After the Supreme Court shot down a challenge to the use of
solitary confinement in prison, Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced
alarm about depriving inmates of daylight for months and
years, according to Courthouse News Service.
Consolidated from two appeals at the 10th Circuit, the case
at issue stems from the incarceration of Jonathan Apodaca, Joshua Vigil and
Donnie Lowe at the Colorado State Penitentiary.
Sotomayor noted that while the three men were in so-called
administrative segregation, doing stints that ran between 11 and 25
months, none were allowed outside except for “recreation time” in a small
room with a chin-up bar.
Measuring 90 square feet, this room did have two windows,
but the metal grates covering them could almost be said to be more cruel than
sealed glass.
“The grates have holes approximately the size of a quarter
that open to the outside,” a prior district court described it, as quoted Tuesday
by Sotomayor. “The inmate can see through the holes, can sometimes feel a
breeze, and can sometimes feel the warmth of the sun. This is his only exposure
of any kind to fresh air.”
Sotomayor went on to explain that the court has for years
recognized the perversion in capriciously depriving a prisoner of outdoor
exercise for extended periods of time.
“It should be clear by now that our Constitution does not
permit such a total deprivation in the absence of a particularly compelling
interest,” she wrote.
The opinion also notes that petitioner Lowe died in the
spring after he was released directly onto the streets after 11 years in
solitary confinement. The crime that had sent him to prison was second-degree
burglary and introduction of contraband.
“While we do not know what caused his death in May 2018, we
do know that solitary confinement imprints on those that it clutches a wide
range of psychological scars,” she wrote.
Today Colorado allows all inmates “access to outdoor
recreation” for at least one hour, three times per week, subject to “security
or safety considerations,” Sotomayor added.
She emphasized that such changes represent “steps toward a
more humane system” but “cannot undo what petitioners, and others similarly
situated, have experienced.”
Quoting a 2015 concurrence from Justice Anthony Kennedy in
the case Davis v. Ayala, Sotomayor also noted that the experience of
solitary confinement described in “A Tale of Two Cities” was inspired by a
real-life visit Charles Dickens paid to Philadelphia’s Eastern State
Penitentiary.
“Dickens did not question the penal officers’ motives,”
Sotomayor wrote. “He concluded, rather, that they did ‘not know what it is that
they are doing’ and that ‘very few’ were ‘capable of estimating the immense
amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for
years, inflicts upon the sufferers.’ The pain caused was invisible and
inaudible, such that ‘slumbering humanity’ was ‘not roused up’ to put a stop to
it.
“We are no longer so unaware. Courts and corrections
officials must accordingly remain alert to the clear constitutional problems
raised by keeping prisoners like Apodaca, Vigil, and Lowe in ‘near-total
isolation’ from the living world, in what comes perilously close to a penal
tomb.”
The Supreme Court did include any grant of certiorari today
in its batch
of orders.
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