by Ed Lyon
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”That’s a famous quote from Luke Skywalker, a character in 1977’s Star Wars, as his Millennium Falcon spacecraft emerges from faster-than-light speed only to find Alderaan, its destination planet, has been destroyed. But this phrase of foreboding was also recently ...
by Ed Lyon
A $1.15 million settlement was reached on January 31, 2020 in the case of a women who gave birth to premature twins, but one died in a prison bathroom.
In 2012, South Carolinian Sinetra Geter was sentenced to two years in prison for violating parole. She discovered ...
by Ed Lyon
The efficacy of states continuing to retain elderly prisoners has been questioned by corrections experts for decades. The problems with continuing to needlessly incarcerate senior prisoners has become even more germane amidst the ongoing coronavirus crisis as activists, along with prison reformists, urge Alabama to release its ...
by Ed Lyon
Thirty-six-year-old Ashley Via Menser of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, is battling both cervical and ovarian cancer from prison after being convicted and sentenced in January 2020 for shoplifting $109.63 worth of groceries.
As her case progressed through court, her cancer progressed, too. She was scheduled for an oncology appointment ...
by Ed Lyon
Prisons are obvious contagion grounds for COVID-19, and conditions in Alabama are among the worst in the nation. Now, it appears, those conditions could get worse even as the coronavirus problem is rapidly spreading at prisons in Alabama and across the country.
On April 16, 2020 the ...
by Ed Lyon
As of April 1, 2020, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) counted just over 122,000 prisoners in custody, more than 25 percent lower than its 2006 peak, continuing a downward trend that began after a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that capped the state prison ...
by Ed Lyon
Despite settling a landmark prisoner civil rights case in 2016, and after a bloody 2018 riot led to a nationwide prisoner work strike that same year, conditions in facilities run by the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) remain so bad that prisoner advocates in late-2019 appealed ...
by Ed Lyon
As the threat of COVID-19 contagion has become tangible to prison populations across the United States, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) has implemented risk management and mitigation protocols throughout its prison system.
Among these is the cessation of accepting new prisoners from county jails and transfers ...
by Ed Lyon
On January 23, 2020, the family of an Arkansas man who was executed three years earlier, filed a lawsuit to obtain evidence from the scene of the murder for which he was convicted, hoping to finally submit it for DNA testing.
“My family has been unable to ...
by Ed Lyon
Daniel Hernandez was a Brooklyn rap artist who managed to achieve no small measure of fame. To his fans he was Tekashi 6ix9ine. He decided to live the gangsta life and rapped about his time as a member of New York City’s Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods. He ...
