NY Prison Authorities Denied Black Man Fair Review after 14 years in Solitary Confinement

Prison officials failed to give a man who’d spent 14 years in solitary confinement a “meaningful review” of his detention conditions as they kept him in administrative segregation for another five years, the Second Circuit said in a split ruling Friday. 

From 2000 to 2014, Tyrone Walker was in solitary confinement as punishment for an attack on corrections officers. When the term ended in 2014, he was immediately placed in a nearly identical form of imprisonment, having been deemed a threat to safety at the prison — despite his lack of involvement in any violent incident since the 2000 attack. 

When that switch happened, according to the federal appeals court, due process requirements afforded Walker a more thorough analysis of his disposition. 

The court took no view as to whether Walker, now 56 and serving a life prison sentence following his 1994 conviction on two murders and an armed robbery, should have been moved into the general population during the five-year period of administrative segregation. 

“But Walker was entitled to meaningful process assessing that question,” U.S. Circuit Judge Susan Carney wrote in the majority opinion, and “a reasonable jury assessing the record could find that the reviews that his continued solitary confinement received were not constitutionally meaningful.” [MORE]