DOVER, Del. (AP) - A Superior Court judge says prisons are not subject to Delaware's equal accommodations law because they do not offer public accommodations.
This week's ruling overturns the state human relations commission's finding that officials violated the law in not providing interpreters and making other accommodations for a deaf inmate incarcerated three times in Sussex County between 2010 and 2013.
The commission awarded the inmate damages, attorney fees and other costs, even after a judge had ruled in a non-related case in 2014 that prisons were not places of public accommodation because they're designed to exclude access by people on the outside.
Judge T. Henley Graves said this week that the commission had no basis to revisit an issue that had already been decided by a judge before its ruling.
