by David M. Reutter
On February 1, 2024, an agreement was filed in the federal court for the District of Colorado by the state Department of Corrections (DOC), promising to pay $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it failed to protect prisoner John Standley Snorsky from assault by gang members. The settlement followed a Court order that Snorsky be placed in protective custody (PC).
As PLN reported, Snorsky reported that he was in fear for his life due to custody issues with other prisoners when he was transferred to Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP) in October 2016. The reason, as he informed prison officials, was that he had agreed to provide witness testimony at the trial of another CSP prisoner, Chad Wesley Merrill, for the fatal 2015 stabbing of Joshua Edmonds at Limon Correctional Facility, where all three were then held.
Because of publicity in that case, Snorsky argued that he was a well-­known “snitch” and easily recognizable to violent prison gangs who targeted him. However, his request for PC placement was denied. Instead, he landed in the same unit with Merrill, who dutifully spread the word that Snorsky was a witness against him. Merrill recruited three more prisoners to ...

On March 14, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a district court erred in dismissing a New York prisoner’s civil rights action for violating the “three strikes” provision of the Prison Litigation and Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e. The Court’s opinion is enlightening in several aspects, including whether claims barred under Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), count as “strikes.”
New York prisoner Maurice Cotton filed at least nineteen different lawsuits during his incarceration and leading up to the filing of the case under review. Cotton, a prisoner at Green Haven Correctional Facility, filed a lawsuit on December 6, 2018, that alleged he was wrongfully denied a transfer to Sing Sing Correctional Facility where he could earn a master’s degree at one of the college programs offered there. Cotton further alleged he was retaliated against for filing grievances related to the matter.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York reviewed Cotton’s motion to proceed in forma pauperis (IFP). Under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(g), as amended by PLRA, IFP status is unavailable to any plaintiff with three previous federal actions that were dismissed as frivolous or malicious or for failure ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 6, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to pay $700,000 to settle a Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) complaint in the death of a prisoner held by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Coleman, Florida. Following that, Robert Conyers, Jr., father of Davon Gillians, dropped an appeal he had filed to dismissal of a separate federal civil rights suit filed against the prison’s warden and six guards, alleging that Gillians died due to use of excessive force.
Gillians, 22, had less than a year left on a 46-­month sentence—for a 2018 conviction in South Carolina for being a felon in possession of a gun—when two BOP guards named Ayers and Morey handcuffed the prisoner behind his back and removed him from his cell on May 16, 2021. Though Gillians offered no resistance, Ayers allegedly punched and choked him into brief unconsciousness. The guards then forcibly picked Gillians off the floor, moved him to a solitary confinement cell and strapped him into a restraint chair.
There he remained for “24-­28 hours,” according to the complaint his dad later filed, “without being provided food, water, or medication” for ...

by David M. Reutter
A report issued by the federal Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) on February 15, 2024, identified “operational and managerial deficiencies” in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) which “created unsafe conditions” blamed for many of 344 prisoner deaths that BOP tallied from 2014 through 2021. Suicides accounted for just over half of those.
BOP came under scrutiny for the most high-­profile deaths: The 2018 murder of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger at the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Hazelton, West Virginia; the 2019 suicide of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan; and a string of homicides at USP Thomson in Illinois. Spurred by concerns from Congress and advocacy groups, OIG initiated its investigation.
What it found were 187 deaths by suicide, 89 homicides, 56 called accidental and the other 12 attributed to unknown factors. The majority of those who died were White (242), with 224 of all deaths occurring at medium or high security prisons. Of the homicides, 54 occurred in general population and 59 in high security level prisons. The suicide rate in general population (100) was higher than the rate in restrictive housing units (86), but ...

by David M. Reutter
On March 28, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California largely denied a motion to dismiss a civil rights action filed by the surviving mother of a murdered state prisoner whose corpse was photographed by a guard and posted online. The complaint accused Sgt. Joseph Burnes and other state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) guards of snapping pictures of Luis Romero’s remains and posting them on the internet.
Romero was brutally murdered at Corcoran State Prison on March 9, 2019, by cellmate Jaime Osuna. After killing him, Osuna used “what appeared to be a razor wrapped in string to remove Romero’s right ear,” according to the complaint filed by the dead man’s mother, Dora Solares. But that was only the beginning of the heinous mutilation of her son’s corpse. As the complaint continued, Osuna “forcibly detached his eyes, removed portions of his ribs and lungs, and decapitated him,” before he finally “used Romero’s blood to write ‘hahahahaha’ on the walls.” When guards found him, Osuna was “wearing a necklace made of Romero’s body parts.”
Immediately after the murder was discovered, Burnes and other guards allegedly took unauthorized pictures of the scene ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 28, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed a 46-­month sentence handed to former Kay Correctional Detention Center (KCDC) guard Matthew Ware for depriving detainees of their civil rights when he subjected them to cruel brutality at the Oklahoma lockup.
As PLN reported, Ware, 55, was sentenced in February 2023 after a jury in federal court for the Western District of Oklahoma found him guilty in April 2022 on three counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, which had been handed down in his November 2021 indictment. [See: PLN, Feb. 2023, p.55.]
His conviction on the first two counts stemmed from an incident on May 18, 2017, when Ware, then a KCDC Lieutenant, ordered subordinate guards to move pretrial detainees D’Angelo Wilson and Marcus Miller to an area of the jail housing avowed white supremacist detainees. Both Wilson and Miller are Black, and Ware knew the move placed them in danger of assault. Worse, over those guards’ protests, he then ordered them to open the doors of all detainees in the cell block. White supremacist detainees rushed into Wilson and Miller’s cell and attacked them. Wilson required seven ...

by David M. Reutter
A suit filed by a Texas prisoner alleging that stifling heat in his cell threatens his life was allowed to proceed against Defendant officials with the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) on June 14, 2024, when the federal court for the Western District of Texas denied their motion to dismiss Bernie Tiede’s complaint.
Tiede, 65, suffers from diabetes and hypertension, serious medical conditions which, combined with the heat inside his Estelle Unit cell, caused him to suffer something like a ministroke, he claimed. Of Texas’ 100 state prisons, only about 30% are fully air conditioned. The remainder have partial or no air conditioning, leaving indoor temperatures to climb dangerously high—often exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, advocates say.
Those from four advocacy groups—Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants, Inc., Coalition for Texans with Disabilities, Inc., Texas Prisons Community Advocates, and Build Up, Inc.—joined Tiede in filing his amended complaint on May 7, 2024, seeking an injunction to force TDCJ Director Brian Collier to remedy the excessive heat conditions. The suit alleges that environmental conditions in Texas prisons without air conditioning violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
At issue for the Court in ...

by David M. Reutter
On February 28, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a report finding that conditions at Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF), South Mississippi Correctional Institution (SMCI) and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility (WCCF) violate prisoners’ Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The report required Mississippi officials to correct the unconstitutional conditions or face a federal lawsuit.
DOJ began an investigation in February 2020 at the three prisons, as well as Mississippi State Prison in Parchman. An April 2022 report declared that conditions found at the latter violated the Constitution, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Nov. 2022, p.34.] In its most recent report, DOJ said that “[m]any of the conditions we found at Parchman” exist at CMCF, SMCI and WCCF.
The state Department of Corrections (DOC) failed to protect prisoners from violence at all three prisons, the report declared. CMCF and SMCI are DOC’s largest prisons, holding up to 4,000 and 2,882 prisoners, respectively. WCCF, which is privately managed for DOC by Utah-­based Management and Training Corporation (MTC), holds another 949. Together, the three prisons house one-­third of DOC’s prisoner population.
According to DOJ, each prison is “riddled with violence.” But“[g]ross understaffing, poor supervision, and inadequate investigations” also ...

by David M. Reutter
When Sheriff Scott Childers lost his reelection bid in Missouri’s Ray County on August 6, 2024, he had already been out of office for five months. That’s because the county court issued a Preliminary Order in Quo Warranto removing him from office on March 6, 2024. The unusual order came in response to a petition filed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R).
The removal petition alleged that Childers administered a work program at the county jail using detainees to labor on his own properties and those belonging to friends—including contributors to his political campaigns for Sheriff. It was further alleged that he left these detainees unsupervised and even allowed some conjugal visits, as well as car trips to shop at local stores, after which drugs, alcohol and cellphones flowed in and out of the jail.
The petition recalled that Childers was warned by judicial and elected officials that his program was illegal. But the warnings had no impact as Childers allegedly continued to release detainees for personally enriching work and even boasted about the program on social media.
In granting the petition, the Court “immediately enjoined” Childers from “engaging in any activity, or exercising any ...

by David M. Reutter
On March 26, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed a district court’s award of more than $578,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs made as part of a $60,000 offer of judgment to settle an excessive force claim by Kansas prisoner Samuel Lee Dartez, II. The appeal required the Court to decide how an offer of judgment affects statutory provisions allowing and limiting a fee award.
Dartez sued 15 Kansas Highway Patrol (KHP) officers in November 2015, alleging they used excessive force after his arrest one year earlier. To settle, KHP made a $60,000 offer of judgment to Dartez “plus reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs allowed by law, if any.” Because Dartez was incarcerated by the time he sued, his complaint was subject to the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1997e—a statute that limits recovery of legal fees and costs. But the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas assumed the offer of judgment trumped the statutes, and it awarded Dartez $576,242.28 in attorneys’ fees and costs. Defendants appealed.
The Tenth Circuit began by first rejecting Defendants’ “perfunctory” argument that Dartez was not entitled to an award of attorneys’ fees ...