Word: sheriffs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...each; a decade ago the average was 60. Ten years ago, grand juries that indicted two dozen people were considered especially zealous. Now grand juries indict 120 people at a time, mostly Tazewell residents, says Lee. Eighty percent of the crimes involve people stealing for drug money. The local sheriff's department is woefully understaffed, and the five-attorney prosecutor's office needs three more lawyers to meet state standards...
Federal authorities are at a loss to explain why prescription-pill abuse pops up in some places and not in others, and why places like central Maine, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia--where OxyContin abuse first emerged as a problem--are awash in drug-related crime. But Sheriff H.S. Caudill says a clue to how it all began in Tazewell lies in one of the original nicknames for OxyContin: coal miner's cocaine. Retired miners with back injuries were among the first in the area to use the powerful drug, and as word of its effectiveness spread, abusers began diverting...
...from 1998 to 2003 the number of robberies, burglaries and larcenies jumped 131% in neighboring Buchanan County, 44% in Wise County, 62% in Lee County and 102% in Russell County. In Buchanan, where the jail typically holds more than twice the 34 inmates it was built to accommodate, the sheriff's department was so bogged down with drug-related crime that it dropped out of a four-county drug task force in order to concentrate on its own problems. In Lee, which has the same jail-crowding problem as Buchanan, local authorities have called on federal prosecutors to help take...
...receive intensely monitored probation. And Lee has been appointed a special U.S. Attorney, giving him the power to prosecute weapons-for-drugs cases in federal court--a statute that doesn't exist on Virginia state books--where convictions carry a minimum penalty of five years in prison. Says Tazewell sheriff's captain Clarence Tatum: "If we could get rid of Oxy and all the related drugs, we'd wipe out 75% of the crime in this county...
CAPTURED. BRIAN NICHOLS, 33, rape defendant accused of killing the judge presiding over his trial; by police, after a massive, 26-hour manhunt; in Atlanta. Nichols allegedly wrestled a gun from a sheriff's deputy at the Fulton County Courthouse and fatally shot Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, a stenographer and another deputy. Nichols then stole a series of cars--allegedly killing an off-duty federal customs agent in the process--before a woman tipped off police that he had been holding her hostage in her apartment...