Supreme Court dismisses case over outdoor exercise for solitary prisoners

The Supreme Court ruled on an outraged dissent from the three liberal members on Monday rejected an appeal from an Illinois inmate in solitary confinement who said prolonged deprivation of outdoor exercise was cruel and unusual punishment.

As is the court’s practice, the summary order denying review was not reasoned.

In dissent, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote that the inmate, Michael Johnson, was isolated in squalid conditions at the Pontiac Correctional Center for nearly three years.

“During that time, Johnson spent nearly every hour of his existence in a windowless, constantly lit cell the size of a parking lot,” Judge Jackson wrote. “His cell was poorly ventilated, resulting in unbearable heat and noxious odors. The area was also unsanitary, often caked with human waste.”

“And because Pontiac officials would not give Johnson cleaning supplies unless he purchased them from the commissary, he was often forced to clean up that mess with his bare hands,” Judge Jackson continued. “Johnson was only allowed to leave his cell to shower once a week, for ten short minutes.”

But none of that was the central issue in the case, Johnson vs. PrenticeNo. 22-693.

“In addition to the typical hardships associated with solitary confinement,” Judge Jackson wrote, “prison officials completely deprived Johnson of exercise for almost the entirety of his incarceration in Pontiac.”

Mr. Johnson suffered from what the corrections system recognized as a serious mental illness. He broke numerous prison rules, disobeyed guards’ orders, spat at them and damaged property.

As punishment for these violations, prison authorities took away the hour of exercise that prisoners in solitary confinement generally received five days a week, usually in a small, secure cage outside.

“Each yard restriction was imposed for a period of between 30 and 90 days, but the restrictions were stacked in such a way that Johnson received a total of more than three years of yard restrictions,” Judge Jackson wrote. ‘The cramped confines of Johnson’s cell prevented him from exercising there. So for three years Johnson had no opportunity to stretch his limbs or breathe fresh air.”

“The consequences of such a long period of abstinence from exercise were predictably serious,” Judge Jackson continued. “Most strikingly, Johnson’s mental condition rapidly deteriorated. He suffered from hallucinations, denounced his own flesh, urinated and defecated on himself, and smeared feces all over his body and cell. Johnson became suicidal and sometimes committed misconduct in the hope that prison guards would beat him to death.”

Mr Johnson, who was serving a prison sentence for a home invasion and assault, was eventually transferred to a specialist mental health unit where his condition improved.

Most federal appeals courts have said prisoners have a constitutional right to regular outdoor exercise.

Judge Anthony M. Kennedy, who retired in 2018, wrote while he was a federal appeals court judge that prisoners in solitary confinement had a right to fresh air.

‘Some form of regular outdoor exercise is extremely important for the psychological and physical well-being of prisoners’ he wrote in 1979 before a unanimous three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. “It was cruel and unusual punishment for a prisoner to be locked up for a period of years without the opportunity to go outside, apart from occasional court appearances, interviews with lawyers and hospital appointments.”

In Mr. Johnson’s case, a divided three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit ruled that denying him the opportunity to practice for 90 days straight as punishment for serious misconduct did not violate the Eighth Amendment. “That’s not it either,” Judge Diane S. Sykes wrote for the majority“a violation of the Eighth Amendment to ‘stagger’ such sentences.”

Mr. Johnson, represented by the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, asked the full Seventh Circuit to rehear his appeal. The court rejected him with a tie, with five judges in favor and five against.

If you do not agree with the decision not to rehear the case, Judge Diane P. Wood Prison officials should no more deprive prisoners of movement than starve or torture them.

“No one is saying that a deprivation of 24 hours, or even a deprivation of two or three weeks, automatically violates the Eighth Amendment, any more than you would say that the Constitution entitles Johnson to a state-of-the-art gym,” Judge Wood wrote. “But somewhere between three weeks and two years the constitutional limit is exceeded.”