BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - A federal judge questioned Monday whether state officials damaged independent data collection of temperatures on Louisiana's death row by trying adjustments that could have cooled off the cells.
The information was being collected at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola as part of a lawsuit claiming that three condemned killers are forced to live in dangerous heat conditions in the south Louisiana summer.
U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson had ordered collection of 21 days of temperature data in advance of the two-day trial that opened Monday.
But he was told that Angola officials added temporary awnings to some of the death row cell blocks and tried to soak some of the buildings with water hoses during the data collection.
"This could have materially altered the data being collected. How do you get around that?" Jackson asked Amy McInnis, a lawyer for prison officials and the state corrections department.
Jackson said he didn't understand why prison officials would make any modifications without seeking approval from him. He didn't immediately decide whether to sanction state officials, but said he would consider the request from the inmates' lawyers.
The judge said either someone at the prison "exercised shockingly poor judgment," or tried to compromise the evidence.
McInnis said the awnings were discussed with a magistrate judge during talks of a possible lawsuit settlement. But Jackson said he spoke with the magistrate judge and was told he gave no one approval to make adjustments that could change the temperature data.
The awnings were added "to ameliorate some of the discomfort," McInnis said. She also said prison officials tried to use water hoses to see if it would cool off the death row tiers, but she said water pressure problems stopped the attempt.
"It just doesn't make any sense to me why this occurred," Jackson said. He added, "I'm very, very troubled by this."
Nilay Vora, a lawyer for the death row inmates, said he received reports of prison officials misting the cells, tinting windows and experimenting with opening and closing windows during the temperature data collection period.
McInnis denied those actions occurred. Vora cited a deposition from Burl Cain, warden of the Angola prison, in which Cain said the cinder block walls were being misted and ventilation was being tested with the opening and closing of windows.
"There should be a level playing field between the plaintiffs and the defendants as to the gathering and collection of that data," Vora said.
He said if prison officials weren't seeking to tamper with the data, they could have tried those experiments on death row tiers where the temperature wasn't being monitored.
The lawsuit was filed in June on behalf of condemned killers Elzie Ball, Nathaniel Code and James Magee, saying the heat conditions violated the death row inmates' constitutional right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment and federal law requiring reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.
All three men have hypertension, along with other health conditions and have increased vulnerability to the heat, the lawsuit says.
Code, 57, was the only inmate in court Monday, appearing in an orange jumpsuit and shackled at the hands and feet.