Berch v. Stahl

• Decision Date: 25 March 1974
• Docket Number: No. C-C-72-53,C-C-72-181,C-C-72-220.,C-C-72-53
• Citation: 373 F. Supp. 412
• Parties: James Everett BERCH, Plaintiff, v. Sheriff, Donald W. STAHL, et al. Defendants. Ronald GIBSON, Plaintiff, v. Donald STAHL, Defendant. Dewey LUCAS, Plaintiff, v. Donald STAHL, Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Western District of North Carolina

373 F. Supp. 412

James Everett BERCH, Plaintiff, v. Sheriff, Donald W. STAHL, et al. Defendants.

Ronald GIBSON, Plaintiff, v. Donald STAHL, Defendant.

Dewey LUCAS, Plaintiff, v. Donald STAHL, Defendant.

Nos. C-C-72-53, C-C-72-181, C-C-72-220.

United States District Court, W. D. North Carolina, Charlotte Division.

March 25, 1974.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

George S. Daly, Jr., Charlotte, N. C., for plaintiffs.

Frank B. Aycock, III, and James O. Cobb, Charlotte, N. C., for defendants.

MEMORANDUM OF DECISION AND ORDER

McMILLAN, District Judge.

PRELIMINARY STATEMENT

These cases were heard at Charlotte on February 20, 1973, having earlier been combined for testimony on all equity matters at issue. Pursuant to 42 U. S.C. § 1983, they challenge conditions and practices in the Mecklenburg County Jail, Charlotte, North Carolina, as unconstitutional under the First, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Damages and equitable relief are sought. The court has jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1343(3). Defendant Stahl is and was at all times mentioned the Sheriff of Mecklenburg County and responsible for the keeping of prisoners at the Mecklenburg County Jail, see North Carolina General Statutes § 162-22. Defendants Maness and Green are, and were at all pertinent times, jailers and employees of the defendant Stahl.

FINDINGS OF FACT

The jail inmates and their accommodations. — The Mecklenburg County Jail was first occupied in March, 1971. It has 370 bunks on the second and third floors, and a few more on the first floor used for temporary purposes. All persons not expected to be released in the near future are housed on the second and third floors. The average daily population of the jail in 1972 was 390 persons. The jail has contained as many as 450 to 470 inmates at one time. The jail is used to detain many categories of persons, including those awaiting trial on all types of charges, convicted misdemeanants and felons awaiting determination of their appeals, persons doing time for public drunkenness, persons on work-release programs, persons who are allowed to go home and to work on weekends, federal prisoners (see North Carolina General Statutes § 153-183), inmates of the North Carolina Department of Correction returned to Mecklenburg County for hearing of post-conviction writs, and juveniles who cannot be handled by the local juvenile diagnostic center. In 1972, the combined number of bookings and releases was about 36,000. Inmates stay in the jail from a few hours to a year or more. At any given time, approximately 200 of the inmates are in for thirty days or longer. The average daily turnover (total of persons booked and those discharged) is ninety to ninety-five persons, but the turnover is higher on weekends and lower during the week. The Sheriff is obligated by law to receive and retain persons presented by certain law enforcement officers (see North Carolina General Statutes § 153-190.1).

Jail inmates are segregated according to various criteria:

(1) According to the ad hoc decisions of the Sheriff and jail personnel, as described later in this opinion;

(2) According to their particular legal status (i. e., drunks, work release inmates, post-conviction petitioners, felons awaiting determination of their appeals in the North Carolina courts are kept together); and

(3) According to race (for persons sixteen and seventeen years of age).

The majority of the prisoners are housed in "regular" cells, which hold twelve, sixteen or eighteen persons. These cells are divided into two areas: a sleeping area with bunks, and a dayroom area which has several picnic-type tables and showers. Towels are provided three times a week, along with soap and razors for shaving. Sheets are changed once a week; meals are served three times a day. On the second floor the day area and the sleeping area are separated by bars, and one area may be locked off from another. The lighting in all prisoner areas of the jail is extremely dim. The court visited the jail at noon on one of the brightest days of the year, and there was not enough light to permit comfortable reading.

What happened to Dewey Lucas.— Plaintiff Dewey Lucas, age twenty-five, is presently confined in the North Carolina Department of Correction, serving sentences for common law robbery and crime against nature. His expected release date is 1979. Lucas is a Negro. On November 16, 1971, he was confined in the Mecklenburg County Jail, awaiting determination of his appeal on his common law robbery conviction. He was confined in a regular sixteen-man cell. At about 1:30 a. m. that day, the sole white male in Lucas's cell, then populated by the white man and by some fourteen Negroes including Lucas, was apparently the victim of a homosexual rape. A jailer (Mr. Isom) was attracted to the cell by loud noises, and discovered the victim alone and nude in the middle of the floor. The victim was taken out of the cell and into the adjacent corridor, whereupon the deputy in charge (Mr. Kea) arrived. Mr. Isom testified that the victim told him "Dewey Lucas is the instigator"; but Mr. Kea testified that the victim didn't know the name of his aggressors, but knew "what bunks they slept in." The prisoners in the cell were then made to stand by their bunks, and the victim, then or shortly previously hysterical, identified several of them as his attackers. He identified Lucas because he "remembered his voice," according to Mr. Kea. Without allowing Lucas any opportunity to make a statement, Mr. Kea made the determination to put Lucas into "S-4."

"S-4" is an area of the jail which consists of (a) four "barred door" single cells, each measuring approximately four feet by ten feet and equipped with steel bunk, toilet, basin, three solid walls and bars at one end; (b) three "solid door" single cells on the opposite side of a narrow corridor, equipped identically with the barred door cells, except that these three cells also have an additional sliding solid steel door having a glass window covered by a metal shield that may be lifted only from outside the cell; and (c) the "box."

The "box" is a metal container about five feet by seven feet, with solid steel walls and solid door, windowless, and totally bare except for an oriental toilet (a hole in one corner of the floor) flushable only from outside the cell. It has one dim light behind a glass pane on one wall, which sheds less useful illumination than a small candle.

Mr. Kea testified that Lucas was put into a barred door cell, then a few days later moved to "F-1" (another section of cells in the jail, identical with "S-4") and put into a solid door cell where he stayed until he left the jail some fifty-five days later. Lucas testified that he was first put in a solid door cell for two days, and then put in the "box" for four days; and that when he repeatedly beat on the walls and asked to see the Sheriff, a jailer came and took his clothes away, leaving him naked. He stated that he got two meals (Gibson says he got three) a day in the box, but no mail, no use of the telephone (even to call his lawyer), no writing materials, no "store box" (concessions), no tobacco, no exercise outside his cell, no visitors and no toothbrush, and that certain of his personal books (Soul on Ice, Native Son, Black Pride) were taken from him when he was placed in "S-4" and never returned. The defendant and his employees admit some and deny some of these deprivations, but claim that the deprivations were incidents of his confinement in a solid door cell and that he was not kept in the "box." Lucas testified that the oriental toilet was rarely if ever flushed and that the smell became almost unbearable.

The Sheriff testified that he had ordered Lucas put into a solid door cell because he was an "escape risk." He came to this conclusion because, as he testified, several days after Lucas had been put into "S-4" Lucas told him to his face, "When I get out of here, I will kill you." Apparently there were no other witnesses to this conversation and no attempt to carry out the threat, and the Sheriff made no "offense report" of it since he does not consider himself bound by the rule that an "offense report" should be made each time a prisoner is changed in the circumstances of his confinement for disciplinary reasons. Mr. Kea testified that he was the one who moved Lucas, but Kea gave no testimony of the alleged threat. The Sheriff nevertheless testified that he determined that Lucas should be transferred to a solid door cell, because the Sheriff now feared that if left in a barred cell Lucas would reach out through the bars and grab a jailer. Lucas was therefore put in dark and solitary confinement because he had been accused of a sexual assault, and kept there because of the threat.

The jail records do not reflect, beyond the notation of "S-4," the particular type of confinement within "S-4" in which Lucas was placed. The court visited "S-4" during the trial, and observed evidence (burned spots on the floor) of prior habitation in the "box." The Sheriff testified that during the past year or so the "boxes" had only been used for "mental" patients. The Sheriff has no policy on how long a prisoner may be kept in "S-4" or its equivalent elsewhere in the jail.

Lucas was subsequently charged with sexual assault and made a bargained plea of guilty of a crime against nature, on account of the sexual assault mentioned. He denies any association with the assault, other than having been asleep in the cell at the time.

Whether Lucas was, after his initial commitment to "S-4," confined in a solid door cell or in the box, the circumstances of that confinement were substantially more burdensome than he had suffered prior to the assault, or prior to the alleged threat. Either type of confinement tended to prevent him from communicating with friends, relatives, counsel and courts, and this restriction lasted for a period of seventy to...