An inmate who is no longer able to afford ongoing legal representation must often pursue his legal remedies as a pro se litigant. This task can be doubly difficult for the prisoner pro se litigant because communications with outside support can be so difficult. But sometimes, the incarcerated pro se litigant has access to a [...]
Many of the petitions filed in the U.S. Supreme Court each term are filed by prisoners representing themselves. And most of these prisoner pro se petitions are filed on the Court’s in forma pauperis [IFP] docket. With the petition, IFP petitioners file a sworn affidavit describing their financial resources. Prisoners—who typically have little or no [...]
When a litigant proceeds without legal counsel, they are said to be proceeding “pro se” or “on one’s own behalf.” The task of representing one’s own interests can be daunting, especially when one is misinformed about the nature of pro se litigation. There are several misconceptions about what it means to proceed pro se. Below [...]
At Cockle Legal Briefs we work with a great variety of customers, including incarcerated prisoners appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court as pro se litigants. Prisoners who believe that some aspect of their conviction or confinement is unlawful are entitled to bring their cases to the courts—even as far as the highest Court. Some prisoners [...]
I kind of figured what would happen after Adam Liptak from the New York Times called to say he was going to write a follow-up piece to his 2010 article about my life and legal successes while in prison. After the article in the Times, my wife Annie and I had a crazy couple of weeks that [...]
Doesn’t it make you feel foolish when something you’ve done to others comes back around to you? In the past, I’ve been highly critical of public figures, and not just for what they do or say, but also for what I believed were their motives. What I believed was in their hearts. [...]
I recently learned about a new book on how prisoners can write grievances complaining about their conditions in prison. The book, written by Terri LeClercq, is called "Prison Grievances: When to Write, How to Write." The reason why this book is so good for prisoners is because it is written in a simple, and easy [...]
This past week, the Seattle Times published an op-ed I wrote about the need for prison reform. In the article, I talk about how I caught a big break following my release from federal prison. I was released in October of 2008, during the heart of the recession, and everyone found it difficult to obtain [...]
Want to change a life? Make the community safer? Save taxpayer dollars? Incarcerating someone for one year costs around $35,000--as I wrote about yesterday in The Atlantic.com--it's the equivalent of a year's college tuition. It also leads to more crime in the long run as the national recidivism rate for returning prisoners hovers around 66%. [...]
When I saw that halfway houses were trending on Twitter last week, I almost started laughing. I didn't know what the story was about, but I could take an educated guess. In case you missed it, the New York Times ran a series of pieces on the deplorable conditions at private New Jersey halfway houses. Then, [...]