by David M. Reutter
A federal district court in Indiana awarded $21,525 to a prisoner on May 30, 2021, after granting partial summary judgment in a civil rights action he filed alleging battery by a guard at the state’s Pendleton Correctional Facility.
The lawsuit was filed pro se in U.S. ...
by David M. Reutter
After guards at the Lake County Jail (LCJ) in Illinois were sued for using excessive force by tasering an unresisting prisoner, the parties reached a settlement for $90,000 on June 30, 2021.
The prisoner, Christopher Davis, was held at LCJ while awaiting sentencing and housed in ...
by David M. Reutter
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held on August 24, 2021, that two Michigan prison employees were not entitled to qualified immunity in a lawsuit alleging they were deliberately indifferent to a prisoner’s safety.
The case involved an October 15, 2015, incident in ...
by David M. Reutter
A Bloomberg Equality report published on January 11, 2022, gave little hope that the omicron variant behind a resurgence in the COVID-19 pandemic would spare immigrant detainees held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with 1,254 people in isolation out of 22,142 in custody, a ...
Company Walks From Similar Case in Maine
by David M. Reutter
In November 2021, a year after a federal district court in California approved a $900,000 settlement in a class-action lawsuit alleging Securus Technologies, Inc. unlawfully recorded privileged calls between detainees and attorneys, the prison phone giant was still fighting ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 8, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused a request to rehear en banc a decision by a three-judge panel of the Court that three months earlier affirmed a grant of qualified immunity to a guard who monitored phone calls ...
by David M. Reutter
On June 9, 2021, the California Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to a decision handed down by the state’s First District Court of Appeal on March 29, 2021, reinstating most charges that a trial court had dismissed against four prisoners involved in a riot ...
by David M. Reutter
In a ruling on March 30, 2021, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that prison officials were entitled to qualified immunity because it was not clearly established that a prisoner had a right to fair notice of a security detention hearing.
The Court’s opinion was ...
by David M. Reutter
A California federal court approved a $150,000 settlement on October 13, 2021, for the estate of a prisoner who died of valley fever at the Merced County Jail.
The prisoner, 29-year-old Luis Patino, was booked into the county’s main jail on June 24, 2017, dutifully reporting ...
by David M Reutter
On October 20, 2020, a federal judge in New York refused to overturn a $650,000 award made by a jury earlier that year to a state prisoner on his excessive-use-of-force claim.
The action took place in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ...
