Judge: Texas must give number of heat-related prison deaths
Source: Associated Press
Judge: Texas must give number of heat-related prison deaths
Updated 12:57 pm, Thursday, December 29, 2016
HOUSTON (AP) A federal judge is ordering the state to disclose the number of heat-related deaths that have occurred since 1990 in Texas prisons, where less than a third have air conditioning in all housing areas.
U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison at a hearing Wednesday in Houston gave the state 30 days to comply, but not before questioning why its lawyers had not provided the information sooner, the Houston Chronicle reported (http://bit.ly/2hzkC3J ).
The order comes as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2013 that contends at least 13 inmates being held by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice have died of heat-related deaths since 2007, including 11 in 2011 when a heat wave brought some of the hottest temperatures on record.
"We are not talking about how many widgets were sold out of a given factory," Ellison said during the hearing. "We are talking about human lives, and I would be very distressed if the answer is the TDCJ does not even keep count of how many people died of heat-related illness."
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Judge-Texas-must-give-number-of-heat-related-10824475.php
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