Attorney Laura Sheppard, PhD

15/10/2026

06/10/2026

CDCR has published requests for bids from mail-scanning companies. If we don't stop them, they're going to take away all or most physical mail, cards, artwork, and photos from incarcerated people, and replace them with scans that can be surveilled, pay-to-print, and which will be lost if/when tablet providers change or the recipient is released. This MUST be stopped! See this story about other places where this has already happened. (Link comments)

03/10/2026

What happens when a person is wrongly accused of a serious crime, even if they're not wrongfully convicted and imprisoned? Read this man's story to find out. (Link in comments)
THIS is why we need law enforcement and prosecutors that are less quick to jump to judgement, less prone to cognitive biases, and more careful to investigate thoroughly.

A short TL/DR summary of the story: Forrest Welborn was arrested in 1999 and accused of taking part in the murders of four girls at an eatery in Austin, Texas. For nine months he was a suspect in the case. Even after the charges against him were dropped, his life was never the same. “Most people in Austin believed he was guilty. The police harassed him. The public hated him. Men pulled guns on him, and girlfriends dumped him when they found out about his past. He lost his business. He couldn’t find a job. He stopped trusting almost everyone. He became an outcast in his own city."

03/10/2026

Wonderful news!!

Bill Text (2026-09-10) Inmates: visitation. [Enrolled and presented to the Governor at 3 p.m.]

03/10/2026

Incarcerated individuals can undergo profound transformations long before their sentences conclude, according to Dortell Williams. Through peer mentoring and rehabilitative programming, Williams observes that personal change often precedes the end of lengthy terms. His work explores the disconnect between individual rehabilitation and extreme sentencing. By contrasting modern imprisonment with historical public punishment and citing research on aging out of crime, he highlights the experiences of those who have changed while serving time.

https://davisvanguard.org/2026/10/foucault-discipline-punish-evolution/

02/10/2026

This optimistic article may overstate gains somewhat, but it does make a great point. Incarceration rates are down, while crime rates have ALSO stayed down. This is something to cheer about! Writes the article: “Some have characterized the imprisonment of millions of Americans as a tragic necessity in a high-crime society, others have celebrated it as just deserts for criminals, and still others have denounced it as a reinvention of Jim Crow policies that oppress Black Americans. But one fact remains remarkably neglected: Mass incarceration is ending.”

America’s prison population is plummeting thanks to lower crime rates. The consequences are extraordinary.

01/10/2026

This poor woman, Christa Pike, has just been tortured - lawfully - by the state of Tennessee. She participated in a gruesome murder of a female classmate in 1995 when she was 18 years old - that part is not in dispute. She shows full accountability and great remorse for what she did, even though she did as a young, disturbed and intoxicated abuse survivor.
But now, after spending 30+ years on death row, and a WARNING by her lawyers that lethal injection would amount to torture, that is exactly what happened. After TWO supposedly-lethal injections of phenobarbitol, Christa was still alive, snoring and groaning and suffering in the death chamber, before she was taken to the hospital, where she is now in critical condition.
This is a woman who was r***d and sexually assaulted numerous times as a child, suffered from bipolar and PTSD from all the abuse she endured, and whose male codefendants were NOT sentenced to death because they were just months younger, and therefore minors (17 years old). This is NOT proportional punishment, and it is not justice.
At minimum, having now endured both the permanent loss of her freedom, 30+ years of fear and dehumanization, and the TORTUROUS attempt to execute her, Christa's sentence should be commuted. She should never have to face state-sanctioned homicide again.

Her attorney called the process cruel and tortuous, saying he was “haunted” by what he saw after the ex*****on team struggled to find a vein for the lethal drugs.

01/10/2026

At age 16, Reginald Dwayne Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison. He turned to books to help hold onto his sanity — and developed a belief that we find what we look for, even in the toughest places. Now a lawyer and poet, he's opened hundreds of Freedom Libraries inside prisons across the US...