AUSTIN — A major lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) began a round of hearings this week in federal court. Dozens of witnesses were called to the stand to testify about a deadly issue: the lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons. Nearly 70% of inmates in the state’s prison system live without A/C, impacting around 85,000 Texans.
While the suit could have a ripple effect across the state, the landmark case has a direct connection to the Big Bend through Jodi Cole, an Alpine-based attorney. Last summer, Cole filed an emergency motion on behalf of convicted murderer Bernhard “Bernie” Tiede who alleged that he suffered a stroke as a direct result of sweltering temperatures.
Tiede has been moved to an air-conditioned unit — for now. The restraining orders granted by the court ordered the move, but does not require the TDCJ to continue housing Tiede in cooler temps indefinitely.
Cole is one of a dozen attorneys and four advocacy groups that came together after the emergency filings to widen the scope, launching a suit that names other plaintiffs in an attempt to require TDCJ to house all inmates in a “safe” temperature range between 65 and 85 degrees.
Last week’s hearings thrust the case back in the headlines, with many watching — and waiting — to see if it will result in a literal breath of fresh air for tens of thousands of incarcerated Texans.
“Midnight in the garden of East Texas”
The story of how Cole came to the fight for Texas inmates is just as long and full of twists and turns as the fictional works inspired by Tiede’s story.
In some circles, Tiede is a household name. He was the subject of an infamous 1998 true crime story in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth, who later authored a screenplay with Austin-based director Richard Linklater. The film — a dark comedy called Bernie, starring Jack Black — hit theaters in 2012.
Hollandsworth would later tell an interviewer that he became interested in the story after seeing a brief write-up in the Dallas Morning News about Tiede, a former funeral home director who confessed to the murder of an elderly oil-rich widow in 1996.
The story turned familiar true crime tropes on their heads. What would happen in a case where the victim was so disliked that no one noticed she was dead for nine months — and her killer was so beloved that he was showered with donations for his bond? “If I made a list of people I knew were going to heaven … Bernie [Tiede] would be first on that list,” one woman told Hollandsworth.
As the story goes, Tiede was an assistant funeral home director who quickly gained a reputation for his soft and comforting nature, particularly towards older women who had suffered the deaths of their husbands. Marjorie Nugent was one such woman, and Tiede — noticing that she had little contact with family and few friends — spent time by her side as she processed the loss.
Nugent hired Tiede as a personal assistant of sorts. Tiede quickly took advantage of Nugent’s lack of interest in her own bank accounts — though not necessarily for himself. He earned a reputation in the small East Texas town of Carthage as a Robin Hood figure, cutting checks from Nugent’s fortune toward small businesses and programs for local kids.
There were strings attached to Tiede’s sudden access to fast cash. Nugent had a reputation for being cruel and exacting, and one day — as he would later admit to law enforcement — he’d had enough. He shot his benefactress four times and put her body in a deep freezer, where it would go unnoticed for nine months.
Tiede was sentenced to life in prison for her murder, where he would remain until 2014.
After the release of Linklater’s film in 2012, Nugent’s family pushed against the characterization of Marjorie as a mean, miserly old lady, alleging instead that it was Tiede’s influence that estranged her from the family, rather than her character. “My grandmother didn’t deserve to be murdered,” Shanna Nugent wrote in an op-ed for the Texas Tribune.
Nugent’s family argued that the story’s Hollywood treatment unfairly biased the public against the facts of the case. Whether or not they were right, it’s inarguable that the film attracted attention.
Cole met Linklater at the premiere of the film, where she talked to him about her work as a criminal defense attorney and an advocate for incarcerated people.
She then filed a writ of habeas corpus on Tiede’s behalf, claiming that new evidence had emerged that might exonerate him. The writ was granted by a judge, and Tiede was released from prison briefly in 2014. He lived in Linklater’s garage apartment and worked as an assistant for Cole — both conditions of his release.
While Cole’s motion provided temporary relief, Tiede was re-sentenced in 2016 and returned to prison, where he will be ineligible for parole until 2029.
“Remember that we’re humans”
Tiede’s return to Huntsville wasn’t the end of his time in the spotlight. In the record-breaking heat wave of 2023, he suffered an “acute medical crisis and likely stroke” in his cell, which had reached a temperature of 112 degrees. “He continues to have serious health problems and will likely never fully recover,” his advocates argue in their original complaint against TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier.
It’s no secret that Texas is hot — and getting hotter, with 2011 earning the title of hottest summer on record and 2023 its second-hottest. “Texas prisoners are being cooked to death,” reads the explosive first line of the complaint, referencing a Marshall Project study into an acute crisis facing the TDCJ.
The suit alleges that 13% of TDCJ inmate deaths are the direct result of extreme heat, averaging about 14 casualties per year among a population that is increasingly “sick, elderly, disabled and susceptible to heat.”
The suit pulls from testimony by numerous inmates, who reported intentionally clogging their toilets and flooding their cells for relief. One woman even said that she watched a cook smuggle an egg out of the kitchen and crack it near the floor of her cell, waiting for it to fry. (It did.)
Texas is in a very small minority of states that don’t cool their prisons. Nearby neighbors Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico all provide air conditioning. Federal prison regulations require temperatures to be kept between 68 and 76 degrees — even suspected terrorists housed at Guantanamo Bay enjoy air up to 74 degrees cooler than Texans on state charges.
“74 degrees” is not a typo. All that concrete traps heat, and temperatures inside Texas prisons can soar beyond readings outside, “similar to how a garage is often hotter than the outside air in summer,” the suit explains.
In the muggier parts of the state, the heat index — a measure of how hot it feels, rather than how high the mercury reads — takes humidity into account.
On July 19, 2011, the Hutchins Unit outside of Dallas recorded a record-shattering heat index of 150 degrees. A little over a week later, Larry McCollum — who was serving a short sentence for writing a bad check — passed away, presumably from the heat. His body temperature at the time of his death was 109.4 degrees.
McCollum was diabetic, which can make people more susceptible to heat illness. Age and heart conditions can limit a person’s heat tolerance, as can a wide range of medications that include allergy treatments and certain antidepressants and antipsychotics.
The suit argues that forcing people to live in 150-degree heat is a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” for those convicted of crimes. “Remember that we’re humans. I did commit a crime,” said one inmate who agreed to speak to KUT under the condition of anonymity. “But this is torture. If that’s what they wanted to do … why didn’t they just kill us?”
Last Friday afternoon, defendant and TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier took to the stand, saying that the issue was on the agency’s radar but that it did not have nearly enough funding to retrofit all hundred-odd units.
Collier estimated that the cost to implement the changes across the system would be around $1 billion; $85 million was awarded to the TDCJ by the Legislature for “maintenance funding.” Some have pushed back on the figures, pointing out that the agency had spent $7.3 million in legal fees on a similar lawsuit filed in 2018 on behalf of inmates at the Pack Unit outside College Station. The TDCJ claimed in court that the project would cost around $20 million, but was completed for a comparatively measly $4 million.
Collier admitted that progress was slow, but that the agency had added thousands of air-conditioned living spaces since the 2018 lawsuit. Current official figures can be found online at the TDCJ’s website.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman has given both sides an August 20 deadline to file any additional documents or motions before a final judgment.
Cole is hopeful about the future of the case. “I don’t want to hear about how things can never happen,” she said. “I want to know how they can happen, and if we need to create something or tear something down, that’s what I’m willing to do.”