AUSTIN, Texas — Describing Texas prisons as so hot that inmates would cool off by splashing themselves with toilet water or faking suicide attempts to get moved to cooler medical areas, advocates on Tuesday asked a federal judge to declare the state prison system's lack of air conditioning as unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment.
Tuesday began a multi-day hearing in a lawsuit that seeks to force Texas to fully air condition a prison system that houses more than 130,000 inmates, but has full AC in only about a third of its 100 prison units. The rest have partial or no air-conditioning.
Inmate advocacy groups allege that temperatures inside can push above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (48.9 Celsius), and that the extreme heat has led to hundreds of inmate deaths in recent years. They want U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman to require Texas to maintain temperatures in prison housing and occupied areas between 65 and 85 degrees F (18 and 29 degrees Celsius), the same temperature range required by law in county jails.
Texas is not alone in facing lawsuits over dangerously hot prisons. Cases also have been filed in Louisiana and New Mexico. One filed last week in Georgia alleged an inmate died in July 2023 after he was left in an outdoor cell for hours without water, shade or ice.
The Texas lawsuit was initially filed in 2023 by Bernie Tiede, the former mortician whose murder case inspired the movie ''Bernie.'' Tiede, who is serving a life sentence for killing Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow in 1996, has diabetes and hypertension and alleged his life was in danger because he was being housed in a stifling prison cell without air conditioning.
At Tuesday's hearing, Marci Marie Simmons, who moved between three Texas prisons while serving 10 years for felony theft, described ''oppressive, suffocating'' conditions as temperatures rose from spring through summer. She was released in 2021.
''In summer, I was in complete survival mode. I felt like a caged animal,'' said Simmons, who is now the community outreach coordinator for Lioness: Justice Impacted Women's Alliance, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She said the organization represents about 700 current and former inmates.
Simmons testified she once watched a kitchen worker bring an egg back to her cell and cook it on the concrete floor. In 2020, a hallway thermometer in one unit reached 136 degrees when Simmons and two other inmates peeled off the tape that was meant to hide the reading, she said.
