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The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. Sounds simple enough. But Supreme Court justices disagree vehemently about what the amendment protects — and you can probably guess how they line up.
Supreme Court justices disagree vehemently about what the amendment protects — and you can probably guess how they line up.
Consequently, litigation over the constitutional provision provides a useful snapshot of the court. Which brings us to Michael Johnson, a man classified as seriously mentally ill who was kept in solitary confinement without exercise for three years in a windowless, perpetually lighted cell about the size of a parking space. His lawyers pressed the justices to take up his appeal, arguing this treatment, specifically the deprivation of exercise, violated Johnson's constitutional rights.
But the court declined to do so Monday, over dissent from the three Democratic-appointed justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. It takes four justices to review an appeal; the court includes six Republican appointees.
Writing for the three dissenters, Jackson noted that Eighth Amendment challenges to confinement conditions involve determining whether prison officials acted with “deliberate indifference” to a substantial risk to inmates’ health or safety. But the lower court in Johnson’s case approved summary judgment for officials “without applying that well-established standard,” Jackson wrote.
“Given this indisputable legal error,” the Joe Biden appointee said, she would have summarily reversed it.
And what do the six other justices think of what a third of the court called an “indisputable legal error”?
There was “more than enough evidence to support a reasonable jury finding that the overall 3-year deprivation of yard time that Johnson was subjected to was the result of unconstitutional deliberate indifference,” Jackson wrote for the trio.
And what do the six other justices think of what a third of the court called an “indisputable legal error”?
Not much is the message sent by their silence, effectively deeming the case unworthy of review.
To be sure, it’s worth wondering what a majority ruling on the subject would look like from this court, given its stingy approach to Eighth Amendment complaints over the years. But so long as the court’s current membership holds, Supreme Court opinions raising these issues may mostly be left to dissents.
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