Dewalt et al. v. Hooks

After spending years locked away in solitary confinement in North Carolina prisons, four people brought a class action lawsuit, alleging the practice violated the state constitution’s ban on cruel or unusual punishment. The MacArthur Justice Center represents amici, who argued that prison conditions violate the state constitution when they are objectively harsh or excessive in light on longstanding practices, regardless of whether the plaintiffs can prove that officials knew it would cause them harm. 

Rocky Dewalt, Robert Parham, Anthony McGee, and Shawn Bonnett – who spent years isolated in solitary confinement – sued the Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety for violating the North Carolina State Constitution’s analogue of the Eighth Amendment right against cruel or unusual punishment under the North Carolina Constitution.  

According to the ACLU of North Carolina, who represents the plaintiffs, approximately 3000 people were being held in some form of solitary confinement in the state as of July 2019 – hundreds for months or years. The harms of solitary confinement are widely accepted, with even the defendants acknowledging that it causes severe psychiatric harm that is “toxic to brain functioning.” 

The case reached the North Carolina Supreme Court, which  considered whether claims challenging conditions of confinement under the state constitution’s ban on cruel or unusual punishment should be analyzed under  the subjective deliberate indifference standard applied by federal courts considering claims under the federal Eighth Amendment – which requires people challenging solitary confinement must prove that the officials responsible knew that the conditions would cause harm – or an objective standard that does not require proving culpable intent.  

The MacArthur Justice Center filed an amicus  brief  on behalf of scholars Sharon Dolovich, Alexander A. Reinert, Margo Schlanger, and John F. Stinneford, who, through their extensive research, have concluded that the federal courts erred in adopting the subjective standard because it is impracticable to administer, causes cruel and unusual conditions to proliferate, and incentivizes undesirable conduct by jail and prison officials.  

The brief explains that the subjective standard is a relatively recent innovation rather than a long-settled doctrine, and that a recent Supreme Court decision, Kingsley v. Hendrickson, may preview a return to an objective approach. More fundamentally, the brief explained that state courts need not mirror federal courts in the interpretation of their own constitutions and urged the North Carolina Supreme Court to adopt an objective standard for conditions-of-confinement claims arising under its constitution.  

UPDATE

The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s order denying class certification. It did not address the question of the proper standard, leaving open the possibility that an objective standard could be applied to conditions-of-confinement claims brought under the North Carolina Constitution.