Jay-z, Yo Gotti sue Miss. prison officials
Lawsuit alleges ‘inhumane conditions’
Attorneys working with celebrities Jay-z and Yo Gotti are suing Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Pelicia Hall and Mississippi State Penitentiary Superintendent Marshal Turner on behalf of 29 people incarcerated in Mississippi prisons.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court Tuesday, alleges inmates are being kept in unconstitutional “inhumane conditions.”
“Plaintiffs lives are in peril,” the lawsuit begins. “Individuals held in Mississippi’s prisons are dying because Mississippi has failed to fund its prisons, resulting in prisons where violence reigns because prisons are understaffed. In the past two weeks alone, five men incarcerated in Mississippi have died as the result of prison violence. These deaths are a direct result of Mississippi’s utter disregard for the people it has incarcerated and their constitutional rights.”
New York-based attorney Alex Spiro represents Team Roc, the philanthropic arm of Jay-z and Yo Gotti’s company, Roc Nation.
Spiro told the Clarion Ledger Tuesday the plaintiffs are locked up at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, where much of the recent violence has taken place.
“They share the common injustice
of being in a facility that’s inhumane,” Spiro said.
“We lock these people up and forget about them. I’m hopeful that these sorts of actions give them hope and give oversight to a prison system that desperately needed it,” Spiro said.
On Thursday, Jay-z and Yo Gotti wrote a letter to then-mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and Hall, demanding change and threatening a lawsuit.
The letter mentioned frequent prison lockdowns, violence, a staffing shortage and inmates who “are forced to live in squalor, with rats that crawl over them as they sleep on the floor, having been denied even a mattress for a cot.”
In a statement, Yo Gotti called the conditions inside Mississippi prisons “absolutely inhumane and unconstitutional.”
“To see this happen so close to my hometown of Memphis is truly devastating,” the rapper’s statement said. “That’s why we’re calling on Mississippi state leaders to take immediate action and rectify this issue. If they don’t right this wrong, we’re prepared to take legal action to provide relief for those that are incarcerated and their families.”
Spiro, whose name is on the letter, said he wrote it in collaboration with the celebrities.
“I just think its troubling where you have people, predominantly African American, who are locked inside cages where they don’t have a voice to be heard and are essentially the forgotten,” Spiro said. “It strikes us that there has to be a spotlight on this, otherwise we might not even be scratching the surface of the horror going on inside these prisons.”
Spiro said Jay-z and Yo Gotti do not want to “remain idle spectators with something this inhumane.”
The lawsuit is filed by Spiro, Ellyde R. Thompson and Joshua Stanton with New York law firm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, as well as Canton attorney Lawrence Blackmon.
Hall’s last day on the job is this week, MDOC has said. She is resigning for a job in the private sector.
Contact Alissa Zhu at azhu@gannett.com. Follow @Alissazhu on Twitter.