Nebraska prison officials did not violate an inmate's rights by placing him in solitary confinement for 12 years after he stabbed a prison employee during an escape attempt, a federal judge has ruled.

As an inmate in the “intensive management” unit of administrative segregation, Thomas Fleming spent 23 hours a day, Monday through Friday, in a seven foot by 10 foot cell equipped with a bed consisting of a one-inch mattress on top of a concrete slab. He was restricted to the spartan cell on Saturdays and Sundays.

While Fleming, 45, is now in a less restrictive setting, he claimed in an Eighth Amendment suit that his time in solitary injured him psychologically, making it difficult for him to trust and be around other people. He sought $1 million in punitive damages as well as unspecified compensatory damages.

But Senior U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom found after a bench trial that the psychological deprivation Fleming suffered was not “sufficiently serious” to amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

“There is simply no evidence that the basic conditions that the plaintiff experienced in administrative confinement, alone or in combination, 'produce[d] the deprivation of a single, identifiable human need such as food, warmth, or exercise,'” he said in his decision.

Fleming's “opportunities to talk with others were significantly restricted,” Urbom agreed, but the restrictions “were not so severe as to prevent the plaintiff from developing a close friendship” with the athletic and recreation director at the Omaha Home for Boys.

Fleming was one of five inmates who attempted to escape from the Nebraska State Penitentiary in August 1991 by commandeering a garbage truck. He is serving an 80-year sentence after pleading guilty to stabbing the driver of the truck, Max Frederickson, who was also doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire.

“To start somebody on fire, short of outright murder, I’m not aware of anything more vicious or violent,” a prison official testified.

Asked how he stayed sane while in solitary, Fleming said, “I ain’t never figured that out ... Maybe the will to live.” He apologized to Frederickson at a meeting last year.

By Matthew Heller
10/21/06