"The statute seems to be making even constitutionally meritorious cases harder both to bring and to win," she wrote in a Harvard Law Review study.
Besides the presence of civilian correctional officers in the incidents at Iraq, another link between US prison systems and the military system has raised questions.
O.L. "Lane" McCotter, who oversaw prisons in three states before helping set up operations at Abu Ghraib, had been in charge of state systems in New Mexico and Utah when abuses were allleged. He resigned as head of Utah's prisons in 1997, two months after a mentally ill inmate died after spending 16 hours strapped to a restraining chair.
In New Mexico in 1988, a court-appointed prison monitor accused officials of erasing a videotape to cover up brutality. McCotter accused the monitor of "fabricating atrocities" and said the tape erasure was accidental.
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