San Francisco Hall of Justice, which houses County Jail No. 4. (Courthouse News photo via Wikipedia)
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) A federal judge wrongly ordered two San Francisco county jails to provide an hour of access to outdoor sunlight per week to pre-trial inmates locked up for more than four years, an attorney for the city argued before three Ninth Circuit judges Thursday.
“There is no per se constitutional right to outdoor recreation under either the Eighth or the Fourteenth amendments,” Deputy City Attorney Kaitlyn Murphy said, referring to the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and its guarantee of the right to due process.
Photo by (Jesstess87, CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons via Courthouse News)
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) Despite disturbing reports of pest invasions and contaminated food, a federal judge on Monday refused to impose stricter health and safety requirements on a county jail’s industrial kitchen.
Inmates at Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California, reported finding cockroaches in sandwiches, rat feces on bread and razor shards in oatmeal, among other troubling testimony.
The jail and its contractor Aramak, which runs the kitchen, denied many of those claims. They cited health inspections that found zero pest problems and emphasized that the jail has used a pest control service for the kitchen five days a week since October 2019.
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