by Matt Clarke
In February 2010, the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) published an issue brief on the relationship between hired defense counsel and the death penalty. The brief concluded that defendants charged with a capital crime who hired a private attorney, even if only for a ...
by Matt Clarke
In July 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report on mortality in U.S. jails from 2000 through 2007. During the 8-year period covered by the report, 8,110 prisoners died in U.S. jails. The number of deaths increased each year from 905 ...
by Matt Clarke
For five years, Jeff Maier, 53, was an Ohio prison guard. Then for 13 months he was an Ohio state prisoner. The change from one side of the bars to the other occurred after Maier was discovered smuggling drugs into the facility where he worked. Following his ...
by Matt Clarke
The twenty states that have civil commitment programs will spend close to a half-billion dollars in 2010 to incarcerate and provide treatment for some 5,200 civilly-committed sex offenders. The per-offender cost for civil commitment is much higher than the cost of incarcerating people in prison, and has ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 3, 2010, a U.S. District Court in Washington State held it was unconstitutional to shackle a prisoner in labor.
Cassandra Brawley, 30, was a Washington state prisoner. In 2006 she was arrested for second degree theft and received a fourteen-month prison sentence. She was five ...
by Matt Clarke
In 2009, 191 of 210 clerk magistrates and assistants in Massachusetts padded their incomes by pocketing over $2.5 million in after-hours bail fees.
Clerk magistrates and assistants are paid salaries ranging from $84,000 to $110,000. Due to a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that bail hearings must ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 12, 2010, the Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee (UPLC), a nine-member body appointed by the Texas Supreme Court that is responsible for enforcing statutes prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law, filed suit against Tony R. Davis, a former federal prisoner, and his two affiliated companies, ...
by Matt Clarke
If you are arrested in Harris County (Houston), Texas, you can usually pay a bondsman 10% of the bail amount to get out of jail. The bondsman pledges the full amount and assures your appearance in court. But what if you are one of the estimated 5% ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 13, 2010, a Wisconsin federal court issued a 68-page decision holding that a Wisconsin state law prohibiting hormone therapy for prisoners with gender identity disorder (GID) was an unconstitutional violation of their equal protection and Eighth Amendment rights.
Andrea Fields, Matthew Davidson (aka Jessica Davidson) ...
by Matt Clarke
Authorities at the Cherlapally Central Jail, a 2,100-bed facility near Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, announced in May 2010 that they will open an outsourcing unit. [See: PLN, July 2010, p.32].
The program will be privately run by Bangalore-based Radiant Info Systems ...
