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      Robert Pickton, Notorious Canadian Serial Killer, Dies at 74

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      Convicted in the murder of six women (though he boasted of killing many more), he died of unspecified injuries after being assaulted in prison.Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most notorious serial killers, whose crimes called attention to police and societal disregard for the violent deaths of Indigenous women, died on Friday after a fellow inmate attacked him in prison in Quebec, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 74.His death, in a hospital, was announced by Correctional Service Canada, which said he had been assaulted on May 19 at Port-Cartier Institution and had died of unspecified injuries. The announcement did not give a motive for the attack.In 2007, Mr. Pickton was convicted in the murders of six women, though he boasted to an undercover police officer that he had killed 49 in all.The remains of his victims were found at a ramshackle pig farm he owned outside Vancouver, where authorities conducted what at the time was the largest crime-scene investigation in Canadian history. After 18 months, they found the remains of 33 women.The victims were mainly members of Indigenous groups, and most were sex workers and drug addicts whom Mr. Pickton encountered in the Downtown Eastside, an underbelly of the scenic, affluent Vancouver.Mr. Pickton was able to continue killing for so long, according to an investigation by the provincial government of British Columbia, because of police bias toward the race and marginalized status of his victims.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Inmates Remain at Large in Louisiana Jail Escape

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      Two of the escapees were back in jail after being found in a dumpster, while the others remained at large, officials said.Four men were able to escape from Tangipahoa Parish Jail in Louisiana this weekend because of an eight-inch gap and a lack of oversight at the facility, the authorities said. Two of the men were still at large as of Monday night, while the other two had been found hiding in a dumpster, the police said.Jimmy Travis, the chief of operations for the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s office, blamed structural issues and a lack of oversight by the jail staff in a news conference on Monday.The four men escaped after they evaded correction officers during recreation time in the yard and hid out until darkness, according to a Facebook statement from the Tangipahoa Parish sheriff, Daniel Edwards.The men escaped in pairs, Mr. Travis said. The first two — Avery Guidry, 19, and Travon Johnson, 21 — left the jail on Saturday by evading correctional officers and escaping through a narrow, eight-inch gap under a wall before scaling two fences after dark. On Sunday, two other inmates — Omarion Hookfin, 19, and Jamarcus Cyprian, 20 — copied that route for their escape.The authorities were not aware that the men had escaped until a family member of one of the escapees called them on Sunday, saying that the men had tried to seek refuge at a relative’s house, Mr. Travis said. He attributed the delayed realization to understaffing and a lack of oversight.“If proper head counts had been conducted we would have known about it immediately,” he said.The staffing issues at the jail over the weekend are not unique for the state, which has one of the most overcrowded prison systems in the country. In 2022, Louisiana corrections officials told lawmakers that state prisons and juvenile detention facilities were understaffed because of low wages and poor conditions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Riverside County Jail Death Lawsuit Is Settled for $7.5 Million Amid Inquiry

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      A violent encounter captured on video was part of a surge in jail deaths that spurred an inquiry into the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.Video from inside a Southern California jail shows a violent confrontation in October 2020 in which 10 sheriff’s deputies burst into the cell of a man who was having delusions and resisting medical care, restrained him and repeatedly shocked him, leading to his death days later.Officials in Riverside County did not bring charges against any of the deputies involved in the encounter with the man, Christopher Zumwalt, 39, but quietly agreed in December 2023 to pay $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by his family.Depositions from the case and video footage obtained by The New York Times show the frantic and violent minutes when deputies tried to force Mr. Zumwalt out of his cell as he paced and talked incoherently. In the video, deputies wearing helmets and shields toss canisters of pepper spray into the small concrete room, struggle with Mr. Zumwalt, and strap him to an emergency restraint chair. They cover his head with a spit mask and move him to another cell, where he sat unmonitored and appeared to stop breathing for at least five minutes. He died on Oct. 25, 2020, after experiencing cardiac arrest.Mr. Zumwalt, who was arrested near his home on Oct. 22, 2020, on suspicion of public intoxication, was never charged with a crime, and the arrest report indicates that he was to be released with a citation after he sobered up from the methamphetamine he admitted to taking the night before. On the day of his arrest, he was issued a citation for bringing drugs into a jail.In a statement Friday, Sheriff Chad Bianco said his deputies did nothing wrong and characterized the settlement as a business decision by lawyers that does not imply wrongdoing.“The facts of this case clearly show the actions of our deputies were appropriate and lawful,” Sheriff Bianco said, adding that actions taken by Mr. Zumwalt in a “methamphetamine-induced psychosis caused his death.” More

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      Judge in Sept. 11 Case Visits Former C.I.A. Black Site

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      Col. Matthew McCall toured the part of the prison at Guantánamo Bay where, in 2007, federal agents obtained now-disputed confessions from terrorism suspects.In a first, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay on Friday crossed into the security zone containing the wartime prison and inspected a former C.I.A. “black site” facility at the center of a dispute over the taint of torture in the Sept. 11, 2001, case.It was a noteworthy moment in the arc of the two-decade history of the Guantánamo trials. No war court judge had before made the five-mile trip to look at the detention operations, where the military maintains the only known, still-intact remnant of the network of overseas prisons that the C.I.A. operated from 2002 to 2009.But Col. Matthew N. McCall, the judge, is edging toward a decision on whether the accused mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and three co-defendants voluntarily confessed to conspiring in the attacks in their fourth year of detention, under questioning by F.B.I. agents at Guantánamo prison.And the prison site he visited, called Camp Echo, has played a central but covert role in the case. From 2003 to 2004, the C.I.A. kept five prized prisoners there, near the prison facilities but out of reach of the International Red Cross. It was part of its secret overseas network that hid about 120 “high-value detainees” in such far-flung sites as Afghanistan, Thailand and Poland.In April 2004, the agency closed the black site at Guantánamo and moved those five prisoners to other secret sites, on the advice of the Justice Department, to avoid a looming U.S. Supreme Court decision later that year that granted detainees at U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Bay access to lawyers.After President George W. Bush ordered Mr. Mohammed and 13 other C.I.A. prisoners be moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 to face trial, federal agents used the same portion of Camp Echo to obtain ostensibly lawful confessions by what the prosecutors called “clean teams.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Woman Admits Killing Pregnant Teenager for Her Baby

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      Clarisa Figueroa, 51, of Chicago, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Prosecutors say she strangled the young mother and tried to pass the baby off as her own. A Chicago woman who killed a pregnant teenager and aimed to pass the baby off as her own pleaded guilty to murder Tuesday and was sentenced to 50 years in prison, prosecutors said.In April 2019, Clarisa Figueroa, 51, who had been pretending to be pregnant, fatally strangled Marlen Ochoa-Lopez, 19, who was eight months pregnant, according to a legal document known as a bond proffer obtained by The Associated Press.Ms. Figueroa cut Ms. Ochoa-Lopez’s baby from her body in hopes of passing him off as her own, the court record said. The boy later died.Now, Ms. Figueroa is set to serve her sentence at an Illinois state prison, according to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, ending a grim five-year case that stunned a community and left a husband widowed and without a son.“The memory of my infant son’s last breath in my arms is complete agony,” the baby’s father, Yovanny Lopez, said in a statement in the courtroom Tuesday, according to The A.P.Ms. Figueroa and her daughter, Desiree Figueroa, were arrested in May 2019 after investigators found Ms. Ochoa-Lopez’s car near Ms. Figueroa’s home and then discovered Ms. Ochoa-Lopez’s remains stuffed in a garbage bag in Ms. Figueroa’s garage, according to the proffer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Correction Officers and Rikers Employees Charged With Corruption

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      Federal prosecutors said the defendants accepted bribes and smuggled in contraband, including drugs, for detainees at the troubled New York City jail.Five people who worked at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City, as well as a detainee there, have been charged with corruption, including smuggling contraband into the jail, according to three complaints unsealed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.Federal prosecutors said that in 2021 and 2022, several former city correction officers, a Department of Correction employee and an employee of a department contractor accepted bribes to smuggle in cellphones, oxycodone, marijuana, fentanyl and a synthetic drug known as K2.Their actions made Rikers Island “less safe, for inmates and officers alike,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement, adding that the defendants “engaged in corruption for their own enrichment.”Five of the defendants were arrested on Tuesday; the sixth was already in state custody. Lawyers for the defendants could not immediately be identified.During the period in which the officers and other employees are accused of smuggling drugs into the jail, visitation had stopped because of the coronavirus pandemic, but the number of overdoses in the city’s jail system had spiked.In 2021, were 113 overdoses in city jails that required a 911 call — a 55 percent increase from the previous year, according to data from Correctional Health Services, the agency that provides health care to detainees. In 2022, five of the 19 people who died in the jails or soon after release had overdosed on drugs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Prisoners Who Sued Over Lockdown Will Be Allowed to View Solar Eclipse

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      The six inmates at an upstate New York prison had said the eclipse was “a religious event that they must witness.” A statewide prison lockdown will remain in place.New York State’s corrections department agreed on Thursday to allow six men who had sued to be able to view Monday’s total solar eclipse to do so at the upstate prison where they are held, but the department stopped short of lifting a statewide prison lockdown during the eclipse.The men, inmates at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Sullivan County, filed a federal lawsuit last week arguing that the lockdown during the eclipse violated their constitutional right to practice their religion.Though they come from varying religious backgrounds, the men all believe that the eclipse “is a religious event that they must witness and reflect on to observe their faiths,” according to court documents.“This is a huge win for them — they are all ecstatic,” said Chris McArdle, one of the lawyers who represented the men. “Keeping our fingers crossed that it’s not cloudy or raining, they are going to be able to practice their sincerely held religious beliefs, which is the outcome we always wanted for them.”A spokesman for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said in a statement that the lawsuit had come “to an appropriate resolution.”Jeremy Zielinski, one of the men who filed the lawsuit, asked in January for permission to watch the eclipse from Woodbourne’s main yard. In his written request to prison officials, Mr. Zielinski, who is an atheist, said he believed eclipses were times to “celebrate science, reason and all things Atheism.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lawsuits Accuse 2 Michigan Jails of Banning Family Visits to Increase Revenue

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      The suits contend that two counties entered into agreements with telecommunications companies that would bring more money because of increased use of phone calls and electronic messaging.Two county jails in Michigan banned in-person family visits for inmates several years ago as a way to boost county revenues from the increased number of phone calls and electronic messaging that resulted, a pair of lawsuits filed this month claim.The bans on in-person visits leave “electronic communications — phone and video calls and electronic messaging — as the sole way for the families of people detained in the jail to talk with their loved ones inside,” according to the lawsuits, which were filed on behalf of the families. The suits claim that officials in St. Clair County and Genesee County entered into a “quid pro quo kickback scheme” with Global Tel*Link Corporation and Securus Technologies.Both companies denied any wrongdoing.Jennifer Jackson-Luth, a spokesperson for Securus, called the lawsuit in which that company is named “misguided and without merit.”“We look forward to defending ourselves, and we will not let this suit detract from our successful efforts to create meaningful and positive outcomes for the consumers we serve,” she said.Global Tel*Link, which changed its name to ViaPath Technologies in 2022, said that it “denies the allegations in the complaint and looks forward to the opportunity to defend the claims made against it.”Phone messages left with the Genesee County Sheriff’s Office and to the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office this week were not returned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More