Free Republic

A federal judge has ordered New York City to draft plans to hand over management of its Rikers Island jail complex to a third-party receiver after holding the city's Department of Corrections (DOC) in civil contempt for failing to meet more than a dozen requirements to improve conditions in its violence-wracked jails. In an opinion and order issued Tuesday, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York Laura Taylor Swain wrote that she was "inclined to impose a receivership" after finding that violence and death inside Rikers has not improved since New York City agreed to a...

Virginia State Police on Tuesday contradicted Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) claim that Charlottesville protesters had weapons “stashed around the city.” McAuliffe made the claim about stashed weapons during an interview on DeRay McKesson’s podcast Save the People. Twitter user @nycsouthpaw quoted McAuliffe using the podcast interview to describe protesters, saying, “They had battering rams and we had picked up different weapons that they had stashed around the city.” Yet the very next day–August 15–Virginia State Police countered McAuliffe’s narrative by denying that any weapons caches were discovered during sweeps of the city. Reason’s CJ Ciaramella tweeted: "I just got comment...