A former inmate is now suing the state of Missouri for holding her in solitary confinement from 2015 to 2021.
That's the shocking allegation at the center of a lawsuit filed today in U.S. District Court's Western District against Missouri Department of Corrections Director Anne Precythe and 11 staffers at the Jefferson City Correctional Center.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a woman identified only as "Jane Roe," who the lawsuit describes as a Black, transgender woman who is HIV-positive. According to the suit, after Roe was "violently assaulted" by her cellmate in April 2015, she was deemed "an immediate or long-term danger to other defendants" due to her HIV status — and placed in a situation that the U.N. has stated is torture if it lasts for more than 15 days.
Her stay far exceeded that.
"Defendants held Ms. Roe in solitary confinement for the next six years without any meaningful review of the classification and placement and despite the substantial risk of serious harm that she faced, and despite the ongoing and documented damage to her physical and mental health," the lawsuit, Roe vs. Precythe, states. "Involuntary solitary confinement is the practice of punishing incarcerated people by removing them from general population and subjecting them to harsh isolation and severe deprivation. This practice is referred to by other names, including administrative segregation (or 'ad-seg'), single-cell mandate, and disciplinary segregation. Regardless of how it is identified, the strict conditions often amount to torture and cause serious harm to incarcerated persons."
That was the case for Roe, who the suit says suffered from depression and severe anxiety, to the point of self-harm and multiple suicide attempts.
The suit notes that Roe would not have even been a danger to others, such as her assailant. It accuses prison staff of failing to conduct "an individualized assessment of Ms. Roe" and failing to "consider that Ms. Roe’s HIV was virally suppressed, and she therefore was incapable of transmission of HIV."
Filed by Lambda Legal, the MacArthur Justice Center and the law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Roe's suit alleges violations of the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
“No person should be subjected to the inhumane and devastating effects of long-term solitary confinement, conditions that Ms. Roe faced every day for more than six years,” said Lambda Legal senior attorney and Criminal Justice and Police Misconduct Strategist Richard Saenz in a statement. “We filed this lawsuit to hold the Missouri Department of Corrections accountable for its use of an unconstitutional and discriminatory policy that singles out people living with HIV.”
The suit says that Roe was in prison for actions dating back to her teenage years — and that her HIV status also played a key role in the years she spent in confinement.
As a teenager in 2008, Roe allegedly fled from a police officer who was attempting to execute a warrant for misdemeanor stealing. "The officer chased Ms. Roe, and there was a short struggle in which she bit the officer as he was attempting to pull her to the floor," the suit says. "Ms. Doe was on antiretroviral therapy to control her HIV, which would have made transmission unlikely, but nevertheless was convicted of assault and risking infection of HIV."
She was sent to prison before being released on probation in 2012. She was sent back to prison, apparently for violating terms of her probation, in March 2014.
One year later, her nightmare in solitary began. In 2022, within a year of being released from solitary, the suit says, Roe was released on parole.
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