In January 2001, pro se prisoner John Poullard won a $1.5 million judgment against five guards who beat him in retaliation for other lawsuits and complaints he had previously filed.
Poullard, who is serving time at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, alleged that the five guards--identified as Captain Joseph Turner, ...
New York Expands "Son of Sam" Law Giving Crime Victims More "Clout"
by Lonnie Burton
In June 2001, the State of New York amended its socalled "Son of Sam" law to allow crime victims to collect on any monies a prisoner receives while in prison and to extend the statute ...
In February 2001, a federal judge ruled that two Michigan prisoners are entitled to almost $7,000 in damages after they were unjustly punished by the state Department of Corrections when they were transferred to highersecurity prisons. The transfers came after the prisoners exercised their First Amendment right to free speech ...
On May 16, 2001, the State of Washington and King County agreed to pay $5.5 million to the family of a man stabbed to death by a mentally ill man who was mistakenly released from the King County (Washington) jail.
On August 24, 1997, 64 year old Ross Stevenson, a ...
In January 2000, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict awarding $100,000 to a former Arizona prisoner who was refused medical treatment while at the Maricopa County Jail.
In late 1994, Daniel Hawkins was arrested and booked into the Maricopa County Jail after police caught him breaking ...
Washington Governor Gary Locke recently signed into law the biggest changes to that state's sentencing laws since the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA) was established. The Bill, known formally as Third Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 6151, creates, among other things, a new parole board exclusively for sex offenders, and ...
The federal government wrote Terry Dean Scearce a check for $355,000 in November, 2000, to settle his claim that he suffered a stroke in 1998 because prison officials did not give him the medicine prescribed to treat his high blood pressure.
Scearce, in his late 50's, was being held at ...
An Arizona prisoner was awarded over $146,000 in damages in January 2000 after he filed suit claiming that an Arizona prison nurse's care amounted to deliberate indifference.
Manuel Covarrubias, 46, was a prisoner at the state prison at Douglas, Arizona in April, 1995, when he was injured while working. Covarrubias, ...
On Dec 14, 2000, a federal jury in South Carolina awarded a 14-year-old boy more than $3 million in damages after finding Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) guilty of physically abusing the Charleston, SC teen-ager.
In 1996, William Pacetti, then 14, was sent to CCA on charges that he ...
In 1999 an Illinois state prisoner was awarded nearly $57,000 in damages and fees following trial on his charges that fellow prisoners beat him while a guard stood and watched.
Ronnie W. Carroll filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois alleging that while ...
