As questions swirl around the suicide of a man being held in solitary confinement at the ACI last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island today filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting an ACI inmate’s constitutional challenge to his confinement in solitary for over a year as a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The brief was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in support of Jerry Cintron, whose lawsuit alleges that while suffering from substance use disorder, he was given no treatment despite his requests for it. Instead, he was kept in disciplinary segregation for over one year where he spent at least 23 hours a day in an eight-by-ten foot cell, was given a maximum of one 10-minute phone call each month, and was provided no access to programming.
