| Prison Legal News, a monthly print publication that covers criminal justice issues, is a project of the Human Rights Defense Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. |
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Federal judge must decide: How hot is too hot for Texas prison inmates? As summer heats up across the South, a federal judge here is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether prison inmates have the right to live in cooled housing areas when the mercury rises above 90 degrees. In anticipation of the coming heat, U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison held a landmark two-week hearing concluding Thursday in a lawsuit brought by inmates at the Wallace Pack Unit northwest of Houston, where prisoners - including the elderly and infirm - want emergency relief. The case comes in the wake of 22 indoor heat deaths at Texas Department of Criminal Justice units since 1998. Lawyers for the six inmates who sued say the hearing marked the first time a group of inmates collectively testified about their exposure to heat and what it's like to live day to day in un-air-conditioned prison housing units. According to Jeff Edwards, one of the team of lawyers who argued the case for the inmates, the case boils down to two questions: Do the Pack Unit inmates face a substantial risk of harm from extreme heat, and is Texas violating the Constitution by exposing them to "cruel and unusual punishment"? Read More |
Virginia's Efforts to Keep Opioids Out of State Prisons The epidemic of addiction to opiate drugs in Virginia has added to a prison population of nearly 30,000 people, and since 2015, nine of them have died from an overdose of fentanyl or heroin. Last year, the Department of Corrections reported 12 cases in which drugs were sent to inmates through the mail and in the first quarter of this year, eight more envelopes arrived bearing banned substances. Now, prisons are cracking down - making major changes in the mailroom as Sandy Hausman reports. Alex Friedmann is managing editor of Prison Legal News. He says the drug suboxone is actually used to help addicts get off opioids like fentanyl, but it can also provide a mild high. Other drugs can be dissolved into liquids. "In some cases maybe the paper has been soaked with a drug solution. That simply won't get to the prisoner, because they're scanning them or making copies, and the originals are destroyed." Friedmann says this change is hard on men and women - most of them following prison rules, not using drugs and trying to maintain family ties. "You're not getting original photographs or drawings from your children. A lot of people place a lot of sentimental value on that, and getting a scanned copy or a photo copy pales in comparison to having the original." Read More |
Tennessee Orders County Jail to Reduce Overpopulation Following multiple inspections and a recent inmate death, a Tennessee county jail has been ordered to reduce its inmate overpopulation. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports Rhea County Sheriff Mike Neal says the jail is approved to house 87 inmates, but has 205 inmates with two guards. The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance ordered the jail Tuesday to reduce overpopulation by 50 percent within 30 days and completely eliminate overcrowding within 60 days. Neal is also required to provide a monthly report on daily inmate populations to the Tennessee Corrections Institute. Neal says the inmate population has exceeded capacity since he became sheriff 15 years ago. He said inmates will have to be housed at surrounding county jails until a new one is built. Source |
Mississippi: $20 million lawsuit filed against Epps, codefendant in bribery case A guard allegedly beaten by an inmate at a state jail in Alcorn County says the conspiracy between former Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps and former prison consultant Irb Benjamin created a ticking time bomb at the facility. Ruben Paul Martin, a then-20 year veteran of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, says he was permanently disabled in the 2014 attack by an inmate at the then-Alcorn County Community Work Center, according to a lawsuit. Martin filed the $20 million lawsuit Wednesday in Hinds County Circuit Court against Epps, Benjamin, MDOC, companies associated with Benjamin and others. Epps pleaded guilty in one of the largest bribery schemes in the state's history and was sentenced last month to 19 years in prison. A federal indictment accused Epps of taking at least $1.4 million in bribes and kickbacks to steer more than $800 million worth of state prison contracts. In March, Benjamin was sentenced to almost six years in prison for bribes to Epps. Read More |
Kentucky State Penitentiary on lockdown after workers attacked Kentucky State Penitentiary is under lockdown after eight prison workers were assaulted. That's according to the Kentucky Department of Corrections who says the attack happened in the yard of the maximum security prison Thursday afternoon. Director of Communications Lisa Lamb says the workers were attacked near the canteen line. 16 inmates have been connected to the attack but the department says an investigation is ongoing. Kentucky State Penitentiary is the state's oldest and only maximum security prison in the Commonwealth. It's in Eddyville, KY. The Kentucky Department of Corrections says their investigation has now revealed 16 inmates were involved in the attack. The eight workers attacked were security staff: officers, sergeants, lieutenants, and a captain. The Kentucky Department of Corrections says they are doing ok and being treated for non-life threatening injuries. They say none of the inmates needed medical attention outside of the prison. Source |
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From the PLN in Print Archives Texas Lawyer Quits with 0-34 Record of Losses in Death Penalty Cases If you were on trial for your life, you would want the best possible lawyer. That would exclude Houston, Texas attorney Jerry Guerinot, 71, who has a great deal of experience but a very poor track record. Guerinot lost all 34 capital cases he defended at trial, and in August 2016 announced he was no longer taking such cases. Not all of Guerinot's clients who faced capital punishment reside on death row. Thirteen received life sentences in plea bargains or jury verdicts. Two had their death sentences commuted to life after the U.S. Supreme Court held that defendants who were younger than 18 at the time of the offense could not be sentenced to death. One is awaiting retrial. Ten have already been executed. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty," observed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Guerinot's dismal record in death penalty cases reflected a failure to "conduct even rudimentary investigations," according to an article in the New York Times titled "A Lawyer Known Best for Losing Capital Cases." "He doesn't even pick the low-hanging fruit which is hitting him in the head as he walks under the tree," said University of Houston law professor David R. Dow, who is also the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service - an organization that provides representation for death row prisoners. Guerinot countered that he takes the worst of the very worst cases because "Somebody's got to defend - 'defend' is the wrong word - represent these people." Read More |
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Sotomayor's blistering SCOTUS dissent warns America is turning into a prison state Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor strongly disagreed with the majority as she passionately denounced a ruling on unreasonable search and seizures. A 5-3 majority ruled that prosecutors may present evidence unlawfully collected by police officers to reverse a Utah Supreme Court decision, and Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, argued that "the costs of exclusion outweighs its deterrent benefits." Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan each wrote a dissent, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined portions of each. In her dissent to the ruling in Utah v. Strieff, which revolved on the matter of reasonable suspicion, Sotomayor cited James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me to describe what's it's like to live in constant fear of "suspicionless stops" as a person of color. "Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more," wrote Sotomayor. "This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants - so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact." Read More |
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"You're Full of #$*@!" At N.H. Parole Board, Tough Talk Can Veer to the Profane The New Hampshire parole board plays a key role in the state's criminal justice system. Its nine members decide which inmates get out on parole, and which parolees return to prison. Although parole hearings are open to the public, they take place with little oversight or public scrutiny. And, unlike most legal proceedings, they can be surprisingly unrefined affairs. The hearings take place inside what used to be the warden's residence at the State Prison for Men in Concord. "It is probably the cleanest building in the state. It's the only place I've ever been where they empty the waste baskets twice a day," Donna Sytek, the board's chair, told me at her kitchen table last month. "Because they have all this free labor." Sytek was referring to inmates. The room itself looks like a courtroom: the inmate faces the board members, who sit behind a wooden bench. Often, new lawyers stand up to address the board. They're told to sit down. This is not a courtroom. Read More |
Pew Analysis Finds No Relationship Between Drug Imprisonment and Drug Problems On June 19, 2017, The Pew Charitable Trusts submitted a letter to the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, outlining an analysis of whether state drug imprisonment rates are linked to the nature and extent of state drug problems-a key question as the nation faces an escalating opioid epidemic. Pew compared publicly available data from law enforcement, corrections, and health agencies from all 50 states. Pew's analysis found no statistically significant relationship between states' drug offender imprisonment rates and three measures of drug problems: rates of illicit use, overdose deaths, and arrests. The findings reinforce previous research that cast doubt on the theory that stiffer prison terms deter drug use and related crime. Although the federal courts receive the lion's share of public attention, most of the nation's criminal justice system is administered by states. State laws determine criminal penalties for most drug offenses, and the states have made different policy choices regarding those punishments, resulting in widely varied imprisonment rates. For example, Louisiana had the country's highest drug-offender imprisonment rate in 2014, with 226.4 drug offenders in prison per 100,000 residents. In contrast, Massachusetts's rate was the lowest, 30.2 per 100,000 residents, less than one-seventh Louisiana's rate. Read More |
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