by Chuck Sharman

In an ruling on August 25, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia found officials with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) in contempt of an injunction issued three months earlier, when a state prisoner’s request was granted for transfer from solitary confinement at Mount Olive Correctional Complex, where he had been held since 2012.

The prisoner, Keith Lowe, made a suicide attempt on April 6, 2025, after which attorneys with Mountain State Justice filed suit for him under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, accusing DCR officials of deliberate indifference to his serious medical need, in violation of the Eighth Amendment guarantee of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Though he “has been less than a model inmate,” the district court allowed—pointing to three escape attempts since he was confined in 2007 to serve a sentence for murder—Lowe had been held in solitary confinement in a 6-­by-­10-­foot cell for 23 hours a day for a decade, save for one hour a day when he was allowed into an outdoor cage about the same size, and without direct sunlight.

The district court enjoined the DCR from continuing these harsh conditions in an order dated May 23, 2025, finding that Lowe met both prongs of the test for deliberate indifference claims laid out in Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994). Defendant prison officials did not disagree that suicide “is the type of harm that is contemplated by the objective prong,” as the district court recalled. But they argued that Lowe failed to show that they had knowledge of his risk of suicide resulting from being kept in isolation, thereby failing to meet the subjective prong.

Lowe refuted this by pointing to his suicide attempt, as well as several unanswered requests for help. The DCR, in turn, attempted to pass the blame to its contracted private mental health provider, PsiMed Corrections LLC. But the district court said that the DCR “cannot shirk responsibility for providing adequate medical care by … outsourcing such care to PsiMed.

Defendants also argued that the mental health treatment given to Lowe since his suicide attempt had been reasonably adequate. But the district court said that “misses the mark” because Lowe had shown “that the combination of his serious mental health history, his extraordinary period of solitary confinement with no end in sight, an actual [suicide] attempt, and then sending him back to solitary confinement only two days after a suicide attempt was not reasonable.”

This was not “mere negligence,” as Defendants argued, the district court continued. Again the DCR pointed fingers at PsiMed, whose staffers had determined that Lowe’s suicide threats were not credible—both before and after his unsuccessful suicide attempt. Finding PsiMed’s claims “debatable, at best,” the district court also rejected the excuse that the DCR offered—that the prison system was too short-­staffed to do any better. Failing to provide Lowe “critical mental health services at a time in which he is vulnerable to committing suicide” demonstrated that the DCR “is not capable, even if it is willing, of treating … his suicidal risk,” the district court declared. Far from a reasonable response to the risk he faced, the DCR’s efforts were “simply inadequate to meet the moment.”

The DCR also argued that keeping Lowe in isolation was a legitimate penological response to his repeated escape attempts. But the last such attempt was in 2020, the district court noted, and even prison Superintendent John Frame admitted years had passed since the prisoner’s last disciplinary writeup in 2022. “The state of the record now,” the district court said, “makes it seem less like the legitimate pursuit of penological interest and more akin to arbitrary decisions by prison staff.”

Accordingly, the district court found that Plaintiff was likely to prevail upon the merits of his claim, as well as satisfying the other requirements for a preliminary injunction—that he was likely to suffer “irreparable harm” without it and that the balance of equities and public interest weighed in his favor. Therefore. Lowe was ordered transferred to a state psychiatric facility “forthwith.” See: Lowe v. Frame, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 98745 (S.D. W. Va.). 

State’s Foot-dragging Results
in Contempt Order

That didn’t happen, though. At first, it appeared that the transfer faced resistance from the state Department of Health Facilities (DHF). So the district court granted a motion by Lowe’s attorneys to amend the complaint to join DHF Secretary Michael Caruso as a Defendant on July 22, 2025. Yet when the district court heard Lowe’s motions to enforce the injunction the following month, he remained in solitary at Mount Olive. 

“How did this happen?” the district court wondered. Perhaps the order was “apparently confusing” to the DCR and the DHF, which “attempted to seek clarity by asking each other” what it meant; however, “[a]t no point was this Court made aware of Defendants’ purported confusion.” In the end, the agencies decided between themselves that all the order required of them was to file a petition for Lowe’s involuntary commitment under W. Va. Code § 27-­5-­2.

Meanwhile, Frame moved Lowe to the prison’s mental health unit, but the prisoner testified that his solitary confinement conditions there remained largely the same. At a hearing on the involuntary commitment motion that DCR and DHF filed, Frame and Caruso switched course, attempting “to develop a record that Mount Olive ‘showed a willingness’ to provide adequate care for Plaintiff, even if it was ‘not adequate’ at the moment,” the district court later recalled. As if it weren’t strange enough for the two officials to oppose their own motion, Lowe testified that he was in favor of it—undermining the concept of an “involuntary” commitment.

The motion was granted anyway. But the commitment was stayed until the Defendants could find “a suitable treatment facility” for someone as dangerous as they said that Lowe was. They eventually negotiated his transfer to a federal medical lockup—but not before he once again attempted suicide on July 7, 2025. As Frame later admitted, Mount Olive failed to place a restriction on Lowe that would have prevented him from getting the razor used in the attempt, a failure that the district court called simply “[m]ystifying.”

Lowe then filed his motion to enforce the injunction, which the district court granted at its August 2025 hearing, also finding both Frame and Caruso in contempt of its earlier order. But the court’s ire burned hottest at attorney Gail Lipscomb, counsel for Caruso. She had objected to entering a recording of the commitment hearing into the record only then to submit an errata claiming that the DHF “took no position” on the request but merely “expressed an interest in protecting the current patients and staff at Sharpe Hospital.” Both of those statements were false, the district court noted. Lipscomb offered an apology, claiming a faulty memory rather than any intent to deceive. But the district court flatly declared, “These excuses are unacceptable,” and it referred her to the state Bar for possible discipline. See: Lowe v. Frame, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 164522 (S.D. W. Va.).

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