Courts

The Supreme Court Really Doesn't Like Prisoners

Eighth amendment smaith amendment.

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counting marks on wall jailWhen introducing someone to the notion that factory farming is cruel, they usually start with the living conditions of the animals. They usually mention that chickens or cows live their lives in cages that don’t allow for movement or that they end up covered in their own waste. Its bad enough for animals to live like this — people go out of their way to pay for free range livestock for a reason — but for a person to live like that has to be objectionable, right? It would be at least worth hearing a case alleging a violation of the 8th amendment because a person was solitarily confined and not allowed to stretch or breathe fresh air for 3 years, right? Not to 6 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices.

From Reuters:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s three liberal justices on Monday sharply objected to the court’s refusal to hear an appeal by a former Illinois inmate who was kept in solitary confinement in a state prison and virtually deprived of any exercise for about three years.

The court takes up appeals when at least four of its nine justices agree to hear a case. None of the six conservative justices joined with the liberal justices to provide the fourth vote needed to hear former inmate Michael Johnson’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling rejecting his 2016 civil rights lawsuit accusing prison officials of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishment.

I get Clarence and Alito — I’m not expecting much compassion from two justices that would be happy to role back protections against child labor. No surprise toward Barrett, what with the weird Christian cult she was a handmaid for — wouldn’t be the first time someone hated the crime not the prisoner out of accountability, but Roberts? Not even the guy with the damage control persona of trying to keep both sides happy?

The legal controversy of the case is whether the lower courts should have applied the Supreme Court’s standard of determining if prison officials acted with “deliberate indifference” toward an inmate’s health or safety rather than the standard they actually applied —  were the punishments meted out for “some utterly trivial infraction” of prison rules.

If this case isn’t enough to cross the threshold of justice interest, it acts like a green light for prisons to continue using the lower standard despite Supreme Court precedent. Does the Court not even care about its own authority anymore?

US Supreme Court Liberals Dissent In ‘Unusually Severe’ Solitary Confinement Case [Reuters]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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