In a sternly worded rebuke, a panel of federal judges ordered California
to release 10,000 prisoners by the end of 2013 or face contempt
charges.
The battle over California prison overcrowding has spanned five governors and 23 years since prisoners Ralph Coleman and Marciano Plata charged that cramped conditions degraded medical and mental health care. Coleman filed a federal class action in 1990 on behalf of seriously mentally ill inmates, while Plata filed his 2001 action to improve conditions for prisons with serious medical conditions.
A three-judge panel for California's Eastern and Northern Districts first ordered California to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity in 2009, but left state officials to come up with a specific plan. California appealed the order, arguing that the panel was convened prematurely and that the substance of the order was improper.
Though a five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the order in 2011, Justice Antonin Scalia decried the entire proceedings as "a judicial travesty," and Justice Samuel Alito wrote that "the Constitution does not give federal judges the authority to run state penal systems."
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/06/21/58749.htm
The battle over California prison overcrowding has spanned five governors and 23 years since prisoners Ralph Coleman and Marciano Plata charged that cramped conditions degraded medical and mental health care. Coleman filed a federal class action in 1990 on behalf of seriously mentally ill inmates, while Plata filed his 2001 action to improve conditions for prisons with serious medical conditions.
A three-judge panel for California's Eastern and Northern Districts first ordered California to reduce its prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity in 2009, but left state officials to come up with a specific plan. California appealed the order, arguing that the panel was convened prematurely and that the substance of the order was improper.
Though a five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the order in 2011, Justice Antonin Scalia decried the entire proceedings as "a judicial travesty," and Justice Samuel Alito wrote that "the Constitution does not give federal judges the authority to run state penal systems."
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/06/21/58749.htm
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