A team of University of Georgia law students has persuaded a federal appeals court panel to reinstate a lawsuit brought by a Georgia prisoner.

The Sept. 3 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit revived in part a civil rights suit brought by Fred Dalton Brooks, serving a life sentence in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Brooks has accused corrections officers of laughing as he lay in his own waste for two days while receiving medical attention in a hospital after a prison riot.

“Forcing a prisoner to soil himself over a two-day period while chained in a hospital bed creates an obvious health risk and is an affront to human dignity,” Judge Stanley Marcus wrote for a three-judge panel.