by Douglas Ankney
On September 28, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied the appeal of a federal prisoner in Florida, whose application for compassionate release satisfied the first factor enumerated by statute, saying that one factor carried no more weight than others referenced in ...
by Douglas Ankney
On November 4, 2020, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel C. Hoppe of the Western District of Virginia recommended an award of $5,000 plus costs to prisoner Plaintiff Erin D. Proctor in his claiming former Virginia Department of Corrections (DOC) guard Robert Jefferson abused him and then retaliated against ...
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 furlough status. ...
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 was tried for ...
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 wrongfully denied ...
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, including a brutal ...
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 hearings violated ...
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, 2021.
HRDC, ...
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 injunctions put ...
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 filed suit in ...
