Prison Litigation Reform Act: Congressional Statute Not Open to Judicial Discretion.

Lieutenant Lane. On the other hand, under the Model Penal Code interpretation, the brief time lapse would not have precluded an EED defense. Regarding prison culture, although Mr. Johnson was denied access to records related to general prison violence on the basis of relevance, in that the records were not necessary for the preparation of his defense, one could argue that such records would have provided information about the prison climate, which in turn, may have provided information relevant to Mr. Johnson’s state of mind. Although not mentioned in the decision, the Arkansas prison system has a history of investigations of prisoner mistreatment, including an 18-month Department of Justice investigation resulting in the citation of two Arkansas prisons for unconstitutional conditions (Rigby M: DOJ Investigation: Conditions in Arkansas Prisons Unconstitutional. May 15, 2004. Available at https://www.prisonlegalnews. org/news/2004/may/15/doj-investigation-conditionsain-rkansas-prisons-unconstitutional. Accessed October 22, 2016). The most recent Department of Justice investigation of the prison system began in 2015 and was, based on inmates’ allegations of sexual abuse and harassment by corrections officers in the Arkansas womens’ prison (U.S. Department of Justice: Justice Department Announces Investigation into Allegations of Sexual Abuse at the McPherson Women’s Prison in Newport, Arkansas. June 11, 2015. Available at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justicedepartment-announces-investigation-allegationssexual-abuse-mcpherson-womens-prison. Accessed September 22, 2016). Another aspect of this case to consider is that Mr. Johnson was already serving time in prison for killing his father. Parricide is rare, and most of those cases involve a child who has been severely abused or has mental illness (Hart JL, Helms JL: Factors of parricide: allowance of the use of battered child syndrome as a defense. Aggress Violent Behav 8: 671– 83, 2003). We have limited information about Mr. Johnson’s developmental, family, and psychological history. Nonetheless, if Mr. Johnson had been a victim of severe abuse as a child, might prison conditions exacerbate any baseline heightened arousal and hypervigilance? Might the actions of a prison authority figure trigger safety fears rooted in childhood trauma? The possibility of a prisoner’s successful EED claim based on prison environment may raise concerns of opening the floodgates of prisoner litigation. Yet, this case raises a theoretical possibility that perhaps should be considered in the future: could a prison climate of fear and violence, combined with insufficient mental health services be so abhorrent as to give rise to an EED claim? In this case, the court’s heat-of-passion interpretation of the relevant Arkansas statute did not require it to address this question.