On September 20, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found “no room for doubt” that a mentally-ill Pennsylvania prisoner has a basic constitutional right not to be held in solitary confinement indefinitely—despite being sentenced to death. Defendant officials with the state Department of Corrections (DOC) have asked the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) to hear their appeal to the ruling, which could leave them liable for damages to Roy Lee Williams.

The prisoner, now 58, was 22 in July 1988 when he went looking for a white man to hurt and fatally shot construction worker James McDonald, 29. Four years later, he was sentenced to death for the crime and placed in solitary confinement in the Capital Case Unit (CCU), which is Pennsylvania’s death row. There he remained from 1993 until 2019, when the state agreed to end the practice in the settlement of another prisoner’s suit, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2020, p.59.] During Williams’ 26 years in a cell the size of a parking spot, he had an active death warrant just 37 days.

After the settlement and his release from solitary, Williams filed suit in March 2021, accusing the DOC’s then-Secretary John E. Wetzel and his successor, George Little, of violating his Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. He also made a claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. ch.126, § 12101 et seq., because his diagnosed mental health problems dated back to age 14, when he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for suicidal ideation.

The federal court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled for Defendants on all three claims, finding they were shielded from liability by qualified immunity (QI). The prisoner turned to Third Circuit, which affirmed dismissal of his Fourteenth Amendment claim but reversed the lower court and reinstated the other two.

The Court agreed that Defendants were entitled to QI on Williams’ Fourteenth Amendment claim—for his “automatic” placement in solitary confinement without due process—because it has never been determined that a condemned state prisoner has a procedural due process interest in the DOC’s decision to place him in solitary confinement.

However, the Court said that the right of “a death row prisoner, with a known preexisting serious mental illness not to be placed and held in prolonged solitary confinement—without penological justification—was clearly established” at the time that the DOC kept Williams confined in isolation.

In making such confinement decisions, “[t]he touchstone is the health of the inmate,” the Court said, quoting Young v. Quinlan, 960 F.2d 351 (3d Cir. 1992), which also held that “[t]he duration and conditions of segregated confinement cannot be ignored in deciding whether such confinement meets constitutional standards.” Here the Court pointed to a pair of letters to the DOC from the federal Department of Justice in 1994 and 2014 to hold that “subjecting prisoners with [serious mental illness (“SMI”)] to prolonged periods of solitary confinement under harsh conditions that are not necessary for legitimate security-related reasons…exposes them to an excessive and obvious risk of serious harm.”

The latter report, in turn, relied upon SCOTUS precedent laid out in Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730 (2002), and Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994), which the Court summarized in Clark v. Coupe, 55 F.4th 167 (3d Cir. 2022), as “the right of a prisoner known to be seriously mentally ill to not be placed in solitary confinement for an extended period of time by prison officials who were aware of, but disregarded, the risk of lasting harm posed by such conditions.”

Here Williams had been diagnosed with mental illness serious enough that mental health providers had noted his suicidal ideation at least a dozen years prior to his imprisonment in the DOC at age 26. These factors were known to the prison administrators, and Williams credibly complained that “his mental disability ha[d] [been] exacerbated due to the effects of prolonged isolation.” Thus, DOC officials should have “known that holding this death-row prisoner with preexisting serious mental illness in solitary confinement from 1993 to 2019 without penological justification violated the Eighth Amendment,” the Court declared. Finding them not entitled to QI, therefore, the Court reversed dismissal of Williams’ Eighth Amendment and ADA claims.

In his dissent, Judge Peter J. Phipps claimed that “[t]he Majority Opinion’s conclusion regarding the clarity of the right at issue also cannot be reconciled with this Court’s most recent solitary confinement decisions.” He argued that there was no case law specifically putting the DOC on notice that prolonged solitary confinement may be unconstitutional before a 2017 holding that prisoner Craig Williams’ rights were violated when he was held in isolation after his death sentence was vacated. Moreover, that decision—Williams v. Sec’y Pa. Dep’t of Corr., 848 F.3d 549 (3d Cir. 2017)—was based on a finding that his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights were violated, not the Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment which the majority found violated in Williams’ case.

Those arguments may convince SCOTUS to grant a writ of certiorari to hear the DOC’s appeal; if so, PLN will report on the outcome. Before the Third Circuit, Williams was represented by attorney Matthew J. Feldman of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project. See: Williams v. Sec’y Pa. Dep’t of Corr., 117 F.4th 503 (3d Cir. 2024).  

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login