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 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 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 David M. Reutter
On March 21, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York denied state prison officials’ motion to dismiss a lawsuit seeking damages for alleged Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment violations that stranded Kayson Pearson in solitary confinement without periodic reviews for 13 years. ...
by David M. Reutter
Though Georgia has no other way to kill him, a condemned state prisoner convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to agree on June 23, 2022, that his objection to lethal injection is a viable civil rights claim and not a doomed petition for habeas corpus relief.
In ...
by David M. Reutter
On February 17, 2022, the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) stipulated to a $3.75 million judgment in state court to settle all claims — including costs and attorney’s fees — made by the estate of a prisoner who died in 2019 from breast cancer. Though DOC’s ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 14, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of New York denied a motion to decertify the class in a long-running suit filed by prisoners subjected to terms of post-release supervision (PRS) administratively imposed by the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision ...
by David M. Reutter
On March 30, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to an Ohio prison doctor who interrupted a state prisoner’s prescribed medical treatment plan, after which he suffered a stroke that left him blind.
The Court’s opinion ...
