Debate is quietly raging within the medical and law enforcement communities about a diagnosis first identified more than 160 years ago which more recently has become associated with the deaths of people in police custody, many of whom were involved in physical altercations with officers or shocked with Tasers …
by David Reutter
An advocacy group composed of architects, building designers and planners is hailing a decision by the National Ethics Council of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to reconsider a proposal to prohibit its members from designing “execution chambers and spaces intended for torture or cruel, …
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that “using a chemical agent in an attempt to wake a sleeping prisoner, without apparent necessity and in the absence of mitigating circumstances, violates clearly established law.” The ruling came in an interlocutory appeal filed by a Michigan prison guard.
Prisoner …
A Kentucky state jury found for the defendants in a lawsuit alleging a jail guard and nurse failed to monitor and treat a pretrial detainee’s serious medical condition, resulting in her death. Recently, however, the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded for a new trial.
Melissa Czaja, 34, …
An Arkansas federal jury awarded $5,000 to a prisoner in an Eighth Amendment failure to treat claim.
While in the Jackson County Jail on a warrant for failure to pay child support, Hubert Wren was bitten by a brown recluse spider. The area around the wound began to …
A private medical vendor’s discontinuation of a pre-trial detainee’s psychotropic medication in the middle of a double-homicide trial was being called government misconduct that merited dismissal of the charges.
Michael John Pierce, 39, suffers from schizophrenia. He was charged in the murders of two people in their Quilcene, …
Official with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) devised a plan in 2006 that aimed to chop the head off of prison gangs. What CDCR did not consider was that the gang leaders it indefinitely isolated on the Short Corridor of the Special Housing Unit (SHU) at …
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) has white racist gangs operating at its highest levels, threatening the lives of deputies who exposed it, and labeling them as “race traitors” and “snitches.” Those claims are included in a federal civil action filed by two LASD deputies.
Michael Rathbun …
The Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) has “a policy of routinely refusing to subtract previously credited good time as well as some previously credited earned time from inmates’ sentences despite the fact that the inmate has earned those credits,” charges a federal civil rights complaint. The suit, which may …
California prison mental health care workers are practicing “defensive medicine” and overmedicating their patients with psychotropic medications. Fear of triggering a lawsuit or federal court order drives the practice, admits a former top prison official.
An Associated Press report found spending on psychotropic drugs in California prisons greatly …
