by John E. Dannenberg
A hit man with 20 cold-blooded murders under his belt, but who turned government informant to expose a dirty FBI agent, was released from a Massachusetts state prison in 2007 after serving only 12 years. To help him get on his feet, the U.S. Drug Enforcement ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The California Court of Appeals has held that because California’s 1996 voter-approved Medical Marijuana Program Act (Proposition 115) permits a citizen to possess marijuana for medical use, bringing medically-approved marijuana into a jail could not be punished as a felony under Penal Code § 4573.5 (which ...
by John E. Dannenberg
A Missouri nurse employed by the state’s execution team was hired by federal officials to participate in the execution of mass killer Timothy McVeigh at Terre Haute, Indiana in 2001. However, before the nurse could leave the state he had to get permission – from his ...
by John E. Dannenberg
Robert Sillen, the scrappy Receiver appointed by a U.S. District Court to fix California’s ailing prison healthcare system, was replaced on January 23, 2008 by J. Clark Kelso, former Chief Information Officer for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who announced the change in ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California has held that the rights of California juvenile parolees were violated by the single-hearing revocation process used by the Juvenile Parole Board (JPB). Nevertheless, the court declined to require the initial revocation hearing to be held ...
by John E. Dannenberg
Even though California widely expanded the potential pool of violent sex predator (SVP) prisoners who could be forced into mental hospitals after completing their criminal sentences, and despite spending $27 million to screen and evaluate thousands of newly eligible candidates, the state hasn’t committed any of ...
by John E. Dannenberg
On November 20, 2007, the California Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal filed by a group of Lancaster State Prison visitors who sought damages for being subjected to Secure 1000 X-ray machines whenever they visited prisoners at the facility. The Secure 1000 is a low-level “backscatter” ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, applying the “atypical and significant hardship” test of Sandin v. Conner, 515 U.S. 472 (1995), affirmed a U.S. District Court’s (N.D. Cal.) ruling that denied relief from an allegedly unconstitutional prison classification decision. The Court also affirmed the denial ...
by John E. Dannenberg
A Washington state prisoner who lay for two days in the Stafford Creek Correctional Facility infirmary in agonizing pain, with a rash covering his torso and slowly drifting into septic shock, had been misdiagnosed by infirmary staff as having only an allergic reaction to Robitussin (an ...
by John E. Dannenberg
In the past three years more than 900 of the 5,300 prisoners at California’s Pleasant Valley State Prison (PVSP) in Fresno County, plus 80 staff members, have contracted coccidioidomycosis, a fungus commonly known as “valley fever.” Over a dozen prisoners and one guard have died from ...
