Jury awards $753 to CT convict who claimed he spent decades confined in ‘inhumane’ prison conditions after murdering a police officer

A jury in a federal civil rights case awarded minimal damages of $753 in damages to a convicted cop killer who claimed in a lawsuit that the harsh conditions in which he has been held in Connecticut’s prison system amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

Convicted murderer Richard Reynolds’ suit against the state turned on what he has described as the illegally severe conditions of his imprisonment after abolition of the state death penalty, first by the legislature in 2012 and later by the state Supreme Court three years later.

The damages returned by a jury Thursday after a week-long trial in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport turned on how Reynolds was classified as an inmate rather than his claims of inhumane treatment. Reynolds, who was sentenced to life in prison after the death penalty was abolished, was awarded $3 on one of the constitutional violations he claimed in his suit and $750 on a second, officials said.

Reynolds, a prolific prison litigator, has been pressing the suit for a decade. Two federal courts agreed with one of the claims ― that the method by which the legislature enacted the law establishing the conditions of confinement for former death row inmates like him was unconstitutional. The question of whether Reynolds was held in inhumane conditions was left to the jury.

Reynolds was a New York drug dealer who shot to death Waterbury police Officer Walter Williams on Dec. 18, 1992. Williams had stopped Reynolds and was planning to frisk him. Reynolds bumped Williams to learn whether he was wearing a bulletproof vest, then pulled a gun and shot the officer in the head. Reynolds was sentenced to death in 1995.

In 2017, he was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release after the state Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill agreed with a claim at the center of Reynold’s suit — that the state law establishing the conditions of his imprisonment — a so-called legislative compromise devised to abolish capital punishment in Connecticut — was illegal.

The compromise was an effort by death penalty opponents to win votes in a state where most people supported capital punishment. It established that when capital punishment was abolished, those spared execution would spend the rest of their lives under harsh, death row conditions — among them, little if no interaction with others; no physical contact, ever, with family; and only a brief period of two hours or so a day outside of cramped, concrete cells.

The resulting law, known as section 18-10b, created a new category of “special circumstance” inmates — Reynolds and the 10 other killers previously sentenced to death — and it guaranteed that they would spend the remainder of their lives under conditions created especially for them. The federal courts said the legislature acted illegally by identifying a select group of people and imposing a punishment specifically for them without the benefit of a trial.

Reynolds was confined for more than two decades at the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, the state’s most secure maximum security prison. He had lived alone in a 12 foot by 7 foot cell. Gov. Ned Lamont ordered the prison closed in January 2021.

In two comprehensive decisions settling parts of Reynold’s suit in his favor, Underhill wrote that conditions imposed on the former death row inmates amounted in Reynolds’ case to psychological torture with potentially dire mental health consequences.

Underhill wrote that Reynolds was allowed out of his cell for two 15-minute periods to eat lunch and dinner. He was allowed to take one 15-minute shower each day, two hours of recreation each day for six days a week and two hours of weekly indoor gym recreation. Reynolds could, upon request, receive visits from clergy, attorneys, or prison medical staff.

Underhill gave the Department of Correction a list of instructions that would relax Reynolds’ confinement. Among other things, Underhill said Reynolds should be allowed to socialize with inmates who have a lower security classification and be allowed “contact” with visitors. He also ordered the damages hearing now before the jury “to determine the scope and amount of liability of” the prison administrators named in the suit.

Attorney General William Tong’s office, defending the prison administration, argued at the time that the legislature sets policy. Additionally, the attorney general said that “Death row inmates are a special class of prisoners ... They have nothing to lose in committing assaults or attempting to escape. It is eminently rational to conclude that death row inmates constitute the biggest escape risk should they be housed in general population.”

The state disputed many of Reynolds’ allegations and responded that he was relatively comfortable in a modern well-furnished cell with TV, radio, video games, heating, cooling, lighting and hot and cold water.

Reynolds has sued the state, for among other things, violating his first amendment right by denying him pornography. He challenged his prison conditions in a long, handwritten suit in 2013. Two years later, Underhill allowed a law clinic affiliated with Columbia University’s law school to be appointed to press the suit in Reynolds’ behalf.

There are unresolved issues in the suit that will continue to be litigated.