Cintron v. Bibeault

Jerry Cintron spent two and a half years in a room no bigger than a parking spot as punishment for a disease that affects millions of Americans: opioid use disorder (OUD). The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting alongside Mr. Cintron to advocate for the ending of solitary confinement—particularly in response to mental and physical health crises—a horrific practice that all but ensures poor, and sometimes deadly, outcomes for incarcerated people.

Mr. Cintron was placed in solitary confinement for 450 days because of a fentanyl overdose. The stress of solitary led to more relapses and other disciplinary tickets—ranging from arguing with a guard to asking for an extra piece of fruit—which, in turn, resulted in additional solitary. All along, Mr. Cintron begged to be treated for his disorder. Specifically, he asked to be treated with medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD, also known as Medication Assisted Treatment or MAT), which the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (RIDOC) claims to provide to anyone suffering from OUD and which has been proven to reduce opioid dependence and death from overdose. Yet Defendants refused to provide him with this care.

Instead, they kept Cintron in conditions that deepened his substance use disorder and caused him to deteriorate mentally and physically. The lights glared overhead 24 hours a day, and loud bangs kept him awake all night. He was only let out of his cell for between 45 and 60 minutes on weekdays (to exercise alone in another enclosure), and he was cut off from his children, wife, and other loved ones. Years of isolation led to mental illness, including anxiety and depression; self-harm, including pulling out his hair and badly injuring his hand by bashing it against the wall; and weight loss of almost 70 pounds. This deterioration was exactly what Defendants intended, having told him that they would “bury [him] alive” and keep him in solitary until he was no longer “normal.”

Mr. Cintron sued to challenge his conditions of confinement. The district court denied prison officials’ motion for judgment on the pleadings, and they filed an interlocutory appeal.  The MacArthur Justice Center, alongside the Rhode Island Center for Justice, represents Mr. Cintron on appeal. In the appeal, the First Circuit will consider whether placing Mr. Cintron in two and a half years in solitary confinement while denying him medical treatment for his OUD violated the Eighth Amendment, and, if so, whether Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity for their actions.

In support of Mr. Cintron, various organizations and individuals filed ten different amicus briefs, some related to the problems that plague the doctrine of qualified immunity, and others about the devastating physical and mental health consequences of solitary confinement, and still others about the ways opioids work on the brain. These included a brief from survivors of solitary confinement in Rhode Island, who recounted the horrors of isolation and its impact on their health and lives; a former medical director the prison where Mr. Cintron is incarcerated, detailing the serious and lasting damage solitary caused to the men she was tasked with caring for; and the nation’s leading expert on the prescription opioid and heroin crisis, explaining that Mr. Cintron’s OUD is severe but treatable medical condition, not a sign of moral failure.