Orange County and the Supreme Court
The Orange County Jail and the Supreme Court
Historically, federal officials and judges only reluctantly intervened in local policing and jail conditions, including poor medical care or excessive violence, which are largely seen as local problems (read: states’ rights). Some of these protections have been written as procedures that require individuals to exhaust internal grievance policies; others are practical as courts order facilities to change, but little happens and, when it does, happens slowly.
The spread of COVID-19 between bars means people in both federal, state and county facilities have filed lawsuits to compel prisons and jails to implement conditions in line with CDC recommendations and release those who are either at high risk or are scheduled for release in the near future (as a way to make jails less crowded and allow for some measure of social distancing).
Last week, the Supreme Court intervened in a 5-4 decision to grant a stay in favor of Orange County, California, Sheriff Don Barnes. Back in May, the district court had granted an injunction in favor of the plaintiffs, those inside the jail, finding that Sheriff Barnes had not implemented measures designed to keep people safe inside the over-3,000-person jail facility. Such measures include the availability of hand sanitizer and soap as well as social distancing achieved through reducing the jail population enough to permit more space.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, points out the obvious – SCOTUS “[disregarded] the District Court’s detailed factual findings, its application of established law and the fact that the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has twice denied a stay pending its review of the District Court’s order.” She then proceeds through the facts, namely that Sheriff Barnes knew that COVID-19 would spread through the facility and was deliberately indifferent to the health of inmates, despite orders to do the opposite. SCOTUS’s decision, as Justice Sotomayor writes, “reward[s] bad behavior” on the part of the Sheriff.
Jails are never safe. At their best, they house large numbers of high-need individuals who are undergoing trauma in stressful conditions not conducive to healing. For most people, the days after arrest are incredibly traumatic – more suicides happen in local jails than in long-term lockups – and the institutional impersonal treatment implemented in modern jails is designed to isolate and break down individuals, stripping them of humanity. At their worst, jails are torture chambers where people endure violence and an utter lack of concern for humanity. The fact that jails have endured as institutions for so long is a sign of how we as a society disregard the humanity of those who are arrested.
The Supreme Court’s unusual and unnecessary decision here to intervene in Orange County is of a piece with so many failures of the federal government to condemn acts of institutional racism and cruelty. After Reconstruction, the feds made a decision to let Southern white governments rule as they wished, with disastrous consequences. When the extreme and unmasked violence and cruelty of Sheriff Joe Arpaio came to the attention of the federal government, Janet Napolitano, then the lawyer in the U.S. Department of Justice in charge of investigating Arpaio, downplayed the extent of the abuses, never filed civil rights charges, and dismissed everything as “lawyerly paperwork.” In their application to SCOTUS, Sheriff Barnes called the lower court’s decision to require better sanitation measures after the presentation of copious evidence “micromanagement.”
In addition to his well-known history of scandal, Sheriff Barnes is part of President Trump’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice as a member of the committee examining “mental health,” led by Sheriff Manny Gonzales, who has resisted common-sense reforms and sided with Trump in his tirades about law and order. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court knows full well that these decisions dramatically, and happen without oral argument or fact-finding. In this case, the lower courts did evaluate the factual record and found Sheriff Barnes wanting, so there was no need to intervene here except for political reasons.
Other Reading
1) Seth Freed Wessler wrote a wonderful piece about Sheriff Butch Conway’s reign of terror in Gwinnett County. It’s a good reminder that Joe Arpaio isn’t an anomaly. Also, the story quotes no lawyers, which is an amazing testament that it CAN be done.
2) The New York Times published a story about excessive violence by law enforcement in rural areas where the most important law enforcement agency is the sheriff’s office.
3) In Vermont, voters have the option to select their high bailiff, a position with the potential to provide a check on the sheriff’s office.