Free Republic

A Texas lawmaker was released from a Texas jail at 11:34 p.m.Thursday after serving only four months of a 12-month jail sentence. Rep. Ron Reynolds, a Missouri City Democrat, was convicted of five counts of barratry in 2015 and sentenced to one year in jail. Reynolds won re-election to the Texas House of Representatives in November to represent District 27. He was unopposed in that race, but still managed to gather 47,305 votes. Reynolds was booked into the county jail on Sept. 7 and was supposed to serve a year-long sentence... Since the convictions were misdemeanors, Reynolds did not have...

Nato's Parliamentary Assembly recently published what some have called a "scathing" report on Turkey. Until now, Nato had given almost no input on the country's deterioration in human rights and rule of law, despite Turkey being one of its largest member states.The report mentioned the impact of emergency rule, elimination of independent media, and related concerns. But it left unmentioned other grave violations - namely, the fate of the thousands of people falsely imprisoned in the post-coup crackdown - including officials of Nato itself. One such Nato official is Cafer Topkaya, a Turkish man who was serving in Belgium at...

FULL TITLE: Grandmother, 55, sues Miami prison after staff book her as a MAN despite strip search and lock her up in a male jail with 40 men who taunted and leered at her A grandmother who was mistakenly booked into Miami jail as man is now she's suing prison workers who forced her to spend nearly 10 hours in a male cell where she was so tormented she wet herself. Fior Pichardo de Veloz, 55, was booked in the Metro West Detention Center in Miami on November 4, 2013. Pichardo was an attorney and elected official in the Dominican...

A Muslim civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against a regional jail in Virginia, alleging that the jail has set up a Christians-only unit dubbed the "God Pod." The Council on American-Islamic Relations says officials at the Riverside Regional Jail have set aside a housing pod exclusively for Christian inmates who promise to live in accordance with the Bible. The group says the Christian pod violates the Constitution by favoring one religion over others. The lawsuit accuses jail officials of discriminating against Muslim inmates and others by preventing them from participating in programs that teach their faith and...

Don Cresitello is not the kind of guy to say "I hate to say I told you so."  In fact he takes great pleasure in doing so. And the Democratic former mayor of Morristown told you long ago that we need better coordination between local and federal authorities when it comes to dealing with potentially violent undocumented immigrants.That was proven against last week when an undocumented Mexican immigrant murdered three people in Missouri after being released from the Middlesex County jail in December to await trial on charges of domestic violence.That incident brought memories of a 2007 incident in which...

On Friday, failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stated she would “like to be president” during a live taping of Recode Decode at New York City’s 92nd Street Y. “I’d like to be president,” stated Clinton. “I think, hopefully, when we have a Democrat in the oval office in January 2021, there’s gonna be so much work to be done.” I mean, we have confused everyone in the world, including ourselves. We have confused our friends and our enemies. They have no idea what the United States stands for, what we’re likely to do, what we think is important. So...

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing "clearly false" affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a...

We want to see Christin Blasey-Ford in handcuffs along with her co-conspirators. Arrest them tomorrow or Saturday and begin prosecution proceeds for perjury, defamation of character, conspiracy to commit treason by subverting lawful governmental process and whatever else can be charged. All of those people need to go to jail. ANYONE who tries to pull that kind of stuff in the future needs to be behind bars. This stuff has got to be stopped now.

NEW HAVEN — Ending modern day slavery in prisons in the United States was one of the demands made at a rally Saturday in New Haven where about 70 people gathered for speeches and a march in support of a nationwide prison strike for reforms, including more than below minimum wage pay and rehabilitation services. “No justice, no peace,” the crowd chanted in unison, some holding signs, led by Jamarr Jabari of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, New Haven. “It’s time for us to start treating people as human beings, not just for profit,” he said. “We’re fighting for...

On the heels of a massive fight between fans during the Oakland Raiders second preseason game, an announcement was made about the future home of the Silver and Black. When it comes to fighting among fans, the new Las Vegas stadium will have none of it. The situation is being taken so seriously that the stadium will have a small jail and courtroom to "deal with unruly fans."

An attorney filed a sentencing memo on behalf of former House IT aide Imran Awan, claiming that President Donald Trump, other Republicans, and “conspiratorial media” attacks serve as a sufficient substitute for jail time for his client’s bank fraud conviction. Attorney Chris Gowen, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, argued to Judge Tanya Chutkan, a President Barack Obama-appointee, that Imran should be spared jail, in part because of Trump, who engaged in “incoherent rambling” about the former IT aide. “Considering … the conduct of several government officials, including the president of the United States, Imran Awan respectfully requests this court...

According to an Independent Communication Network (BÄ°A) report, 315 media employees in Turkey, including reporters, columnists, executives and illustrators, face 47 aggravated life sentences, one life sentence, 3,034 years of imprisonment and TL 4.040.000 ($840,000) in damages. The report stated that in 33 trials in April, May and June, the courts handed down two aggravated life sentences without the chance of parole and 137 years, two months and 19 days in prison to journalists on charges of supporting a failed coup in 2016, disseminating terrorist propaganda, membership in a terrorist organization, defying state institutions or insulting the president. In that...

A transgender prisoner has been charged with committing four sexual offences against inmates at a women's jail in West Yorkshire. Karen White, 51, is accused of four counts of sexual touching at New Hall Prison, Wakefield. The offences are alleged to have taken place between September and November last year. She appeared before magistrates earlier this month and is due to appear at Leeds Crown Court in August.

A Turkish court ordered on Wednesday U.S. pastor Andrew Brunson, who is being tried on terrorism and spying charges, to remain in detention, rejecting his lawyer's plea for release. The judge said the next hearing in the trial would be on October 12. Brunson, a Christian pastor from North Carolina who has lived in Turkey for more than two decades, was indicted on charges of helping the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ), which Ankara blames for the failed 2016 coup, as well as supporting the PKK terrorists organization. Speaking to reporters in western Izmir province after the ruling, U.S. Charge d'Affaires...

Alabama’s governor has begun to cut off a gravy train for the state’s sheriffs: the unspent money for prisoners’ meals that the sheriffs have long been allowed to keep for themselves. The practice, born of a bickered-over ambiguity in a state law, has let sheriffs pocket tax dollars that over the decades almost certainly ran into the millions. To curtail the practice, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered in a memorandum to the state comptroller that payments of certain funds related to jail food “no longer be made to the sheriffs personally.” Instead, the governor wrote, the money must be paid to...

On 16 November 2016, an off-duty security guard, Melvin Stephens, shot and killed a man who charged at him up stairs at his apartment complex. The incident occurred in Austin, Texas. The two had been in a confrontation earlier. The man killed, Dedric Earl, had scissors that were discovered at the scene. Stephens called 911 to report the shooting. Stephens was arrested and jailed because of statements he made to police. Bail was set at $125,000. It was more than Stephens could raise or afford. He spent over one and a half years in jail, from November 2016, to...

During a TV interview in 2011, I quoted the words of a Christian lawyer who said that just as gay activists were once put in jail, they now want to put us in jail. For making this comment, I was vilified by Right Wing Watch, mocked by gay activists, and ridiculed by others. I wonder what those critics are saying today in light of a recently proposed California bill that would send nursing home caregivers to jail for “misgendering” their nursing home patients. As a Daily Caller headline announces, “California Could Start Jailing People Who Don’t Use Transgender Pronouns.”

Veteran journalist Lale Kemal, a columnist for the Zaman newspaper, at one time Turkey’s most highly circulated newspaper before the Turkish government’s unlawful takeover and closure of it in 2016, said at her last court hearing on Thursday, “I was put in prison without a single piece of evidence.”Kemal was arrested with former Zaman columnists Ali Bulaç, Ahmet Turan Alkan, Nuriye Akman, Mustafa Ünal and Şahin Alpay on July 30, 2017 after a controversial military coup attempt on July 15, 2016 and released pending trial under judicial probation after months of pretrial detention. The journalist presented her last defence before...

Special counsel Robert Mueller filed a superseding indictment Friday against former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, and added Russian citizen Konstantin Kilimnik as a defendant. The superseding indictment lodged by a grand jury sitting in federal court in Washington, DC, came days after Mueller asked the judge in Manafort's case to revoke his bail and jail him because of an alleged effort to tamper with witnesses. This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

A Washington think tank has warned that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is holding a number of Western nationals in jail to use them as “bargaining chips” against their countries in what they called “hostage diplomacy.”A 36-page report released on June 1 and titled “Erdogan’s Hostage Diplomacy – Western Nationals in Turkish Prisons” by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) said more than 30 Western nationals have been jailed in Turkey since a military coup attempt on July 15, 2016.At least nine of them remained in prison as of June 1, 2018, noted the report, co-authored by FDD fellows Eric...