Last June, Bernhardt Tiede suffered a likely stroke while living in a prison cell that regularly got up to around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The 65-year-old—whose story inspired the 2011 Richard Linklater film “Bernie”—is housed at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. Now, several new parties have joined and expanded a lawsuit Tiede filed last year against the prison system and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton related to its inadequate heat safety measures.

On Monday, Tiede’s attorneys filed an amended complaint, along with the nonprofits Texas Prisons Community Advocates, Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants (Texas CURE), and Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. This new complaint expands the suit beyond Tiede’s case, with potential implications for everyone incarcerated in Texas prisons. In the suit, the plaintiffs ask the court to declare that its current heat mitigation policies are unconstitutional and to require the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to cap prison temperatures at 85 degrees. For 30 years, Texas jails have been required to keep facilities cooler than 85 degrees. Federal prisons in Texas also have a 76 degree maximum, but the state’s prisons have no such upper limit.

“If cooking someone to death does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, then nothing does,” the complaint said. 

Tiede lives with diabetes, hypertension, emphysema, among other conditions, that all make him more vulnerable to heat. At one point, Tiede was taken by ambulance to a hospital due to heat-related illness. Afterward, “he was returned to the same oven-like cell,” the new complaint says. The incident resulted in permanent partial paralysis, as well as some chronic illnesses, according to the suit. Last August, Tiede filed a civil rights suit in the U.S. Western District Court in Austin and won a temporary injunction moving Tiede to an air-conditioned cell. But that injunction was a temporary relief. TDCJ has the power to move Tiede, and any of the system’s other nearly 130,000 prisoners, to uncooled cells this summer. Last year was the second hottest summer on record in Texas, and climate experts are predicting 2024 will be another brutal one. 

In Texas, less than one-third of the units have fully air conditioned housing areas. Previous lawsuits have led to some progress. Since 2018, TDCJ has installed 8,433 “cool beds”, and another 2,149 are under construction (mostly in state jails). Last year, the Texas Legislature allocated $85 million to the prison system for maintenance projects that have gone toward installing AC in the state’s prisons. (This was after the Texas House approved a budget that would have put more than half a billion dollars toward installing climate control in prisons, but the effort died in the Senate.)

The reality inside an un-airconditioned Texas prison is a miserable one. According to the lawsuit, TDCJ processed nearly 6,000 heat-related grievances over the course of less than a year, from September 2020 to the following August. Men and women housed in stifling units have to improvise ways to try to stay cool, like flooding their cells with toilet water so they can lie in the relatively cool puddles. “Many spend their summer days avoiding any exertion that could bring on heat-related illness (including walking to the chow hall for meals),” the lawsuit said. 

Because of the way many prisons are constructed—old-style brick buildings that trap heat—nighttime in prisons isn’t much better than mid-afternoon. 

“At night it get[s] bad. I lay there and it feels like I want to throw up, and I’m so thirsty that when I get up to drink water out [of] the sink it makes it worse,” one man wrote to the Observer last year. “The fans they sell us … they feel like you are laying under a hair dryer, so really not helping.” 

The lawsuit alleges that at least 40 people died, and hundreds more fell ill, in Texas prisons last year because of the heat. This directly contradicts TDCJ, which told the Observer Monday the agency “has not had a heat-related death since 2012,” despite reporting deaths since then to the Attorney General’s office that list heat as a contributing factor on autopsy reports. 

In June of last year, 37-year-old Elizabeth Hagerty was set to be released. She was transferred from an air conditioned unit to an uncooled one. Shortly after arriving, Hagerty—who suffered from diabetes, hypertension, and asthma—began having trouble breathing, the suit said. She died June 28, a 100 degree day. According to the lawsuit, Hagerty “had a sign in her cell window that read, ‘please give me water,’ but she was ignored.” The suit says high temperatures were cited as a “contributory factor” to her death. 

That same day, June 28, 37-year-old Jon Anthony Southards died at the Estelle Unit. His mother, Tona Southards-Naranjo, who told the Observer she spoke with her son on the phone three times the day he died, is quoted in the lawsuit saying when she saw her son’s body, he had a heat rash “from the top of his head to the backs of his knees.” 

Naranjo told the Observer the medical examiner stated in her son’s autopsy report that heat couldn’t be ruled out as a factor. The family had a separate autopsy done, as well, and the second medical examiner agreed. But still, TDCJ hasn’t released her son’s core body temperature, so they can’t be certain. She said she drove down to the unit the night her son died and took the temperature across the street from the unit. She said it was 98 degrees at 2:35 a.m. “The judge sentenced him to 20 years,” Naranjo said. “A cell sentenced him to death.” 

Advocates are urging TDCJ to keep its prisons cooler than 85 degrees, as what’s sure to be a hot summer looms. Michelle Pitcher

The lawsuit lists 20 deaths between 1998 and 2012, in which the body temperatures ranged from 104.1 degrees to 109.9 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 19 of these people were on medication known to reduce heat tolerance. 

“It is likely that there are many more heat-related injuries and deaths than TDCJ has acknowledged because hyperthermia is known to be an underreported cause of death by medical examiners and pathologists,” the amended complaint said. 

This isn’t the first time an outside group has questioned TDCJ’s lack of reported heat deaths. In 2022, a group of researchers determined that 271 people who died in TDCJ custody between 2001 and 2019 could have died of heat-related issues. 

Heat ranks first among deadly environmental threats. By itself, it’s plenty dangerous. But conditions like hypertension and asthma, as well as many common medications, make it much harder for people to regulate their temperatures.

TDCJ’s own heat mitigation policies don’t dispute that heat can be detrimental to people’s health. But even so, many of the units rely heavily on ventilation and personal fans, strategies that end up just circulating scorching air. For this reason, the inside of Texas prisons are often hotter than outside. The lawsuit includes an excerpt from a 2011 temperature log from the Hutchins Unit in Dallas, where it was noted that the heat index reached “149+” degrees by 10:30 a.m. 

TDCJ’s website lists “enhanced heat protocols” that go into effect from April through October. These measures include increased medical screening, restricting outdoor activities, and training prisoners and guards on how to notice and react to symptoms of heat illnesses. According to the lawsuit, TDCJ’s current policies to mitigate heat—like offering fans and distributing water—are not enough. 

“TDCJ’s heat response amounts to a hospital triage policy during wartime or mass casualty events, where responders must decide who to treat and in what priority order,” the lawsuit said. “It does nothing to address the underlying cause of heat-related illness and death—the heat itself. Unlike responders during wartime, TDCJ can control the heat. It simply refuses to do so.”

By CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY (Associated Press)

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — The group gathered inside the conference room, mostly women, fell silent as the audio recording began to play.

The male voice, clearly agitated, railed against what he thought had been fraud that cost former President Donald Trump reelection four years ago.

“You’re gonna pay for it,” said the man, filling his message with expletives and suggesting his target’s throat be slashed with a knife. “We will … take you out. Your family, your life.

“Watch your … back.”

The call had been directed at one of their own, a city clerk who had overseen elections in 2020 in suburban Detroit. The former clerk, Tina Barton, played the recording of the call she had received to an audience that included several dozen local election clerks and law enforcement officials who had gathered recently inside an office building conference room in northern Michigan.

“I want you to understand this voicemail is the same type of thing that we’re seeing across the country, and it can find you anywhere you are — small community, large community, Michigan, Arizona. It can find you,” said Barton, who was overseeing elections in Rochester Hills when she received the voicemail a week after the 2020 presidential election.

The recent gathering in Traverse City, a picturesque community on the shores of Lake Michigan in a county that has twice voted for Trump, was part of a national effort to train local election workers on how they can respond to threats and work with law enforcement to counter them.

As the nation barrels toward another highly charged presidential election, the threats to election offices that have been an alarming consequence of Trump’s false claims about his 2020 loss loom as a perilous wildcard for the thousands of local government workers who will oversee the indispensable infrastructure of the nation’s democracy. The constant threats and harassment have contributed to an exodus of election officials across the country.

THREATS ‘ALREADY HAPPENING’

Barton understands the pressure they are under and has been on a mission to help them stay safe. She left her job in Rochester Hills shortly after the 2020 election and later became part of the newly formed Committee for Safe and Secure Elections. Since joining, she has given nearly 100 presentations throughout the country.

Earlier this month, The Associated Press was granted rare access inside the committee’s training session in Traverse City and allowed to observe the scenarios election workers are likely to face this year and the discussions about how they and law enforcement can prepare for them.

The threats to Barton started after she posted a video that was intended to counter false claims directed at her office by Ronna McDaniel, then-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

“None of these scenarios are sensational. They are all things that have already happened in some way, shape or form across the country,” Barton tells the group. “To say, ‘Oh, that could never happen.’ These things are already happening.”

Barton’s partner in the trainings is Justin Smith, the former sheriff in Larimer County, Colorado, who signed up after retiring last year and hearing directly from local election officials about the onslaught of threats they have faced since 2020.

Smith often speaks directly to the police officers and sheriff’s deputies in the room, explaining the role they play in elections and how the environment has changed since 2020. In past years, election officials were likely to deal with issues on their own, such as protesters or unruly citizens looking to promote their candidates at polling places.

“It’s not that simple anymore,” Smith tells the group. “We need to be at the table and be part of the solution.”

To election officials, he explains how law enforcement has historically sought to keep its distance from anything to do with elections, mindful of First Amendment concerns and not wanting to interfere with anyone’s right to vote.

“When initially I would bring up the topic, there were a lot of law enforcement folks that kind of winced, just because it’s a very controversial area.” Smith said during an interview after the training.

‘FRONTLINE DEFENDERS’ OF DEMOCRACY

Barton guides the election officials through various scenarios and encourages them to think through their responses, when it makes sense to alert law enforcement and when to consider releasing information to the public.

“I know there’s been some, maybe disgruntlement across the country from some election officials that feel that they haven’t gotten the response from law enforcement that they thought law enforcement should give,” Barton tells the election officials. “So these conversations help us understand what they can actually do in those scenarios and what they can’t do.”

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She said election offices might deal with everything from threatening emails and phone calls to an AI-generated robocall sent to poll workers telling them to stay home on Election Day. One of the scenarios Barton presented to the group mirrors events that unfolded in the days immediately after elections last fall, when local election offices in a handful of states received letters in the mail that contained fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid.

The fentanyl example sparked animated conversations among the election workers, as many of them began to understand they were not taking sufficient precautions. As one clerk and her deputy sat next to each other, they realized that also was how they opened mail — together in the clerk’s office.

“If something were to happen to both of them, where does that chain of command go? For some of you, that might be your whole office,” Barton tells the group.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, whose office helped sponsor and coordinate the Traverse City training and who also has endured numerous threats, said it’s imperative for law enforcement and election officials to work together to ensure a smooth election in November.

Benson said her office has been providing grants to election offices to help them boost security. The federal government also is engaged in the effort. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will assess the physical security of local election offices and has written guidance for workers on how to de-escalate tense situations.

Spencer Wood, the federal agency’s regional election security adviser, told the attendees they were not facing the threats alone and praised them as the “frontline defenders” of the nation’s elections.

“For more than 200 years, American democracy has withstood a range of physical, cyber and operational risks — and 2024 will be no different,” he said.

‘SAD THAT WE ARE AT THIS POINT’

Throughout the training, Barton referenced the election officials who have retired or left the profession, citing the stress since the 2020 presidential election. A survey last year by the Brennan Center for Justice found that about 1 in 5 election workers knew someone who left their election job for safety reasons and nearly three-quarters of local election officials said harassment had increased. Barton emphasized to the clerks the importance of having access to mental health services.

One longtime election official who attended the Michigan training, East Bay Township Clerk Susanne Courtade, not only plans to stay for the November election but is running for another term despite being harassed in the aftermath of the 2020 election. She said she faced attacks on her character and demands for her removal.

“I felt attacked, but then I also felt that if I stepped aside, they win,” she said. “I’m sad that we are at this point where we have to understand better how to prepare and protect ourselves and our citizens and our workers, but I’m glad that we are able to come together.”

Even as the clerks prepare for November, many of them expressed concerns over what they could face.

The week before the training session, Trump held a rally two hours south in Grand Rapids. Joining him onstage were a handful of county sheriffs from across Michigan who support him and who heard Trump repeat claims that Democrats “cheat in elections.”

This past week, a small group of sheriffs from across the country gathered in Las Vegas to join forces with prominent election conspiracy theorists. The group, which calls itself the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, argues that sheriffs have unlimited power and must investigate elections.

Traverse City Clerk Benjamin Marentette said training sessions like the one in Traverse City are crucial to make sure local election offices and law enforcement are communicating.

“You can build that trust because everyone – law enforcement and election officials – 99% of them are there for the right reasons and with a true heart for service,” Marentette said.

Michael D. Shea, the sheriff in Grand Traverse County, said he was surprised at how vulnerable election officials can be because of the requirements associated with their job. A Republican who is on the ballot in the fall, Shea said it was understandable to have some concerns about elections, particularly with the use of technology in parts of the voting process, but said he trusted experts and his local election officials.

“The goal is a safe, secure, fair election,” said Shea, who attended the training. “And we intend to make that happen.”

Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Nicholas Riccardi in Las Vegas; Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.