STORIES
There are hundreds of prisoners who cannot get their stories or legal mail out due to the censorship and confiscations by prison staff and officials. This is for Real and we need to stop it. There is Strong Justification for a Class Action Suit against the PA DOC. There are prisoners at this moment who are being brutally beaten and without mail, due to the inhumane treatment by many PA DOC employees who choose to deprive and abuse the individuals. These are vicious criminals, the state has hired and maintained, in spite of their knowlege of what is occurring within their own prisons and knowing that they are in violations of international treaties, as well as the Constitution of the United States. There are also guards who are aware and sympathetic of these abused prisoners and are unable to do anything about it, due to fears of retaliation from their own peers. If you are one of them, please contact the following:
lawyers for whistleblowers nationwide
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/whistleblower.html
Pennsylvania Prisons have been the center of negative attention in the past year or so.
November 18, 2008
An inmate at the State Correctional Institution Fayette who sued the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections will act as his own lawyer today as the trial begins in U.S. District Court.
Andre Jacobs, 26, formerly of Harrisburg, is alleging that prison guards confiscated and destroyed about 150 pages of legal documents in 2003 because they found out they were named in a lawsuit Mr. Jacobs was going to file.
In court filings, the Department of Corrections acknowledged taking the documents, but denied any effort to deny Mr. Jacobs his right to access the court system.
Judge Joy Flowers Conti will preside at the trial. Jury selection was yesterday.
The handwritten complaint alleges that the guards confiscated the documents from inmate Eric Lyons, who was helping Mr. Jacobs with his lawsuit, saying they were contraband. The policy is that prisoners are unable to assist each other unless they are "recognized legal aides," yet there was no policy to recognize aides.
The lawsuit states that the "DOC's policy of discouraging legally educated inmates from assisting legally uneducated inmates is designed to hinder prisoners' right to access the courts and make meaningful court filings."
The documents included a potential lawsuit that named three prison officials as defendants. Mr. Jacobs alleges that once the officials found this out, they had the documents destroyed.
Bret Grote, an investigator from the Human Rights Coalition, an advocacy group, said he plans to testify at the trial about the systemic oppression of inmates' rights to access courts.
"We have an endless series of comparable reports" to Mr. Jacobs', Mr. Grote said.
In addition to this case, Mr. Jacobs has two pending lawsuits against corrections officers for assaults, one of which is for an alleged sexual assault.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/my_case_is.html
Richard Taus earned three Bronze Stars and seven Air Medals flying helicopters in Vietnam. Taus later became a highly decorated FBI Agent in New York while also serving as a Reserve Army Instructor for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Colleges. In the 1980s, before the Iran-Contra scandals, Taus uncovered massive illegal covert operations that led directly to Bill Casey, Oliver North and Vice President George Bush through a contract spook outfit called "The K Team." Undaunted by pressure from higher-ups - including one of my favorite bad guys, FBI Assistant Director, Oliver "Buck" Revell - to cease and desist his investigations, Taus refused to yield. His investigations led to drugs, money laundering, weapons smuggling, political corruption and into the heart of the CIA.
Taus was so persistent that, when his cover as a soccer coach got him too close to powerful political circles, he was railroaded