Alfredo Prieto sits alone 23 hours a day in a locked, seventy-square-feet box. The lights never go out.
According to trial records, Prieto grew up in tough circumstances in war-torn El Salvador, escaped with his family to California. He became involved in gangs and violent crime, culminating ultimately in his conviction for rape, larceny and double murder in Virginia. But during his eight-year incarceration, Prieto has been by all accounts a model prisoner. He is one of eight men who await execution on Virginia's death row.
Virginia locks its death-row prisoners in solitary confinement and throws away the key, no questions asked, until they are released due to successful appeal or executed. And Virginia is not alone. For many, a death sentence means a double punishment. As we documented extensively in our report A Death Before Dying, people on death row can spend decades locked alone in a tiny, cement room before they are ever strapped to an execution gurney, dying a slow and painful psychological death in solitary confinement before the state executes them.
No other class of prisoners is automatically locked alone with no end in sight.
But this week, a Virginia federal court looked past the murder convictions and death sentence Prieto is still challenging (in the lengthy capital appellate process), and held that the U.S. Constitution still affords him rights. In a case brought by Prieto, District Court Judge Leona Brinkema has ruled that Virginia's automatic placement of death-row prisoners in solitary confinement – without any process in which the prisoner could challenge the placement, and certainly without respect to their dangerousness, misconduct, or any other individualized reason – violates the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
This is the first time any court in this country has made such a ruling.
Source: ACLU Capital Punishment Project, November 15, 2013
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