HUNTSVILLE, Texas — An acclaimed film director and a Texas prison inmate whose story spawned the movie “Bernie” have launched a fight for him to be held in an air-conditioned facility. It’s a legal crusade attorneys say could help others incarcerated in the state’s sweltering prisons.
The pushback follows what the state climatologist says was Texas's second hottest summer on record. The heatwave put a new and urgent emphasis on the lack of universal air conditioning inside the state’s more than 100 prison facilities.
The KVUE Defenders obtained exclusive video of Bernie Tiede talking about conditions inside the Huntsville unit where he is housed.
“You wake up, and you’re just rolling in sweat,” Tiede says in one video.
Texas-based film director and producer Richard Linklater, whose famous works include “Dazed and Confused” and “Boyhood,” took a series of videos of Tiede inside the maximum-security Estelle Unit in Huntsville on Aug. 4. In them, Tiede describes the broiling conditions inside the unit.
“There’s no escape,” Bernie says in the video. “You can’t get away from it, unless you put something wet on your face or you have a chill towel or something like that.”
A dozen years earlier, Linklater made Tiede’s story of killing an elderly East Texas woman and storing her body in a freezer the plot of the acclaimed 2011 dark comedy “Bernie.”
Linklater, working with Tiede’s new legal team, went to see him in prison after learning about his declining health.
“He wasn’t really the Bernie I knew,” Linklater said of his visit with Teide. “He was always positive. He’s teaching, always doing things for others. He was happy to see me, and I noticed, everyone around, there was just this pall over everything.”
A couple of weeks later, Tiede’s legal team filed a lawsuit against the State of Texas in federal court in Austin, asking that Tiede be urgently moved from his unairconditioned housing to an air-conditioned facility.
They argue because of his overall health, including hypertension and diabetes, that “if Mr. Tiede’s deadly incarceration conditions continue, unabated, Mr. Tiede is likely to die this summer, in 2023.”
In what his attorneys say was a rarely granted effort, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Lane ordered Tiede to receive air conditioning for at least 14 days, adding that “the nature of the risk – death – warrants emergency intervention.”
Those 14 days end on Thursday, Sept. 28.
This year’s brutal summer – the second worst in state history, behind 2011 – placed a new emphasis on the lack of universal air conditioning in most of the state’s prisons. Texas is one of 13 states that has no way of cooling its facilities.
During this year’s legislative session, the Texas House of Representatives advanced a bipartisan $540 million effort to cover the initial cost of a plan to eventually provide so-called “cool beds” in all of the state’s 100 prisons. But the Senate did not address the funding, and it was left out of the state’s $321 billion biennium budget. The issue prompted a rally at the Texas State Capitol in July.
According to a 2022 report by Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, 23 people have died in the state prison system since 1998. In 2018 alone, at least 79 incarcerated people and staff were sickened by the heat. The State says it has not had a heat-related death since 2012.
“It’s just a horrible, horrible, torturous situation,” Linklater said. “I have to believe your average citizen is not for that. We are not for it with animals, and certainly, we aren’t for it with humans.”
Linklater said he was deeply disturbed by Tiede’s condition after visiting him.
“This is a horrible feeling to have, when you are leaving someone, but to go, ‘I think this may be the last time I see Bernie alive.' I really had that feeling,” Linklater said.
That’s why he made the videos of Tiede.
“It’s just really, really bad because of the heat,” Linklater said. “The heat has a tremendous effect on us as human beings. I truly believe that.”
Tiede’s attorneys are asking a federal judge to extend the period that he must receive air conditioning beyond 14 days.
The KVUE Defenders also reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, but a spokesperson said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.