State ordered to free inmate from solitary confinement of 36 years
A federal judge in Harrisburg has ordered the state prison system to release Arthur Johnson from solitary confinement, where he has spent the past 36 years.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner ruled Tuesday that prison concerns that Johnson might try to escape, as officials said he did in the 1970s and 1980s, are outweighed by his argument that the confinement amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
“The court has no crystal ball. It may well be that Johnson will endeavor to escape again,” the judge wrote. “But Mr. Johnson is 64 years old. And he will be subject to three decades of improvements in institutional security over the general population. The Department [of Corrections] has at its disposal a broad array of investigative and penological techniques to dissuade even the most entrenched escape artist. Surely, there are less restrictive means to monitor Mr. Johnson than solitary confinement.”
Johnson’s legal team is based in Pittsburgh. It includes Jones Day partners Tom Jones and Peter Laun along with two associates at the firm, Tarah Ackerman and Mark Zheng; Bret Grote and Dustin McDaniel from the Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center; and Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/news/state/2016/09/21/Judge-says-Pennsylvania-inmate-s-decades-in-solitary-to-end/stories/201609210150
