Pictured during his final State of the State address in the West Virginia House Chamber in Charleston on Jan. 10, 2024, Gov. Jim Justice has tried to avoid providing wide-ranging information to plaintiffs who have been state correctional facility inmates in a lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions at state facilities.
Pictured during his final State of the State address in the West Virginia House Chamber in Charleston on Jan. 10, 2024, Gov. Jim Justice has tried to avoid providing wide-ranging information to plaintiffs who have been state correctional facility inmates in a lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions at state facilities.
A judge has scheduled a hearing to consider whether to force Gov. Jim Justice and the head of the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security to respond to requests for information in a federal class-action lawsuit alleging inhumane conditions throughout the state’s corrections system.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Cheryl Eifert scheduled the hearing for later this month on motions filed last month to get Justice and Homeland Security Secretary Mark Sorsaia to respond to information regarding inmate deaths at state correctional facilities amid a long-term rise in those deaths.
Plaintiffs who have been inmates at some of the facilities have requested and been denied communications between Justice, Sorsaia and state employees regarding:
Inmate deaths
Employee grievances pertaining to understaffing, overcrowding or deferred maintenance at facilities
COVID economic stimulus (CARES Act) or other federal funding requested for or allocated to the Homeland Security department’s Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Destroying of documents, records or other evidence at any correctional facility
The hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. May 31 in courtroom 102 at the Sidney L. Christie Federal Building and Courthouse in Huntington.
Justice and Sorsaia have contended in court filings the requests for information are unduly burdensome and extend beyond the parameters of the lawsuit filed in August 2023.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia by plaintiffs who have been inmates at Mount Olive Correctional Complex in Fayette County, Southwestern Regional Jail in Logan County and Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center in Boone County.
The plaintiffs say West Virginia prisons, jails and juvenile centers have been plagued by “pervasive and unconstitutional†conditions of understaffing, overcrowding and deferred maintenance, violating the 8th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and showing deliberate indifference to plaintiffs’ health and safety.
The resistance from Justice and Sorsaia to share information comes after a judge found state officials intentionally destroyed evidence in another case alleging inhumane conditions at the state-run Southern Regional Jail and Correctional Facility in Raleigh County.
Following that finding, state officials agreed in November to pay $4 million to settle the Southern Regional-focused lawsuit.
The plaintiffs who have been incarcerated at Mount Olive, Southwestern Regional Jail and the Kuhn Juvenile Center — Thomas Sheppheard, Tyler Randall and Adam Perry (guardian of minor child J.P.), respectively — have asked the court to compel Justice and Sorsaia to spend state budget surplus funds to make all needed deferred maintenance repairs at state correctional facilities totaling at least $270 million, and hire and pay enough correctional staff to sufficiently staff facilities with at least $60 million.
The lawsuit highlights a Governor’s Office news release from June 30, 2023, noting that $454 million of a state budget surplus was unappropriated as of that day. It also highlights depositions from former Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation Commissioner Betsy Jividen and former DHS Secretary Jeff Sandy that deferred maintenance costs across the correctional system totaled $200 million to $277 million.
The Justice administration spent $10 million of $28.3 million it used to reimburse itself from previously incurred corrections expenses on a new baseball stadium for Marshall University in October 2022.
Rather than reimbursing the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation with the funds, the Justice administration sat on most of it following the transfer. There was still $17.6 million in the Governor’s Office-controlled fund into which the Justice administration transferred the $28.3 million as of late February, according to the Auditor’s Office.
Justice wouldn’t say W.Va. had to provide living basics
In a filing last month, Justice declined to admit that the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation had a duty to provide inmates at state correctional facilities with:
A working sink and shower
Hot and cold running water
Water supplies and plumbing fixtures maintained in an operable, sanitary condition
Access to a working toilet
Justice argued the requests called for a legal conclusion and declined to admit the DCR hadn’t made those provisions on the same basis.
Details on inmate deaths
Of the 177 inmate deaths in state-run jails from the start of 2009 to May 2023, 19% occurred since the beginning of last year, according to state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation data obtained by the Gazette-Mail through a Freedom of Information Act request. The agency’s records listed 19 deaths at Southern Regional alone from March 2021 through March 2023.
Of those 19 deaths, nine occurred 22 or fewer days after the deceased inmate was booked, the data show. Thirteen of the inmates were awaiting trial. The Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation said 11 of the deaths had natural causes, with four overdoses, two suicides, one accident resulting in a head injury and one cause that was pending.
Deaths at state-run jails in West Virginia declined in 2023 from the previous year but remained significantly higher than totals throughout the 2010s.
In 2023, 16 incarcerated people died in West Virginia regional jails, according to data the Gazette-Mail obtained from the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The 2023 death count is a substantial decrease from the three-year average of 25 fatalities per year annually from 2020 through 2022. But the latest annual death total remains far above a previous five-year average of 11.2 deaths per year from 2015 through 2019.
Seven of the 16 deaths in 2023 occurred at the Southern Regional Jail and Correctional Facility in Raleigh County, which has been the site of 38, or 20%, of the 187 deaths at the state’s regional jails from 2009 through 2023.
Judge: State officials destroyed evidence in the case
U.S. Magistrate Judge Omar Aboulhosn found in October that state officials intentionally destroyed evidence in the case that had been requested by the plaintiffs in the Southern Regional-focused case.
Aboulhosn found the officials’ efforts constituted “a dereliction of duty†and asked that a copy of his order be distributed to the U.S. Attorney to consider whether an investigation of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation was warranted.
Gov. Jim Justice’s chief of staff, Brian Abraham, has denied Aboulhosn’s conclusion that state officials destroyed paper evidence and asserted that officials already provided information that Brad Douglas, who had most recently served as Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation executive officer, failed to confirm had been preserved in hearing testimony blasted by Aboulhosn.
The Justice administration fired Douglas and Phil Sword, who was Homeland Security general counsel and an assistant attorney general in the Attorney General’s Office, following Aboulhosn’s order.
