On January 12, 2015, New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer announced the $17 million settlement of wrongful conviction claims brought by three half-brothers who were convicted of murder and spent a combined total of 60 years in prison.
The homicide detective in all three cases was Louis Scarcella, now ...
Former employees of Houston-based Turning Point, Inc., a private, for-profit company which contracted with Texas to provide substance abuse treatment in its state jail system, are revealing how supervisors pressured them to falsify Addiction Severity Index (ADI) scores to downplay mental illness issues and exaggerate alcohol and substance abuse.
Melissa ...
On August 7, 2014, federal district court judge Lawrence K. Karlton granted preliminary approval of a settlement in a class-action suit brought by California state prisoners who suffer from mental illnesses. The settlement ensures that such prisoners will not be excluded from prison programs and services or discriminated against on ...
A wrongful death suit filed by the parents of a 30-year-old Bexar County, Texas jail prisoner who died of a methadone overdose while in solitary confinement at the lock-up settled in February 2015 for $200,000, and a guard responsible for conducting cell checks at the time of the prisoner’s death ...
The Sexual Predator Treatment Program, operated by the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, is at the heart of a debate over whether civil commitment programs are truly designed to rehabilitate offenders convicted of sex crimes, or are thinly-disguised prisons intended to keep sex offenders warehoused once they have ...
On June 26, 2015, a Colorado federal court denied a warden's motion to dismiss him from a prisoner's lawsuit claiming near-fatal deliberate indifference to his serious medical. The warden was included in the suit for failure to train guards who ignored the prisoner's medical condition.
Christopher Tantlinger, 33, a Colorado ...
A San Antonio, Texas judge is considering what he will recommend to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after hearing testimony that four women convicted of sexually abusing two young girls in 1994 should be exonerated. The women, who are known to their supporters and in the media as the ...
As long ago as 1997, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch issued a report that characterized conditions in Venezuelan prisons as “violat[ing] both Venezuelan law and international human rights standards.” The group pointed to dangerous overcrowding as perhaps the greatest fundamental problem in that country’s prisons.
Recent reports, however, indicate ...
In a verdict handed down on August 21, 2014, a federal jury found in favor of an Arkansas prisoner who claimed prison guards had provoked him into attacking them so they could beat him. The jury award of $2,250 included compensatory and punitive damages.
Keith Moore, a state prisoner, was ...
Federal judges, who have lifetime appointments, hold positions that give them unique power to control the future of defendants who appear before them in public proceedings. However, when it comes to examining the personal behavior of those same jurists, they are surrounded by a cloak of secrecy so impenetrable that ...
