by Matthew Clarke
In April 2016, the City of Arlington, Texas agreed to pay the estate of a man who died in the municipal jail $1.25 million to settle a wrongful death suit. Two jailers were indicted for negligent homicide, two others were initially fired and one was reprimanded.
Jonathan ...
by Matthew Clarke
On July 5, 2016, a California federal district court signed off on a consent judgment in a suit filed against Tulare County, California over censorship of Prison Legal News at the county’s jail. To settle the lawsuit, county officials agreed to change the jail’s mail rules to ...
by Matthew Clarke
The District of Columbia agreed to pay $16.65 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a former prisoner wrongfully convicted of rape and murder.
On September 16, 1982, Donald Eugene Gates, then 30, was convicted of raping and killing Catherine Schilling, whose body had been discovered in ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 19, 2014, a Washington State federal court signed off on the preliminary settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought against Spokane County for routinely jailing people with court-ordered fines or other legal financial obligations who were unable to pay them without first holding a hearing on ...
In a November 13, 2015 ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held a district court may compel a lawyer to represent an indigent prisoner challenging prison conditions.
Mario Naranjo was incarcerated at the Reeves County Detention Center in Texas when he filed a lawsuit pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § ...
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) reported a 40% increase in suicides between 2008 and 2014. As of September 2015, the average number of suicide attempts in Texas prisons each month had jumped 28% from 81.7 attempts per month in 2014 to 104.5 attempts per month during the first ...
On August 17, 2015, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a Texas prisoner’s failure to fully exhaust administrative remedies was excused because jail staff had misled him about grievance procedures.
Grady Allen Davis was being held at the Dallas County Jail when guards allegedly used excessive force against ...
TrueAllele DNA testing software has been employed in hundreds of criminal cases around the country since 2009. The software is used to analyze evidence containing mixtures of genetic material and determine whether it contains a match to a suspect or DNA archived in a database. A similar DNA testing program, ...
In June 2015, the State Bar of Texas initiated disciplinary actions against Fort Bend County District Attorney John Francis Healey, Jr. and Assistant District Attorney Mark Harold Hanna. The disciplinary petitions filed by the State Bar Commission for Lawyer Discipline alleged Healey had delayed notifying Jacob Estrada, a state prisoner ...
In unrelated cases, jail guards charged with abusing prisoners were acquitted of the most serious charges filed against them in California and Georgia.
Former jail deputies Christopher Johnson and Robert Kirsh were acquitted by a federal jury on the most serious charges stemming from an assault on prisoner Charles Alonzo ...
