Your rights as a pro se litigator.
Your rights as a free, out of jail, pro se litigant.
Your rights as an indigent pro se prisoner litigator.
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Here is my medley of self-help litigation pages:
http://www.lawyerdude.8k.com/medley.html
Pro Se resources from another guy:
http://www.caught.net/prose/prose.htm
Self help litigation medley
1 Your rights as an imprisoned pro se litigant:
www.circuitlawyer.8m.com/5687.html
2 The top ten criminal motions in California and the Universe.
www.lawyerdude.8k.com/motions.html
3 Motions 101: How to write a motion:
http://www.lawyerdude.netfirms.com/6025.html
4 How to speak up in court.
www.circuitlawyer.8m.com/5537.html
5 Page of 40 motions. This page is listed on the Steve762 page:
http://www.circuitlawyer.8m.com/5695.html
6 Lawyerdude's demurrer page:
http://www.lawyerdude.8k.com/5736.html
7 Lawyerdude's former main traffic page:
http://www.lawyerdude.8m.com/5259.html
8 Lawyerdudes new standard for public defenders:
http://www.circuitlawyer.8m.com/5635.html
9 Lawyerdude’s recommended additions to the bill of rights:
http://www.lawyerdude.8m.com/5677.html
10 The leading 143 cases that define criminal procedure:
http://www.circuitlawyer.8m.com/weinreb.html
11 Go on the offense: Actual section 1983 complaints. Sue em!
http://www.lawyerdude.netfirms.com/6008.html 12 Were you strip searched? Sue em!
http://www.circuitlawyer.8m.com/5728.html Do they do a strip search anus check every time you go to the law library?
13 Our class projects:
http://www.lawyerdude.8k.com/projects.html
Table of Contents:
Right to xerox copies in jail. "Draconian" copying by hand
You have a right to demur instead of making a plea
Ghostwriting
We should have the right to know which clerk ghost wrote the opinion for the various appellate and supreme court judges.
A little-known corporate lobby is drafting business-friendly bills for state legislators across the country
Your rights as a pro se inmate litigant
Your rights as a free out of jail pro se litigant
Lawyerdude says: This aint the half of it.
Cases Pertaining to Rights of Prisoners to Access to the Courts
Gluth v Kangas (1988) 773 F Supp 1309 @ 1321 (D Ariz) Right to xerox copies in jail. "Draconian" copying by hand is not required. Jails and prisons must provide copying service - but Illinois jail denied Palaschak copying rights (while allowing other prisoners copying services - but only after Palaschak began litigating. Cited in Palaschak brief #3591 at page 0.1.
Procunier v Martinez (1974) 40 L Ed 2d 224, 416 US 396, 84 S Ct 1800 Mail is a right.(Added 7 August 2001) This was a class action. Procunier, Director of California Dept. of Corrections told prisoners that mail was a privilege and not a right - until somebody litigated this case. I read about this case in Lawrence Friedman's 1993 book entitled Crime and Punishment in American History.
No paper on this subject is adequate without mentioning Bell v Wolfish and Procunier v Martinez (1974) 40 L Ed 2d 224, 416 US 396, 84 S Ct 1800 Mail is a right.. My page here is based on a pathetically weak writing by the American Judicature Society, 2000. This update was prepared under a grant from the State Justice Institute (SJI-99-N-042-U00-1).
There are several good prison law manuals. I will try to name them.
Bell v Wolfish is the seminal case upon which jails and prisons base their rules but times continue to change and prisoners have more litigation rights.
Your basic rights:
1. You have a right to see your police reports. You have a right to discovery right up front the first day that you show up in court. They should give you your discovery packet.
2. You have a right to have copies made of your papers !
3. You have a right to demur instead of making a plea. See pc 1004 et seq.
4. You have a right to have your complaint signed by a percipient witness! The statutes say otherwise. Your rights may not be taken away by statute.
5. You have a right to a written complaint signed under penalty of perjury by somebody who knows about the case - preferably a percipient witness.
6. You have a right to ask to interview witnesses which means you need their phone number and address. See PD 1054 et seq in California.
7. You have a right to suppress illegal evidence. See pc 1538.5.
8. You have a right to appeal your suppression motion before even making a plea.
9. You have a right to a transcript. Ask for a copy on a floppy or cd rom in ascii or txt or WordPerfect format. I have never been denied an e-transcript. How else you gonna quote it in your brief? Type it all in? That is ludicrous. The stenograph machine converts it to an e transcript.
10. Use your appellate rights, even interlocutory rights.
11. You have a right to speak for yourself. Faretta case.
12. If you are in custody they must give you adequate time in the law library and no jails do this, but Ventura attempts to give you some time.
13. You have a right to softcover lawbooks if they come directly right from the publisher. Buy a penal code.
14. You have a right to communicate with Lawyerdude.
15. You have a right to have your papers ghostwritten by a disbarred lawyer.
I. ISSUES FACING PRO SE INMATES
Inmates find it very difficult to proceed pro se, yet nevertheless, often do. Within the confines of the prison, their access to legal materials is rather limited. They often face an uphill battle with restrictive prison rules and regulations as well as trying to properly follow court rules. The United States constitution provides guarantees that protect inmates' rights.
ACCESS TO THE COURTS
State officials cannot enact regulations that "abridge" or "impair" an inmate's right of access to the courts. They cannot, for example, interfere with the right of inmates to file petitions in court. In the frequently cited case Ex Parte Hull, the United States Supreme Court struck down a regulation that prohibited state prisoners from filing petitions for habeas corpus unless they were determined to be "properly drawn" by the parole board's legal investigator.
Ex Parte Hull, 312 U.S. 546 (1941). The Court determined that the regulation denied inmates' access to the courts because the parole board determined which petitions would be filed. The Hull case continues to be cited in reference to this right, most recently by the Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma in Braun v. State of Oklahoma, 937 P.2d 505, 509 (Okla. Crim. App. 1997).
An inmate's right of access to the courts also mandates that prisons provide inmates with adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law, such as paralegals or law students. Until recently, the leading case concerning the adequacy of prison law libraries or legal assistance was:
Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817 (1977). Now, however, the leading case is
Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343 (J. Stevens dissenting 1996), which expanded Bounds' holding. In Lewis, an inmate claimed that his prison's law library and legal assistance program was inadequate and thus "abridged" or "impaired" his access to the courts. But the United States Supreme Court disagreed, holding that an inmate cannot bring a general challenge to the adequacy of a prison's law library or the legal assistance program. Instead, an inmate must show that he has suffered "actual harm" to a legal claim that involved his criminal conviction or the conditions of his incarceration and that the cause of the injury must be the method of access (i.e., the inadequacy of the law library or the legal assistance program). Id. at 351.
The Lewis case has been accepted and cited by several courts. See
Triestman v. Poe, 1997 WL 216251 at 7 (N.D.N.Y. 1997);
Prisoner's' Legal Association v. Roberson, 1997 WL 998592 at 2 (D.N.J. 1997);
Ex parte Coleman, 728 So.2d 703, 706 (Ala. Crim. App. 1998);
Hadix v. Johnson, 173 F.3d 958, 963 (6th Cir. 1999);
Smith v. Armstrong, 968 F. Supp. 50, 51 (D. Con. 1997).
Lewis was most recently relied on in
Benjamin v. Kerik, 2000 WL 726861, which applied the Lewis "actual harm" analysis to find that no system wide inadequacies existed in the New York Department of Corrections' prison law libraries. The Benjamin court found that only three of the plaintiffs could meet the Lewis standard, and that this was an insufficient number to justify a finding of system wide inadequacy.
Although an inmate's right of access to the courts includes access to some combination of legal assistance, legal materials and/or a law library, inmates do not have a constitutional right to engage in legal writing for other inmates. This means that an inmate's right of access to the courts is specific to the inmate who is seeking to bring a claim before the court. Sizemore v. Lee, 20 F.Supp.2d 956, 958 (W.D.Va. 1998). For example, an inmate cannot argue that his right of access to the courts was "abridged" or "impaired" because he was prohibited from assisting other inmates, or was prohibited from receiving help form other inmates.
There is more. click on the link at the top.
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