by Chuck Sharman
In a decision reached on April 7, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit clarified the boundaries of qualified immunity (QI) for a Michigan jailer accused of retaliatory assault on a compliant prisoner and deliberate indifference to his resulting injuries. The Court …
by Chuck Sharman
For letting a detainee’s infected leg go untreated so long that it had to be amputated, a federal jury assigned liability to NaphCare, Inc., the contracted healthcare provider at Washington’s Pierce County Jail in Tacoma, returning a massive $25 million verdict on Javier Tapia’s civil …
by Chuck Sharman
A wild day unfolded in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on November 13, 2025, as the attorney for the last of 16 defendants awaiting sentencing in a massive Aryan Brotherhood (AB) conspiracy noted that he spent nearly 18 months unknowingly …
by Chuck Sharman
A $2.75 million settlement will help the surviving children of a detainee left to decompensate from her mental illness for seven and a half months before she died in Washington’s Clark County Jail in Vancouver. That was the result of an agreement reached in July …
by Chuck Sharman
Ramsey Kettle, now 34, is a member of the White Earth Nation with a diagnosed serious mental illness (SMI). Yet when he arrived at Minnesota’s Otter Tail County Jail in February 2024, he was immediately thrown in disciplinary segregation, without a mental health assessment or …
by Chuck Sharman
On July 29, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada granted dismissal to a suit filed by state prisoner Thomas Burdsal, 62, after he agreed to accept a $4,652 payment from the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to settle claims that he …
by Chuck Sharman
With a change announced by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) on October 20, 2025, federal prisoners should finally begin to see more concrete results from the First Step Act (FSA), the 2018 law passed to reduce prison overcrowding by rewarding prisoners for participation in …
by Chuck Sharman
The Chicago City Council voted on January 15, 2025, to pay $7.5 million to Clarissa Glenn and her husband, Ben Baker, who spent 10 years in state prison on drug convictions obtained with planted evidence. Former Chicago Police Department (CPD) Sgt. Ronald Watts was the …
by Chuck Sharman
Meeting at the courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the Luzerne County Council approved three settlements in November 2024, totaling $645,330 in payouts on behalf of three former detainees at the Luzerne County Prison—two of whom committed suicides that jailers allegedly failed to prevent. That was on …
by Chuck Sharman
In a report compiled on November 25, 2025, the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) broke down the impact of prison “gerrymandering” in 14 of the 33 states that have so far failed to halt the federal Census Bureau’s practice of counting prisoners as residents of …
