Search Results for: inmates rights

Ecuadorians voted to approve a number of security proposals from President Daniel Noboa on Sunday as the South American country experiences a surge in violence that has claimed the lives of multiple public officials, including a presidential candidate. Among the proposals was a proposition to amend Ecuador’s constitution to allow the country’s armed forces to [...]

The US prides itself on being a nation built on freedom, justice, and individual rights. And yet the evolution of its system of mass incarceration — a system that cannot be defined without reference to shocking racial disparities — seems to directly contradict these founding principles. The US prison population dwarfs those of nearly every other [...]

A US federal judge on Friday ordered  the appointment of a special master to oversee a federal women’s prison in California that is notorious for widespread sexual abuse against inmates. This move marks the first time the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has been subject to such oversight. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote, [...]

The government of Haiti extended the state of emergency around Port-Au-Prince Thursday following the increasing escalation of gang violence and the displacement of thousands. The state of emergency bans all forms of public protest, day and night, introduces a new curfew and grants security forces the ability to use “all legal means” to enforce the [...]

At its core, the death penalty feeds one of the basest desires known to humankind: the craving for revenge. The 3,200+ members of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty” — a group I co-founded — along with millions of other death penalty abolitionists across the world have demonstrated time and again in recent years how [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of South Carolina filed a lawsuit against the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) on Thursday, claiming the department’s ban on news media interviews for incarcerated people violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The department’s policy explicitly prohibits “personal contact interviews” with inmates, and in [...]

A death row inmate in Alabama filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of nitrogen gas executions. He argued that the first person in the nation put to death by this method experienced violent convulsions for several minutes in “a human experiment that officials botched miserably.” Bernard E. Harcourt, counsel for death row [...]

Australian Federal MPs voted Wednesday in favour of a motion supporting the return of Wikileaks’ founder Jullian Assange to Australia, ahead of a US extradition hearing next week in London’s High Court of Justice. In an unprecedented show of political support for Assange, the Australian Parliament called upon the US and UK to bring the [...]

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, urged the UK government Tuesday to stop the impending extradition of Julian Assange to the US. She urged the government to carefully consider Assange’s appeal and cited significant concerns that his extradition could put him at risk of treatment amounting to torture. The Special Rapporteur called for [...]

Alabama’s experimental use of gas to torture to death Kenneth Smith on January 25th — like all executions by lethal injection — has perpetuated a horrific Nazi legacy in the United States and is a traumatizing affront to many in the Jewish community. The fact that this torment was blindly carried out just ahead of [...]