US Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit by Texas Inmate Held 27 Years in Solitary Confinement

Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on April 23, 2021. Seated from left: Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Standing from left: Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. (Erin Schaff/Pool/Getty Images)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a Texas prisoner who was convicted of robbery but argued officials violated the constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment by submitting him to spend 27 years in solitary confinement.

Dennis Wayne Hope, the inmate, appealed a lower court ruling that argued he did not show whether his prolonged stay in solitary confinement violated the Constitution’s 8th Amendment. Hope is still in prison but was released from solitary last year.

In an unsigned order, the court turned away Hope’s appeal. None of the justices issued a dissent.

After being convicted in 1990 of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, he tried to escape prison in both 1990 and 1994 before he was sent to solitary confinement. Court papers that he submitted to the Supreme Court stated that he spent 22 to 24 hours per day in a small cell and suffered from “hallucinations and thoughts of suicide” as a result.

“Hope’s solitary confinement violated the Eighth Amendment because it was, objectively, a sufficiently serious deprivation and because prison officials, subjectively, acted with deliberate indifference to that deprivation (one defendant, for example, knew of the effects long-term isolation had on Mr. Hope yet refused to order his release from solitary confinement),” court papers said. It noted that the state relied on Hope’s escape more than two decades ago in justifying his solitary confinement punishment.

The 8th Amendment states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

John F. Stinneford, a law professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law,  wrote in an amicus brief that common use of solitary confinement is a relatively new feature within America’s prison system.

“This practice has not enjoyed anything close to ‘long usage,’” the professor’s brief stated (pdf). “It was tried for a few decades in the nineteenth century but was then largely abandoned because it resulted in a high prevalence of severe harm to prisoners—including insanity, self-mutilation, and suicide.”

In 2020, a federal judge in Texas dismissed Hope’s lawsuit and said he failed to bring arguments that rose “to the level of a violation of the Eighth Amendment.” The New Orleans-based U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 agreed with the judge’s assertion in 2021, triggering Hope’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

Hope’s “allegations against the named defendants fail to show the defendants’ actions rose to the level of the deliberate indifference,” federal Judge Ron Clark wrote. Meanwhile, he did not show “either a retaliatory motive or causation regarding his claims against the defendants” and that he has failed to “produce either direct evidence of motivation or allege a chronology of events from which retaliation may plausibly be inferred.”

The judge also factored Hope’s “propensity to commit violent crimes, as well as a history of possession and use of firearms, impersonating a public servant or security officer, and escaping from custody on two separate occasions” in rejecting his lawsuit.

“Plaintiff also complains of the defendants’ failure to follow prison rules and regulations. However, the failure to follow prison regulations, rules or procedures does not rise to the level of a constitutional violation,” Clark’s order said. “Therefore, plaintiff’s allegations fail to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.

Later, the 5th Appeals Court decided that “long-term solitary confinement is not per se cruel and unusual” and made reference to a Supreme Court ruling that stating that “the length of isolation sentences was not considered in a vacuum.”

After Hope filed his lawsuit, officials in Texas started a process that allowed Hope to transfer out of solitary confinement in June before he was released into the prison’s general population, reported Reuters. The state of Texas had asked the Supreme Court to render Hope’s case moot as he’s no longer being held in solitary confinement.

After the Supreme Court’s order Monday, Hope’s attorneys expressed disappointment.

“We are disappointed that the Supreme Court did not take up this case,” lawyer Easha Anand of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center said in a statement. “Hundreds of people in Texas alone have spent double-digit numbers of years in solitary confinement—a practice that the Supreme Court over the centuries has variously called ‘perilously close to a penal tomb,’ something that will ‘inevitably bring prisoners to the edge of madness, perhaps to madness itself,’ and a ‘further terror even over and above a death sentence.’”

She added: “The idea of putting prisoners in solitary confinement for decades on end would have been anathema to the founders, and we believe that the Supreme Court must someday take up a case to make that clear.”