by Douglas Ankney
Colorado lawmakers wasted little time in this year’s session before killing Senate Bill 12 (SB 12) on February 7, 2024. Though the state has one of the country’s highest recidivism rates—about 50%—the one-year pilot program that would provide up to $3,000 in conditional cash assistance upon release ...
by Douglas Ankney
A New Jersey prisoner filed a putative class-action lawsuit on December 19, 2023, alleging that privileged telephone communications with his attorney were recorded by the jail where he was held, provided to prosecutors and used against him at trial. Disturbingly, this is not the first such ...
by Douglas Ankney
On April 2, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois denied relief to Wexford Health Sources, Inc., the private healthcare contractor for the state Department of Corrections (DOC), from a $750,000 jury verdict for delayed surgery that left a state prisoner to ...
by Doug Ankney
On December 14, 2023, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri granted only part of a motion by defendant state prison officials to dismiss a complaint filed by Muslim state prisoners, who accused guards of beating and pepper-spraying them while they were praying ...
by Douglas Ankney
“If we refused to work we had to stand on top of a wooden box in the sun. It was called ‘doin’ the scarecrow’ and some guys passed out from the heat”—Florida prisoner Ronald Smith, quoted by formerly incarcerated journalist Ryan Moser in Slavery and the Modern-Day Prison Plantation, JStor Daily (Nov. 2023).
That quote is not a relic of the 19th century. Smith was talking about 1988, when he was part of a “gun squad”—a group of prisoners who toiled outdoors under the eye of guards on horseback armed with 12-guage shotguns.
As PLN reported, prisons have not been left out of the modern effort to erase the names of slavers and Confederates from public buildings that once honored them. [See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.32.] Name changes are easy. But what about the men and women caged inside the prisons, who are still routinely coerced to work for little or no pay? While most elected officials disavow any ambition to return to America’s slaveholding past, the ugly practice continues. Slavery is almost “mandated” as appropriate “punishment” for crime in the U.S. Constitution. Apparently, the United States cannot break from the desire shared ...
by Douglas Ankney
On December 14, 2023, the New York Court of Appeals refused to hold officials with the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) liable for malpractice committed on a state prisoner by Dr. Jun Wang. Why? Because Wang is an employee of private pathology group Cortland Pathology, which is not under contract to DOCCS, so he is not entitled to indemnification by the state.
The underlying facts unfolded after Omar J. Alvarez developed a mass in his right armpit while held at Auburn Correctional Facility in 2012. Pathologist Dr. R. Wayne Cotie, who was under contract with DOCCS to provide medical services to state prisoners, removed a biopsy specimen and sent it to the pathology department at Cortland Regional Medical Center (CRMC) for examination.
Cortland Pathology had an exclusive contract with CRMC to perform all pathology examinations. Wang, a member of Cortland Pathology and also Medical Director of CRMC’s pathology department, examined the specimen and concluded it was benign. But about one year later, the prisoner was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Meanwhile he developed paraplegia from spinal cord compression attributable to the delayed Hodgkins diagnosis.
Alvarez brought a medical malpractice action against CRMC, which subsequently ...
by Douglas Ankney
Two former guards with Inmate Services Corporation (ISC), a private contractor that provided prisoner transports across the U.S., have been sentenced to federal prison for raping detainees in their charge. Marquet Johnson, 45, was sentenced on April 16, 2024, to 30 years in federal prison followed by five years of supervised release; he must also register as a sex offender. Fellow ISC guard Rogeric Hankins, then 37, was sentenced on July 11, 2023, to nine years in prison and three years of supervised release.
ISC provided transport for individuals arrested on out-of-state warrants. Hankins drove his ISC van to the jail in Olympia, Washington, on March 31, 2020, to transport detainee Jennifer Seelig to another lockup in St. Paul, Minnesota. En route, he parked at a Missouri rest stop on April 3, 2020, to let the detainee use the restroom. When she finished, Hankins took Seelig into the men’s restroom and began forcing her shirt up. The detainee tried to resist, but Hankins forced her to “perform a sexual act on him,” according to his plea agreement, before he “bent the victim over a toilet and raped her.”
Johnson admitted raping other detainees he bent over ...
by Douglas Ankney
On February 28, 2024, Idaho halted the execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, 73, after the all-volunteer team assigned to kill him was unable to find a suitable vein to establish the intravenous connection necessary for his lethal injection.
Creech, convicted of five murders in three states, was initially sentenced to death in 1983 for the murder of fellow prisoner David Dale Jensen in 1981. At the time of Jensen’s murder, Creech was serving two life sentences for the murders of house painters John Wayne Bradford and Edward Thomas Arnold. But Creech “admitted to killing or participating in the killing of at least 26 people,” as the Supreme Court of the U.S. recalled when hearing his appeal in Arave v. Creech, 507 U.S. 463 (1993), and “[t]he bodies of 11 of his victims—who were shot, stabbed, beaten, or strangled to death—have been recovered in seven States.”
Placed on a gurney, Creech was wheeled into the execution chamber at Idaho Maximum Security Institution (IMSI) at 10:00 a.m. Three members of the killing team tried eight times to establish an IV in Creech’s arms, legs, hands, and feet. But they could not access a vein of sufficient quality. ...
Lack of expert testimony halved a $500,000 award made by a federal jury to Pennsylvania prisoner Michael Sherman Allen on November 1, 2023, for injuries sustained in a brutal 2019 beating at the hands of Robert Hollowood and fellow guards at State Correctional Institution (SCI) in Fayette.
Allen, who is an African-American, was previously held at SCI-Graterford when he filed an earlier complaint against several guards in July 2015. Before that case went to trial, one of the named defendants—guard Edward Settle—died. SCI-Fayette guards, apparently aware of the case and blaming Allen for Settle’s death, called the prisoner a “snitch” and a “scum bag.”
It was against this background that Allen observed Hollowood and two other guards—Juan Macias and Paul Gaffey—enter his cell at SCI-Fayette on February 25, 2019. Allen at the time was on the telephone, so he terminated his call and approached his cell to see why the guards were inside, finding that Hollowood was destroying his CPAP machine.
Gaffey prevented Allen from entering the cell to attempt to save the device and ordered him to strip naked in front of the other prisoners on the cell block. Allen complied. Surveillance video then captured Hollowood as he ran ...
