By John Monk
The State
COLUMBIA, S.C. — After years of contentious litigation and negotiations, a tentative agreement has been reached that could sharply upgrade the treatment of an estimated 3,500 mentally ill inmates at the S.C. Department of Corrections.
The agreement in the long-running class action lawsuit is between the South Carolina-based Protection and Advocacy for People with Disabilities, Inc. and the Department of Corrections, according to a joint press release Wednesday by both parties.
A major feature of the proposed settlement, which still must be approved by a judge, would create an independent process to monitor implementation of the plan that parties to the lawsuit say would transform the culture and performance of SCDC personnel who deal with offenders with serious mental illnesses.
“This is possibly an historic day for justice, one we have been seeking for a decade,” said Gloria Prevost, executive director of Protection and Advocacy for People with Disabilities, Inc, in a prepared statement. “For years we met with stone cold resistance to anything resembling fairness and justice. It was only after Governor Haley appointed Bryan Stirling SCDC director that progress was made. Our many discussions convinced us that the new leadership genuinely desired to do the right thing.”
“This settlement marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another with changes in culture, policy and procedure at SCDC. We will continue the movement towards rehabilitation and comprehensive care for a safer South Carolina,” added Bryan P. Stirling, prison director, in a prepared statement.
The agreement establishes measurements that have strict timetables and will be supervised by a panel of independent national experts. The test for satisfaction of the standards is that SCDC would have to achieve and maintain compliance with each component of the plan for at least 18 months.
SCDC will have four years to implement the remedial guidelines.
“This is a critical agreement whose implementation can end a dark chapter in South Carolina history in which offenders with serious mental illnesses were subjected to abject brutality and neglect, much of which was captured on video and shocked the nation when shown in open court,” a press release approved by the parties said.
“The evidence in this case has proved that inmates have died in the South Carolina Department of Corrections for lack of basic mental health care, and hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious injury, mental decompensation and profound, permanent mental illness,” Judge Baxley wrote after the trial in 2012.
There will be a one-time cost of $1.7 million for facility upgrades and $7 million annually for mental health staffing, which is being phased in over three years, a press release said.
Wednesday’s announcement comes more than two years after S.C. Judge Michael Baxley, after a non-jury trial, found that the state Department of Corrections was so substandard in treating mentally ill inmates that the treatment was unconstitutional and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
“Evidence in this case has proved that inmates have died in the S.C. Department of Corrections lack of basic mental health care,” Judge Michael Baxley wrote in his 45-page order, filed in January 2014.
Baxley, of Hartsville, called the lawsuit “the most troubling” of the 70,000 cases he has handled in his 14 years on the bench.
“Hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental decompensation, and profound, permanent mental illness,” wrote Baxley. He cited numerous individual cases as evidence of “a system that is inherently flawed in many respects, understaffed, underfunded and inadequate.”
He found that evidence in the case showed that for more than 10 years, the state prison system has known “its mental health program is systemically deficient and exposes seriously mentally ill inmates to a substantial risk of serious harm.”
The settlement had its origins in a class action lawsuit filed in 2005 in circuit court in Richland County. Several prison inmates –identified only by their initials as well as Protection and Advocacy for People with Disabilities – brought the lawsuit.
“We are now eight years into this litigation. Rather than accept the obvious at some point and come forward in a meaningful way to try and improve its mental healthy system, Defendants have fought this case tooth and nail – on the facts, on the law, on the constitutional issues,” Baxley wrote.
“The hundreds of thousands of tax dollars spent defending this lawsuit, at trial and most likely now on appeal, would be better expended to improve mental health services delivery at SCDC.”
It could not be learned how much taxpayer money was spent fighting the lawsuit. Prison officials hired the Columbia law firm of Davidson & Lindemann to defend the agency. Agency private lawyers had contended at trial that any abuses cited by the plaintiffs were extreme and that the court did not have the authority to tell the state prison system what to do.
The lawsuit did not seek damages, but only to force the state prison department to develop and fund a “reasonable and adequate system for the mental health care of inmates suffering from mental illness,” according to a complaint in the case.
There were no immediate estimates on how much it would cost the state to upgrade treatment for seriously mentally ill inmates.
The judge’s order marks a clear turning point of a 11-year legal saga for prisoners and Protection and Advocacy for People With Disabilities, who brought the suit, as well as for Columbia’s Nelson Mullins law firm, which has handled the case for free.
The case is apparently the most sweeping legal victory for inmates’ rights in South Carolina since the case of inmate Gary Wayne Nelson vs. Leeke in the early 1980s.
At that time, Nelson’s class action lawsuit in federal court forced the overcrowded state prison system to sharply upgrade conditions in sleeping areas, build new prisons, limit overcrowding, improve staffing and upgrade health services, fire safety and sanitation. Following that lawsuit, the state spent more than $200 million to build five prisons and make other substantial upgrades.
The state had long resisted improvements before the Nelson verdict.
The mental illness case actually began in 2002, when Nelson Mullins lawyers were approached by the Protection and Advocacy group and the Death Penalty Resources Center, both of which had clients suffering from mental illness who were in the prison system.
In 2005, Nelson Mullins filed suit on behalf of several inmates and the Protection and Advocacy group.
In 2012, the case went to trial. Over five weeks, some 15 inmates and three experts testified for the plaintiffs, and another dozen or so testified for the Department of Corrections.
Over the years, Nelson Mullins estimates, its lawyers and paralegals spent at least 43,000 hours on the case – time that would have cost about $9 million.
Copyright 2016 The State