On August 19, Monica Sud, a woman from California, filed a class action lawsuit against Costco Wholesale Corporation claiming that the retailer knowingly sold prawns produced by slave labor and never disclosed these practices to customers like herself who bought the products without knowing they were produced by illegal labor.

New York City will begin a surveillance pilot program aimed at keeping juvenile defendants accused of committing certain felonies off of Rikers Island. As The New York Times reported on August 14, eligible youth between the ages of sixteen and eighteen will be outfitted with lightweight bracelets tethered electronically to smartphones that are to be carried with them at all times and cannot be turned off.

GIving credit to Black Lives Matter. A former prisoner recounts 37 days in a jail, terrified of needing to use the jailhouse medical clinic. When your boss is a Hal-9000. Plus other selections from the Shadowproof mailbag.

On August 17, Citigroup agreed to pay $180 million to settle charges from the SEC that two of the megabank’s hedge funds defrauded investors. According to the SEC, Citigroup’s hedge funds “made false and misleading representations to investors” about how risky investing in the funds were.

In a federal lawsuit filed in April, the relative of a deceased inmate blames his wrongful death on a private inmate healthcare company and a for-profit inmate transportation company. The lawsuit accuses Advanced Correctional Healthcare and Prisoner Transport Services of neglecting and even mocking the serious medical needs of William Weintraub, PhD, as he died a slow and painful death from a perforated ulcer, shackled in the back of a crowded van.

It may never be possible to know the true death toll of the modern Western wars on the Middle East, but that figure could be 4 million or higher. Since the vast majority of those killed were of Arab descent, and mostly Muslim, when would it be fair to accuse the United States and its allies of genocide?

After a four-hour disciplinary board hearing, the United States Army has punished Chelsea Manning for possessing books and magazines having to do with LGBTQ and political issues. The Army has also punished her for having an expired tube of toothpaste and for brushing food off the table and refusing to talk to a guard after she was accused of misconduct. For these actions, the Army imposed 21 days of recreational restrictions.

With wildfires blazing throughout the parched Western United States, the state of California has found a novel, though ethically questionable, way to save money on the state’s safety budget: Send state prisoners to work on the frontlines fighting forest fires for $2 per day. About 4,000 low-level felons from California’s state prisons are fighting the fires, operating out of so-called “conservation camps.”

Attorneys for Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammed Kamin asked the Periodic Review Board during a hearing to approve his release. Kamin is an Afghan who has been detained at the military prison for over eleven years. He is currently not charged with any crime, however, he is one of a number of forever prisoners, who President Barack Obama’s administration has designated for indefinite detention. In April 2008, Kamin was charged with “material support for terrorism.” A convening authority subsequently withdrew the charge against him 2009, and a federal court later ruled “material support” was not a valid offense triable by a military commission.