by Douglas Ankney
On November 29, 2023, the Big Sandy Regional Detention Center in Eastern Kentucky settled a complaint brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with an agreement to provide medication to prisoners suffering with opioid use disorder (OUD).
According to the agreement, DOJ received a complaint from a medical provider that the Jail refused to provide buprenorphine to a patient identified as “J.F.”—despite the detainee’s medical prescription for the drug. DOJ substantiated allegations that the Jail effectively banned medication for OUD, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 § 12101 et seq.
That law prohibits disability-based discrimination by any “public entity”—including denial of “services provided in connection with drug rehabilitation.” OUD is considered a disability because those who suffer with it “have drug addiction—a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of their major life activities,” as defined in 28 C.F.R. § 35.108. Methadone, naltrexone and buprenorphine are medications approved to treat OUD by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Rather than litigate the matter, the Jail agreed not to “change or discontinue” any detainee’s use of a medication for OUD without “an individualized determination by a qualified medical ...
by Douglas Ankney
When a jail is found to violate a detainee’s Sixth Amendment expectation that communications with his attorney are privileged, courts often shrug it off as harmless; after all, the detainee won’t raise the objection unless what was discussed could undermine his defense, and in that case courts are loathe to let the guilty go free.
But a nation of laws must abide by all of them, no matter the result. So it was a welcome surprise when the Supreme Court of Nevada on March 7, 2024, refused to take the easy way out and agree with a lower court that a detainee who violated jail phone policy to make a legal call had waived attorney-client privilege for it.
The Court’s ruling came in an appeal by former Clark County Detention Center detainee Jamal Jacqkey Gibbs. In April 2021, he was 29 and at the Las Vegas apartment of his girlfriend when her daughter returned from a visit with the child’s father, Jaylon Tiffith, 29. The mother then got in a fight with Tiffith’s new girlfriend, who was also not named. Both Tiffith and Gibbs—recently released from state prison after completing a 10-year term for a 2008 gang ...
by Douglas Ankney
On June 28, 2024, former District of Columbia (D.C.) Department of Corrections (DOC) guard Marcus Bias, 28, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison and 24 months of supervised release for assaulting a handcuffed prisoner. The sentence follows his guilty plea in March 2024 to one count of deprivation of rights under color of law.
Surveillance video captured the entire incident, which unfolded at the D.C. Jail on June 12, 2019. It began when a prisoner identified as “J.W.” refused a guard’s order to return to his cell from the dining hall and began using a phone there instead. Bias, who was then 23 and had been on the job 18 months, arrived with other members of an Emergency Response Team, pepper-spraying and handcuffing the prisoner. That’s when Bias “intentionally and without provocation” pushed him head-first into a metal doorframe, “causing serious injuries” that required hospital treatment, court documents recalled.
DOC fired Bias after reviewing the video. But he wasn’t charged and arrested until November 2022. Pastor Cheryl Mitchell Gaines wrote the federal court for the District of Columbia that her parishioner “was the youngest one there … and now he’s the fall guy.”
But D.C.’s ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 29, 2023, New York state prisoners Eugene Taylor, 32, and Charles Wright, 44, filed separate lawsuits alleging that guards with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) beat and waterboarded them two months before.
According to Taylor’s complaint, he was incarcerated at Green ...
by Douglas Ankney
A November 2023 report by the New York Office of the Inspector General (OIG) detailed grave defects uncovered by an investigation into the Contraband Drug Testing Program of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). That led to another round of expungements of disciplinary actions ...
by Douglas Ankney
On November 2, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, does not require a group of Arkansas prisoners to show perfect adherence to allegedly burdened beliefs in order to demonstrate ...
by Douglas Ankney
In an important decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on December 8, 2023, that pretrial detainees no longer need show that a detention official “knew of and disregarded a substantial risk to the inmate’s health or safety” to state a claim of ...
by Douglas Ankney
After a federal court found its provision of healthcare and mental health care to all state prisoners was “plainly, grossly inadequate,” Arizona settled a suit over one prisoner’s suicide on November 11, 2023. In the agreement, the state promised to pay $40,000 to Julie Georgatos to settle ...
by Douglas Ankney
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held on November 15, 2023, that a lower court erred in assuming that a group of Virginia prisoners proceeded in forma pauperis (IFP) when they sued federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Daniel I. Werfel for COVID-19 stimulus ...
by Douglas Ankney
Of the many hurdles prisoners and jail detainees face, the statute of limitations for a civil rights claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is among the first. Now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has made it even harder to clear, with a decision on ...
