Alvin Thomas is a federal inmate incarcerated in Kentucky, sentenced to 20-years imprisonment for cocaine distribution and possession. During the course of the prosecution, government lawyers initiated asset forfeiture proceedings against his property. Mr. Thomas asserts that because those efforts prevented him from using his assets to hire an attorney of his choice, the government [...]
If you are concerned about the number of citizens we as a society simply give up on by locking them up for decades, then you might want to think about not banking with Wells Fargo. Charles Davis at Salon writes that the Wells Fargo used bailout funds to invest in the GEO Group, the second largest private prison [...]
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 [...]