State prison officials violated agreement to end solitary confinement, judge rules

The state prisons department engaged in a "systemic misuse" of information provided by confidential informants to hold prisoners in solitary confinement and deny them parole in violation of a 2016 settlement agreement to stop indefinite use of the practice, a magistrate judge has ruled.

The order issued Friday detailed state prison officials using uncorroborated, confidential information to conduct what amounted to "meaningless disciplinary hearings" without providing prisoners the due process rights to contest the characterizations, among other violations.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Illman of Eureka extended plaintiff oversight of the agreement for a year in his order.

The defense argued the court lacks the jurisdiction to review the department's disciplinary findings and said it does not use fabricated or unreliable evidence to conduct unconstitutional disciplinary hearings.

"Plaintiffs offer no evidence of a substantial or material breach of a settlement term sufficient to trigger enforcement, and they fail to identify any contractual provision that permits the court to rewrite the agreed-upon terms," lead defense attorney Adriano Hrvatin of the California Department of Justice Hrvatin wrote in his case.

However, plaintiffs' attorney Rachel Meeropol of the Center for Constitutional Rights. said, "There's overwhelming evidence that it's not just one case here and another there of them getting it wrong. We're seeing it over and over again in prisons at different staff levels. There's clearly no adequate controls to ensure it's not misused."

The two sides reached a landmark settlement agreement ending indeterminate sentences in isolated security housing units in state prisons in 2016.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is "assessing the court's order," said Deputy Press Secretary Terry Thornton.

Plaintiffs' attorneys are seeking the appointment of a special master to review solitary confinement practices. They also plan to petition the judge to mandate the release of prisoners, whose accounts are detailed in their complaint, from isolated detention, according to Meeropol. Ashker et al. v. Newsom et al., 09-CV5796 (N.D. Cal., filed Dec. 9, 2009).

Prior to the settlement agreement, prison officials would use confidential informants to validate gang affiliation and sentence individuals to solitary confinement as well as deny them parole, according to Meeropol. She said prisons now use confidential informants to accuse prisoners of disciplinary offenses to achieve the same result.

"What they've done as a way around that change is start to use the same impossible-to-challenge confidential information to accuse individuals of infractions," she said. "They're sending the same individuals back to solitary, and they have no way of challenging it."

Plaintiffs argued the Department of Corrections and prison authorities continue to violate the settlement agreement by failing to ensure the accuracy of information by confidential informants, refusing to return prisoners to the general prison population and using unreliable gang validations to deny class members a fair opportunity to seek parole.

In one example from the order, a prisoner was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder based on a single informant identifying him as a gang member.

"Systemic due process violations are manifest in CDCR's misuse of confidential information in disciplinary proceedings, resulting in a return of class members to solitary confinement, and a frustration of the purpose of the settlement agreement," Illman wrote.

Illman said the court is not reviewing the department's findings to affirm or reverse them but to scrutinize evidence concerning the allegedly improper hearings, which was included as a provision in the settlement agreement.

And while the judge conceded prison officials conducted periodic reviews of individuals identified as active gang members, which was used as evidence to keep them in solitary confinement, Illman found the prisoners were being deprived of "the opportunity to be heard at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner."

The legal action was part of a larger movement to change solitary confinement practices. The named plaintiffs in the suit include several leaders of the 2013 statewide hunger strike in which roughly 30,000 inmates protested.

"Research still confirms what this court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price," wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in a June 2015 opinion, urging courts to scrutinize prolonged isolated detention. "Solitary confinement literally drives men mad," he testified to Congress.

Pelican Bay State Prison, which is where the named plaintiffs are being held; the California Department of Justice; and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association did not respond to requests for comment.