Texas Prison Heat Declared Unconstitutional
In a ruling on March 26, 2025, the federal court for the Western District of Texas agreed that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) was likely violating the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by holding most state prisoners in cells that are not air-conditioned. However, the Court declined to issue a preliminary injunction (PI) requiring the prison system to rectify the problem.
Plaintiffs also withdrew a motion filed just eight days earlier, asking the Court to demand that the agency show cause why it should not be sanctioned for providing falsified evidence in the suit. It was filed in 2023 by prisoner Bernie Tiede, now 65, who challenged “life-threatening” excessive heat inside his cell—one that is not air-conditioned, like most cells holding the state’s 134,000 prisoners. As PLN reported, Defendant prison officials moved to dismiss the complaint, but the motion was denied in June 2024. [See: PLN, Sep. 2024, p.46.]
It was during a subsequent August 2024 hearing that Judge Robert Pitman expressed skepticism with the accuracy of a TDCJ log showing no temperature above 79 degrees Fahrenheit in mid-July 2022 at the Stiles Unit in Beaumont. That was equal to or below the daily low temperature recorded by the National Weather Service for any day in the second half of the month. “This is not a mistake,” declared Pittman from the bench. “This is a fabricated document. Somebody needs to look into this.”
An internal investigation then confirmed that temperature logs were falsified in at least one state prison. For reasons that remain unclear, TDCJ officials received the report in November 2024 but waited until March 2025 to share it with the Court. However, Texas Board of Criminal Justice (TBCJ) Chief Audit Executive Chris Cirrito assured the Court that there was no intent to deceive because the logs were created before the suit was even filed. He said that employees responding to a public records request had noticed some logs were missing or had been doodled on, so they attempted to recreate them.
“The evidence supports periods of carelessness in record creation and/or retention and an attempt by the unit to avoid reporting missing temperature logs,” he explained.
Beyond Tiede’s suit, TDCJ had another incentive to fudge reports: extensive—and expensive—remediation efforts triggered by higher temperatures. A reading over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, requires the prison to provide fans, extra water and cool showers.
Moreover, if the unidentified employees were just trying to recreate missing logs, they missed the mark by a wide margin; TBCJ said that temperatures were logged at the Stiles Unit between 58 and 60 degrees on July 31, 2022, for example, “while the lowest actual recorded temperature for that day was 76 degrees.”
Nevertheless, the Court took pity on TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier, who testified “that his goal is ‘absolutely’ to install air conditioning in all TDCJ facilities”—if only the state legislature would appropriate sufficient funds. Falling back on pragmatism, Pitman said that there was almost no way the money could be appropriated, and the units installed, in the 90 days before a PI would expire. Plaintiff’s PI motion was therefore denied.
The case is now headed for trial, and PLN will continue to report developments. Tiede and fellow Plaintiffs—Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants; Coalition for Texans with Disabilities; Texas Prisons Community Advocates; and Build Up, a/k/a Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance—are represented by attorneys with O’Melveny & Myers, LLP and Winston & Strawn LLP, both in Houston; Edwards Law in Austin; the Law Office of Jodi Callaway Cole in Alpine; as well as Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell and Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman, LLC, both in Denver. See: Tiede v. Collier, USDC (W.D. Tex.), Case No. 1:23-cv-01004.
Tiede’s suit claimed that he suffered a stroke from heat. Since then, TDCJ has added more than 10,000 “cool beds” to hold those at highest risk of heat-related health complications, boosting the total beds available to nearly 46,000. However, that still leaves some 90,000 state prisoners sweltering. Moreover, as PLN also reported, many of those “cool beds” are located in isolation units, where access is restricted to programming and recreation. [See: PLN, Sep. 2023, p.1.]
Additional source: KUT
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