Inmate Charges Light Violates Rights Says Flourescent Bulb Left On All Day Interfered With Sleep, Psychological Health
A state inmate wants to extinguish 24-hour lights in the isolation cells at Airway Heights Corrections Center, claiming they violate his civil rights.
Brian Ridley is suing Superintendent Kay Walter, saying the lights in the “hole,” or special management unit of the prison, violate Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
A nonjury trial began Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Spokane. Ridley is asking for a court order forcing the prison to turn the lights off from 11:30 p.m. to 6 a.m.
In a complaint filed nearly three years ago, Ridley claimed the overhead light is bright enough to interfere with normal sleep and caused him nausea, psychologic stress, weight loss and headaches. The suit also claims that Walter was deliberately indifferent to inmate complaints over the effects of the 4-foot-long fluorescent bulbs.
Unlike the rest of the prison, three fluorescent bulbs light each isolation cell. Inmates can control two of the three bulbs from inside the cell. The other is on constantly for security and the inmates’ safety, prison officials said.
Ridley, who was sentenced to nearly 17 years for armed robbery and attempted murder, spent more than 77 days in the hole over three stays in 1996-98.
He testified that he suffered sleep deprivation and stress to the extent that he began talking to himself and seeing his hand change colors. He said it was “like a bad mushroom flashback, like being underwater.”
The assistant attorneys general defending Walter countered that there is no medical evidence Ridley suffered any physical harm, sought medical help or reported his symptoms until after he read other lawsuits on the effects of 24-hour illumination.
They also note that Walter had filters installed on the lights after she learned they could be dimmed without compromising security.
Her attorney, Douglas Carr, also questioned whether Ridley’s symptoms weren’t the result of being in a noisy area of the prison, deprived of the food he usually gets from the prison store and his normal workout routine.
During the proceedings, Ridley was shackled at the ankle and waist, and his attorney had to hold a cup of water to his lips.
The case sheds light into the peculiarities of the inmate code and the behavior inmates expect of one another. Ridley first went to the hole for refusing to share his cell with an African American.
It was not racist, he testified. The inmate was his pinochle partner, but Ridley, who had been at Airway Heights just eight weeks, said he had learned at Clallam Bay that black inmates and white inmates do not share cells or fraternize, and that to do so was to set himself up as a target. Instead, he protested the room assignment by dumping his belongings before a seated corrections officer and standing up on the counter.
LOCKDOWN The special management unit houses offenders who break prison rules and those who are in danger, or a danger to themselves or others. Inmates spend 23 hours a day “locked down” in the unit and are handcuffed before being released for a shower or an hour of recreation in a small concrete yard.