By Douglas Ankey
A Vermont prisoner’s valiant effort to hold the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to account died a maddening bureaucratic death in state court on April 4, 2022.
The facts underlying the case began in April 2017, when DOC placed state prisoner Anthony Davey on community-reentry …
By Douglas Ankey
In a decision released on December 1, 2020, the Supreme Court of Connecticut held that a special credibility instruction is required for a jury when hearing testimony from a jailhouse informant regardless of the location where the defendant allegedly confessed.
When Billy Ray Jones …
by Douglas Ankney
Over 42 years after he was sentenced to Life with Possibility of Parole (LWPP), a pro se Hawaii prisoner took a step closer to the promise contained in his sentence on October 22, 2021, when the state Supreme Court reinstated his claim that he was …
by Doug Ankney
In an opinion issued on October 7, 2021, the Supreme Court of Washington ruled that holding wheelchair-bound prisoner Robert Rufus Williams in a cell that lacked a sink or toilet violated the Washington State Constitution.
The now-79-year old Williams was convicted of multiple offenses, …
by Douglas Ankney
On September 22, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a pro se prisoner’s 42 U.S.C. § 1983 complaint, after determining he had presented a plausible claim that retroactive application of amended guidelines to his parole …
by Douglas Ankney
A suit brought by the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) alleging a price-fixing and kickback scheme by prison telephone service providers Global Tel*Link Corp. (now known as ViaPath), Securus Technologies, LLC, and 3Cinteractive Corp. (3Ci), survived a motion to dismiss by Defendants on September 30, …
by Douglas Ankney
On October 20, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s injunction ordering system-wide relief to protect detainees held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from COVID-19. In so doing the Court continued a trend of reversing protective …
by Douglas Ankney
In August 2021, the Arizona State Bar disciplined a former state Assistant Attorney General, Michael John Hrnicek, for his misconduct while opposing a prisoner’s lawsuit against several employees of the state Department of Corrections (DOC).
The prisoner, Tyson McDaniel, is a practicing Muslim who …
by Douglas Ankney
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that an illegal mandatory sentence of life without parole (“LWOP”) imposed upon a juvenile undermined the validity of a later conviction for assault by a life prisoner predicated on the LWOP.
In 1970, James Henry Cobbs was 17 …
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with Plaintiff Craig Shipp that a district court erred when it failed to rely on federal law in determining the admissibility of the testimony of Shipp’s expert, but in this case the error was harmless.
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