BOP

Detainee at Polk County, Fla. jail sues officials for, among other things, scanning his legal mail into a computer system. Eleventh Circuit: The First Amendment requires opening legal mail in the detainee's presence and checking only for contraband. That doesn't include scanning it and saving it on a computer that jail officials can access. The jail's mail-scanning policy "sufficiently chills, inhibits, or interferes with" an inmate's ability to speak openly with his attorney and infringes his right to free speech. Case undismissed!

Delaware physician is convicted on 13 counts of unlawfully dispensing opioids. At sentencing, the gov't puts forward a medical expert who reviewed files for 24 of the 1,142 patients to whom the good doctor had prescribed controlled substances in the last two years, concluding that prescriptions for 18 of the patients were illegal. Extrapolating from the sample, prosecutors argued he should be sentenced based on a drug weight of 106,000 kilos. The doctor argues for 7,500 kilos and the court settles on 30,000 kilos, sentencing the doctor to 20 years in prison. Yikes!

Records obtained from the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) show at least 4,950 people died in its custody over roughly the past decade (article available here).

Although there are more than 120 federal prisons nationwide, a quarter of those deaths occurred in a single place: the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, North Carolina.

Muslim man in Ohio prison alleges that prison officials failed to accommodate his observance of Ramadan while making comparable accommodations for Christians and Jews, and that officials retaliated against him when he exercised his First Amendment rights to complain about them by threatening to move him to a higher security prison, kicking him out of a cultural awareness group, and associating false positive drug tests with inmates in his cell block at random.

A federal court has temporarily blocked federal prison officials from transferring a transgender woman to a men’s facility and denying her access to gender-affirming care in accordance with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump (access full article).

Two transgender women in prison will be transferred back to a women’s prison after a district court further blocked the Trump administration’s executive order requiring the Bureau of Prisons to only recognize a person’s gender at birth ( view full article).

During COVID-19 pandemic, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) implemented a policy to allow phone calls to be free to adults in custody. Each month those in custody could make up to 500 minutes of calls at no cost. However, with the end of the pandemic declared over a year ago and the BOP under budgetary constraints, that program is coming to an end (access full article).

Given the stakes involved, a judge’s criminal docket should always be a top priority.

According to a team of investigative journalists and attorneys, a Cincinnati federal judge neglected criminal cases for so long that he has a dead person on his docket, and just now ruling on inmate COVID release petitions filed in 2020.