Corridore v. Washington

In Michigan, people can be sentenced to lifetime electronic monitoring that restricts movement and travel, causes physical injuries, can lead to loss of employment, and violates bodily autonomy. The MacArthur Justice Center represents researchers Kate Weisburd and James Kilgore in an amicus brief that focuses on the tangible, real-world harms of electronic monitoring and how it is more than a mere “collateral consequence” of conviction but a lifetime custody for the purposes of the federal habeas statute.  

Electronic monitoring, through the use of devices worn on a person’s body, is an increasingly prevalent practice for those awaiting trial or as a condition of release for those who have been incarcerated. In Michigan, however, people who commit a certain type of crime are sentenced to lifetime electronic monitoring. Frank Corridore was one of these people, ordered to wear an electronic monitoring device for the rest of his life by a district court.  

Mr. Corridore’s case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, where he and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are challenging the district court’s ruling by arguing that electronic monitoring constitutes being “in custody,” and therefore can be challenged through the federal habeas statute, a procedure in which the federal court can review the circumstances of a person’s incarceration. 

The MacArthur Justice Center (MJC) filed an amicus brief on behalf of electronic surveillance researcher Kate Weisburd and electronic monitoring and digital modes of confinement researcher James Kilgore to argue that the court should recognize lifetime electronic monitoring as a violation of civil liberty. In the brief, MJC illustrates how people on electronic monitoring are “in custody,” because it causes monitored peoples’ personal liberty to be significantly restrained and controlled by the state. Researchers note the rules and requirements associated with a monitoring device, including burdensome charging requirements, GPS connectivity problems, and wearing the hardware itself. People who have experienced electronic monitoring have expressed feeling “caged” or “on a leash like an animal.”  

Additionally, communities of color disproportionately bear the harms of electronic monitoring, reinforcing racialized patterns of punishment and surveillance in this country. In Chicago, for example, where 25% of the population is Black, nearly 75% of the people on electronic monitoring are Black. As Professor Michelle Alexander has written, these “digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery.”