Texas death row prisoners spend decades in solitary confinement. A lawsuit wants to end that "cruel"

[LetMyPeopleVote]

A high school classmate of my middle child is one of the attorneys in this case

Link to tweet

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/26/texas-death-row-solitary-lawsuit/?utm_campaign=trib-social&utm_content=1674772556&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Texas death row prisoners are suing the state, arguing it’s unconstitutional to hold them in solitary confinement for the entirety of their metered lives with minimal health care, no regard for their mental suffering and few avenues to seek legal help.

On death row, men are shut alone in small cells between 22 and 24 hours a day, often violating the state’s own policies on how often they are let out, the lawsuit says. On good days, they get to take a shower or go outside for an hour, alone in a cage. More often, due to short staffing, they spend their days sitting on a metal bed, listening to the echoing voices of other prisoners and guards through steel doors and concrete walls. If they roll up their thin mattresses to stand on, prisoners have said they can peek out the narrow window slits at the top of their cell walls to see the sky.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in a Houston federal court, claims the extended isolation deprives the prisoners of their right to access medical care and attorneys and causes severe physical and psychological harm......

Texas death row prisoners are suing the state, arguing it’s unconstitutional to hold them in solitary confinement for the entirety of their metered lives with minimal health care, no regard for their mental suffering and few avenues to seek legal help.

On death row, men are shut alone in small cells between 22 and 24 hours a day, often violating the state’s own policies on how often they are let out, the lawsuit says. On good days, they get to take a shower or go outside for an hour, alone in a cage. More often, due to short staffing, they spend their days sitting on a metal bed, listening to the echoing voices of other prisoners and guards through steel doors and concrete walls. If they roll up their thin mattresses to stand on, prisoners have said they can peek out the narrow window slits at the top of their cell walls to see the sky.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in a Houston federal court, claims the extended isolation deprives the prisoners of their right to access medical care and attorneys and causes severe physical and psychological harm.

[Elessar Zappa]

1. Solitary confinement is cruel.

If they absolutely have to be isolated, they should be given a television and sufficient exercise time so they don’t go crazy. Also access to phone calls with relatives.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. K&R. It's torture.

[secondwind]

3. They do this to receive the $$$$$. If they are on death row,

get on with it! TX is just making money off their misery. This is not right.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[duhneece]

5. Cruelty beyond belief...Arizona's prisons' cruelty to inmates caught up with them, finally, legally

snip
Arizona chose — for more than a decade — to violate the constitutional rights of the people in its custody. It denied medical care to the men and women incarcerated in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) for years, causing untold suffering and deaths. It ignored the mental health needs of people in ADCRR, spraying them with pepper spray or shooting them with pepper ball guns instead of providing treatment. And it buried people in solitary confinement for years on end, sometimes for the terrible misdeed of being assaulted.

All the while, ADCRR denied that these constitutional violations were occurring and frequently told outright lies to the court presiding over Jensen v. Shinn, the lawsuit challenging these unlawful conditions brought by the ACLU’s National Prison Project, the ACLU of Arizona, the Prison Law Office, the Arizona Center for Disability Law, and the law firm of Perkins Coie LLP in 2012.

Arizona chose — for more than a decade — to violate the constitutional rights of the people in its custody.

Finally, Arizona is being held to account. This month, U.S. District Judge Roslyn O. Silver issued a preliminary but sweeping remedial order, telling state officials what they must do to bring standards up to constitutional muster — and that the state will not weasel out of its constitutional obligations this time.
snip
https://www.aclu.org/news/prisoners-rights/arizona-violated-the-rights-of-incarcerated-people-for-more-than-a-decade-that-will-finally-end

[Hermit-The-Prog]

6. Death row itself should be eliminated

Part of what leads to this cruelty is the idea that these are throw-away people who won't be around to complain.

[roamer65]

7. Good for them.

It is cruel and unusual punishment via the US Constitution.

The death penalty should be EXTREMELY rare.