After spending nine years alone in a concrete cell the size of a parking space, a former New York prisoner recently got the chance to tell his story to a jury and win a landmark civil rights verdict with help from a pro bono team of Sidley Austin LLP attorneys.

Two New York State Department of Corrections and Community Services officials agreed to pay $100,000 in punitive damages after an eight-member federal jury found in September, in the first such verdict in state history, that Wonder Williams' nine years of solitary confinement violated the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"This landmark case is the first time we saw solitary confinement in New York state prisons found to violate the Eighth Amendment," said Sidley Austin partner Sona De, who helped represent Williams at trial. "The jury's unanimous verdict holding high-level prison officials accountable for that speaks volumes."

The Sidley team faced constitutional, judicial and courtroom challenges to reach the unanimous jury verdict. Chief among them was that using the Eighth Amendment to argue that solitary confinement constituted cruel and unusual punishment had never been successfully done in New York's federal courts before. But 3½ years of litigation and five days of trial in September led the team to a landmark victory.

In addition to being a first-of-its-kind verdict in the state, the $100,000 in damages represents the largest published settlement amount in a single-plaintiff solitary confinement case involving the New York state prisons.

"The punitive damages award was especially meaningful as one of our client's goals in pursuing this case was to help deter this cruel and callous treatment of others in the government's custody," said Michael Lisak, an attorney with Sidley Austin who helped represent Williams at trial.

Joining De and Lisak on the Sidley team was partner Ellen Dunn, who co-leads the firm's insurance litigation group. The team was assisted by Sidley pro bono counsel Leslie Kuhn-Thayer, senior managing associate Tyler Domino, managing associates Cassandra Liu and Laura Sorice, and associate Briana Merritt.

Basing the civil rights case on the Eighth Amendment brought the complaint to the federal level in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. However, De said it also meant the attorneys were constrained by the 11th Amendment, which limits the extent to which the federal courts can hear cases brought against states and state entities.

Instead, Williams' March 2021 complaint targeted individual state officials who played a role in keeping him in solitary confinement — or administrative segregation, the term used by the Department of Corrections — at Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, 60 miles southwest of Syracuse, and Mid-State Correctional Facility, in Marcy, between Rome and Utica. Named as defendants in the case were James O'Gorman, deputy state corrections commissioner; John Colvin, superintendent of Five Points; and Matthew Thoms, superintendent of Mid-State.

Before the trial started, Chief U.S. District Judge Brenda K. Sannes advised the attorneys that the case would be heard by an eight-person jury with no alternates, and that they would need to arrive at a unanimous decision.

One major challenge for the Sidley team was trying to humanize Williams, who was serving a lengthy sentence for his involvement in a failed murder-for-hire plot orchestrated while being held in jail for a separate crime. According to court records, Williams had been arrested and incarcerated on Rikers Island awaiting trial for a shooting that occurred on New Year's Eve 2007. Prison officials said Williams used the telephone and mail to coordinate a plot to kill three witnesses to the shooting.

After he was convicted of conspiracy, assault and criminal possession of a weapon, Williams' attempted plot was used as justification to keep him in administrative segregation from March 2010 to February 2019.

Sidley's attorneys introduced Williams in their opening statement as a family man who became a model prisoner once he was allowed back into the general population in 2019. He was released on parole in February 2021 and now lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with his family, according to court records.

Their next task was to meet a two-part test to prove to the jury that the defendants violated Williams' constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. To do that, the team had to show that Williams was at risk of serious damage to his health due to the conditions of his confinement, and that high-ranking prison officials acted with deliberate indifference to those conditions.

The first part involved more objective evidence and testimony from expert witnesses showing the detrimental effects of Williams' incarceration. The cells, the team argued, were dirty, brightly lit, cold in the winter thanks to the inadequate clothing and blankets provided by the prison, and hot in the summer with no fresh air or fans. Williams received one hour of recreation time a day, where he was held alone, outside, in a small pen. Human interaction was limited to yelling to neighboring prisoners, which was prohibited, and short conversations with correctional officers and medical staffers.

In his complaint, Williams said that his nearly nine years of solitary confinement led him to suffer several physical and mental ailments including migraines, severe pain in his back and neck, a thyroid condition, anxiety, depression, insomnia and adverse changes to his personality.

Meeting the second part of the test — that officials willfully ignored the conditions of Williams' detention — is more subjective since defendants are unlikely to admit culpability, De told Law360. So the Sidley team used years of official records rubber-stamped by O'Gorman approving the confinement without the required diligence or inspections to create a narrative for jurors that satisfied both parts of the test, De said.

The jury unanimously found that O'Gorman and Colvin violated Williams' rights based on the conditions of his confinement. O'Gorman was also found liable for lacking a penological justification to sign off on Williams' continued solitary confinement. The jury did not find Thoms liable.

Before the case moved on to a separate hearing before the same jury to determine the amount of punitive damages owed to Williams, O'Gorman and Colvin agreed to settle the matter for $100,000. Williams felt "thankful and vindicated" about getting his opportunity to testify about his experience in solitary and receiving the jury verdict and settlement, De said.

"The verdict demonstrates that our client's multiyear effort to tell his story of mistreatment was not in vain," Dunn, a partner in Sidley's New York office, added in a statement. "The protections conferred by the U.S. Constitution have real meaning for incarcerated individuals."
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-Editing by Karin Roberts.

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