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

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

Deputy Mark Lane Smith was the first person to perform artificial respiration on Livingston in an unsuccessful attempt to revive him. When another deputy took over, wrote Smith in a Detention Bureau Report, "I then removed myself from the area and walked into the sally port, where I threw up from inhaling pepper gas residue from inmate Livingston."

It's hard to imagine the terror someone feels who is buckled into a restraint chair after being peppers-prayed, says Haskell. "You wouldn't do that to a dog."

The chair that held James Arthur Livingston for more than four hours on the night of July 6, 1999, was manufactured by KLK, Inc., of Phoenix, Arizona. The KLK chair sells for $2,290, plus a $190 crating charge. This "Violent Person Restraint Chair" (the company's name for the device) "has been in use by the sixth largest sheriff's office jail system in the nation for four (4) years, with a ninety (90%) percent reduction in injuries compared to the previous four (4) years," brags the company advertising. "Special sizes or colors upon request."

I telephone KLK. Teresa Dominguez, a production coordinator with the company, tells me the chair is sold mainly to prisons and mental hospitals but says she can give me no other information. On her advice, I submit a fax of questions for the company's officers. After more than a week without a response, I call back.

"They basically said they can't answer the questions," says Dominguez. "The owner ... saw the fax and said, `No, we won't answer these.'"

The company also declined to answer questions about the death of James Arthur Livingston. But Dominguez says the chair isn't to blame. "How they use the chair, I imagine, would be the question," she says.

Another manufacturer is more forthcoming. Dan Corcoran is president of AEDEC International Inc., of Beaverton, Oregon, which manufactures the popular Prostraint Violent Prisoner Chain

Corcoran says his chair is "humane" and was designed to be so. "You know, when you take a little bird and it's lost and confused, and at first its heart is beating?" he asks. But if you fully cup that bird in your hands and immobilize it, the bird, he says, "calms down." So, too, says Corcoran, with human beings. The chair "makes a real nice sit for them."

What about allegations that the restraint chair has been linked to several deaths and that it is easily misused? "The people who want to do good start gainsaying it, calling it a medieval instrument of torture," says Corcoran, who "has no patience" with this stance. "It's a way of getting attention."

When I ask Corcoran for a press packet, he tells me he doesn't have one "because every lawyer who doesn't have a job" will want to get hold of the press packet and take his words out of context.

He will, however, tell me the chair's cost--"900 bucks. If you get the accessories, $1,300." He will also tell me who his customers are--"mostly county jails," but also state prison systems, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Forest Service. "Park Service, too," he says. "Every state, every province has it."