Until just this year, Rhode Island was the only state to have and enforce a statute which declares any person serving a life sentence in prison “civilly dead.” The provision was so archaic that the Harvard Law Review called it “outworn as a mode of punishment” back in 1937. Even so, the Department of Corrections as recently as 2018 sought to bar an inmate from bringing a civil rights suit over his living conditions at the ACI because he was “civilly dead.”
However, a positive decision from the Rhode Island Supreme Court in March of 2022, resulting from ACLU-involved litigation, declared the statute unequivocally unconstitutional. We supported this legislation repealing the statute as a matter of cleaning up this unjust and unconstitutional law from the books. Unfortunately, though the bill passed the House, it died in committee in the Senate.
