Alaska: On April 11, 2002, Cynthia Cooper, the head prosecutor in the state attorney general's office, resigned after being judicially admonished for pursuing felony charges against a public defender who crashed his car into a light pole. Anchorage prosecutors had agreed to a misdemeanor plea bargain with Wally Tetlow, the ...
9-11 Immigration Detainees
NJ Sex Offender Website
Florida Guards Acquitted
Parents' Project
S.Ct. on Civil Commitment
$3.5 Million Nevada Settlement
Damages in Michigan Smoking Case
Legal Mail Bans
$2.8 Million TX Boot Camp Award
Texas Guards
California Parole
News in Brief
When people think of the prison
system, they usually ...
( On October 24, 2001, Muhammed Butt died of a heart attack at the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. Butt, a Pakistani national, was detained on September 19 by the FBI as a suspect connected with the September 11 attacks. He was then transferred to the Immigration ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 11
A federal district court in New Jersey has denied sex offender plaintiffs Motion for Preliminary Injunction Relief seeking to prevent implementation of New Jersey's (NJ) Internet sex offender registry, but barred the listing of the offenders' home addresses. On November 7, 2000, NJ's electorate approved a public referendum to amend ...
by David M. Reutter
A state jury has acquitted three Florida prison guards in the murder of death row inmate Frank Valdes. The guards, Captain Timothy Thornton, Sgt. Jason P. Griffis, and Sgt. Charles A. Brown, were exonerated of second-degree murder, conspiracy to commit aggravated battery on a prisoner, official ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 13
The Supreme Court of New Jersey has affirmed an Appellate Division's holding that the No Early Release Act (NERA), N.J.S.A. 2C:43-7.2, does not apply to murder. The justices evenly split on this case of statutory construction.
Murder is the only crime for which life imprisonment is an available ordinary sentence ...
by Denise Johnston and Michael Carlin
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, more than 25% of the nation's adult population lives with a criminal record for a substantial portion of their lives. The majority of these adults are parents. The Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents estimates that there ...
by Jon Marc Taylor, Biddle Publishing Co., 2002, pb. 341 pages
Review by Hans Sherrer
All across the country DOC educational programs available to prisoners are being reduced or eliminated. That dire situation is compounded by the increasing denial of ready access by prisoners to information about outside educational opportunities. ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 16
A private company, MgtGP Inc., was awarded a $1.5 Million contract in 1997, and a four-year renewal in January 1997 worth $615,000 for that year alone, to run Kansas's Reno County Jail Annex. In May 2001, Reno's Sheriff, Larry Leslie, pled innocent to 34 counts of bribery. Also pleading innocent ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 16
The District of Columbia (DC) Court of Appeals has vacated a district court ruling on the merits of a prisoner lawsuit where the district court also found that the prisoner plaintiffs failed to exhaust administrative remedies prior to filing suit.
Louis Johnson, Isadore Gartrell, Carl Wolfe, and Roddy McDowell are ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 17
The Washington State Supreme Court held that the Washington Public Disclosure Act (PDA) at RCW § 42.17 et seq, may be used as a pretrial discovery tool to obtain caserelated documents from agencies against whom parties are litigating civil cases.
The issue arose from a civil action filed in the ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 17
The U.S. Supreme Court refined its earlier ruling that a sexually violent predator could constitutionally be civilly committed after his criminal sentence had been served by distinguishing sexual misbehavioral impairment classifications into those caused by an uncontrollable mental abnormality and those resulting from volitional acts.
Michael T. Crane was the ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 18
by Lonnie Burton
Attorney Jean Scheidler-Brown holds the DOC "free-services" contract to provide legal representation to prisoners incarcerated at McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) and the Washington Correction Center for Women, both in Washington state. In April 1997, she agreed to represent MICC prisoner William H. Rayburn in filing an ...
by Deborah M. Golden
In September 2001, the United States Parole Commission (USPC) issued a Notice of Action that, while not precedent, signifies an important policy and a possible way for prisoners to challenge parole decisions. The case arose after the USPC denied parole to a woman because she was ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The US District Court (M.D. Ga.) remanded a state prisoner 42 USC §1983 medical indifference civil rights suit back to state court because under state law, defendant Georgia Dept. of Corrections (DOC) could not hide behind an Eleventh Amendment immunity bar there.
Prisoner Danny Iler died ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 19
On October 5, 2001, the Denton County Juvenile Detention Center in Texas agreed to a pre lawsuit settlement of $100,000 in the suicide death of Seth Moss. Moss, 15, was being held in the Center as a runaway. Apparently Moss hung himself thinking that he would promptly be found by ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 20
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia has upheld the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policy prohibiting prisoners from using or possessing electric guitars or electronic musical instruments. The court enjoined BOP's exception that permitted electric guitars and electronic musical instruments owned by the Religious Services Department ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 21
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals for the has reversed and remanded for a district court to decide, in the first instance, whether the statute of limitations is tolled by a prisoner's satisfaction of the mandatory exhaustion requirements of 42 U.S.C. § 1997e(a). Prisoner Arsenio Leal filed a civil rights ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 21
Wisconsin DOC in Contempt For Not Collecting PLRA Fees
The US District Court (E.D. Wis.) issued an Order to Show Cause to Wisconsin DOC Secretary Jon E. Litscher as to why he should not be held in contempt for declaring he had no further obligation to collect court-ordered filing fees ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 22
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a pro se motion must be accepted as a notice of appeal if it states the intent to appeal, and that a jury's damage award could be set off against a plaintiff's liability for costs awarded to defendants when the plaintiff ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 22
Frank Valdes may have accomplished in death what he could not in life: a decrease in prisoner beatings by guards. The problem of abusive guards, nonetheless, has not disappeared after Valdes's murder. The form of the abuse has progressed to frequent gassings. "Before Valdes, we were getting all kinds of ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 24
Six Nevada teenagers in a juvenile offender program working to pay off fees and restitution in lieu of doing time in a detention center were struck and killed in March 2000 as they picked up trash on a freeway median near Las Vegas. The families of those teens have agreed ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The U.S. District Court (E.D..) awarded an asthmatic Michigan state prisoner $36,500 in compensatory damages and $18,250 in punitive damages after a bench trial determination that Michigan Department of Corrections (DOC) wardens had violated his Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment ...
by David M. Reutter
( A federal district court for the Eastern District of Michigan (EDM) has held the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) caps attorney fees in prisoner civil rights cases, but criticized that holding. Michigan prisoner Blaine Sallier was awarded damages of $13,000 by a jury for a ...
by John E. Dannenberg
The disturbing trend of several states to inspect legal mail outside the presence of the prisoner [see PLN Mar. 2002 "State Prisons Abrogate Attorney Client Privilege"] has begun to crumble under court challenges. Begun under the pretext of postSeptember 11, 2001 security concerns, Massachusetts, Virginia, New ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 27
Judge Awards $2.8 million to Victims of CSC Texas Boot Camp Sexual Abuse
On March 5, 2001, State District Court Judge Paul Enlow found Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) criminally liable for the actions of two former employees who sexually harassed three women while they were confined in a CSC-operated boot ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 27
Federal prisoners Curtis Sherfield and Hugh Grayson, who were being held at the Oklahoma County jail on federal drug charges, were given a total of $80,000 in December 2001 to settle their lawsuit against the county after they were beaten when other prisoners discovered the two were snitches.
The suit, ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 28
Four female guards were each freed from Jefferson County Jail on $6,000 bond early in January 2002 after being charged with crimes involving sex with Texas prisoners. The four women were employed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) at the Mark W. Stiles State Prison, a 2,800-man maximum-security ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 28
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a Tennessee Federal District Court's dismissal of a prisoner's 42 U.S.C. §1983 claims as frivolous, vacating and remanding part of the lower court's decision with instructions.
David Dellis is a Wisconsin prisoner who was for a time held in private Tennessee prisons ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 29
In a December 2001 special report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice, determined that the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) have had significant, but differing, effects on the filing rates of prisoner petitions. The ...
The California Supreme Court let stand one appellate court's ruling that the California Board of Prison Terms' (BPT) lifer parole denial decisions were subject to court oversight under a "some evidence" standard, but granted a Petition for Review of (and thereby temporarily vacated) another appellate court's ruling on the arguably ...
Loaded on
Aug. 15, 2002
published in Prison Legal News
August, 2002, page 32
California: On May 1, 2002, the Wasco State Prison banned all smoking by prisoners at the facility, becoming the second state prison in California to do so. Prison officials claimed it was costing $250,000 a year to reprimand prisoners smoking in non smoking areas and to repair damage to lighting ...
