Ohio prison law library access

The Mansfield News Journal carried a story yesterday morning about a Richland Correctional Institute inmate’s suing the state prison system, claiming his civil rights were violated when bound legal books were replaced with computers.

Richland County inmate Dwayne Harris, convicted of rape, kidnapping, felonious assault, and aggravated assault in 1989, saying he no longer had access to law books, after RiCI's law library removed a number of books, replacing them with seven computers with access to Westlaw, an online legal research service. He says he’s computer-illiterate and doesn't know how to use them to access legal information, claiming a violation of his constitutional rights and seeking a jury trial and damages of $20,000 from each of the four defendants, plus $50,000 from each of the four as punitive damages.

A conversion from bound books to Westlaw has been occurring over the past 12 years, prison officials told the Journal. "In the last 18 months to two years,” Ohio Corrections spokesman Carlo LoParo said, “state-wide, throughout all of our 32 facilities, actual hard-copy books have not been being updated, in lieu of providing services online because the information provided online through Westlaw is more comprehensive and up to date…. and, the law librarians and inmate clerks are all available to assist inmates who do not have the technical ability to navigate the system on their own."

The Supreme Court in Bounds v. Smith, 430 U.S. 817, 97 S.Ct. 1491 (1977), held that the fundamental constitutional right of access to courts requires prison authorities to provide adequate law libraries or adequate assistance from persons trained in the law. In 1996, in Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343, 116 S.Ct. 2174 it held that prisoners do not have an abstract freestanding right to a law library and must demonstrate actual injury in order to sustain a challenge to the adequacy of the law library.

One interesting aside is that in 2005, in Kane v. Espitia, 546 U.S. 9, 126 S.Ct. 407, the Supreme Court also held that “While Faretta v. California, 422 U. S. 806 ( ) establishes a Sixth Amendment right to self-representation, it does not “clearly establis[h]” a law library access right… A necessary condition for such relief is that the state-court decision be “contrary to, or involv[e] an unreasonable habeas application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by” this Court.
28 U. S. C.§ 2254(d)(1).”