This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Bruske, Stacey Cole, and Todd Michaels.

Let's go on talking about what's going on in prison.

13 months. That's how long Richard Allen spent in maximum security, solitary confinement before his trial in case you're just

joining us in a unit called Westville Correctional Unit, designed for what prison officials

called the worst of the worst. Alan had never been arrested before. He was a pretrial detainee,

presumed innocent. You don't put people there in that sort of a state.

That's for hardened convicted criminals, not someone who's been accused of the crime

and awaiting trial.

But as you were alert in this case, nothing is as it should be.

And according to the appeal, he was the first safekeeper, anyone in IDOC could remember ever being placed in that unit.

The results were predictable because the state of Indiana already knew what prolonged solitary does to people with serious mental illnesses.

They'd been sued over it before.

They settled.

They had a 30-day policy for exactly this reason,

but they allegedly kept Allen in a strip cell for over a year anyway, watching him deteriorate

from a coherent 180-pound man into a 135-pound psychotic shell, who smeared feces on himself,

drank toilet water, and confessed to murders while asking if he was dead. The state then used those confessions to convict him. Bob Manna is with us,

host of the podcast Defense Diaries, to help us break more of this down. The appeal references a federal court order and a settlement, I Pass versus IDOC,

that found Indiana's practice of housing seriously mentally ill inmates in solitary constituted cruel

and unusual punishment.

That settlement established a 30-day limit.

Alan was there for 13 months.

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