RALEIGH, N.C. (Legal Newsline) - The North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the denial of a class action on behalf of thousands of state prisoners subjected to solitary confinement, saying the wide variety in housing conditions and length of stay prevented a court from deciding one single issue for everybody.
The court’s Nov. 4 decision drew a lengthy dissent from two justices. The unsuccessful plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and supported by civil-rights groups including the NAACP and the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
Rocky Dewalt and other inmates filed the class action in October 2019, seeking to certify a class of present and future prisoners assigned to one of five “restrictive housing classifications.” They claimed all five classifications presented the same risk of harm and violated the North Carolina Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
A trial judge rejected their bid for class certification in February 2021, ruling they had failed to meet the test of identifying a single issue that could be resolved through litigation as required under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Walmart v. Dukes. The court also ruled the class representatives were inadequate as they weren’t typical of other prisoners subjected to different conditions.
The North Carolina Supreme Court agreed, ruling the plaintiffs had failed to meet the test for class certification under Dukes. The plaintiffs cited four studies to show that all class members faced a risk of harm. But only two studies concerned the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and only one addressed solitary confinement, the court said. One study that associated restrictive housing with “an increased risk of death during community reentry” described correlation, not causation, and didn’t address confounding factors that might be the real cause, the trial court found.
Further, each type of restrictive housing “serves a distinct purpose,” the Supreme Court said. The trial court didn’t abuse its discretion by concluding those different purposes precluded a finding of a common issue to resolve, it ruled.
Finally, the plaintiffs claimed inmates in solitary confinement face the same risk of substantial harm within 15 days, but the average length of stay in the least restrictive categories was only eight days, while the most restrictive averaged 154 days.
The appeals court said the variation in reasons for solitary confinement, procedural safeguards and lack of evidence was enough to support the denial of class certification. It didn’t address the trial court’s other reasons for denying certification.
Justice Anita Earls dissented, joined by Justice Robin Hudson. She said the trial court improperly required the plaintiffs “to prove their case on the merits in the guise of determining a common legal issue.” Citing former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who quoted Dostoyevsky in turn, she wrote: “The degree of civilization in a society can by judged by entering its prisons.”
“Because thousands of people are subjected to solitary confinement each day under the same statewide policy, there are thousands of potential class members, all of whom face nearly identical conditions,” she wrote. “The class here is not based on the individual circumstances of each plaintiff, instead it is based on a solitary confinement policy that subjects people to twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day in a cell, for an unlimited number of days.”