A U.S. appeals court has ruled that a man who spent 26 years in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania can sue prison officials for alleged cruel and unusual punishment.
Warehousing a person for decades as just a vessel for the life you intend to eventually take is competitive with the brutality of any torture I've ever heard of.
Williams had been sentenced to death for killing a construction worker in Philadelphia in 1988. Williams, who is Black, had said he wanted to kill a white person because a white person had put him in jail in a robbery case, the Associated Press reported.
I wouldn't believe a summary from the Inquirer or any capitalist media on the prison state. They routinely recycle copaganda without remorse.
But, even if dude did commit this crime, this country supposedly (lol) forbids cruel and unusual punishment. This case unmasks the reality and underlying fascism behind locking millions of people in cages. It's literally the worst prison culture in the history of humanity.
If the dude's guilty of murder, and got the death sentence, get on with it. Decades of Solitary does nothing but drain resources and erode the validity of law.
The death penalty is significantly more expensive than life in prison actually.
A preliminary study by South Dakotans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, examining first-degree murder cases since 1985 that have resulted in a death sentence or life in prison, found that on average, legal costs in death penalty cases exceeded those in the other cases by $353,105.[24]