The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a “supervision for life” provision imposed by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin when defendant Nicolai D. Quinn was sentenced to 97 months imprisonment for possession of child pornography.
Both the Sentencing Guidelines and statute under which Quinn ...
Illinois state prisoner Brian Burd filed a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 complaint for damages in 2010, alleging that officials at the Sheridan Correctional Center had denied him reasonable access to the facility’s law library; consequently, he was unable to research and timely file a motion to withdraw his guilty plea ...
In an unexpected turnabout, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has modified its July 2013 decision to transfer all prisoners from the only federal women’s facility in the northeast, located in Danbury, Connecticut. The BOP had planned to ship 1,120 prisoners held at FCI Danbury to a recently-opened 1,800-bed facility in ...
As previously reported in Prison Legal News, hundreds of federal prisoners at USP Canaan, a high-security federal prison northwest of Scranton, Pennsylvania, became sick after eating salmonella-contaminated chicken in June 2011. [See: PLN, August 2012, p.31].
Although Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officials denied reports of widespread food poisoning at the ...
Another challenge to the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) initially met with limited success, but ultimately failed.
Lindon Roy Knutson pleaded guilty to failing to register as a sex offender under SORNA stemming from a 1974 rape conviction but reserved several issues on appeal, including a challenge ...
One of the ironies of the recent 16-day federal government shutdown, which ended on October 16, 2013, is that prisoners in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) continued to receive their paychecks while BOP workers did not. FCI Forrest City, Arkansas prison employee and local union president Jeff Roberts, and ...
In 2004, Charles F. Murray was sentenced to 95 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography and traveling interstate to engage in illicit sexual conduct with a minor. As part of his sentence he was required to comply with “various special conditions of supervised release ...
Philip Colasuonno, a defendant in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was resentenced to 4 months in prison after the court found he had “willfully violated probation by failing to pay ordered restitution.” Colasuonno filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy following his initial sentencing, then argued ...
In a case of first impression, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the period of time spent in civil confinement under the Adam Walsh Act does not constitute “imprisonment,” and that a defendant’s period of supervised release is thus not tolled and continues to run during that time. ...
Many human rights activists have noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is protected by draconian post-9/11 legislation and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule-making power, has been prone to abusive detention practices – especially in the area of solitary confinement. However, courts have been reluctant to criticize ...
