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Bernhardt Tiede has diabetes and hypertension, and is obese. In the summer of 2023, he suffered a stroke in a Texas prison cell that court documents say regularly exceeded 110 degrees. If there were ever a person the state should flag as vulnerable to extreme heat, it’s him. He is also the reason Texas has spent the past two years fighting a federal lawsuit, brought by Tiede, over air conditioning in its prisons. And this spring, right before trial, the state’s own heat-tracking system did for him what it’s done for tens of thousands of other people: nothing. Officials removed him from the case, successfully arguing before the court that a policy update meant he’d now get priority for a cool bed, on account of his current age: 67. They got that result due to a state formula for determining who gets air conditioning. Not the diabetes. Not the hypertension. A number.

That number is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “heat-sensitivity score,” a rating a computer assigns based on medical conditions and medications that could make someone more susceptible to heat. It’s supposed to identify who’s medically at risk in a cell with no air conditioning. In practice, according to the federal judge who’s spent two years staring at how it works, it identifies almost nobody. Only about 10 percent of Texas prisoners have a score at all, even though the roughly 134,500 people the state incarcerates all face what Judge Robert Pitman called a substantial risk of serious harm from the heat. Pitman found the system “in practice, arbitrary, inadequate, and ineffective,” and gave an example that should embarrass the agency more than it apparently has: A 90-year-old with hypertension could still fail to qualify for a score at all. Have the condition without whatever else the........

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