Mother sues over inmate son’s suicide

BOISE – The mother of an Idaho inmate who killed himself in a dilapidated private Texas prison earlier this year has filed a $500,000 claim against Idaho, contending the state’s Department of Correction is responsible for “inhumane treatment and illegal and unconstitutional conditions of confinement” that contributed to his death.

Scot Noble Payne, 43, was in prison for aggravated battery and lewd and lascivious conduct when he slashed his throat March 4. He had been sent to the Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas, with other inmates last year to relieve overcrowding in Idaho prisons, which have more than 7,000 prisoners but too few beds to house them all.

Following Payne’s death, Idaho prison health care director Donald Stockman investigated Dickens and concluded “the physical condition of the cell where the suicide occurred does not, in my opinion, comply with any standards related to inmate housing for either segregated housing or housing for inmates on suicide watch. The physical environment of the cell would have only enhanced the inmate’s depression that could have been a major contributing factor in his suicide.”

“Just being in the filth and degradation of that cell was sufficient to drive somebody into suicide,” Payne’s mother, Shirley Noble, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday from her home near Los Angeles.

The tort claim against Idaho was filed last week. Under state law, the maximum Noble could recover is $500,000. The state now has 90 days to respond; if it doesn’t, Noble could file a civil rights lawsuit in federal court.

Kit Coffin, the state’s risk management program manager with the Department of Administration, said tort claims like this are reviewed and assigned to state adjudicators for consideration.

In suicide notes he wrote for relatives, Payne described a constantly wet floor, bloodstained sheets and smelly towels in the isolation cell at the prison where he was confined for three months following his escape and recapture in December 2006. He slit his throat in his cell just after midnight March 4.

Since Payne’s death, 69 Idaho inmates have been moved from Dickens, which is run by Florida-based private prison operator the GEO Group, to another prison. By September, the remaining 56 Idaho inmates still at Dickens are set to be moved to another Texas prison because Idaho officials aren’t satisfied with improvements at Dickens.

Noble’s lawyer in Boise, Breck Seiniger, said Idaho had the responsibility to ensure conditions at Dickens were adequate, regardless of whether prisoners were located in Idaho or 1,500 miles away. Brent Reinke, director of the Idaho Department of Correction since January, has conceded his agency didn’t do enough to monitor conditions at Dickens between August 2006, when Idaho prisoners were sent there, and Payne’s suicide in March.

Payne’s family has also discussed a federal lawsuit against the GEO Group, though no lawsuit has yet been filed. Phone calls to a spokesman weren’t immediately returned.