Back in 2016, then President of the United States, Barack Obama, called solitary confinement “an affront to our common humanity” and ordered the Justice Department to implement reforms to the practice in U.S. prisons. Although just three short years ago, in too many ways it seems a different age: We have seen a resurgence of the “tough on crime” rhetoric that favors harsh policies and approaches that we know don’t work. Despite these painful setbacks in other areas, the strength of grassroots movements, political leadership, and growing public awareness have created a robust and growing movement to end solitary conferment — known to those of us in the justice community as Stop Solitary — dedicated to ensuring that this torturous practice ends up in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

In 2019, we saw national momentum to reign in the abusive use of solitary confinement expand faster than ever before. This year was record-setting in terms of reforms we saw introduced in state legislatures. Twenty-eight states introduced legislation to ban or restrict solitary confinement, and twelve states passed reform legislation: Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Virginia. Some of these new laws, such as those in Connecticut and Washington, present tentative and piecemeal approaches to change. But most represent significant reforms to existing practices that promise to facilitate more humane and effective prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers.   

New Jersey passed the strongest law yet in the nation, limiting the length of solitary confinement to 20 consecutive days for all prisoners and detainees. Before the passage of this law, New Jersey put people in solitary for months or even years at a time. The new law ends that practice and also protects vulnerable populations from the harms of solitary, including people under 21 and over 65, pregnant and post-partum people and those who have recently suffered a miscarriage or terminated a pregnancy, LGBTQ people, those with serious medical conditions, and those with various forms of mental health or developmental disabilities.

Nebraska’s law also stands out: It bans any practice that looks like solitary for minors, pregnant people, and those with serious mental illness, developmental disabilities, or traumatic brain injuries. New Mexico also moved aggressively to ban solitary for minors and pregnant people and ban its use on individuals with serious mental illness. Several states, including Georgia, Texas, Montana, and Maryland passed laws prohibiting the use of solitary on pregnant people, and Montana, Maryland, and Arkansas also passed prohibitions on the use of solitary confinement on minors. In total, five states limited the use of solitary confinement on minors, and six prohibited its use on pregnant people. We even saw this issue taken up at the federal level, with the first briefing in the U.S. House of Representative highlighting The Solitary Confinement Study and Reform Act of 2019, a bipartisan bill which would establish a national commission to study the problem of solitary confinement and recommend national standards for reducing its use.

The one major disappointment came from New York, where the widely-supported HALT Solitary Bill was never brought to a vote after legislative leaders cut a deal with New York Governor Cuomo to let the prison administrators write their own reform policies. Those proposed rules have already been widely panned as woefully inadequate to stop the torture of solitary in New York State. Despite these setbacks, advocates in New York continue to push for passage of HALT and the implementation of real reform in the state, including a 15-day limit on solitary confinement that conforms with the international human rights standards set forth in the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners, now known as the Mandela Rules. If HALT passes in 2020, New York will be the first state in the nation to incorporate the Mandela Rules into its laws.  

Advocates across the country are now gearing up to introduce more legislation to Stop Solitary and to ensure that the significant reforms passed in 2019 are actually implemented by corrections institutions as the laws require. State by state and community by community, solitary survivors, civil rights advocates, faith leaders, medical professionals, politicians, and interested members of the public are joining together to bring an end to the torture of solitary confinement in the United States. Much has changed since President Obama spoke of “our common humanity” in 2016, but that humanity remains the same. It demands that we end solitary confinement once and for all — to the protect the people it harms and the communities they will return to, but also so we can be the type of country we aspire to be.           

Part of an end of year wrap-up series. Read more:

Under Attack by Trump, Immigrant Justice is Advancing in the States

In 2019, We Fought Across the Country to Dismantle Mass Incarceration. We won on Multiple Fronts

The Battle for Abortion Access is in the States

The 2020 Election Promises Record Turnout

The Death Penalty in 2019: A Year of Incredible Progress, Marred by Unconscionable Executions

Amy Fettig, Deputy Director, National Prison Project, ACLU

Last month, in an unprecedented move, President Trump pardoned war crimes charges against three U.S. military service members. The decision provoked opposition from former military leaders and many veterans, but was applauded by some lawmakers and media.

The three men forgiven by the president — Lt. Clint Lorance, Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, and Chief Edward Gallagher — had committed or were accused of horrifying crimes. Lorance was serving a 19-year prison sentence for ordering the murder of two unarmed Afghan villagers. Platoon members who turned him in described Lorance as aggressive, ordering them to shoot indiscriminately at civilians in order to “make them afraid of us.” Golsteyn was set to go on trial next year for killing an unarmed Afghan man.  

Gallagher was charged with shooting at civilians for sport, including an Iraqi school girl and an elderly man. Witnesses testified that he stabbed a wounded teenage captive multiple times and posed with his mutilated corpse. Eventually convicted on a minor count of bringing discredit to the armed forces, Gallagher was demoted one step. Overriding internal military processes, the president restored his rank.

President Trump’s intervention evinces a callous disregard for the lives of victims and survivors, the rule of law, and the military justice system. For him, it was irrelevant that the service members violated clearly established laws of war. The fact that they did so while wearing an American uniform made them beyond reproach. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” he lamented on Twitter in October.

Citing harms to the integrity of the military legal system and undue command influence, former military leaders expressed concern that the pardons may encourage more impunity for war crimes. They aren’t wrong, but they are very late.

This country has been on a war footing for more than 18 years, with no end in sight. Since U.S. troops were first stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, there have been numerous reports of war crimes committed by service members and military contractors. A self-described “kill team” was accused of hunting Afghans for the thrill of it. There was systemic abuse of prisoners by the military and the CIA in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib. Contractors massacred Iraqi civilians in Fallujah and Haditha and Nisour Square.

American systems of civilian and military legal accountability for crimes and other abuses committed since 9/11 have not held up. Some of the troops accused of being involved in these horrific incidents were never charged or were acquitted. Others received a slap on the wrist. Virtually no senior level official has been held meaningfully accountable for systemic wrongs. The record of incomplete accountability for war crimes in Afghanistan prompted the International Criminal Court prosecutor to seek authorization for a war crimes investigation, an effort that the Trump administration tried to scuttle but is now on appeal — arguments took place in the Hague last week.

It may be tempting to view the Trump pardons as exceptional, yet another example of denigrating established norms. It is true that no other president has pardoned war crimes as Trump has done. It is also true that the record of accountability for abuses committed in the name of America’s fight against terrorism is abysmal.

But that poor accountability record started in the Bush administration and continued during the Obama administration. By looking forward as opposed to looking backward, this country failed to reckon with some of the most shameful episodes in its recent history. No senior U.S. government official has been held accountable for authorizing the CIA’s torture program. The military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, where many survivors of CIA and military torture were imprisoned without charge, still holds 40 men.

Victims and survivors of illegal and abusive U.S. counterterrorism policies have found it exceedingly difficult to obtain justice in U.S. courts. Courts give excessive deference to executive branch justifications and secrecy in cases implicating national security. As a result, government officials have largely been shielded from liability. Courts have also abstained from deciding the legality of controversial counterterrorism policies such as the lethal strikes program abroad, which has targeted U.S. citizens with drones and killed many hundreds of civilians, at least.

Litigants challenging abuses committed on U.S. soil have hardly fared better. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the FBI detained hundreds of Arab and South Asian immigrant men and treated them as terrorism suspects because they were Muslim. The detainees were confined for months in maximum-security prisons and subjected to harsh treatment. In two separate cases challenging this detention policy, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of limiting accountability for federal officials. The Court even made it harder for victims to bring civil rights lawsuits and limited the ability of plaintiffs to obtain damages when federal officials violate their constitutional rights.

As avenues for redress for victims narrowed over the years, the military legal system offered some reassurance — however imperfect — that flagrant violations of the law would at least be investigated. Trump’s pardons are sabotaging even that avenue. We owe it to the victims of America’s abuses to start grappling with the tremendous harm that our counterterrorism policies have caused, and strive to repair this harm by holding perpetrators accountable.

Noor Zafar, Fellow, National Security Project, ACLU

America made big strides in 2019 on its path to dismantle the racist, unfair, and inhumane death penalty. Today, dramatically fewer states permit the death penalty than any time in the modern era, and the number of people on death row is at a 27-year low.

Bi-partisan supermajorities in the New Hampshire legislature abolished the death penalty in May, making it the 21^st state to formally reject the punishment. Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a sweeping moratorium on executions in California, closing the death chamber in the state with the largest death row in the country and prohibiting the execution of 737 death row prisoners. Four states — California, Oregon, Colorado, and Pennsylvania — are now under official Governor-imposed moratoria, bringing the total number of states that wouldn’t carry out an execution to 25. Ten years ago, just 12 states prohibited executions. In other words, the number of states prohibiting executions has more than doubled in the last decade — a remarkable pace of change.

The shift in states rejecting the death penalty is mirrored by the movement in public opinion away from capital punishment. The Gallup Poll has tracked public opinion about the death penalty versus life imprisonment since 1985. This year, for the first time since Gallup began tracking public opinion on this issue, a majority of Americans (60 percent) prefer life imprisonment to the death penalty. 

Part of this shift is the clear proof that the government does not always get it right — innocent people have been sentenced to death, including the 166 people who have been formally exonerated. This year brought even more proof that the death penalty cannot shake its innocence problem. In 2019, two men, Charles Ray Finch and Clifford Willians Jr., both of whom were convicted and sentenced to death in 1976, were exonerated and released. Additionally, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted an indefinite stay to Rodney Reed after a groundswell of public opposition clamored against his execution in light of powerful new evidence of his innocence. Other names like James Dailey, Richard Glossip, and Larry Swearingen also made headlines for credible innocence claims. For Swearingen, those news stories came too late. 

While a year of much progress, 2019 was also a year plagued by shameful state executions and the reckless attempt by the federal government to rush the executions of five men after a nearly two decade de facto moratorium. The Supreme Court allowed Alabama to execute Dominque Ray, a Black Muslim who was denied access to the spiritual advice of his Imam — a comfort guaranteed to Christian prisoners. Just weeks later, the Court stopped the execution of Patrick Murphy, a white Buddhist man, triggering concerns that race and religion played a role in the disparate outcomes. 

Other unconscionable executions from 2019 include: Georgia’s execution of Ray Cromartie without permitting a simple DNA test that could have fully exonerated him; Missouri’s execution of terminally ill Russell Bucklew in the face of evidence that his execution was likely to be torturous; and Tennessee’s execution of legally blind Lee Hall, Jr. The Supreme Court and the government of South Dakota alike failed Charles Rhines, allowing his execution despite evidence that his jurors sentenced him to death because of their anti-LGBT prejudice.    

This year was mixed in terms of the courts willingness to grapple with intractable problems of racial discrimination in the death penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear cases from Oklahoma that challenged the systemic racial bias in the imposition of the death penalty, as well as from California, where the state supreme court had upheld the outrageous claim that a prosecutor’s decision to exclude jurors who did not oppose the OJ Simpson verdict was unrelated to race.

But the North Carolina Supreme Court granted review in six cases where the petitioners were yanked from death row, to life without parole, and back again — without due process or new trials — after they had proved racism infected their cases and the state legislature repealed its anti-discrimination law. And the U.S. Supreme Court issued a powerful decision in Flowers v. Mississippi, reaffirming its commitment to overturning cases in which prosecutors secured death sentences by systematically excluding qualified Black jurors from jury service. 

The modern death penalty has churned along for over 40 years since the Supreme Court permitted its reinstatement in Gregg v. Georgia, after finding it unconstitutionally biased and arbitrary in 1972. After more than 40 years, none of the major problems with the death penalty have been addressed. An outgrowth of lynching and slavery, the modern death penalty is still racially biased. Supposed to be reserved for the “worst of the worst” defendants, the death penalty is handed down more often for those with the worst lawyers — not the worst crimes. Geography, money, and race are still the best predictors of who will receive the death penalty. The good news from 2019 is that the country is accelerating in its efforts to finally break with the inhumane and unjust punishment.      

Part of an end of year wrap-up series. Read more:

Under Attack by Trump, Immigrant Justice is Advancing in the States

In 2019, We Fought Across the Country to Dismantle Mass Incarceration. We Won on Multiple Fronts.

The Battle for Abortion Access is in the States

The 2020 Election Promises Record Turnout

Cassandra Stubbs, Director Capital Punishment Project, ACLU