High Court Orders Release of California Inmates
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower-court order that could require California to release tens of thousands of inmates, a last-ditch remedy after the state failed to correct "serious constitutional violations" in its prison system.
The court split along its ideological divide, with four liberals joining Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion upholding a special three-judge district court that has been overseeing California prison litigation for years.
The suit, which traces to 1990, alleged that California prisons were denying inmates the minimally required level of mental-health treatment. The state acknowledged that its prison mental-health care was so poor it violated the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The district court found none of its efforts to cure the problems sufficient, because of severe overcrowding that has seen its penitentiaries swell to nearly double their intended capacity of 80,000.
Although California has toughened its sentences with such laws as "three strikes and you're out," it hasn't added prison cells to meet the growing number of convicts.
When the district court ordered the state to reduce its prison population to 137.5% of its designed capacity, California appealed to the Supreme Court.
Justice Kennedy wrote that the state was free to ask the district court to modify the prisoner-release order should conditions improve. But, meanwhile, "this extensive and ongoing constitutional violation requires a remedy, and a remedy will not be achieved without a reduction in overcrowding," he wrote. "The state shall implement the order without delay."
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority.
Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
Justice Scalia called the district court order "perhaps the most radical injunction issued by a court in our nation's history: an order requiring California to release the staggering number of 46,000 convicted criminals."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000....com%3A+Law%29
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