Police Misconduct Blog

A California man who spent 39 years in prison for two murders he didn’t commit is free – and rich. Craig Coley, now 71, received a $21 million settlement from the city of Simi Valley for the time spent behind bars after his wrongful 1980 conviction in the deaths of his former girlfriend...

New York City’s Rikers Island jail has long been known as one of the worst such institutions in the country. Now, a new book by Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City’s Correctional Health Services, outlines just how deadly Rikers Island is.
From...

A whole generation has come of age unfamiliar with phone booths and other means of communicating in the pre-cell phone era. Pay phones are still a staple of local jails, and the fees charged inmates to make such calls are often exorbitant. One 15-minute phone call will often cost an inmate over...

In the middle of the afternoon on January 20, 2015, Mark Pajas Sr. was found face down in his own vomit in his detox jail cell at the Monterey County Jail. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead at age 56.
Just over four years later, his family was awarded $1.6 million by a jury who...

Last year, Sequita Eddy Thompson watched in horror as two police officers shot her 22-year-old grandson, Stephon Clark, to death in the backyard of her Sacramento home. Clark was unarmed, carrying his cellphone, which the cops apparently mistook for a gun.
He was shot either seven or eight...

Hundreds of inmates became sick and “frantic” as heat failed in a Brooklyn jail during the recent polar vortex. The temperature in New York City was as low as two degrees, but more than 1,000 inmates had neither heat nor power during this perilous cold spell.
The Metropolitan...

Almost from the moment Lamekia Dockery entered the Elkhart Community Corrections (“ECC”) work-release facility in Goshen, Indiana, she told guards she was having severe stomach pains and needed medical attention. For six days, she begged to go to a hospital, only to have corrections...

Some people kill themselves and no one saw it coming. Keith Kosirog, 39, was not one of those people. His was a life full of extraordinary misfortune, and by the time he finally succeeded in taking his own life at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility (“CNMCF”), he had...

The life of Kalief Browder was short and exceptionally tragic, and his death had much too do with the appalling situation in the New York City correctional system. Browder, who died by his own hand in 2015, spent three years on Riker’s Island – much of it in solitary confinement –...

In recent years, the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora, New York is best known for the escape of two convicted killers, Richard Matt and David Sweat, in 2015. The pair became friends with a civilian employee in the prison’s tailor shop, who gave them tools to aid their...