Police Misconduct Blog

The Douglas County Jail in Douglasville, Georgia is no stranger to controversy. The facility, operated by Douglas County Sheriff Tim Pounds, has been sued multiple times. Numerous people have died in the jail because of poor medical care. At least two jail staff were indicted after an inmate died...

The recent COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is causing lawyers, governments and the private sector to grapple with new legal issues every day. Nursing homes aren’t allowing family members to visit, some jails are now faced with deadly coronavirus outbreaks and businesses are balancing privacy...

In late September 2018, Madelyn Linsenmeir was booked on a New Hampshire warrant on charges of giving false information to a law enforcement officer. She told these law enforcement officers that she was having difficulty breathing and felt like her chest was going to “cave in.” She told...

Rappers Jay-Z and Yo Gotti are helping 152 inmates incarcerated in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman State Penitentiary with a lawsuit filed February 26 in the federal court in the Northern District of Mississippi. Both rappers also assisted 29 inmates in filing a lawsuit in January, but this...

If the condition were a virus, the entire state would go into quarantine. By any measurement, it is a crisis, and Mississippi prison officials are trying to determine and deal with the tremendous number of inmates who have died while in custody in little more than a month. As of February 3, the...

In October 2015, 26-year-old Terral Ellis was in an Ottawa County, Oklahoma, jail on a DUI charge. He entered the jail on October 10, and 12 days later, he left on a stretcher – dead from septic shock. This week, the surveillance video of Ellis’ final hours, which contains audio, was...

On January 27, another inmate was found hanged in his cell at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the ninth inmate to die there in the past month. For Governor Tate Reeves, that was enough.
The same day, in his State of the State address, Reeves said he was shutting...

Smartphones aren’t permitted in prisons. Of course, that does not mean they aren’t readily available - for a price. These days, the use of contraband smartphones by inmates are revealing, through images and words, the horrors of conditions in Mississippi and other prisons.
A...

In January of this year, a Cook County jury awarded $8.1 million to the family of a deceased Chicago woman whose delayed diagnosis of lung cancer resulted in her death at age 64. The family had argued that if it weren’t for a radiologist’s error reading a 2013 X-ray, Althea...

The Mississippi prison system is a well-known hellhole. Its horrible reputation just got worse (if possible) after five inmates were killed, and two are currently missing since violence erupted at three facilities beginning December 29. The Mississippi Department of Corrections (“MDOC”)...