By Mark Wilson An Oregon judge has held that a prosecutor improperly seized money from a prisoner’s trust account to pay a court-ordered “compensatory fine.” In 2006, Norman Earl Schlunt was convicted of poisoning and suffocating his business partner and sentenced to life in prison. He also was ordered to pay a $20,000 “compensatory fine”
The arrival of the mail is the highlight of the day for many prisoners, who crowd around the officer’s station hoping their name will be called. The arrival of the monthly Bargain Books catalog from mail-order bookseller Edward R. Hamilton of Falls Village, Connecticut, is a special cause of celebration. A Cornucopia of Literary Delights
By Prison Legal News The Oklahoma Supreme Court has held that jail officials are not immune from liability for excessive force claims under the Oklahoma Governmental Tort Claims Act (OGTCA). On May 17, 2011, Daniel Bosh was detained at the Cherokee County Detention Center for failure to pay a traffic ticket. Video surveillance showed him
A short distance from Delhi sits Tihar Jail, one of the largest prisons in the world. The ten sub-jails within the prison complex are home to more than 13,500 inmates. Situated on the plains of northern India, the jail provides few comforts. Inmates bake through the sweltering heat of summer while winters are cold and
By Prison Legal News Prison officials in several states are mulling over two sides of the same coin with respect to organ transplants for prisoners: first, the eligibility and cost of such medical procedures, and second, whether prisoners should be allowed to donate their organs. Prisoners in Need of Organ Transplants In Rhode Island, a
Los Angeles County’s GPS monitoring system, designed to keep track of high-risk probationers, has overwhelmed probation officers with thousands of false alerts each day – so many that some officers simply ignore them. As a result, dozens of probationers have been able to roam unmonitored. In some cases, even when probationers removed their monitoring devices,
The term “gadfly” was used by Plato in The Apology to describe Socrates’s relationship to the Athenian political scene, which he compared to a slow and dimwitted horse. Essentially, Socrates was a goad, a poignant reminder of right and wrong. So a gadfly is someone who upsets the existing state of affairs by asking uncomfortable
By Carrie Wilkinson Although Prison Legal News and its parent organization, the Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), are best known for litigation involving censorship by prison and jail officials, HRDC also co-counsels select other cases, mainly involving wrongful deaths on behalf of prisoners’ surviving family members. As detailed in this issue’s cover story, one of
By Matt Clarke On October 24, 2012, a federal jury in Texas awarded $2.25 million to the estate and survivors of a prisoner who died at a facility operated by LCS Corrections Services (LCS), after finding the company was 100% at fault. The district court subsequently reversed its dismissal of § 1983 claims against LCS
We are excited to announce that a new and improved site is on its way. From January 12 through January 16, we will be migrating to the latest and greatest version of Squarespace. Due to the vast number of articles, photos, and videos on the site, the migration will require four or five days to