by Lonnie Burton
On March 29, 2017, United States District Judge George B. Daniels, sitting in the Southern District of New York, adopted in part a magistrate's report and recommendation which granted attorney's fees and costs to a lawyer who had won a jury verdict in a prisoner's 42 U.S.C. ...
by Lonnie Burton
In April 2017, the state of Arkansas decided to fast track the execution of eight prisoners before its supply of lethal injection drugs became unavailable. Soon after Governor Asa Hutchinson signed execution orders that would schedule what was called assembly line executions for one week in April ...
by Lonnie Burton
On April 24, 2017, the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued a series of rulings paving the way for the state of Arkansas to continue killing its prisoners via lethal injection at an alarming rate before the drugs used in lethal injections become unavailable. In this ...
by Lonnie Burton
On September 16, 2014, United States District Judge William Alsup, sitting in the Northern District of California, issued an order granting in part and denying in part a motion for summary judgment filed by prison officials in a case where a prisoner had sued for inadequate dental ...
by Lonnie Burton
On September 25, 2016, the state of Washington finalized a settlement agreement with a prisoner who had sued for public records act violations and for improper prison mail rejections. The parties agreed to a $750 payment to dismiss the suit, an amount which will be free from ...
By Lonnie Burton
On April 24, 2017, the state of Rhode Island and attorneys for the United States Department of Justice (D0J) reached a settlement agreement in a three year old lawsuit over discriminatory hiring practices in the state's department of corrections (RIDOC). The settlement called for, among other things, ...
by Lonnie Burton
A November 2016 report found that 67,000 prisoners were held in restrictive housing throughout the United States – also known as solitary confinement or segregation – in both state and federal facilities. The report was released soon after a group of U.S. senators introduced a bill in ...
by Lonnie Burton
On March 13, 2017, the city of Pagedale, Missouri agreed to pay $1.2 million to the family of a woman who hung herself at the city jail two-and-a-half years earlier. The resolution of the case meant that a jury trial scheduled for August 2017 was called off. ...
by Lonnie Burton
A July 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Education found that spending on prisons and jails nationwide outpaced what public officials spent on education at a rate of more than three-to-one. The study covered a 33-year period – from 1979 to 2012 – which saw the ...
by Lonnie Burton
The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has reversed a district court’s order dismissing a Wisconsin state prisoner’s 42 U.S.C. § 1983 lawsuit on the grounds that he failed to exhaust his administrative remedies. The appellate court held the lower court had erred when it failed ...
