Judge Elissa Cadish, a state court judge in Nevada who President Obama nominated to a federal district court, asked the President to withdraw her nomination, according to a letter that became public today. Cadish was the victim of an arcane senate tradition that allowed just one senator, Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV), to unilaterally block her nomination. Heller objected to her nomination because she once correctly described the state of gun rights law prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.

In 2008, before Heller established for the first time in American history that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, Cadish was asked whether the Constitution does indeed protect such an individual right, and she gave the only correct answer a judge could have given at that point in history — “I do not believe that there is this constitutional right,” adding “of course, I will enforce the laws as they exist as a judge.” This statement accurately described the state of the law pre-Heller.

Nevertheless, Cadish’s nomination languished without a hearing due to a Senate tradition that allows a single senator to veto a nominee from their home state. In Senate parlance, Heller refused to return his “blue slip” on Cadish, and Senate Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy (D-VT) honored a tradition establishing that a nomination will not receive a hearing unless both home-state senators sign these slips.

It should be noted that not every Senate Judiciary Chair has honored this tradition in the past. In 2003, for example, when Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) took over as Judiciary chair and George W. Bush was president, Hatch largely abandoned the blue slip rule. According to the Congressional Research Service, “[a] return of a negative blue slip by one or both home-state Senators d[id] not prevent the committee from moving forward with the nomination — provided that the Administration [] engaged in pre-nomination consultation with both of the home-state Senators,” during during Hatch’s tenure.

There is no good reason why President Obama’s nominees should not enjoy the same deference that President Bush’s nominees enjoyed under Hatch.

A $15.5 million settlement to a man who was confined in isolation for almost two years after he was charged but not convicted of driving while intoxicated is shedding light on the horror that can befall someone incarcerated even on mere allegations of criminal activity.

Stephen Slevin, arrested for a DWI and accused of driving a stolen car that he said he borrowed from a friend, was placed in solitary confinement shortly after he arrived at Dona Ana County Detention Center in New Mexico because he declined to post a $40,000 bond. After one medical examination, Slevin, who was severely depressed even before his arrest, was deemed suicidal and placed in a padded isolated cell with no natural light for 23 hours a day.

Once in that cell, Slevin faced an insurmountable battle in changing his circumstance, in spite of neglect so severe that his toenails grew to curl around his foot, he pulled out his own decaying tooth and fungus grew on his face. He sent letters saying “I’m afraid to close my eyes” and “I don’t know much longer I can go on.” But the only response he received was greater sedation, his lawyer told NBC News. After two years in this circumstance, the charges against Slevin were dropped and he was released, having never been found guilty of any crime. Slevin later sued and won a $22 million jury award, an amount that was upheld by a federal judge in a decision that sums up the horror of the conditions he withstood:

[The] evidence included letters written by Plaintiff seeking help, and sick call requests documenting Plaintiff’s suffering from bed sores on his thighs, fungus growing on his face, rotting teeth, pain, inability to sleep and nightmares where he could not sleep. … Medical records kept by the Detention Center similarly documented Plaintiff’s experience of pain and suffering, and the lack of treatment for his many medical and dental conditions. … Plaintiff … spent six months along in his cell with virtually no human contact before his release.

Although first attempting to explain away his lack of recreation time by testifying that Plaintiff refused to come out of his cell, [Detention Center Director Christopher] Barela testified that he would not have put his dog in a cell like Plaintiff’s cell and left him there for a month at a time, even if his dog refused to come out. He admitted that, if his dog refused to come out, he would wonder what was wrong with her and take her to the veterinarian. Barela also acknowledged that he knew it was not acceptable to leave his dog or Plaintiff in the conditions in which Plaintiff was left [...]

With regard to the injurious effects of administrative confinement on Plaintiff, his expert, Dr. Grasisan,  … testified that Plaintiff was “more massively impaired by the PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, than [he] ha[d] ever seen in [his] entire professional life.” According to Dr. Grassian’s testimony, Plaintiff’s life “is kind of torture.”

To compound matters, Slevin is now suffering from lung cancer, and he accepted the county’s settlement offer of $15.5 million even though the higher $22 million judgment was upheld by a judge. Even that lower sum is one of the largest prisoner civil rights payouts in history – an unsurprising fact considering the extremity of the mistreatment of an individual who, it is worth repeating, was never found guilty of any wrongdoing whatsoever. But the solitary confinement of individuals with identified mental health concerns is alarmingly common, in spite of evidence that the mentally ill are particularly vulnerable to long-term psychological harm from isolation. As in many detention facilities around the country, it was the policy of Dona Ana County jail to put people with mental health issues into solitary confinement — one of several issues that also prompted a class lawsuit by the ACLU of New Mexico that yielded reforms in 2010.

The rampant use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons for not just the mentally ill (who are increasingly jailed in place of mental health treatment) but also children as young as 13 has become so severe that the federal agency tasked with overseeing prisons agreed last month to undertake a closer examination of the practice, which has been deemed torture, cruel and inhumane, and worse than being held hostage in Iran.

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio may be the most despicable law enforcement officer in the country. A Justice Department legal complaint against his office alleges widespread constitutional violations and mistreatment of Latinos, including an alleged assault against a pregnant Latina woman, widespread racial profiling and use of racial slurs, and incidents where “female Latina [limited English proficiency] prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of [the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's] failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.”

He also may not be sheriff much longer, as an effort to recall Arpaio already collected 120,000 of the 335,000 signatures needed to force a recall election.

A bill that passed the GOP-controlled Arizona House of Representatives could make Arpaio very difficult to defeat, however. Currently, a recalled official in Arizona faces a single election that could include challengers from their own party. The GOP bill would change this process so that the parties would choose their candidates in a primary election, and then Arpaio would likely face the winner of the Democratic primary in the general election.

The reason why this change matters is because Maricopa County is very Republican — Romney won the county by nearly 12 points — so it would be difficult for a Democrat to defeat Arpaio in a one-on-one race. At the same time, Maricopa’s Democratic voters could potentially join with a minority of the county’s Republicans in order to elect a Republican challenger to Arpaio. Indeed, this is exactly what happened when Democrats joined with some Republicans to remove anti-immigrant Senate President Russell Pearce (R) and replace him with Republican challenger Jerry Lewis in a 2011 recall election.

In other words, it may be the case that a majority of Maricopa’s voters want to remove Arpaio, and thus he could lose a recall election under the current rules. Under the GOP House’s bill, however, Arpaio would likely have a clear shot to survive the recall election so long as a majority of the county’s Republicans vote for him in the primary election.