Monthly Archives: February 2021

COMMONWEALTH COMMITTED TO “OTHER DEATH PENALTY”

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Please see my newest article at DIGBoston: Commonwealth Committed to “Other Death Penalty”–New report shows 1/6 of women in Mass prisons sentenced to life without parole.Angela Jefferson (left) and her daughter, Shanita. Photo courtesy of Families for Justice as Healing WEBSITE

It begins: “The fear of the unknown is what I feel every day,” Angela Jefferson writes. The note came in an email from MCI Framingham, where she has served “30 long years.”

Jefferson adds, “I get sad a lot of times when I think about all of the things that I could be doing out there in the world to give back. I look out the window to my room and see the cars passing by, but the thing that makes it depressing is the barbed wire that is wrapped around the fences.”

Jefferson is one of the 26 women out of 163 currently held at the oldest women’s prison in the country who are serving life without parole (LWOP). Parole does not mean a guarantee of release but offers a second chance, whereas LWOP is often called “the other death penalty.” (I previously wrote about this in 2019.)  MORE

WHY ARE HALF OF MASS CORRECTION OFFICERS REFUSING THE COVID VACCINE?

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See my newest article at DIGBoston which begins 

“The DOC has failed to control the virus.”

Prisoners’ Legal Services attorney Bonnie Tenneriello made that argument on Feb. 9, in the continuing PLS Superior Court case against the Department of Correction and the Mass Parole Board. An emergency motion was filed in October ordering the DOC to establish a home confinement program for sentenced prisoners, but there has been no significant decarceration since March, claims PLS, and they are still litigating the case.

Tenneriello lambasted the DOC in her opening for their multiple failures: they have not created a home confinement program; they have failed to reasonably release people who are sick and dying; and they are not following a new decarceration law approved by the legislature in December. As she built to her claim that both the DOC and the Parole Board are guilty of deliberate indifference, Tenneriello charged that since March, ‘Twenty-one people have died and over 2,800 people have been sickened by COVID.’

Another failure also was spotlighted in this hearing before Judge Robert Ullmann, who is trying the case: per Tenneriello, while COVID has been “raging,” 53% of DOC staff and correctional officers (COs) have “refused the vaccine.”  MORE

The DOC Mail Hearing, OMG

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Photo from the Zoom hearing where many flashed an Icon instead of their name: “No New Mail Rules” #handsoffourmail. Photo Courtesy of Jean Trounstine

Please see my newest on DIGBoston called: DOC CAN BARELY RUN ZOOM MEETING, BUT WANTS TO SCAN ALL PRISONER MAIL 

It begins: “More than 100 people would have attended the three-and-a-half hour virtual hearing on proposed new mail rules last Friday if they’d been allowed in the Zoom room.

But because the Massachusetts Department of Correction did not purchase a Zoom webinar license to enable enough space for a public hearing of that size, dozens of people were turned away.”  MORE