So, in 2008, he stopped leaving his cell.
“I went for years
with no shower, no library, no nothing,” said Dennis, who was released from
prison in 2017 after a federal judge found that he was wrongly convicted of
killing a teenage girl for her gold earrings in 1992 because prosecutors
withheld key evidence. But he still has not recovered from the trauma. “It’s
like chipping away at your soul on so many different levels, and you feel like
you’re literally suffocating in your own skin.”
The Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections has agreed to sweeping changes that will allow the 136
people sentenced to death to enjoy many of the same rights as those in the
general population: to be out of their cells 42.5 hours a week or more, to use
the phone at least 15 minutes each day, and to have contact visits with family
who have, in many cases, not hugged their loved ones in decades, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.
To
settle a civil-rights lawsuit filed last year by the American Civil
Liberties Union, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist
Law Project, and two law firms on behalf of those housed on death row, the
department also agreed to provide resocialization assistance as well as
physical and mental health evaluations.
“This settlement brings Pennsylvania out of the penological
dark ages and makes it a national leader in treating all incarcerated persons
humanely,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in
a statement.
A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, Susan
McNaughton, said the proposed settlement “formally memorializes many of the
reforms that the DOC had already instituted.”
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