Judge says reforms worked for a while

Judge recalls his role in landmark changes at Texas Youth Commission.

He once held Texas' most dysfunctional institutions under his control, supervising landmark litigation involving prisons, youth lockups and facilities for people with mental retardation at a time when all three were mired in scandal.

These days, with those court cases long ended, U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, 87, says he has no desire to make the kind of headlines he once did.

Kelly West/AMERICAN-STATESMAN (enlarge photo) U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice presided over lawsuits that forced the State of Texas to spend millions of dollars to improve the care of the people it confined.

But he has been following them in recent weeks amid a new scandal at the Texas Youth Commission, a troubled agency that Justice thought was fixed decades ago in his court. Litigants in a lawsuit reached a settlement that made Texas a national model in juvenile offender programs.

"The culture was changed, for a while," Justice said in his court chambers recently, in his first public comments since the latest Youth Commission scandal erupted. "I think they (have) regressed."

The landmark Youth Commission case — Morales v. Turman, filed in 1971 — hinged on allegations that the system had failed the kids in its custody: Incarcerated juveniles were beaten and sprayed with Mace; guards were not properly trained or supervised, grievance procedures were flawed. Escaped youths were hunted down with dogs; some inmates were ordered to dig dirt all day with spoons.

Justice approved the settlement in 1984, and federal supervision ended in 1988. It was his first big case, he recalled — and was later joined by the landmark Ruiz prison reform case and a similar one regarding the care of Texas' citizens with mental retardation.

Home base for Justice then was Tyler, in the Eastern District federal court. Now on senior status, he lives in Austin, but his court work is mostly in Del Rio.

Though nearly two decades have passed since the Morales case ended, some details remain vivid. Like the torment of "Tweetybird," a boy given to screaming fits who was repeatedly tossed into solitary confinement.

In one instance, Justice recalled, the boy was punched in his stomach by guards, blindfolded and then told to run for his cell. He repeatedly slammed into the walls of a cell, trying to get away.

When he finally collapsed, "someone put a mop over his face," Justice said. "There ought to be a better way of doing things, rather than throwing a kid like that into an institution."

His advice to state officials about the current scandal?

"I don't have any," said the judge once vilified by lawmakers for decisions that forced the state to spend millions on care for people who are mentally retarded, mentally ill, criminal or delinquent. "I don't think they'd want it anyway,"Justice said.

mward@statesman.com; 476-3445