For years, the City and County of San Francisco has housed inmates awaiting trial in tiny cells, letting them out for only a few hours a day for exercise and often depriving them of any time outdoors, but conditions are set to improve for some after a federal judge ruled Friday that pre-trial detainees incarcerated for more than four years must be given at least one hour a week of access to direct sunlight.
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A death-row inmate convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of a 12-year-old boy argued before a Sixth Circuit panel Thursday that his intellectual disabilities render his sentence unconstitutional.
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Lee Boyd Malvo, who terrorized the Washington region in 2002 as one-half of a sniper team, is at the center of a case the Supreme Court will hear this fall. But the justices’ eventual ruling probably will mean less for him than for a dozen other inmates who, like the now-34-year-old Malvo, were sentenced to life without parole for murders they committed as teens.
Read moreMissouri has set an October execution date for a convicted murderer who claims his unique medical condition could cause intense pain and suffering during the lethal-injection process.
Read moreThe Fourth Circuit upheld a ruling Friday in favor of Virginia death row inmates, finding that their living conditions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
Read moreTwo legal rights groups filed a federal class action Wednesday claiming some New York inmates with mental disabilities who served their time are illegally kept behind bars because there are no beds for them at community mental health centers.
Read moreRecent Supreme Court decisions regarding juvenile justice and emerging science on youth brain development led the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges to update its guidelines this week to call for alternatives to detention of youth offenders.
Read moreA class of inmates sued Ohio jail officials Thursday claiming chronic overcrowding and understaffing, lack of access to safe drinking water and food, and other inhumane conditions they say have led to a spike in deaths and assaults.
Read moreRecommending they read William Faulkner to learn the “boundaries of human decency,” a federal judge on Friday admonished former Mississippi police officers accused of forcing a mentally disabled man to eat a mouthful of cinnamon days after making him box a cop.
Read moreThe Supreme Court struggled Tuesday with the claims of a man of death row who says his rare medical condition will make lethal injection severely painful under Missouri’s execution method.
Read moreCalling it “an accident waiting to happen,” the man who built Tennessee’s electric chair told Courthouse News that modifications made to the machine may not do an effective job in Thursday night’s planned execution of a double murderer.
Read moreA mentally ill man imprisoned after stealing $1 and a hat claims in a civil rights lawsuit that Illinois prison officials tortured him by putting him in solitary confinement for two decades, where he self-mutilated himself, including slicing off his testicle and hanging it on his cell door.
Read moreAfter the Supreme Court shot down a challenge to the use of solitary confinement in prison, Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced alarm Tuesday about depriving inmates of daylight for months and years.
Read moreDenial of methadone to prison inmates with opioid addictions constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, the ACLU claimed in federal court Wednesday.
Read moreThe Oregon Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a 112-year sentence of a young man who shot 26 of his high school classmates after killing his parents in 1998.
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