The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled against two Pennsylvania prisoners who were held in solitary confinement on death row for years after their death sentences were vacated. In the course of its opinion, however, the appellate court made it clear that in the future, the state may not subject prisoners to
Wading again into the murky area of how and when juror racial prejudice can upset a criminal conviction, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted the scheduled execution of a Georgia inmate. The move came in September in order to hear the inmate’s appeal of a lower federal court’s decision that evidence of a juror’s racially
By Christopher Zoukis In March 2015, 53-year-old Ralph Karl Ingrim suffered a seizure at a Dollar General store in Amarillo, Texas. A store clerk was kind enough to call the police to have him removed. When they arrived, Ingrim allegedly became argumentative, placed his hand on an officer’s chest, and was promptly arrested on a
During its new term started in October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of McCoy v. Louisiana, which asks whether a Death Row inmate can appeal a death sentence because his lawyer, over the inmate’s strenuous objections, admitted his client’s guilt during his trial. Robert McCoy was charged with murdering the mother, stepfather,
A judge in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered the FBI to greatly increase the speed at which it is producing documents responsive to a professor’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The request was made by Professor Nina Gilden Seavey, a documentary filmmaker and professor in the Department
The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed a district court’s ruling that held a jail detainee’s excessive force and assault and battery claims could not go forward. Henry M. Davis was arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, for driving while intoxicated between 3 and 4 a.m. on September 20, 2009. He was instructed to enter
In March 2016, the Fourth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a prisoner’s Eighth Amendment failure to protect claim in a case that was subsequently settled. The prisoner, James Herman Raynor, was held at the Sussex II State Prison in Virginia. In November 2012, Raynor, who suffers from seizures, blackouts, heart issues, and breathing
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has affirmed a district court’s finding that a Missouri prison guard did not use excessive force when he pepper sprayed a prisoner four times, including a shot straight to the genitals. Kevin Ward was imprisoned in administrative segregation at the South Central Correctional Center on
A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit, the Atlanta-based federal appeals court, in U.S. v. Eric Jermaine Spivey et al. upheld a police search defendants had challenged as “shocking,” even if police used deception to obtain the residents’ consent to search their home. Eric Spivey and Chenequa Austin lived in Lauderhill, Florida, and ran a
By Christopher Zoukis Five media companies, including The Associated Press, were denied statutory damages and attorney’s fees in an unsuccessful public records request filed in Cincinnati, Ohio. The suit, filed over a body-camera video from a police shooting, was denied by the trial court. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed the denial. The plaintiff media companies
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