‘Exposed to feces, urine’: 10th Circuit revives civil rights case against Mack Alford Correctional Center

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State prisoner Joseph Womble’s civil rights case against former Mack Alford Correctional Center leaders is headed back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma after the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled April 21 that his claim about exposure to “other inmates’ urine and feces” should not have been dismissed.

Womble sued then-MACC warden Jerry Chrisman and then-deputy warden Tommy Sharp in 2014 alleging the Stringtown facility operated by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections had violated his civil rights by failing to provide adequate nutrition, failing to screen new inmates for mental illness, and providing inadequate maintenance of the shower and bathroom faculties. The screening claim was dismissed in a previous appeal, and the district court dismissed both the nutrition claim and the inadequate facilities claim for insufficient evidence. Womble appealed.

Judge Scott Matheson and two other 10th Circuit judges agreed with the dismissal by the district court on the nutrition claim, but they reversed the inadequate facilities claim.

“We conclude a reasonable jury could find that some food rationing occurred at MACC during the relevant time period in question. But we are not convinced the evidence could allow a finding that the food rationing was so severe as to deprive Mr. Womble of the minimal civilized measures of life’s necessities or create a substantial risk of serious harm to him,” Matheson wrote. “We conclude that Mr. Womble established a triable issue on the objective component of an Eighth Amendment violation based on the regular presence of feces on the floors of the toilets due to clogging and overflowing, the lack of adequate lighting in the toilet areas, and the inadequacy of the toilets-to-inmates ratio.”

‘Bathrooms contained garbage and exposed wiring’

Located southwest of McAlester in Atoka County, the Mack Alford Correctional Center provided inadequate facilities to inmates by failing to maintain bathrooms and shower areas, Womble’s surviving Eighth Amendment claim argues.

The alleged incidents happened in 2014 when the MACC “received 128 inmates from Oklahoma county jails, which increased the A-South inmate population from 100 to 132 inmates” leading the prison to construct “32 temporary bunks in the common areas,” according to the 10th Circuit’s summary of the facts.

“The temporary bunks in A-South did not have bathrooms, so MACC left two (and later three) cells vacant so that inmates housed in the temporary bunks could use the toilets in each of them. As a result, 32 inmates housed in the temporary bunks had to share the two (and later three) toilets. And all 132 inmates in A-South shared 11 showers,” Matheson wrote. “Due to the overcrowding in A-South, the toilets and showers shared by inmates in the temporary bunks became overwhelmed. Toilets were often ‘out of order’ or ‘overflowing.’ The bathrooms contained garbage and exposed wiring. Shower drains were frequently clogged. These conditions ‘were either not fixed or maintenance was delayed.’ The maintenance issues caused Mr. Womble and other inmates to be exposed to feces and urine in the bathrooms and showers.”

Womble told the court he wore boots whenever he went to the bathroom “due to ‘the general condition of the bathrooms.'” He said lightbulbs frequently did not work and that he had to “kind of squat over the toilet to use the bathroom.” He further alleged that, when fights would break out, staff would use one to two of the bathrooms as temporary holding cells for about a week per incident, further straining the remaining facilities.

“Mr. Womble soiled himself ‘multiple times waiting for a bathroom to open up.’ He alleges he ‘experienced physical pain while waiting on bathrooms, and his digestive system suffered damage for having to hold bowel movements for long periods of time,'” Matheson wrote. “We conclude that Mr. Womble’s evidence was sufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether defendants knew about unsanitary conditions of confinement and failed to take reasonable measures to abate those conditions. Although defendants took some measures to address overflowing and clogged toilets, a reasonable jury could find that those measures were inadequate and that defendants knew so given the persistence of the toilet overflow problem.”

The 10th Circuit ruling sends the case back to Magistrate Judge Jason Robertson, and it clears the way for Womble’s inadequate facilities claim to go to trial in Muskogee unless a settlement is reached.

Womble is currently incarcerated at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington after being convicted in Tulsa County of second-degree robbery in August 2023, about two and a half years after his 2011 sentence for a robbery conviction had ended. Previously, Womble unsuccessfully sued ODOC’s former director in state court over a claim that the agency was improperly taking 100 percent of his wages to cover “legal and medical expenses,” such as “legal co-pays” as expenses for copies of case law printed from a law library computer.

Problems within Oklahoma DOC were well documented around the time of Womble’s 2014 lawsuit, with the agency facing prison overcrowding problems and budgetary constraints.

Last week’s appellate decision in the Womble lawsuit follows a pattern of the 10th Circuit cases overturning Oklahoma’s federal courts’ dismissals of civil rights cases, including:

• In August, Wagoner County law enforcement officers were found not to be entitled to qualified immunity in the 2019 fatal beating of Jeffrey Krueger;
• In November, a pair of Bartlesville officers were found not to be entitled to qualified immunity in the 2019 shooting death of Thomas Gay;
• In December, the 10th Circuit said a reasonable jury could find that Grady County officers were not adequately trained to recognize suicidal inmates at the Grady County Jail;
• In January, three Oklahoma City officers were determined not to be entitled to qualified immunity in the 2020 death of Dawawn McCoy; and
• In March, former Tulsa Police Department Betty Shelby was found not to be entitled to qualified immunity in 2016 fatal shooting of Terence Crutcher.

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