In a class action § 1983 suit brought by pre-arraignment jail detainees, a divided Ninth Circuit panel held that San Francisco’s blanket policy of strip searching all arrestees classified for the jail’s general population, in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion, violated the arrestees’ clearly established constitutional rights and that ...
by Mike Brodheim
Judging by the statistics, Reginald Powell, 54, may be the proverbial exception to the rule – the rule, in this case, being that convicted murderers who are granted parole only rarely re-offend.
In 1984, Powell was convicted of the shooting death of New York cabbie Joseph Accordino. ...
by Mike Brodheim
On January 3, 2011, the California Court of Appeal, Fifth District, affirmed a “three strikes” sentence of 25 years to life for a prisoner who, while confined in a security housing unit at the California State Prison at Corcoran, threw a food tray at a guard through ...
In a class-action suit brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a federal district court in New Jersey held that a blanket policy of strip searching arrestees charged with non-indictable offenses, absent reasonable suspicion that they were concealing contraband, drugs or weapons, violated the arrestees’ clearly established constitutional right to be ...
by Mike Brodheim
A rose by any other name, Shakespeare wrote, would still smell as sweet.
In California the question is, does referring to a cage as a “therapeutic module” make it any less inhumane, despite the fact that a human being is locked inside a space that the Society ...
by Mike Brodheim
Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court held in Johnson v. California, 543 U.S. 499 (2005) [PLN, July 2005, p.22; April 2004, p.40] that California’s policy of housing prisoners in cells according to race was constitutionally impermissible and morally repugnant to civilized society, California prisoners and prison ...
by Mike Brodheim
In October 2010, the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP) of the Santa Clara University School of Law published a study regarding the extent of prosecutorial misconduct in California. The study explores the ways in which the criminal justice system identifies and addresses the problem of misconduct by ...
by Mike Brodheim
In August 2010, California’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report summarizing and analyzing the results of medical inspections at 17 of 33 adult prisons operated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). The inspections, conducted between September 2008 and January 2010, marked ...
by Mike Brodheim
Responding to concerns brought to its attention by pharmacy staff regarding the amount of medication wasted in California’s prisons, in April 2010 the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a special report titled “Lost Opportunities for Savings Within California Prison Pharmacies.” The OIG found that inefficiencies ...
by Mike Brodheim
In August 2010, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced plans to deploy a high-tech heat ray device, originally developed by Raytheon Company for use by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, as a tool to respond to prisoner unrest at the Pitchess Detention Center’s North County Correctional ...
