Pennsylvania: 5 death row inmates challenge policy of solitary confinement

5 death row inmates sued Pennsylvania prison officials on Thursday, challenging a policy that keeps the convicts isolated most of the time and calling the practice degrading and inhumane.

The federal lawsuit asks the court to end mandatory, indefinite solitary confinement for the 156 men on death row at Graterford and Greene state prisons.

The lawsuit said death row inmates are locked up alone 22 to 24 hours each day, and their small cells are kept illuminated at all hours.

"The devastating effects of such prolonged isolation are well known among mental health experts, physicians and human rights experts in the United States and around the world," the lawsuit said. "It is established beyond dispute that solitary confinement puts prisoners at risk of substantial physical, mental and emotional harm."

The lawsuit seeks class-action status as well as a declaration that the solitary policy violates constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment and violates the guarantee of due process.

A Corrections Department official said the lawsuit was being reviewed. The defendants are the Corrections secretary and the wardens at Graterford and Greene.

The inmates who sued - Anthony Reid, 50; Ricardo Natividad, 49; Mark Newton Spotz, 46; Ronald Gibson, 49; and Jermont Cox, 46 - have spent between 16 and 27 years on the state's death row. The lawsuit said the state has not provided a meaningful way for them to challenge their confinement conditions.

The inmates say they are kept segregated inside cells the size of a parking space. They can exercise in small, outdoor enclosures for no more than 2 hours during weekdays but are kept in their cells around-the-clock on weekends, unless they have a visitor. They change cells every 3 months. The men may not participate in prison vocational, recreational or educational programs, nor can they join in any communal worship.

The Marshall Project reported earlier this year that 20 of the 31 death penalty states allow death row inmates fewer than 4 hours of recreation outside their cells each day.

Pennsylvania has executed 3 people since 1976, all of whom had voluntarily given up on their appeals. The state's death row has been shrinking, as fewer death sentences are being imposed and appeals have resulted in some death row inmates being resentenced to life.

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced a death penalty moratorium soon after he took office 3 years ago, saying he was concerned about "a flawed system that has been proven to be an endless cycle of court proceedings as well as ineffective, unjust, and expensive."

Wolf has said the moratorium will say in place until a state Senate-commissioned study of capital punishment is complete.

Source: Associated Press, January 26, 2017

ACLU Sues Pennsylvania For Putting Death Row Inmates in Permanent Solitary Confinement

"This is a profoundly damaging practice. It destroys people."

5 inmates on Pennsylvania's death row have spent a cumulative 115 years in solitary confinement - more than 42,000 days with little to no human contact in a cell the size of a parking space.

Such extreme and prolonged deprivation violates their constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment, according to a new lawsuit filed today on their behalf, as well as 151 Pennsylvania death row inmates, by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Abolitionist Law Center.

"Defendants' years of infliction of mental and physical harm on Plaintiffs and the Class Members strips them of their dignity and worth, transgresses civilized society's notions of decency, and constitutes a practice that is disavowed in modern society," the lawsuit says.

Pennsylvania automatically places death row inmates in solitary confinement, regardless of their behavior, and they stay in those 8-by-12-foot concrete cells 22 hours a day, every day, until they're executed or their sentence is overturned.

Because of the rarity of actual executions in Pennsylvania - the last one occurred in 1999, and there have only been 3 total since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976 - this effectively means death row inmates are condemned to decades of mind-scrambling isolation. 80 % of the state's death row inmates have been in solitary for more than 10 years, according to the lawsuit. 1 plaintiff in the lawsuit has spent 27 years in solitary.

"This is a profoundly damaging practice that exacerbates mental illness, creates mental illness in previously healthy people, causes and aggravates a whole range of physical illnesses, and it destroys people," says David Fathi, Director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

One of the most pernicious effects of prolonged isolation, Fathi says, is what social psychologist Craig Haney, a who studied inmates at the "secure housing unit" in California's infamous Pelican Bay State Prison, calls "social death."

"You forget how to interact with other humans," Fathi says. "You've just forgotten how to be a person, really."

Beyond that, there's also the fiscal argument. Holding an inmate in a supermax cell costs 2- to 3-times as much as keeping them in the general prison population, Fathi says.

The Supreme Court recognized as early as 1890 that solitary confinement has a devastating effect on inmates, but courts have traditionally given wide deference to prison managers when it comes to security.

However, the lawsuit argues the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections' policy serves no penological purpose, and Fathi says courts have become more receptive in recent years to claims that solitary confinement is unique from regular prison practices.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required inmates be afforded procedural protections from being sent to supermax confinement.

In 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a concurrence that "research still confirms what this Court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price."

Both the federal government and states have been slowly rolling back their use of solitary confinement. In recent years, both the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) and the American Correctional Association released new guidelines and standards limiting the use of solitary confinement. The Obama administration also banned the use of solitary confinement for juveniles in the federal prison system and limited the amount of time adults can spend in solitary.

While the use of solitary confinement in the U.S. has been dwindling in recent years, there were at least 67,442 inmates in the U.S. locked in their cells for 22 or more hours a day in the fall of 2015, according to a report last year by the ASCA and Yale Law School.

The practice of solitary confinment was in fact invented in Pennsyvania. When Charles Dickens visited Pennsylvania's Eastern State Penitentiary in 1842, where the use of what we now call solitary confinement was pioneered, he recoiled in horror.

"I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body," he wrote, "and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay."

But because of a growing number of lawsuits and prison reforms, the secret punishment is now out in the open.

Source: reason.com, C.J. Ciaramella , January 25, 2018. C.J. Ciaramella is a criminal justice reporter at Reason.

Is life in solitary inhumane? Lawsuit seeks end to 'death row' in Pennsylvania

A federal class-action lawsuit filed Thursday morning by the Pennsylvania ACLU, the Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Project and 3 other law firms seeks to move death row inmates into general population, arguing that their current conditions are degrading, inhumane and a violation of the Eighth and 14th Amendments.

Gov. Wolf has placed a moratorium on the death penalty in Pennsylvania - yet 156 men remain on death row, which is both a figure of speech and a literal place in 2 state prisons where death-sentenced inmates are held in isolation for between 22 and 24 hours a day. 80 % of them have been in solitary for more than a decade.

"These folks have been sentenced to death. They haven't been sentenced to a lifetime of psychological torture," said Witold "Vic" Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. The suit was filed in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

He noted that other states, North Carolina and Missouri, have stopped holding death-sentenced inmates in solitary, and that at least 4 other states are in the process of moving such inmates out of isolation.

Pennsylvania reinstituted the death penalty in 1978, and the decision to hold inmates in solitary was challenged in a class-action lawsuit, Peterkin v. Jeffes, in the 1980s. A federal court found that the conditions were acceptable.

"In the intervening time, there has been a sea change in the scientific understanding of solitary confinement and increasing recognition by the courts that this crosses constitutional boundaries when it is prolonged," said Bret Grote, of the Abolitionist Law Center.

He said inmates he's visited in death-row solitary exhibit familiar symptoms: memory loss, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts or actions. "They didn't begin their time in solitary with mental health issues but now are on the mental health roster," he said. "It's a trajectory of despair and hopelessness."

Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that inmates in Pennsylvania may not be kept in solitary after their sentences have been vacated.

1 death row inmate, Robert Lark, was in isolation for years even though he had been granted a new trial.

He eventually was moved into general population after a jury found him guilty last year, but sentenced him to life in prison rather than death.

Only 3 people in Pennsylvania have been put to death since the penalty was reinstated.

The future of the death penalty in Pennsylvania is likely to be a campaign issue in the governor's race. Scott Wagner, a York County Republican running to unseat Wolf, has promised to reverse the moratorium "within 48 hours."

Philadelphia's new district attorney, Larry Krasner, pledged not to seek the death penalty (though, more recently, he said, "You never want to say never.")

Walczak said the ACLU met with Pennsylvania corrections officials last year and urged them to reconsider conditions for death-row inmates. "They told us they weren't in a position to make any changes. That's why we're here today."

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections said it is reviewing the lawsuit.

Source: philly.com, January 25, 2018

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde