On November 19, 2024, the Board of County Commissioners of Colorado’s El Paso County approved an agreement with the Estate of Daniel James Murray, a detainee who died at the county jail of untreated alcohol withdrawal in July 2022. Surviving claims against the jail’s contracted medical provider, Wellpath LLC, …
On December 6, 2024, two Nevada prisoners filed notices as interested parties in the religious discrimination case of a third, Said Elmajzoub. By that point, he had won a $95,000 settlement from the state Department of Corrections (DOC), resolving his claims its officials unreasonably refused to accommodate his request …
Los Angeles attorney Aaron Spolin pleaded no contest to misconduct on June 17, 2025, agreeing to be stripped of his law license because he “promoted false hopes in his clients and their families that the clients’ sentences would be reduced when in fact that was highly unlikely.”
As …
On June 2, 2025, the federal court for the Northern District of California issued a consent decree settling demands for injunctive relief filed by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) against California’s Sonoma County over censorship of publications at the Main Adult Detention Facility (MADF) in Santa Rosa. In …
by Chuck Sharman
On June 6, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted two employees of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in Virginia for allegedly showing deliberate indifference to a prisoner suffering a cardiac emergency that killed him in 2021.
Guard Lt. Shronda Covington, 47, and Registered …
by Chuck Sharman
Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University reveal that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to struggle with accurate reporting of the number of migrants it tracks through its Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program. In just one week in …
by Chuck Sharman
A collection of graphic videos reported by the Los Angeles Times on June 24, 2023, pulled back the curtain on rampant violence and chaos inside Los Angeles County jails. The footage, saved on a discarded thumb drive, portrays a shocking lack of supervision …
On June 8, 2023, a judge in Alabama’s Lauderdale County handed a life sentence without parole to a state prisoner for escaping the county lockup with his jail-guard lover, who then committed suicide as pursuing police closed in. Casey White, 39, pleaded guilty to felony escape in a deal …
by Jo Ellen Nott and Chuck Sharman
Long notorious for harsh prison conditions, Alabama’s Department of Corrections (DOC) shows no signs of remediating them despite not one but two suits by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) for violating the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of state prisoners.
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by Chuck Sharman
Thirty years since its last reboot, the troubled U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta has gotten another one, after violence and corruption led the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to transfer most prisoners elsewhere in late 2021. [See: PLN, Jan. 2022, p.22.]
The lockup is …
