by Douglas Ankney and Anthony W. Accurso
Prisoners have lost two chances to rein in abuses of solitary confinement in the past year, most recently with a toothless advisory from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). That followed a refusal by the ...
by Douglas Ankney
In an April 2024 article, Willamette University Van Winkle Melton Professor of Law Laura I. Appleman traces the profit motive in American criminal punishment from colonial times, aiming to better understand and reform the way private companies exploit prisoners and their families.
Appleman identifies the investors, corporations ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 8, 2023, the Supreme Court of Alaska held that the state Department of Corrections (DOC) violated the rulemaking process laid out in the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) when it unilaterally changed the definition of “firm release date” found in 22 Alaska Administrative Code (AAC) 05.660(a)(18) ...
by Douglas Ankney
When the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) changed its Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in January 2019 to prohibit prisoners from sending money from their trust accounts to private individuals, it didn’t promulgate a new rule under G. L. c. 30A. Prisoners called foul and sued, but a ...
by Douglas Ankney
In federal court for the Southern District of Indiana on April 11, 2024, Clark County officials agreed to pay $328,000 to settle claims filed by 25 former detainees for sexual assault at the county jail in October 2021, during the tenure of former Sheriff Jamey Noel. He ...
by Douglas Ankney
After winning a temporary restraining order (TRO) directing the medical contractor for the Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) to treat his colon disease, state prisoner Arthur Burnham’s location was unknown on September 10, 2024. That was the date when the U.S. District Court for the District of ...
by Douglas Ankney
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against a class of Oregon prisoners suing over the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal court for the District of Oregon dismissed their claims against Gov. Kate Brown (D) on April 10, 2024. But ...
by Douglas Ankney
In a maddeningly byzantine decision on February 21, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed a claim by Massachusetts prisoner Jwainus Perry that his due process rights were violated by state Department of Correction (DOC) officials, who held him in solitary confinement for almost two years in a Special Management Unit (SMU) at the notorious Souza-Baronowski Correctional Center between 2010 and 2012 “without affording him either notice of the factual basis for that confinement or an opportunity for rebuttal.”
Perry filed his claim in April 2014, after which the federal court for the District of Massachusetts granted Defendants summary judgment. A panel of the First Circuit affirmed that decision in 2018, agreeing that they were entitled to qualified immunity (QI) because the law was not clearly established, at the time of the alleged violation, that prolonged SMU confinement was a deprivation of a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause. Four years later, the full Court sitting en banc vacated that decision and granted Perry’s motion for rehearing—only to reach the same conclusion again another two years after that.
Attempting this time to provide a framework for determining when confinement in segregation ...
by Douglas Ankney
In an amended complaint filed in federal court for the Western District of Virginia on January 19, 2024, the former warden of Marion Correctional Treatment Center (MCTC) was added to the list of Defendants being sued by the surviving sister of an intellectually disabled prisoner fatally beaten by guards.
The filing by Kymberly Hobbs came three months after a grand jury refused to indict MCTC guards Joshua Caleb Jackson, William Zachary Montgomery, Samuel Dale Osbourne, Gregory Scott Plummer and Sgt. Anthony Raymond Kelly for killing her brother, Charles James Givens, 52, on February 5, 2022.
Givens was incarcerated for fatally shooting home health nurse Misty Leann Garrett, 22, in 2010. Due to his intellectual disability—he had the mental capacity of a child aged 7 or 8, the result of a childhood tumble down the stairs—he was housed at MCTC with other “prisoners with mental-health issues and/or limited intellectual development,” the complaint continued. He also suffered from Crohn’s disease, one of the “complex medical reasons” that the complaint faults for Givens’ soiling himself.
But Defendant MCTC guards said that he “defecated on himself intentionally,” Hobbs’ complaint recalled; and because of Givens’ “inability to promptly decipher and follow [their] ...
by Douglas Ankney
On February 9, 2024, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals held that even though Henry Neal Ferguson III had been sentenced to life in state prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP), he was entitled to a sentence credit for the time he served in jail before sentencing.
The odd-sounding result—even with credit, Ferguson’s sentence still has no end—sprang from a habeas corpus petition he filed against the state Department of Corrections (DOC) in St. Claire County Circuit Court in February 2023. That recalled the facts of his case, beginning with a May 1993 arrest for first degree assault that landed him in the Talladega County Jail (TCJ). He escaped the following month, and while on the run, a grand jury indicted him in February 1994 for attempted murder. Ferguson was captured and returned to TCJ in June 1994, and two months later he was convicted of attempted murder. The circuit court sentenced him to LWOP as a habitual felon in September 1994.
Ferguson argued in the habeas petition that he was due credit for the time spent in TCJ before sentencing—less those days he was on the run. The circuit court denied his petition, reasoning that ...
