It rained heavily the night before the retaking of New York’s Attica Correctional Facility.
A guard, William Quinn, had been killed.
The men on the D yard waited for the inevitable.
“We are men,” said L.D.
Barkley, one of the leaders of the revolt.
“We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.”
Terrified, the men desperately searched for cover.
One prisoner was shot 12 times at close range by two separate guns.
A paramedic later testified he saw a trooper execute a prisoner begging for help at point-blank range.
If they moved, troopers beat them and threatened to shoot them where they lay.
They struck prisoners with clubs and hurled racist epithets.
Many prisoners stumbled to the ground and ended up crawling on pavement littered with shattered glass.
Once inside, officers threatened some prisoners with castration.
Others they forced to play Russian roulette with live ammunition or lined up against the wall in mock executions.
In the intervening period, a series of new laws and legal standards changed the landscape for incarcerated plaintiffs.
The judges of the 2nd Circuit disagreed.
But that was not enough, without evidence that those elements were designed to wantonly inflict pain.
If prisoners are harming themselves or another person, for example, quick intervention can be critical.
In the face of these institutional failures, federal courts have declined to step into the breach.
Of these, 208 cases involved claims of excessive force.
Dozens of plaintiffs in BI’s sample said they were beaten while immobilized in restraints.
Another dozen said they were subjected to racist abuse or threatened with retaliatory violence.
Multiple people said they were sexually abused by prison staff, including two while in restraints.
All of these plaintiffs lost their cases.
Judges rarely questioned the authority of prison staff to determine when a use of force was justified.
Sixty-one of the excessive-force cases, almost a third, settled.
Only one of the excessive-force plaintiffs, Jordan Branstetter, won his case in court.
The Hawaii Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not respond to requests for comment.
None of those cases involved an admission of wrongdoing.
Here’s what it takes.
The officers said they thought Lightfoot had posed “a serious threat to staff safety.”
‘“The UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich discussed themalicious-and-sadistic standardin a 2022 Harvard Law Review article.
“That this standard is intrinsically defendant friendly,” she wrote, “is undeniable.”
“The Supreme Court has told judges not to micro-manage the force necessary to quell such volatile situations.”
Judges dismissed other cases on technicalities.
The guard refused, White said, then grew irate at how much time White was taking.
The Michigan Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.
Jacobs said one officer screamed, “I will fucking kill you.”
Because Jacobs had missed a deadline to appeal his internal prison grievance, O’Hearndecidedin favor of the defendants.
That’s nearly twice a day.
An officer heard him plead, “I can’t breathe.”
Blinded and panicked, his throat burning from the pepper spray, Kelley later said, he lost consciousness.
Kelley sued and lost.
Judges also sided with guards who injured prisoners they didn’t perceive to be resisting.
Guards ordered all prisoners to the ground.
Carter immediately complied, dropping to his stomach, arms spread-eagled.
Both shots missed the men fighting.
Like Kelley, Carter lost his case.
That’s how one California prisoner’s case failed before the District Court for the Eastern District of California.
District Judge Jennifer Thurston agreed and dismissed the case.
Cases against corrections officers run into another set of challenges under the doctrine of “qualified immunity.”
The standard has drawn national attention as anobstacleto police accountability.
That day, a prisoner named Marquieth Jackson threw water at a corrections officer passing by his solitary-confinement cell.
Incensed, the officer brandished his pepper spray and threatened Jackson.
He then spun and blasted a prisoner in a nearby cell in the face at point-blank range.
McCoy denied throwing anything and said Alamu attacked him in anger “for no reason at all.”
Alamu did not respond to requests for comment by phone and mail.
“How could any guard not know that an unprovoked use of pepper spray is unlawful?”
Gregg Costa, one of the appeals court judges, wrote in a furious dissent.
The cases BI reviewed contain multiple claims of retaliation against prisoners who decide to complain.
“You fuck with Padilla,” she quoted one officer saying, “You fuck with me.”
The prisoner, Ronnie Price, suffered a pulmonary embolism and died two days later.
“My back was broken.
“I have night terrors at least 4-5 times a week.
I also cannot get that piss and shit taste out of my mouth.”
He said he reported the incident but believed no internal investigation had taken place.
“I pray you hey take action cause my life is endangered,” he wrote in one letter.
Still, his complaint languished.
(The case remains ongoing.)
It remains the only case decided under the malicious-and-sadistic standard to spark significant prison reforms in the state.
The special master’s mandate has long since expired.
These patterns had been long documented.
If the courts were expected to provide a backstop, they failed.
