by Benjamin Tschirhart
In a decision handed down on June 22, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found no Fourth Amendment violation for a group of protestors arrested and held nearly three days without a bail hearing. The decision affirmed a lower court ruling that found ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
In a maddening decision issued on March 23, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit performed legal gymnastics to deny a former Texas prisoner’s damages claim for unlawful imprisonment after Dallas County improperly relied on polygraph tests to keep him locked up 13 years ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
It took a civil complaint to make Sheriff Chad Bianco talk. The five jails he runs for California’s Riverside County had seen 13 deaths in the first eight months of 2022 — the highest number for any year on record. And until the press conference on September ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On June 22, 2022, an attorney for theVirginia Department of Corrections signed off on an agreement to pay $87,000 to settle a state prisoner’s claims that he was kicked in the testicles by a guard.
The incident occurred on July 15, 2016, when a guard identified as ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On May 17, 2022, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that sheriffs may continue the decades-old practice of collecting commissions from charges for phone calls made by those incarcerated in the state’s jails.
At issue is the cost of communication for an extremely vulnerable population, which ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On October 3, 2022, the same day her jury trial was scheduled to begin for sexually abusing a prisoner, a former assistant warden with the Nebraska Department of Corrections (DOC) reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. Admitting to a charge of “unlawful visitation or communication with an ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On September 29, 2022, former PLN Editor Alex Friedmann, 53, settled with the Tennessee Department of Corrections (DOC) in a federal action alleging his civil rights were violated when he was held 580 days in pretrial detention in an ‘Iron Man’ cell that he called “utterly barren ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
In November 2022, Dallas resident Christopher Arnone was charged with sexually abusing his son. He struck a deal and entered a plea of nolo contendere to one charge of injury to a child. The state court sentenced him to ten years ‘deferred adjudication community supervision,’ the conditions ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
The U.S. Constitution, in its idealistic fashion, guarantees citizens that they “shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” During the intervening centuries, the fine brush of precedent has filled in those broad, optimistic strokes.
But even a cursory examination will ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On November 18, 2022, almost four years after Congress passed the First Step Act (FSA) to reduce the population incarcerated by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), new BOP Director Colette Peters finally clarified the agency’s policy to implement the law.
FSA was signed into law by ...
