Texas Tough by Robert Perkinson

Author:Robert Perkinson [Perkinson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Penology, History, United States, State & Local, Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), Political Science, Law Enforcement
ISBN: 9780312680473
Google: aBKTbwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0312680473
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2010-10-25T23:00:00+00:00

From the disciplinary block at Wynne, Ruíz’s document traveled first to Judge Justice’s courthouse in Tyler, where a clerk stamped it June 26, civil action 5523, and filed it away. At the time, Justice’s docket was one of the busiest in the nation. In addition to the standard load of criminal and civil proceedings, the judge was managing the school integration case, the statewide reapportionment of legislative districts, and a class-action lawsuit against the Texas Youth Commission, which had scarcely improved since Ruíz’s days at Gatesville. Already up to his receding hairline in work, Justice was in no hurry to take on TDC, one of the most powerful and respected agencies in the state. Nevertheless, the judge and his clerks selected eight illustrative prisoner complaints—with Ruíz’s headlining—and sent them to the New York offices of the NAACP’s storied Legal Defense Fund to solicit representation for the indigent plaintiffs.⁶⁰

The “first-class lawyer” Justice hoped would take the case was William Bennett Turner, a premier expert in prison law whom Justice had met at a symposium in Dallas. Turner was no longer in New York, so Ruíz’s writ and its companions flew from New York to San Francisco, where Turner had opened an LDF branch office, and then across two oceans to a spare, concrete-block hotel room in Kathmandu, where the attorney was on holiday.⁶¹

Turner says that a wave of disquiet washed over him as he read through Justice’s packet. He was unquestionably the right man for the job; he knew prison law backwards and forwards and had already worked with Jalet on other Texas cases. But Turner was also restless. He didn’t like a case or even a girlfriend that hung around too long, and he was itching to get into other lines of litigation. He was born in Fort Worth but had gladly left Texas behind—for a middle-class upbringing in Saginaw, Michigan, for college at Northwestern and law school at Harvard—and he didn’t relish returning. Civil rights was a passion, but he wasn’t sure he was up for a protracted lawsuit against TDC. In the Arkansas case, which Turner had helped formulate, a reform-minded prison administration had secretly welcomed litigation as a way to pry resources out of the legislature.⁶² From Beto’s bare-knuckled tactics against Jalet and the eight-hoe squad, however, Turner knew Texas would fight against federal intervention like it had during the Civil War. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to say no. But respected federal judges are hard to turn down, and Turner reluctantly said yes.

Once he returned to the United States, Turner filed an amended lawsuit under section 1983 that extended the case from Eastham to all fourteen TDC units and from a handful of plaintiffs to every prisoner in the system. He agreed to forgo any monetary damages, which allowed Justice to try the case alone, without a jury. In this amended form, Ruíz’s civil action 5523 became known as Ruiz v. Estelle, with Ward Jim Estelle, Beto’s handpicked successor as TDC director, standing as the named defendant.

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