On September 5, 2024, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) gave the last signoff to a $5.6 million settlement with the wife of a state prisoner who was forced to strip and submit to an invasive body cavity search when she went to visit him.
When …
In a research paper published on October 15, 2024, UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich examined the state of civil rights law regarding excessive use of force by American prison guards and concluded that the current standard is woefully inadequate to protect prisoners from abuse or permit redress once excessive …
by Matt Clarke
On August 22, 2024, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky sentenced Jesse Kipf to 81 months in federal prison for hacking into the Hawai’i Death Registry the year before. It was a strange crime; in his guilty plea, Kipf, 39, admitted to …
by Matt Clarke
On May 7, 2024, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $24 million settlement for two California men who were wrongly convicted as teenagers of a 1997 murder, based on an unreliable jailhouse snitch’s testimony and falsified evidence.
On June 28, 1997, …
by Matt Clarke
On September 26, 2024, United States Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz released findings from an unannounced inspection of the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Numerous violations of federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policy were found at the 1,128-bed medium-security …
by Matt Clarke
On September 20, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit held that a prisoner’s consensual sexual encounters with a guard cannot, as a matter of law, constitute the pain required to sustain a claim under the Eighth Amendment. Though a blow …
by Matt Clarke
The Sunset Advisory Commission, an oversight body for Texas government agencies, published a 189-page report in September 2024 that found persistent critical staffing shortages are making Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prisons unsafe for staff and prisoners alike. In fact, some guards and parole …
by Matthew Thomas Clarke
On July 2, 2024, the federal court for the District of Arizona approved settlement of a lawsuit brought against the United States by former immigration detainees under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. §§ 1346(b)(1), 2671, et seq., for separating them from …
by Matt Clarke
"People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed,” lockups where “[i]nmates are maimed, tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not-so-benign neglect.”
So began a scathing 93-page report published by the Civil Rights …
by Matt Clarke
On August 16, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the verdict and jury award of $6.4 million in compensatory damages against three nurses who worked for Corizon Health when it held the contract to provide healthcare at Michigan’s Kent …
