Prison Deaths

Re "Deadly medical lapses in prison," Sept. 20 It's been nearly two years since U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson appointed Robert Sillen as federal receiver for California's 32 state prisons, specifically to upgrade health and medical care for the state's 173,000 inmates. Yet The Times cites a report that states "one in six deaths of California prison inmates last year might have been preventable." California taxpayers in 2006 paid $1.

JERUSALEM -- The sudden death of a 30-year-old Palestinian man being held in an Israeli jail sparked another day of protests and rioting across the West Bank on Sunday as fears heightened that Palestinian frustration levels are nearing a boiling point. Clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers erupted in the West Bank city of Hebron and nearby villages following the death of Arafat Jaradat, a gas station attendant who was arrested Feb. 18 for throwing rocks and firebombs at Israelis near Hebron.

A prisoner whose death in Uzbek custody sparked a high-level investigation hanged himself, as authorities had said, and his body showed no signs of serious torture, international experts concluded. Andrei Shelkovenko, 36, died May 19 in a holding cell at a police station in his hometown of Gazalkent. The family and international human rights groups called for an independent investigation, saying that marks on his body might have been evidence of torture. Dr.

He was chained to a cot, a lone prisoner in a small cell facing eight guards who beat him while a summoned ambulance crew was kept waiting outside. When the doctors were finally admitted to the prison, they found Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitsky dead, his body bruised, most of his knuckles smashed, one of his arms dark blue from a grip of the handcuffs lying nearby. The attorney's death in Moscow's infamous Sailor's Silence prison was described Tuesday in a report delivered to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev by his advisory human rights council.

A military policeman has been sentenced to three months in prison after pleading guilty to assault and two counts of making a false statement in the 2002 beating death of a prisoner in Afghanistan. Under a plea bargain, Army prosecutors will not pursue a maltreatment charge against Spc. Brian E. Cammack. He agreed to testify in other cases related to the deaths of two inmates at the Bagram Control Point. Cammack was sentenced Friday during a court-martial at Ft. Bliss, Texas.

A grand jury may be hearing testimony on the death of an inmate who bled in his cell while guards watched football on television. Ronald Herrera bled to death at Corcoran State Prison on Feb. 2, the night of the Super Bowl, which led to accusations that guards neglected to help him because they were distracted by the game. Prison officials have denied those charges. On Thursday, several officers were served with grand jury summonses asking them to testify in the case.

Relatives of former Jewish Defense League activist Earl Krugel are calling for an investigation into his death at a federal prison in Phoenix. FBI agents on Monday interviewed inmates and prison guards at the medium-security prison, where Krugel, 62, was imprisoned for plotting to bomb a Culver City mosque and the field office of Arab American Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista). But an FBI spokeswoman declined to provide additional details on Krugel's death, which occurred about 5:30 p.m.

A prisoner on San Quentin's Death Row hanged himself Friday, and his attorney charged that prison officials disregarded repeated warnings that he was deeply psychotic and suicidal. Ronald E. Fuller, 35, convicted of killing a cab driver in Culver City in 1982, was found hanging from a torn bed sheet about 10:35 a.m. He was pronounced dead at 11 a.m., Sgt. Vernell Crittendon of San Quentin said. Fuller is the third San Quentin Death Row prisoner to kill himself in nine months.

A San Fernando Superior Court jury Monday awarded $2.5 million to the widow and children of a North Hollywood man who died in jail after Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies ignored a court order to take him to a hospital for medical treatment and instead strapped him to a cot. The unanimous verdict in the lawsuit against the county came after eight days of deliberations. Stanley Malinovitz, 38, died from a blood clot in his lung Jan.

Stephen A. Wagner, the former finance officer who was convicted of embezzling $3.7 million from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District nearly three years ago, died over the weekend from an AIDS-related illness in a medical facility at Vacaville prison, authorities said Monday. Wagner, 43, died Saturday at 8:25 a.m. He had been transferred from Vacaville's general prison population and was being treated in the California Medical Facility, the hospital unit of the Vacaville prison.

California continued to buck a nationwide trend away from costly and litigious death sentences in 2010, adding 28 new prisoners to the country's most populous death row, according to correction officials and a national database on capital punishment. Los Angeles County alone condemned eight defendants to death this year, the same number as Texas, and Riverside County sent six men to await execution, officials said. The state's death chamber was idle for a fifth year, though, because of protracted legal challenges of lethal injection practices and a nationwide shortage of the key drug used in the three-injection procedure.

The military equivalent of a preliminary hearing is set for Monday at Ft. Carson, Colo., for an Army private accused of premeditated murder in the shooting death of a senior Taliban commander being held prisoner in Afghanistan. Pfc. David W. Lawrence, 20, is accused of shooting Mullah Mohebullah in the head Oct. 17 while assigned to guard duty at a detention center in the Arghandab district of Kandahar province. Under military law, premeditated murder can carry the death penalty.

While the debate over capital punishment rages in Texas, the number of inmates sentenced to death row in 2009 is at a 35-year low. Prosecutors have been pushing for fewer death sentences and, many observers believe, juries have become less willing to give them. The biggest game-changer, several prosecutors and defense lawyers said, appears to be the introduction in 2005 of life without parole as an option. Jurors in capital cases previously were responsible for choosing either the death penalty or a life sentence in which a convicted killer could be eligible for parole in 40 years.

Getting big-boxed in Re "Politically correct, he isn't," Sept. 20 Thank you for your article about R. Rex Parris. We shop in Lancaster, and relatives live in Quartz Hill near where the proposed Wal-Mart is supposed to go up. I wrote Parris a letter protesting that decision because there is another such store only a few miles away; I think we have too many big-box stores too close already. From what I've read, Parris also is fond of "legislating morality" at Lancaster city meetings.

Sixteen Arizona corrections employees have been fired, suspended or otherwise disciplined for their roles in the death of an inmate left in an outdoor holding cell for four hours in triple-digit heat, and for a punishment practiced at the prison where she died. Three of those disciplined were fired, two stepped down rather than be dismissed, 10 received suspensions ranging from 40 to 80 hours, and one was demoted. Two others are to be disciplined after they return from medical leave.

A 31-year-old Yemeni was found dead in his cell at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in an apparent suicide, U.S. military officials said Tuesday. Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih would be the fifth prisoner to take his life at the detention center since the Pentagon began holding terrorism suspects there more than seven years ago. The death late Monday spurred fresh criticism of the U.S. detention policy and demands that President Obama make good on his vow to close Guantanamo by January.

All through the night, the howls kept coming from the cell of inmate Ronald Herrera. More than one guard at Corcoran State Prison thought something was terribly amiss. Herrera wouldn't stop screaming late Sunday, and he had covered his cell window in a curtain of toilet paper soaked in blood. One guard had seen Herrera, a dialysis patient suffering from hepatitis, pull out the medical shunt from his arm, corrections officials said.

The former UC Berkeley student known as the Naked Guy, who gained notoriety for attending class in the buff in the early 1990s, died in jail, apparently a suicide, authorities said. Andrew Martinez, 33, whose stripped-down campus strolls got him expelled and prompted the liberal city to adopt an anti-nudity ordinance, was pronounced dead early Thursday in the Santa Clara County Main Jail, jail spokesman Mark Cursi said.

Prison guards fired live rounds, pepper spray and rubber bullets to quell a riot at Kern Valley State Prison in which one inmate was stabbed to death and 17 others injured, state corrections officials disclosed Thursday. The deadly melee in the maximum-security section of the overcrowded prison involved 38 inmates, four of whom suffered bullet wounds after guards moved in to contain the riot that began at 3:20 p.m. Wednesday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported.

The killer of a 12-year-old Orange County girl who has spent 22 years fighting execution has died on death row, escaping what the victim's father termed "the justice the world deserved." Thomas Francis Edwards, 65, died of natural causes Saturday at San Quentin State Prison's medical facility, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported Monday.