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).
Jones, 64, was convicted in 1995 of abusing and killing his ex-girlfriend’s daughter, Rachel Gray, 4. Her mother, Angela Gray, served 11 years in prison for reckless child abuse because she failed to get her child life-saving medical treatment.
Years later, now-retired AFD investigator Andrew Sowards discovered discrepancies in the testimony the medical examiner gave at the two trials. He also found unexamined tissue samples from the child’s corpse that showed scarring, indicating her injuries were sustained before the day Jones allegedly abused her.
AFD attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition for Jones, claiming ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) at his trial. The federal court for the District of Arizona agreed and tossed his conviction in 2018, a decision affirmed the following year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But in May 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, saying federal courts cannot hear an ...
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 a deal with prosecutors, who dropped a capital murder charge that might have sent him to death row.
White was serving a 75-year prison sentence for attempted murder with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) when he was transferred to the Lauderdale County Detention Center in 2020 to face trial for a 2015 murder in the county. Not quite two years later, jail Assistant Director Vicky White, 56 – who was no relation – hurriedly arranged her own retirement and sold her home at a steep discount for cash to finance the prisoner’s escape on April 29, 2022. Their getaway triggered a nearly two-week manhunt before cops caught up with the couple near Evansville, Indiana, running their car off the road on May 9, 2022. Vicky White then fatally shot herself. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.58.]
“You think you know someone,” county Sheriff Rick Singleton said of his dead ...
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 the federal court for the Southern District of New York on March 8, 2023, pending the outcome of bankruptcy proceedings filed by one of the defendants, former jail healthcare provider Corizon Health.
The group of 29 former detainees alleged that the City and Corizon Health should have stopped Sidney Wilson from abusing his role in the jail’s medical unit to ply them with gifts – including Popeye’s Chicken, a sex toy and prescription drugs – as he “repeatedly raped, sexually assaulted and abused” them between 2015 and 2017. [See: PLN, Nov. 2016, p.63.]
Wilson, now 66, was criminally charged. But the charges were dropped in June 2021. Bronx Senior Assistant District Attorney Nancy Strohmeyer admitted then that the case “could not be brought into compliance” with reform laws passed the year before, which set strict timelines for prosecutors to share discovery materials with defendants.
Though their alleged assailant ...
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 last appeal.
Tisius was 18 in 1999 when he tried to pawn a rented stereo and was locked up on a misdemeanor charge in the Randolph County Jail. There he met Roy Vance, then 27, who later recalled the teen was “a kid in a grown man’s body, and I knew I could manipulate him into what I wanted him to do.”
Following a plan they hatched, Tisius returned to the jail after his release with Vance’s then-27-year-old girlfriend, Traci Burlington, on June 22, 2000, under the guise of delivering cigarettes to the prisoner. The plan was to overpower guards to steal their cell keys. But instead Tisius shot and killed jail supervisor Leon Egley, 33, and guard Jason Acton, 36. However,
their keys didn’t open Vance’s cell.
Leaving him there, Tisius and Burlington fled and were captured the next day, after their car broke down 130 miles away in ...
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 Bureau of Investigation (GBI) said that Weekes, 27, ran what he called the Yves St. Laurent gang, moving large quantities of smuggled drugs and other contraband into and around the lockup. Adams allegedly accepted payoffs to look the other way and even lied to GBI agents investigating a trio of murders tied to the group.
First, GBI said, Weekes ordered his girlfriend killed – prison guard Jessica Gerling, 28 – apparently fearing the ring would be exposed after her arrest on smuggling charges in June 2020. GBI said that Weekes and his new girlfriend, former guard Keisha Janae Jones, 36, contracted for the killing with Christopher Sumlin, 31, who had been paroled from the prison.
But Sumlin botched his attempt in January 2021 and killed Gerling’s neighbor, Bobby Kicklighter, 88. For that murder, Weekes and Jones were indicted in May 2022, along with Jones’ roommate, Aerial Deshay Murphy, 23.
Just ...
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, it has little, if any, impact on the actual lives of those subjected to discriminatory laws,” declared Jennifer Orthwein, an attorney representing LGBTQ clients who is also a forensic psychologist in state prisons.
Launched in February 2020, the initiative was focused on pardoning vagrancy, loitering and sodomy charges historically used to target LGBTQ individuals. Pachnowski, a Holocaust survivor, was caught engaging in consensual sex with another man outside an Orange County warehouse. He said he was “thrilled that this finally happened.”
“I thought I was going to die with that burden,” he added. “It almost feels like now I’m whole.”
The first pardon under the program was granted posthumously to civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who died in 1987. Convicted of vagrancy in 1953 for engaging in consensual sexual activity with another man, he was also posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by former Pres. Barack Obama ...
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 conditions at the city’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex, claiming Steven J. Martin was weaponizing the data to make DOC look bad.
Molina’s ire was apparently piqued a day earlier, when Martin reported to the federal court for the Southern District of New York that Molina had mischaracterized five detainee deaths in ways that made them appear less preventable than they were. There were 19 deaths at the jail in 2022, and three more by May 2023.
The gloves then came off as Martin accused Molina and DOC of “inaccuracies and a lack of transparency” in another filing in the case on June 8, 2023. In a third filing on June 12, 2023, Martin told Judge Laura Taylor Swain that “it is difficult for the Monitoring Team to keep the Court appropriately apprised of matters when the City and [DOC] take positions and actions that shift day to day and ...
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 shots to a nearby elevated train platform, where a man wearing a dark baseball cap shot another man carrying a baseball bat. The cops gave chase, exchanging gunfire with the assailant. The victim survived, but the gunman got away.
A week later, Peets and two other men were arrested and detained for attempted robbery of a chicken stand. The charges against Peets were later dismissed, but not before one of the cops saw Peets in a detention cell and claimed to recognize him from the earlier shooting.
Peets was tried for attempted murder in Bronx County Supreme Court on April 26, 1999. Both cops identified him as the gunman, though they admitted seeing his face only briefly. So did one of two men shot as the gunman fled the subway platform. The other could not make an identification of Peets.
Peets claimed he was home that evening recovering from a ...
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 true.
The study focused on the effect in New York City of 2020 bail reform laws, which eliminated a judge’s discretion to impose bail for low-level crimes. What researchers found was that these reforms reduced the likelihood of rearrest, with one exception: The re-arrest rate for those released following a recent violent felony arrest showed a slight increase.
According to DCJ Director Michael Rempel, “Fundamentally, we found that eliminating bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies reduced recidivism in New York City.”
The study did not attempt to explain reasons for decreased recidivism among those released without bail. But experts suggest that even temporary incarceration can lead to job loss, family disruption, and housing instability, any of which may lead to further criminal activity.
The 2020 reforms allow New Yorkers charged with most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies to be released while their cases are being processed. For those in New ...
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 per minute – the law passed Congress in November 2022, expanding the FCC’s regulatory power to cover intrastate calls.
Since 2014, when Congress initially granted the FCC authority to cap interstate prison call costs, prices have decreased to approximately 12-14 cents per minute. However, the limits did not apply to calls made within a state, which account for 80% of the total. The new law closed that loophole, over the predictable objections of companies that have sprung up to provide what they call “inmate calling services” (ICS).
The two largest ICS firms are ViaPath – formerly Global Tel*Link (GTL) – and Aventiv Technologies, which owns both Securus and JPay. Aventiv eventually came out in support of the new law, but Chief Communications and Community Engagement Officer Margita Thompson emphasized the need to protect the firm’s investment in setting up and delivering phone and video calls in high-security prison and jail ...
