The Devil's Chair - misuse of restraint chairs - Editorial

Progressive, The, April, 2000 by Anne-Marie Cusac

Also in March 1997, Daniel Sagers died in an Osceola County, Florida, jail after guards placed him in a restraint chair and beat him, using a towel to force his head back so violently that they damaged his brain stem. Sagers, who was mentally ill, was being held at the jail for firing a shotgun while on a golfing range. His family eventually won a $2.2 million civil lawsuit. In February 1999, a former corrections officer was convicted of manslaughter in Sagers's death and sentenced to one year in jail. He has filed an appeal. Two other guards pleaded no contest to charges of battery and were placed on probation.

On August 30, 1997, Anthony R. Goins died in a Kansas City, Missouri, jail of cardiac arrest after struggling with guards who squirted him with pepper spray and strapped him in a restraint chain When the officers returned a few minutes later from washing the spray off themselves, they found him dead. The coroner said that the drug PCP and Goins's struggle with the police were contributing factors in his death.

In December 1998, Kenneth Vincent Bishop died at the Pueblo County Jail in Colorado shortly after being placed in a restraint chair. Although the Pueblo County coroner ruled that his death resulted from an excessive level of amphetamines, the sheriff has denied the ACLU's open-records request of the video of Bishop's treatment. According to Mark Silverstein, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the sheriff has also refused to hand over the jail's restraint policy.

Demetrius Brown, a twenty-year-old mentally ill man, died in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 31, 1999, after a guard used a choke hold while others attempted to strap him into a restraining chair. "The manner of death," concluded the medical examiner's report, is homicidal."

On the night of July 6, 1999, James Arthur Livingston was having a psychotic break. He wrongly believed his brother-in-law was chasing him and trying to kill him. Livingston, a thirty-year-old man with schizophrenia from Tarrant County, Texas, ran to the police for protection. In about eight hours, Livingston was dead. He had spent much of that time in and out of a restraint chair.

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office determined last August that Livingston's was a natural death caused by bronchial pneumonia. But that's not the whole truth, says Richard Haskell, a lawyer who is representing Livingston's mother, Maxine Jackson, in a suit against the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department. He says Livingston's last stint in the chair killed him.

"So far as we know, he was peppers-prayed in the face and then placed in a restraint chair," says Haskell. Livingston was not allowed to wash the pepper spray out of his eyes and off his face in apparent violation of Tarrant County Sheriff's Department procedures, says Haskell. "He was not decontaminated, and he was left alone in a room. Within twenty minutes he was dead."

Pepper spray "inflames the mucous membranes, causing closing of the eyes, coughing, gagging, shortness of breath, and an acute burning sensation on the skin and inside the nose and mouth," said Amnesty International in a 1998 report on human rights abuses in the United States. "There is considerable concern about its health risks."