Prisoners Rights

A long-standing policy at an Orange County jail that puts tighter restrictions on book deliveries to inmates than those imposed in prisons has irked immigrant families of inmates and local booksellers. Among the books that have been returned to sender are Spanish-language Bibles and other Christian titles. Orange County Sheriff's spokesman Damon Micalizzi said books must come directly from a publisher or a major book distributor for security reasons.

California's bid to end court oversight of the care it gives about 33,000 mentally ill inmates was heard Wednesday by a federal judge who voiced concern that he had only days to weigh thousands of pages of contradictory claims and issue a decision. Gov. Jerry Brown's motion to end oversight, filed in early January, triggered a federal law that requires a decision in 90 days. Documents produced in court show the state began its own preparation in late 2011, when it hired experts to review the adequacy of inmate care.

Re "Prison Held Gang Members in Lockdown for Almost 2 Years," April 8: The prison officials are to be applauded for locking down prisoners who are hellbent on being disruptive and a danger to other inmates. Prisoners' rights are directly tied to their willingness to follow the rules of incarceration. Sadly, prisoners' rights advocates fail to accept this premise. Officials reported that those in the extended lockdown refused to make a pledge to not initiate further violence. Let us not forget that while in the 20-month lockdown, these inmates did not injure or kill another prisoner.

The lawyers who spent years fighting to free prisoners at Guantanamo Bay thought they had won in 2008, when the Supreme Court gave detainees a right to go to court and Barack Obama was elected president. But things haven't worked out as they had hoped. Last month, President Obama reversed a campaign promise and announced plans to keep prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely. Congress has blocked moving any prisoners from the Cuba detention center to this country, even for a trial.

A prisoner's civil rights lawsuit against five Corcoran State Prison guards has been thrown out of court by a federal judge. Inmate Ronnie Dewberry represented himself in the case against five officers until it was dismissed late Tuesday. Dewberry, a convicted killer from Oakland, said he was put into the now-infamous security housing unit's exercise yard at the prison with his enemies and was wounded by a gas gun fired to break up a fight in which he was involved.

A comprehensive review of conditions facing women in American prisons has found that incidents of rape, sexual abuse and medical neglect are widespread among inmates nationwide. The study, released Thursday by the human rights group Amnesty International, cited unacceptable conditions in prisons and jails for many female inmates, whose numbers have tripled in the last 15 years to about 138,000.

Male prisoners have a constitutional right to procreate by means of artificial insemination, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday. The 2-1 decision, the first of its kind by a federal appellate court, comes in the case of William Reno Gerber, a 41-year-old third-strike convict now serving a 111-year sentence for negligently discharging a firearm, making terrorist threats and possessing a handgun as an ex-felon.

Alejandro Hernandez knows much more about extortion today than he did when he was arrested for that crime two years ago. Unable to meet his $11,000 bail, he has been subjected to what he calls systematic extortion at the prison on the northern limits of Mexico City where he is being held awaiting trial.

This is how the justice system used to work in this country: Debtors were routinely locked up. Peasants could spend decades in prison for stealing and eating a cow. Suspects languished eight years behind bars awaiting a verdict, were found innocent, then had to remain in prison while prosecutors appealed--sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court.

The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

According to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form -- but suffered neither serious nor permanent harm -- has no claim that his constitutional rights were violated. Thomas objected when the high court, in a little-noted recent opinion, said this unprovoked and malicious assault by a North Carolina prison guard amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The court's decision came a few days after Thomas' now-famous former law clerk John C. Yoo was charged with flawed reasoning, but not professional misconduct, as a Justice Department lawyer when he applied much the same view toward the treatment of Al Qaeda prisoners.

During a visit to the Tehran military courthouse one day last fall, Hossein and Hamid spotted the doctor. Memories from their five days at Kahrizak prison came flooding back. Prisoners seeking help were handed a few aspirin and told to go away. When they asked for bandages, the doctor struck some lightly with a club. One inmate had been beaten so badly on his feet that his toes were swollen and infected and he couldn't walk properly. He arranged for an appointment with the doctor, who told him, "Get lost before I beat you up," according to Hossein, who said he didn't even bother asking for help for his own injuries.

In a trial that never became the referendum on abortion that some abortion foes wanted, Scott Roeder, a 51-year-old airport shuttle driver, was convicted Friday of murdering George Tiller, one the nation's few physicians who performed late-term abortions. When he was slain in the vestibule of his church last May 31, Tiller became the eighth doctor since 1993 to be killed by antiabortion extremists. In June, his family announced that his clinic would close permanently. The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for only 37 minutes before finding Roeder guilty of premeditated murder.

A group of dangerous sex criminals who took their case before the Supreme Court on Tuesday had one clear champion: Justice Antonin Scalia. A staunch conservative, he has not developed new sympathy for criminals. Instead, the issue before the court was whether the Constitution gave the federal government the power to lock up offenders after they had served their prison terms. Scalia said protecting the public against sex criminals was a matter for the states, their police and their prisons.

With a wide war on terrorism still being fought, an appellate court said Tuesday that Guantanamo Bay prison detainees had few legal rights, so long as the government could show they fought for or actively supported the Taliban or Al Qaeda. A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the government's broad power to hold indefinitely suspected former Taliban fighters and their supporters who were captured abroad and sent to the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

President Obama began the year with a pledge to close the Guantanamo prison, and to restore due process and the core constitutional values that he said "made this country great." But his administration has set out a multi-pronged legal policy for the remaining Guantanamo prisoners that bears a striking similarity to that of the final year of George W. Bush's presidency. Some detainees could be held indefinitely without being charged, if they're deemed impossible to prosecute but too dangerous to release.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned the death sentence of a mentally disturbed murderer who was being forcibly medicated by Louisiana prison officials so that he could be executed. The case of Michael Owen Perry has been the most closely watched death penalty case of the current term because it tested the willingness of the court's dominant conservatives to uphold executions.

Like all prisoners on Japan's death row, Masao Akahori knew that his execution would come without warning. The fear made him stiffen at the sound of the guards' approaching footsteps, wondering if the clack of boots was a countdown to death or would pass by, fading into the silence of another reprieve. One morning in the early 1970s, the march stopped outside Akahori's cell and a key turned the lock. "We have come to fetch you," the guards told him.

Lawyers for five foreign men who allege that a Boeing subsidiary conspired with the CIA in their kidnapping and torture urged a federal appeals court Tuesday to allow their lawsuit to go to trial and their abusers to be held accountable. In the case against Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. of San Jose, the former terrorism suspects were denied their day in court two years ago when a U.S. District Court judge heeded the Bush administration's claim that the case had to be dismissed because its entire subject matter was a state secret.

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has argued that the worth of the Bush administration's aggressive interrogation program was proved in two secret CIA memos that he urged be released. But those documents, and others that were finally unsealed Monday, are at best inconclusive -- attesting that captured terrorism suspects provided crucial intelligence on Al Qaeda and its plans, but offering little to support the argument that harsh or abusive methods played a key role.