by Chuck Sharman
A decade after PLN secured a settlement halting censorship of soft-cover books at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, its nonprofit publisher headed back to court on December 4, 2025, challenging new jail rules that violate the earlier agreement and the …
by Chuck Sharman
On November 10, 2025, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York returned a $112 million verdict in favor of Plaintiffs in a class-action suit accusing the Sheriff of Suffolk County of illegally detaining them in the County jail …
by Chuck Sharman
An executive order (EO) issued by then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D), allowing agents of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into the city’s Rikers Island jail complex, was declared illegal by a state judge on September 8, 2025. The ruling by the state …
by Chuck Sharman
On September 12, 2025, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio returned a verdict awarding $404,000 in damages to state prisoner Tommy Meadows on his claim that he was brutalized at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) near Lucasville in …
by Chuck Sharman
On November 25, 2025, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), nonprofit publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News (CLN), filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, accusing Walla Walla County and Jail Commander Steve Barker of violating its First …
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 …
