by Chuck Sharman
After 29 years in prison, condemned Arizona prisoner Barry Lee Jones was freed on June 15, 2023. Callous state prison officials dropped him on a street in Phoenix. Undeterred, Jones walked in the heat to the only address he recalled: the office of Arizona Public Defenders (AFD). ...
by Chuck Sharman
On June 8, 2023, a judge in Alabama’s Lauderdale County handed a life sentence without parole to a state prisoner for escaping the county lockup with his jail-guard lover, who then committed suicide as pursuing police closed in. Casey White, 39, pleaded guilty to felony escape in ...
by Chuck Sharman
A group of women who claimed they were raped by a physician’s assistant at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has now been screwed two more times. First, prosecutors apparently bungled the criminal case against their alleged assailant. Then a lawsuit the group filed was stayed ...
by Chuck Sharman
Depending on who’s telling the story, Missouri prisoner Michael Tisius, 42, got either what he deserved or the last in a long line of bad breaks when he was executed on June 6, 2023, hours after the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) refused to hear his ...
by Chuck Sharman
After Georgia prisoner Nathan Weekes and three others were indicted for murder in April 2022, a smuggling ring they operated at Smith State Prison was busted. That has now led to the arrest of the prison’s warden, Brian Dennis Adams, 48, on February 8, 2023.
The state ...
by Chuck Sharman
Three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) unveiled a plan to pardon LGBTQ Californians prosecuted for their sexual orientation, the program has exactly one living beneficiary: Henry Pachnowski, 83, whose 1967 lewd conduct conviction was pardoned in 2022.
“While this initiative may appear to rectify historical wrongs, ...
by Kevin W. Bliss, Chuck Sharman and Benjamin Tschirhart
On May 31, 2023, Luis Molina, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction (DOC), announced his agency would no longer make public reports of in-custody deaths. Why? Molina blamed the federal monitor overseeing a long-running class-action lawsuit to improve ...
by Chuck Sharman
After a wild legal ride, Norberto Peets was exonerated of attempted murder on May 9, 2023, and he was released from a New York prison after 26 years.
Early on September 29, 1996, two New York City policemen patrolling in Fordham Heights heard gunfire. They traced the ...
by Chuck Sharman
A study released on March 14, 2023, revealed that New York’s controversial new bail laws have not led to more rearrests of offenders, as some politicians claimed. In fact, according to the study’s authors at the John Jay College Data Collaborative for Justice (DCJ), the opposite is ...
by Chuck Sharman
On March 16, 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to begin rule-making to implement the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022. Named after a determined woman who tirelessly campaigned to lower her bill to call her imprisoned grandson – which sometimes exceeded $1 ...
