Free Republic

Washington state will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn a surprising federal court ruling that tossed out the state's 120-year-old prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons, Attorney General Rob McKenna said today. The ruling, handed down Tuesday by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S> Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, found that Washington's criminal-justice system was so "infected" with racial discrimination that a ban on felon voting violated civil-rights protections. The state hoped to have the case heard during the U.S. Supreme Court's fall session, McKenna told reporters at a hastily-arranged news conference at...

Note: The following text is a quote: Some Guantanamo Detainees to Move to Illinois Prison By Gerry J. Gilmore American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2009 – President Barack Obama’s administration plans to transfer a limited number of detainees held at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a prison in rural western Illinois, senior administration officials said here today. The federal government plans to acquire Thomson Correctional Center, a 10-year-old maximum security prison in Thomson, Ill., a farming community about 150 miles west of Chicago, officials said in a background briefing. The administration would need to work...

Currently, the constitution allows prisoners to perform work for governmental agencies during their prison sentence, but the amendment would allow them to volunteer for religious, charitable and educational groups as well. Letting inmates work for non-profits was common practice for jails across the state until the state Commission of Correction determined it was unconstitutional about three years ago, state Sheriffs' Association Counsel Thomas Mitchell said. The nonprofit work could be used as an incentive for good behavior.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s controversial program to charge inmates for rent, haircuts, medical visits and high school equivalency tests raised $750,000, but outraged inmate advocates who said the fees violated their constitutional rights and amounted to an unlawful tax. Five years after a judge struck down the program - ruling that county sheriffs do not have the authority to charge such fees - Hodgson is reviving the proposal. The state’s highest court will hear arguments in Hodgson’s appeal today. When he initially imposed the fees in 2002, Hodgson said he believed they could help teach inmates to accept responsibility...

Even as some Americans await the arrival of their swine flu vaccines, the Pentagon has decided to vaccinate both soldiers and terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There was no word Wednesday on when the the first vaccines would reach the remote base in southeast Cuba. But U.S. military there were notified late last week that service members would get their H1N1 virus vaccinations first. Private contractors and sailors' wives and children could get theirs afterward ``as the supply permits.'' And that means the 221 war on terror captives would also be vaccinated first, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt,...

Being Supreme Leader of the Free World is a tough job; but someone's got to do it. Enter Barack Hussein Obama. Mmm....mmm...mm. When he's not pushing Obamacare, bashing FOX News for linking him to ACORN and other radical associations, hiding in the closet on gay rights, what's he doing? Why he's busy taking heat from all sides in the Afghanistan debate. I guess you just can't please all the people, all of the time. Or in this case, any of the people on all sides of the debate. Health care legislation has been hard for President Obama, but Afghanistan...

CONVICTED criminals are being employed as telemarketers to cold-call people as part of a radical new prison employment program. But those called will have no idea they are talking to an inmate and the State Government will not say which organisations are using the convicts as part of a confidentiality deal. The program is designed to prepare women prisoners from Windsor's low and medium-security Dillwynia Correctional Centre for life on the outside, training them for work and stopping them from reoffending. However it is also being used as a low-cost way for companies to get cheap telemarketing work and for...

Alcohol hand gel meant to combat swine flu has been banned from a prison after inmates became embroiled in a drunken brawl after drinking it. Hand gels supplied to a prison to combat the risk of swine flu have been removed after inmates realised it contained alcohol and began drinking it to try to get drunk. At least one prisoner at HMP The Verne on Portland, Dorset, was found intoxicated. The Prison Service confirmed that this case was being investigated but meanwhile antibacterial gel pumps had been removed as a "precautionary measure". Andy Fear, a member of the Verne's Prison...

California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass plans to strip the most controversial provisions from a Senate-approved plan that would have trimmed the state's prison population by 27,000 inmates. The Assembly version would keep about 10,000 more inmates behind bars and leave the state with a new, nearly $200 million budget hole, Bass said early Friday. Bass said the new plan -- to be considered Monday -- would do away with proposals by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to allow home detention with electronic monitoring for inmates with less than 12 months to serve, who are over age 60 or who are medically incapacitated....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration plans to transfer six prisoners abroad from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. official said on Wednesday, part of the effort to close the controversial facility by early 2010. The detainees include those previously ordered released by U.S. courts or whose release has been approved through the Obama administration's review process, a Justice Department official said, declining to give further details. The administration notified Congress around August 6-7 of the planned moves, starting a 15-day waiting period before the transfers can begin. One, Mohammed Jawad, could be sent back to Afghanistan as...

"17,000 prisoners were freed after amnesty and commutation of punishment term of a number of prisoners by the Supreme Leader," State Prisons Organization's Deputy Director for Management and Resource Development Mohammad Ali Zanjirehi told FNA on Friday. "40 percent of the country's inmates, who account for around 68,000 people, were liable to the amnesty," Zanjirei said, adding that 17,000 out of the 68,000 inmates have been freed and the rest have enjoyed commutation of their terms or will be granted leaves in final months of their incarceration.

According to news received by the International Committee against Executions, 29 people are to be executed tomorrow, Saturday, in Ghezal Hesar prison in Karaj. It has been reported that the 29 have been separated from other prisoners. There is no information on their charges. The executions are being carried out in order to intimidate people and is directed at the protesting people of Iran.

LANSING, Mich. -- Empty Michigan prisons could become home to hundreds of California inmates if a deal can be struck. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm sent a letter Monday to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger formally offering space for some of the inmates California is running out of room to house to Michigan. Download: Ganholm Letter To Schwarzenegger Michigan plans to close two prisons by the end of September. They are the Standish Maximum Correctional facility about 145 miles northwest of Detroit and a medium-security prison in Muskegon, about 45 miles northwest of Grand Rapids. Michigan could save the jobs of about...

Tens Of Thousands Pennsylvania Prison Inmates ... ... will still be paid for the jobs they do at state correctional institutions even as the people who guard them and see to their welfare run the risk of going unpaid in the event of a budget impasse this summer, The Morning Call has learned. Concerns about public safety helped drive the decision to continue paying the 31,175 inmates who do everything from serve meals to sweep cell-blocks at the state’s 27 correctional institutions. They’re paid 19 cents to 42 cents an hour for their labors, spokespeople for Gov. Ed Rendell and...

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has ordered the release of 'all' Hamas prisoners, including those held on security charges, a senior aide told al-Jazeera from Ramallah on Monday. Azzam Ahmed, the head of the parliamentary bloc of Abbas’ Fatah party charged with holding reconciliation talks with the rival Hamas movement ruling Gaza, told the Doha-based channel the release would get underway in the coming days. The Palestinian Ma’an news agency, however, quoted sources close to Abbas as saying Hamas prisoners would only be released on “condition they do not pose a threat to general security and law and order.” Abbas had...

NORRISTOWN — When Wendy Lavin discovered that jail cell writings from her daughter's killer were for sale on the Internet, she was horrified. "I was disgusted. I felt sick to my stomach," said Lavin, whose 20-year-old daughter, Jennifer Louise Still, was stabbed to death by serial killer John Charles Eichinger in 1999. "I could not believe that after everything I had been through with the murder and trial, it was like it was happening all over again. I could not believe that something so horrific was going on and I wasn't aware of it." Lavin discovered the Web site when...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) -- A session of the Guantanamo war crimes court that began Sunday will likely show the difficulties President Barack Obama faces in changing the system and closing the prison by January. The case in question, of a Canadian charged with killing an American soldier, is stalled by infighting among lawyers. Other defendants have even more complex legal issues, and officials say the U.S. may have to choose between delaying Guantanamo's closure or quickly finding somewhere else to hold the trials. "I don't think they'll get a single trial done by January," said Michael Berrigan,...

HARDIN, Mont. (AP) - On Capitol Hill, politicians are dead-set against transferring some of the world's most feared terrorists from Guantanamo to prisons on U.S. soil. But at City Hall in this impoverished town on the Northern Plains, the attitude is: Bring 'em on. Hardin, a dusty town of 3,400 people so desperate that it built a $27 million jail a couple of years ago in the vain hope it would be a moneymaker, is offering to house hundreds of Gitmo detainees at the brand-new, never-used institution. The medium-security jail was conceived as a holding facility for drunks and other...

In California's latest doom-and-gloom announcement, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Department of Finance on Tuesday proposed closing the state's main welfare program, releasing nonviolent prisoners one year early and shuttering up to 80 percent of state parks to shrink the state's $24.3 billion budget deficit. Schwarzenegger wants $5.6 billion in new cuts to replace a like amount of borrowing he proposed in his budget plan earlier this month. The Republican governor previously asked for more than $15 billion in other savings by slashing schools and Medi-Cal, laying off 5,000 state workers and borrowing money from local governments. The governor's plan would release...

With the Democratic no-go on Guantánamo (I'll leave it to the better informed to ascertain the degree that the Democratic Congress came to the rescue of an embarrassed Obama administration and cut off funding for the shutdown to allow him an out with the now familiar excuse of "they did it — not me, who keeps promises"), I think we now have come to the end to the five-year left-wing attack theme of Bush "shredding the Constitution." Except for the introduction of euphemisms and a few new ballyhooed but largely meaningless protocols, there is no longer a Bush-did-it argument. The...