Editorial: Even murderers are protected by the Constitution

Alfredo Prieto is, by any objective assessment, someone who needs to be locked away from society. He is under three death sentences for murder — two in Virginia and one in California — and police have implicated him in six other killings for which he likely will never be charged.

But even convicted murderers are protected by the Constitution, and in a legal challenge to Virginia’s policy requiring all death row inmates to live in solitary confinement, Prieto has raised valid questions about due process and, by extension, about the nature of punishment.

Law enforcement officials like to talk about the “worst of the worst,” and Prieto certainly fits that description. He was sentenced to death for the 1990 rape and murder of 15-year-old Yvette Woodruff in Ontario, and packed off to San Quentin’s death row. In 2007, a Virginia grand jury indicted him, based on DNA evidence, for an unsolved 1988 double murder (one victim was also raped). Prieto was extradited, convicted and sent to death row, where, under prison policy, he was placed in solitary confinement.

Prieto sued, arguing that automatically consigning the condemned to solitary based on their sentence singles them out for unduly harsh treatment in a prison system in which other inmates are housed based on a checklist of risk and behavioral factors.

Prieto deserves no sympathy. But he does deserve — and the Constitution promises him — due process of law. He had no opportunity to challenge a policy that doesn’t distinguish among individuals. As a result, he has spent six years in a 71-square-foot cell with no human interaction other than the occasional guard or prison medical personnel. Like the seven other death row inmates in Virginia, he is let out of his cell five times a week for an hour of solo exercise in an outdoor cell with no equipment known as the “dog cage,” and three times a week for a 10-minute shower. Psychologists assert that such treatment pushes even the sane to the edge.

Prieto’s sentence was death, not solitary confinement until death. A federal district court ruled last year that Virginia prison officials must make individual determinations about safety and risk before locking people away in such onerous conditions. The state should not have appealed that reasonable decision, but it did, and in a 4th Circuit Court of Appeals hearing last week prison officials argued that death row inmates pose a substantial risk because they have nothing to lose in attacking a guard or fellow inmate. There may be some truth to that argument, but the decision should be based not on suppositions about dangers that might exist, but on each prisoner’s history and behavior.

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