The Grayson County jail in North Texas is censoring books and magazines sent to inmates, a nonprofit prison advocacy says, in violation of the organization’s rights under the First and Fourteenth amendments.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, in Sherman, heard arguments Monday on a motion for a preliminary injunction brought by the Human Rights Defense Center. The judge said he will issue a ruling at a later time but did not offer an exact deadline, lawyers in the hearing said.
The Florida-based advocacy group is represented by a group of O’Melveny & Myers lawyers who are working the case pro bono, alongside the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic. The lawsuit, filed in September, names as defendants Grayson County and its sheriff, Tom Watt.
Since September 2021, the advocacy organization has mailed packages including its magazines, Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News, along with books and informational brochures, to inmates in the Sherman jail, according to the lawsuit. Dozens of the correspondences were rejected, the lawsuit states.
The packages were returned with handwritten notations on the outside stating “Contents Not Allowed/No Books,” “No magazines allowed,” “No Stapled Articles Allowed” and other similarly brief notes, according to the lawsuit. But never have jail officials provided the advocacy group with “a constitutionally adequate notice” or an opportunity to challenge their decisions, the lawsuit claims.
The jail’s website states that books and packages will be rejected without authorization from jail administrators, but the website does not provide information for a publisher to seek prior approval or appeal a rejection, the group says.
The group’s motion for preliminary injunction asks for the judge to order jail administrators to cease enforcement of “unconstitutional censorship policies and practices” that prevent the literature from reaching inmates and to provide the organization with “due process” when administrators block its packages.
The defendants argue that there is no First Amendment violation and sought to convince the judge that the advocacy group failed to prove several required elements for injunctive relief. Among their arguments, the organization did not “write or contact the defendants nor the Grayson County jail to raise any issue or to seek a resolution to a perceived issue.”
“This matter could have been addressed without the need for litigation or unnecessary expense, litigation, and Court time,” the defendants wrote in their response.
The relief the organization wants would unduly burden jail staff, the sheriff and county further contended.
“Requiring jail staff to remove all staples from all publications sent to its facility and permitting all publications to be housed in the inmate cells takes time and would adversely affect the allocation of jail staff resources and impose logistical and safety challenges upon the jail,” the defendants argue.
During the two-hour hearing, the judge questioned both sides about staples found in some of the materials — what threats they pose, why the court should order jail staff to remove the staples and whether other jail staffs remove staples from correspondences to inmates — lawyers for the advocacy group told The Texas Lawbook after the hearing.
“We put forth a lot of evidence that [Human Rights Defense Center] sends this to 3,000 different correctional facilities, including 154 Texas jails,” O’Melveny associate Don Olmos said. “[The judge] seemed to really like that part, because a lot of the questions he had for opposing counsel were about, ‘Well, if all these other facilities are doing it, why can’t you?’”
Defense lawyer James C. Tidwell, of Wolfe, Tidwell & McCoy in Sherman, did not respond to The Lawbook’s interview request.
The judge also showed a particular interest in a third-party vendor in Fort Worth that the jail works with to scan non-privileged mail onto electronic devices that inmates can access, Olmos said.
The defendants offered the Fort Worth address as a sufficient alternative in its response. When the organization mailed its packages to that facility, its literature was scanned and provided to the inmate it was addressed to, the defendants said.
But the record is murky on how often inmates can access the reading materials and how long the electronic devices retain the information, Olmos said, and the judge made an effort to clarify those details.
The advocacy group also argued that the jail policy is ambiguous on how a publisher can appeal a rejection, prompting the judge to ask pointed questions about the policy and how it is applied, O’Melveny partner Timothy S. Durst said. The judge asked defendants to submit a subsequent filing to answer his questions about their policies, Durst added.
Human Rights Defense Center is also represented by Frances Mackay and Brandon Duke of O’Melveny & Myers, as well as Peter B. Steffensen and Thomas S. Leatherbury of Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and students.
The case is No. 4:24-cv-00828, Human Rights Defense Center v. Grayson County, Texas; and Tom Watt.