BOSTON (CN) — Civil rights lawyers urged a federal appeals panel on Wednesday to find that Rhode Island corrections officers violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment by keeping an opioid-addicted inmate in long-term solitary confinement for over a year and denying him mental health treatment while his condition spiraled.
Jerry Cintron was placed in solitary confinement for 450 days because he overdosed on a fentanyl-laced pill in prison.
He says the Rhode Island Department of Corrections denied his requests for mental health treatment and access to medication for addiction treatment for incarcerated people with opioid use disorder, which was available in the prison while he spent 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.
“Years of isolation led to mental illness, including anxiety and depression; self-harm, including pulling out his hair and badly injuring his hand by bashing it against the wall; and weight loss of almost 70 pounds,” Cintron's attorneys wrote in his appeals brief. “This deterioration was exactly what defendants intended, having told him that they would ‘bury [him] alive’ and keep him in solitary until he was no longer ‘normal’.”
Cintron sued pro se in 2019 to challenge his conditions of solitary confinement. The lower court denied prison officials’ motion for judgment on the pleadings, and the officials filed an interlocutory appeal.
Attorney George Mills, from the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center told the appeals panel on Wednesday the prolonged confinement "in a room no bigger than a parking spot" exacerbated his client's underlying mental issues and caused a severe physical and psychological deterioration while prison staff ignored direct requests from a social worker to release Cintron from solitary.
Mills said the deleterious conditions of Cintron’s solitary confinement worsened the underlying mental and physical symptoms of the opioid addiction that landed him in prison in the first place.
“For people with particular vulnerabilities, going into solitary confinement will exacerbate and make more serious those harms,” he said. In Cintron's case, that meant experiencing anxiety and depression; self-harm, including pulling out his hair and badly injuring his hand by bashing it against the wall; and weight loss of almost 70 pounds.
Citron’s attorneys noted in his appeals brief that Rhode Island, where he is incarcerated, has been one of the states hardest-hit by the opioid epidemic, which has resulted in opioid overdose becoming the leading cause of accidental death in the Ocean State.
Rhode Island Solicitor General Katherine Sadeck argued in an appeals brief that the seven correction officers named as co-defendants are entitled to qualified immunity against Cintron’s claims because he failed to plead facts showing that corrections officials violated a statutory or constitutional right, and also failed to demonstrate that any such right was clearly established.
“The allegations in this case against the actual defendants are very sparse,” she said in court Wednesday.
The Obama-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge William Kayatta pushed back: “You’re saying that, at the time this happened, officials in charge of this prison did not know that it was violation of the law to ignore or not treat a serious medical condition such as what he’s alleged here?”
“I don’t think it’s a fair reading of the complaint to say that any of these seven officials named in the suit ignored or even were responsible for Cintron’s treatment,” Sadeck replied. “He admits he got medication, he admits he had a social worker, and he doesn’t claim that he asked any of these particular defendants for any kind of medical services and they declined. It’s these seven defendants.”
Cintron says qualified immunity — which protects law enforcement officers from most lawsuits stemming from work performed in the line of duty — doesn't apply in his case, where the defendants were on notice that their conduct violated a constitutional right of an inmate.
But Sadeck insisted on Wednesday that nothing in First Circuit precedent at the time would have put the corrections officials “on notice that what they were doing was unlawful.”
“Here, the corrections officials are accused of knowing that solitary confinement imposed harm and still imposing it. That’s what this court in Jackson and Honeywell and O’Brien knew — and still said it was lawful,” the Rhode Island assistant attorney general said.
The Rhode Island state ACLU argued in an amicus brief that the state’s use of solitary confinement represents cruel and unusual punishment in violation of Cintron’s Eight Amendment rights, and that prison officials were aware of his ongoing mental deterioration.
Kayatta was joined on the three-judge panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Kermit Lipez, a Clinton appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judge Gustavo Gelp, a Biden appointee.
The panel did not immediately rule on the appeal.
The use of solitary confinement, which involves separating an incarcerated person from the general population of a prison for months at a time, is widespread in the federal prison system. A February report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Bureau of Prisons was holding roughly 8% of its total prison population in solitary confinement as of last fall.
Last month, Senate Democrats introduced a pair of bills that would, among other things, set guardrails on when the Bureau of Prisons and federal immigration services can use solitary confinement.
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