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 ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 28, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a report finding that conditions at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF), South Mississippi Correctional Institution (SMCI) and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility (WCCF) violate prisoners’ Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The report required Mississippi officials to correct the unconstitutional conditions or face a federal lawsuit.
DOJ began an investigation in February 2020 at the three prisons, as well as Mississippi State Prison in Parchman. An April 2022 report declared that conditions found at the latter violated the Constitution, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.34.] In its most recent report, DOJ said that “[m]any of the conditions we found at Parchman” exist at CMCF, SMCI and WCCF.
The state Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to protect prisoners from violence at all three prisons, the report declared. CMCF and SMCI are DOC’s largest prisons, holding up to 4,000 and 2,882 prisoners, respectively. WCCF, which is privately managed for DOC by Utah-­based Management and Training Corporation (MTC), holds another 949. Together, the three prisons house one-­third of DOC’s prisoner population.
According to DOJ, each prison is “riddled with violence.” But“[g]ross understaffing, poor supervision, and inadequate investigations” also ...

by David M. Reutter
When Sheriff Scott Childers lost his reelection bid in Missouri’s Ray County on August 6, 2024, he had already been out of office for five months. That’s because the county court issued a Preliminary Order in Quo Warranto removing him from office on March 6, 2024. The unusual order came in response to a petition filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R).
The removal petition alleged that Childers administered a work program at the county jail using detainees to labor on his own properties and those belonging to friends—including contributors to his political campaigns for Sheriff. It was further alleged that he left these detainees unsupervised and even allowed some conjugal visits, as well as car trips to shop at local stores, after which drugs, alcohol and cellphones flowed in and out of the jail.
The petition recalled that Childers was warned by judicial and elected officials that his program was illegal. But the warnings had no impact as Childers allegedly continued to release detainees for personally enriching work and even boasted about the program on social media.
In granting the petition, the Court “immediately enjoined” Childers from “engaging in any activity, or exercising any ...

by David M. Reutter
On March 26, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed a district court’s award of more than $578,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs made as part of a $60,000 offer of judgment to settle an excessive force claim by Kansas prisoner Samuel Lee Dartez, II. The appeal required the Court to decide how an offer of judgment affects statutory provisions allowing and limiting a fee award.
Dartez sued 15 Kansas Highway Patrol (KHP) officers in November 2015, alleging they used excessive force after his arrest one year earlier. To settle, KHP made a $60,000 offer of judgment to Dartez “plus reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs allowed by law, if any.” Because Dartez was incarcerated by the time he sued, his complaint was subject to the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1997e—a statute that limits recovery of legal fees and costs. But the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas assumed the offer of judgment trumped the statutes, and it awarded Dartez $576,242.28 in attorneys’ fees and costs. Defendants appealed.
The Tenth Circuit began by first rejecting Defendants’ “perfunctory” argument that Dartez was not entitled to an award of attorneys’ fees ...

by David M. Reutter
On March 21, 2024, the Nevada Board of Examiners (BOE)—a three-­member panel composed of Gov. Joe Lombardo (R), Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) and Secretary of State Francisco “Cisco” Aguilar (D)—approved a $3.4 million settlement to resolve a state prisoner’s civil rights action accusing state Department of Corrections (DOC) officials of violating the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment with denial and delay of medical care.
After arriving at Southern Desert Correctional Center (SDCC) in late 2002, 60-­year-­old Lewis Stewart began to feel “discomfort in his lower abdominal and back area,” according to the complaint he later filed. Repeatedly filing medical care requests, he was finally seen by prison healthcare providers, including Dr. Romeo Aranas and Dr. Francisco Sanchez.
As PLN reported, Stewart complained of problems urinating, indicating possible prostate problems; he “had to sit on the toilet to urinate,” he said, and his “short and irregular urine flows were very painful.” Aranas and Sanchez took his vitals and prodded the affected areas. But they examined him no further, administering only generic pain medication. For over a decade, that was all the treatment Stewart got—even as he passed 70 and began experiencing inflammation in ...

by David M. Reutter
A $2,000 award of statutory damages by the Supreme Court of Ohio on March 31, 2024, brought the total recovered by Trumball Correctional Institution (TCI) prisoner Kimani Ware for denied public records to at least $9,025. As PLN reported, Ware’s previous trip to the Court was unsuccessful, but in prior mandamus actions for denied public records—all proceeding pro se—the prisoner collected over $7,025. [See: PLN, July 18, 2024, online].
In this case, the Court found two violations of the state Public Records Act (PRA), R.C. 149.43. It declined to find any violation in four other requests that were denied. Ware submitted all six requests to TCI officials between May 29, 2021, and June 23, 2022, seeking records relating to (a) the number of prisoners infected by COVID-19 and (b) visitor policy during the pandemic, as well as (c) a legal mail log, (d) Ware’s master and disciplinary files, (e) an informational handbook on religions and (f) a list of canteen items that increased in price.
When he didn’t get any of the records, Ware filed a mandamus petition. Prison officials moved to dismiss it, arguing that he failed to notify them that the requests were being made ...

by David Reutter
As resources are stretched by millions of people released annually from U.S. prisons and jails, advocates struggle to obtain accurate information about the scope of the need. The nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) responded with a report on February 29, 2024, finding that a significant percentage of those released are women.
PPI used data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to create estimates of releases by sex. BJS’s most recent Annual Survey of Jails from 2022 does not break down releases by state; that is done by the less frequent Census of Jails, the most recent from 2019
But data on releases by sex or gender identity is important because “the mass incarceration of women has been overlooked” despite growing twice as fast as men’s incarceration, PPI said. Since over half of incarcerated women are mothers, and women are more likely their children’s primary caregivers, “entire families are harmed when a woman is put in prison or jail.”
Using BJS data, PPI was able to create “rough estimates” of prison releases by sex in 2022: About 51,228 from women’s state prisons, plus another 3,951 from federal prisons for women. On top of that, PPI estimated ...

by David Reutter

A report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on February 6, 2024, found that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was holding about 8% of its population—nearly 12,000 prisoners—in Special Housing Units (SHUs), the agency’s polite term for solitary confinement. In SHU, prisoners are isolated ...