Source: https://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=254&amp;search=
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 06:15:14+00:00

Document:
In 1972, plaintiffs filed a class action suit against the Harris County Commissioners Court and the County Sheriff's Department in district court for the Southern District of Texas, alleging unconstitutional jail conditions resulting from overcrowding. In 1975, the court (Judge Carl O. Bue, Jr.) entered a consent decree and instructed defendants to take remedial action to alleviate overcrowding in the jail, to address sanitation problems, and to submit reports to court of its progress. Alberti v. Sheriff of Harris Co., 406 F. Supp. 649 (S.D. Tex. 1975).
The court issued subsequent orders instructing defendants to continue to improve jail conditions, specifically staffing and supervision. In 1985, the court found defendants in civil contempt for failing to comply with staffing requirements laid out in a 1984 order. Alberti v. Klevenhagen, 610 F. Supp. 138 (S.D. Tex. 1985). Defendants appealed the 1985 staffing order, and in 1986, the Fifth Circuit affirmed, Alberti v. Klevenhagen, 790 F.2d 1220 (5th Cir. 1986), and later denied a rehearing en banc. Alberti v. Klevenhagen, 799 F.2d 992 (5th Cir. 1986). Over the next several years, the jail was monitored by a special master, a medical monitor-assessor, and a jail monitor-assessor.
Around 1989, defendants joined the Governor of Texas as a third-party defendant, alleging that the state was responsible for overcrowded conditions because the state jail refused to accept state inmates held at the county jail. The state defendants petitioned the Fifth Circuit for a writ of mandamus to compel transfer of the third-party complaint to a different court in In re Clements (see JC-TX-010). In 1991, the Fifth Circuit held that the state could be held liable for conditions in the county jail system if the state were deliberately indifferent to conditions at the jails and remanded the issue of indifference. Alberti v. Sheriff of Harris Co., 937 F.2d 984 (5th Cir. 1991). The district court (Chief Judge James DeAnda) held both the state and county liable; defendants appealed, the Fifth Circuit affirmed, Alberti v. Sheriff of Harris Co., 978 F.2d 893 (5th Cir. 1992), and the Supreme Court denied defendants' certiorari petition. Richards v. Alberti, 509 U.S. 905 (1993).
Sometime after the Supreme Court denied defendants' writ of certiorari, the district court (Chief Judge Norman W. Black) denied the state's motion to modify the court's 1991 order, and the state appealed. In 1995, the Fifth Circuit affirmed most of the district court's holding but reversed on the issue of population caps. Alberti v. Klevenhagen, 46 F.3d 1347 (5th Cir. 1995).
The PACER docket for this case, which begins in 1992, is virtually empty, so we have no information after 1995 except that the case was reassigned to a new district judge in 1997. The docket records that the case was closed in 1992.
Plaintiff Description Plaintiffs are inmates of the Harris County Jail.

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