CHEYENNE -- The American Civil Liberties Union and the state remain at odds over four issues in the proposed remedial plan to protect prison inmates from assault by other inmates, ACLU Attorney Steven Pevar said Wednesday.

Pevar announced on Tuesday a settlement in the lawsuit filed by inmate Brad Skinner against former Department of Corrections Director Judy Uphoff and three other current and former prison officials.The amount of damages the state will pay to Skinner are confidential under the settlement agreement.

Both the state and the ACLU are submitting similar proposed remedial plans to Federal Judge Clarence Brimmer. But the ACLU is objecting to four aspects of the state's plan, Pevar said.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Craig Kirkwood said these four issues have become "sticking points."

Pevar's said that first of all, he wants the state to investigate nine prior assaults at the Wyoming State Penitentiary (WSP) that are among the most serious that took place.

One of those assaults was against inmate Ellis Kennedy who was murdered by three other inmates.

Kennedy, 21, died of strangulation and suffocation in his cell March 22, 2000, in the protective custody section of the WSP.

"We feel it's important for them to find out what went wrong," Pevar said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

"The whole premise of Judge Brimmer's initial decision is that it's important to investigate prior assaults so you can fix any problems. And it just doesn't make sense they don't want to investigate prior assaults."

The state's position is that the prison remedial plan under the Prison Litigation Reform Act contemplates only prospective relief for the future, Kirkwood said Thursday.

The ACLU wants the state to look at prior assaults going back to 1996, including the Kennedy matter, Kirkwood said, adding that the Kennedy case already has been litigated in full by other attorneys.

The Kennedy family filed the wrongful death lawsuit and already knows what happened, Kirkwood said.

The second objection by the ACLU, Pevar said, is to a paragraph in the plan that says the plaintiffs have no state liberty interests or contractual rights in the remedial plan.

Kirkwood said the remedial plan is not a consent decree that allows these rights.

The ACLU's third objection is to a policy that gives corrections officers total discretion to deny inmates who seek protective custody of their property -- televisions and radios -- and contact visits with family for 30 days.

"It doesn't make sense because it discourages inmates from going there," Pevar said. "It's counter productive and it basically punishes these guys who, through no fault of their own, have been threatened by other people and as a condition of safe haven they have to give up their property and visit with loved ones."

Pevar said the ACLU attorneys are asking the judge to invalidate that portion of the protective order.

"What the ACLU wants is the ability to be actively involved in the running of the penitentiary," Kirkwood said. "For obvious reasons, that's not acceptable to the state."

The discretion of the correction officers is "not an unfettered discretion," he said, because the process on protective custody is subject to the grievance procedure.

This means that an associate warden and the warden and the Department of Corrections will look at the corrections officer's decision on inmate property in protective custody.

The ACLU's fourth objection is a confidentiality section covering reports of new assaults on inmates.

As part of the remedial plan corrections, officials must submit to the court and to lawyers copies of files on these new assaults. The state, however, wants the judge to sign an order to prevent Pevar and other ACLU lawyers from showing copies of these documents to their clients or telling them of their content even if names of informants are blacked out, Pevar said.

If this becomes policy, the ACLU will be unable to verify any information about inmate assaults, Pevar said.

He said that while some information must be kept confidential the provision submitted by the state is "too broad,"

The state's responses to the ACLU objections already have been filed with the court, Kirkwood said.

Kirkwood said the case of Brad Skinner arose because Skinner had been identified in newspaper articles as someone who provided information to authorities before he entered the penitentiary.

So he was tagged as a "snitch" even before he entered the penitentiary.

Skinner claimed corrections officers in November 1999 ignored his pleas for protection from other inmates who subsequently gave him a vicious beating that sent him to the prison infirmary for weeks.

Some inmates, Kirkwood said, try to get rehabilitated and talk to officials to help with investigations.

"If you reveal those names, those inmates are in exactly the same danger as Mr. Skinner was," Kirkwood said.

Even if the names are blacked out, inmates can still identify the informants from other information in the report, he said.

"The Department of Corrections is saying, 'Look, we've learned our lesson ... We're going to protect these guys from inmate-on-inmate assaults. Why in the world are you insisting that you be allowed to distribute these reports? It doesn't make any sense," Kirkwood said.