Edition: U.S. / Global

Ex-Officer in the Louima Case Protests Conditions in Prison

Published: February 5, 2002

Charles Schwarz, a former police officer who is serving a 15-year prison term for the assault on Abner Louima, filed legal papers yesterday asserting that prison authorities are holding him in inhumane conditions, including keeping him in a solitary-confinement ''hole'' with a concrete slab for a bed and limiting his recreation to ''one hour a day in an animal cage.''

Mr. Schwarz is fighting his conviction for leading Mr. Louima, a Haitian immigrant, to the bathroom of a Brooklyn police station where he was brutalized with a broomstick by Officer Justin A. Volpe in 1997. Mr. Schwarz's lawyer, Ronald P. Fischetti, said prison officials seemed to have no way to protect Mr. Schwarz from the violent criminals in maximum-security prisons who focus on former police officers, other than to return him repeatedly to special detention units that he called solitary confinement.

''Guilty or innocent,'' Mr. Fischetti said, ''he doesn't deserve to spend 15 years in solitary confinement. No one does.'' He asked that a federal judge in Brooklyn order prison authorities to transfer Mr. Schwarz to a minimum-security prison camp.

Mr. Fischetti said Mr. Schwarz had been moved from the general prison population to administrative detention, and from prison to prison, as other inmates have learned of his connection to the notorious case and threatened to do him harm.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons said she could not comment on Mr. Schwarz's case specifically. But she responded to Mr. Fischetti's allegations with what amounted to a point-by-point denial that the authorities ever hold inmates under the conditions he described.

''The inmates receive all the same services when they are in administrative detention as when they are in the general population,'' said the spokeswoman, Traci Billingsley. She said, for example, that prisoners in administrative detention had mattresses and were permitted daily recreation outdoors, not kept in the animal cages referred to by Mr. Fischetti.

Prisoners are sometimes kept in administrative detention, she said, to protect them from other inmates.

Mr. Schwarz has been in prison for more than two and a half years and has been moved at least five times, including to federal prisons in Massachusetts, Colorado and, most recently, Springfield, Mo.

Mr. Schwarz's legal filing also said he had been refused permission to speak to his lawyer for more than 15 minutes and that he had been denied access to religious services, hobby shops or television. The filing said Mr. Schwarz was also denied daily showers and could change his underclothes only a few times a week.

Ms. Billingsley said all inmates were permitted to confer with their lawyers and were permitted religious observances and regular hygiene.

Mr. Schwarz and his family have been waging a long campaign insisting that he had no role in the assault on Mr. Louima. That campaign suffered a sharp setback in September when the judge in the case, Eugene H. Nickerson, issued a sharply worded opinion denying Mr. Schwarz's request for a new trial. Judge Nickerson has since died, and the request filed yesterday will be heard by Judge Reena Raggi in federal court in Brooklyn.

Mr. Fischetti portrayed Mr. Schwarz as suffering depression and said he expressed bitterness about the conditions of his incarceration.

In a letter to Mr. Fischetti, the legal filing said, Mr. Schwarz ''noted the irony that Taliban prisoners being held in Cuba have been permitted to leave their cells and to shower every day, while at the same time, these simple conveniences have been denied to him.''

Photo: Charles Schwarz is serving 15 years in the Abner Louima assault. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times)