In The News

Texas prisons lawsuit

06 Aug “The Definition of Cruel and Unusual Punishment:” Amended Lawsuit Seeks Court Order Forcing Texas Prisons to House People in Safe Temperatures

Posted at 20:31h in In The News by

Trial started just this week in the United States District Court Western District of Texas as Holland, Holland Edwards & Grossman LLC, Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell LLP, Winston & Strawn LLP, the Law Office of Jodi Cole, and Edwards Law expand the suit that Bernhardt (“Bernie”) Tiede filed against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) in September 2023, asking the court to require TDCJ to house the nearly 130,000 inmates in the TDCJ system in safe temperatures below 85 degrees.

Just last year, 65-year-old Bernie Tiede suffered an acute medical crisis and likely Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) (also known as a “mini stroke”) due to allegedly heat related causes brought on by the TDCJ’s refusal to act on the relentless triple degree heat experienced by Tiede and other incarcerated individuals housed in their facilities. Only after the Court forced TDCJ’s hand was the 65-year-old transferred to an air-conditioned cell.

Building on Tiede’s case, the amended lawsuit alleges that “Texas prisoners are being cooked to death.” In the midst of an oppressive heat wave, the overwhelming majority of TDCJ facilities (approximately 70%) lack air conditioning in the housing units, resulting in an astounding 85,000 of the 130,000 individuals incarcerated in Texas prisons living without air conditioning.

The National Library of Medicine asserts that “rising temperatures and heatwaves increase mortality.” And as global climate warming launches Texas into some of the hottest summers on record, this correlation has witnessed a surge in inmate mortality. In the summer of 2023, whose heat averages have been trumped only by the record-breaking year of 2021, the Texas Attorney General’s Custodial Death Reports documented over a hundred deaths in Texas prisons – many of which were alleged to be heat related. That same summer, some TDCJ units were reported to reach over 149° Fahrenheit.

The Texas Newsroom recently acquired the autopsies of nine inmates named in the lawsuit against the state. According to NPR’s Lauren McGaughy, “At least three mention heat as a possible contributing factor in their deaths, but Texas prison officials reject that explanation.” As alleged in the report, one inmate died with a core body temperature of 106.9 degrees, and another with a 107.5 degree body temperature. Yet TDCJ continues to downplay the role of heat in inmate mortality, not only insisting that heat was not the “primary cause of death” in the aforementioned reports, but that there “have been no heat-related deaths in the state’s prisons since 2012” (emphasis added).

County jails in Texas must be kept between 65 and 85 degrees. The amended lawsuit discussed herein implores the court to order that TDCJ facilities be required to do the same. After a promising bill that proposed installing air conditioning in state prisons passed the Texas House and died in the more conservative Senate, this lawsuit seeks overdue redress for the hundreds of lives already lost at the hands of preventable and inhumane heat exposure in TDCJ prisons.

Marci Simmons, former Lane Murray inmate and current leader of advocacy group Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, explains how “the water in the toilet, if you flush it several times, it gets cool. And you have people who scrub their toilet out and put toilet water on the floor, trying to get some relief.” In what has been called a “humanitarian crisis”, cooling down TDCJ facilities is not a matter of improvement, it is a matter of survival.

You can read more about this case by accessing the following media links: