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Re: Justices Order California to Shed 30,000 Prisoners

By: clo in FFFT | Recommend this post (0)
Mon, 23 May 11 10:05 PM | 70 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Food For Further Thought 		Msg. 29365 of 65535
(This msg. is a reply to 29361 by weco)
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Scalia forgets Citizens United...
Boy, he was seething...
Besides, these prisoners can be transferred & should be if found guilty of a violent crime. clo

Monday’s ruling in the case, Brown v. Plata, No. 09-1233, affirmed an order by a special three-judge federal court requiring state officials to reduce the prison population to 110,000, which is 137.5 percent of the system’s capacity. There have been more than 160,000 inmates in the system in recent years, and there are currently more than 140,000.

State officials will have two years to comply with the order, and they may ask for more time. Justice Kennedy emphasized that the reduction in population need not be achieved solely by releasing prisoners early. Among the other possibilities, he said, are new construction, out-of-state transfers and using county facilities.




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The above is a reply to the following message:
Justices Order California to Shed 30,000 Prisoners
By: weco in FFFT
Mon, 23 May 11 9:24 PM 		Msg. 29361 of 65535

Justices Order California to Shed 30,000 Prisoners
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: May 23, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html

WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”

Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. filed vigorous dissents. Justice Scalia called the order affirmed by the majority “perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation’s history.” Justice Alito said “the majority is gambling with the safety of the people of California.”

The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the national average. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”

continues

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