Last week, the Supreme Court relisted a case involving some transsexual prisoners' claims that the State of Wisconsin violated their right to adequate medical care by failing to provide them with hormonal therapy. The case is Smith v. Fields, No. 11-561. Both the Federal District Court and Seventh Circuit found in favor of the prisoners, concluding that the [...]
I wrote this past year about the obstacles that prisoners filing pro se face when challenging their convictions and sentences. The Seventh Circuit's opinion today in United States v. Wyatt kind of typifies the problems inherent in a system that requires uneducated prisoners to fend for themselves and learn the law within a year in order to meet [...]
What happens when no one comes to the defense of defenseless prisoners? Rulings like last week's decision in Howes v. Field, No. 10-680, where the Supreme Court held that law enforcement questioning of an inmate inside a prison about allegedly criminal events that occurred outside the prison is not necessarily a custodial situation for Miranda purposes. Or, [...]
Professors Marit Rehavi and Sonja Starr recently published this piece, entitled Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences. After analyzing data, the professors concluded that federal prosecutors charge offenders differently by race, and those charging differences often lead to disparities in sentences. Not surprisingly, men of color are charged, and therefore, sentenced more harshly. Here [...]
This week Adam Gopnik published a piece at The New Yorker on this country's mass incarceration problem. Not only does it provide a number of sources and statistics to back up its claims, it also does so in a wonderful yet chilling way. The piece is long but well worth the read. You can find [...]
As Professor Michael W. Martin and I pointed out in our new articles in the Fordham Law Review (here and here), although a huge swath of litigation occurring in federal courts is a result of filings from pro se prisoners, very few of those litigants actually obtain some modicum of success, let alone win a new [...]
This article in Mother Jones suggests that the answer is approximately 1 percent. That doesn't seem like a lot until you remember that there are over 2 million prisoners in the U.S. So that is roughly 20,000 people who were erroneously convicted. I wonder how many tax dollars are spent to house those 20,000.
Given the state of our economy and the rising costs of legal representation, it should come as no surprise that pro se litigation is increasing--rapidly. It should also come as no surprise that the legal system struggles to cope with pro se litigants. In his forward, entitled "Root Causes of the Pro Se Prisoner Litigation [...]
Adam Liptak at the New York Times has this fantastic piece on the death penalty and the many years that the convicted wait on death row. Check it out.
There has been a ton of prisoner-related news over the last few days and almost all of it courtesy of the New York Times. First, the Times noted a trend amongst conservative states: they are lightening harsh sentences in an effort to save money. Then came word that Texas--the incarcerationa and death penalty capital of [...]