‘…Something in the Ayala case stirred Kennedy, though the strange opacity of the Supreme Court means we can’t really know what it was. As Kennedy’s opinion noted, there are about 25,000 people in solitary confinement in the country; Ayala’s circumstances were neither well described in the court record nor unique. But his concurring opinion quoted Dickens and cited the dehumanizing treatment of Kalief Browder in New York; he had his law clerks dig up an 1890 case in which the Supreme Court had decided that even for those prisoners sentenced to death, solitary confinement contained a “particular terror and a peculiar mark of infamy.” Kennedy closed by quoting Dostoyevsky: The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. Then the justice wrote, “There is truth to this in our time.”…’
Source: The Movement Against Solitary Confinement — NYMag
thx…
When a Supreme Court Justice quotes Dostoevsky: the Hector Ayala case and Justice Kennedy on solitary confinement http://t.co/z7iE88iR6g
— Sarah Kay (Taylor’s Version) (@K_interarma) August 15, 2015