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 Paul Wright
The United States bills itself as a country that values free speech. For over 30 years I have watched as prison and jail officials around the country censor Prison Legal News (PLN), Criminal Legal News (CLN),and some or all of the books which ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On June 18, 2022, almost three-and-a-half years after former President Donald J. Trump (R) signed the First Step Act (FSA) into law in December 2018, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced that sentence recalculations under the law had been completed for about 8,600 — or ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 21, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York denied state prison officials’ motion to dismiss a lawsuit seeking damages for alleged Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment violations that stranded Kayson Pearson in solitary confinement without periodic reviews for 13 years. ...
by David M. Reutter
Though Georgia has no other way to kill him, a condemned state prisoner convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to agree on June 23, 2022, that his objection to lethal injection is a viable civil rights claim and not a doomed petition for habeas corpus relief.
In ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
With 39 prisoners dead by September 1, 2022 — despite a federal Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation ongoing since 2016 and two federal court orders — the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) remains unwilling or unable to address hellish conditions in its prisons.
One of those ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
Crisis conditions continue at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, where 13 deaths have been recorded through the first eight months of 2022. Given a population of some 5,700 prisoners and detainees at the jail, that’s a death rate over twice as a high as ...
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 Kevin W. Bliss
On May 12, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed HB 873, “providing an exemption from public records requirements for information or records that identify or could reasonably lead to the identification of any person or entity that participates in an execution.”
Sponsored by state Sen. ...
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 Matt Clarke
On July 6, 2022, the New Hampshire Personnel Appeals Board upheld the firing of former State Trooper Haden Wilber, who allegedly illegally searched a woman during a traffic stop, found suspected heroin residue, and then — together with fellow Trooper Matthew Locke — falsified evidence that got ...
by Ben Tschirhart
On June 21, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court held that cases involving medical transport orders for prisoners seeking evidence of mental impairment to bolster a habeas corpus petition are now among those immediately appealable and do not have to await final judgment.
The Court customarily doesn’t rule ...
by Brian Dolinar
Guardian RFID is a virtually unknown, but rapidly growing, company that sells digital technology to jails. It makes ID cards and bracelets that can be scanned by guards when doing head counts, meal distribution and suicide checks.
Guardian RFID is yet another prison profiteer among the ever-expanding ...
by David M. Reutter
On February 17, 2022, the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) stipulated to a $3.75 million judgment in state court to settle all claims — including costs and attorney’s fees — made by the estate of a prisoner who died in 2019 from breast cancer. Though DOC’s ...
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 Ben Tschirhart
On March 31, 2022, an agreement was entered by Michigan’s Macomb County paying $1.15 million to the estate of David Stojcevski, 32, a detainee who died from drug withdrawal while in custody in the county jail. Separately, the jail’s privately contracted healthcare provider, Correct Care Solutions (CCS) ...
by Chuck Sharman
On December 30, 2021, a second suit was filed in Oregon state court accusing former state youth worker Frank Milligan of sexually assaulting a juvenile detainee. Milligan, 53, was imprisoned for 30 years in 2001 for sexually abusing and attempting to murder another boy. He received an ...
by Alleen Brown
With flames bearing down on the remote California town of Susanville in August 2021, residents were getting ready to evacuate. The Dixie Fire, the state’s second-largest blaze ever, had already been wreaking havoc on the main business in town: the two state prisons, each with capacities in ...
by Harold Hempstead
On January 28, 2022, when Sheriff Steve Hespen retired after 35 years in Dodge County, Nebraska, he left behind unanswered a charge from the state Jail Standards Board (JSB) that the county jail was almost two years out of compliance in documenting admissions and releases.
That charge ...
by Ben Tschirhart
Ten years ago, in Martinez v. Ryan, 566 U.S. 1 (2012), the U.S. Supreme Court confronted a dilemma posed by Congress’ passage of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996. That law subjects to procedural default any federal habeas corpus claims not already ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
The New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) shuttered its upstate “shock camp” on March 10, 2022. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) announced in her 2022 budget the closing of several prisons including the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility. That leaves the state’s last shock ...
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 Keith Sanders
On June 27, 2022, the last of a trio of private prison employees — plus two immigration attorneys — who were sentenced in a bribery scandal at two Texas prisons holding federal detainees surrendered to U.S. Marshals to begin serving his sentence.
Damian Ortiz, 33, a former ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 23, 2022, a jury convicted the last of three ex-prison guards indicted in the fatal beating of a prisoner at Western Illinois Correctional Center (WICC) four years earlier.
Former Lt. Todd Sheffler, 54, was found guilty of conspiracy to deprive civil rights, tampering with a ...
by Jacob Barrett
In a 4-to-3 decision handed down on March 10, 2022, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin held an employer did not unlawfully discriminate against a former state prisoner by rescinding a job offer based on his domestic violence convictions.
In its ruling, the Court held that the state ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 14, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of New York denied a motion to decertify the class in a long-running suit filed by prisoners subjected to terms of post-release supervision (PRS) administratively imposed by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
Is a man your mother marries after you grow up and leave home your stepfather? What if she dies — is he still your stepfather then?
The questions sound like parlor games, but the answers carry significance under regulations promulgated by the California Department of Corrections ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 30, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to an Ohio prison doctor who interrupted a state prisoner’s prescribed medical treatment plan, after which he suffered a stroke that left him blind.
The Court’s opinion ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 22, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed termination of all prospective relief in a long-running class action alleging unconstitutional conditions at the Idaho State Correctional Institution (ISCI).
The Court’s opinion ended a 1981 lawsuit filed by prisoner Walter Balla, ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 7, 2022, the Supreme Court of New Jersey held that a settlement agreement resolving a disciplinary action against a guard at the Cumberland County Jail (CCJ) qualified as a government record, not a personnel record, and was thus available for public review under the ...
by David M. Reutter
After a verdict was returned by a federal jury in favor of a disabled Illinois prisoner against the state Department of Corrections (DOC), the parties reached a settlement agreement for $1,050,000 — inclusive of attorney’s fees and costs — and attorneys for Plaintiff signed off on ...
by Jayson Hawkins
It is no secret that in most prisons, poverty is the characteristic most often shared by prisoners. Some countries are trying to reduce crime by reducing poverty. But in many American states a different tactic is used: They criminalize being poor.
Take what happened to Roxanna Beck. ...
by Matt Clarke
In February 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau published what may be the first multi-state report on the mortality of released prisoners. After their incarceration, “former prisoners have higher mortality rates than their demographic counterparts in the general population,” the study warned.
The study compared the deaths of ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 8, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part the grant of summary judgment to Prison Legal News (PLN) in a lawsuit alleging a censorship policy of the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) ...
by Matt Clarke
On February 11, 2022, California’s Santa Clara County paid $7 million to settle its part of a lawsuit brought by a former detainee who suffered a spinal injury in his cell at the county’s Elmwood Correctional Center, where responding guards and ambulance staff were allegedly so negligent ...
by Matt Clarke
On December 9, 2021, an agreement was reached by Richland County, Ohio, paying $4 million to settle claims in a suit that was about to be brought by the family of Alexander Jose Rios, a pretrial detainee who died at the county jail following an altercation with ...
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, ...
by David M. Reutter
As of June 6, 2022, the Arkansas Department of Corrections (DOC) had returned $2,551,198 in confiscated federal relief or stimulus funds to state prisoners, according to Communications Director Cindy Murphy.
A permanent injunction granted by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas on ...
Loaded on
Sept. 30, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
October, 2022, page 64
Alabama: A jail guard in Chilton County, Alabama, was arrested on July 21, 2022, and charged with promoting contraband, the Clanton Advertiser reported. The guard, Tyler Ryan Couch, is accused of organizing an effort to smuggle drugs to detainees. Though jail policy forbids guards from transmitting messages or packages, ...
