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Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, left, and Clarence Thomas look on during the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (Chip Somodevilla/Pool Photo via AP).
The U.S. Supreme Court missed a notable chance to address a contentious case regarding a prison construction mandate in Louisiana, a decision Justice Samuel Alito criticized, highlighting what he described as “serious errors” by a conservative appeals court.
In a list of orders issued on Monday, Alito, with Justice Clarence Thomas concurring in a brief dissent, criticized both his fellow justices and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He expressed dissatisfaction with their failure to nullify an “unlawful prison-building order” dating back to 2019, when a federal judge mandated New Orleans to “construct a new facility for inmates with mental-health needs.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch also believed the Supreme Court should have reviewed the petition for certiorari filed by New Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson, though he did not add his name to the dissent.
Alito emphasized that the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) clearly prohibits courts from “ordering the construction of prisons.” He further asserted that if such an order is made, a “party ‘shall be entitled to the immediate termination of any prospective relief.’”
“Accordingly,” Alito noted, “since the prison-building injunction was illegal from the start, it should have been terminated by the lower courts.”
The issue at hand spans more than a decade, when local New Orleans authorities as part of a consent decree vowed to address “constitutionally inadequate housing and medical care for jail detainees at Orleans Parish Prison” by building a “mental health annex, known as Phase III, at the existing jail.”
After a temporary housing solution “became untenable,” a district judge issued an injunction ordering Phase III to move forward in 2019. But amid a change in power at the sheriff’s office, the position of Louisiana authorities shifted to seek the termination of the orders, a move that was denied at the district court and appellate court on jurisdictional grounds.
Alito, noting a circuit split on the issue, bristled over a “backwards” analysis on who actually bears the burden in circumstances like these.
“It was not the sheriff’s burden to provide a basis for termination; it was the opposing parties’ burden to show a basis for maintaining the injunction,” Alito explained. “In short, the Fifth Circuit erroneously resolved an important issue of federal law on which there is a Circuit split. This case cried out for our review. By failing to intervene, we leave New Orleans to pay for the Fifth Circuit’s serious errors. I respectfully dissent.”
The 5th Circuit’s refusal to rehear the case en banc and additional case history documents were attached to the denied petition.
U.S. Circuit Judges Jerry Smith, a Ronald Reagan appointee, and Dana Douglas, a Joe Biden appointee, and Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Jacques L. Wiener Jr., a George H.W. Bush appointee, issued the per curiam decision in January, noting that the vote was 11-6 against rehearing.
Within the majority were three George W. Bush appointees, Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod along with U.S. Circuit Judges Leslie Southwick and Catharina Haynes, and three Donald Trump appointees, U.S. Circuit Judges Don Willett, Kurt Engelhardt, and Cory Wilson. Douglas was joined by Irma Carrillo Ramirez, also a Biden appointee, James Graves Jr. and Stephen Higginson, two Barack Obama appointees, and Carl Stewart, the lone active Bill Clinton appointee on the court.
The minority included U.S. Circuit Judges Kyle Duncan, James Ho, Andrew Oldham — each a Trump appointee — as well as Priscilla Richman and Edith Jones, a Bush and Reagan appointee respectively, and Smith.
Ho and Oldham each penned dissents, with Oldham blasting the 5th Circuit’s “egregiously wrong” and “bizarre[]” dismissal of Hutson’s appeal for lack of jurisdiction.
“The Prison Litigation Reform Act prohibits federal courts from ordering the construction of prisons or enforcing consent decrees and settlement agreements that provide for the construction of prisons. Such prospective relief exceeds the remedial authority of federal courts,” Oldham wrote, in straightforward agreement with what Alito wrote on Monday.