Charles Donelson was a prisoner in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) when he was charged with disciplinary infractions for two incidents involving the same guard. Donelson denied that he had tried to leave his housing unit without permission, failed to follow the guard’s warning and then ...
In February 2014, following a bench trial, U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence K. Karlton found that two California laws created as a result of state ballot initiatives “retrospectively increased punishments, in violation of the ex post facto clause of the U.S. Constitution.” Proposition 9 mandated longer intervals between parole hearings, ...
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-1 decision, left no doubt that it did not believe prosecutors’ assertions that race was not a factor during jury selection in a death penalty case. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in a May 23, 2016 decision, found that prosecutors had ...
Prisoners’ rights advocates know that education is a key element of reducing recidivism, and the federal Bureau of Prisons and most state departments of corrections agree. However, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has had to continue its decade-long oversight of the infamous Rikers Island ...
Tobias Payton, a prisoner at the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, was denied access to a number of adult magazines depicting naked or scantily clad women, and filed suit in federal court alleging violation of his First Amendment rights. Those rights, he argued, included “access to, as well as creation ...
The fact that prosecutors and corrections officials read emails between prisoners and their lawyers comes as no surprise to most defense attorneys, many of whom find it ironic that the very public officials paid to enforce the laws do not hesitate to disregard long-established professional confidentiality standards when it suits ...
A February 2016 study by The Sentencing Project, “U.S. Prison Population Trends 1999-2014: Broad Variation Among States in Recent Years,” found there has been a 2.9% average decline in the number of state prisoners during that period. Over those 15 years, 39 states experienced declines and 11 had increases in ...
Lake County, Illinois Sheriff Mark C. Curran, Jr. demoted a jail supervisor and suspended ten guards over an incident in which a prisoner was paralyzed after an altercation with jailers and later died. Three other guards were fired. Curran took the disciplinary actions after an almost $2 million settlement in ...
Kickstarter and other crowdfunding websites provide an interesting option for prisoners with imagination and originality to explore career-expanding opportunities, raise money and gain access to a commodity often in short supply behind bars – hope.
Basically, crowdfunding involves developing online campaigns for specific projects, charitable causes or services, or to ...
The federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), pilloried by one Congressional study that found it was unable to follow its own compassionate release policy, and by yet another criticizing endemic overcrowding, has again been called to task for failing to release prisoners at the conclusion of their sentences. The Justice Department’s ...
