Free Republic

The triggerman in the Pamela Smart murder trial was granted parole Thursday, nearly 25 years after he killed his school instructor's husband and launched a global spectacle packed with lurid details of sex and manipulation. William Flynn was 16-year-old "Billy" in 1990 when he and three teenage friends carried out what prosecutors said was Pamela Smart's plot to murder Gregg Smart. Flynn pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 28 years to life in prison, minus time served before trial. The trial was a media circus and one of the first high-profile cases about a sexual affair between...

The murder of an Iraqi migrant has Muslims in Texas looking for answers just weeks after three Muslim students were killed in North Carolina. Dallas police said that Ahmed Al-Jumaili, 36, was shot and killed outside his apartment last week as he watched his first snowfall. No motive has been determined, but a local Muslim group is working closely with police. On Monday, the group offered a $7,000 (£4,630) reward to solve the case. Alia Salem, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said there was not enough evidence to say whether the shooting...

Justice has been served. After fighting a murder conviction for more than 30 years, Cathy Woods has finally had the charges against her dropped. She has been living with her brother since having her conviction overturned last September, but she still had murder charges against her, and was supposed to have a trial this summer. That changed on Friday, March 6, 2014. Washoe County District Attorney Chris Hicks announced he is filing a motion to dismiss the case against Woods because DNA evidence has made it clear that Woods didn't kill 19-year-old Michelle Mitchell in 1976. It's a day Cathy...

(CNN)—An Iraqi man watching his first snowfall in his new American hometown was shot and killed by an unknown assailant, according to Dallas police. Authorities have stepped up patrols in the neighborhood where Ahmed Al-Jumaili lived -- and died -- in their effort to find whoever killed the 36-year-old early Thursday as he and his brother watched the snow while Al-Jumaili's wife took photos.

Increased gun control measures would go a long way toward cutting down on America’s homicide rate, President Obama said during a town-hall event on Friday. “Our homicide rates are so much larger than other industrialized countries, by like a mile,” he said during a speech at Benedict College in South Carolina. “Most of that is attributable to the easy, ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.” Obama’s made a hard push for increasing gun control measures during his presidency, specifically toughening background checks and banning certain assault weapons. He tried to gin up congressional support for those policies after a man...

Live Science reported in January on research being done by scientists at Ganogen, Inc., a biotech company in California, that transplants organs from aborted babies into lab rats with the goal of growing them for use in patients who need organ transplants. “Researchers say they have developed a new technique that will get more kidneys to people who need transplants, but the method is sure to be controversial: The research shows that it is feasible to remove a kidney from an aborted human fetus, and implant the organ into a rat, where the kidney can grow to a larger size,”...

The mother-daughter murder victims of the early morning triple shooting in eastern New Orleans are 25-year-old Walesha Williams and 8-year-old Paris Williams, grieving family members said Tuesday (March 3). Mercedes Brown said the victims were her niece and great niece, and that she notified her brother, Walter, the victims' father and grandfather who lives near Houston.Police said the mother and daughter were shot early Tuesday at at 14535 Duane Rd. in eastern New Orleans. Police said a 39-year-old woman was also shot multiple times at the house and is hospitalized and expected to survive. Williams' relatives said the woman is...

The execution of the only woman on Georgia's death row has been postponed at the last minute for a second time in less than a week - because the drug used in the lethal injection she was scheduled to receive was 'cloudy'. Kelly Renee Gissendaner, 46, was due to be given an injection of pentobarbital at a prison in Jackson at 7pm on Monday in retribution for plotting the murder of her husband in 1997. But after officials observed the drug to be used in the execution had a 'cloudy' appearance, they postponed her death until a future, unspecified date...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - North Carolina prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a man who police say kept detailed notes on parking at his condominium complex before gunning down three young Muslims in a neighboring unit, according to documents released on Monday. Craig Hicks, 46, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the Feb. 10 shooting deaths of a newlywed couple and the wife's sister about two miles from the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill.

Preliminary autopsy results say 20-day-old Justice Rees, whose tiny body was found Wednesday at a remote slough near Knights Landing, may have drowned or died of hypothermia. In an interview Thursday, Yolo County Sheriff Ed Prieto said authorities have no evidence the infant was a victim of homicide.

The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors. Author Leovy's angle is that routine murder in African American ghettos is invisible, in the sense that individual murders don't get a write-up in the paper. So she decided to do something about it, The Homicide Report, a blog that documents each and every murder in LA. Each murder, routine as it is, devastates a family, but the cops only arrest a suspect...

A top political nemesis of President Vladimir Putin was shot and killed early Saturday in central Moscow, Russian police said, one day before an opposition rally was scheduled to take place. Boris Nemtsov, 55, a former deputy prime minister, was shot four times from a passing car as he was walking on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. Interior Ministry spokeswoman Yelena Alexeyeva told reporters on the scene that Nemtsov was walking with a female acquaintance, a Ukrainian citizen, when a vehicle drove up and unidentified assailants shot him dead. The woman wasn't hurt.

A prominent Bangladeshi-American blogger known for speaking out against religious extremism was hacked to death as he walked through Bangladesh's capital with his wife, police said Friday. The attack Thursday night on Avijit Roy, a Bangladesh-born U.S. citizen, occurred on a crowded sidewalk as he and his wife, Rafida Ahmed, were returning from a book fair at Dhaka University. Ahmed, who is also a blogger, was seriously injured. It was the latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years. A previously unknown militant group, Ansar Bangla 7, claimed responsibility for the attack, Assistant Police...

Nine people are dead Friday morning after a string of murders in Texas County, Mo. Missouri State Highway Patrol confirmed that an investigation is on going into the deaths of these individuals, which includes the alleged shooter. Eight people were found dead in Texas County and one was found dead in Shannon County. According to police, there were at least four crime scenes with a fifth and sixth possible, the Houston Herald reports.

ISIS has reportedly murdered 15 of the Assyrian Christians it captured earlier this week. Aid to the Church in Need reported that the Islamist group murdered a number of Assyrians it took from Hassake governorate in Syria. Abbot Emanuel Youkhana passed on the news to various Catholic agencies working in the area, and said the number still being held totalled 350. Abbot Youkhana said: “Around 15 young Assyrians are martyred. Many of them were fighting to defend and protect the villages and families.” The captured came from a number of villages in the area: 14 people from Tel Hormizd, 81...

To the four clean-cut college freshman out on a double date, it had seemed like a typical McDonald's: spanking clean, well-lighted, and safe. It was in a good neighborhood too, right next to Texas A&M University in College Station -- a campus known for its friendly atmosphere and official down-home greeting: “howdy” Shortly after 2 a.m that Sunday, they pulled into the parking lot of so-called “University McDonald's” – and beheld a scene unlike anything portrayed in all those wholesome McDonald's television commercials. Before them, hundreds of young black males were loitering about, some without shirts. Other local residents --...

ARACHI, Pakistan — The nursery where they killed him, one year on, is oddly peaceful. Lush mango, palm and pomegranate trees are in bloom, their thick, green leaves whispering in a gentle breeze.The cinder-block storehouse where he was executed is empty, save for some flower pots, a cot and crumpled packs of cigarettes strewn across the floor. The 10-foot by 15-foot main room still has a metal door and metal shutters that can be padlocked. Sounds of life reach the room: birds chirping and cars driving past to a nearby religious school run by Al Rashid Trust, an organization...

The Muslim supremacists have their own reason for pushing this victim card, and it involves providing justification for offensive jihad against unbelievers By now, the reader has surely heard about the murder last week of three Muslim students at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill by Craig Stephen Hicks, a local resident. Because the killer is a gun-owning white male with a rather unshaven appearance, the immediate assumption made before the facts of the case began to come out, even by many conservatives, was that Hicks must be a right-wing Christian Tea Partier who killed the students because they were...

CORBIN, Ky. (AP) — A 16-year-old boy killed in a shootout Saturday with police in Maryland, prompted the search of his home over 500 miles away in Kentucky, where authorities found the bodies of his parents and younger sister. Friends and relatives of Jason Hendrix were struggling to understand how the boy, a faithful churchgoer who was baptized just two months ago, could end up as the suspect in the slayings. Hendrix, a Kentucky high school ROTC student and active church member, was angry at his parents for taking away his computer privileges when he's suspected of killing his family...

On Wednesday, the Twitter hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter began trending after news spread of a multiple homicide involving three Muslim victims. A self described “radical atheist” or “anti-theist,” Craig Stephen Hicks, shot three victims in the head on Tuesday—21-year-old Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salah, her 19-year-old sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salah, and her husband, 23-year-old Deah Shaddy Barakat. Reportedly, the three murders may have been the result of a long standing dispute over a parking space. Murder isn’t really news these days. The bastions of Liberal governance—Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York—are killing fields where the depraved roam unfettered and prey with impunity on the disarmed....