Jail, Inmate | featured news

The attorney for an Ohio death-row inmate set for execution says the condemned man is sorry for killing two strangers 23 years ago and wants to give their families justice.

After 49 years behind bars, the nation's longest-serving female inmate is free. Betty Smithey, 69, whose prison term began following her conviction for the murder of a 15-month-old Phoenix girl in 1963, appeared at a parole hearing Monday morning and by that afternoon walked, with the aid of a cane, out of the gates of the Perryville state prison.

At least 382 people died in the fire in central Honduras and there are new questions about exactly what happened that night in the overcrowded prison... Outrage over the fire increased after the president of the country's supreme court admitted that only 40% of the inmates in the prison had been convicted. The majority were awaiting trial or waiting for charges to be filed against them.

Lyralisa Stevens, who was born male but lives as a female, had asked the state to pay for the removal of her male genitalia.A transgender California inmate has lost a legal bid for a sex-change operation at taxpayer expense.

Hundreds of thousands of people are rallying to support Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis. They not only oppose capital punishment but they also believe the state could put an innocent man to death. The case is packed with drama: the murder of an off-duty police officer; conflicting eyewitness testimony; last-minute court decisions sparing a condemned man's life and global dignitaries who say they fear an innocent man could die.

The United States apologized for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which government medical researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan inmates with syphilis.

A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is "tantamount to torture."

In a landmark ruling a Kenya court rules that prisoners will be allowed to vote in the referendum on a new constitution.

Maine police are searching for a maximum-security inmate who was mistakenly released from the county jail.