All posts tagged: prison

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova Talks Reclaiming Her Prison Time

Published by José

[ad_1] Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world. More than a decade after Pussy Riot cofounder Nadya Tolokonnikova was imprisoned in Russia for two years after performing a “punk prayer” inside of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the artist is putting herself back into a prison of her own making.  For her installation Police State (2025) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (LA MOCA), Tolonkonnikova has recreated a Russian jail cell. This time, however, she reimagines the cell as a space for art. The work is a form of reclamation not only for Tolonkonnikova but also for all the Russian, Belarusian, and American prisoners whose work is also included in the installation. The effort to include them is part of a larger ongoing project between Tolokonnikova’s organization Art Action Foundation and the Artistic Freedom Initiative, which work together to archive and exhibit prisoners’ art. Related Articles Within the piece, visitors are thrust into an eerie authoritarian …

R Kelly rushed to hospital after prison ‘overdose’ plot, his lawyers say | US News

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] R Kelly was hospitalised after prison officials gave him an overdose of medication, his lawyers have claimed – as part of what they say is an ongoing assassination plot. Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, is currently serving time at the Federal Correctional Institute in Butner, North Carolina, after being convicted of sex trafficking and racketeering in 2021. A year later, he was found guilty on three charges of producing child sexual abuse images and three charges of enticement of minors for sex. The 58-year-old was taken to hospital on Friday after prison staff “administered an overdose of his medication”, according to a court document filed by his lawyer. The document, filed on Tuesday, reads: “Mr. Kelly’s life is in danger, and that danger is coming from Bureau of Prisons officials and their actions. “Mr. Kelly needs this Court’s intervention. His life actually depends on it.” Nicole Blank Becker, one of Kelly’s lawyers, said he is in solitary confinement and that she spoke with him on Monday. “What is happening right now …

The Shame of Israeli Medicine | Neve Gordon, Guy Shalev, Osama Tanous

Published by José

[ad_1] In late March 2024 Israeli soldiers raided Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip. They arrested medical staff and patients, as well as civilians who were sheltering in the hospital compound. H., an orthopedic doctor, was partway through a shift when the soldiers began beating him. They kicked him in the stomach, groin, and testicles, told him to take his clothes off, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and escorted him to the hospital yard. Then they drove him across the Israeli border to the infamous Sde Teiman military base, near the southern city of Be’er Sheva, where at the time hundreds of Palestinians were being held blindfolded and shackled in overcrowded, filthy cages, some forced to sleep on the floor without mattresses or blankets. In October 2024 H. gave an affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI), a nonprofit where one of us, Guy Shalev, is the executive director and another, Osama Tanous, is a board member. H. recounted that at one point during his sixty-nine days at Sde Teiman his guards put him in …

A Shelter or a Prison? | Dawn Marie Paley

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] When Angela Garcia, an anthropologist and professor at Stanford University, arrived in Mexico City in 2011 to begin research for her second book, the war on drugs in Mexico had been in full swing for almost five years. She had planned to write about Health City, a proposed hospital and residential complex intended to address economic and health disparities. But once there, watching coverage of massacres and kidnappings on the news at night, she came to suspect that the big plans for Health City were little more than propaganda, utopian promises that would never be fulfilled. Adrift in the city, Garcia took a ride with a cabdriver, Manuel, whom she’d hired to take her around the city. He told her he had never heard of Health City, but her description of her previous research on addiction in New Mexico touched a nerve. He took an unexpected turn and drove toward the outskirts of the city, pulling up to a small building with a metal gate. And then he let Garcia in on a difficult …

Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Under the applicable sentencing guidelines, Mashinsky could have faced up to 30 years in prison. But federal judges are required to take into account various additional factors when coming to a sentence, including the characteristics and personal history of a defendant, the likelihood they might reoffend, and so on. “It’s a complicated patchwork of facts to put together to come to a just sentence,” says Timothy Howard, partner at law firm Freshfields and former Southern District of New York prosecutor. In advance of the sentencing hearing, Mashinsky’s legal representatives had petitioned the judge for a custodial sentence of only 366 days, citing his admissions of guilt, military service in Israel, the deprivations he experienced in childhood, and external market factors that contributed to the downfall of Celsius. “This case is not about an arrogant, greedy swindler who thought he could get away with stealing people’s hard-earned money to satisfy his own hedonistic pleasures,” argued Mashinsky’s lawyers in a court filing. “Those are post-hoc, shallow and dehumanizing tropes that do not apply here.” The DOJ, …

The Return | Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Yasmine Seale

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] My darling Sammour, After years of silence, I began writing you a letter last October. I gave it the title “Guardian of Hope,” since your absence is bound up with my sense of hope, both personal and public, slowly eroding for the last eleven years. But I stopped after a few lines, for there was nothing I could tell you about the situation. You are the situation. What could someone who has no part in your absence tell you about yourself? Only you experienced it all, and only you can provide full testimony. All this while I have made every effort, Sammour, somehow to forget your disappearance, so as not to spend every minute in its company. Still, it would attack me unawares at odd moments, snatching me away just as you were snatched away eleven years ago.  Yet now I am taking up this letter again, writing with what would have been the best possible news had you been with me. The regime has fallen! Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia! Without a single …

The Apathetic Court | Duncan Hosie

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] James Broadnax spends nearly all his time alone, locked in a concrete cell in a remote corner of eastern Texas. When he was twenty, a nearly all-white jury sentenced Broadnax, who is black, to death for murdering two white people. He is now thirty-six, having spent the past decade and a half awaiting his execution in near-constant isolation. Prison rules promise him two hours of recreation on most days, but guards routinely withhold even that reprieve. To steel himself against the monotony, he keeps up an exercise routine and reads whatever books he can get his hands on. He has also devoted his time to a more urgent goal: contesting his capital conviction. “I am fighting for my life to not receive an execution date by the state of Texas,” he wrote in a 2022 letter. That fight led him to the Supreme Court. In September 2023 Broadnax asked the justices to throw out death as punishment for his crimes on the grounds that Dallas prosecutors had weaponized race to secure his conviction. Before his trial began in …

A Prison Death Highlights Russia’s LGBTQ Crackdown

Published by Sam

[ad_1] The travel agency offered tours aimed solely at men, and that was enough to attract the attention of the police enforcing new Russian laws that restrict the rights of gay people. One night in December, officers stormed the apartment of the agency’s owner and tied him up, he later told a court. “Fifteen people came to my place at night,” said the owner, Andrei Kotov. “They were beating me in the face, kicking me and leaving bruises.” His comments were reported by Russian media and confirmed by his lawyer. Mr. Kotov said the officers pressured him to “confess” that he was running a travel agency aimed at gay people, which he denied. The officers kept beating him, he said, and told him: “No trips for gays.” A few weeks later, Mr. Kotov, then 48, was found dead in his prison cell. Prison officials told his mother that he cut himself with a razor, said his lawyer, Leysan Mannapova. The circumstances of his death could not be independently determined, and Russian officials did not respond …

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

Published by José

[ad_1] The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up. The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims. But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia …

Jack Fincham: Love Island star wins appeal against prison sentence for dangerous dog offences | Ents & Arts News

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[ad_1] Former Love Island winner Jack Fincham has won an appeal against his prison sentence for two dangerous dog offences. Fincham, 32, was sentenced to six weeks imprisonment at Southend Magistrates’ Court on 29 January after pleading guilty to two counts of having a dangerously out-of-control black cane corso. But within hours of the sentencing, he was released on conditional bail and vowed to appeal it. On Friday, Fincham, who won the ITV dating show with Dani Dyer in 2018, was told by a judge at Basildon Crown Court that the original sentence had not been “just in the circumstances”. Image: Fincham and his black cane corso Elvis. Pic: @jack_charlesf 2021 Instead, Judge Samantha Leigh set aside the custodial sentence and extended a suspended sentence he was given in March last year for two unrelated offences in 2023 – drug driving and fraudulent use of a registered trademark. That order of 12 weeks custody – suspended for 18 months – has been lengthened by three months, Judge Leigh told the court. Prosecutors said Fincham’s dog, …