by Matt Clarke
On April 5, 2023, the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia refused a motion for judgment as a matter of law, or in the alternative a new trial, made by defendant prison officials and their private medical contractor, Armor Correctional Health Services, in a civil ...
by Matt Clarke
After the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) settled a lawsuit over life-threatening excessive heat at the Wallace Pack Unit in 2018, it realized it needed to apply the suit’s heat-sensitivity criteria systemwide – and found a quick solution.
For years, officials had been moving prisoners out of administrative segregation (ad seg) and super segregation (super seg) cells, slowly freeing thousands of beds in some of the prison system’s only air-conditioned cells. So TDCJ decided to begin moving all its heat sensitive prisoners – most of whom are elderly, infirm or taking psychotropic medications – into the former isolation cells.
But there is a cruelty baked into the architecture of ad seg and super seg, not to mention the attitudes of guards who work there. Those spaces were designed to hold very dangerous prisoners in extreme isolation; simply changing occupants does not change the fact that the isolation is much greater than it is for prisoners in general population, while also denying access to programs and activities such as education, library, recreation, law library and chapel services.
Simultaneously, housing elderly and infirm prisoners alongside young prisoners with mental illness – often in the same cells – is ...
by Matt Clarke
On October 4, 2022, a federal jury in Colorado awarded $8.25 million to a woman taken by a former sheriff to his home and sexually assaulted as he was transporting her to another jail.
Peatinna Biggs, 46, who is developmentally disabled, was in custody of Sedgwick County when then-Sheriff Thomas Hanna decided to transport her to the Logan County Jail in August 2016. Before leaving the Sedgewick lockup, he had her change into street clothes. Then, using his personal pickup truck – in violation of department policy – he didn’t take her directly to the other jail. Instead Hanna allegedly drove to his house and ordered Biggs to go inside.
There he allegedly offered her $60 to have sex with him, and when she refused, he ordered her to undress, removed some of his own clothing and sexually assaulted her. He then threatened her, she said, vowing she would go to prison for the rest of her life if she told anyone about the sexual assault. Then, at last, he took her to the Logan County Jail.
Sedgwick County Deputy Sheriff Larry Neugebauer witnessed as Hanna had Biggs change into street clothes, which was highly unusual for ...
by Matt Clarke
On December 5, 2022, federal prosecutors moved to dismiss insider trading charges against JPay founder Ryan Shapiro, 45. For a hefty fee, the firm provides financial and communications services to people incarcerated in jail and prisons. JPay was acquired by Securus Technologies in April 2015. Both are now subsidiaries of Dallas-based Aventiv Technologies.
Shapiro was charged with financial securities crimes in a Boston federal court in January 2022, along with his friend, founder and manager of the hedge fund Sakal Capital Management, Kris Bortnovsky, then 40, and David Schottenstein, then 38, whom the Miami Herald called “a member of one of America’s richest families.” [See: PLN, Mar. 2022, p.10.]
Schottenstein signed an affidavit swearing, under penalty of perjury, that he provided the other two men with insider information so they could illegally profit from the stock market. Schottenstein received the information from a relative, a member of the board of DSW and Green Growth Brands. The information included a pending merger not yet announced between Albertson’s and Rite-Aid, as well as a planned hostile takeover attempt by Green Growth Brands of marijuana distributor Aphria. Both the merger and takeover ultimately failed but not before their announcements briefly ...
by Matt Clarke
A North Carolina prisoner who alleged his constitutional rights were violated during his arrest and pretrial detention eventually filed five federal lawsuits. Three were dismissed by the federal court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. One is still pending. Another was settled on August 12, 2021, for a payment of $5,000 to the prisoner, Cornelius Lamont Barnes, 42.
The complaints date back to September 5, 2018, when Barnes was arrested by U.S. Marshals in Virginia and returned to North Carolina to face rape charges. Kinston police took him to Lenoir County Jail (LCJ). While he was there, Kinston Detectives executed a search warrant at Barnes’ residence on October 30, 2018, seizing a cellphone they found. They sent it to the State Bureau of Investigation lab, where a digital copy was made of its contents – despite the absence of a search warrant for the phone.
A CD with the copied information was given to Assistant District Attorney Tonya Montanye, who advised Barnes that she intended to use it in his criminal prosecution. On January 27, 2020, Barnes filed suit pro se in the Court pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging the search of the phone ...
by Matt Clarke
On April 7, 2023, a visibly annoyed U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver issued a highly-detailed permanent injunction (PI) specifying what must be done by the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (DCRR) to meet minimum constitutional standards in providing prisoner healthcare and mental health care, as well as conditions in isolation.
As PLN previously reported, the Court found in June 2022 that healthcare and mental health care in the prison system was “plainly grossly inadequate,” and the conditions in its restrictive housing units were unconstitutional. [See: PLN, Dec. 2022, p.l.]
Before issuing the PI, Judge Silver noted that she was forced to throw out a six-year-old settlement because DCRR showed little interest in making the improvements it agreed to, despite $2.5 million in contempt-of-court fines.
“Given this history, the Court cannot impose an injunction that is even minutely ambiguous,” Silver wrote, “because Defendants have proven they will exploit any ambiguity to the maximum extent possible.”
The final PI includes “a specific number of key personnel that must be hired.” That number was determined by court-appointed experts Dr. Marc Stern, Dr. Bart Abplanalp and John McGrath. The court ordered DCRR to immediately hire the specified number of ...
by Matt Clarke
On February 8, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reinstated claims by Pennsylvania child support debtors jailed for civil contempt, who argued they were unfairly forced to perform unsafe and nearly uncompensated labor at a privately-operated, county-owned recycling center.
William Burrell, Jr. was jailed in Lackawanna County in 2014 for civil contempt after failing to make court-ordered child support payments. He qualified for the jail’s work-release program, which would allow him to pay off his child support debt and be released from jail rather than serving the entire length of his civil contempt sentence. However, the county had a policy requiring anyone seeking work-release to first work half of their sentence at the recycling center owned by the county’s Solid Waste Management Authority (SWMA).
SWMA is operated by a private company, the Lakawanna County Recycling Center, Inc. (LCRR). The firm paid laborers $5 per 8-hour work day – 63¢ per hour – for sorting trash in allegedly dangerous and disgusting conditions, including denying the workers portions of sack meals sent from the jail if they didn’t perform quickly enough.
Burrell filed a pro se federal civil rights lawsuit in September 2014, alleging the ...
by Matt Clarke
Corizon Heath, Inc. has engaged in legal maneuvers over the course of the past year that are intended to limit how much it must pay on over $38 million in debt to companies that supplied it with staffing, medical supplies and real estate, as well as plaintiffs and attorneys who won lawsuits against the firm and government entities it had agreed to indemnify for lawsuit losses.
Corizon began the first step of the legal maneuvers known as the “Texas 2-step” in April 2022 when it converted to a Texas corporation. At the time, Corizon’s headquarters was in Tennessee, and it was not conducting any business in Texas. The sole reason it became a Texas corporation was to perform a “divisional merger,” a process permitted under Texas law in which a corporation divides into multiple successor corporations with assets and liabilities assigned to the successors as it sees fit under Tex. Bus. Orgs. Code, §§ 10.00l(a), 10.003.
In this case, Corizon survived and retained all of its expired contracts and their corresponding liabilities plus $1 million in cash, the right to collect on its insurance policies, and the right to collect up to $4 million under a “funding ...
by Matt Clarke
On March 21, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reinstated a former federal prisoner’s lawsuit under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb et seq., alleging religiously motivated harassment by guards with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) caused him to cease daily Muslim prayer at his workplace in the prison commissary and then cost him his job.
In 2009, Charles Mack was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Loretto, Pennsylvania. A devout Muslim as well as a paid worker in the prison’s commissary, he tried to observe the basic tenet of his faith that he pray daily at five specified times, as his work duties allowed. Mack typically went to the back corner of the commissary to pray for about five minutes.
Mack was easily identifiable as a devout Muslim because he wore religious headgear and was exempted from handling pork products in the commissary. Most of the guards assigned to the commissary had no problem with his prayers, he said. But two guards, Doug Roberts and Samuel Venslosky, allegedly targeted Mack for religious animus. Because of his religious beliefs, the two guards – who were assigned to ...
by Matt Clarke
On January 25, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released a report finding the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) was deliberately indifferent to the due-process rights of state prisoners who were held long past their release dates. DOJ also found that DPSC has been aware of this problem for more than a decade yet refused to take effective steps to ensure the timely release of its prisoners.
The report noted that between January and April 2022, 1,108 (26.8%) of the 4,135 prisoners DPSC released were held past their release dates. The median over-detention was 29 days, but 31% were over-detained at least 60 days and 24% at least 90 days.
Although Louisiana does not compensate over-detained prisoners, it does have to pay to keep them incarcerated – at least $2.5 million a year, DOJ estimated. That is because DPSC uses 104 local parish jails to incarcerate about half of its 26,000 prisoners, as well as privately operated lockups where it contracts for bed space. All prisoners held at jails, however, remain in custody of DPSC, which is responsible for their timely release.
It is this extensive use of local jails, along with an ...
