The Daily - 27 Years in Solitary Confinement

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

In the 1990s, Dennis Wayne Hope committed a series of armed robberies. After proving adept at escaping prison, he was put in isolation. He has been there for nearly three decades.His case, if the Supreme Court agrees to hear it, could answer the fundamental question of how long people can be held in solitary confinement.Guest: Adam Liptak, a reporter covering the Supreme Court for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Mr. Hope has spent more than half his life in solitary confinement, in a cell that is nine feet long and six feet wide — smaller than a compact parking space.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. In the coming months, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear the case of a Texas man who has spent the past 27 years in solitary confinement. Today, my colleague, Adam Liptak, on Dennis Wayne Hope's argument and the questions it raises about the practice of solitary confinement. It's Friday, April 15th. So, Adam, who is Dennis Wayne Hope? Dennis Wayne Hope is a Texas man who in the 1990s committed a series of armed robberies. 1990s, committed a series of armed robberies. And he did it cleverly enough that he came to the attention of a, I can't help but call it cheesy documentary series called I Almost Got

Away With It, which came out in 2011. He is incredibly slippery, devious, manipulative, one of the most intelligent criminals I've ever prosecuted. So what's the story that that cheesy documentary tells? June 1989, Dallas, Texas. Well, according to Hope, whom they interviewed for this documentary, he was working at a grocery store chain called Albertson's in Dallas, Texas. He gets fired. After all the time that I put in with them,

all the sacrifice and my vacations and all that, and then they fired me, that's when I decided, well, I was going to rob them. And then he decides he's going to rob a few Albertson's stores at gunpoint. He gets caught eventually, most criminals do, and he's sentenced to rob a few Albertson stores at gunpoint. He gets caught eventually, most criminals do. And he's sentenced to 80 years for armed robbery. Oh, wow. He's only in his 20s.

But he's a resourceful guy. I had a handcuff key I'd made out of an ink filter. I took my right hand out of the handcuff. And while he's being transported in a prison van, he manages to slip out of his handcuffs and And while he's being transported in a prison van, he manages to slip out of his handcuffs and takes off running, goes around the corner, takes off his prison garb, strips down to his boxer shorts, and starts running like crazy when a cop pulls him over, thinking he might have been robbed. What's he doing out there in his underwear? I told him, well, I'm training for a

triathlon. I wear these light shorts so that I could wring them out so they don't shave the inner part of my thighs. He said, okay, well, I'll let you get on. And the cop says, okay, buddy. Yes. Good luck to you in the triathlon. Godspeed. Go on your way. And he takes off. Oh my God. So he gets away with it. He gets away with it for a while. Eventually he's caught again, and he gets some extra years tacked on to his sentence for the escape, and they put him in a maximum security prison in Texas. I knew then the only way I was going to get out of this was to escape. And you would think someone who's good at escaping might be under a special watch, but in a maximum security prison, he and two Confederates managed to take out the electrical system, the generator and the backup generator, and in the darkness, hop a couple of fences and run for it.

I was the first one over the fence, and I ran about 40 yards, and I turned around to look to see if they were coming, and they were both still on the fence. The Confederates are quickly caught, but he manages to stay on the lam for two months, committing some further crimes. Long as I wasn't getting caught and I was enjoying life, there was women around, there was money to spend, there was entertainment.

That's what I was interested in. And eventually, after a couple months, he's caught again. The night they did capture me, when I woke up in jail, I had a dream that I wasn't captured. When I turned over and saw that steel wall, I knew that my nightmare came true. When I turned over and saw that steel wall, I knew that my nightmare came true. And now they bring him back into prison and put him into solitary confinement. And there he's been ever since.

So he's been in solitary confinement since the 1990s. He has had essentially no human contact with anyone other than prison guards and occasionally journalists, including the people who made this documentary. He's been living in a cell that's 54 square feet. To give you a sense of that, that's smaller than a compact parking space. And he's in that space for 23 hours a day, leaving for one hour a day to exercise by himself in a little enclosure. And Hope has written about what it's like to endure this kind of isolation. I obtained some letters that he wrote to his lawyers, and maybe just to give you a sense of it, let me read a little bit from them. He writes, for almost 27 years now, I have survived in solitary confinement in the Texas prison system.

That survival has not come without physical and mental cost. Describing the size of the cell, he says, it's three steps to the door and then turn around and three steps back. This stepping and turning in such close confinement in an effort to exercise my legs has added to the deterioration of my knees and back. And then he talks about the mental toll. My ability to maintain thoughts or concentrate on one thing has diminished greatly. I fumble for words that used to just roll off my tongue. My vocabulary has been drastically reduced and my vocal cords weakened from talking so little. My eyesight has

been weakened through years of looking through mesh wire and looking at white or green walls. My biggest fear was losing my mind and going insane. I have been reluctant to share these things because they only want to medicate you. I once shared these things with a psychiatrist, and when he saw that I had been in solitary confinement for over 21 years at the time, he said, you're doing a lot better than I would be doing. Oh.

I mean, that is just an unbelievably painful existence that he's describing, just completely without any human contact, which is just kind of not how we're programmed as human beings, right? No, we're social beings, Sabrina. And to be deprived even for a week, two weeks of human contact is really hard to take. But think about doing that for decades and what that does to someone's mind. Yeah. So why then has Texas put this man in solitary confinement for this amount of time? I mean, what's its justification?

Well, I don't know, Sabrina, that they've ever offered a formal justification, but there's really no question but that he embarrassed them because he was so good at escaping, and they didn't want him to be escaping anymore. And they probably particularly didn't like that he gave interviews about his prowess as an escape artist. Dennis Wayne Hope openly brags about his next escape from prison. You can put me on high security, but I was on high security when I left last time. At one point, he was interviewed by a local news reporter. So you can take this

ballpoint pen refill and make a key and get out of your handcuffs with it. Who asked him, for instance, could he fashion a key out of a ballpoint pen? And he said, I could make six keys. Oh, no. He goes on to say, and there's a logic to this, he says, Well, what have I got to lose? Why wouldn't I try to escape? If you get shot, odds are you're not going to live past 75 in a prison environment anyway,

whether you die of a disease, a stabbing, whatever. But first of all, it's not clear to me that being an escape risk at all is justification for solitary confinement. You would think that the main, if not only, job of a prison system is to keep people from escaping with or without solitary confinement. But in any event, as the years go by, in 2005, a committee of prison security personnel conclude that Hope was no longer an escape risk. And yet here he is these many years later still kept in solitary. But I don't understand that. I mean, if they

concluded that he was no longer an escape risk, why is he still in solitary. But I don't understand that. I mean, if they concluded that he was no longer an escape risk, why is he still in solitary? Well, that's an excellent question. We don't have a good answer to it. He's trying to get an answer to it. He is sued in federal court and said that he should be allowed to pursue a claim to contest his more than quarter century of solitary confinement for apparently no good reason. He's lost in the lower federal courts, and now he's taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and asking the justices to hear his case and to answer the fundamental question of how long people can be held in solitary confinement. We'll be right back. Okay, Adam, you said that Dennis Hope is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court.

What argument are his lawyers making? They say that he should be allowed to sue under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the one that prohibits the government from imposing cruel and unusual punishment. And they say that extended solitary confinement without good reason satisfies both of those criteria. It's cruel, they say, and it's unusual. And so I imagine that the Texas prison officials, for their part, presumably are making the argument that it's not cruel or unusual, right? yet. But in the appeals court, they give this idea the back of their hand. They say Hope has no plausible Eighth Amendment claim. While the conditions of Hope's confinement may be unpleasant and possibly harsh, he failed to show the conditions are objectively so serious as to deprive him of the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities. Huh. So has the Supreme Court ever ruled on that? I mean,

whether solitary confinement is a violation of the Eighth Amendment? No, the Supreme Court has never addressed that question as a court, but there is a fairly elaborate and robust Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, and they have used the Eighth Amendment to do many things, to strike down the juvenile death penalty, to forbid the execution of people who are intellectually disabled, to limit juvenile life without parole, to forbid the death penalty in cases not involving murder. involving murder. So the court has a fairly elaborate Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, and it could map onto this question pretty well if the justices choose to hear the case. Okay, so there is a history of them taking up Eighth Amendment cases, just not solitary confinement. Right, and what we've learned from the Supreme Court through these cases is that they look to what a 1958 decision said was that the Eighth Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society. So the court cares about the contemporary experience about whether a punishment is cruel and unusual.

What's the argument that solitary confinement is a cruel and unusual punishment? Well, let's start with cruel. There is something like a consensus among scholars and psychiatrists and psychologists and corrections officials, that even relatively brief solitary confinement gives rise to terrible paranoia, hallucination, thoughts of suicide. It really does have the potential to drive people mad. And the United Nations, under what they call the Nelson Mandela rules, that's a reference, of course, to the South African dissident and eventual leader who spent decades in prison for his political activities, much of it in solitary confinement. The UN says that more than 15 days in solitary confinement amounts to torture.

What about the argument that it's unusual? Right. So that's the second component. And we can break that down into two different pieces. Is it unusual today? And I think the answer to that is arguably yes. It's on the decline in much of the nation. And a few outlying jurisdictions, notably Texas, are where this practice, this unusual practice, is so commonplace. Texas has 500 people who have served in solitary confinement for more than 10 years. And 138 who've served for more than 20 years. To put that into context, there are only 12 prisoners outside of Texas, according to Mr. Hope's lawyers, who have served more than 20 years who are not on death row. So as a percentage of total prison population, those are vanishingly small numbers, and therefore you could

try to make the case that this punishment as a contemporary matter is unusual. But that may not be the right question, Sabrina. There are members of the Supreme Court who are less concerned about contemporary practices than about the original understanding of the Constitution when it was adopted. These would be the conservative members of the court. Yes, the originalists. And there, there's a pretty good argument that solitary confinement was not contemplated by the framers, indeed was all but unknown at the founding. The nation experimented with it in the 19th century and rejected it on grounds of cruelty. And it's really only come back into fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. So there's a second kind of argument that it's unusual as a historical matter. So Adam, you said the Supreme Court is considering whether to hear Hope's case. What's the chances it will?

Well, getting a petition seeking review granted is always a long shot at the court. But the court has indicated some level of interest in this case. Texas thought it was such a frivolous petition that it told the court it wasn't even going to bother to file a response. And that apparently didn't sit well with at least one justice because they ordered Texas to file a response to Mr. Hope's petition, and that's due now next month. So the court has indicated some level of interest in the case. And over the years,

there have been at least three justices who've expressed substantial concern about extended solitary confinement. Justice Anthony Kennedy, for instance, in 2015, wrote that years on end of near total isolation exact a terrible price. And Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor have said similar things. Justice Sotomayor called it something like a penal tomb into which people in extended solitary confinement have been consigned. So you see that members of the Supreme Court are attuned to this. Whether there are the necessary four votes on the current Supreme Court to grant review or whether there are five votes to actually do something about this practice is harder to say. But it's not as though this issue has not been a flashpoint, at least

over the years at the court. So if the court does decide to take the case and to rule on it, will that ruling apply just to Dennis Hope or will it have broader implications for other people in solitary confinement? Yeah, the court doesn't take cases really to resolve individual disputes. It takes cases to announce broad legal principles that would apply to lots of people. But I would say that the legal principle here, if it takes the case and if it rules for Mr. Hope, would be in its way modest. It would just say, you're allowed to challenge under the Eighth Amendment, prolonged solitary confinement. That doesn't mean you win. It may be that the prison has good reason to keep you there. But it would at least acknowledge that without good reason,

but it would at least acknowledge that without good reason, keeping someone locked up for decades in isolation violates the Constitution. And it would also, as Supreme Court cases do, sort of put this on the national agenda. I mean, look at what's going on here. Here we are in 2022, and from the looks of it the state of texas more out of inertia and laziness than any kind of principle has kept a man in all but total isolation for more than a quarter century and he's not alone in the second most populous state in the nation, it's a practice that serious people see as torture, and it's not getting nearly the attention it deserves. So Adam, how is Dennis Hope seeing all of this? I mean, he's waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether they're

going to take his case. Do we know what he's thinking? Well, so interestingly, Sabrina, the very bringing of the case has given him something to look forward to and has engaged his mind. Let me read you something he wrote to his lawyers. his mind. Let me read you something he wrote to his lawyers. Having sat back here and watched men commit suicide, mutilate themselves, try to overdose on pills, and slowly lose their minds, I said to myself that I was going to try to make a positive change in the way we are housed and treated if it was the last thing I did. Challenging the use of solitary confinement has given me a purpose and goal and helped me maintain a degree of my sanity in an otherwise insane environment. Adam, thank you.

Thank you, Sabrina. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We'll be right back. for $43 billion. Musk, a longtime Twitter critic, who last week had agreed to join Twitter's board and then abruptly reversed course, says he wants to take Twitter from being a public company to a private one that emphasizes unfettered free speech. Twitter's board is weighing ways to make it harder for Musk to buy the company.

But Musk could still succeed by appealing directly to Twitter's shareholders. However, in a sign that investors are lukewarm about the idea, Twitter's stock price fell 2% on Thursday. And Russia suffered another setback in its war against Ukraine when its naval flagship, called Moskva, sank in the Black Sea. Ukraine claimed it hit the ship with a missile strike. Russia denied the ship had been hit, but acknowledged it was on fire. The missile strike, if confirmed, would be a significant sign of Ukraine's military capability and could serve as a deterrent to Russian naval attacks. Today's episode was produced by Eric Krupke, Stella Tan, and Sidney Harper. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Dan Powell

and Marian Lozano and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.