by David M. Reutter

Jails face a monumental task in the provision of medical care. Those who’ve just been arrested are often experiencing withdrawal from drugs or alcohol. Other pre-existing medical conditions are routine and routinely severe. Then there are the mentally ill, who land in jail because communities lack resources to treat their conditions—even though jails and guards also lack training and expertise to provide adequate care. Into the breach step privately contracted providers, promising to fill the need. But their results belie that promise, demonstrating only that profit comes before service.

How else to explain the marketing materials distributed to prospective customers by jail healthcare contractor Turn Key Health Clinics LLC? In those, the firm bragged that after taking over healthcare at Oklahoma’s Tulsa County Jail in 2016, emergency transfers to hospitals fell by an eyepopping 77% in just a few months. The number of days detainees spent hospitalized also cratered by 35%. Did they suddenly get healthier? Or were they simply denied care?

The answer seems obvious, yet jails continue to turn to private providers like Turn Key. For one, it comes with a staff of credentialed personnel already employed, so sheriffs don’t have to vet and ...

On February 13, 2024, the Third Judicial Circuit Court in and for Salt Lake County, Utah, ordered an examination to determine if death row prisoner Ralph Leroy Menzies, 65, is competent to be executed. Menzies’ attorneys argued that he suffers from dementia.
After Maurine Hunsaker’s body was found tied to a tree in Big Cottonwood Canyon in 1986, Menzies was convicted two years later of kidnapping her from a convenience store and murdering her. Fast-forward 36 years, and as his execution neared, Menzies’ attorneys filed a petition that included a written evaluation from Dr. Lynette M. Abrams-Silva, who opined “that Menzies suffers from vascular dementia and lacks the ability to form a rational understanding of the reasons why the State seeks to execute him,” as the Court recalled. Though prosecutors disagreed that Menzies is incompetent to be executed, they did not object to “further inquiry into Menzies’ mental health” in order to develop “a complete and accurate record, analysis, and determination” of his competency for execution.
Accordingly, the Court stayed proceedings leading to the execution, cancelled a hearing on the State’s application for an execution warrant that was scheduled for February 23, 2024, and also appointed two independent examiners to ...

On February 12, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri denied a motion to dismiss a prisoner’s pro se lawsuit by Defendant officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC), who argued that he failed to exhaust administrative remedies as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. The Court ruled that DOC officials failed to prove that Moreno Salinas’ delay in completing the grievance process at Southeast Correctional Center (SECC) was his fault and not their own.
While imprisoned at SECC on January 28, 2021, Salinas alleged in his 42 U.S.C. § 1983 complaint, he was subjected to excessive force by guards Lt. Stephan V. Clark, Cole Hansens, Johnny Clubbs, Vanissa Lemons, Darrel Wilson, Tyler Womach and Jerry Walls, in violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. During the PLRA screening process, the Court found that Salinas stated a plausible excessive force claim against the seven guards, plus a plausible failure to intervene claim against another guard named Rangdale and DOC Case Manager Brandi Merideth. Though the Court did not mention her by name, claims against Darcie Bolin, another Defendant DOC case manager, also survived.
After Salinas filed an ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 1, 2024, an agreement was filed in the federal court for the District of Colorado by the state Department of Corrections (DOC), promising to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it failed to protect prisoner John Standley Snorsky from assault by gang members. The settlement followed a Court order that Snorsky be placed in protective custody (PC).
As PLN reported, Snorsky reported that he was in fear for his life due to custody issues with other prisoners when he was transferred to Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) in October 2016. The reason, as he informed prison officials, was that he had agreed to provide witness testimony at the trial of another CSP prisoner, Chad Wesley Merrill, for the fatal 2015 stabbing of Joshua Edmonds at Limon Correctional Facility, where all three were then held.
Because of publicity in that case, Snorsky argued that he was a well-­known “snitch” and easily recognizable to violent prison gangs who targeted him. However, his request for PC placement was denied. Instead, he landed in the same unit with Merrill, who dutifully spread the word that Snorsky was a witness against him. Merrill recruited three more prisoners to ...

On March 14, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a district court erred in dismissing a New York prisoner’s civil rights action for violating the “three strikes” provision of the Prison Litigation and Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. The Court’s opinion is enlightening in several aspects, including whether claims barred under Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), count as “strikes.”
New York prisoner Maurice Cotton filed at least nineteen different lawsuits during his incarceration and leading up to the filing of the case under review. Cotton, a prisoner at Green Haven Correctional Facility, filed a lawsuit on December 6, 2018, that alleged he was wrongfully denied a transfer to Sing Sing Correctional Facility where he could earn a master’s degree at one of the college programs offered there. Cotton further alleged he was retaliated against for filing grievances related to the matter.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York reviewed Cotton’s motion to proceed in forma pauperis (IFP). Under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g), as amended by PLRA, IFP status is unavailable to any plaintiff with three previous federal actions that were dismissed as frivolous or malicious or for failure ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 6, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to pay $700,000 to settle a Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) complaint in the death of a prisoner held by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Coleman, Florida. Following that, Robert Conyers, Jr., father of Davon Gillians, dropped an appeal he had filed to dismissal of a separate federal civil rights suit filed against the prison’s warden and six guards, alleging that Gillians died due to use of excessive force.
Gillians, 22, had less than a year left on a 46-­month sentence—for a 2018 conviction in South Carolina for being a felon in possession of a gun—when two BOP guards named Ayers and Morey handcuffed the prisoner behind his back and removed him from his cell on May 16, 2021. Though Gillians offered no resistance, Ayers allegedly punched and choked him into brief unconsciousness. The guards then forcibly picked Gillians off the floor, moved him to a solitary confinement cell and strapped him into a restraint chair.
There he remained for “24-­28 hours,” according to the complaint his dad later filed, “without being provided food, water, or medication” for ...

by David M. Reutter
A report issued by the federal Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on February 15, 2024, identified “operational and managerial deficiencies” in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) which “created unsafe conditions” blamed for many of 344 prisoner deaths that BOP tallied from 2014 through 2021. Suicides accounted for just over half of those.
BOP came under scrutiny for the most high-­profile deaths: The 2018 murder of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger at the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Hazelton, West Virginia; the 2019 suicide of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan; and a string of homicides at USP Thomson in Illinois. Spurred by concerns from Congress and advocacy groups, OIG initiated its investigation.
What it found were 187 deaths by suicide, 89 homicides, 56 called accidental and the other 12 attributed to unknown factors. The majority of those who died were White (242), with 224 of all deaths occurring at medium or high security prisons. Of the homicides, 54 occurred in general population and 59 in high security level prisons. The suicide rate in general population (100) was higher than the rate in restrictive housing units (86), but ...

by David M. Reutter
On March 28, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California largely denied a motion to dismiss a civil rights action filed by the surviving mother of a murdered state prisoner whose corpse was photographed by a guard and posted online. The complaint accused Sgt. Joseph Burnes and other state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) guards of snapping pictures of Luis Romero’s remains and posting them on the internet.
Romero was brutally murdered at Corcoran State Prison on March 9, 2019, by cellmate Jaime Osuna. After killing him, Osuna used “what appeared to be a razor wrapped in string to remove Romero’s right ear,” according to the complaint filed by the dead man’s mother, Dora Solares. But that was only the beginning of the heinous mutilation of her son’s corpse. As the complaint continued, Osuna “forcibly detached his eyes, removed portions of his ribs and lungs, and decapitated him,” before he finally “used Romero’s blood to write ‘hahahahaha’ on the walls.” When guards found him, Osuna was “wearing a necklace made of Romero’s body parts.”
Immediately after the murder was discovered, Burnes and other guards allegedly took unauthorized pictures of the scene ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 28, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed a 46-­month sentence handed to former Kay Correctional Detention Center (KCDC) guard Matthew Ware for depriving detainees of their civil rights when he subjected them to cruel brutality at the Oklahoma lockup.
As PLN reported, Ware, 55, was sentenced in February 2023 after a jury in federal court for the Western District of Oklahoma found him guilty in April 2022 on three counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, which had been handed down in his November 2021 indictment. [See: PLN, Feb. 2023, p.55.]
His conviction on the first two counts stemmed from an incident on May 18, 2017, when Ware, then a KCDC Lieutenant, ordered subordinate guards to move pretrial detainees D’Angelo Wilson and Marcus Miller to an area of the jail housing avowed white supremacist detainees. Both Wilson and Miller are Black, and Ware knew the move placed them in danger of assault. Worse, over those guards’ protests, he then ordered them to open the doors of all detainees in the cell block. White supremacist detainees rushed into Wilson and Miller’s cell and attacked them. Wilson required seven ...

by David M. Reutter
A suit filed by a Texas prisoner alleging that stifling heat in his cell threatens his life was allowed to proceed against Defendant officials with the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) on June 14, 2024, when the federal court for the Western District of Texas denied their motion to dismiss Bernie Tiede’s complaint.
Tiede, 65, suffers from diabetes and hypertension, serious medical conditions which, combined with the heat inside his Estelle Unit cell, caused him to suffer something like a ministroke, he claimed. Of Texas’ 100 state prisons, only about 30% are fully air conditioned. The remainder have partial or no air conditioning, leaving indoor temperatures to climb dangerously high—often exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, advocates say.
Those from four advocacy groups—Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, Inc., Coalition for Texans with Disabilities, Inc., Texas Prisons Community Advocates, and Build Up, Inc.—joined Tiede in filing his amended complaint on May 7, 2024, seeking an injunction to force TDCJ Director Brian Collier to remedy the excessive heat conditions. The suit alleges that environmental conditions in Texas prisons without air conditioning violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
At issue for the Court in ...