by Paul Wright

In the course of publishing PLN we file a lot of public records requests with local jails, state prisons and federal law enforcement agencies—hundreds every year. These requests result in the news coverage you are reading now as well as reports, audits, misconduct reports and much, much more which we also make publicly available on our websites after reporting on them. Agencies generally comply with our records requests about 97 or 98% of the time. For the agencies that don’t, we file about two dozen state and federal court records cases each year.

The Human Rights Defense Center, which publishes Prison Legal News, has sued the San Diego jail in California for censoring our publications in the past. We have also reported on dozens of deaths that have occurred in the jail, most from medical neglect. The jail is also subject to a class action lawsuit over inadequate medical care. We learned that the jail was creating Critical Incident Review Board reports after many of the deaths and that these had been disclosed in discovery to the plaintiff’s lawyers but were subject to a protective order. HRDC and two other publications moved to unseal the records so we could review them and see why so many prisoners were dying and if the CIRBs were so helpful, why are prisoners still dying?

As we report on page 56, the trial court agreed with us and ordered the jail to disclose the reports so we could review them and report on them. The jail appealed and the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court reversed, ruling against us. We sought en banc review, which was denied. The result is that prisoners keep dying in fairly large numbers in the San Diego jail and the sheriff and local government officials won’t tell us why and the Ninth circuit has held we do not have a right to these records that, in theory at least, might tell us why prisoners keep dying in the jail in large numbers, even if it won’t stop the deaths.

Prisons and jails remain the least transparent of all American institutions and this ruling helps ensure they remain opaque and unaccountable to the public at large.

This month’s cover story reports on a writer’s journey to the death chamber in the Texas prison system. The American insistence on the death penalty and killing its own citizens is something that seems to mystify much of the world. I first became aware of the death penalty in 1979. I was in junior high school in Florida when the principal came on the intercom around noon on May 25 to announce that the state of Florida had killed John Spenkelink by electrocution, the first person to be killed in Florida since the U.S. Supreme Court had suspended executions in 1973 after holding the death penalty was applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Most of the kids in my 8th grade class cheered at the news.

Almost to the day, fifteen years later, on May 27, 1994, I was in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, Washington, when tv news stations announced that Charles Campbell had been executed by hanging at the Washington State Penitentiary for the killing of three female victims, including a woman he had previously been convicted of raping. The cellblock erupted in cheers at the news.

I have never understood the celebration of state murder, whether by children, criminals or anyone else. Yet it seems pretty deeply rooted in American culture and society. That said, American juries are increasingly rejecting attempts to impose the death penalty on defendants but this is offset by the fervor of judges and politicians alike to kill as many people as possible.

It is that time of year when we hold our annual fundraiser. If you can donate, please do so. We rely on individual donors like you to carry out a lot of our work, whether investigative reporting, litigation, advocacy and much, much more. Right now, prisons and jails are using mail digitization as an excuse to ban our books and magazines. We have statewide censorship suits challenging these bans pending in Missouri, New Mexico, and Hawaii, with more in the works.

We need your help and support to continue these fights. Enjoy this issue of PLN and please encourage others to subscribe.  

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