Bel v. Hall

• Decision Date: 24 March 1975
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 73-1654-G.
• Citation: 392 F. Supp. 274
• Parties: James V. BEL, Jr., et al., Plaintiffs, v. Frank A. HALL et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Massachusetts

392 F. Supp. 274

James V. BEL, Jr., et al., Plaintiffs, v. Frank A. HALL et al., Defendants.

Civ. A. No. 73-1654-G.

United States District Court, D. Massachusetts.

March 24, 1975.

James M. Pool, Boston, Mass., for plaintiffs.

Dennis LaCroix, Asst. Atty. Gen., Boston, Mass., for defendants.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER ADOPTING MASTER'S REPORT

GARRITY, District Judge.

Since the filing of the report of the United States Magistrate sitting as a special master,¹ dated September 17, 1974, the court received objections to the report filed by both parties and a supplemental memorandum on the objections from the special master dated February 21, 1975. At a hearing on the objections, plaintiffs withdrew objections filed on their behalf and counsel for the defendants requested an opportunity to file a further submission in support of the defendants' objections. This was received in the form of a letter from Assistant Attorney General Lacroix dated March 14, 1975. Upon consideration of the special master's reports and defendants' objections and oral argument and memoranda, the court orders, for reasons which follow, that the master's report be adopted and that confinement in the BX Unit of the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater under existing conditions is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

The standard for reviewing the master's findings of fact appears in Rule 53(e)(2), Fed.R.Civ.P. They are to be accepted unless clearly erroneous. The master's findings in this case rest not only upon testimony presented to him during an evidentiary hearing which lasted for seven days but also upon three separate visits which he made to the institution. Many of the defendants' objections to the master's findings are irrelevant at this stage of the proceedings because applicable to portions of the master's report in which he found no violations of the plaintiffs' civil rights, e. g., medical treatment. The court understands the desire of the defendants, who are public officials, to enter in the record objections to any criticisms of the institution which they deem to be unwarranted. However, the master's ultimate finding of an Eighth Amendment violation rests entirely upon unsanitary conditions at the institution and inadequate heating. Therefore, as to claims of the plaintiffs on which he found in favor of the defendants a controversy no longer exists in the light of plaintiffs' having withdrawn their objections to the master's report.

Turning to the determinative findings of the master as to sanitation and heating, some of the master's findings may be incomplete or inaccurate in minor respects, e. g., describing a sink as a "trough" and describing as inoperable shower facilities which, though out of order, could be repaired. However, in all major respects they were supported by evidence and not clearly erroneous. The crucial findings regarding sanitation were the insufficiency of toilets available to inmates in the BX Unit during the daytime and the fact that they were required to use chamber pots while confined to their cells during the nighttime. Regarding heating, the master concluded that the defendants were unable, because of the age and unreliability of the heating system, to provide adequate heat. In this regard the superintendent testified that it was necessary for institutional personnel to continually improvise to keep heating available and that some areas were almost totally without heat for several days; and an ex-inmate testified that there was sometimes no heat in the so-called shanty area.

Since the conclusion of the hearings before the master, the prospects of heating the BX Unit adequately have improved substantially because it is no longer necessary to provide heat to the old state hospital unit and it will not be necessary in the near future to provide heat in the treatment center unit, both of which were heated from the same source as the BX Unit during the period to which the evidence before the master related. Therefore plaintiffs' claims about inadequate heat may be satisfied without further order of the court. But for the sanitation problems, then, there would be no occasion for the court to adopt the master's ultimate conclusion of unconstitutionality and to order that further hearings be conducted toward determining a suitable remedy.

Whether the unsanitary conditions at the BX Unit constitute cruel and unusual punishment is a close question. The standard is well established: basic humanity in the eyes of informed contemporary society. It is an evolving standard, Trop v. Dulles, 1958, 356 U.S. 86, 78 S.Ct. 590, 2 L.Ed.2d 630, and is subjective, Furman v. State of Georgia, 1972, 408 U.S. 238, 92 S.Ct. 2726, 33 L. Ed.2d 346, Mr. Justice Marshall concurring at 362, 92 S.Ct. at 2789. In...