Disability rights lawyers sound the alarm on LA county jails
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This story is about Disability Rights California and their clients. Disability Rights CA is a ChangeLawyers Legal Aid grantee.
People with mental illnesses who are in conservatorships are being held in Los Angeles County jails even after their criminal charges are dropped, according to a report released Tuesday by Disability Rights California.
Similarly, they are staying months in county psychiatric hospitals after doctors have agreed that it’s safe for them to leave, the report said.
The issue is partly one of capacity. Facilities where they could be sent after being released from jail or hospitals are often full and have months-long waiting lists.
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The lawyers bringing attention to the horrors faced by incarcerated women
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This story is about California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ) and their clients. CCIJ is a ChangeLawyers Legal Empowerment grantee.
A U.S. district judge Friday ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee the Federal Correctional Institution Dublin, the Bay Area women’s prison with a history of widespread sexual abuse.
The order, declaring the prison a “dysfunctional mess,” came just four days after the appointment of a new warden and a sweep by FBI agents.
“The situation can no longer be tolerated,” federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in the order Friday, citing in part her own observations. “The facility is in dire need of immediate change.”
The blistering order said the U.S. Bureau of Prison “has proceeded sluggishly with intentional disregard of the inmates’ constitutional rights despite being fully apprised of the situation for years.” “The repeated installation of BOP leadership who fail to grasp and address the situation strains credulity. The Court is compelled to intercede.”
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Sure seems like the courts have placed Christianity above other religions
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“Religious freedom” is having a moment in federal courts. One of the big successful goals of the conservative legal movement was that religious freedom would be advanced in a way that it supposedly had not been before. However, while the courts have certainly presented Christian legal interests with significant wins over the last several years, now that the takeover of the federal judiciary by conservative movement judges has advanced, left-leaning fears of religious favoritism in the judiciary appear to have been validated. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit demonstrated in an opinion issued earlier this month in Apache Stronghold v. United States, for religious practitioners outside of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, religious freedoms may actually be more restricted than they were under previous legal regimes.
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