Michael Thomas Anderson, a prisoner at both the Napa County, California, and Siskiyou County, California jails, who had a long history of severe medical and psychological problems, took his own life on April 9, 2009. His heirs filed suit shortly thereafter in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District ...
Illinois’ Cook County Jail is widely considered to be one of the most dangerous correctional facilities in the nation. An antiquated jail lacking many of the updated security features found in other jails, it is riddled with gangs and guards not always concerned about the welfare of their prisoners.
This ...
Advocates of American "Exceptionalism" generally have little explanation for why the United States, with 5% of the world's population, has 20% of its prisoners, or why it lags behind many other countries in properly preparing its prisoners for release, and why it puts so many roadblocks to rehabilitation in their ...
New York immigration attorney Alfred Placeres committed legal malpractice, the New York Court of Appeals, First Department, said in a December 23, 2014 decision, for failure to meet a filing deadline, causing his client Jose Borges to spend additional time in immigration detention. Borges testified that he remained in detention ...
In yet another iteration of a complex litigation spanning over twenty years pitting advocates of prisoner rights in the area of medical treatment of sexual identity disorder (SID) issues, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, in a controversial en banc decision, has reversed the order of a Massachusetts district court ...
A new report issued by Stanford University explores how California Assembly Bill 109 (AB 109), also known as the “realignment bill,” has shifted control of local correction activities to county agencies from the state. Funded by state block grants, the bill was designed in part to relieve serious overcrowding of ...
The University of Cincinnati, Ohio, has agreed to pay the family of decedent Samuel DuBose $4.85 million after one of their police officers, Ray Tensing, shot him in the head during a traffic stop for a missing front license plate, on July 19, 2015. The settlement agreement, entered into on ...
The City of New York, after eleven years of litigation, finally agreed to pay $41 million to settle a case involving the wrongful conviction of five former prisoners who were juveniles at the time of their arrest. One of the men received $12.25 million and each of the other four ...
As indicated by this month’s cover story, violence or the threat of violence has long been part of life for prisoners in Los Angeles County’s jail system. An incident that occurred in August 2008, however, demonstrated that the most significant threat of violence comes from correctional staff. Following a contentious ...
The Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) was the subject of a recent Prison Legal News cover story that detailed prisoner deaths, excessive use of force by guards, and other types of misconduct and corruption. [See: PLN, Feb. 2016, p.1]. The FDOC was also criticized in a recent audit report ...
