by Jo Ellen Nott
When the men and women incarcerated in San Diego County jails awoke on October 6, 2022, the biggest news was also the grimmest: Nothing had changed. A fellow detainee had been murdered the night before, but his was the 19th jail death in just over nine ...
by Paul Wright
Most of PLN’s prisoner readers are housed in state or federal prisons and serving a sentence after being convicted of a crime. On any given day at least 500,000 people are being held in jails around the country, operated by cities, counties or Indian Tribes. The vast ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On April 15, 2022, Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) approved H.P. 853, a new law capping the cost of calls in state prisons and county jails. Effective October 1, 2022, calls may not exceed the federal rate of twelve cents per minute in prisons and twenty-one cents ...
by Jayson Hawkins
On March 29, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of California approved a settlement between the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSD) and the widow of a 21-year-old U.S. Marine who committed suicide while held in pretrial detention at the county’s Vista Detention Facility (VDF). ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 26, 2022, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) announced a new “fresh start” policy for people whose student loans are in default, and it may help prisoners who would otherwise be barred from receiving Pell Grants when they become available next year.
The policy brings ...
by David M. Reutter and Ed Lyon
On September 6, 2022, the Richland County Court of Common Pleas granted an injunction in a challenge brought by four condemned South Carolina prisoners to 2021 state legislation making electrocution the default method of execution unless a prisoner opts instead for lethal injection ...
by Harold Hempstead
On September 2, 2021, the federal court for the District of Maryland denied a motion for summary judgment made by a state prison guard who is the defendant in a case brought by a prisoner who was himself a former guard, and who alleged he was subjected ...
by David M. Reutter
On April 28, 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court held that possession of a cell phone by a prisoner may not justify an enhanced sentence under the state criminal code unless the facts also establish that the prisoner’s conduct actually threatened prison security. That drew a sharp ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On January 7, 2022, Ohio’s Franklin County Board of Commissioners settled a suit brought by a class of former female detainees in the county jail who claimed their constitutional rights were violated when photographs of tattoos on or around their private areas were taken by deputies ...
by Chuck Sharman
In October 2022, PLN successfully concluded a months-long effort to obtain a copy of an agreement by San Diego County to pay nearly $3.5 million to settle its part of a lawsuit filed by the family of Paul Silva, a mentally ill detainee who died after a ...
by Chuck Sharman
On June 22, 2022, San Diego County agreed to pay $8.1 million to settle claims that a deputy outside a county jail chased a fleeing detainee and fatally shot him in the back. It was the largest payout for a wrongful death by the county in at ...
by Jacob Barrett
On April 18, 2022, after finding the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) “employed tactics similar to the game of Plinko on The Price is Right,” an exasperated federal judge demanded the agency produce a timeline for compliance with an earlier Preliminary Injunction (PI) ordering Gender Confirming ...
by Dave Maas
Imagine you’ve been arrested and are sitting in county lock-up. You need to make arrangements for bail, a lawyer, and a caretaker for your kids or pets. Maybe you need someone to bring your prescription or you need to talk to your AA sponsor. On top of ...
by Anastasia Valeeva, Weihua Li, and Susie Cagle
President Biden’s signature American Rescue Plan Act gave local governments $350 billion to recover from COVID-19. They spent much of it on police, prisons and the courts.
(This article originally appeared on themarshallproject.org on September 7, 2022. It is reprinted here ...
by David M. Reutter
On May 26, 2022, the SupremeCourt of North Dakota vacated a state prisoner’s conviction for aggravated assault of a guard because the trial court committed error by instructing the jury on the wrong law under which he was charged.
While held at the North Dakota State ...
by David M. Reutter
On April 20, 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a report finding conditions at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman likely violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of the prisoners held there. DOJ is reportedly working with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) ...
by Jacob Barrett
On September 9, 2022, the Washington Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) levied an $84,000 fine against the state Department of Corrections (DOC) for safety violations at a state prison that was the epicenter of the state’s largest tuberculosis outbreak in 20 years.
L&I issued the fine ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 4, 2022, the federal court for the Northern District of Georgia gave final approval to a settlement in a lawsuit brought by mentally ill women incarcerated at the South Fulton Jail. The agreement included numerous changes to jail policies and practices, along with monitoring and ...
by David M. Reutter
On April 5, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that a conviction for federal witness tampering requires an affirmative answer to two questions: (1) Did the defendant contemplate a particular proceeding in which the witness would testify and (2) was it ...
by Keith Sanders
On April 7, 2022, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) announced indictments against seven federal prisoners for the brutal murder of two fellow prisoners in their Texas lockup, an incident that prompted a rare nationwide lockdown of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
The victims, Guillermo Riojas, ...
by Chuck Sharman
When his death warrant expired at 12:01 a.m. on September 23, 2022, condemned Alabama prisoner Alan Eugene Miller was still alive, capping a wild few days during which his execution was stayed by a federal judge and then reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court before executioners tried ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 7, 2022, a federal judge for the Southern District of Mississippi levied a $6,000 sanction against a federal prosecutor for lying about his COVID-19 vaccination status.
When Assistant U.S. Attorney Theodore “Ted” Cooperstein was quizzed on three appearances before Judge Carlton W. Reeves on ...
by Douglas Ankney
It took him three years to do it, but Hawaii Gov. David Ige (D) finally appointed a director for the state Correctional Systems Oversight Commission (CSOC). On April 4, 2022, former New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) Monitor Christin Johnson assumed the role created by the ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart and Casey J. Bastian
On July 20, 2022, the nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) reported a spike in the share of state prisoners serving long sentences, with 57% now locked up for ten years or more. As a result, the average length of time served has ...
by Harold Hempstead
On May 2, 2022, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) halted all executions scheduled for the remainder of the year for an independent investigation into the state’s lethal injection protocols. Four days later, the interim director of the state Department of Correction (DOC), Lisa Helton, filed her admission ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On April 18, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue a writ of certiorari to hear a challenge that the abandoned property policy of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) violates the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. See: Conyers v. City of Chi., 142 ...
by David M. Reutter
On April 28, 2022, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that a lower state court erred in denying good time credit when resentencing a state prisoner who had violated the terms of his post-release supervision (PRS).
The Court’s opinion was issued in an appeal by Joshua J. ...
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 David M. Reutter
On March 31, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of Mississippi granted a state prisoner’s petition and enjoined the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide him total hip revision surgery. He was also awarded damages and attorney fees totaling over $386,000.
Since age ...
by David M. Reutter
On August 5, 2022, a Wisconsin state prisoner signed off on an agreement to accept $8,000 to resolve claims that a guard destroyed his legal documents in retaliation for a lawsuit the prisoner was preparing to file.
The settlement comes on the heels of a ruling ...
by David M. Reutter
How much actual knowledge does a prisoner need to have of items in his possession to support a contraband conviction? According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the answer is “not much.”
That was the Court’s conclusion in a ruling filed on ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 1, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a district court’s denial of qualified immunity (QI) to staff in a Texas jail who allegedly ignored the medical needs of a prisoner for 32 hours while he “moaned in pain, twitched, thrashed, ...
by Keith Sanders
On October 22, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey awarded $215,000 in damages to a former pretrial detainee at the Cumberland County Jail (CCJ) for injuries suffered during an assault there by guards and police officers.
Lourenzo Witt, the plaintiff, was arrested ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Each year, thousands of Nebraska prisoners go before the state Parole Board, hoping to return to their lives and their families. But when board members don’t show up for work, people often stay in prison instead of going home.
That’s because the board needs at least three ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
With two former Bureau of Prisons (BOP) staffers convicted of sexually abusing prisoners and three more charged and awaiting trial — including the former warden — the “rape club” scandal continues to widen at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California. It now counts a ...
by Jacob Barrett
On April 19, 2022, Georgia’s DeKalb County Jail (DCJ) and county Sheriff Melody M. Maddox filed a stipulation in a civil suit agreeing to provide religious meals for Muslim prisoners observing daylight fasts during Ramadan.
The suit was brought by Norman Simmonds, who was detained at DCJ ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 1, 2022, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin decided that just because a jailhouse snitch used a government-provided device to tape incriminating statements made by a fellow pretrial detainee, he was not acting as a “state agent,” so the defendant’s right to counsel was not ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
On April 21, 2022, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) signed H.B. 936, a new law creating “special care facilities” to house and provide healthcare for about 600 “medically frail” state prisoners eligible for parole whom the state Department of Corrections (DOC) refuses to release because they ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On July 12, 2022, the District Attorney (DA) for Alabama’s Lauderdale County announced murder charges against a former detainee in the county jail who escaped with the help of a high-ranking guard, after which she fatally shot herself as authorities closed in to recapture him.
Vicky ...
by David M. Reutter
On May 5, 2022, Ohio’s Cuyahoga County agreed to pay $2.1 million to the estate of a mentally ill detainee arrested on bogus charges who was then left to commit suicide at the county jail (CCJ). The settlement is one of 11 so far in 30 ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
The City of Philadelphia formally apologized on October 6, 2022, for medical experiments conducted on some 300 men — mostly Black, many of them pretrial detainees — incarcerated at the now-shuttered Holmesburg Prison over 50 years ago.
Interest revived in the ancient torture at the notorious ...
by Anthony W. Accurso
On February 25th, 2022, winning turnedout to be losing for a federal prisoner when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a massive restitution order issued by a district court in Texas, saying the prisoner had provided jurisdiction with his own successful challenge ...
by Jayson Hawkins
Like many prison systems across America, Maine’s Department of Corrections (DOC) has a work-release program that allows prisoners to hold jobs in local communities while serving their sentence. But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, the programs were suspended as part of the effort to ...
Loaded on
Oct. 31, 2022
published in Prison Legal News
November, 2022, page 65
Alabama: A convicted bank robber had 30 months added to his 17-year prison sentence on September 26, 2022, for bribing an Alabama jail guard to smuggle him a cellphone, K2 “spice” paper, and other contraband. According to a federal Department of Justice (DOJ) press release, while Stanley Young, 34, was ...
