PHILADELPHIA -- A man who spent 26 years in solitary confinement despite a history of mental illness can sue Pennsylvania prison officials for alleged cruel and unusual punishment, a U.S. appeals court said in reviving the man’s lawsuit.
Roy Lee Williams spent nearly all of his time alone from 1993 until 2019, when a legal settlement led the state to end the practice of routinely housing death-row inmates in solitary confinement. Williams had been sentenced to death for killing a construction worker in Philadelphia in 1988. An Associated Press story on the 1992 trial reported that Williams, who is Black, had said he wanted to kill a white person because a white person had put him in jail in a robbery case.
He was sentenced to death row at 26. His mental health problems date back to at least age 14, when he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility amid suicidal ideation, according to his lawsuit. Prison officials knew of his history of severe mental health and cognition problems at least by 1996, Senior U.
S. Circuit Judge Theodore McKee wrote in the 2-1 ruling issued Friday, which reversed a lower court ruling. While state officials argued that the Department of Corrections was not on notice before 2019 that its solitary confinement practices were unconstitutional, McKee found they were.
He cited a 25-page letter outlining needed reforms the agency received in 2014 from the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The 2014 DOJ report concisely packaged much of the relevan.