Category: Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement
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Deja Taylor Had One Job: Stay Clean and Sober
by Kerry Dougherty Good grief, lady. You had ONE job. Just one. Your assignment was to stay clean and sober for four months, but apparently Deja Taylor – the mother of the 6-year-old Newport News first grader who shot his teacher with his mother’s gun – couldn’t do that. After pleading guilty in June to…
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Virginia Deserves a Parole Board that Puts Public Safety First
by Kerry Dougherty When Terry McAuliffe was governor he found a loyal Democrat lawyer to appoint to head Virginia’s parole board. That was Adrianne Bennett, a failed candidate for the House of Delegates in 2011 and undoubtedly the most controversial parole board chair in Virginia history. She was a success if you believe, as McAuliffe…
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All Hat, No Cattle
by Dick Hall-Sizemore In Texas, the phrase, “all hat, no cattle” refers to someone who is all talk with little substance. Governor Glenn Youngkin is in the running for one of those hats. The latest “Team Youngkin” fund-raising scare e-mail deals with fentanyl. It starts off by recounting the number of fatal overdoses in Virginia…
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Blue on Blue
Monica Lisle, a long-serving Alexandria police captain, has charged the city’s police chief with denying her a promotion to assistant chief by stacking the deck against her in favor of Black candidates in order to “fill certain unannounced racial quotas.” As Lisle wrote in an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint last year, according to The…
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Broken Doorknobs, Broken Locks
Last year Jwanta Scarbor, a resident of public housing in Norfolk, was found shot to death in her apartment. Now her mother has filed suit against the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority on the grounds that it failed, despite repeated requests, to fix broken doorknobs, locks and windows. “My family is destroyed,” Tawanda Scarbor told…
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Leftist Media Canonizes Another Killer
by Kerry Dougherty Ronald Albert Barnes. That was the name of the Southampton County Correctional Center guard who died in March of 1975 after being beaten and stomped by two inmates, including convicted rapist Tony Lewis. If you read Sunday’s Virginian-Pilot, maybe you were moved by the front-page valentine to “Tony The Tiger,” as he…
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The Sorry State of the ACLU of Virginia
by Hans Bader The communist activist Angela Davis advocated abolishing prisons in the U.S., while supporting the incarceration of political prisoners in totalitarian communist regimes overseas. The ACLU of Virginia has touted Angela Davis’s stances in the past, such as in an April 4, 2022 tweet quoting Davis. Now, the ACLU of Virginia has returned…
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Nursing Homes – What Could Go Wrong?
by James C. Sherlock I have written a lot recently about staffing shortages in Virginia nursing homes and the Commonwealth’s national ranking near the bottom of the states for staffing measures. It is appropriate to ask why that matters. Federal analyses of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data offer the answer. In proposing…
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Understaffed Nursing Homes and the False Claims Act
by James C. Sherlock Nursing home operators, paid by government insurance programs on a per diem basis for caring for their patients, make higher profits if they understaff than otherwise. The less staff they have, the higher their operating margins. The federal government, with much experience in such situations, tries to offset those incentives with…
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Miyares Loses in Court
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Our Attorney General has taken his lumps in court recently. First was a jury acquittal in a high-profile criminal case he engineered. Later, the Virginia Supreme Court unanimously ruled against an agency that had been administering a provision of the Code based on guidance from the Attorney General. The first case was…
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Corruption, Ignorance Turn Deadly in the General Assembly
by James C. Sherlock Virginia Department of Health inspectors, on page 11 of 66 of a statement of deficiencies dated June 21, 2021, wrote of a gut-wrenching discovery. They found an incontinent patient at Autumn Care of Suffolk, a stroke victim unable to talk, tied to her bed by a staffer. She was terrified and…
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Mr. Saddam Salim’s Strange Acceptance of Political Endorsements
by Emilio Jaksetic In the upcoming November 2023 election, the Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Senate District 37 is Saddam Azlan Salim. Salim won the Democratic nomination by defeating Chap Peterson in the June 20, 2023 primary. A profile of Mr. Salim is available on Ballotpedia. A hypertext link in the Ballotpedia profile goes to…
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Where Do Dems Stand on Civil Immunity for Law Enforcement Officers?
by James C. Sherlock Being a law enforcement officer is tough under the best of circumstances. Do you think that exposure to losing your house and car in a civil suit for something you did in a split second to protect the public and yourself and did not have reason to know was against the…
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Nursing Shortages Require Better Oversight of Virginia Nursing Homes – Part Two – State Action Required
by James C. Sherlock Patterns of understaffing, medical harm and abuse in nursing homes are traceable: in some cases to a business model of understaffing to increase profits. Federal fines are built into the business models of the bad actors. Some of the worst post double-digit annual operating margins; in some to other systemic chain-wide…
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A Simple Statement of Fact about the Public Schools
by James C. Sherlock I know. Schools. Again. But Virginia’s schools have been shown to be getting worse faster than those of other states. Perhaps we should do something. Read the National Assessment Board’s press release from June 21st. One paragraph drew my attention: The LTT assessments in reading and math measure fundamental skills among nationally…