For the third time, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has sent a Texas prisoner’s long-running sleep-deprivation lawsuit back to a federal district court, finding the judge had again applied legal standards the appeals court had previously rejected.
“This is Michael Garrett’s fourth trip to our court,” a three-judge panel of Circuit Judges Don R. Willett, Kurt Damian Engelhardt and Dana M. Douglas wrote in an Aug. 4 opinion. “Twice before, we remanded because the district court applied the wrong legal standard to his Eighth Amendment sleep-deprivation claim. Yet the renewed decision again measures Garrett’s claim against requirements our precedents reject.”
Garrett has spent more than a decade arguing that Texas prison schedules deprive him of sufficient sleep in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
“The Fifth Circuit’s opinion confirms that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t allow state prison officials to turn a blind eye to severe inmate sleep deprivation, and it provides helpful clarity on the standards for an Eighth Amendment claim,” said Chris Knight, an appellate partner in Haynes Boone’s Fort Worth office who is handling the case pro bono. “Mr. Garrett has been fighting for humane sleep conditions for over a dozen years. We look forward to continuing to seek that relief in the district court.”
Since 2019, Haynes Boone has dedicated about 1,200 hours to the case, roughly half of them Knight’s.
Read our past coverage of the case: Cruel & Unusual Punishment: The Tale of 2 Prisoner Rights Pro Bono Wins; Haynes Boone Associates Get Pro Bono Win for Sleep-Deprived Inmate
Knight was an associate looking to gain experience when he volunteered for the case. It went on to give him his first opportunity to argue before the Fifth Circuit in 2023.
What has kept Knight on the case are the interesting legal issues, the chance to work on constitutional questions not often encountered by Big Law attorneys and a client he describes as thankful, helpful and “really not getting a ton of sleep.”
Garrett, who sued Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials in 2013, alleges prison schedules have allowed him no more than four hours of sleep each night since at least 2008. He sought an injunction requiring at least six hours of nightly sleep.
The litigation has followed Garrett as he was transferred from TDCJ’s McConnell Unit to the Estelle Unit. At Estelle, the district court previously found Garrett was afforded about three-and-a-half hours of sleep, further interrupted by hourly cell-door operations, bright lights and a 1 a.m. bed-book count.
The schedule has since changed again. According to the Fifth Circuit, the parties now agree that Garrett is afforded three total hours of nighttime sleep — from 11 p.m. to midnight and again from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. — and that sleep is subject to interruptions from lighting, cell-door operations and bed counts.
Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of the Southern District of Texas nevertheless rejected Garrett’s constitutional claim, finding in part that his expert had demonstrated only an association, rather than a cause-and-effect relationship, between sleep deprivation and health problems. The court also faulted Garrett for failing to establish a specific harm and considered his ability to sleep in chunks throughout the day and night.
The Fifth Circuit said that analysis contained three legal errors.
The judges held that the district court improperly required Garrett to establish causation rather than a substantial risk of serious harm, demanded a numerical benchmark for the minimum amount of sleep constitutionally required and failed to adequately consider how long Garrett has endured the challenged conditions.
Garrett is not required to prove that his sleep schedule caused a particular medical condition, the panel wrote. Under the Eighth Amendment standard, he instead must establish that the conditions pose a substantial risk of serious harm.
The Fifth Circuit also rejected the district court’s requirement that Garrett identify a precise amount of sleep necessary to avoid significant health effects.
The panel separately emphasized that the length of the alleged deprivation matters. On remand, the judges instructed the district court to consider how long Garrett experienced the conditions, as well as whether opportunities to sleep during the day meaningfully offset long-term restrictions on nighttime sleep.
Those errors also affected the district court’s analysis of whether TDCJ officials acted with deliberate indifference, the Fifth Circuit held. The district court must reconsider what prison officials knew about the risks Garrett identified and what, if anything, they did in response to his complaints.
The Fifth Circuit stopped short of ruling that Garrett had established an Eighth Amendment violation. The panel said factual questions remain about whether the Estelle Unit schedule, considering its duration and all meaningful opportunities to sleep, poses a substantial risk of serious harm and whether prison officials knew of and disregarded an excessive risk to Garrett’s health and safety.