The following is an excerpt of the US Human Rights Record from 1999 to 2020 on human rights violations by judicial departments:

2000
 
The United States, the only country where carrying a private weapon is a constitutional right, is a society ridden with violence.
 
The United States is the world's number one "gun nation" with more than 200 million private guns, or nearly one for each American.
 
The number of registered weapon vendors in the country exceeds 100,000, more than the total number of overseas outlets of fast food giant MacDonald's.
 
A tracking investigation of 70,000 guns conducted annually by a US agency has shown that about 50,000 of them were used in assaults, and the rest turned up in criminal investigations: 5,000 were used in murders, 5,000 for assaults, several thousand were used in thefts and robberies, and some were used in drug-related assault incidents.
 
The excessive number of privately owned guns has resulted in countless gun-related assaults, resulting in tragedy for many innocent people:
 
On February 29, 2000, a six-year-old boy in the state of Michigan killed a girl, one of his classmates.
 
On April 18 that year, a man in suburban Detroit, who became angry when his neighbors complained about him, fired on the office of the apartment complex, leaving three women dead or injured.
 
At the night of April 24, seven children were senselessly slaughtered by a gunman at the Washington National Zoo.
 
On December 28, four masked gunmen broke into a home in Philadelphia fatally shooting seven people and injuring three.
 
This year on January 9, a gunman killed three people in Houston, Texas, and on February 5, another gunman killed four people and injured four others at a factory near Chicago.
 
Statistics have shown that over 31,000 people in the United States are killed by guns each year, and over 80 people are killed in gun-related incidents every day.
 
Police brutality is not uncommon in the United States.
 
Each year, thousands of allegations of police abuse are filed across the country, but relatively few police officers who violate the law are held accountable.
 
Victims seeking redress faced obstacles that ranged from overt intimidation to the reluctance of local and federal prosecutors to take on police brutality cases.
 
During 1999, about 12,000 civil rights complaints, most alleging police abuse, were submitted to the US Department of Justice, but over the same period just 31 officers confessed or were convicted.
 
The judicial system in the US is extremely unfair, with the death penalty exercised in 38 of the 50 US states.
 
By July 1, 2000, there were 3,682 people on death row in the nation, 90 percent of whom had been victims of sexual abuse and assault.
 
Most of them had to rely on officially appointed lawyers as they were too poor to pay for their own attorneys.
 
After reviewing the 5,760 death penalty cases over a period of 23 years starting 1973 in the US, a team of Columbia University professors revealed on June 12, 2000 that 68 percent of the death penalty sentences in the country did not fit the crimes.
 
They said that on average more than two of every three death penalty sentences were overturned on appeal.
 
The rate of erroneous judgment on death penalty in the state of Florida was 73 percent, while the figures rose to as high as 100 percent in the states of Kentucky, Maryland and Tennessee, said the professors.
 
A total of 660 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 by the Supreme Court of the United States; 500 people were executed in the past eight years.
 
In 2000, over 70 people were executed, accounting for 11 percent of the total.
 
The United States violates international conventions by convicting and executing juvenile and mentally retarded offenders, and failing to provide defendants facing execution with competent attorneys.
 
Thirty mentally retarded people have been executed in the United States in the past decade.
 
Citing figures from the US Department of Justice, the American newspaper USA Today reported in its August 8 edition that about 6.3 million men and women in the US were on probation or parole, or were in jail or prison at the end of 1999.
 
The figure represents 3 percent of the adult population of the United States. The "correctional population" increased 2.7 percent from 1998 and 44.6 percent from 1990, according to the newspaper.
 
Under US law, whose who are serving prison terms and former inmates out on probation or parole are disenfranchised, and one quarter of the states denied the right to vote of those who had served their sentences.
 
It is estimated that over one million Americans who have finished serving their sentences are deprived of their right to vote.
 
A report of a US judicial policy research institute showed that more than two million men and women were behind bars by February 15, 2000, up 75 percent from the 1.14 million reported 11 years ago, accounting for one-quarter of the total across the world, and ranking first in the world.
 
The US Department of Justice also revealed in August 2000 that the rate of incarceration had reached 690 inmates per 100,000 residents by the end of 1999, also the highest in the world. The state of Louisiana took the lead with 736 inmates per 100,000.
 
Despite huge spending that far exceeds the federal budget for education, US prisons are overcrowded, prison violence is rampant and prisoners are badly treated.
 
Statistics show that in 1998, 59 inmates in the US were killed by other inmates, and assaults, fights, and rapes injured 6, 750 inmates and 2,331 prison staff.
 
Estimates by non-governmental groups in the state of California have shown that over 10,000 sexual assaults occur daily in US prisons, and male inmates are sexually assaulted by their roommates. In the most extreme cases, the raped inmates were literally the slaves of the perpetrators, being "rented out" for sex, "sold," or even auctioned off to other inmates.
 
Despite the devastating psychological impact of such abuse, perpetrators were rarely punished adequately.
 
A report released in September 2000 by the US Department of Justice said an "institutional culture that supports and promotes abuses" was in place in US prisons.
 
Frequent reports of physical abuse by prison guards include brutal beatings by officers and officers paying inmates to beat other inmates.
 
At Wallens Ridge State Prison, Virginia's super-maximum security prison, 50,000-volt stun guns were often used against inmates.
 
The Virginia Department of Corrections reported that between January 1999 and June 2000, prison guards at Red Onion State Prison, Virginia's super-max security prison, shot a total of 116 blank rounds and 25 stinger rounds of rubber bullets and discharged stun guns on 130 separate occasions.
 
At Corcoran State Prison in California, eight prison guards drove a group of inmates to a small playground for a wrestling match that resulted in several deaths.
 
Over 20,000 inmates were placed in solitary confinement in special maximum security facilities, where they were locked alone in small and sometimes windowless cells and released for only a few hours each week.
 
They were handcuffed, shackled and escorted by officers whenever they left their cells.
 
At Wisconsin's new super-maximum prisons, inmates were subjected to round-the-clock confinement in isolation, subject to constant fluorescent lighting in their cells and 24-hour video monitoring.

2001
 
The rights of ordinary Americans have met with challenge after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The anti-terrorism law USA Patriot Act, which took effect on October 26, 2001, provides law enforcement agencies with greater powers for investigation, including wiretapping of phone calls and Internet E-mail communications by suspect terrorists.
 
A Federal Court of Appeals on November 18 ruled that the Department of Justice asking for expanding its investigative powers is constitutional, and therefore should not be restricted. It aroused great concern among the American public that the DOJ would encroach upon their right of privacy in its work.
 
Commenting on the court ruling, U.S. House Judiciary Committee Representative John Conyers said in a statement the same day, "Piece by piece, this Administration is dismantling the basic rights afforded to every American under the Constitution." Some civil rights and electronic information organizations worried that there would have no effective protection of civil rights after the ruling.
 
Police brutality is a chronic malady in American society. On July 6, 2002, a bystander videotaped a scene in which several white police officers at Inglewood, Los Angeles, slammed the head of a handcuffed 16-year-old black, named Donovan Jackson, on a squad car and punched him in his eyes, neck and hands. Afterwards, one police officer involved was ordered a paid leave. In contrast, the man who filmed the videotape was detained on July 10.
 
In another incident, on July 8, Oklahoma City police officers repeatedly beat a black suspect on the ground with their batons. The suspect was pepper-sprayed twice. On September 16, police in Boston shot at a suspect car hijacker in the downtown area and wounded him seriously. The incident led to a mass demonstration against police brutality.
 
Indiscriminate arrests are another serious problem in the United States. According to an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), prosecutors declined to bring charges in 15,798 arrests in 2001, or 26 percent of the 60,412 cases they reviewed that year, the vast majority brought by Baltimore police.
 
In 2002 the number of monthly arrests increased by 15 percent over the previous year to 7,832. Prosecutors declined to charge in24 percent of the cases. Two-thirds of the cases they dropped were dropped on the day of arrest because they could not be proved in court (May 9, 2002, Sun).
 
Within half a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI detained for security reasons more than 1,200 non-US nationals, mainly men from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries (Washington, Dec.10, 2002, EFE). Most of them were detained for overstaying their visas, and according to rules the detention should last for no more than 48 hours. However, many were actually held in custody for a month or more, or even up to 50 days.
 
While in custody, they were deprived of their basic rights -- making phone calls, access to a lawyer, family visits, being informed of the reasons for the detention, or challenging the lawfulness of the detention.
 
They were let out for exercise and air less than an hour a day. Many were handcuffed, and some were even bundled. Those falling ill could not get timely medical treatment.
 
In many cases torture was used to extract confessions, and unjust charges were often reported in the United States. According to a Reuters report on February 11, 2002, U.S. authorities confirmed that over 200 inmates had been wrongly convicted since 1973; among them 99 inmates on death row had been proved innocent, but most of them had not got compensations (Washington, Feb.11, 2002, Reuters).
 
Ray Krone walked out an Arizona courtroom a free man in April 2002 after spending 10 years and three months in prison, with more than two years in the death cell (USA Today, June 18, 2002). Yet, he could hardly obtain any compensation from the state government in accordance with state laws.
 
A black man in Detroit, named Eddie Joe Lloyd, served a term of 17 years, three months and five days in jail on a charge of raping and murdering a teenage girl before he was freed in August 2002 (New York Times, Aug. 27, 2002).
 
The wrong verdicts are closely related to confessions from innocent people extracted by police. According to an ABC (American Broadcasting Company) news report on March 15, 2002, every year thousands of criminals are convicted on the basis of confessions obtained from police interrogations.
 
Also according to the ABC news report, in 1993, Gary Gauger, a man in Illinois, was forced to confess he had killed his parents, a crime he did not commit, when he broke down after 21 hours of police interrogation. He was then sentenced to death for double murder. Two years later, the real killers confessed to the crime in an unrelated federal investigation. Gauger was freed in 1996, after spending three years behind bars.
 
The United States is one of the few countries to impose capital punishment on child offenders and mentally ill people in the world. Twenty-three U.S. states permit the execution of child offenders (under 18 at the time of the crime). Two thirds of the executions of child offenders over the past decade worldwide were carried out in the United States.
 
Since 1985, 18 child offenders had been executed, half of them in Texas State (May 9, 2002, EFE). The executions in 2002 also included three child offenders and one mentally ill man. There were 80 child offenders on death row, and the figure in the case of the mentally retarded was estimated to be around 200 to 300. (The Amnesty International)
 
Prisons in the United States are jam-packed with inmates. According to a report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the Department of Justice released on August 25, 2002, the adult U.S. correctional population reached a record of almost 6.6 million at the end of 2001, or fourfold of the 1980 figure. About 3.1 percent of the nation's adult population, or 1 in every 32 adult residents, were on probation or parole or were held in a prison or jail. Roughly two million Americans are currently behind bars.
 
In a report titled "A stigma that never fades", the British business magazine Economist said that America is "the world's most aggressive jailer", and "when local jails are included in the American tally, the United States locks up nearly 700 people per 100,000". (The Economist, August 10, 2002)
 
Poor management of prisons leads to lack of protection of inmates' legitimate rights. Extortion, abuse, violence and sexual assault are serious in prisons of the United States.
 
An Amnesty International report released on May 14, 2002 said inmate Frank Valdes at the Florida State Prison was beaten to death by guards in July 1999. Autopsy reports proved massive injuries, including 22 broken ribs and a fractured sternum, nose and jaw, and there were boot marks on his face, neck, abdomen and back.
 
The three guards involved were charged of second-degree murder in 1999. But the Florida State prosecutors decided in February 2002 to drop the charges.
 
According to reports of U.S. human rights organizations, brutalities targeted at inmates number about 100,000 a year in American prisons. A former chief law officer of Virginia State estimated the number of such brutalities to be at least 250,000 oras many as 600,000 a year.
 
Sexual assaults between male inmates are prominent in the prisons. Most of such assaults are coupled with the use of force, causing spread of HIV virus and physical and mental injuries on victims. The prison and judicial departments remain indifferent towards such complaints and take no punishment measures.
 
The Sun newspaper reported on August 31, 2002, the Baltimore City Detention Center has a poorly run system of health care and suicide prevention. In some cases, the problems resulted in jail suicides, heart attack deaths and fatal asthma spasms that federal authorities deemed preventable if the inmates had been properly treated.
 
In another case, a fire killed eight inmates locked in cells in Mitchell County jail in North Carolina and injured 13 others. The prison authority blamed lack of water sprinklers for the tragedy.

2005
 
There exist serious infringements upon personal rights and freedoms by law enforcement and judicial organs in the United States.
 
Secret snooping is prevalent and illegal detention occurs from time to time. The recently disclosed Snoopgate scandal has aroused keen attention of the public in the United States. After the Sept.11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the U.S. President has for dozens of times authorized the National Security Agency and other departments to wiretap some domestic phone calls. With this authorization, the National Security Agency may conduct surveillance over phone calls and e-mails of 500 U.S. citizens at a time. It is reported that from 2002 through 2004, there were at least 287 cases in which special agents of FBI were suspected of illegally conducting electronic surveillance. In one of the cases, a FBI agent conducted secret surveillance of an American citizen for five years without notifying the U.S. Department of Justice. On Dec. 21, 2005, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the Patriot Act, a move that aroused keen concern of public opinion. The law makes it easier for FBI agents to monitor phone calls and e-mails, to search homes and offices, and to obtain the business records of terrorism suspects. (Senate Votes to Extend Patriotic Act for 6 Months, The Washington Post, Dec. 22, 2005). According to a report of the U.S. National Broadcasting Company on Dec. 13, 2005, the U.S. Defense Department had been secretly collecting information about U.S. citizens opposing the Iraq war and secretly monitoring all meetings for peace and against the war. According to a report of the New York Times, in recent years, FBI had been collecting information on large numbers of non-governmental organizations that participated in anti-war demonstrations everywhere in the United States through its monitoring network and other channels. The volume of collected information is stunning. (The Fog of False Choices, The New York Times, Editorial, Dec. 20, 2005). Among it, there are 2,400 pages of information on Greenpeace, an environmental group. On Jan. 9, 2006, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection announced that in the "anti-terrorism" fight the U.S. customs has the right to open and inspect incoming private letters, which again sparked protests. (The AP, Jan. 9, 2006.) On Jan. 17, 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights separately filed suits in U.S. district court for eastern Michigan and a federal court against the U.S. President and heads of security agencies for spying on U.S. citizens.
 
Police abuse is also very common in the United States. According to a report of the Los Angeles Times on July 14, 2005, Los Angeles police shot dead the 19-month-old daughter of a suspect when trying to arrest the suspect, which triggered public outcry. On Oct. 9, five New Orleans police officers battered a 64-year-old retired teacher on the street while trying to arrest him, and he suffered injuries. (AP, Oct. 9, 2005) The incident caught the attention of public opinion. On Dec. 26, a New Orleans Police officer fired at least six shots at a black man carrying a knife and killed him. Cases of police abuse are usually hard to get just settlement. According to a report of the Los Angeles Times on March 31, 2005, only eight out of more than 200 charges against police mistreatment and abuse were resolved, and the rest were either shelved or settled privately.
 
There exist obvious injustice and frequent rights infringements in the judiciary system. In 2005, the U.S. media disclosed several cases of citizens wrongly convicted. After 24 years in prison, Robert Clark Jr. from Georgia was released after a DNA test proved him innocent. Clark's was one of the longest incarcerations served by the 164 people who have been exonerated by DNA testing. (After 24 Years in Prison, Man Has a Reason to Smile, the New York Times, Dec. 8, 2005). On the night of Dec. 21, 2005, the CNN Larry King Live program interviewed four convicted felons that have recently been proven innocent by DNA evidence after having stayed more than10 years behind bars. Well-known Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos said during the program that he had seen studies that there are up to 20 percent of wrongful convictions in the United States. (Many Convicted Felons Have Been Proven Innocent by DNA Evidence, CNN Larry King Live, Aired Dec. 21, 2005.) A report of the U.S. Death Penalty Information Center released in October 2005 said the U.S. death penalty system is "woefully short of justice," because of "misconduct in misinforming the juries." (AFP, Oct. 18, 2005)
 
The United States proclaims to be a "paradise of freedom," yet the total number and ratio of its people behind bars both rank the first in the world. According to data released by the statistics bureau of the U.S. Justice Department on Oct. 23, 2005, the total number of people incarcerated in the United States was 2,267,787 at the end of 2004. This meant an incarceration rate of 724 per 100,000, up 18 percent from ten years earlier and 25 percent higher than that of any other nation. (Study Notes Upswing In Arrests of Women, the Washington Post, Oct. 24, 2005.) According to a survey of the New York Times, the number of people sentenced to life in prison had doubled in the United States over the past ten years. (Packing Prisons, Squandering Lives, the Baltimore Sun, Oct. 21, 2005.) From 2003 to 2004, the number of prisoners grew at a rate of 900 each week. In the first half of 2004, the number of newly incarcerated in the 50 states grew 2.3 percent over the same period of the previous year to 48,000.
 
As the prisons were packed, the situation of prisoners worsened. On Dec. 31, 2004, 24 state prison systems were operating at or above their highest capacity. The federal system was 40 percent over capacity. (The Nation's Prison Population Continues Its Slow Growth, U.S. Department of Justice, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs) As the government cut back on expenditure of prisons, some state prison systems reduced input on medical care for prisoners. As a result, a large number of prisoners were infected with tuberculosis or hepatitis. In April 2005, a 44-year-old male inmate died in a prison of New York for lack of timely treatment. In recent years, hundreds of inmates suffered head injuries from maltreatment in New York City alone. In a Rikers Island jail of New York, an inmate was punched on the head by a prison guard and he lost the sight in one eye; an inmate had his eardrum broken and the cheekbone of another inmate was fractured from police maltreatment. (In City Jails, A Question of Force, the New York Times, Oct. 30, 2005.) In Phoenix city, inmates were kept in tents and forced to undertake various sorts of labor, fed with only two meals a day and bereft of any entertainment. (El Universal of Mexico, Aug. 26, 2005.) In August 2005, a Qatar student that had been detained for two years without indictment described the living conditions in the prison: no guarantee of basic life necessities, long-time confinement in a very tiny ward with the longest period lasting 60 days, handcuffed and fettered even in the ward, including during bath. During Hurricane Katrina, between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1, 2005, correctional officers from the New Orleans Sheriff's Department abandoned 600 inmates in a prison, as many were immersed in chest and neck level water and left without food, water, electricity, fresh air, or functioning facilities for four days and nights.
 
Sexual infringement is quite common in prisons. According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2005, an estimated 8,210 allegations of sexual violence were reported by correctional authorities, of which almost 42 percent involved staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct. A report of the Human Rights Watch said that 21 percent of inmates in seven Midwestern prisons in the United States suffered sexual violence perpetrated by inmates of the same sex. 

 2007

The abuse of their power by law enforcement and judicial departments in the United States has seriously violated the freedom and rights of its citizens.
 
Cases in which U.S. law enforcement authorities allegedly violated victims' civil rights increased by 25 percent from fiscal year 2001 to 2007 over the previous seven years, according to statistics from U.S. Department of Justice (Police Brutality Cases Up 25%; Union Worried Over Dip in Hiring Standards, USA Today, December 18, 2007). The national average among large police departments for excessive-force complaints was 9.5 per 100 full-time officers (The New York Times, November 14, 2007). But the majority of law enforcement officers accused of brutality were not prosecuted in the end. From May 2001 to June 2006, 2,451 police officers in Chicago received four to 10 complaints each, 662 of them received more than 10 complaints each, but only 22 were punished. Furthermore, there were officers who had amassed more than 50 abuse complaints but were never disciplined in any fashion (The Chicago Police Department's Broken System, University of Chicago, www.law.chicago.edu). On August 17, 2006, a 52-year-old Chicago woman named Dolores Robare was nearly struck by a speeding police car when she was crossing the road. The officer stopped and asked her to produce her identification. She was brutally beaten by the police when she asked them why it was taking so long (The Chicago Tribune, May 1, 2007). On December 15,2006, four businessmen were beaten by six off-duty officers at a bar for no apparent reasons (The Chicago Tribune, June 9, 2007). On August 3, 42-year-old African American Geffrey Johnson was killed at his home by the police using a taser gun. On August 6, 18-year-old black youth Aaron Harrison was shot in the back and killed by police pursuing him (The Chicago Tribune, August 9, 2007). On May 1 when Latino immigrants were campaigning for the rights of illegal immigrants at MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles, police officers abused their power by clubbing demonstrators and journalists and shooting them with rubber bullets (The Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2007). On November 12, five police officers fired 20 bullets at 18-year-old youth Khiel Coppin, eight hitting him, in front of his mother's house, after mistaking a comb he was brandishing as a gun (The China Press, New York, November 19, 2007). According to a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in October 2007, 47 states and the District of Columbia reported 2,002 arrest-related deaths between 2003 and 2005. Among these, 1,095, or 55 percent, were killed by gunfire of state or local police (Death in Custody Statistical Tables, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs).
 
The United States of America is the world's largest prison and has the highest inmates/population ratio in the world. A December 5, 2007 report by EFE news agency quoted statistics of U.S. Department of Justice as saying that the number of inmates in U.S. prisons has increased by 500 percent over the last 30 years. By the end of 2006, there were 2.26 million inmates in U.S. prisons, up 2.8 percent from a year ago. The number is the highest over the last six years. The U.S. population only accounted for 5 percent of the world total, but its inmates made up 25 percent of the world total. There were 751 inmates in every 100,000 U.S. citizens, far higher than the rates in other Western countries (EFE news agency, December 5, 2007). Among the inmates, 96 percent were serving sentences of more than one year, which equaled about one in every 200 U.S. citizens serving a sentence of more than a year (Prisoners In 2006, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). Since the September 11 attacks, reincarceration rate has been rising in the United States. According to statistics, about two thirds of the inmates would commit a second crime within three years after releasing. Two out of three inmates would be caught again after their release and 40 percent would be put behind bars again.
 
Abusing the inmates is commonplace in U.S. prisons. According to a report released by U.S. Department of Justice in December 2007, an estimated 60,500 inmates, or 4.5 percent of State and Federal inmates, experienced one or more incidents of sexual victimization, 2.9 percent of the inmates reported an incident involving prison staff, 0.5 percent said they had been sexually victimized by both other inmates and staff, 0.8 percent of the inmates were injured as a result of sexual victimization (Sexual Victimization in State and Federal Prisons Reported by Inmates, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). The U.S. government acknowledged in a January 16, 2007 report that suspected illegal immigrants were mistreated in five prisons, breaching the principle of humane custody (The Washington Post, January 17, 2007). The Washington Post reported on December 17, 2007 that juvenile inmates in a West Texas youth prison were sexually assaulted or beaten and denied medical care. Those who reported the crime got revenged upon and the situation remained unimproved months after the scandal was brought to light. (Dad Dismissed Prison Reform, The Washington Times, December 17, 2007).In January 2008, seven prisoners in Georgia State filed a class-action lawsuit accusing guards and other corrections officers of abusing and torturing them between October 2005 and August 2007, including beating them with batons and special black leather "beating gloves" and ramming inmates' heads against the wall. Media reports said some 40 inmates in other Georgia prisons complained of similar cases, in which guards strapped nude inmates to iron beds or iron chairs, denying them of food, water or access to bathroom for as long as 48 hours, and causing the death of two inmates (International Herald Tribune, January 8, 2008). Guards in American prisons regularly use taser guns. According to a 2007 report from Amnesty International, 230 Americans have died from taser guns since 2001. In July 2006, a prison in Garfield County, Colorado was accused of regularly using taser guns or pepper sprayers on inmates, and then tying them to chairs in awkward positions for hours. In August, prison guards in Arapahoe County of Colorado strapped inmate Raul Gallegos-Reyes to a restraint chair for yelling and knocking on his cell door. He died after being repeatedly stunned with a taser gun.
 
U.S. prisoners often die from HIV/AIDS infection or inadequate medical service. A report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in September 2007 said there were 22,480 state and federal inmates who were HIV infected or had confirmed AIDS at yearend 2005, 5,620 inmates had confirmed AIDS. During 2005 an estimated 176 state and 27 federal inmates died from AIDS-related causes (HIV in prisons 2005, U.S. Department of Justice, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs). According to a report by the Los Angeles Times on September 20, 2007, 426 death cases took place in California prisons in 2006 due to belated treatment. Among them, 18 deaths were found to be "preventable" and an additional 48 were found to be "possibly preventable". On April 14, 2007, 41-year-old diabetic prisoner Rodolfo Ramos died after being left alone and covered in his own feces for a week. Prison officials failed to get medical treatment for him despite knowing of his condition (The Associated Press, April 27, 2007).
 
The justice of U.S. judicial system was increasingly put in question. Survey finds that since the first DNA exoneration in 1989, there have been 209 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. The average length of time served by exonerees is 12 years. The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions was 26, and 15 of the 209 people exonerated through DNA served time on death row (Facts on Post-Conviction DNA Exonerations, Innocence Project, www.innocenceproject.com). The Associated Press reported on January 3, 2008 that Charles Chatman of Texas was proved innocent by DNA evidence after spending 26 years in prison. In 1981, he was sentenced to 99 years in prison after convicted of committing serious sexual assaults. He was the 15th inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in Dalas since 2001 (Texas Man Exonerated by DNA After 26 Years, the Associated Press, January 3, 2008).