Nebraska inmate sues over access to son conceived with staff member
By LORI PILGER – Lincoln Journal Star, Neb. (TNS)
An inmate serving a life sentence has sued a Nebraska prison warden and the director of prisons, alleging they have kept him from having parenting time with his young son because he was conceived by a prison staff member.
At a recent hearing, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office asked Lancaster County District Judge Andrew Jacobsen to dismiss James Price’s lawsuit.
Price, who is 49, said he has been incarcerated since he was 19, and James, who just turned 2, is his first child.
James Price
James Price
“I’m not proud of the circumstances that transpired. Ms. Cedillo and I broke the law, embarrassed ourselves, embarrassed the Department of Corrections. And we’re both having to pay the consequences of those actions,” he said.
Last February, Samantha Cedillo was sentenced to three years of probation for attempted sexual abuse of an inmate while she was working at the Omaha Correctional Center in 2022.
Inmates, by law, cannot consent to sex when they are incarcerated.
Price said that in the fall of 2022 a previous warden at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, where he was transferred and was living when he filed the lawsuit in August, approved his request to communicate through messaging and calls with Cedillo for parenting time.
But after Barb Lewien, who was the warden at OCC when Cedillo worked there, became warden of the State Penitentiary in Lincoln early this year, she restricted communication between them.
In misconduct reports, Price is accused of having three-way calls with Cedillo, which aren’t allowed.
Price, who appeared by video from the Tecumseh State Correctional Institution where he was transferred this fall, said the state’s brief makes it sound like he is doing this for visitation with Cedillo.
“When in fact this is about my son,” he told Jacobsen at a hearing last week. “This is about me being able to read to him at night. You know, help him develop as a good person. Just be actively in his life.”
Price said Cedillo is his son’s caregiver and accused Lewien and Rob Jeffreys, the director of Corrections, of terminating his parenting time.
Assistant Nebraska Attorney General Joseph McKechnie said that’s not what occurred here.
He said Price was restricted from contacting three people — Samantha Cedillo, Price’s brother and his brother’s girlfriend — because of a three-way call.
“These restrictions are justified by legitimate penological concerns,” McKechnie told the judge.
He said Price attempted to circumvent the restriction to contact Cedillo by engaging in three-way calling with the two others.
McKechnie said that while an Omaha judge in Cedillo’s criminal case allowed her to communicate with him, it has no bearing on what the prison chooses to do.
He said Price’s case should be dismissed because prisoners do not have a constitutional right to unlimited phone use or to visit with any particular person.
McKechnie said Price didn’t lose good-time credit and wasn’t put in isolation.
“He received restrictions on phone use,” the attorney said, which he said isn’t enough to support this type of legal challenge.
Price said the prison hasn’t given him an alternative to communicate with his son, who is too young to make a call himself.
“What they’re saying is that I’m trying to supersede the process and go around the system, which is not accurate. If there was an alternative, then this wouldn’t be an issue,” he said.
Price said he wants to be able to be there and guide his son the best he can in this situation.
“I have a willing desire to do that,” he said.
Jacobsen said he understood where Price was coming from, but he had to deal with the motion to dismiss.
He hasn’t yet ruled.
Price was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 5 to 10 years after a jury found him guilty of felony murder for the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony in the 1995 killing of Curtis Patterson in Omaha.
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