I have to write about something and I don’t want to.
I don’t want to because I am dead tired, and need sleep, so blogging about anything is a supreme pain in the ass. (Yeah, I just updated an earlier post about Gingrich, as if I can stop him and his police state advocacy…)
But when I read the story that Glenn Reynolds linked about a guy who was arrested for DWI and sat in a cell — apparently “forgotten” — for 22 months, I found myself flabbergasted.
Sorry, but I’m an American citizen who believes in the Constitution, and who also happens to be an attorney, and stuff like this is just plain not supposed to happen.
A man who spent two years in solitary confinement after getting arrested for DWI was awarded $22 million for suffering inhumane treatment in New Mexico’s Dona Ana County Jail.
Stephen Slevin was arrested in August of 2005 for driving while intoxicated, according to NBC station KOB.com. He said he never got a trial and spent the entire time languishing in solitary, even pulling his own tooth when he was denied dental care.
“‘[Prison officials were] walking by me every day, watching me deteriorate,” he said. “Day after day after day, they did nothing, nothing at all, to get me any help.”
Slevin said he made countless requests to see a doctor to get medication for his depression, but wasn’t allowed to see one until only a few weeks before his release. He also never got to see a judge.
The $22 million settlement, awarded by a federal jury on Tuesday, is one of the largest prisoner civil rights settlements in U.S. history, according to KOB.com.
He says he has no idea why they did what they did, and the alleged humans who run the county don’t return the reporters’ phone calls.
This just didn’t make any sense to me. I have sometimes succumbed to fits of paranoia in which I have wondered whether the United States (a country I have known and loved as early I can remember) might be degenerating into something like a Third World country, but a story like this hammers home the reality of that so starkly and bleakly that I just don’t want to believe it’s true.
So I Googled. Reading between the lines, it seems that the DWI suspect was mentally ill. Somehow, that served as an excuse to just let him rot:
Slevin, 58, was arrested in August 2005 and charged with driving while intoxicated and receiving a stolen vehicle near Las Cruces. His lawyers said the prison segregated him because he had a lifelong history of mental illness.
Albuquerque civil rights attorney Matthew Coyte said his client then began to deteriorate while in isolation.
“They threw him in solitary and then ignored him,” said Coyte. “He disappeared into delirium, and his mental illness was made worse by being isolated from human contact and a lack of medical care.”
Slevin’s lawsuit alleged he became malnourished, lost significant weight, developed bedsores, fungus and dental problems and was not aware of his situation or surroundings.
He was transferred to another state facility for two weeks, where he was given a psychiatric evaluation and then sent back to the Dona Ana County Detention Center, where he was again placed in solitary confinement. Coyte said Slevin did receive a brief competency hearing a year into his imprisonment, but the case against the man never proceeded.
After 22 months as a pre-trial detainee, Slevin was released and the charges dismissed. He then filed suit, claiming his rights of due process were violated since he was not given a hearing before being placed in solitary confinement.
Photos taken before and after his confinement show dramatic appearance changes. The plaintiff said things were so bad he was forced to pull his own tooth while in custody, and that his pleas for help were dismissed.
It’s so sickening I don’t know where to start. I’ve written countless posts about the fate of the mentally ill in this country, but this incident really takes the cake. I’m glad he won, and if I were a taxpayer in that God-awful excuse for an American town which locked him up and threw away the key, I’d be asking why my tax dollars should have to be paying the $22 million, and not the sons of bitches who did this to him.
All I can do is agree with what Glenn said:
…these guys should have to spend 6 years in solitary each. But, of course, all that happens is that taxpayers get stuck.
“Sovereign immunity” works that way.
The “sovereigns” play, while the rest of us pay.
Bastards.
(If there is a bright side in this mess, I guess it’s to be found in the $22 million jury verdict. That would not have happened in Zimbabwe, Iran, Venezuela, Mexico, North Korea, China, Mexico, or in most of the countries on this planet. But give us time!)
Comments
4 responses to “This is the United States of America?”
I must be stupid, but when I saw this article online I wondered, how could nobody have missed this guy or wondered where he was? Was he able to call anyone?
Montjoie — the families of severely mentally ill adults are rather accustomed to them disappearing for extended periods of time. Often it is because they are in an institution somewhere. The family hopes it’s a mental hospital where they are getting help, but it’s not possible to determine that because of laws designed to protect the privacy of mental patients.
Phone calls from jails or prisons are notoriously hard to make. Locally, the inmate has to be both mentally and physically capable of dialing in a long sequence of access numbers to make a call. And while the first call is free, it had better be spent making arrangements to pay for any subsequent calls because it’s limited in time. Subsequent calls cost about $2/minute and any amount transferred into the inmate’s phone call account and not used is non-refundable and non-transferable from one facility to another.
My son has been going thru the same thing in Lincoln County Detention Center in Carrizozo,New Mexico. He also is mentally I’ll was kept in lockdown and isolated. Between mid July of 2011 and January of 2012 he attempted suicide 4 times twice of which were in suicide watch. He was denied his meds, he was denied mental health counseling, he was denied medical care after he shattered his hand. And upon treatment of one of the suicide attempts at the local hospital the hospital itself was told by the nurse at the detention center that if they tried to have him committed to a mental health facility they would file charges against the hospital for accessory to escape. The legal system must pay for their wrongs
Here in Denver, the cops have locked up around 500 innocent people in the last ten years because of mistaken identity. Sometimes for weeks at a time. That is, the cops were too lazy to check the description of the suspect and compare with who they put in jail. Most of the time, the innocent folks were nowhere near the age, height or even race of the suspects. And then there’s the incident in Fort Collins up to the north, where Tim Masters rotted in prison for ten years for a murder he didn’t commit (he got ten million for that). Looks like the prosecutor is in trouble for falsifying evidence and purgery.