Louisiana is imprisoning people beyond their release dates. Multiple people are filing a class-action lawsuit for being detained after courts had authorized their freedom.
One woman said she lost over 100 days.
A previous departmental review found that over 2,000 people were overdetained annually by an average of roughly 71 days. Between 2012 and recent years, roughly 25% to 27% of people released from state custody were held past their legal release date.
Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds are paying jails to incarcerate people who are legally free.
This is obviously an egregious violation of basic civil liberties. Regardless of how we may personally feel about any incarcerated individuals, the continuation of captivity after the state's legal authority has expired is basically kidnapping and false imprisonment.
Detaining an individual past the expiration of their court-ordered sentence is a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This should be much bigger news.
Our federal government has an obligation to put an end to unconstitutional overdetention.
A mother just walked out of a North Carolina police department and said this:
Her son, Aamari “Shawn” Eubanks, vanished Dec. 4, 2024 on a short drive to pick up his grandmother’s mail.
The next day they found the car in the woods. Window smashed. Blood everywhere. No Shawn.
She says 20 months later:
• The detective forwards calls her to voicemail
• The SBI agent on the case is a former Burlington officer who won’t call her back
• They told her if she keeps looking into it, they’ll arrest her and that he isn’t even entered in THEIR missing persons database.
A blood-soaked car is not a closed case. A mother asking where her son is. This is not a crime.
What do you make of this? Things aren’t adding up…