The last big case over which Shira Scheindlin presided as a Federal Judge began with a hand-written letter from an inmate serving a lengthy sentence for a couple of rapes who claimed he had been unfairly kept in solitary confinement for an extended period.
It wasn’t uncommon for Ms. Scheindlin to receive this kind of complaint from a prisoner representing himself. The great majority of them, she said during a May 3 interview, she quickly tossed aside as frivolous or otherwise flawed. But this one involved an inmate who said his time in solitary stemmed from nothing more serious than violating the prison’s rules by keeping legal papers in his cell—false liens he prepared against officials in the Queens District Attorney’s Office who had gotten him convicted.
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