Free Republic

There's nothing petty about petty crime. Tolerate it, and society descends into disorder. You're standing in line at Starbucks and watch a freeloader go to the front, pick out a sandwich and walk out without paying. No one says a word. Or you pay your bills, then find out thieves have robbed the blue USPS box to abscond with your checking information and empty your account. That happened to me last week. The thieves fish mail out of the box or use stolen USPS keys sold on the internet. This crime is surging, but the police and banks shrug their...

There’s always an uproar when we see Asian-Americans being beaten to a pulp or murdered on video and the people around them just stare instead of intervene. But why are we surprised? They are just doing exactly what society has told them to do. It’s not necessarily cowardice. They are making an entirely rational choice based on our society’s unequivocal message that we should stand back and watch. If we, as a society, want to have people leap into the fray, and I would like that, then we need to do the things that make it a rational choice to...

A law in South Carolina bans playing pinball if you're under 18. That's just one of America's many ridiculous laws restricting freedom. "There is a role for the government in keeping people safe from actual criminals, people who commit murder, robbery," says Rafael Mangual, a "tough-on-crime" guy at the Manhattan Institute. "But a lot of laws don't keep people safe," he says. "There's a federal prohibition on walking a dog on a leash longer than six feet on federal property. It is a jailable offense." Three hundred thousand federal criminal offenses are on the books. "It's way too big," says...

Just a few months since passage of the so-called First Step Act, we now know that the kinds of convicted criminals actually gaining early freedom are not the docile mice promised in the big sales pitches for this trumpeted bipartisan bill passed by the split Congress in December and signed by President Trump. The proposal was loudly billed to secure early releases of first-time, low-level, nonviolent drug offenders to home confinement on grounds that they’d gotten raw sentencing deals at a time when America was tamping down the crack cocaine-fueled national crime plagues of the early 1990s.But alas, it turns...

Undoing wrongful convictions takes a killer instinct. Chicago-based exoneration specialist Kathleen Zellner's got it. Her record speaks for itself. Over the past two decades, she has righted more wrongful convictions than any private attorney in America. What's her secret? The Herculean task of untangling official lies, investigative bias, prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective counsel and forensic junk science to free 19 innocent men requires more than intellectual firepower (of which Zellner possesses a chess grandmaster's surplus). The job demands iron will and unshakeable fortitude to beat a system rigged to preserve government errors and protect prosecutions. As the "Survivor" slogan goes: "Outwit,...

After two decades of drastic crime reduction, homicides in America’s 50 largest cities increased by 17% in 2015. Following two decades of employing proactive police techniques whose greatest beneficiaries were residents of poor minority neighborhoods, officers suddenly started to face new obstacles. When working in inner cities, cops found themselves surrounded by jeering crowds whenever they attempted to make an arrest or simply interview citizens. Predictably, officers then began to retreat from proactive policing techniques. Rather than questioning a suspicious person who appeared to be hiding a gun they let an armed robbery take place. They began reacting to crimes...

New Jersey to consider abolishing death penalty Tue May 8, 2007 2:43PM EDT By Jon Hurdle PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - New Jersey lawmakers will consider abolishing the death penalty this week, starting a process that could see the liberal state become the first to scrap capital punishment since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976. On Thursday, the judiciary committee of the state Senate will consider two bills calling for New Jersey to replace execution with life imprisonment without parole. Capital punishment in the state is already suspended under a moratorium passed by legislators in late 2005. Sen. Ray Lesniak,...

With everyone trying to keep too many balls in the air at the same time what with all that's going on in the World today, thought I would try to lighten things up for a minute by passing an E-Mail my kid sister sent to me today. Those in the older set will probably enjoy this more than youngsters because we can remember the "Good Old Days"!