Ohio league reports gerrymandering is successful

Ohio league reports gerrymandering is successful

COLUMBUS

The League of Women Voters of Ohio has released a report showing gerrymandered legislative districts delivered nearly perfect results in 2012 and 2014, sending candidates of the intended political party to the Statehouse in almost 100 percent of cases.

The league, a longtime advocate for voting fairness, used its “Predictable Results II” report Wednesday to urge support for Issue 1, a fall ballot issue overhauling Ohio’s redistricting system.

Environmental, farming and other groups also back Issue 1, saying it will make Ohioans’ votes more significant and effective in electing a representative government by adding transparency and fairness to legislative map-making.

Inmate escapes from workhouse

CLEVELAND

Authorities are asking for help locating a man who escaped from the Cleveland House of Corrections.

Cleveland police released a wanted poster Wednesday for 59-year-old Darryl Smith of Cleveland after he escaped around 5:20 a.m. from the city-owned jail in suburban Highland Hills.

Court records show Smith received 152 days in the House of Corrections on July 13 after pleading no contest in Cleveland Municipal Court to a misdemeanor charge of aggravated menacing. Court records show he received 30 days on Tuesday after being found guilty of contempt of court.

The wanted poster says Smith is 6 feet tall and weighs 170 pounds and was wearing a white inmate uniform when he escaped.

Officer shot and one of 3 stabbing victims die in La.

SUNSET, La.

A police officer was shot and killed Wednesday when he responded to a call from a house where three women had been stabbed, one of them fatally, in a town about 60 miles west of Baton Rouge, said the sheriff of rural St. Landry Parish.

The man accused in the attacks drove from the house in Sunset, a town of about 2,900, and into a convenience store about three blocks away, barricading himself in an office and telling police that he wouldn’t come out and was ready to fight, St. Landry Parish Sheriff Bobby Guidroz said.

He said SWAT team members lobbed tear gas and “C-gas” into the building, then broke in using hammers and fire axes to arrest Harrison Lee Riley Jr., 35, of Arnaudville, about 8 miles from Sunset.

Guidroz identified the dead as Officer Henry Nelson, 51, and Shameka Johnson, 40, and the wounded as her sister Shurlay Johnson, 34, and Wiley’s wife, Courtney Jolivette Riley, whose age the sheriff didn’t know. All three women were stabbed, he said.

Associated Press