by Matt Clarke
On November 22, 2023, the Supreme Court of Ohio reiterated that a prisoner’s “kite”—his communication with staff—is a public record subject to disclosure upon request. Moreover, the Court added, a prisoner may bring a petition for a writ of mandamus to enforce his right to a ...
by Matt Clarke
On November 7, 2023, a Vermont court ruled in favor of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN and Criminal Legal News, in its request for records from Centurion of Vermont related to its contract to provide medical, dental and mental health care to prisoners of the state Department of Corrections (DOC) between 2015 and 2020.
Pursuant to the Vermont Public Records Act (PRA), 1 V.S.A. subchapter 3, HRDC requested that Centurion disclose records related to any legal claims that resulted in expenditures of $1,000 or more. Centurion responded that it was not subject to the PRA. Aided by Burlington attorney Robert Appeal and in-house counsel, HRDC sued Centurion for disclosure.
The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment. Centurion alleged it was not subject to PRA, and if it was, the records were not public records, and, if they were, the records were exempt from disclosure pursuant to 1 V.S.A. § 317(c).
But the Court found controlling the decision in Hum. Rights Def. Ctr. v. Correct Care Sols., LLC, 263 A.3d 1260 (Vt. 2021), agreeing with the nonprofit that Centurion’s contract with DOC made it an “instrumentality” of the state and subject to ...
by Matthew T. Clarke
On December 20, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that an Illinois prisoner’s challenge to civil commitment as a sexually violent person after release cannot be raised under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, unless the underlying civil commitment is first terminated in his favor or shown to be invalid “through another outlet.” The ruling extended application of the principal laid out in Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), that a civil rights challenge to prison disciplinary action is barred whenever a favorable ruling for the prisoner would necessarily imply that it was invalid.
After serving his eight-year Illinois state sentence for sexual assault, Timothy Bell was civilly committed under the state’s Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act (SVPCA), 725 ILCS §§ 207/1 - 207/99. Pursuant to that law, he remained incarcerated in an Illinois prison for another 16 years.
Bell filed a pro se federal civil rights action against state Attorney General Kwame Raouo (D) and the assistant attorney general who conducted his commitment proceedings. Proceeding pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, he challenged his continued incarceration for exceeding an alleged 15-year statutory cap. But during screening pursuant to 28 ...
by Matthew T. Clarke
According to a federal civil rights action filed by Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project attorneys Matthew A. Feldman and Evangeline Wright on November 15, 2023, a Black Jamaican migrant held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the Pike County Correctional Facility (PCCF) was subjected to racial slurs by guards, who choked and pepper- sprayed him while he was strapped into a restraint chair. The infraction that brought down this terrible punishment? Guards said that Damion Davis, 44, used a homemade envelope to send his wife a letter, in violation of jail rules.
Born in Jamaica, Davis came to the U.S. in 1989. Though his father was a naturalized citizen, U.S. law then did not automatically extend derivative U.S. citizenship to Davis. A 2000 change in the law also was not made retroactive. He has thus been detained by ICE for violating immigration law since 2019 and held at PCCF pursuant to ICE’s contract with the county.
On December 2, 2021, Davis wrote his wife a letter, sealed it in a homemade envelope and gave it to a guard to be mailed. The guard told him that homemade envelopes violated jail rules, so Davis would ...
by Matt Clarke
In a settlement agreement effective October 23, 2023, California’sAlameda County agreed to pay $7 million to the estate and progeny of a detainee who died while incarcerated at the county’s jail in Santa Rita. The large settlement amount reflected the egregious neglect that allegedly contributed to the death of Maurice Monk, including a failure to provide the mentally ill detainee with necessary medication and ignoring his obviously deteriorating mental and physical health until he died, while also falsifying wellness checks.
Monk’s corpse was found in his jail cell on November 15, 2021, lying in a puddle of his own urine that had been there for days. The floor of his cell was littered with unopened meal trays and unused cups of medication that guards and medical personnel had left there, allegedly without trying to see if he was in medical distress.
This sad story has even more tragedy at its core because Monk probably should not have been in jail at all. He was arrested the previous month after a verbal altercation with a bus driver who refused to let him board because he was not wearing a face mask, as required by COVID-19 protocols then ...
On October 17, 2023, the estate of a detainee who committed suicide in Florida’s Escambia County Jail accepted $300,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit. Lukas MacKenzie Snelson, 24, was arrested on December 30, 2021, for second degree homicide of his grandmother, Fran Fournier, 75, grand theft of her automobile, and resisting arrest. As he was being booked into the jail, Snelson made suicidal comments. He was given a mental health evaluation and placed under observation in the infirmary for three days, then transferred to a cell.
The next day, Snelson began a suicide attempt by hanging himself from the cell bars with a bedsheet. At the time, guard trainee Gregory Morgan Oglesby and fellow guard Spiros Leonida Mumtzis were working in Snelson’s housing area. They were responsible for making periodic cell checks to determine detainees’ welfare. Despite multiple “checks” that they recorded, though, Snelson was left hanging for more than 40 minutes before he was found and released from his bedsheet ligature. When Emergency Medical Services (EMS) arrived about 15 minutes later, Snelson’s heart had stopped beating. EMS was able to resuscitate him for transport to a hospital, but he died two days later when he was taken ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 28, 2023, the federal court for the Western District of Michigan awarded a state prisoner $16,975.00 in attorney fees and $4,459.91 in costs in a civil rights lawsuit over his sexual abuse by a state Department of Corrections (DOC) guard. The Court had previously awarded $50,000 in compensatory damages to Patrick Grover on June 30, 2023, including $30,000 to reimburse the costs of counseling sessions.
Grover was incarcerated at Oak Correctional Facility in September 2019 when guard Traci Lange (now Perez) began working in his housing unit. She soon approached him and “commented favorably on his physique,” according to the complaint he later filed. She added that “he needed a woman like her and that she could pull strings to get him home.” Grover recalled he was “uncomfortable” with her “interest and tried to distance himself from her.” But she began “blowing him kisses during rounds, and she wrote him letters in which she stated that ‘she wanted to have sex with him.’”
“On a number of occasions,” the complaint recalled, Perez asked him “to show her his private parts,” and she took him to closets and other places off-camera “to have sex with ...
by Matt Clarke
On December 13, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that a group of North Carolina prisoners can be treated like adherents of a religion even if the group denies the “religion” label. The case is one of three in which the state ...
by Matthew T. Clarke
On August 22, 2023, the federal court for the Middle District of Alabama declined to dismiss all but a few claims against officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) that were made by a prisoner who was abducted at knifepoint, repeatedly sexually assaulted and held ...
by Matt Clarke
On October 11, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit determined it was illegal to collect court filing fees from a prisoner denied indigent status to proceed in forma pauperis (IFP) unless he decides to go forward and pay them on his own. Once ...
