. Even though 53-year-old Raymond Reggie pleaded guilty in the fall to five counts of mail fraud, he testified Wednesday that he was stroke-impaired when he admitted his guilt Oct. 27, and he asked U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick to let him withdraw that guilty plea and instead go to...

Early last Wednesday evening jurors communicated to the judge that they were split on a number of the charges against Dr. Annette Bosworth. And yet later that night they found her guilty on all counts. All twelve felony counts. She’s the South Dakota physician who filed several hundred nominating petitions to put her name on the ballot for U.S. Senate last year — six of which sported the names of 37 people who signed without Dr. Bosworth being in the room to witness them actually put pen to paper. Her sister was one. The affidavit on the petition does indeed...

Todd Macaluso, who helped represent Casey Anthony, faces 20 years in prisonA prominent San Diego personal injury attorney pleaded guilty Tuesday to defrauding clients, forging their signatures to gain millions of dollars from investors, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Todd Macaluso, 52 -- a lead player in personal injury, plaintiff’s and aviation law -- once helped represent high-profile defendant Casey Anthony, a Florida mother acquitted in her 2-year-old daughter’s death. Now, he has admitted in his plea deal to bankrolling his law practice through “funding agreements” with investors. Under the plan, Macaluso would offer them the right to...

Just last month, Apple chief executive Tim Cook made headlines when he wrote a piece in The Washington Post, panning Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act as "very dangerous." Apple, Cook wrote, does not believe in discrimination and strives to "do business in a way that is just and fair." This month, the San Francisco Chronicle's Wendy Lee reported, Apple fired some construction workers at Apple Campus 2 in January because they had been convicted of felonies or face felony charges. Just and fair? Hardly. Apple would not respond on the record, but someone familiar with the matter said the Apple...

DONNA, Texas – The president of the Donna Independent School District (ISD), Albert Sandoval, hired a convicted felon to be general counsel for the district and agreed to pay him $300,000 per year in retainer fees plus $225 per hour for legal services. The negotiating of the contract with Robert J. Salinas, and his hiring was done without input from the school board. Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz previously reported that Salinas was hired at a rate that was over three times the retainer that was paid to his predecessor, the law firm of Guerra & Farah. That firm was paid...

Ana Zamora, who came to the United States illegally, is among the 22 people selected to sit with First Lady Michelle Obama at tonight’s State of the Union address. This is an honor bestowed on people who provide a human face for the liberal agenda that President Obama will lay out. Ana is the face of Obama’s executive amnesty, which conservative Republicans call an affront to the U.S. Constitution.

Washington (CNN) - After pleading guilty to a judge Tuesday on a felony tax evasion charge, New York Rep. Michael Grimm pledged to reporters he would also stay in Congress. Grimm pled guilty in court to one count of tax evasion and was set to submit to a "statement of facts" that admits to all the conduct alleged in the 20-count federal indictment.

Convicted terrorist and retired professor Bill Ayers sat down with Fars News, a state-controlled media outlet that serves the Islamic Republic of Iran, where he proclaimed that the United States is a “terrorist nation” that is the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth… and the foremost threat to world peace.”

Full Title "Former Democratic Charlotte Mayor, a Convicted Felon, Caught at Polling Place Doing Something ‘He Shouldn’t Have Done’" Former Charlotte mayor and convicted felon Patrick Cannon appeared to cast a ballot Tuesday, putting him in violation of his bond, an official told a local news outlet. Greg Forrest, who heads Charlotte’s U.S. Probation Office, told the Observer the action might have the 47-year-old Democrat in front of a judge again. “Let’s cut to the chase: He shouldn’t have done that, and we’re going to talk to him tomorrow,” Forrest told the newspaper. Forrest said he would report the apparent...

Former Charlotte Mayor Patrick Cannon was stripped of his right to vote in October when he was sentenced to 44 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to felony corruption charges. But just over two weeks later, Cannon cast a ballot in North Carolina's midterm elections. And the vote, a violation of Cannon's bond, has again landed the former mayor in hot water. "Let's cut to the chase: He shouldn't have done that, and we're going to talk to him tomorrow," Greg Forrest, chief of the U.S. Probation Office in Charlotte, told the Charlotte Observer on Tuesday.

A convicted white-collar criminal once connected to some of America’s most prominent political families pleaded guilty in federal court on Monday to stealing more than $1 million from multiple south Louisiana car dealerships over a three-year period, billing them for advertising services never rendered and sweeping the fees into his own bank accounts. Raymond Christopher Reggie, a Mandeville businessman who previously worked on many high-profile Democratic campaigns, including those of former President Bill Clinton, agreed to a guilty plea in Baton Rouge federal court to five counts of mail fraud related to the illegal billing scheme, the U.S. Attorney’s Office...

A senior Department of Defense official says President Obama and his administration are giving the public inaccurate information about his foreign policy strategy, particularly with regards to Iraq. Joseph Miller, the pseudonym for a ranking Department of Defense official who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote in The Daily Caller Tuesday, partially in reaction to a statement released by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest which said that the decision for American military forces to leave Iraq “was predicated on the will of the Iraqi security forces to fight for their country.” Miller said this was “not true.” “In...

An armed security contractor with a criminal background was allowed in an elevator with President Obama earlier this month, according to reports , adding to a string of security breaches plaguing the Secret Service. The member of a private security firm was on an elevator with Obama during the president's trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta on Sept. 16. The man did not comply with agents who told him to stop filming the president on the elevator. Only when a supervisor for the private security firm came over to address the situation did the agents...

Full title: Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, sentenced in Forest Grove fatal crash, released from immigration, KGW reports The immigration case has been dropped against the woman sentenced in a fatal hit and run crash that killed two Forest Grove girls, KGW reports. The station quotes Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Andrew S. Munoz as saying, that Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros "was released from ICE custody Aug. 14 after an immigration judge dismissed her case." According to KGW, KXL radio was the first to report on her release. Garcia-Cisneros was convicted of felony hit and run in the October crash that killed two young stepsisters...

More than a week after convicted felon and former state Sen. Gary George was expected to disclose who is funding his longshot bid for Congress, he has still not done so. Until George files the report, voters will not find out who, if anyone, is backing his longshot bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, a Milwaukee Democrat. In an abrupt phone interview Wednesday with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, George declined to explain himself, telling a reporter he had no time to talk and would only take questions by email. “I’ve got to go,” George said. By email, George’s campaign...

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for bribery, money laundering and other corruption that spanned his two terms as mayor — including the chaotic years after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. U.S. District Judge Helen Berrigan handed down the sentence Wednesday morning. Nagin was convicted Feb. 12 of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from businessmen who wanted work from the city or Nagin's support for various projects. The bribes came in the form of money, free vacations and truckloads of free granite for his family business. The 58-year-old Democrat had defiantly...

Bill Ayers shouldn’t be interviewed; he should be jailed. Megyn Kelly’s interview of Ayers, made reference to the role of Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the bombing-murder of San Francisco policeman Brian V. McDonnell. Unfortunately, Ayers lied his way through the interview, which aired over two nights on her nightly Fox News Channel show, “The Kelly File.” But this is what happens when a professional liar like Ayers does a “shocking” TV interview. The exchange may achieve high ratings, but nothing good will come out of the interview unless Kelly now follows up with the “Justice for Victims of the...

Rosario Socope, a Guatemalan immigrant in the country illegally, had an unwelcome surprise waiting for her when she attended a pretrial hearing on a felony charge at a courthouse in Brooklyn this month. As she stepped out of the courtroom into a public hallway, she was approached by immigration agents seeking to deport her. As her husband, her social worker and one of her lawyers looked on aghast, the agents hauled her away. The encounter was only the most recent in a long series of such cases across the country that immigrant advocates and politicians say have spread fear of...

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter has died. Sympathetic obituaries say things like "wrongfully convicted" or "exonerated." But the black middleweight-title-contending boxer was neither. Carter, in 1966, murdered three people. But Hollywood later made a movie, "Hurricane," in which Denzel Washington brilliantly portrayed Carter as a wrongfully convicted near-saint, hounded mercilessly by a determined, racist detective. Excellent moviemaking, but it adds more sludge to the widely held notion of the "racist criminal justice system" that supposedly "warehouses" black males for no reason other than wrong place, wrong time, wrong skin. So, what really happened that night in Paterson, N.J., when three people were...