The Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections is defending the estimated $2.9 million the state is spending to defend against a lawsuit alleging that confinement policies at a prison in Claiborne Parish violate the Eighth Amendment.
The federal case brought by Bruce Charles and other inmates at the David Wade Correctional Center was originally filed in 2018 in the Western District of Louisiana. The plaintiffs allege that the center’s lack of adequate mental health care facilities and long periods of solitary confinement violate the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments.
“This prolonged period of time on lockdown in the punitive and harsh conditions … and without access to a functioning mental health care system operate independently and in combination to create a substantial risk of harm to the men at David Wade,” a plaintiffs’ motion filed last year in the legal proceedings states.
A description of conditions at the prison by the Louisiana ACLU, which is supporting the litigation, says hundreds of inmates have been held in their cells for about 23 hours per day, with little to no contact with others.
“The prolonged confinement and sensory deprivation causes and exacerbates serious mental illness,” the ACLU description says.
Although the corrections department declined to comment on the details of the case, state officials have indicated that the spending on private attorneys to defend against the class-action lawsuit was necessary.
“Prisoner civil rights law is a highly specialized area of litigation, and few attorneys have the requisite expertise required to defend these types of cases – especially large-scale class-action proceedings such as this matter which involve multiple expert witnesses and millions of pages of documents,” Ken Pastorick, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety & Corrections, told the Louisiana Record in an email.
The department lacked the needed legal experts and resources to manage the lawsuit, Pastorick said.
“Thus, it was necessary to hire well-qualified and experienced counsel with consultation and approval from the attorney general,” he said. “The chosen firm has the requisite skill, knowledge and expertise to produce a positive outcome for the state of Louisiana.”
A bench trial examining the plaintiffs’ allegations is currently under way. Assisting the department’s general counsel in its defense against the allegations are four Butler Snow attorneys from the law firm’s Baton Rouge office, according to court documents describing the Zoom trial’s proceedings.