On February 5, 2014, Prison Legal News editor Paul Wright interviewed Noam Chomsky, 85, at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. Professor Chomsky is the foremost dissident intellectual in the United States, and for decades has been a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy, human rights abuses, imperialism and the media’s ...

This month’s interview with Noam Chomsky is part of PLN’s ongoing series of interviews with notable people who have diverse views of the U.S. criminal justice system. Prior interviews have been conducted with well-known actor Danny Trejo, media mogul and millionaire Conrad Black, and wrongfully convicted former prisoner Jeff Deskovic. ...

by Matt Clarke

On October 24, 2012, a federal jury in Texas awarded $2.25 million to the estate and survivors of a prisoner who died at a facility operated by LCS Corrections Services (LCS), after finding the company was 100% at fault. The district court subsequently reversed its dismissal of ...

In April 2013, an Ohio appellate court ruled that a sex offender, who was required by virtue of a California conviction to register his address annually for ten years, could not subsequently be indicted, after moving to Ohio and being reclassified under the Adam Walsh Act, for failing to register ...

by Jamie Longazel and Rachel Archer

Michael Saffioti was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana charge and held at the Snohomish County Jail (SCJ) in Washington State. On the morning of July 2, 2012, he arrived at the center of his module where breakfast was being served. Because he had a ...

On March 28, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a federal district court may impose a federal prison term that is consecutive to an anticipated future state court sentence. In February 2014, the Third Circuit ruled that a district court’s ability to impose such a sentence only applies at ...

A mentally ill detainee who was placed in solitary confinement in a New Mexico county jail for nearly two years, without adequate medical or mental health care, accepted a $15.5 million settlement for violations of his civil rights.

Stephen Slevin, 59, served almost 22 months in solitary confinement between 2005 ...

A civilian prison employee’s sexual abuse of two prisoners at a federal facility in Phoenix, Arizona was made public after an FBI surveillance camera captured the lascivious details of their ménage à trois.

According to a rather explicit criminal complaint filed on August 29, 2012 in U.S. District Court, Carl ...

Last month, Prison Legal News reported that the parents of a slain Colorado prison guard did not want the prisoner who murdered him to face the death penalty. Edward Montour, who beat Lima Correctional Facility guard Eric Autobee to death in October 2002, was initially sentenced to death but that ...

There are currently 2.2 million people held in prisons and jails in the United States,1 and an estimated 95% of prisoners currently in custody will one day be released. Based on 2012 data, around 637,400 people are released annually from state and federal prisons.2

According to an April 2011 report ...

Last year the Supreme Court of Iowa reversed a parolee’s conviction on drug charges, holding that his acceptance of a search condition in a parole agreement did not constitute voluntary consent, and therefore a warrantless, suspicionless search of his car was unreasonable and violative of his rights under the search ...

Although the Oregon State Bar initially decided to pursue disciplinary charges against the district attorney for Washington County and a criminal defense attorney who represented a mentally ill defendant, for causing the defendant’s illegal confinement, the charges were later dropped.

Donn Thomas Spinosa stabbed his wife to death on May ...

Prison Legal News previously reported a decision by the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel for the Eighth Circuit, which held that a Missouri bankruptcy court was correct in concluding that state prison officials did not violate a discharge injunction by collecting money from a prisoner’s account for incarceration costs that accrued after ...

Arkansas officials are suing prisoners under the State Prison Inmate Care and Custody Reimbursement Act (Act), seeking reimbursement for the costs of their incarceration by obtaining court orders and seizing money from their prison trust accounts.

For example, a state court entered an order requiring prisoner Michael R. MacKool to ...

The Montana Supreme Court held on March 5, 2013 that refusing to grant a hospitalized prisoner’s motion for continuance of a divorce trial was an abuse of discretion.

David and Lori Eslick were married on August 15, 2005. In December 2010, David began serving a sentence in the Montana State ...

On April 22, 2013, the Supreme Court of California, resolving a conflict among lower state courts, held that a defendant who fails to contest a jail booking fee order when it is imposed forfeits the right to challenge the order on appeal.

After pleading no contest to being a convicted ...

A Texas probationer subjected to false arrest and malicious prosecution has been awarded $169,000 in damages plus attorneys’ fees and costs.

Thomas Hannon, 37, unemployed and on probation, had an outstanding arrest warrant for probation revocation. Dallas police knew he was at a local hotel, and on August 1, 2007, ...

by Matt Clarke

A study involving eight people who lost consciousness immediately after being shocked by a TASER X26 – the most common electronic control device (ECD) used by police, corrections agencies and the military – concluded that ECD shocks can induce fatal cardiac arrest by causing cardiac “capture” and ...

On March 19, 2014, a state district court in Travis County, Texas held that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest for-profit prison company, is considered a “governmental body” for purposes of the state’s Public Information Act and therefore subject to the Act’s “obligations to disclose public information.”

The ...

A Prison Policy Initiative briefing

by Peter Wagner and Leah Sakala

Wait, does the United States have 1.4 million or more than 2 million people in prison? And do the 688,000 people released every year include those getting out of local jails? Frustrating questions like these abound because our systems ...

The New York Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling that granted an incarcerated father visitation rights with his three-year-old child. The Court held the lower court had properly applied a legal standard that presumes in favor of visitation and considers whether that presumption is rebutted by evidence showing ...

Los Angeles County’s GPS monitoring system, designed to keep track of high-risk probationers, has overwhelmed probation officers with thousands of false alerts each day – so many that some officers simply ignore them. As a result, dozens of probationers have been able to roam unmonitored. In some cases, even when ...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals applied the harmless error test in finding that a district court’s late Rand summary judgment notice did not deprive a prisoner of substantial rights. Additionally, the appellate court held prison officials were not deliberately indifferent to a substantial risk of violence by placing two ...

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of qualified immunity to a Michigan prison guard who allegedly strip searched a prisoner without a legitimate penological reason for doing so. The appellate court also vacated the denial of qualified immunity to a warden who sanctioned the prisoner’s placement in ...

In 2008, within a supposedly high-security prison in the giant federal correctional complex in Florence, Colorado, Gary Watland, a “boarder” from Maine, murdered another prisoner, white supremacist Mark Baker.

After five and a half years – and after, probably, millions in taxpayer-paid legal costs, including for his defense team – ...

by Bryan Garner (Thomson West, 2nd Ed., 2006). 510 pages (spiral bound), $15.00.

Book review by John E. Dannenberg

The Redbook is a comprehensive reference manual that provides guidance with every facet of preparing legal documents. Reviewed by judges and attorneys, the Redbook authoritatively instructs litigants in the mechanics of ...

In March 2014, a U.S. District Court ordered Columbia County, Oregon to pay $763,803.45 in attorney’s fees and $38,373.01 in costs in a lawsuit raising claims of illegal censorship at the Columbia County Jail.

Prison Legal News had filed suit against Columbia County and Sheriff Jeff Dickerson in January 2012 ...

In May 2013, the Oregon Court of Appeals agreed that a trial court had committed plain error when it recommended that a defendant pay restitution in an amount to be determined by the Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision (Board). The appellate court refused to correct the error, however, because ...

The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, held that a hunger striking prisoner’s rights were not violated by a judicial order allowing the state to feed him by nasogastric tube to preserve his life.

The Court’s decision labeled New York state prisoner Leroy Dorsey a “serial hunger ...

In an unpublished ruling, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel reversed in part a district court’s grant of summary judgment to prison officials who, a prisoner alleged, were deliberately indifferent to his serious medical needs.

In 2008, Nevada prisoner Martinez Aytch filed numerous requests for dental treatment for a ...

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered a new trial in a civil rights action that alleges a prisoner was subjected to improper strip searches to humiliate him, then was subjected to an “especially protracted, gratuitous and humiliating strip search” in retaliation for having filed grievances complaining about the ...

On June 6, 2013, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a prisoner was not entitled to credit toward his federal sentence for time already served on state charges.

In March 2007, Charles Lee Elwell was arrested in Iowa. A federal indictment was issued against him several days later; ...

A former Oregon jail guard was sentenced to probation for sexually abusing a female prisoner after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge; his defense attorney blamed the incarcerated victim while the prosecutor defended the light sentence. The guard, Eddie James Miller, 60, was later accused of sexually harassing a co-worker. ...

The Idaho Supreme Court has affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of § 1983 claims stemming from the death of a detainee who committed suicide at the Ada County Jail (ACJ).

On September 28, 2008, Bradley Munroe was arrested for robbery. He was hospitalized because he was intoxicated, uncooperative and exhibiting ...

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a district court’s imposition of four special conditions of supervised release, due to the court’s failure to explain its reasons for imposing them.

Rashan R. Doyle was convicted in New York of attempted sexual abuse in the first degree; as a result ...

The Washington Court of Appeals, Division Two, held on July 30, 2013 that a state agency violated Washington’s Public Records Act (PRA) by failing to respond to a prisoner’s request within the statutory time limit and by redacting information not exempt from disclosure. The appellate court instructed the lower court ...

Prison officials in several states are mulling over two sides of the same coin with respect to organ transplants for prisoners: first, the eligibility and cost of such medical procedures, and second, whether prisoners should be allowed to donate their organs.

Prisoners in Need of Organ Transplants

In Rhode Island, ...

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has held that jail officials are not immune from liability for excessive force claims under the Oklahoma Governmental Tort Claims Act (OGTCA).

On May 17, 2011, Daniel Bosh was detained at the Cherokee County Detention Center for failure to pay a traffic ticket. Video surveillance showed ...

Alabama: Carbon Hill Mayor James “Pee Wee” Richardson, 61, was arrested on September 19, 2013 on multiple charges related to sexually abusing four prisoners at the city’s municipal jail; he was released eight days later after posting a $250,000 property bond. In addition to the criminal charges, Richardson faces a ...