Free Republic

Legal experts analyzed what they called "breathtaking" civil penalties against former President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, former Trump Organization Comptroller Jeffrey McConney and ex-CFO Allen Weisselberg – warning other corporations based in the Empire State may realize they could suddenly be put out of business by the state on a political whim. New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump liable for more than $350 million in damages in the fraud suit brought against him and his company by New York State Democratic District Attorney Letitia James. Trump Sr., the Trump Revocable Trust and Trump Organization...

The Internal Revenue Service penalty for tax underpayments has nearly tripled since 2021, putting gig economy workers and consultants at the largest risk of having to cough up big bucks to Uncle Sam. As of Oct. 1, the IRS will now charge 8% interest on estimated tax underpayments, up from 3% two years ago, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The IRS penalty for underpayment of estimated taxes is up sharply this year, with self-employed and freelance workers at the biggest risk of getting hit. The penalty, calculated quarterly based on the Federal Reserve's benchmark rate, hit 8 percent on October 1, up from just 3 percent in early 2021, when Fed rates were near zero. The penalty rate applies to shortfalls in estimated taxes, which self-employed workers pay the IRS quarterly based on their earnings for the period. Employees who have income taxes deducted from their paychecks generally do not have to pay estimated taxes, and are unlikely to...

Middle-class families in California are getting slammed with an "unreasonable" cost-of-living-penalty for simply residing in the Golden State, according to a new report. According to data from the Transparency Foundation's Cost of California Report, a typical middle-class family of three earning $130,000 a year faces a financial burden of more than $26,000 because of higher living expenses. The nonpartisan group's report compares costs such as housing, utilities, food, gas, child care and health care, in every major household budget category between California and national averages. The foundation's data showed that on every household budget, the cost to live in California...

KGO I-Team investigative reporter Dan Noyes has covered plenty of crime stories, but Sunday night, became the victim of crime himself. In a video Noyes just posted to his Facebook and Twitter accounts Wednesday morning, we see freshly rattled Noyes describing that he was assaulted in an encounter with a group of teens, one of whom tried to steal his bike. And while Noyes has a badly bruised and possibly injured arm from the encounter, he did stymie the would-be bike thief by threatening, “You're about to be on Channel 7.”Update: Noyes tells SFist that he did indeed suffer a...

A San Francisco news reporter claimed he was attacked by teenagers, who tried to steal his bicycle last weekend but escaped the robbery when he told them they were going to be on the news. Dan Noyes, an award-winning investigative reporter for ABC7 Bay Area, was riding his bicycle in the Presidio National Park site, near the Golden Gate Bridge, when he encountered the massive group. “I’m coming home and I see a group of probably 15 young teens, young teens probably couldn’t drive yet, a lot on bicycles,” Noyes said in a video posted to his social media accounts...

All the other parents I told about my plan for “dead week” reacted in the same way. “What a great idea! “Dead week” in Juneau is the week before school starts, when there are no camps, and the district-sponsored after-school and summer program takes a break to prepare for the school year...I realized that for $299, I could take my first-grader on an Alaska cruise. I’d never been on a cruise and, as someone who has lived in Juneau through the cruise industry’s explosive growth, I have mixed feelings about it... I booked last minute and the total came out...

Peloton reached a settlement with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission Thursday over its defective treadmills that caused injuries and the company’s failure to report the concerns to the commission. Peloton recalled all of its treadmills in 2021 after the death of a child and dozens of other injuries occurred while using the product. In the commission’s press release published Thursday, it announced that Peloton agreed to pay a $19 million civil penalty because the company “knowingly failed” to report that its Tread+ treadmill had a “substantial” hazard that could serious injury to the consumer. Peloton received reports of injuries...

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday that she is commuting the sentences of all of the state’s 17 inmates awaiting execution, saying their death sentences will be changed to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Brown, a Democrat with less than a month remaining in office, said she was using her executive clemency powers to commute the sentences and that her order will take effect on Wednesday. “I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even...

With less than one hundred days to go for the Beijing Winter Olympics, China is maximising its efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19, with new locally-transmitted cases at a six-week high. The Chinese mainland reported 78 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Saturday, with 59 locally transmitted. China has so far reported 97,080 total infections and 4,626 deaths from COVID-19. As part of its zero-COVID policy, China has shut down multiple cities, stopped trains and quarantined all of its passengers after finding out that only a single one can been in contact with a COVID-19 patient, and restricted public transport...

McALESTER, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma ended a six-year moratorium on executions Thursday, administering the death penalty on a man who convulsed and vomited as he was executed for the 1998 slaying of a prison cafeteria worker. John Marion Grant, 60, who was strapped to a gurney inside the execution chamber, began convulsing and vomiting after the first drug, the sedative midazolam, was administered. Several minutes later, two members of the execution team wiped the vomit from his face and neck. He was serving a 130-year prison sentence for several armed robberies when witnesses say he dragged prison cafeteria worker Gay...

Josh Duggar, 33, a former star of the reality television series 19 Kids and Counting is facing up to 40 years in prison if convicted on charges of receiving and possessing material depicting the sexual abuse of children.* * *It's not the first time Josh has attracted controversy and a 33-page police report detailed years of allegations of sexual misconduct. In 2002, Jim Bob Duggar, Josh's father, told police his son admitted to folding (sic) (my bolding) several victims' breasts and genitals while they were sleeping, according to the report, and Jim Bob and his wife, Michelle, were made aware...

A federal death-row inmate scheduled to be executed days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration has tested positive for the coronavirus, his attorney said Thursday. Dustin John Higgs is one of several people on federal death row set to be executed during the presidential transition, which has drawn condemnation from attorneys and critics who argue against carrying out their sentenced before President Trump, who supports capital punishment, is replaced by Biden, who opposes it. “Today, we were informed by the Bureau of Prisons that Dustin Higgs has tested positive for COVID-19,” Shawn Nolan, Higgs’s attorney, said in a statement. “This is...

After nearly two decades without any federal executions, the Justice Department reversed course this summer by carrying out three death sentences in four days. Now the department is planning a similarly busy schedule of executions during the Trump administration’s final days, before a president who staunchly backs capital punishment is succeeded by one who opposes it. *** A Justice Department official disputed that reasoning, asserting that Attorney General William P. Barr had been routinely scheduling executions, as the law dictated he should do, since concluding an Obama administration-era review of the federal death penalty last year. “It’s his job to...

Rush just asked, "Why shouldn't the Democrats cheat? There is no downside for doing so! They are never held to account. Where is the DOJ?"

What are the penalties for voter fraud? What should they be? My search of the internet came up with a confusing conglomeration that was hard to sort out and follow. States vary with laws and enforcement, and I think there is another designation specific for federal elections. Do any Freepers have a clear understanding of this? Seems there aren't that many convictions for voter fraud, and penalties for those few convictions are light. This is a big issue. There should be a severe enough penalty that would make people think twice before committing this crime. If Congress could get serious...

The Justice Department on Thursday carried out the second federal execution this week, following another set of Supreme Court orders issued in the dead of night saying the lethal injection could proceed. Federal officials in Indiana executed Wesley Purkey, 68. He was pronounced dead at 8:19 a.m., they said. Purkey was convicted in 2003 of raping and murdering 16-year-old Jennifer Long, and had also killed Mary Ruth Bales, an 80-year-old woman, court records show. *** PurkeyÂ’s execution, like LeeÂ’s, was carried out following expansive legal battles that unfolded on multiple fronts before eventually arriving at the Supreme Court. In various...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted another injunction on the Trump administration's rapid push to resume federal death sentences this week. A divided court lifted one of a handful of injunctions temporarily blocking the execution of a man whose lawyers say suffers from severe dementia. The vote was 5-4 with the liberal justices — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — dissenting. DEVELOPING...

A federal judge in Washington has blocked federal executions scheduled for this week, citing concerns that the lethal injection protocol involved is "very likely to cause extreme pain and needless suffering." Judge Tanya Chutkan said the last-minute ruling only hours before executions were set to resume for the first time in 17 years was "unfortunate," but she blamed the Justice Department for racing ahead before legal challenges had been fully aired. The judge said the prison's plan to use a single drug, pentobarbital, could cause pulmonary edema, producing a sense that the condemned men were drowning. That would violate the...

he U.S. on Tuesday carried out its first federal execution in almost two decades, killing by lethal injection a man convicted of murdering an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest. The execution of Daniel Lewis Lee, over the objection of the victims’ relatives and following days of legal wrangling and delays, revived the debate over capital punishment during a time of widespread social unrest. *** Lee, 47, of Yukon, Oklahoma, professed his innocence just before he was executed at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. “I didn’t do it," Lee...