Look back in time (1971)

Attorneys involved in the Charles Street Jail case in 1971 expected the lawsuit to last a couple of years. Instead, the litigation would span nearly three decades, rattling state officials and affecting prison conditions nationwide along the way.

In 1973, federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity found that conditions at Boston's Charles Street Jail amounted to "punishment" in violation of pretrial detainees' 14th Amendment due-process rights and ordered the facility closed. As it turned out, that was just the beginning of the case.

Troubles replacing the facility, transferring detainees and coping with a soaring inmate population resulted in delays that dragged out the litigation for 27 years.

Early on in the case, at the plaintiffs' request, Garrity took a tour of the jail to see the conditions firsthand. After viewing the hulking granite-faced building, located in the city's Charles Street Circle, Garrity and his clerk reportedly dined at a posh Boston restaurant and then returned to spend the night in a cell.

The judge subsequently gave the sheriff six months to cease the double-bunking of inmates and ordered the jail closed by June 30, 1976.

But, by 1976, no progress had been made on a replacement facility, and the litigation continued.

A new jail was finally built in 1989 on nearby Nashua Street, but the double-bunking issue persisted and ultimately wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case came to a close in 1998 when the Supreme Court refused to hear Boston criminal defense attorney Max D. Stern's arguments as to why a previously issued consent decree prohibiting inmate double-bunking should still be enforced in the wake of federal legislation to the contrary.

"As a lawyer," Stern says, "I feel I was able to do some good for people who — but for what I did — might have continued to have been mistreated or worse. I feel the lawsuit did some good for the community."

ne of Stern's adversaries in the case, Robert C. Rufo, at the time a staff lawyer in the Suffolk County Sheriff's Office and later a sheriff himself, believes that the litigation made "a huge difference in terms of setting national precedent. [The Prison Litigation Reform Act] was passed, and I know the Charles Street Jail case is something [Congress] looked at in terms of fashioning the legislation."