The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit waded into a contentious debate over religious rights on November 27, 2023, holding that prisoners claiming a violation of those rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 need to show only that their beliefs were burdened. The Court joined the Third, …
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 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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
