S.C. Trial Judge Condemns State Leaders, Citizens For Prisoner Neglect

A trial judge’s recent opinion, issued as part of a years-long legal battle over the treatment of the mentally ill in South Carolina prisons, condemns the state’s lawmakers, legal officials and religious leaders for standing by while known violations occurred. Judge Michael Baxley, a former Representative for South Carolina, wrote that the case was one of the “most troubling” he’d ever seen. The evidence in this case, he wrote, “has proved that inmates have died in the South Carolina Department of Corrections for lack of basic mental health care, and hundreds more remain substantially at risk for serious physical injury, mental decompensation, and profound, permanent mental illness.”