In 1992 the inmates of the Arizona Department of Corrections with the help of
the A.C.L.U. filed a class action lawsuit in the federal district court in
Phoenix - Casey v. Lewis, 834 F. Supp. 1553 (DC AZ 1992). The lawsuit
challenged the department over numerous issues related to access to the
courts. The district court ruled in favor of the inmates and held that the
Arizona DOC’s law libraries and legal assistance programs violated prisoners’
right of access of the court. Specifically, the court held that the following
areas were constitutionally deficient: the contents of the law libraries; the
access to the libraries; legal assistance for prisoners who were illiterate or
non-English speaking; library staffing; the indigence standard in order to
receive legal supplies; the photocopying policy that allowed the
confidentiality of legal documents to be breached and limitations on
prisoners’ phone calls to their attorneys. After appointing a Special Master
to assist in developing proper injunctive relief the court issued a permanent
injunction requiring the ADOC to implement the legal access plan devised by
the Special Master. The ADOC appealed, challenging the district court’s
findings of fact and conclusions of law, the scope of the injunctive relief
ordered and the requirements that the ADOC pay the Special Master’s fees
without being given an opportunity to object.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision. The state
republicans saw this as another attempt by the federal judges to micro-manage
their prison system. They decided to take their case all the way up to the US
Supreme Court on a Writ of Certiorari. The climate was ripe for such a case.
In general, 99% of all Writ of Certiorari appeals are not heard by the US
Supreme Court. However, this time, with the climate of the Anti-Terrorism bill
and the Felker case (testing the Anti-Terrorism bill time limitations) and the
Prison Litigation Reform Act, they accepted cert. It certainly didn’t hurt
that justices O’Connor and Rehnquist are republican conservatives from
Arizona. As fate would have it, the court ruled against the inmates and
overturned the lower courts’ findings in this case and left the inmates with
nothing. Thus political pressure had come to bear on the inmates.

Upon hearing of the decision by the Supreme Court, Terry Stewart, the director
of corrections, stated that he would scrap the 34 law libraries in the prison
system. He said that eliminating the law libraries would save the tax payers
millions of dollars. The falsehood behind all this is that the law libraries
are paid for out of the proceeds of sales in the inmate commissaries. Not a
penny comes from the taxpayers. What remains to be seen is what will happen to
the existing law libraries when the case is finalized. Once again the poor and
indigent, the uneducated and inexperienced prisoners who are trying to fight
their cases are being stymied and prevented from the opportunity to address
the mistakes and unfairness in their cases. By taking the few tools available
to the disenfranchised populations in prison are we accomplishing anything
logical? Or are we just locking the doors completely to those behind bars in
the warehouses we call prisons? What kind of a society are we when we deny
fairness to those who can not afford to buy high-priced lawyers to defend
themselves and help appeal their cases? This is not the America outlined in
the Constitution that I learned about in school. Doesn’t anyone care anymore?

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Richard Rossi, 1997