Banned inmate paper sues state

Greg Tuttle

Wednesday, July 12, 2000 | 10:33 a.m.

A publication aimed at prison inmates edited by a man serving time for murder has filed a lawsuit after Nevada state officials banned its circulation behind bars.

Prison Legal News, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, filed a complaint Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Reno seeking to reverse a policy by the Nevada Department of Prisons that deems the publication unauthorized material.

"This is a very serious First Amendment issue," said Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU in Nevada.

Donald Evans, a Reno attorney who works with the ACLU, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the 32-page tabloid published since 1990.

Howard Skolnick, the state's assistant prison director, said Tuesday he had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment.

Prison Legal News has a circulation of about 3,500 and is read by inmates in all 50 states, said Fred Markham, who serves as the general manager for the publication printed in Seattle, Wash. The monthly tabloid publishes articles by inmates, attorneys and others with a focus on legal issues of interest to those already serving time.

The articles are edited by Paul Wright, a former Army private who was convicted of murder and sentenced to 24 years for shooting a man during a botched robbery in the early 1980s. Wright founded the publication with another inmate as a nonprofit corporation 10 years ago.

Today about 60 percent of the subscribers are inmates, Markham said. They pay $15 a year to receive the publication. Other readers, who include attorneys, judges and other legal professionals, make up the remaining subscribers.

Markham said copies of Prison Legal News have been sent to Nevada inmates since the first issue rolled off the press a decade ago. It wasn't until last fall that he began to hear from the 21 Nevada inmate subscribers that they were not receiving their copies.

Markham said he began receiving returned issues of the tabloid from Nevada prisons last September marked "unauthorized." His attempts to contact state officials to discuss the problem failed, he said.

Peck said state prison officials apparently decided the publication falls into a category of contraband and a policy that prohibits correspondence between inmates. He called the ban on Prison Legal News "nonsense."