by David M. Reutter
On December 26, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit largely reversed a lower court and restored qualified immunity (QI) to guards at Minnesota’s Washington County Jail (WCJ) in a prisoner’s claim that they either used excessive force against him or failed ...
by David M. Reutter
On May 1, 2023, following an order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit that reversed a grant of summary judgment to a guard at Colorado’s Mesa County Detention Facility (MCDF), a $2 million settlement was reached in a suit filed by ...
by David M. Reutter
On September 29, 2023, Maryland’s Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a $48 million settlement for former state prisoners Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart, Jr. and Ransom Watkins, all 56, who were released from prison on November 25, 2019, after serving 36 years for a murder they ...
by David M. Reutter
On December 13, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed dismissal of an Equal Protection Clause claim by Ohio prisoner Lyle Heyward that officials frustrated his attempts to celebrate Ramadan. However, dismissal was affirmed for companion claims that they also violated ...
by David M. Reutter
West Virginia Division of Corrections (WVDC) officials agreed to pay $4 million on November 8, 2023, to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging unconstitutional conditions at the Southern Regional Jail (SRJ) in Raleigh County. The settlement provided for a cash payment to current and former detainee ...
by David M. Reutter
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals resentenced death row prisoner Tomas Raul Gallo, 49, to life imprisonment on April 5, 2024, approving an agreement by prosecutors that Gallo’s intellectual disability (ID) prohibits his execution. The agreement further acknowledges that Gallo’s death sentence violated his due ...
by David M. Reutter
On November 6, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana issued a Remedial Order (RO) to correct unconstitutional healthcare at Louisiana State Prison in Angola. In a companion opinion, the Court found the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) did not provide Angola prisoners “care at all, but abhorrent and unusual punishment that violates the United States Constitution.”
But rather than use the state’s resources to address the deficiencies, DPSC is spending even more in attorney’s fees on a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which agreed to hear the case and stayed the RO on March 6, 2024. See: Parker v. Hooper, 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 5445 (5th Cir.).
The state’s decision is sadly predictable. Over 26 years have passed since the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found in 1989 that DPSC failed to provide adequate medical and psychiatric care to Angola prisoners. A 1992 class-action lawsuit that DOJ joined attempted to address provision of healthcare. But a 2009 report ordered from consulting prison healthcare giant Wexford Health Sources still “found multiple medical care deficiencies.” The district court said “the human cost” of ...
by David M. Reutter
Before he retired in July 2023, Warden Thomas Bergami was sent by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Thomson, Illinois, with a mandate: Clean the place up. But Begami said he got little support for his reform efforts and was in fact actively opposed by guards—some of whom even goaded prisoners to assault him.
The latter claim was first made in a handwritten letter from 14 prisoners that arrived at prison nonprofit advocacy The Marshall Project (TMP) in late December 2022, headed “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ISSUE!!!” The prisoners who wrote it said that guards angered by Bergami’s reform efforts attempted to bribe them to attack him and one of his captains, offering to “poorly tighten their hand restraints” during the warden’s walk-through so that they could slip free and assault him.
As PLN reported, USP-Thomson inherited the Special Management Unit (SMU) from USP-Lewisburg in Pennsylvania in 2018, while a lawsuit was pending there over abuse alleged by prisoners held in the high-security unit. By July 2023, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs had found evidence that 82 prisoners in the SMU at USP-Thomson had ...
by David M. Reutter
On September 7, 2023, the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government in Kentucky agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle a civil rights action alleging constitutional violations in the wrongful murder convictions and imprisonment of Jeffrey Dwayne Clark and Garr Keith Hardin.
Both now 54, they were 22-year-olds when found guilty in the 1992 stabbing death of Hardin’s girlfriend, Rhonda Sue Warford, 19. Prosecutors charged the killing was part of a satanic ritual, pointing to Hardin’s admitted involvement in satanism. But that admission was a lie made up by a dirty cop, who also tied the two to other evidence found at the crime scene. After 22 years of wrongful imprisonment, they were exonerated and freed in 2016 when DNA analysis of that evidence failed to find a match to them. But there was more to cast doubt on their 1995 murder conviction.
The lawsuit that they filed in 2017 alleged that disgraced Louisville police detective Mark Handy fabricated and manipulated evidence to wrongly convict them. The complaint noted that Handy had a reputation among colleagues as a “closer who could wrest a confession out of anybody.” He falsely reported that Hardin admitted to performing satanic rituals ...
by David M. Reutter
On November 16, 2023, the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) agreed to pay $5 million to the estate of Thomas Henry Giles, 31, a mentally ill prisoner who died after guards left him for hours locked inside a cell on fire at Augusta State Medical Prison (ASMP). It was reportedly the largest payout ever for a state prisoner’s death.
As a form of protest for being denied access to his counselor, Giles set fire to the mattress in his cell at about 2 p.m. on October 28, 2020. Guards Robert Roberson and Marcus Phillips watched as he used a shank to expose wires in a light fixture and sparked the blaze. But they took no action to stop him. Nor did they try to extinguish the fire. They also made no attempt to remove Giles. As smoke escaped the cell and filtered into the hallway, Sgt. Reggie Crite opened the food flap on Giles’ cell door. But no one did anything else to dissipate the heavy smoke filling the cell. Crite did, however, open a door to vent smoke from the cell block.
Giles begged guard Brittney Seals to render aid and remove him from ...
