by Lonnie Burton
On April 7, 2017, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a district court’s denial of a motion to dismiss filed by county defendants who asserted that a former prisoner’s 42 U.S.C. § 1983 lawsuit was time-barred. The appellate court rejected the plaintiff’s argument that ...
by Lonnie Burton
Under new rules adopted by a state regulatory agency in February 2017, any California jail that offered in-person prisoner visitation at the beginning of 2017 may not limit visits to video calls. Further, all future jails in the state will have to provide space for in-person, face-to-face ...
by Lonnie Burton
In December 2016, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo ordered an official probe into allegations of racial bias by guards in the state’s prison system. The governor’s announcement came shortly after the New York Times published evidence of racial discrimination it had uncovered following an investigation that examined nearly ...
by Lonnie Burton
In October 2016 report by Prison Voice Washington detailed the adverse effects of a takeover of food services in Washington state prisons by Correctional Industries (CI). The report, titled “Correcting Food Policy in Washington Prisons: How the DOC Makes Healthy Food Choices Impossible for Incarcerated People and ...
by Lonnie Burton
Several studies have shown that prisoners released directly to the streets from solitary confinement are more likely to reoffend, commit new crimes sooner and exhibit violent behavior after release. The most recent study, “From Solitary to Society,” authored by Samarth Gupta and published in the Harvard Political ...
by Lonnie Burton
On August 18, 2015, the state of Michigan agreed to pay a prisoner $4,000 to settle a lawsuit in which prison staff deliberately ignored a medically-issued "bottom bunk detail" and the prisoner later fell from the top bunk injuring his shoulder.
Timothy Murphy had been incarcerated in ...
by Lonnie Burton
On August 17, 2015, an administrative law judge in Maryland ruled that state prison officials were guilty of sexually harassing and mistreating a transgender prisoner and awarded her $5,000 in damages. The ruling was the first of its kind for a transgender prisoner alleging harassment at the ...
by Lonnie Burton
Timothy Murphy and Joe Hoffman dug a makeshift tunnel in an attempt to escape from Michigan's Kinross prison in March 2007. While their effort was ultimately foiled at the last minute, a feature article in the August 2008 edition of Esquire magazine entitled "The Tunnel" detailed the ...
by Lonnie Burton
In a settlement of a lawsuit previously mentioned in Prison Legal News, New York City agreed on September 27, 2016, to pay $5.75 million to the mother of a mentally ill Rikers Island prisoner who died on his cell floor in September 2013, naked and covered ...
by Lonnie Burton
On November 16, 2016, the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed a lower court order involuntarily committing a defendant who was found incompetent to stand trial to a psychiatric hospital. The state high court ruled that the applicable law did not authorize the circuit court to issue such ...
