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Review order keeping inmate isolated from others, court says Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - A federal appeals panel Monday told Arkansas prison officials to take another look at an order that has kept a man serving life without parole isolated from other state inmates for 13 years. A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis reversed a judge's ruling that while inmate David Williams' confinement was atypical, he received all the process he was due and had failed to establish an equal protection violation. Williams, convicted of killing his father in Clay County 1980 and later a fellow inmate in prison, sued state Department of Correction officials, claiming their reviews of his segregated status were "meaningless, sham proceedings." The federal appeals court ruled Monday in Williams' appeal of the federal district court decision. "Defendants offered no evidence whatsoever as to why they concluded, after each hearing before a committee tasked with reviewing Williams' housing status, that he remained a security threat," the appeals court said. In 1981, Williams was convicted of killing his father, David Polk Williams, at his home outside Piggott. In 1982, he was convicted of first-degree murder and first-degree battery after stabbing one fellow inmate to death and critically injuring another. Inmate Williams initially was kept isolated from the rest of the inmate population, for his own protection, for about a year and was allowed to return to the main population in mid-1983. In 1995, he was attacked by another inmate and again placed in administrative segregation. The following year he was transferred to a prison in Utah where he spent three years in isolation. He was moved back to Arkansas in 1999 and has remained isolated since. Arkansas prison spokeswoman Dina Tyler said David Williams, who is at the Varner Supermax in Varner, receives a mental health evaluation every 30 days and once a year prison policy requires the prison warden meet personally with him to determine whether he should continue in isolation. |
