by Douglas Ankney
In a maddeningly byzantine decision on February 21, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit dismissed a claim by Massachusetts prisoner Jwainus Perry that his due process rights were violated by state Department of Correction (DOC) officials, who held him in solitary confinement for almost two years in a Special Management Unit (SMU) at the notorious Souza-Baronowski Correctional Center between 2010 and 2012 “without affording him either notice of the factual basis for that confinement or an opportunity for rebuttal.”
Perry filed his claim in April 2014, after which the federal court for the District of Massachusetts granted Defendants summary judgment. A panel of the First Circuit affirmed that decision in 2018, agreeing that they were entitled to qualified immunity (QI) because the law was not clearly established, at the time of the alleged violation, that prolonged SMU confinement was a deprivation of a liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause. Four years later, the full Court sitting en banc vacated that decision and granted Perry’s motion for rehearing—only to reach the same conclusion again another two years after that.
Attempting this time to provide a framework for determining when confinement in segregation ...
by Douglas Ankney
In an amended complaint filed in federal court for the Western District of Virginia on January 19, 2024, the former warden of Marion Correctional Treatment Center (MCTC) was added to the list of Defendants being sued by the surviving sister of an intellectually disabled prisoner fatally beaten by guards.
The filing by Kymberly Hobbs came three months after a grand jury refused to indict MCTC guards Joshua Caleb Jackson, William Zachary Montgomery, Samuel Dale Osbourne, Gregory Scott Plummer and Sgt. Anthony Raymond Kelly for killing her brother, Charles James Givens, 52, on February 5, 2022.
Givens was incarcerated for fatally shooting home health nurse Misty Leann Garrett, 22, in 2010. Due to his intellectual disability—he had the mental capacity of a child aged 7 or 8, the result of a childhood tumble down the stairs—he was housed at MCTC with other “prisoners with mental-health issues and/or limited intellectual development,” the complaint continued. He also suffered from Crohn’s disease, one of the “complex medical reasons” that the complaint faults for Givens’ soiling himself.
But Defendant MCTC guards said that he “defecated on himself intentionally,” Hobbs’ complaint recalled; and because of Givens’ “inability to promptly decipher and follow [their] ...
by Douglas Ankney
On February 9, 2024, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals held that even though Henry Neal Ferguson III had been sentenced to life in state prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP), he was entitled to a sentence credit for the time he served in jail before sentencing.
The odd-sounding result—even with credit, Ferguson’s sentence still has no end—sprang from a habeas corpus petition he filed against the state Department of Corrections (DOC) in St. Claire County Circuit Court in February 2023. That recalled the facts of his case, beginning with a May 1993 arrest for first degree assault that landed him in the Talladega County Jail (TCJ). He escaped the following month, and while on the run, a grand jury indicted him in February 1994 for attempted murder. Ferguson was captured and returned to TCJ in June 1994, and two months later he was convicted of attempted murder. The circuit court sentenced him to LWOP as a habitual felon in September 1994.
Ferguson argued in the habeas petition that he was due credit for the time spent in TCJ before sentencing—less those days he was on the run. The circuit court denied his petition, reasoning that ...
by Douglas Ankney
On November 29, 2023, the Big Sandy Regional Detention Center in Eastern Kentucky settled a complaint brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with an agreement to provide medication to prisoners suffering with opioid use disorder (OUD).
According to the agreement, DOJ received a complaint from a medical provider that the Jail refused to provide buprenorphine to a patient identified as “J.F.”—despite the detainee’s medical prescription for the drug. DOJ substantiated allegations that the Jail effectively banned medication for OUD, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126 § 12101 et seq.
That law prohibits disability-based discrimination by any “public entity”—including denial of “services provided in connection with drug rehabilitation.” OUD is considered a disability because those who suffer with it “have drug addiction—a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of their major life activities,” as defined in 28 C.F.R. § 35.108. Methadone, naltrexone and buprenorphine are medications approved to treat OUD by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Rather than litigate the matter, the Jail agreed not to “change or discontinue” any detainee’s use of a medication for OUD without “an individualized determination by a qualified medical ...
by Douglas Ankney
When a jail is found to violate a detainee’s Sixth Amendment expectation that communications with his attorney are privileged, courts often shrug it off as harmless; after all, the detainee won’t raise the objection unless what was discussed could undermine his defense, and in that case courts are loathe to let the guilty go free.
But a nation of laws must abide by all of them, no matter the result. So it was a welcome surprise when the Supreme Court of Nevada on March 7, 2024, refused to take the easy way out and agree with a lower court that a detainee who violated jail phone policy to make a legal call had waived attorney-client privilege for it.
The Court’s ruling came in an appeal by former Clark County Detention Center detainee Jamal Jacqkey Gibbs. In April 2021, he was 29 and at the Las Vegas apartment of his girlfriend when her daughter returned from a visit with the child’s father, Jaylon Tiffith, 29. The mother then got in a fight with Tiffith’s new girlfriend, who was also not named. Both Tiffith and Gibbs—recently released from state prison after completing a 10-year term for a 2008 gang ...
by Douglas Ankney
On June 28, 2024, former District of Columbia (D.C.) Department of Corrections (DOC) guard Marcus Bias, 28, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison and 24 months of supervised release for assaulting a handcuffed prisoner. The sentence follows his guilty plea in March 2024 to one count of deprivation of rights under color of law.
Surveillance video captured the entire incident, which unfolded at the D.C. Jail on June 12, 2019. It began when a prisoner identified as “J.W.” refused a guard’s order to return to his cell from the dining hall and began using a phone there instead. Bias, who was then 23 and had been on the job 18 months, arrived with other members of an Emergency Response Team, pepper-spraying and handcuffing the prisoner. That’s when Bias “intentionally and without provocation” pushed him head-first into a metal doorframe, “causing serious injuries” that required hospital treatment, court documents recalled.
DOC fired Bias after reviewing the video. But he wasn’t charged and arrested until November 2022. Pastor Cheryl Mitchell Gaines wrote the federal court for the District of Columbia that her parishioner “was the youngest one there … and now he’s the fall guy.”
But D.C.’s ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 29, 2023, New York state prisoners Eugene Taylor, 32, and Charles Wright, 44, filed separate lawsuits alleging that guards with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) beat and waterboarded them two months before.
According to Taylor’s complaint, he was incarcerated at Green ...
by Douglas Ankney
A November 2023 report by the New York Office of the Inspector General (OIG) detailed grave defects uncovered by an investigation into the Contraband Drug Testing Program of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). That led to another round of expungements of disciplinary actions ...
by Douglas Ankney
On November 2, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000cc, does not require a group of Arkansas prisoners to show perfect adherence to allegedly burdened beliefs in order to demonstrate ...
by Douglas Ankney
In an important decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on December 8, 2023, that pretrial detainees no longer need show that a detention official “knew of and disregarded a substantial risk to the inmate’s health or safety” to state a claim of ...
