It’s almost certain the due-process procedures required in Heald will be brought up in the coming legal battle over Deane Brown’s shipment to Maryland (see “Inmate Sues Prison Officials in Federal Court,” by Lance Tapley, May 18). Williams, his attorney, in Bar Harbor, says in an e-mail, “the language of the consent judgment in Heald provides a solid basis for arguing that Deane Brown’s transfer to Maryland, also without prior notice or opportunity for hearing, violated Mr. Brown’s due process rights and that the court should grant an injunction ordering the return of Mr. Brown to Maine. We are seriously considering filing for such an injunction.”
Reporter Norma Jane Langford, 74, now a writer in Massachusetts and a communications teacher at Northeastern University, says she filed her suit against the prison system because “they wouldn’t allow me in at all.” The Telegram’s editors backed her up, she says. She remembers that two top editors bargained with state officials. And she is proud that her lawsuit “opened up all institutions to reporters.”
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Lance Tapley: ltapley@adelphia.net
Related:
Prison ‘troublemaker’ confronts racism, medical abuse, Lockdown, A threat, but not to security, More 
- Prison ‘troublemaker’ confronts racism, medical abuse
Vacillating between grit and despair — between aggressive lawsuits and suicide attempts — Deane Brown, the prisoner who in 2005 blew the whistle on the torture of mentally ill inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement “Supermax” unit, is struggling against prison conditions in Maryland, where he was exiled by the Baldacci administration.
- Lockdown
If you were a reporter and you received a letter like the one excerpted below, what would you make of it? Lance Tapley discusses reporting the prisons
- A threat, but not to security
Maine prisoner Deane Brown, 44, is no longer in solitary confinement, though he remains far from Maine.
- Pressure rising
Four months ago, a Phoenix investigative series revealed abuses of inmates at the “Supermax,” a 100-bed, solitary-confinement, maximum-security facility inside the Maine State Prison in Warren; since our articles were published, several important developments have taken place.
- Three years and counting
For the past three years, Portland Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley has been the only reporter in Maine to pay attention to the appalling conditions suffered by inmates in the Maine State Prison
- Letters to the Portland editor: May 4, 2007
God bless the First Amendment.
- Injustice everywhere
Thank you for the timely interview with Harvey Silverglate.
- Letters to the Portland editor: December 29, 2006
Cheers to Lance Tapley for his quality reporting on the Maine State Prison and the apparent political persecution of Deane Brown (see “ Lockdown ,” December 15).
- Press behind bars
As a reporter, I can attest that the rules the state agreed to in the 1970s on news-media access to prisoners have been violated by the Corrections Department in its recent practices.
- An unprecedented crime
I have a true ghost story to tell: the story of 35,000 ghosts in America, the largely invisible inmates of our solitary-confinement “supermax” prisons.
- Stabbed in the back
Right now, a bewildered Mark Cible is on a nightmarish journey through some of America’s most violent prisons.
- Less
Topics:
News Features
, U.S. Government, U.S. State Government, University of Maine School of Law, More
, U.S. Government, U.S. State Government, University of Maine School of Law, David Farmer, Mal Leary, Augustus Heald, Norma Jane Langford, Richard Picariello, Politics, Criminal Sentencing and Punishment, Less
