The Legal Aid Society brought an action on behalf of Elvin Suarez, an incarcerated person with serious mental illness whose psychiatric medication and mental health treatment was abruptly discontinued while at Downstate Correctional Facility in 2017. Six weeks after the facility discontinued his medication, he had predictably decompensated. Instead of providing necessary mental health treatment, the facility placed Mr. Suarez in solitary confinement for 29 days, in violation of New York’s SHU Exclusion Law for individuals with mental illness and his Eighth Amendment rights.

In 2024, a district court judge granted the government’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed the litigation. Legal Aid appealed the order.

On March 31, 2025, the Second Circuit heard oral argument on the appeal from the grant of summary judgment and a decision is pending.