Category: Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement
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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 andย Housing Authority on the grounds that it failed, despite repeated requests, to fix broken doorknobs, locks and windows. โMy family is destroyed,โ 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 Sundayโs Virginian-Pilot, maybe you were moved by the front-page valentine to โTony The Tiger,โ 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 Davisโs stances in the past, such as in an April 4, 2022 tweet ย 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 Salimโs 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 Virginiaโs schools have been shown to be getting worse faster than those of other states. Perhaps we should do something. Read the National Assessment Board’sย press release from June 21st. One paragraph drew my attention: The LTT assessments in reading and math measure fundamental skills among nationally…
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Check Out Which New Virginia Laws Go Into Effect July 1st
by The Republican Standard staff The Virginia General Assembly passed several small bills due to the split between the Republican-led House of Delegates and the Democratic-controlled Virginia State Senate. Yet the areas where they did find co-operation could matter to many Virginians as we head into Fourth of July weekend. Enhanced Penalties for Fentanyl Manufacturing…
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Old Law Coming Back to Bite Virginia?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore On behalf of three Virginia residents, the Virginia ACLU, along with a large D.C. law firm, has filed suit in federal court challenging the provision of Virginiaโs constitution that disenfranchises anyone convicted of a felony, providing that their voting rights can be restored only by the governor. Such a legal challenge is…
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Correction: My Story on PIPP Was Wrong
Virginiaโs Department of Social Services (DSS) has prepared a plan for the implementation of a cap on electricity costs for low-income customers of Virginiaโs two main utilities. My report on June 27 that the plan was โmissing in actionโ was wrong. For the most interested, you can find the DSS draft here, and it envisions…
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Policing Ain’t Bean Bag… Or Maybe It Is
๏ปฟ Upon hearing that the Fairfax County Police Department had scrapped conventional shotgun shells in favor of “bean bag” projectiles, my initial reaction was to mock the change. Bean bags? What’s the next tool in the police arsenal — pillows? Given the approving tone of the article in The Washington Post, I was tempted to…