| 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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New York: Holding Prison Guards Accountable New York State prison guards often escape punishment for acts of brutality because district attorneys in communities where prisons provide jobs, and are thus essential to the communities' economic health, are hesitant to charge them. Another factor is that the union contract with the state shields prison workers from prosecution even in many egregious cases. That contract is now being renegotiated. Gov. Andrew Cuomo needs to hold out for a new one that strengthens state control over the prison system by holding guards more closely accountable for wrongdoing. The flaws in the disciplinary system, which have been obvious for some time, were exposed yet again last year when the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York charged five corrections officers with fraud and with violating the civil rights of an inmate whom guards had beaten nearly to death at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill three years earlier. Three of the officers pleaded guilty. Last month, a federal jury in Westchester County convicted the remaining two - one of them a supervisor - of a barbaric crime and an extensive cover-up that might have gone unpunished if not for federal intervention. The case dates back to November 2013, when officers grew angry at a 54-year-old inmate named Kevin Moore for talking back to them. They proceeded to kick, punch and beat him with batons for what court documents describe as "an extended period," leaving him with five fractured ribs, a collapsed lung and multiple facial fractures. Read More |
IMPORTANT NOTICE If you or someone you know has been forced to work in a chicken processing plant in Oklahoma, Missouri, Georgia or Arkansas as part of a work release, diversion or jail work program under threat of being sent to prison and were paid little or nothing we would like to talk to you for a story we are investigating. Please contact Alex Friedmann at: afrie...@prisonlegalnews.org |
California Is Running Out of Inmates to Fight Its Fires For a dollar an hour and credit toward early parole, more than 1,700 convicted felons fought on the front lines of the destructive wildfires that raged across Northern California this October. While communities from Sonoma to Mendocino evacuated in the firestorm's path, these inmates worked shifts of up to 72 straight hours to contain the blaze and protect the property residents left behind, clearing brush and other potential fuel and digging containment lines often just feet away from the flames. Hundreds more are on the fire line now, combatting the inferno spreading across Southern California. Inmates have been fighting California's wildfires since the 1940s, when the state first called up prisoners to replace men assisting the war effort. More than 3,700 men and women-and even some juvenile offenders-now voluntarily serve on the force. Collectively, they make up roughly a third of the state's wildfire-fighting personnel, and work an average of 10 million hours each year responding to fires and other emergencies and handling community-service projects like park maintenance, reforestation, and fire and flood protection. But over the course of the last decade, their ranks have begun to thin. As drought and heat have fueled some of the worst fires in California's history, the state has faced a court mandate to reduce overcrowding in its prisons. State officials, caught between an increasing risk of wildfires and a decreasing number of prisoners eligible to fight them, have striven to safeguard the valuable labor inmates provide by scrambling to recruit more of them to join the force. Still, these efforts have been limited by the courts, public opinion, and how far corrections officials and elected leaders have been willing to go: The number of inmate firefighters has fallen 13 percent since 2008. This push-and-pull between changing carceral policy and the demands of firefighting is unlikely to abate anytime soon, and surely not before the next fire season begins this spring. After a series of intensely destructive seasons linked to climate change, scientists are projecting that California will face still more disastrous blazes in the future; at the same time, voters and officials are contemplating further reducing imprisonment around the state. The fate of the inmate-firefighting program lies in the balance between these trends: buoyed by the increasing need for cheap labor, threatened by the pending decline in incarceration. Read More |
ICYMI: New from the Human Rights Defense Center! Criminal Legal News You may already be familiar with the Human Rights Defense Center's longtime publication, Prison Legal News (PLN), widely regarded as the preeminent source of legal news on prison, jail, and detention issues in America. HRDC is now pleased to announce its new publication, Criminal Legal News (CLN), a monthly legal news magazine available in print to subscribers and online to all at www.criminallegalnews.org. CLN will complement PLN, offering timely, relevant, and practical legal news about the criminal justice system prior to confinement and after release. We educate readers about constitutional rights, developments in criminal and constitutional law, and criminal justice system reform. We cover criminal law and procedure, police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, habeas corpus relief, ineffective counsel, sentencing errors and reform, militarization of the police, surveillance state, policing of immigrants, junk science, wrongful convictions, false confessions, witness misidentification, paid/incentivized informants, search and seizure violations, right to remain silent, right to counsel, right to a speedy trial, due process rights, and the seemingly inexorable expansion of the police state in America. Together, HRDC's publications research, analyze, report, and expose the criminal justice system in the U.S. Stop resisting! Subscribe to Criminal Legal News today! Check out a digital preview of our inaugural issue HERE! |
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From the December 2017 Issue of Criminal Legal News California Felonizes Some Prosecutorial Misconduct On September 30, 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that was introduced by Assemblywoman Patty Lopez (D-San Fernando), felonizing some prosecutorial misconduct. Under the new law, a prosecutor can be sentenced to up to three years in prison for altering or intentionally withholding evidence that could help exonerate a defendant. Previously, such prosecutorial misconduct was a misdemeanor, but a 2010 study of prosecutorial misconduct by the Santa Clara School of Law's Veritas Initiative found that "courts fail to report prosecutorial misconduct (despite having a statutory obligation to do so), prosecutors deny that it occurred, and the California State Bar almost never disciplines it." "I hear so many stories about innocent people across California, and across the country, who have been wrongfully convicted," said Lopez. "I just hope that when people think the rules don't apply to them, they will think twice before they abuse their power." "When a prosecutor intentionally withholds exculpatory evidence, an unknowing and innocent defendant can be convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated for a long time," according to California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a group of criminal defense attorneys that supported the bill. "These bad-acting prosecutors rarely, if ever, face any actual consequences for their actions." Obie Anthony, 43, knows all about that. He served 17 years in prison after being convicted in 1995 of committing a murder outside a South Los Angeles brothel. His exoneration followed the revelation that a pimp who was a key prosecution witness received leniency for his testimony-a fact withheld from the defense. "I'm glad the governor decided to put his foot down," said Anthony, who told his story to lawmakers in hopes of drumming up support for the bill. "I went to talk to them about how those bad-acting prosecutors took 17 years of my life." Following his exoneration, Anthony moved to Missouri where he runs Exonerated Nation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the wrongly convicted. Read More |
Alaska Department of Corrections at fault for inmate suicide in 2014, jury finds The Alaska Department of Corrections was at fault for a 24-year-old's suicide in the Anchorage jail, a jury found last month. Mark Bolus hanged himself with a blanket in his segregation cell at the Anchorage Correctional Complex on May 11, 2014. He died three days later in a local hospital. Bolus' mother, Maria Rathbun, sued the state nearly two years after his death, in April 2016. She needed to know what had happened, Rathbun said in an interview last week. Rathbun thought her son, who suffered from schizophrenia, would be safe in jail, after a parole violation landed him back in the Anchorage Correctional Complex. Six weeks later, he was dead. "Don't leave your children in jail," Rathbun said. "If they have mental illness, get them out. Don't ever trust them to be taken care of in there. Not in Anchorage, anyway." Read More |
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From the PLN December 2017 Issue Arizona: Mixed Rulings in Challenges to State's Lethal Injection Protocol A federal judge has held that members of the media and witnesses may view all aspects of executions carried out in Arizona. State prison officials can no longer prohibit journalists from seeing prisoners being escorted into the death chamber, the insertion of drug catheters or the administration of lethal injections. U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow, who signed the order on December 21, 2016, also ruled there was not enough evidence to adjudicate other aspects of the lawsuit - filed by death row prisoners and later joined by various news media organizations - which sought to force the Arizona Department of Corrections (DOC) to provide more information about staff members who administer lethal injection drugs, the quality and amount of the drugs used, as well as their sources. The state had argued that revealing such information would jeopardize its ability to acquire the drugs and carry out executions. The case was filed shortly after the botched execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood III in July 2014. When the initial lethal injection drugs failed to kill Wood, DOC Director Charles Ryan instructed prison officials to keep trying. They then gave Wood 14 more doses. In a procedure that should have lasted 10 minutes, Wood lingered two hours before he died. He snorted and gasped on the execution table as witnesses, unaware that he was receiving multiple doses, watched in horror. The execution took so long that Wood's attorneys had time to conduct a phone interview with a federal judge in an attempt to stop the procedure. [See: PLN, Sept. 2016, p.52]. The portion of the lawsuit seeking information about the state's lethal injection drugs had been filed on Wood's behalf before he was executed. Judge Snow granted a stay halting his execution until the information was provided, but the stay was lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court and Wood was put to death. Seven other prisoners on Arizona's death row joined the suit, arguing that the state's lethal injection protocol caused inhumane suffering with drugs that were unproven and unable to be independently evaluated because the state was concealing their sources. A coalition of media agencies - including the Associated Press, Arizona Republic, Arizona Daily Star and CBS 5 (KPHO-TV) - also joined the suit a year later seeking to compel state officials to provide more transparency during the execution process. Read More |
| Pennsylvania: Contract worker charged with bringing contraband into Lackawanna County Prison Federal authorities accused an Archbald man Wednesday of supplying oxycodone and other contraband to inmates at Lackawanna County Prison while working for the jail's food service contractor. Jerry DeFazio, 39, was charged in a one-count criminal information with providing and attempting to provide prohibited objects to inmates at the facility. In announcing the charge, U.S. Attorney David J. Freed said DeFazio knowingly provided and tried to provide oxycodone, suboxone and tobacco to inmates between November 2015 and April 2016. Oxycodone is a strong narcotic pain reliever; suboxone is used to treat opioid addiction. The contraband threatened the order, discipline and security of the prison, which houses federal prisoners for the U.S. Marshals Service in addition to county inmates, according to the information. The charge followed an investigation by the FBI, Freed said. Read More |
Illinois Legislators Pledge to Deal with 'Pipeline to Prison' at Juvenile Correctional Facility A top juvenile official testified Tuesday that guards at a southern Illinois youth correctional facility have created a "pipeline to prison" that is hampering the state's ability to fulfill its juvenile justice mission. More than 100 people gathered at a nearly five-hour hearing before the House Appropriations-Public Safety Committee to address reports of violence in Department of Juvenile Justice facilities and the state's adult prisons. Kathleen Bankhead, the state's independent juvenile ombudsman, focused her testimony on a series of alleged assaults by teenagers on staff at the Illinois Youth Center at Harrisburg in southern Illinois. ProPublica Illinois reported in October that guards and other employees there have pursued more criminal charges for youth-on-staff assaults since 2016 than all other state juvenile correctional facilities combined. Those assaults included spitting on, pushing or punching guards. Typically, the cases would have been handled internally, with youths losing privileges, spending time in solitary confinement, or having their sentences extended instead of being charged criminally. Read More |
Please note that the content of our newsletter mainly consists of news reports from third-party sources. We are not responsible for the accuracy or content of third parties, nor do their statements or positions necessarily reflect those of HRDC/PLN. Our newsletter content is for informational purposes only. |
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