A pair of former Illinois prisoners, each exonerated after spending 23 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit, accepted a total of $14.5 million in settlements from the City of Rockford, which voted in April 2025 to issue bonds to cover the debt.
Both Patrick Pursley, …
A young dad detoxing from fentanyl when he was booked into a Washington jail began exhibiting increasingly bizarre behavior, yet he was ignored until he climbed atop a metal sink and dived head-first onto the concrete floor, suffering a fatal spinal injury. That was the allegation made against staff …
A group of cases pending in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia paint a picture of senseless violence and petty retaliation by officials with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the U.S. Penitentiary-Lee near rural Pennington Gap.
At this same prison in 2023, …
The federal court for the Northern District of Alabama issued an order on May 16, 2025, demanding that attorneys representing the state Department of Corrections (DOC) show cause why they should not be sanctioned for filing error-riddled briefs apparently written by an artificial intelligence (AI) software program.
AI …
On March 25, 2025, the federal court for the Northern District of New York granted dismissal to a suit filed by former state prisoner Matthew Raymond, after he accepted a $1.2 million settlement from the state Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) for an alleged violent assault by …
On September 13, 2024, nearly five years after a detainee died of untreated heroin withdrawal symptoms at San Diego County’s Las Colinas Detention Facility, a $15 million settlement agreement resolving a lawsuit brought by her estate was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. …
Under an agreement reached on May 21, 2025, Massachusetts will pay $6.75 million to settle claims by a group of some 150 current and former state prisoners who accused guards at Souza-Baronowski Correctional Center (SBCC) of carrying out a systematic campaign of retaliatory beatings, following a disturbance in early …
On September 19, 2024, Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Mary Kathlin Sickel put the final signature on an agreement paying $325,000 to former state prisoner Darnell Price, settling his claims that a state Department of Corrections (DOC) physician ignored a mass on his leg which later proved to be cancerous. …
When the Texas legislature adjourned its annual session on June 2, 2025, lawmakers had taken some steps to restrict bail and successfully fought back an effort to expand parole. Most other jail and prison reforms—including a bill to air-condition the state’s miserably hot lockups—were left on the table, too. …
Since the passage almost 30 years ago of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, prisoners have been required prior to filing suit against their captors to exhaust all available administrative remedies, usually through the prison grievance system. A body of case law has since arisen …
