Is it cruel and unusual to subject an incarcerated person to sleep deprivation for years? This is a question that has taken federal courts more than a decade to answer.
March 22, the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reinstated Texas inmate Michael Garrett’s 11-year-old, ongoing lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, in which a lower district court was found to have repeatedly and wrongly subjected him to a higher limit than he would have to prove that less than four hours of sleep per night violated his constitutional rights.
Garrett’s case is an extreme example of how long it takes and how difficult it is to prevail in an Eighth Amendment case, even on what should be a simple question.
Garrett first filed a lawsuit against the department in 2013 alleging that he and his fellow inmates in his unit were given less than four hours of sleep a night and only two and a half hours of continuous sleep at most. Bedtime is 10.30pm, followed by a head count at 1am, then breakfast starts around 2am.
Garrett argued that continued sleep deprivation posed a serious health risk and asked for an injunction imposing a prison program with six hours a night set aside for sleep.
A year later, a federal magistrate judge dismissed Garrett’s complaint for failure to state a plea, finding that he “has no constitutional right to a predetermined number of hours of uninterrupted sleep each night” and that, to prevail, “he would have to to demonstrate that he suffered physical harm caused by the alleged sleep deprivation.”
However, the 5th Circuit reversed that decision, finding that sleep deprivation “could conceivably constitute a denial of the civilized minimum standard of the necessities of life.”
In a 2018 bench trial in district court, a federal judge again ruled against Garrett, finding that he had not directly linked his health problems — migraines, seizures, dizziness and hypertension, among others — to sleep deprivation inflicted on him by prison.
This is despite the expert testimony of Candice Alfano, director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center at the University of Houston.
“Powerful cause-and-effect relationships between inadequate sleep and medical problems have been demonstrated for decades in scientific studies,” Alfano said in a statement to Reason. “Indeed, there is no debate among sleep experts regarding the wide-ranging harmful effects of inadequate sleep on physical and mental health. Therefore, the idea that the burden of proof falls solely on the individual in legal proceedings It is neither reasonable nor just.”
In 2019, Garrett was moved to a new prison unit where sleep times were actually slightly worse. The 5th Circuit sent Garrett’s case back to the district court to review the new conditions, but the district court ruled that “[n]Nothing in the evidence suggests that TDCJ engaged in conduct designed to intentionally inflict sleep deprivation on detainees.”
Garrett appealed, and last month the 5th Circuit ruled that the lower district court had improperly required Garrett to show evidence of actual harm suffered from sleep deprivation, when the legal standard only required him to show a substantial risk of damage.
Now Garrett’s case once again returns to district court.
All of this shouldn’t have been a particularly difficult question for a federal court to answer, given that sleep deprivation is a long-established tactic to disrupt interrogations. For example, a 2014 United Nations report condemned the United States for allowing interrogations to keep military detainees awake for 20 hours a day, more time than Garrett and other detainees in the Texas unit. (The report did not go so far as to call this torture, but rather a “form of mistreatment.”)
The Constitution guarantees inmates the right to basic sanitation and living conditions necessary to maintain their human dignity, but in practice the time it takes to bring a federal civil rights lawsuit and the high bar to prevail over an Eighth Amendment requirement mean to which detained persons may be subjected gruesome medical negligence, extreme heat and coldAND atrocious living conditions for years without remedy.
How many more years will Texas inmates be subjected to brutal sleep programs before federal courts can decide whether it is constitutional or not?