by Mark Wilson
Can a prisoner’s mail be rejected without any notice whatsoever? Not without violating his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. That was the decision of a federal court in Alaska on December 14, 2021.
At issue was a discrepancy in the mail policy of the state Department of ...
by Mark Wilson
Months after a government watchdog found wretched conditions at a privately operated New Mexico prison and called on federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to remove its migrant detainees, they remained there, holding a hunger strike in protest in September 2022.
Both ICE officials and the prison’s ...
by Mark Wilson
On June 21, 2022, a preliminary injunction granted by the federal court for the District of Oregon expired, ending its mandate that state prison employees comply with the COVID-19 masking policy of the state Department of Corrections (DOC).
Aaron Hanna, a prisoner at Two Rivers Correctional Institution ...
By Mark Wilson
Prisoners making court challenges to their conditions of confinement must walk a legal tightrope to avoid pitfalls fatal to their claims. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit schooled a North Carolina prisoner in this on January 20, 2022, when it dismissed claims he was ...
by Mark Wilson
There are many ways to destroy a person, but one of the simplest and most devastating is through prolonged solitary confinement. Deprived of meaningful human interaction, otherwise healthy prisoners become unhinged. … Not only psychological or social identity but the most basic sense of identity is threatened ...
by Mark Wilson
On February 10, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed a lower court’s dismissal of two Pennsylvania prisoners’ federal civil rights claims because not all parties had consented to a magistrate judge’s jurisdiction.
In its precedential opinion, the Court said that the Federal ...
by Mark Wilson
Saying that “sometimes information that has entered the public domain may nonetheless fall within the scope of the state secrets privilege,” the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers on March 3, 2022, blocking CIA contractors from testifying about brutal torture that a terror ...
by Mark Wilson
“I feel whole and connected in myself.”
That’s what transgender Idaho prisoner Adree Edmo had to say after receiving gender confirmation surgery (GCS) in July 2020, just under a year after a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cleared the way. Edmo, ...
by Mark Wilson
On July 27, 2021, just 25 days after a federal court in California denied summary judgment to San Mateo County Jail guards on a detainee’s excessive force claims, county officials quickly paid him $55,000 for breaking his arm.
When the detainee, Oscar Tapia-Carmona, was booked into the ...
by Mark Wilson
On March 15, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated a lower court’s order that California prison officials implement a mandatory COVID-19 employee vaccination policy. The Court concluded that prison officials were not deliberately indifferent in not requiring all employees to get vaccinated, ...
