by Christopher Zoukis

On March 13, 1997, 41-year-old Dahn Clary, Jr. of Texarkana, Texas was arrested and charged with the aggravated sexual assault of his best friend’s 11-year-old son.

The boy told his father and police that Clary had fondled his genitals and performed oral sex on him several times. Clary was convicted and served 10 years in prison.

The only problem was that he was innocent.

In June 2013, the then-adult “victim” signed a sworn statement that he had made up the allegations because he was angry at Clary for spending less time with him.

“I did not understand the consequences of my actions at the time I fabricated the story,” he said.

Clary was formally exonerated in June 2016.

The National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) tracks wrongful convictions, and has tallied 2,040 cases since 1989. But 2016 saw a record number of exonerations like Clary’s; nationwide, the NRE reported 166 wrongful convictions that year. Texas continued to lead the way, with the exoneration of 58 men and women who were actually innocent. Most came from Harris County, which includes the city of Houston.

In 2014, a newspaper reporter noticed that in some Harris County drug cases the results ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held it was premature to file a request to revise conditions of supervised release 14 years before those conditions were to go into effect.

The terse per curium ruling, issued on September 6, 2016, disallowed federal prisoner Andre Williams’ request to ...

by Christopher Zoukis

Tyrone Grayson was on parole after serving a 20-year sentence for attempted robbery and a consecutive 10-year sentence for unlawful possession of a firearm when he committed another offense. He was charged and received a new 12-year prison term, then ordered to serve the balance of his 20-year sentence by the parole board.

The problem was that when he violated his parole, the 20-year sentence for attempted robbery had already been discharged – yet that was the term the parole board had revoked. The Indiana Department of Correction later “fixed the records” to reflect that Grayson was on parole for the 10-year sentence for possession of a firearm when he violated parole.

On August 23, 2016, the Court of Appeals held that merely “fixing” the records wasn’t enough.

“Because parolees charged with violations of parole are within the protection of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, we find that Grayson was entitled to an opportunity to be heard on the allegation that he violated parole for the correct sentence,” the appellate court wrote.

The state acknowledged a mistake had been made, but argued that changing the paperwork was all that was required. Given the fact ...

by Christopher Zoukis

On May 16, 2016, the Colorado Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s ruling which found a convicted sex offender did not violate the terms of his probation by refusing to participate in court-ordered treatment that included polygraph exams.

Carl Daniel Ruch argued that requiring him to participate in the treatment program would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The appellate court agreed and remanded the case to the trial court for further proceedings. The Colorado Supreme Court reversed, upholding Ruch’s probation violation.

“[W]e perceive no Fifth Amendment violation here,” the Court wrote. “In these circumstances, Ruch’s purported invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights was premature and amounted to a prohibited blanket assertion of the privilege.”

The problem, according to the Supreme Court, was that Ruch had not actually been asked any questions that would have required him to incriminate himself. “[W]e conclude that Ruch’s refusal to attend treatment based on his hypothetical concerns as to what might have been asked of him amounted to a blanket claim of privilege in advance of any questions being propounded, and this blanket claim was both ineffective and premature,” the Court stated.

The narrow ruling only applies to attempts to ...

by Christopher Zoukis

In 2016, questions were raised in at least three states about the amount of taxpayer money flowing into the coffers of private, for-profit prison companies.

Take Colorado, for example. When lawmakers were considering an almost $26 billion state budget last year, they noticed it included a curious last-minute addition: $3 million for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic).

The Denver Post reported that the $3 million payment to CCA was drawn from money earmarked for the Department of Corrections that was set aside “in case the prison population increases faster than current forecasts.” According to Colorado budget writers, the payment was needed to keep the CCA-operated Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington, Colorado from closing its doors. If the prison shut down, the state would need to relocate the 400 prisoners who were housed at the facility as of April 2016.

While the Kit Carson prison has a capacity of about 1,450 beds, the fewer number of prisoners held at the facility meant it was not profitable for CCA. Yet even though the state Senate approved the $3 million payment to ensure the prison stayed open, CCA decided to close it anyway at the ...

by Christopher Zoukis

Thanks in large part to recent well-publicized incidents involving the National Football League, the impact of brain injuries has become a topic of interest to the general public. When highly-paid professional athletes who participate in contact sports engage in bizarre, criminal or suicidal behavior, people want to know why.

Traditionally, the American public has been less interested in the relationship between brain injuries and crimes that do not involve athletes. However, a growing body of scientific evidence linking brain trauma and criminal behavior is beginning to alter such apathy.

In 2013, Kim Gorgens, a neuropsychologist and clinical associate professor at the University of Denver, began to study possible links between brain injuries and criminal behavior. In collaboration with Judy Dettmer, clinical director of the Colorado Brain Injury Program, and Jennifer Gafford, staff psychologist for the Denver County Sheriff’s Office, Gorgens assessed 80 prisoners at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center in Denver over a two-year period.

The findings from that study were dramatic and have led to much more in-depth research: fully 96 percent of the assessed prisoners were found to have suffered moderate or severe brain trauma. [See: PLN, Nov. 2013, p.18].

Gorgens’ data corresponded with ...

by Christopher Zoukis

Every person accused of a crime has the right to a trial by jury. That right is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and is available to anyone charged with a serious criminal offense.

But the number of jury trials is dwindling, replaced by plea bargains.

 “‘12 Angry Men’ is more a cultural concept than a regular happening,” said Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School, referring to the iconic movie about jury deliberations during a criminal trial.

Evidence of the decline in jury trials abounds. In Wisconsin, 1.09 percent of all criminal cases ended with a trial by jury between 2009 and 2013, according to state data. In Santa Cruz, California, the period of 2007 through 2012 saw less than 2 percent of criminal cases go to trial; in 2011, the county didn’t have a single jury trial in a criminal case.

Former Santa Cruz County Judge Jose Lerma expressed shock over those numbers.

“It’s a startling statistic, yes,” he said. “What the reasons for it are, though, is very difficult to say.”

Cecelia Klingele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School Professor and criminal law expert, believes the decreasing number of jury trials is cause ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The promise of safe, humane and less costly prisons has been used for decades by the private prison industry to sell its products. As prison populations skyrocketed, local, state and federal governments became convinced that financing and building more and more correctional facilities was the way to go. So did investors, who picked up municipal bonds used to finance private prison construction in droves.

But lately the bottom is falling out of the prison and jail bond market.

Almost immediately after the U.S. Department of Justice announced plans to discontinue the use of privately-operated Bureau of Prisons facilities in August 2016, S&P Global Ratings downgraded bonds for several private prisons to below junk status. That meant the ratings giant believed they were essentially worthless, as the debt was likely to go into default.

The now junk-status bonds include those used to finance prisons in Garza, Reeves and Willacy counties in Texas. The Willacy facility, which has over $60 million in bond debt, is currently vacant after a February 2015 riot left it uninhabitable. [See: PLN, Dec. 2016, p.20].

Referring to Willacy County in particular, S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Kate Boatright stated, “the downgrade reflects our view ...

by Christopher Zoukis

The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has dealt a blow to the constitutional rights of imprisoned writers.

On December 11, 2012, after serving a lengthy sentence for arson-related crimes in connection with environmental activism, Daniel McGowan was released to the Brooklyn House Residential Reentry Center (RRC) to serve the remainder of his sentence. While a resident of the RRC, McGowan published an article on the Huffington Post’s website, using his own byline (i.e., name), titled “Court Documents Prove I was Sent to a Communications Management Unit (CMU) for my Political Speech.”

That article, published on April 1, 2013, detailed McGowan’s claim that he was placed in a highly restrictive Communications Management Unit in retaliation for publishing political opinion pieces. When Tracy Rivers, Residential Reentry Manager at the New York Residential Reentry Management Office of the Bureau of Prisons, read the article, she issued McGowan an incident report and ordered him remanded to a federal detention facility.

McGowan then spent 22 hours in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) of the Metropolitan Detention Center. That’s how long it took for the BOP to realize that McGowan had been placed in the SHU for violation of a policy ...

by Christopher Zoukis

As the 31 states that practice capital punishment struggle to find the chemicals necessary to execute condemned prisoners, in at least one state the prisoners themselves are successfully bringing in large quantities of drugs, which they sometimes use to commit suicide – to cheat the metaphorical hangman’s noose.

This is both ironic and troubling.

California’s death row is extremely crowded. There were 749 prisoners on the state’s death row as of March 30, 2017 – almost three times as many as in Texas. The reason for this is simple: Since 1976, Texas has executed 538 prisoners but California has executed just 13.

In fact, California hasn’t put a single prisoner to death in over a decade.

This is partly due to the difficulty that some states are experiencing in obtaining lethal injection drugs. Large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer have begun restricting the sale of chemicals to state agencies that intend to use them for executions; as a result, some states are resorting to shady transactions to obtain the necessary drugs. [See: PLN, March 2014, p.46].

Meanwhile, prisoners on California’s death row, who typically spend decades in isolation, are patronizing the robust illicit drug market in ...