by Derek Gilna
Salt Lake County, Utah settled in March of 2020 a wrongful-death lawsuit stemming from the in-custody death in 2016 of Lisa Marie Ostler, who died when jail officials ignored her symptoms of serious Crohn’s disease.
The settlement concluded a federal civil rights lawsuit, which had alleged that, ...
by Derek Gilna
A federal class action lawsuit filed in December of 2017 alleging numerous humanitarian violations at Santa Barbara County Adult Detention Facilities (County Jail) settled on July 17, 2020. Both parties hope that it will bring an end to substandard medical, mental health treatment, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions ...
by Derek Gilna
Three Montana counties agreed on November 26, 2019, to pay $6 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit that accused their county sheriffs and employees of egregious civil rights violations that led to an innocent man serving 23 years in prison, and permitted the killer to ...
by Derek Gilna
The administrator of the estate of the late James J. “Whitey” Bulger, Jr. filed suit on October 30, 2020, in federal district court in West Virginia, alleging that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and a number of its employees were negligent in failing to protect Bulger ...
by Derek Gilna
On October 22, 2020, New Jersey federal district court Judge William J. Martini ended a seven-year class action brought by New Jersey Department of Correction (DOC) prisoners complaining of excessive phone fees levied by Global Tel*Link (GTL), approving a settlement fund of $25 million. Prisoners had alleged ...
by Derek Gilna
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of a Texas’ federal judge’s injunction compelling the Texas Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies to prisoners at the Wallace Pack Unit, a state prison with hundreds of geriatric prisoners infected with COVID-19. ...
by Derek Gilna
COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in jails and prisons across the county. The number of virus-related prisoner deaths reached 1,453 on November 17, 2020. This number exceeds the 1,406 prisoner executions in death penalty cases from 1990 to the present.
There the comparison ends. While executions come ...
by Derek Gilna
In a clear victory for prisoners and their families, a federal judge recently ordered the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make federal stimulus payments previously denied to people in prison and jail.
The same court has also laid out detailed guidelines for ...
by Derek Gilna
The volatile 2020 presidential election campaign led private prison operators, dominated by CoreCivic and GEO Group, to open their wallets, with a vast percentage of their approximately $2 million in combined contributions going to the Republicans, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.
With a sitting ...
by Derek Gilna
A wrongful death action filed by the decedent’s estate of a Rikers Island prisoner against the City of New York, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp., Prison Health Services, and individual prison guard defendants, has settled for $5.5 million.
Eva Luckey, a prisoner at Rikers ...
