by Matt Clarke
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held on March 7, 2019 that prison guards could not be held liable for failing to act on a prisoner’s self-reported symptoms that medical staff had incorrectly diagnosed as the flu.
Barton Roberts was incarcerated at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in ...
by Matt Clarke
In December 2018, Minnesota agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a prisoner who committed suicide while guards ignored orders to keep him under constant observation, then forged documents to cover up their lapses.
William Roy St. John, 47, had ...
by Matt Clarke
In 2019, the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued a report that called the state jail system “a complete failure.” Created in 1993, the category of crime known as a state jail felony was intended to segregate certain nonviolent, low-level offenders – especially those convicted ...
by Matt Clarke
On February 8, 2019, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that a district court erred when it reframed a former Illinois jail prisoner’s lawsuit over denial of a legal publication as a broad First Amendment challenge to the facility’s policy of prohibiting prisoners from receiving ...
by Matt Clarke
On February 15, 2019, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a prisoner’s pro se lawsuit that had been dismissed for failure to comply with Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8 and 20. In doing so, it held that such sua sponte dismissals should be reviewed de ...
by Matt Clarke
Newly elected Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva held a press conference in late January 2019, claiming that court-ordered reforms in the county’s jail system had caused an increase in violence among its 18,000 prisoners – and that the previous sheriff had covered it up. But ...
by Matt Clarke
A lawsuit over the 2015 death of Adams County, Colorado jail detainee Tyler Tabor was secretly settled for $3.9 million in August 2018. The settlement only became public after court documents were filed complaining that Corizon Health had met only $1 million of its $3.7 million settlement ...
by Matt Clarke
Some readers may recall how a hacker targeted Dallas, Texas-based Securus Technologies, a prison telecom company, resulting in the records of some 70 million phone calls made by over 63,000 prisoners being released on the Internet in November 2015. That incident revealed Securus was recording prisoners’ calls ...
by Matt Clarke
On February 5, 2019, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals held that a prisoner cannot waive challenges to portions of his prison discipline to circumvent the requirements of Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994) and Edwards v. Balisok, 520 U.S. 641 (1997). Rather, ...
by Matt Clarke
On January 8, 2019, Montgomery County, Ohio agreed to pay $115,000 to resolve a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by a former jail prisoner who was pepper-sprayed while “largely strapped into” a seven-point restraint chair.
Charles Wade was being booked into the Montgomery County Jail on October ...
