by Benjamin Tschirhart
The U.S. Constitution, in its idealistic fashion, guarantees citizens that they “shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” During the intervening centuries, the fine brush of precedent has filled in those broad, optimistic strokes.
But even a cursory examination will ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On November 18, 2022, almost four years after Congress passed the First Step Act (FSA) to reduce the population incarcerated by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), new BOP Director Colette Peters finally clarified the agency’s policy to implement the law.
FSA was signed into law by ...
by Paul Wright
As we enter PLN’s 33rd year ofpublishing, the most obvious thing about reporting on the American gulag all these years is how much it is really an ongoing story. Unlike fiction novels, movies or plays, which have a beginning, middle and end of the story, much ...
From arbitrary judgment calls to material bans, information censorship protects the carceral system at the expense of the incarcerated
by Tamar Sarai, Prism
In 1971, prisoners in Attica penned the Attica Manifesto during the now infamous five-day-long historic uprising at the facility. Among the list of over two dozen demands ...
by Alleen Brown, The Intercept
Brandon Moore knew something was off at Louisiana’s Raymond Laborde Correctional Center when he woke up to prison guards slamming windows shut in the middle of the night. By morning, a funny smell permeated the air and black smoke was pouring from a tire recycling ...
by David M. Reutter
When is hearsay evidence not hearsay? On August 31, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit provided its answer. Affirming the conviction of a federal prisoner in Hawaii for assaulting a fellow prisoner, the Court said that statements from the victim reported by ...
by Ashleigh N. Dye
For the 2018 deaths of two detainees at Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Correctional Facility (BCCF), the county has agreed to pay a total of $959,000. Its privately contracted jail healthcare provider, PrimeCare Medical, reportedly agreed to pay another $750,000 in one case, plus an undisclosed amount to ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 25, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that a district court in Virginia abused its discretion by implicitly overruling a prisoner’s spoliation objections when several critical issues were left unresolved by the magistrate judge.
The Court’s opinion was issued ...
by Casey J. Bastian
On July 19, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted the motion of a transgender federal prisoner and compelled the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to change its records to reflect her legal name change. However, the Court stopped short of ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled on August 25, 2022, that prison employment falls under federally funded programs protected by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch. 126, § 12101 et seq., as well as the Rehabilitation ...
by David M. Reutter
On August 17, 2022, an Indiana prisoner learned a painful lesson from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. As PLN has repeatedly warned, courts are empowered by the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), 42 U.S.C. § 1997e, to dismiss any lawsuit filed by ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
No one in prison expects to eat fine cuisine. The food served is merely intended to keep prisoners alive, with no thought given to how much it is or isn’t enjoyed. Yet certain people are seeing enormous benefits from prison food — just not prisoners.
In a ...
by Anthony W. Accurso and David M. Reutter
After 16 detainee deaths in 2021[See: PLN, Feb. 2022, p.1], the carnage continued at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex in 2022, leaving 19 more people dead. Having recorded an average of just six deaths a year from 2017 through ...
by Jacob Barrett
On June 24, 2022, a prisoner in the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) accepted $20,000 to settle his claims of deliberate indifference and medical negligence against DOC’s privately contracted healthcare and mental healthcare providers: Centurion of Arizona and MHM Health Professionals, respectively. Both are subsidiaries of Centene ...
by David M. Reutter
In a decision filed on November 28, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed the grant of qualified immunity (QI) to Delaware prison officials in a lawsuit brought by a mentally ill prisoner held in solitary confinement for seven months, alleging they ...
by Jo Ellen Nott
On November 30, 2022, nearly two years after a 44-year-old Alabama prisoner died, an amended complaint filed by his sister claims he “literally baked to death in his cell” where a broken heating system went unrepaired at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility (CF). But the gruesome ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
A former high-ranking Tennessee law enforcement official was sentenced to six years in federal prison on August 26, 2022, for repeatedly punching arrestees in the face while they were handcuffed. Anthony Glen “Tony” Bean, 62, was the Chief of Police in Tracy City in 2014, when ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 5, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that giving a jury a standard instruction to defer to prison officials was error when the jury needed to decide whether prison officials failed to protect a prisoner from violence.
Before the ...
by David M. Reutter
On September 28, 2022, as Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida and neared Category 5 strength, the state Department of Corrections (DOC), which holds about 80,000 prisoners, began evacuating 2,300 of them from 23 prisons statewide. But some lockups in the storm’s path took little action: Rather ...
by Keith Sanders
Many state prison agencies have in-house for-profit companies that utilize the labor of guards and prisoners to provide products and services to private companies and other state agencies. Not surprisingly, such public-private partnerships are often accused of corruption.
Take Arizona Correctional Industries (ACI), for instance, which is ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
Most prisoners quickly learn that slavery has never been fully abolished in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution allows prisoners to be compelled to work for little or no pay, and most jurisdictions take advantage of the provision. In California, some state prisoners are ...
by Harold Hempstead
On August 16, 2022, in a question of first impression for federal appellate courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the complaint of a Virginia jail detainee presented sufficient facts to support the conclusion that gender dysphoria is not an identity disorder ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
In May 2006, Daryl Davis was serving a 37-year sentence for beating his girlfriend with a beer bottle, when he was assaulted — twice — at Texas’ Polunsky Unit by members of a Black prison gang, the Mandingo Warriors. They viciously beat Davis, once with a ...
by Ed Lyon
After Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) took action in August 2022 to forgive up to $20,000 in federal or federally insured student loan debt, nearly 22 million of some 44 million Americans affected rushed to sign up. Prisoners were not excluded from the plan, which was ...
by Eike Blohm, MD and Chuck Sharman
After Arizona resumed executions last year, following an eight-year hiatus, it quickly murdered three murderers on its death row.
On May 11, 2022, a lethal injection of pentobarbital was given to Clarence Dixon, 66, a mentally ill Native American, by then blind. Blaming ...
by Jennifer Taylor, Director, Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School
Time-In-Cell: A 2021 Snapshot of Restrictive Housing, a new study co-authored by the Correctional Leaders Association (CLA) and the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School, estimates that between 41,000 ...
by Harold Hempstead
On July 15, 2022, in a case accusing private prison giant CoreCivic of a Tennessee prisoner’s wrongful death, a federal magistrate judge issued a gag order restricting public comments on the case made by Plaintiff’s attorney.
The suit was brought by Marie Newby in federal court for ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
By the time he filed a pro se complaint against the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in U.S. District Court for the District of West Virginia in May 2020, prisoner Marc Pierre Hall was a “frequent litigant in the federal courts,” as the U.S. Court of Appeals ...
by Matt Clarke
In an important decision for prisoners and jail detainees in Virginia, the state Supreme Court held on July 7, 2022, that a jail physician was entitled to a derivation of the state’s sovereign immunity. As a result, the Court affirmed dismissal of a lawsuit brought against the ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 24, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a district court’s denial of qualified immunity (QI) to the current and former sheriffs of Clay County, Mississippi, in a suit seeking to hold them liable for detaining a mentally ill man in ...
by David M. Reutter
Giving a break to the prisoner who filed a civil rights suit she dismissed on July 8, 2022, Judge Anne R. Traum of the federal court for the District of Nevada ordered return of the plaintiff’s $402 filing fee.
The prisoner, Rafael Bernardo Alvarez, filed a ...
by Jacob Barrett
On July 7, 2022, the federal court for the District of Oregon denied a motion by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to dismiss a suit filed by longtime PLN writer Mark Wilson, accusing officials of retaliating against him for his work as a “jailhouse lawyer” on ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
Nearly all of Georgia’s 159 counties struggled with medium to high levels of COVID-19 infections, especially in county jails. But an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation published on August 22, 2022, blamed a laissez-faire approach to pandemic precautions.
No state or local law required Georgia’s jails to follow ...
by David M. Reutter
On July 21, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit modified a judgment against a prisoner in a civil rights lawsuit he filed and lost against a doctor at Indiana’s LaPorte County Jail (LPCJ). The Court capped the cost amount of a witness’ ...
by David M. Reutter
A Mississippi law that became effective on July 1, 2022, gives the state Department of Corrections (DOC) the discretion to choose the method of execution for a condemned prisoner. In addition, it added nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, and firing squad as execution options, while declaring intravenous injection ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
Hepatitis C (HepC) is inflammation of the liver due to the Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). The virus infects about 1 to 2% of the U.S. population, but it is likely the most prevalent infection in American prisons. As there are no national standardized testing protocols or ...
by David M. Reutter
Florida took a significant step towards charging more ex-convicts with voter fraud, eight days after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced the first 20 arrests in August 2022. [See: PLN, Jan. 2023, p.18.] On August 26, 2022, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) revised its “Instructions ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On August 24, 2022, the federal court for the District of Delaware granted a state prison guard’s request and nearly eliminated the damages against him awarded to a prisoner that a jury found had been sexually abused. That chopped the award to the prisoner, De Shawn ...
by David M. Reutter
On December 6, 2022, a former guard at Oklahoma’s Kay County Detention Center was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for violating the civil rights of detainees. Former Lt. Matthew Ware, 53, was convicted on three charges by a jury in the federal court for ...
by Matt Clarke
On August 10, 2022, the federal court for the Southern District of New York denied a habeas corpus petition filed by the former head of the union representing guards at the New York City Department of Correction. However, the Court suggested procedures by which Norman Seabrook, the ...
by Eike Blohm, MD
A special report issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in August 2022 tracked the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in state and federal prisons. It found they suffered high rates of infection and death despite lockdowns and suspended visitation. There was also a ...
by Ashleigh N. Dye
On August 18, 2022, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ordered two former state judges to pay $206 million in damages for taking $2.8 million in kickbacks to shut down Luzerne County’s juvenile detention center, instead sending children — many first-time offenders as young as eight-years-old — ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart
On July 15, 2022, Pennsylvania’s Bedford County agreed to pay $60,000 to a former detainee in the county jail, settling claims that guards purposefully failed to protect him from a vicious assault by a mentally ill detainee incarcerated there with him.
The suit was filed by Jeffrey ...
by Harold Hempstead
On July 25, 2022, Colorado agreed to pay former state prisoner Susan Ullery $300,000 to settle her claims that she was sexually harassed by a former guard — who also sexually assaulted her while she wore a wire for prison officials trying to catch him in the ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
An out-of-court settlement between the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and a group of former immigrant detainees was made public on July 5, 2022. The plaintiffs, all Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men, were allegedly racially profiled as terrorists. They were awarded $98,000 in damages, and ...
by Ashleigh N. Dye
On August 23, 2022, the Board of Supervisors of California’s Orange County approved a settlement providing $480,000 to a former detainee in the county jail who went into labor and waited hours to reach a hospital — even while transport guards dawdled at Starbucks — after ...
by Kevin W. Bliss
On December 1, 2022, a jury in federal court for the Northern District of California convicted Ray J. Garcia, the former warden of the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Dublin, on seven sexual abuse charges and another of lying about it to government agents investigating the ...
by Matt Clarke
On July 15, 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the denial of qualified immunity (QI) to Mississippi jailers accused of ignoring the injuries and pleas for medical treatment of an injured hemophiliac detainee, who then bled to death internally.
When police in ...
Loaded on
Feb. 1, 2023
published in Prison Legal News
February, 2023, page 63
Alabama: WHNT in Huntsville reported on December 16, 2022, that a Morgan County Jail detainee was charged with assaulting a guard. Ashley Nicole Taymon, 36, had gotten into an altercation at the Community Corrections Office five days earlier and was taken to a hospital. There she burst from a ...
