U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant entered a permanent injunction in a First and Fourteenth Amendment lawsuit against Grayson County and its sheriff that requires the jail to allow books, magazines and other correspondence sent to incarcerated people from the nonprofit prison advocacy Human Rights Defense Center.
The judge’s permanent injunction, issued Thursday, comes several weeks after Grayson County and its sheriff, Tom Watt, agreed to change its mail intake procedures to accommodate the advocacy group’s informational publications. Mazzant’s order places stringent expectations on the jail that the county and sheriff had not offered in its court filing, such as timeframes for giving the mail to inmates after it’s delivered and narrowing the scope for permissible rejections.
The Florida-based Human Rights Defense Center, represented on a pro bono basis by O’Melveny & Meyers and the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law’s First Amendment Clinic, filed the lawsuit in September after the North Texas jail rejected dozens of correspondences since 2021, according to the suit.
O’Melveny partner Timothy S. Durst said his client and legal team were pleased with the judge’s order and believe it will “ensure the go-forward protection of the First Amendment rights” of the people jailed and the advocacy group.
“Protecting those freedoms was a primary objective of the lawsuit,” Durst said.
The lawsuit is still active and the plaintiff will focus on damages and legal expenses, Durst added.
A lawyer for the defendants did not respond to a request for comment.
The jail’s rejection of packages, including the group’s magazines Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News, amounted to “unconstitutional censorship,” the plaintiff had argued. The jail also provided no way to challenge its rejections, the lawsuit said.
Packages were simply 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.
The Human Rights Defense Center has filed similar lawsuits — many of them successfully — against jails across the country.
Grayson County and Sheriff Watt are represented by James C. Tidwell of Wolfe, Tidwell & McCoy in Sherman.
The Human Rights Defense Center is also represented by Don Olmos, Frances Mackay and Brandon Duke of O’Melveny & Meyers, as well as Peter B. Steffensen and Thomas S. Leatherbury of Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law and students.