United States v. Hinds County

District Court, S.D. Mississippi·Decided March 23, 2022·No. 3:16-cv-00489·Unknown

Opinion

ky 5 6 va 5 TN a □□ v | Bas A aiillly 2 ree

No. 3:16-CV-489-CWR-RHWR UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff, v. HINDS COUNTY, ET AL. Defendants.

SECOND ORDER OF CONTEMPT

Before CARLTON W. REEVES, District Judge. For the reasons that follow, Hinds County is again held in contempt of court. I. Factual and Procedural History The factual and procedural history of this case is, by now, well-known. A brief summary of the present situation will do. The United States brought this suit to end unconstitutional conditions of confinement at Hinds County’s Raymond De- tention Center. In 2016, the County agreed that the conditions

were unconstitutional and entered into a Consent Decree to remedy the problems. Since then, compliance has been elusive. Court-appointed in- dependent monitors report that Hinds County is in sustained or substantial compliance with only three of 92 requirements of the Consent Decree. Problems remain with staffing, use of force, basic living conditions, and over-detention, among other issues. Today’s Order, though, is about A-Pod. Among a long string of broken promises, Hinds County vowed to no longer house detainees in A-Pod. The February 2022 Evidentiary Hearing, however, revealed that not only are detainees still being housed in A-Pod, but that is where they will remain indefinitely. By way of brief background, pursuant to the Stipulated Or- der, the County is required to renovate all of the Pods used for housing. Many of these deadlines have long passed, and renovations are still not complete. Initially, B-Pod was cleared to complete its renovations, and the plan was to then transfer all detainees in A-Pod to B-Pod, and close A-Pod for good. See Docket no. 101 at 28 [hereinafter Fifteenth Monitoring Re- port]; see also Tr. vol. 1 at 93, 95-96. Recently, however, the County has decided otherwise. In August, it began to re-populate B-Pod before the renova- tions were complete. Since then, the County has decided to maintain at least two housing units in A-Pod indefinitely. See Tr. vol. 1 at 93, 95-96; see also Fifteenth Monitoring Report at 28. In violation of the Stipulated Order, the County has blown through every deadline related to A-Pod and has no plans to renovate it. See Fifteenth Monitoring Report at 28 (“Not only does the County have no plan for renovating A-Pod, but the 2 additional personnel required to operate any of A-Pod under direct supervision conditions is well beyond the current staff- ing level.”). To be clear, the County is out of compliance with a number of provisions in the Stipulated Order, but A-Pod is in a particu- larly egregious state. The living conditions, or lack thereof, and near-complete lack of supervision, have contributed to lawlessness in that part of the facility. This was plainly illustrated by a death in A-Pod on October 18, 2021. The Monitors described the events as follows: At about 0430 or 0500 in the morning, video footage showed the inmate being hit in the head by another inmate. A third inmate then stomped on his head several times. He was then dragged across the mezzanine. The video foot- age shows brief movement by the decedent and then none indicating that he was probably dead at that point but a time of death has not been established. He was eventually dragged back and propped in a sitting position and then later laid on a mat. He was not discovered by officers until 1:45, almost 9 hours later. Docket No. 96 at 3-4 [hereinafter October 27 Emergency Mon- itoring Report]. On November 23, 2021, concerned by a string of deaths and Jail Administrator Major Kathryn Bryan’s resignation, this Court issued an Order to Show Cause directing the County to explain why it should not be held in contempt of court and why a receivership should not be imposed to run RDC. 3 On February 4, 2022, the Court issued its First Order of Con- tempt. It found that Hinds County was patently non-compli- ant with more than two dozen provisions of the Consent De- cree. A remedy was withheld pending further proceedings. From February 14 to March 1, the Court held an Evidentiary Hearing regarding its Order to Show Cause and the County’s motion to terminate the July 2016 Consent Decree pursuant to the Prison Litigation Reform Act. At the hearing, there was substantial evidence concerning the plight of A-Pod. Testimony focused on the County’s decision to keep it opened, un-renovated, and not under direct super- vision, in violation of the Consent Decree and Stipulated Or- der. As Mr. David Parrish, one of the Court’s Monitors, testified, A-Pod is a disaster. It’s filthy; lights don’t work; locks don’t work; doors can’t be secured; cells don’t have lights inside them. Inmates since they can’t even close the doors, end up hanging blankets down in front of them to have make- shift privacy to their cells. Showers don’t work. Everything in the place is torn up. It’s just a very bad mess. There’s no fire extinguishers inside, of course, because the inmates control that place. There are no officers who work inside the housing units in Alpha. There are no fire hoses. There are not even fire hoses out in the corri- dors, around the control room in Alpha. That area is ill equipped across the board. 4 Tr. vol. 1 at 96. In this very hearing, the Sheriff himself admit- ted that A-Pod is unsafe. See Tr. vol. 10 at 1930 (“I would con- sider A-Pod to be unsafe.”). As instructed in Brown v. Plata, an institution that deprives detainees of the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities is “incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.” 563 U.S. 493, 511 (2011). And where officials fail to fulfill their obligations, “the courts have a responsibility to remedy the resulting Eighth Amendment violation. . . . Courts may not allow constitutional violations to continue simply because a remedy would involve intrusion into the realm of prison administration.” Id. This Order followed. II. Law A. Consent Decrees “A consent decree is akin to a contract yet also functions as an enforceable judicial order.” United States v. Chromalloy Am. Corp., 158 F.3d 345, 349 (5th Cir. 1998); see also Frew ex rel. Frew v. Hawkins, 540 U.S. 431, 437 (2004). Consent decrees are com- monly used to address ongoing constitutional violations in jail and prison cases. E.g., DePriest v. Walnut Grove Corr. Auth., No. 3:10-CV-663-CWR-FKB, 2015 WL 3795020, at *3 (S.D. Miss. June 10, 2015). Although “state and local authorities have primary responsi- bility for curing constitutional violations,” Hutto v. Finney, 437 U.S. 678, 687 (1978), “[f]ederal courts are not reduced to ap- proving consent decrees and hoping for compliance. Once en- tered, a consent decree may be enforced.” Frew, 540 U.S. at 440. 5 B. Civil Contempt “Civil . . . contempt is a sanction to enforce compliance with an order of the court.” McComb v. Jacksonville Paper Co., 336 U.S. 187, 191 (1949) (citations omitted). Courts have inherent power to enforce their orders. Shillitani v. United States, 384 U.S. 364, 370 (1966). As for consent decrees, courts have “the power to enforce and modify the terms of the decree and to penalize the noncomplier through contempt proceedings or the issuance of injunctive relief.” B.H. v. McDonald, 49 F.3d 294, 300 (7th Cir. 1995).

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

United States v. Hinds County, (S.D. Miss. 2022).

United States v. Hinds County (United States v. Hinds County) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

Related