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 ...
by Douglas Ankney
On June 27, 2023, the Office of U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz (OIG) released a report corroborating a New York City medical examiner’s conclusion that the death of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was a suicide but faulting the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for ...
by Douglas Ankney
In the nine months ending on June 30, 2023, there were 47,931 sentences for federal crime, driving more than 5,000 prisoners into custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons every month, according to data released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission on September 21, 2023.
Most of those ...
by Douglas Ankney
In June 2023, Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) reviewed data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics on HIV and people in America’s prisons, finding that infection rates for the virus—which has no cure—remain stubbornly higher behind bars, running three times the overall rate for all those living ...
by Douglas Ankney
Jeff Burkett resigned as Sheriff of Missouri’s Iron County on January 31, 2024, saying if he stayed to defend a civil suit filed to remove him from office, his testimony might undermine his defense to pending criminal charges.
As PLN reported, the now-former Sheriff was arrested in ...
by Douglas Ankney
In an 1829 letter, Pres. Andrew Jackson (D) told the Creek Nation of Indigenous Americans that he was speaking “straight, and not with a forked tongue” when he promised those who evacuated from Alabama would enjoy new lands in Mississippi “forever.” Almost two centuries later, another Democratic ...
by Douglas Ankney
When raw sewage flooded two cell blocks at New Mexico’s Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) on November 14, 2023, guards working for its private operator, CoreCivic, ordered some 40 affected migrant detainees being held for federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to clean it up—and gave the ...
by Douglas Ankney
On February 24, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued its final order requiring prison calling-service provider Global Tel*Link (GTL) “to change its security practices and offer free credit monitoring and identity protection” to some 650,000 customers whose personal information was stolen and made available on the ...
