by Matthew Clarke
A federal indictment handed down in June 2023 accused Scott H. Jenkins, 51, Sheriff of Virginia’s Culpeper County, of taking bribes totaling more than $72,500 from three local businessmen to make them auxiliary deputy sheriffs—issuing them badges, identification cards, guns and body armor, even helping one get ...
by Matt Clarke
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” as former British Prime Minister William Gladstone famously said. On August 7, 2023, a former Illinois prisoner finally got a measure of justice for a botched release 13 years earlier. On that date, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 26, 2023, two sons filed suit for the estate of their schizophrenic dad, accusing officials at San Diego County’s Central Jail where he was incarcerated of letting him die from dehydration, starvation and pneumonia. The lawsuit raises the question: How should jail officials treat detainees ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 26, 2023, the Michigan Supreme Court held that journalists seeking release of videos from the state Department of Corrections (DOC) were prevailing parties and thus entitled to recover attorney fees—even if their attorneys were working pro bono.
Proceeding under the state Freedom of Information Act ...
by Matt Clarke
A $7 million settlement reached in April 2023 marked the latest chapter in a sordid tale of mismanagement at Bi-State Jail (BSJ) in Texarkana, Texas, by former private operator LaSalle Corrections. But the family-owned prison profiteer, based in Ruston, Louisiana—which ended its contract to run BSJ in ...
by Matt Clarke
On June 14, 2023, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin held that a state prisoner must be given jail time credit on his sentence when the charge resulting in jail time was read in at his sentencing on another charge.
Michael K. Fermanich stole three trucks in Langlade ...
by Matt Clarke
On March 13, 2023, the California Court of Appeal for the First Appellate District reinstated a putative class-action lawsuit brought by a prisoner at San Quentin State Prison alleging a problematic prisoner transfer led to a severe outbreak of COVID-19 early in the pandemic.
As PLN reported, ...
by Matt Clarke
On May 19, 2023, the federal court for the Southern District of Illinois denied a state prison warden’s motion for summary judgment in a federal civil rights lawsuit over cell mold that caused a prisoner to suffer an infection and pneumonia. But when the pro se prisoner ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 11, 2023, class-action status was granted to a suit filed the previous April against the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), accusing the prison agency of ignoring provisions of the Humane Alternatives to Long-term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act, Correctional Law § 137(6)(k)(ii).
HALT ...
by Matthew Clarke
The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, raises several barriers for prisoner litigants, not least being a “three strikes” provision that prevents indigent prisoners from having court fees waived by filing in forma pauperis if they have also had three prior cases dismissed because ...
