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 the government to follow to ensure that the incarcerated are not misinformed about their right to the stimulus.
It also forced the IRS to extend its paper-filing deadline to receive stimulus requests, since most people behind bars don’t have access to a computer and can’t take advantage of a later deadline previously granted to online filers. Prisoners and detainees originally had until October 15, 2020 to file by mail but that was extended until October 30. The deadline to file online, using the portal at irs.gov, is November 21.
In her original September 24 order, Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of the 9th Circuit U.S. District Court certified a nationwide class of incarcerated individuals denied federal stimulus checks and granted them a preliminary injunction against the IRS and Treasury, stopping the agencies from blocking such payments and expediting previously denied payments.
Although many federal and state statutes bar current prisoners ...
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 president who has campaigned against illegal immigration and in favor of strict enforcement of immigration laws, the industry clearly wants to maintain its profit stream from facilities holding immigration detainees.
However, whether or not President Donald Trump is reelected, or his Democratic challenger Joe Biden prevails [Editor’s note: This story is being written shortly before the election], the private prison concerns will not likely be going out of business any time soon, for a reason that transcends party politics: There is insufficient space in federal prisons or immigration-holding facilities to house all detainees. There also is no support in Congress for increasing bed space.
In a little-reported development, the Department of Justice quietly transferred the last immigration detainees from its prisons in 2018.
As a result, DOJ and immigration officials were left with no other option but to use private facilities to house them. Both major companies made ...
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 Island, New York, jailed for petit larceny, died in April 2002, because of negligence on the part of jail staff to provide her with the prescription medication needed to control her asthma, and failed to perform CPR on her when she went into respiratory distress.
The December 2019 settlement ended a multiyear legal odyssey, which initially saw the medical providers found guilty of negligence for failure to prescribe needed medication, but also the dismissal of Section 1983 civil rights and negligence claims against other defendants. Luckey’s attorney, Richard Gross of the New York law firm of Rubert & Gross, P.C., appealed, and the court reinstated the dismissed counts, setting the stage for the settlement.
As noted by Prison Legal News in April 2015, the appellate court’s decision found that New York could be held liable for failure “to protect decedent from reasonably foreseeable harm in providing emergency medical assistance once ...
by Derek Gilna
The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), parent company of Prison Legal News, (PLN) and Criminal Legal News (CLN), on September 1, 2020, filed a federal civil rights case alleging violations of its federal civil rights statutes.
HRDC alleged in its complaint that Adams County, Colorado; its sheriff, Richard Reigenborn and the jail chief, Chris Laws, “since June 2019 ... have refused to deliver dozens of HRDC’s mailings to incarcerated persons, directly violating HRDC’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech (and its) Fourteenth Amendment rights to notice and an opportunity to challenge censorship.”
“Although the Jail has an official mail policy in place, its correctional officers arbitrarily enforce that policy,” it further alleged. “HRDC respectfully requests that the Court order the Jail and its employees to cease and desist from continuing their ongoing violation, under color of State law, of HRDC’s rights (and those of its would-be readers) …and to award HRDC damages for the injuries it has sustained as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct.”
PLN noted in its complaint that HRDC “has thousands of subscribers to its monthly magazines in the United States and abroad, including incarcerated persons, attorneys, judges, ...
by Derek Gilna
In a clear victory for prisoners and their families, a federal judge has ordered the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make stimulus payments previously denied to people in prison and jail. Affected individuals must apply no later than October 30, 2020 for ...
by Derek Gilna
Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz has issued a report itemizing the multitude of mistakes and mismanagement that aggravated the troubled agency’s response to the COVID-19 hotspot at the Lompoc, California, federal prison complex.
The 36-page, July 23, 2020 report found that continuing medical staff shortages and failure to follow BOP national guidelines for detection and treatment of COVID-19 put the Lompoc prison complex in a state of crisis, which had been beginning to abate in summer.
After two guards apparently introduced the virus into the prisons in February or March of 2020, it spread rapidly, and at one point over 75% of the prisoners at the FCI were found to be infected. According to a previous story in Prison Legal News [PLN, June 2020, p.32], “Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Lompoc, located in Santa Barbara County, holds 1,162 low-security prisoners, of whom 911 had tested positive for the novel Coronavirus that causes the disease … the highest number of cases in any BOP prison.”As of mid-July, more than 1,000 inmates had tested positive and four had died.
All of this came after March 2020 when Attorney General William Barr directed the BOP ...
by Derek Gilna
In an order entered June 18, 2020, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the federal district court of the District of Columbia entered a preliminary injunction against the district’s Department of Corrections (“DOC”), its Central Detention Facility (“CDF”), and the Correctional Treatment Facility (“CTF”), finding deficiencies in its social-distancing, sick-call procedures and treatment options for COVID-19 cases.
However, the court concluded, “the Court finds that some of the relief requested by Plaintiffs, such as the immediate release of inmates and the appointment of a downsizing expert, is inappropriate at this time on the current factual record.”
The court had initially ordered the jail “to provide a list of the names of the approximately 94 prisoners who had been sentenced to misdemeanors and who could be released; the numbers of people who had been tested for COVID-19 and a break-down of the identities of those individuals ... and the results of those tests; the date on which Defendants began testing people coming into the jails; the number and a breakdown of the results of COVID-19 tests which had been done on those who were incarcerated prior to the date on which Defendants began testing all incoming inmates; (and) all relevant ...
by Derek Gilna
Damage from tornados with winds in excess of 150 miles per hour in April of 2020 forced the immediate transfer of 956 low-security federal prisoners from Estill, South Carolina to the maximum-security U.S. Prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The controversial move by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) was cloaked in secrecy for “security” reasons, but confirmed by correctional officials in Pennsylvania. The move of non-violent prisoners from the relatively safe Estill facility to a United States penitentiary housing more violent offenders did not sit well with prisoners’ family members.
Speaking on condition of anonymity to spare loved ones retaliation from the BOP, the family members were highly critical of the decision, arguing that it put prisoners at risk. Heightening their anxiety was the ever-present risk of COVID-19, which has made all prisoner transfers problematic, and even before the storm, the virus had forced the federal prison system to end all in-person visits. Inquiries to the BOP by family members as to their family member’s whereabouts went unacknowledged and unanswered.
BOP staff was also concerned about the abrupt transfer to a prison that was already short on staff. Union national president Shane Fausey of Employees Council 33 said ...
by Derek Gilna
Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice president, has long touted her law enforcement background in winning election to the offices of district attorney, California attorney general, and U.S. senator. But, serious questions have been raised about an investigation her office launched in 2015 regarding corruption in the Orange County jail.
That investigation quietly ended without any charges filed against law enforcement personnel who perjured themselves and compromised many criminal trials, resulting in numerous retrials and dismissals, as detailed by the Los Angeles Times in a January 20, 2020 story.
“Though the scandal sparked a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and led to retrials for dozens of defendants, including convicted murderers, the unexplained conclusion of the state inquiry has stirred frustration that many key players will escape accountability, the Times said.
The investigation began after a public defender probed the Orange County Sheriff’s Office practice of placing prisoner informants, or “snitches,” in cells with individuals already charged with serious crimes, hoping to elicit an unguarded confession.That violated theirconstitutional right to have an attorney present while being questioned.
Orange County public defender Scott Sanders uncovered this clearly unconstitutional practice as he reviewed discovery records given to him ...
