In 1979, inmates from the Iowa State Penitentiary, the Iowa State Men's Reformatory, and the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women filed a lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa against prison officials complaining of disciplinary proceedings that allegedly violated the prisoners' Fourteenth Amendment rights. The plaintiffs asked the court to expunge from their records determinations of misconduct that did not meet Constitutional procedural due process requirements. A hearing was held on January 18, 1985 and the District Court (Judge Donald E. O'Brien) filed an opinion setting out legal standards for the punishment of prisoners through sanctions, concluding that inmates have a liberty interest in not being punished with sanctions until the inmate has been convicted of a rules violation. The District Court left the application of the principles to individual inmates up to the parties. Dedrick v. Wallman, 617 F.Supp. 178 (D.C. Iowa 1985).

The docket for this case is not available on PACER. All of our information comes from the 1985 ruling on disciplinary sanctions. Therefore, we have no information of subsequent or previous litigation or any other issue.

Rebekah Henn Sullivan - 08/10/2005


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