Topeka ? Convicted murderer Jouett Edgar Arney, whose 1977 petition protesting prison conditions led to federal court oversight of the Kansas penal system, died Monday. He was 71.

Arney died in the clinic at the Lansing Correctional Facility, where he was serving a life sentence for a 1972 killing in Kansas City, Kan. He suffered from persistent health problems, but the Department of Corrections will not know the exact cause of his death until it conducts an autopsy, agency spokesman Bill Miskell said.

In a 1989 interview, Arney said he had picked up most of his legal knowledge from one book in the Lansing prison library when he banged out his six-page petition on a typewriter. He filed it in U.S. District Court, representing himself.

Consolidated with other cases, Arney’s petition led the state to sign a 1980 consent decree promising to improve prison conditions and relieve overcrowding. Seven years later, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a scathing report on conditions in Lansing, and U.S. District Judge Richard Rogers intervened.

The following year, Rogers ordered nearly 800 inmates released from Kansas prisons. The judge eventually set capacity limits for each institution and did not close the case until 1996. Because of Rogers’ orders, the state built a maximum-security prison outside El Dorado and a mental health center for inmates in Lansing.

William Rich, a Washburn University law professor who represented inmates and met with Arney regularly over 15 years, said Arney’s efforts eventually made the state more sensitive to prison conditions.

“His feelings were genuine from the outset,” Rich said Monday. “His concern was that the prison was overcrowded and it was not and could not be properly managed.”

After his first effort proved a success, Arney continued to take his grievances to court.

In 1991, to protest a new property policy that prevented inmates from owning typewriters, Arney scrawled out a petition in pencil on toilet paper, sending separate copies, 3 1/2 feet long, to Rogers and the governor. Five years later, he sued the state again, claiming the prison system wasn’t enforcing a ban on smoking, using the name “Joe Camel.” Arney did not get a typewriter, and his smoking lawsuit also failed.

Wyandotte County Dist. Atty. Nick Tomasic, who prosecuted Arney for murder, said he has a “file cabinet full” of documents from litigation Arney started. Still, Tomasic said he was not surprised that Arney’s complaint led to court oversight of the prison system.

“He had some good points in there,” Tomasic said. “Things needed to be changed.”

Born on Sept. 8, 1932, in Pickett County in northeast Tennessee, Arney said he served in the Air Force in England and worked a series of jobs, including as a steeplejack, before his first brush with the law, for forging checks in 1968 in Indiana.

In Kansas, he went to prison for kidnapping a young couple and leaving them stranded at Wyandotte County Lake, then driving into Kansas City, stopping at the home of a resident, Sam Gutchenritter, and shooting him to death.

Arney consistently maintained his innocence, even suggesting in his 1989 interview that Gutchenritter was the victim of organized crime. However, Tomasic said evidence tied Arney to the crime scene, adding, “He was guilty — there’s no doubt in my mind.”