Project COPE

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Debbie Read
Executive Assistant
(314) 652-3114
debbie@aclu-em.org

The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri Files Additional Suit Against Correctional Medical Services and the City of St. Louis

ST. LOUIS, November 18, 2010--The American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri (ACLU-EM) has filed a civil suit against the City of St. Louis and Correctional Medical Services (CMS), the medical provider for the city jails. Filed on behalf of an HIV-positive inmate at the Medium Security Institute in St. Louis, the lawsuit cites life-threatening deliberate indifference to a serious medical condition. The inmate was incarcerated in late winter of this year, and for the first sixteen days of his incarceration was denied the life saving medication for which he has a daily prescription. During that period he was given only Tylenol, despite repeated attempts by him, a friend, and his doctor to re-establish his prescribed medical regime.

At the end of that initial sixteen-day period, while he started to receive his prescriptions, the inmate endured repeated and substantial periods of time during which his full prescription regime was not administered. Such a denial of adequate treatment can have dramatic and negative health consequences and can ultimately prove fatal to HIV-positive persons, who can quickly build resistance to medications that are not continuously taken.

Brenda Jones, Executive Director of the ACLU-EM, commented on this situation: “No one deserves to have his life endangered simply because he is awaiting trial in the City jails. The case fits a repeated pattern of CMS’s deliberate indifference to inmates, resulting in inadequate medical care.”

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Previous lawsuit filed against CMS and The City of St. Louis: "101210 ACLU-EM Files Wrongful Death Lawsuit"

Enlarge   By David Banks, AP Retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens speaks Monday during the annual meeting of the 7th Circuit Bar Association & Judicial Conference of the 7th Circuit, in Chicago.

 

By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY

• COLUMBUS, Ohio — Modern pressures on the judicial system have raised the chance a defendant could be wrongly sentenced to death, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said Wednesday, explaining his changed view on the constitutionality of capital punishment.

  "The risk of an incorrect decision has increased," he told an audience of hundreds of lawyers and judges at a judicial conference here, responding to a question about his 2008 assertion that the death penalty should be abolished. He said that because of advances in DNA testing, which have led to the freeing of some innocent convicts, "we're more aware of the risk than we might have been before."

   

  In a lethal-injection dispute from Kentucky two years ago, Stevens concluded for the first time that "the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions" to society.

   

   

  FULL COVERAGE: Latest from Supreme Court
  RETIREMENT: Stevens to leave this summer
  VACANCY: Possible picks for Supreme Court
  CASE LOG: Major cases facing Supreme Court

  Stevens, who will retire this summer after nearly 35 years on the bench, offered both substantive views and lighthearted thoughts (why the bow ties?). He recalled an unpopular decision he wrote while he was a lower court judge that led him to believe he could "kiss goodbye" any chance of ever becoming a Supreme Court justice.

   

   

  Stevens said capital juries are dominated by people who favor the death penalty, alluding in part to the Supreme Court's 1986 decision that allowed prosecutors to exclude from capital cases jurors who say they would be reluctant to vote for a death sentence. Stevens said the brutality of the murders that often lead to a capital trial can put pressure on prosecutors.

   

  "The dynamics of the litigation," Stevens said, raises the risk of "incorrect decisions" regarding who should be sentenced to die.

   

  Stevens, 90, was elevated from a Chicago-based federal appeals court when President Gerald Ford appointed him in 1975. He recalled that he dissented in 1971 when the appeals court upheld a Wisconsin State Assembly sanction of civil rights leader and anti-war activist Father James Groppi for disorderly conduct on the floor of the Legislature.

   

  "I remember thinking: I have life tenure," Stevens recalled, expressing some relief that he would face no political repercussions for a view unpopular in its day. "I also thought I could kiss goodbye the idea of ever going on the Supreme Court."

   

  That, of course, turned out to be wrong.

   

  Stevens mused that when he went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, no senators asked about Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide. It would be a few more years before that ruling generated an anti-abortion movement and the issue became a staple of Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

   

  Stanford University law professor Jeffrey Fisher, a former Stevens law clerk who questioned him Wednesday, asked how he might feel on the first Monday in October, when his colleagues take the bench without him.

   

  "I really don't know," Stevens said softly. He said his worry these days is cases yet to be resolved this term. "We're a little behind in some of our output."

   

  Teresa Wynn Roseborough, another ex-Stevens clerk and senior chief counsel for Metropolitan Life Insurance, asked about his signature neckwear: Why bow ties?

   

  "The truth is I can't tie a four in hand," Stevens said of the knot on the more commonly worn tie.

   

   

PHOTO BY J.B. FORBES

Missouri Chief Justice William Ray Price Jr. and state Sen. Matt Bartle, R-Lee’s Summit, fell a little short in persuading the Missouri Legislature to reform the state’s criminal sentencing laws. Their plan was too much too soon for many lawmakers — and maybe a little too costly up front.

But the issue, which would save millions in the long run, is now on the table. With refinement and collaboration, it could pass next year.

The plan would reserve state prison cells for dangerous and incorrigible convicts serving long sentences. Nonviolent and first-time offenders, meanwhile, would be kept for shorter stays in less expensive county jails, or diverted into close supervision by probation and parole officers and expanded substance abuse courts.

Fully realized, the plan would enable the state to close at least one prison. And it could break the dangerous — and ever costlier — cycle of criminal recidivism. When nonviolent offenders are exposed to lengthy prison stays, they’re all but certain to re-offend.

But even the most promising reforms can’t get off the ground without investment; you must spend money, at least at first, to save money.

That’s the case with sentencing reform, a process that has been stalled by budget cuts. Cash-strapped county governments see the Bartle-Price plan as presenting too great a financial risk.

The legislation, worked out with local prosecutors, would have permitted the state Department of Corrections to turn away lower-level nonviolent offenders. The money the state would save on running prisons would be used to reimburse counties for their increased costs.

But lawmakers sent mixed signals. While promising increased financial support, they would not designate any dedicated funding for that purpose. Then they cut the paltry $22 daily reimbursement rate counties receive for state prisoners to $19.58 per day.

That was too much for county leaders, who began lobbying against the bill. Dick Burke, executive director of the Missouri Association of Counties, said his members feared “a classic shift to the local level of state costs.”

Mr. Burke added, “The stakes are too high and the time too short” to win his group’s support this session. But he said counties want to be an active part of negotiations that could lead to success next year.

Now, the state bears much of the counties’ cost. Smaller, mainly rural counties save money by pushing lower-level nonviolent offenders into state penitentiaries. That leaves less room in prisons for violent offenders; with prisons running near capacity, that compromises public safety for everybody.

The dirty secret in this debate is that even without sentencing reform, prisoners will be diverted, only without the careful assessments that the reform bill would have required at sentencing. The cuts will come quietly as inmates are released to make room for a new round of offenders.

’Round and ’round it goes.

There’s talk of amending the reform bill to include only modest, interim steps. Judges who sentence nonviolent offenders to state prisons would be required to justify their decisions in writing. Probation and parole offices would have expanded authority to move prisoners into drug and alcohol courts.

The Department of Corrections, meanwhile, would have to certify how many state penitentiary slots taxpayers are paying for each fiscal year — and publish data on which jurisdictions are overloading them with nonviolent offenders.

Making sure taxpayers know the truth may be the surest path to reform.