by Chuck Sharman
On April 7, 2023, a Texas grand jury indicted a guard at the Hays County Jail for shooting a shackled detainee in the back and killing him. Isaiah Garcia, 27, was charged with felony deadly conduct in the December 2022 death of Joshua Leon Wright, 36.
The ...
by Chuck Sharman
On August 12, 2022, the federal courtfor the Central District of California approved a settlement for the minor children of a jail detainee who committed suicide less than nine hours after he was arrested for auto burglary – despite the refusal of the car’s owner to press ...
by Chuck Sharman
On April 25, 2022, a former guard employed by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping a prisoner. After completing his prison term, Carlos Richard Martinez, 52, must also remain on supervised ...
by Eike Blohm, MD and Chuck Sharman
After Arizona resumed executions last year, following an eight-year hiatus, it quickly murdered three murderers on its death row.
On May 11, 2022, a lethal injection of pentobarbital was given to Clarence Dixon, 66, a mentally ill Native American, by then blind. Blaming ...
by Chuck Sharman
After two detainees died within a week at Arizona’s Pima County Jail — and just before two more committed suicide — two other detainees managed to walk out, all within two months.
One man escaped, and the other was released by a confused guard. On November 21, ...
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 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 Chuck Sharman
A diminutive detainee who was deaf and communicated by sign language was found unresponsive at Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center early on October 9, 2022. Officials from the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) have since announced that the death of Javarick Gantt, ...
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 ...