by Chuck Sharman
On September 23, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California entered final judgment that sustained a $3.3 million verdict for Jay Campos, whose son, Joshua, died of a fentanyl overdose three days after booking into the Orange County jail system.
…
by Chuck Sharman
On October 29, 2025, the City of New York authorized three payouts totaling $4 million to Terrence Rodgers, 32, a former detainee in the City’s Rikers Island jail complex, completing a trio of settlement agreements he reached the month before in suits filed over rapes …
by Chuck Sharman
A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia awarded $600,000 in compensatory damages on December 4, 2025, to a former pretrial detainee at the County jail who was punished with placement in a restraint chair and then a suicide-watch cell …
by Chuck Sharman
A prison case filed in Louisiana by the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) has languished since new leadership was appointed in January 2025 by Pres. Donald J. Trump (R). Filed by the DOJ just before Trump took office, the case sought to hold the state …
by Chuck Sharman
In one of the largest verdicts ever returned in a suit over an American jail death, a federal jury in Louisiana awarded $42.75 million on October 20, 2025, to the Estate of Erie Moore, Sr., who died almost 10 years earlier while detained at …
by Chuck Sharman
A 50-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California on October 30, 2025, seeks “some measure of justice” for the prisoner who filed it, identified in the complaint as “J.M.” and in the accompanying claim under the Federal Tort …
by Chuck Sharman
Under terms of a settlement reached on October 15, 2025, Washington’s Pend Orielle County agreed to pay $1.9 million to the Estate of Jacob Mitchell, a detainee who died at the County jail in 2023 of complications from untreated diabetes. The County also agreed …
by Chuck Sharman
On May 22, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit refused a request by officials with the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC) for a rehearing before the full Court en banc of their challenge to a ruling, which came down in …
by Chuck Sharman
The Board of County Commissioners of Ohio’s Montgomery voted on September 30, 2025, to pay $7 million to the Estate of Christian Black, who died at the county jail the previous March after being violently extracted from his cell and placed in a restraint …
by Chuck Sharman
In an ruling on August 25, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia found officials with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) in contempt of an injunction issued three months earlier, when a state prisoner’s request was …
