A coroner has ruled that a woman died by strangulation during an overnight visit to Mule Creek State Prison in November, and she was alone with her convicted murderer husband at the time.

62-year-old Stephanie Diane Brinson, known to family as Stephanie Dowells, was known to family members as a kind soul who had been encouraging her inmate husband, 54-year-old David Brinson to "be a better person."

Dowells's son, Armand Torres, tells KCRA, that his mother and Brinson would "read the Bible together," and he expressed outrage that prison officials would leave his mother alone with a man with such a violent past. "How could they just let this happen? I just don't get it," he said.

Brinson reportedly called prison guards around 2 am on November 13 from the prison’s family visit unit, where he was having an extended conjugal stay with his wife. He said that his wife had "passed out," and officers began life-saving efforts. Paramedics arrived and continued these efforts, but Dowells was pronounced dead at 2:51 am.

Her cause of death was not immediately known, but as the Sacramento Bee reports, a coroner's report has been completed, and found that she was strangled.

Brinson, for unclear reasons, is currently being held in the state prison system's healthcare facility in Stockton, and he has not yet been charged with Dowells's murder. The district attorney in Amador County, where Mule Creek is located, tells the Bee that he awaiting a full report from the corrections department, and a completed autopsy, before charges can be filed.

The family visiting suite is an apartment-like area in the prison complex where inmates are permitted to have 30- to 40-hour stays with spouses and immediate family members. Inmates on Death Row, and those with convictions for sex offended are not eligible for family visits, but Brinson, who was convicted in a quadruple murder 30 years ago, apparently was.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement, "Family visits are a privilege, and incarcerated persons must apply and meet strict eligibility criteria to be approved. Only those who demonstrate sustained good behavior and meet specific program requirements are considered. These visits are designed to support positive family connections and successful rehabilitation."

Brinson was convicted in 1993 of the execution-style murders of four men. As the LA Times reported at the time, Brinson shot all four men on June 12, 1990 while committing a robbery in which he walked away with just a small amount of marijuana. He was 23 years old at the time of his sentencing, and he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms.

It's not clear when he met and married and Dowells.

Mule Creek State Prison is also where convicted murderer Scott Peterson is serving his time, and where he was recently beaten up by another inmate.

Top image: Stephanie Dowells, photo courtesy of the family

San Quentin State Prison officials are saying it’s a homicide after a 70-year-old child molestation convict was found unresponsive in his cell and later died, and his 36-year-old kidnapping convict cellmate is suspected of doing the deed.  

There's trouble at Marin County’s San Quentin State Prison this week, or as Gavin Newsom would prefer you now call it, “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.” KTVU reports that 70-year-old inmate Mark Squires was killed in his cell Tuesday afternoon between 3:30 and 4 pm. And the suspect is the only person who was in the cell with Squires at the time, 36-year-old Gustavo Lopez.

According to KRON4, the victim, Squires, was serving life without parole for sexually abusing a child under the age of 14 in Riverside County, and he’s been at San Quentin for 24 years. Lopez, meanwhile, had served four years of a 13-year sentence for kidnapping and false imprisonment, also committed in Riverside County.

The ​​California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is classifying the case as a homicide. They say that Lopez has been “placed in restricted housing pending investigation by SQRC [San Quentin Rehabilitation Center] Investigative Services Unit and the Marin County District Attorney’s Office.”

The Marin County Coroner has not yet determined Squires’s official cause of death, and we do not have any further information on what kinds of injuries he suffered.

As KTVU points out, there was another homicide in San Quentin just this past April. On April 24, 50-year-old Joshua Jones, was suspected of killing his 43-year-old cellmate James Healy, 43.

Related: The Prisoner Who Attacked Kristin Smart’s Killer Also Killed the I-5 Strangler in Prison [SFist]

Image: Jesstess87 via Wikimedia Commons

Every prisoner has now been abruptly transferred out of the federal women’s prison in Dublin, but some have been hauled as far away as Florida, and a judge is ordering their belongings returned and their medical care restored.

The federal women’s prison known as Federal Correctional Institution of Dublin (FCI Dublin) has had a stunning string of ghoulish sexual abuse scandals bubble up over the last nearly two years. And while we knew the staff had been abusing the women prisoners, it was a shock when the prison was raided by the FBI in March, and then suddenly closed out of the blue on April 15. The 600-plus prisoners were hastily shoved into buses with no idea where they were being sent, often without their possessions, and with their families not being notified where the women were being sent.

All of the women are now out of that prison. But according to the latest report from KTVU, they’ve been shipped as far away as Texas, Alabama, and Florida. And that same KTVU report details how the women were denied the ability to bring their belongings, medicine, and even feminine hygiene products. So a US District Court judge has written a blistering 15-page ruling condemning how the whole mess was handled, and ordering regular updates proving that the prisoners’ possessions have been returned and their rights restored.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote that the US Bureau of Prisons’ “operational plan for closure of FCI Dublin was ill-conceived and, like Swiss cheese, full of holes.” She added that the bureau “ignored other operational issues including the proper movement of the [adults in custody's] property and the appropriate communication and messaging to the [prisoners] and staff who were not advised of the closure until the last minute.”

Last minute, indeed. The staff were apprantly not notified of the Monday morning tranfers until late the prior Friday afternoon.

Oh, and we’re also learning the prison was somehow crawling with illegal drugs. “Drug treatment programs were not available for the majority of the population that requested treatment, despite drugs being rampant at the facility,” Gonzalez Rogers said.

She mentions this in the context that the transferred prisoners had been denied their prescribed medication, or any medical care they needed.

Gonzalez Rogers ordered weekly and monthly reports proving that each prisoner had all of their possessions returned, all of their medicine provided, and all of the medical care they need delivered. She also demanded staffing reports proving that the new prisons to which the women were moved were adequately staffed.

It seems like a responsible intervention to what has been a real disaster. And maybe it will bring some closure to this nightmare. But considering the haphazard way this matter has been handled, it seems likely that we have not heard the last of these prisoners’ rights being abused.

It also remains unclear if the Bureau of Prisons still intends to reuse and repopulate FCI Dublin, or if it's just going to sit empty for a while.

Related: Scandal-Plagued FCI Dublin Women’s Prison Is Abruptly Closing After Torrent of Sex Abuse Claims [SFist]

Image: Jesstess87 via Wikimedia Commons

We don’t know how many women have been transferred out of the scandal-ravaged and soon-to-be-shuttered FCI Dublin women’s prison, but attorneys for the inmates have filed an emergency restraining order to halt the clearly haphazard and rushed transfer process.

In the shocking Monday morning announcement that the Federal Correctional Institute in Dublin (FCI Dublin) would be suddenly closing after years of sexual misconduct and assault scandals, the US Bureau of Prisons (BOP) said they’d hoped to ship all of the prisoners out by Friday. Well, it is now Friday, and it seems the effort may be just resulting in more prisoner abuse of a different kind.

KTVU reports on the chaotic and hurried transfer process of the estimated 605 women there. Some are reportedly not medically able to be transferred at the time, but are being chained up and shipped out anyway. Others are apparently not being told where they’re going, and are simply being thrown on a bus. There are even reports of strip searches and menstruating women being denied tampons, left to simply bleed on themselves, which indicates this response to the sexual assault scandal is only forcing more trauma on the inmates.

The husband of one prisoner told KTVU his wife “was told she had 15 minutes to pack," and given no information where she was being taken. There are only six other low-security federal women’s prisons elsewhere in the US, none of them in California.

It may be a more important aspect to that KTVU story that attorneys for the prisoners have filed a restraining order to immediately halt the transfers. Or it may prove totally unimportant, as KTVU notes that “most, if not all, of the women have already been hastily shipped out of the prison.”

The restraining order motion says that "While the Court may not prevent BOP from closing a prison in due course, it has the authority, jurisdiction and duty to ensure that the process is carried out in compliance with relevant federal laws and in accordance with constitutional standards."

The FCI Dublin prison guards and their union are also fighting the move. While the BOP has said that none of them will lose their jobs, that likely means that they will have to upend their lives and transfer, probably out of state.

"My officers are not the abusers," union president Edward Canales told KTVU. "They are the officers that maintained safety and security and prevented abuse."

There are some nicely resolved cases where Dublin inmates were released early if their sentences were already nearly complete. But it is odd that the BOP has been completely silent on how many women are still there, and where the others have been shipped to. And it’s possible they will complete all the transfers today in secret, with no accountability.

KTVU spoke with some families, and got the information that “One father said maybe 100 women were left early Friday morning. Another mother said ‘everyone is gone.’”

Related: Scandal-Plagued FCI Dublin Women’s Prison Is Abruptly Closing After Torrent of Sex Abuse Claims [SFist]]

Image: Jesstess87 via Wikimedia Commons

We had no idea that Sarah Shroud, former Iran hostage/UC Berkeley hiker, was so delightfully wacky. Take, for example, the song she just released about her ordeal. It's called "Piece of Time" (which we first mistook for Ashlee Simpson's "Pieces of Me," which, of course, would have been several shades of brilliant.) Written while she was held captive, Shroud's ditty is also about the two men with whom she illegally crossed the border last year, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer.

According to the Associated Press, "the song was one of many [Shroud] composed while in solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran. She would sing the songs to her fiance, Shane Bauer, and friend, Josh Fattal, when they were allowed to see each other in the prison courtyard."

"The reason I'm doing the song is for Shane and Josh and to help people understand what they're going through and what I went through," Shourd goes on to tell AP. "I started writing songs the first day that I was thrown into a cell alone. It was really one of the things that kept me sane."

You can purchase the song on Amazon, too, for $.99.

Watch the video of "Piece of Time" below.

In an effort to ease prison overcrowding, a panel of federal judges "tentatively ruled that California must release tens of thousands of inmates." (Please release Susan Atkins! Please release Susan Atkins! Please release Susan Atkins!) Though a hard number will be decided on later, the plan is to significantly reduce the numbers of inmates in two to three years. According to AP, the judges went on to say that "no other solution will improve conditions so poor that inmates die regularly of suicides or lack of proper care." Released prisoners will be of the low-risk variety. Serial killer Richard Ramirez, at right, will remain incarcerated.

If you've noticed over the past couple of days, it's smells a bit smoky, a bit ashy in Baghdad by the Bay. It seems, according to CBS 5, Northern California is suffering from about 950 wildfire right now.The top half of the state is, in essence, on fire. Yikes! So far, Carmel Valley residents have been forced from their homes due to the massive blaze in the Los Padres National Forest over in Monterey County, which is the largest blaze yet.

Overall, 58,000 acres have been torched over the past couple of weeks. Firefighters from Oregon and Nevada have been imported to help tame the blazes running rampant. What's more, 2,237 California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation inmates have been let loose "to battle the Wild Fire in Solano and Napa counties, and other raging wildfires statewide." Double yikes! According to CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate:

Inmate firefighting crews and the custody staff who supervise them are a critical component of the state's coordinated effort to battle wildfires and to respond to other emergencies ... Right now, a total of 156 inmate firefighter crews from 42 conservation camps are assisting the state gain control of these devastating fires scattered primarily throughout Central and Northern California.

Only minimum-custody inmates, however, can participate in the program.

The fires sparked sue to dry weather and lightning strikes throughout the state. Seeing as how we're not "into the meat of the fire season at this point," this could signify a frightening and disastrous fire season this year.