June 15, 2017 | Sarah Anne Hughes and MK Slaby | The Incline
From energy to entertainment to the environment and more, our seventh Who’s Next class is filled with young legal experts working across Pittsburgh.
One works for the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. Another works to protect constitutional rights of those who are incarcerated. Others have opened their own firms. And multiple started in other careers before going to law school.
June 13, 2017 | Marcia Moore | The Daily Item
Seriously mentally ill inmates at the U.S. penitentiary at Lewisburg are being given word games and Sudoku puzzles instead of treatment and medication, according to a class action lawsuit filed against the federal bureau of prisons.
The suit, filed by the DC Prisoner’s Project of the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, claims prisoners received minimal interaction with counselors, often just a minute or two each week and through cell doors.
Men with lifetime histories of schizophrenia, paranoia, bipolar disorder, depression and other serious mental conditions often receive no treatments at all and are held in cells, often with another inmate, for 23 hours or more a day. Instead of treatment, the suit alleges, these inmates receive Sudoku puzzles, word games and coloring pages.
April 21, 2017 | Angus Love, Esq. | The Legal Intelligencer
On the evening of Jan. 22, 2012, John Morales tried to sell a bag of weed to Donald Clark in the parking lot of Rutter’s gas station in Waynesboro. Little did John know that Clark was a confidential informant working for the local police. Donald insisted that they do the transaction in the parking lot of a local church, claiming he didn’t know where the gas station was. In the church was a nursery. At the subsequent trial after John was busted, the district attorney demanded a mandatory two-year sentence under the Drug Free School Zone Act because of the nursery which triggered the enhancements. This law applies regardless of whether there was any notice that the nursery was considered to be a school and within a school zone, regardless of whether schools were in session. The law also includes transactions within 1,000 feet of bus routes regardless of whether the buses are running or if school is in session.
February 4, 2017 | Marcia Moore | The Daily Item
Due to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' plans to limit the time inmates can spend in the SMU program, the Lewisburg Penitentiary now houses about 500 fewer inmates. Dave Sprout, a paralegal with the Lewisburg Prison Project, believes that this change will lower the number of violent incidents that take place due to the amount of cell space this change frees up.
December 23, 2016 | Matt Stroud | Medium
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, along with The Abolitionist Law Center, PA Institutional Law Project, and Reed Smith filed a lawsuit on behalf of five pregnant women who spent as many as 22 days in ACJ’s Disciplinary Housing Unit for transgressions such as storing envelopes in a library book, and possessing three pairs of shoes instead of two. One of the women named in the lawsuit told Rewire that she was placed into the DHU — a euphemism the county uses for solitary confinement — because she kept her physician-prescribed medications in her cell, apparently against the jail’s policy. Once in the hole, she said she felt “like I was going to be in there forever.” When she filed a written grievance with the warden about being placed into solitary, she noted that she was going through a high-risk pregnancy — a detail that one would imagine the jail’s primary overseer might take seriously. A reply was scribbled at the bottom of the form: “If this is a problem don’t come to jail.”
December 1, 2016 | Matt Farrand | Standard-Journal
Allegations of abuse at USP Lewisburg are still a common occurrence since the new security protocols were instilled in 2009. The prison uses hard restraints that cut off the inmates' circulation as well as other unnecessary punishments. David Sprout, a paralegal and member of the Lewisburg Prison Project, believes that some of the actions of the penitentiary can be seen as torture.
November 1, 2016 | Marcia Moore | The Daily Item
A joint National Public Radio and Marshall Project report on alleged abuse of inmates inside the U.S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg is prompting members of an interfaith organization against torture to call on the U.S. Attorney General’s Office to investigate.
“We are gravely concerned about this,” said the Rev. Laura Markle Downton, director of U.S. prisons policy and program at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
The NPR/Marshall Project report, “Inside Lewisburg Prison: A choice between a violent cellmate or shackles” includes claims The Daily Item has written about for years regarding inmate allegations of mistreatment at the federal prison since it was converted in 2009 into a Special Management Unit (SMU).
October 26, 2016 | Josh Shapiro | National Public Radio: All Things Considered
Listen to the NPR radio news report here →
