by David M. Reutter

The County of San Diego agreed on September 14, 2022, to pay $4.35 million to settle a lawsuit alleging a guard at the county lockup stood by and failed to stop a detainee high on meth from clawing her eyes out.

Tanya Suarez was taken into custody on May 6, 2019, after police found her wandering outside a motel where she had taken drugs. Suarez, 23, a student at San Diego State University, had started experimenting with meth. On the evening of her arrest, that “experiment went terribly wrong,” according to the complaint later filed on her behalf.

After she was booked into the Las Colinas women’s jail, she began acting oddly and started clawing at her eyes. In a delusional hysteria, Suarez screamed at guards to shoot her. She also voiced suspicion that they and medical staff were going to torture her.

Guards tried to restrain her, handcuffing her and placing a spit sock over her head – even clipping her nails so that it would be more difficult to harm herself, though one deputy admitted the attempt left her nails looking more ragged. A surveillance camera than captured the moment six minutes later when ...

by David M. Reutter

On March 31, 2023, the federal court for the District of Maryland granted dismissal to a suit by a former detainee at the Prince George’s County lockup, after he and co-Plaintiffs accepted a settlement resolving their claims that the county Department of Corrections (DOC) operated under an “Islam-specific policy,” singling out Muslim detainees for less-favorable treatment than that afforded to practitioners of other faiths.

While awaiting transfer to the state Department of Public Safety, Enrico Brown said that he and other Muslims detained at the Prince George’s County Detention Center were prohibited from performing religious services, engaging in daily congregational prayers, wearing religious headwear or other clothing items, receiving certain mail and even accessing a Kosher meal.

Brown’s handwritten complaint was filed pro se with the Court in July 2019, a year and a half after attorneys with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington, DC, filed suit on behalf of another group of jail detainees making similar claims. Those lawyers then took on Brown’s case and filed an amended complaint for him in 2020. As the group argued, the jail didn’t allow Muslims to congregate in small groups for prayer, a privilege it extended ...

by David M. Reutter

On March 30, 2023, a jury sitting in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois awarded $50,002 in damages to state prisoner Larry ‘Rocky’ Harris on his claim that prison officials punished and transferred him to a less desirable lockup because of what his daughter posted on her Facebook account.

Harris, now 64, filed his pro se federal civil rights complaint on March 27, 2017, accusing Warden Victor Calloway at Danville Correctional Center (DCC) of throwing the prisoner in segregation in retaliation for Facebook posts made by Amanda Carrasco, Harris’ daughter. In those posts she claimed that a DCC guard was stealing from prisoners’ canteen orders, purposely overcharging them and stealing taxpayer’s money.

As the prisoner’s complaint later recalled, guard Lt. Charles Campbell wrote a disciplinary report after the posts were discovered, charging Harris with engaging in “Threats and Intimidation.” The guard supported that charge by stating the Facebook posts created a “Hostile Work Environment.” The DCC Adjustment Committee agreed and found Harris guilty. Among other sanctions, it ordered a disciplinary transfer to Big Muddy River Correctional Center.

On September 30, 2019, the district court took up the case, first agreeing with Defendants ...

by David M. Reutter

On March 31, 2023, the federal court for the Western District of Arkansas concluded that a “postcard-only” policy at the Baxter County Correctional Center (BCCC) constituted a de facto blanket ban on publications, in violation of the First Amendment rights of the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), publisher of PLN.

HRDC sued Baxter County in 2017 to enjoin the jail’s policy prohibiting all detainee mail except for legal mail and postcards. When the nonprofit attempted to send copies of PLN or its sister publication, Criminal Legal News (CLN), jail officials refused them– though they helpfully offered to deliver the issues if they were reprinted on postcards.

That “postcard-only” policy prevented HRDC from sending its publications and informational packets to anyone held at BCCC. After a three-day trial in April 2019, the district court found the policy was reasonably related to legitimate penological interests and did not violate HRDC’s First Amendment rights. HRDC appealed.

On June 8, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed. It remanded for the district court to more broadly assess the second factor under Turner v. Safely, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), to determine “whether HRDC proved its assertion that ...

by David M. Reutter

Historically, prisoners have been largely left out of the technology wave changing the way the rest of the world communicates and does business. It wasn’t until March 2009 that the first phones for prisoner use were installed by the Texas Department Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Before then, prisoners were limited to legal calls. To use the phones, prisoners could not have any major disciplinary infractions. Gang-affiliated offenders or those on death row could not use them at all. Almost 15 years later, the Internet and cellphone have swept society, but many prisoners are still left with a wall phone – at exorbitant prices – or snail mail.

Of course most prisoners use their electronic devices to communicate with friends or family members, some they have been out of contact with for years or decades. In Florida from around 1999 to 2009, accepting a 15-minute collect call from a prisoner to someone in Michigan cost around $26. Intrastate prisoner calls were so cost prohibitive that many prisoners were told not to call anymore.

Since then prices for phone calls have decreased, squeezing earnings for the prison profiteers peddling communication services. But smart executives foresaw the future lay in ...

by David M. Reutter

On March 6, 2023, the Nevada Department of Corrections (DOC) reached an agreement with a group of state prisoners to settle claims that a change in chapel schedule substantially burdened the exercise of their religion, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal constitution, as well as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000cc, et seq.

Under terms of the settlement, DOC paid $75,000 to four of the prisoner-plaintiffs and agreed to schedule three weekly Episcopal religious services plus another three for The Way faith group. A picture of a wolf that was visible from the chapel was also removed from Lovelock Correctional Center (LCC).

The agreement resolved claims brought pro se in federal court for the District of Nevada by prisoners Norman Shaw, Joseph Cowart and Ansell Jordan, as well as former prisoners Charles Wirth and Brian Kamedula. They alleged that when Warden Renee Baker took over LCC on August 29, 2016, she sought to bring the chapel into strict compliance with DOC Administrative Regulation (AR) 810 to end alleged threats to prison safety and security caused by the “lack of supervision and increased foot traffic ...

by David M. Reutter

Finding that changes in pretrial release procedures of Prince George’s County “may or may not be ameliorative,” the federal court for the District of Maryland on June 7, 2023, refused to dismiss a complaint filed by a group of pretrial detainees who claim the county’s bond review process and pretrial release program are unconstitutional.

The suit was filed almost a year earlier in July 2022 against the county, its jail officials and 11 of its judges by a group of pretrial detainees. They alleged that during bond reviews in the county’s district and circuit courts, judges “abdicated their constitutional duty” and unlawfully deferred to the county jail’s pretrial services program to determine a defendant’s level of supervision or release from jail.

Despite being entitled to release, many defendants often languish in jail for weeks or months while waiting for pretrial services to make a determination on their release eligibility, the lawsuit alleged. Plaintiffs called the process opaque, saying it was bogged down in backlogs. They sought class-action status.

Defendant county officials and judges moved for dismissal, asserting immunity and also arguing that a federal court had no jurisdiction over the issues. They further argued the lawsuit ...

by David M. Reutter

“For decades, women incarcerated in New York state prisons have been raped, assaulted, sexually abused, harassed, and verbally degraded” by male guards, as officials “turned a blind eye to the sexual misconduct.” That explosive allegation was made in a lawsuit filed on November 29, 2022, seeking damages for sexual abuse alleged by a former prisoner at the now-shuttered Bayview Correctional Facility.

The suit was made possible by passage of the state’s “look back” law, the Adult Survivors Act. When it took effect in July 2022, it opened a 12-month window for victims of sexual abuse to bring legal claims that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations.

The claimant in this case was identified in court pleadings as “LK Doe 2.” Her complaint alleged that prisoners held at Bayview, a medium-security all-female prison in New York City operated from 1979 to 2012, “were at high risk of being sexually abused by the predominately male prison staff.” New State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) records from 2007 to 2012 show “women were involved in 30% of sexual misconduct cases and 61% of sexual harassment cases, despite accounting for only 5% of all state ...

by David M. Reutter

By June 8, 2023, misdemeanor criminal records of those previously convicted in Missouri of a nonviolent marijuana-related offense were scheduled to be expunged. Felony expungement is set to follow by December 8, 2023. Though some counties have dragged their feet, the process is underway to implement post-conviction relief provided by passage of Amendment 3 to the state constitution in November 2022.

Approval of the ballot initiative made it legal for those 21 and over to buy and use recreational amounts of marijuana. Expungement of most marijuana-related convictions recognized that the constitution now effectively decriminalizes marijuana use in the state.

Expungement clears all charges and seals or destroys the case record. By June 5, 2023, the state had expunged over 32,500 misdemeanor cases and another 10,000 felony cases. After spending a dozen years in prison on a marijuana conviction, Sean Farmer, 36, said he was “super grateful” for the chance to clear his record.

“I got reintegrated with my children (and) my girlfriend,” he said. “It’s surreal. When I wake up in the morning sometimes I don’t know where I’m at, and then I look around, I’m like, oh God, I’m here.”

Missouri now allows consumers to ...

by David M. Reutter

Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Council took control of the county jail commissary on March 28, 2023, after a watchdog found over $500,000 worth of items were missing. The investigation also found that monies from the canteen fund were misappropriated by the Sheriff’s Office, which has been operating under interim Sheriff Joseph Greiner.

But even jail guards questioned the county’s next decision, awarding a contract to run the commissary to Keefe Commissary Network. That’s because Keefe owner TKC Holdings also owns Trinity Services Group, the contractor long criticized for poor quality meals served to detainees and prisoners.

After receiving a complaint about donations of expired food from the Cuyahoga County Jail commissary, the County’s Inspector General (IG) began an investigation. That uncovered problems from 2020 and 2021, ranging from shoddy bookkeeping to a lack of oversight that “increases the risk of theft or unauthorized transactions going undetected,” the IG said.

The IG found $376,206 in recorded commissary inventory that wasn’t in the warehouse. It guessed there were accounting errors, or waste from expired food, or even potential theft. Around the time the report was issued in June 2022, three guards were fired for stealing commissary snacks for themselves ...