The prisoners write in carefully lettered script or on old electric typewriters. There are sometimes grammatical errors or misspellings. But the language is direct. They describe facing Stage 4 cancer ...

Over the past decade, Minnesota's prisons have experienced officer assaults, lockdowns, and chronic staffing shortages. They have faced allegations of substandard medical care, inhumane living ...

Six years ago, in Timbs v. Indiana, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a majority opinion that pointed out the origins of the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause and the original ...

We analyzed nearly 1,500 cases to obtain data on prisoner litigation. We found that constitutional protections have been dramatically weakened. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of Supreme Court ...

The Annenberg Public Policy Center released a film titled “The Eighth Amendment: Cruel and Unusual Punishment” on Annenberg Classroom in recognition of Constitution Day on Sept. 17. The 24-minute film ...

For years, FBAR litigants have made the commonsense argument that large willful FBAR penalties, which can exceed the value of the unreported foreign accounts themselves, violate the excessive fines ...

So far this year, three False Claims Act defendants have challenged judgments against them based on the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Remarkably, two were successful, as the District ...