Brown v. Plata
The politics associated with the appointment of a replacement for Justice Kennedy, 81, who resigned June 27, 2018, from the US Supreme Court after thirty years of service, is gut-wrenching. Take your own gut test: what rights and protections do you fear are being whittled away by the sway and stench of political expediency?… Read the rest
Some laws are oppressive to low-income people facing criminal prosecution. An example is California Penal Code section 1203.016. This law, effective since January 1, 2015, enables California’s fifty-eight counties to deliver poor people to corporations that then profit from the human misery of these people, men and women who are charged with crimes and stuck in jail.… Read the rest
In April 2001, the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, California, filed a bold class action on behalf of California prisoners. The lawsuit, filed in the US Supreme Court, brought front and center a pernicious, festering problem that the California prison administrators had ignored, or worse, didn’t care about. The issue was overcrowding and the problems associated with inmates being forced to live, eat, work, and sleep in cramped, unsafe, and unhealthy environments.… Read the rest