by David M. Reutter
A settlement approved by the federal court for the Eastern District of California on January 16, 2024, recalls an all-too familiar jail story. A wheelchair-bound detainee named Gregory Cantu was denied anti-seizure medication after arriving at Kings County Jail in Hanford on a probation violation. Despite ...
by David M. Reutter
On January 16, 2024, Maine’s Superior Court for Kennebec County ordered state officials to pay $130,600.02 in attorney fees and legal costs to PLN’s publisher, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), after making a rare finding that the officials exercised bad faith in repeatedly denying the ...
David M. Reutter
On April 6, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of a suit filed by a pretrial detainee challenging the contraband policy at the Cook County Jail (CCJ) in Chicago, after guards took and destroyed approximately 30 of his books.
The lawsuit ...
by David M. Reutter
On August 16, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed dismissal of a Michigan prisoner’s lawsuit with an outrageous-sounding opinion that a guard “may have violated a prison use-of-force policy or committed a state-law tort,” yet that “does not necessarily” mean there ...
David M. Reutter
One alternative to incarceration that criminal justice reformers clamor for is probation or parole. A May 2023 report by Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) counted nearly 3.7 million people in the U.S. under some form of community supervision, nearly twice the number held in prisons and jails. The ...
by David M. Reutter
The Washington city of Lynnwood agreed on September 20, 2023, to pay $1.75 million to settle a lawsuit alleging guards at the Lynnwood Municipal Jail were negligent in the suicide death of Tirhas Tesfatsion two years before. An investigation after her death found “significant” lapses between ...
by David M. Reutter
On September 19, 2023, the Commonwealth of Virginia, the County of Henrico and its Sheriff Alisa A. Gregory agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle claims arising from the death of Ivo Otieno, 28, at Central State Hospital (CSH) in Petersburg.
As PLN previously reported, Otieno ...
by David M. Reutter
On September 25, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed dismissal of Louisiana prisoner Brandon LaVergne’s Eighth Amendment claim, finding the alleged restrictions on his visitation and email access while in “restricted custody”—solitary confinement—were not so bad that they were unconstitutional.
The ...
by David M. Reutter
On August 23, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed denial of qualified immunity (QI) to Anne Precythe, Director of the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC), in an Eighth Amendment complaint filed by a state prisoner accusing Precythe of failing to protect ...
by David M. Reutter
A headline in the August 1965 edition of The Daily Oklahoman said that then-Sheriff Bob Turner of Oklahoma County “denies his jail’s ‘deplorable.’” A new jail was later built, but almost six decades later, a surprise inspection of the lockup in downtown Oklahoma City by the ...
