Free Republic

Two baby-faced Westchester arsonists who admitted to torching a beloved Hudson River lighthouse will get to avoid jail time thanks to a plea deal that allows them to buy their freedom. Elvin Ayavaca, 19, and Richard Joseph Barrero, 20, both pleaded guilty on Monday in exchange for a sweetheart deal that allows the arsonists to dodge any time in prison — as long as they cough up nearly $81,000 each and stay out of trouble for the rest of the year, according to the Westchester DA’s office. If the pair, who caused roughly $100,000 in damage to Westchester’s historic Tarrytown...

The Jerusalem District Court on Sunday issued an interim order temporarily blocking the state's plan to transfer Nile crocodiles to Ketzi'ot Prison, suspending an initiative promoted by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman. The decision came just hours after the animal welfare organization Let Animals Live filed an administrative petition and an urgent request to halt the project. Judge Avraham Rubin ruled that, until further notice, the state may not locate the crocodiles or prepare them for transfer. The order will remain in effect until the court rules on the request for a longer-term injunction...

COBB COUNTY, Ga. — An attorney is accused of smuggling drugs into jail. He and three other suspects are facing charges. Investigators say the drugs were soaked into papers the attorney delivered to his client. On Instagram, attorney Joseph Anfield-El markets himself as a champion and friend to his clients, but investigators say he wasn’t just representing his clients at the jail. “He didn’t respect this facility, and in my mind he didn’t service the clients. Yeah, he serviced them, but not the way he should’ve been servicing them with legal services,” said Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens.

Israel Prison Service Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi last week imposed new restrictions that significantly limit the International Committee of the Red Cross's visits to Palestinian security prisoners, despite a High Court ruling that found the blanket ban on such occasions, imposed after October 7, 2023, to be unlawful.

The debate surrounding Karmelo Anthony’s trial has also drawn attention to his life in prison following his conviction. Anthony, 19, was convicted of the murder of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf on June 9, 2026. He was initially booked into the Collin County Jail before being transferred the following day to the Wallace Pack Unit in Texas. Anthony is not being housed in the general prison population. Because of the high-profile nature of the case, he has remained in protective custody since his transfer to the Wallace Pack Unit. Recent reports also indicate that he is receiving special meals while in custody....

The Justice Department has announced charges in a “sophisticated” criminal operation that it says used high-powered drones to deliver weapons, drugs, cell phones and escape tools into prisons in east coast states. US Attorney Keyes the middle district of Georgia, Federal Bureau of Prisons and FBI investigators in Atlanta, say the rogue drone operation led out of a former daycare in Macon, Georgia where multiple drones were launched on covert missions to deliver the contraband by air to 10 federal prisons at night. “We’re here to announce the unsealing of an indictment that charges the most sophisticated and sprawling criminal...

Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold was arrested and booked on four counts of kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery on Wednesday, and is now facing up to life in prison if convicted. Arnold, 23, turned himself in to authorities on a warrant at the Orient Road jail in Tampa, Fla., the Detroit Free Press reported. He remained in custody as of 10:46 p.m. In a statement released through Arnold’s representative, Arnold “categorically denies any involvement in the matters underlying the allegations made against him and maintains his innocence.” The Lions released a statement that said they are aware of the...

Eight people who were found guilty of terrorism-related charges earlier this year for a 2025 attack on an ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, learned their punishments on Tuesday. One member of the group, identified as the group's leader, was sentenced to a century in prison.The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas said on Monday that sentencing for the defendants would happen Tuesday morning. The verdicts, handed down in March, came as the defendants stood accused in the July 4, 2025, plot targeting the Prairieland ICE detention center following weeks of testimony from investigators, law enforcement and...

Eight members of a North Texas Antifa cell have been given decades in prison for their roles in an attack on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in the state in July of 2025. Sentences handed down to the group of eight militants ranged from 30 years to 100 years. Ringleader Benjamin Hanil Song received the highest sentence, with US District Judge Mark T Pittman sentencing him to 100 years, Andy Ngo reported. Song had been convicted of charges that included attempted murder and discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, the most serious charges in...

Three jailed men who murdered a fellow inmate by stabbing him 25 times in his cell will never be released from prison. Mark Fellows, 45, David Taylor, 64, and Lee Newell, 57, were found guilty of killing Kyle Bevan at HMP Wakefield on 4 November, using makeshift weapons including one made from a metal part from the back of a television. Fellows and Newell were already serving whole life orders for previous convictions, with judge Mrs Justice McGowan imposing "new and separate" life terms for them at Leeds Crown Court. Taylor was given a whole life order for Bevan's death,...

Rapper Mystikal — best known for his 2000 hit “Shake Ya Ass” — has been sentenced to two decades behind bars over a 2022 rape case. According to ABC affiliate WBRZ, the Louisiana hitmaker was handed down a 20-year sentence on Tuesday for third-degree rape. Per the outlet, the rapper, whose given name is Michael Lawrence Tyler, responded in court Tuesday after the victim requested the maximum sentence. “If I did that to you, I deserve the max sentence,” he said. The Grammy-nominated rapper pled guilty in March in an Ascension Parish, Louisiana court — though on Friday, ahead of...

Karmelo Anthony, the Texas man convicted of stabbing a star athlete to death at a high school track meet, is asking the court to appoint a free public defender for his appeal, despite his family raising more than a half million dollars in funds for his legal fees. ... In the days following his conviction, Anthony filed a notice of appeal of the guilty verdict and requested a court-appointed public defender, claiming that he is a "penniless, destitute and indigent person" that is "too poor to employ counsel," according to court documents ... The request from Anthony comes after a...

A Rikers Island Correction captain has been arrested for forcing her subordinates to pay her, buy her gifts and drive her to restaurants and a casino while on duty, according to federal prosecutors. Latanya Brown, 51 — who was known as the “Terror of the Tombs” back when she worked at the Manhattan Detention Complex — sunk to criminal lows when she was transferred to Rikers Island in early 2024, according to a federal extortion and wage theft indictment unsealed in Brooklyn Thursday. Brown was assigned to the jail complex’s Facility Operations Department as a supervisor from July 2024 to...

Everything is working against him. For the next 35 years, Karmelo Anthony has to get used to his new life in a cell. The 19-year-old was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Tuesday after being convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf. Anthony was held at the Collin County Detention Facility in Texas following his conviction for the April 2025 fatal stabbing. During his time at the Collin County Detention Facility post-conviction, authorities placed Anthony in isolation. This was to ensure facility safety and security. However, social media thinks something else is going on. On X, a post about Karmelo Anthony’s...

A grand jury on Wednesday indicted a Louisiana sheriff whose office came under investigation after 10 inmates broke out of a New Orleans jail in an audacious escape that happened on her watch. Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson is not accused of helping the inmates pull off the brazen jailbreak through a hole behind a toilet, setting off a monthslong search before all the escapees were eventually captured. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said a state probe instead found that Hutson’s poor management of the jail led to the escape. The 30-count indictment handed up by a New Orleans grand...

You might expect the left leaning New Yorker magazine to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the plight of Venezuelan President (via fraud) Nicolas Maduro, currently residing in Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center while awaiting his court trial for drug trafficking, narco-terrorism, and weapons offences. But Diego Lasarte's Tuesday story seems less about sympathy and more about generating laughter whether intentional or not as you can see in "What Nicolás Maduro’s Life Is Like in a Notorious Brooklyn Jail.The jail is "notorious," and Maduro is not? The possibility of laughter immediately emerges when Lasarte reveals that Maduro's temporary roommate was a...

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden “withheld evidence” and approved “aggressive arrest tactics” when targeting pro-life defendants — and then slapped them with longer prison sentences than pro-abortion ones, according to an explosive internal review released Tuesday. The DOJ revealed the stunning abuses in a nearly 900-page report after examining more than 700,000 records related to the Biden administration’s prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The 1994 law was passed to protect access to houses of worship, religious institutions, abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers. But the Biden DOJ was...

Oregon is rolling out tablets to all state prisoners, a strategy officials say could help stem the influx of illicit substances into its prisons.Any mail an inmate receives will be digitally scanned and then sent directly to their tablet, eliminating any opportunities for hidden drugs to be unknowingly ferried to their cell, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections.Corrections officials have said these changes will happen gradually, adding that they are aiming to get the tablets in the hands of prisoners by September.There are roughly 12,000 people in state custody who may soon be able to watch movies, play games...

WASHINGTON — President Trump wants to make California’s Alcatraz Island into an active prison again — feared by criminals and impossible to escape. Trump’s budget to Congress on Friday includes a $152 million request to get the long-shuttered iconic lockup up and running again as a “state-of-the-art secure prison facility.”

A report published by the Spanish newspaper ABC on Thursday claimed that Venezuela’s deposed socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro spends his nights in prison yelling “I am the president” and claiming that he was “kidnapped” by the U.S. Maduro, long wanted by U.S. authorities on multiple narco-terrorism charges, led the Venezuelan socialist regime from March 2013 to January 3, 2026, the day the United States executed a law enforcement operation in Caracas to arrest him and his wife, Cilia Flores. The now-deposed dictator clung to power after the end of his first term in 2019 by holding sham presidential elections in...