CA state court : Prisoner Can’t Be Punished for Hunger Strike

• Below is the April 23, 2016 article from SF Gate/San Francisco Chronicle (minus photos and video in the article)
• Court’s full decision at the bottom of the post.

State court rules prisoners can’t be punished for hunger strike

http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/State-court-rules-prisoners-can-t-be-punished-7305577.php

A state appeals court says a California prisoner who took part in a mass hunger strike protesting long-term solitary confinement should not have been punished for disorderly behavior because he did not disrupt prison operations or endanger anyone.

Although the 2013 hunger strike, which involved as many as 30,000 inmates across the state, may have affected the workload of prison staff members, there was no evidence of “a breakdown of order” or any threat of violence, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said in the case of a former inmate at Pelican Bay State Prison.

The ruling, issued last month, was published Friday as a precedent for future cases. In addition to overturning a 90-day sentencing increase for the inmate, the decision could help numerous hunger strikers whose prison conduct is scrutinized by parole boards, said an attorney in the case, Carol Strickman of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.

For inmates serving life sentences with the possibility of parole, “the parole board is citing the hunger strike as a reason to keep them in prison, because of their ongoing criminal mentality,” Strickman said.

“We hope to use this opinion to try to educate the parole board,” she added. “You might say it makes you more suitable (for release), engaging in nonviolent protest. People could see it as good citizenship.”

The inmate, Jorge Gomez, was sent to Pelican Bay, in Del Norte County, in 2000 and was transferred three years later to the prison’s Security Housing Unit, where he was kept in solitary confinement for more than a decade. In July 2013, he refused to eat for four days and, after the third day, was cited for a “serious” violation of prison rules for taking part in a hunger strike.

Other inmates continued the hunger strike for as long as two months. Prison officials attributed the protest to gangs looking to expand their influence, but supporters of the inmates said the action helped to pressure the state into a legal settlement last August that put new limits on the use of solitary confinement and has already returned nearly 1,000 inmates to the general prison population.

In Gomez’s case, a prison hearing officer found that he had willfully disrupted prison operations by requiring officers to delay performing their normal duties and penalized him by taking away 90 days of good-conduct credits, effectively lengthening his sentence. Transferred later to another prison, he appealed unsuccessfully in the prison system and filed a lawsuit in 2014 that a judge summarily dismissed.

But the appeals court said prison officials failed to show that Gomez had engaged in disorderly or disruptive conduct, the regulation he was punished for violating. The court said it could clear him without having to decide whether inmates have a constitutional right, under freedom of speech, to engage in hunger strikes.

Gomez did not act violently or threaten violence, and none of the effects reported by prison officials — delays in some operations and services and reassignment of guards to monitor the hunger strikers — “suggests prison operations were thrown into disorder,” Justice Therese Stewart wrote in the 3-0 decision.

There was no immediate comment from prison officials, who could appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court.

L. Richard Braucher, a lawyer for Gomez, described the inmate’s conduct as “heroic.”

“These inmates were protesting their own mistreatment, peacefully, and then they were punished for it unlawfully,” Braucher said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko

 

First Appellate District Court’s published decision: In re JORGE A. GOMEZ, on Habeas Corpus

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1732578.html

Here are a few excerpts from the court’s decision:

“… There Is Not Some Evidence That Gomez Violated Section 3005(a).
Gomez argues that we must grant his petition because the senior hearing officer’s ruling was not supported by sufficient evidence, and respondent [Pelican Bay] disagrees. We agree with Gomez. …… PBSP authorities disciplined Gomez for refusing nine consecutive meals during three days, from July 8, 2013, to July 10, 2013, coincident to a hunger strike and work stoppage by California state prison inmates who were protesting our state prisons’ solitary confinement practices.¹

…None of these contentions indicate that the facility, outside community or another person was endangered, i.e., put in danger or peril of harm or loss, nor do they indicate that there was a breakdown of order in any aspect of the prison to the contrary, it is apparent from [Sgt.] Navarro’s statements that PBSP authorities were acting within their discretion to make adjustments to workloads and services in order to contend with the hunger strike and work stoppage, and his statements do not indicate that the protest involved any violence or disorderly conduct. Indeed, even assuming for the sake of argument that the disorder prohibited by section 3005(a) did not have to rise to the level of endangering “facility, outside community or another person,” nothing in Navarro’s account of the delays and cancellation of services, and the reallocation of prison personnel, such as to monitor the hunger strikers,13 suggests prison operations were thrown into disorder. …

Gomez’s petition is granted. Respondent [Pelican Bay] is ordered to reverse the disciplinary ruling that Gomez violated section 3005(a), thereby committing a serious rules violation, restore Gomez’s 90 days of conduct credits and expunge all references to his disciplinary charge from his central file….”

1   [footnote from Court] Such practices have come under increasing scrutiny by legal scholars in recent years. (See, e.g., Bennion, Banning the Bing: Why Extreme Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and Far Too Usual Punishment (2015) 90 Ind. L.J. 741; Shaiq, More Restrictive Than Necessary: A Policy Review of Secure Housing Units (2013) 10 Hastings Race & Poverty L.J. 327.) United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote last year: “Of course, prison officials must have discretion to decide that in some  instances temporary, solitary confinement is a useful or necessary means to impose discipline and to protect prison employees and other inmates. But research still confirms what this Court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price. See, e.g., Grassian, Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement, 22 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol’y 325 (2006) (common side-effects of solitary confinement include anxiety, panic, withdrawal, hallucinations, self-mutilation, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors). . . . Over 150 years ago, Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’ The Yale Book of Quotations 210 (F. Shapiro ed. 2006). There is truth to this in our own time.” (Davis v. Ayala (2015) __U.S.__ [135 S.Ct. 2187, 2210] (conc. opn. of Kennedy, J.).)