Christa Pike was sexually abused and raped from the time when she was a toddler until almost a year to the day before she was arrested in 1995 at age 18 for murdering fellow teenager Colleen Slemmer when the two attended a job training program for troubled youth in Knoxville. Tennessee officials do not dispute these facts. “I think everybody in this courtroom wishes that those things had…
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We speak with Keith LaMar, an artist, teacher and writer on death row in Ohio. LaMar, who has spent three decades in solitary confinement, was sentenced to death for the murder of five fellow prisoners during a 1993 prison uprising. He has always maintained his innocence. His trial was held in a remote Ohio community before an all-white jury. LaMar is one of three men on death row for whom Ohio…
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A man with advanced kidney disease who once worried he could be the fourth person to die at the largest immigrant jail in the Northeast says he was surprised and relieved to be released last month. As Truthout previously reported, Izzy Aly was arrested in December at the Philadelphia International Airport as he flew home to Florida from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services-approved…
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In June, the Washington State Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether 38-year-old Amber Kim could be transferred from a men’s prison to the state’s sole women’s prison, where she had been housed for three years. “I feel like I’m in the universe’s waiting room,” Kim told Truthout. Kim had spent 15 years in the state’s men’s jails and prisons. Then, in 2021, the state’s department of…
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On June 10, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya appeared on a screen before Israel’s Supreme Court via video link. He looked gaunt, visibly emaciated, and his hands and feet were bound. It was one of the few times the public had seen the doctor since Israeli soldiers took him from Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza nearly 18 months ago, where he had served as Director. He has been held without charge for…
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This June, a Pride celebration organized by Alliances, a multi-generational and multiracial group of incarcerated queer and trans people, was held inside Washington State’s largest prison. Yet behind the skits and the celebration of queer joy expressed at the June 3 Pride event inside the Twin Rivers Unit at the Monroe Correctional Complex, the continued punishment of trans women and queer…
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