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

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

A. No....

Q. Now, if you thought the chair wasn't punishing, why wouldn't you sell those chairs to Mexico?

A. Because I have seen enough movies, and I may be stereotyping, but there could be interrogations. I didn't want that to happen....

Q. Is it a correct statement that you marketed the Prostraint restraining chair for use which includes interrogating prisoners?

A. Yes....

Q. Do you know if any customers purchased ten restraint Prostraint chairs?

A. Yes.

Q. And has anyone purchased ten?

A. Yes, or more than ten.

Q. What entity would that have been?

A. I think both the states of Florida and the state of Georgia for the juvenile division. They require it."

On December 13, 1999, Amnesty International issued a statement calling for an independent inquiry into police actions at the WTO protests in Seattle. Among the allegations that troubled Amnesty were several incidents involving restraint chairs at the King County Jail. "People were allegedly strapped into four-point restraint chairs as punishment for nonviolent resistance or asking for their lawyers," says the group's press release. "In one case, a man was stripped naked before being strapped into the chair."

Martin Mijal, a building contractor in Portland, Oregon, participated in the WTO protests. He was arrested with other Direct Action Network protesters and charged with "failure to disperse." After ten hours of waiting in several jails, and hearing that a lawyer was on her way, the group decided to resist the deputies' attempts to transfer them to individual cells. According to Mijal, they linked arms.

Mijal says the deputies responded by bringing in several restraint chairs. They then began to separate the protesters. "I was holding myself in a ball with my arms locked under my legs," writes Mijal in his complaint to the ACLU of Washington. "As they carried me, I cried out `Lawyer!' three times because I was very scared and thought they might be close by." Mijal says he did not resist as the guards placed him in the restraint chair. In fact, he wrote in his ACLU statement, "I asked the guards if they were OK since they had to carry me and it must have been awkward. They said yes they were.

"Then, as I remained entirely incapacitated in the wheelchair, and totally by surprise a male guard put pepper foam directly into my eyes," says Mijal in his complaint. "It was very, very painful. Instinctually, to get the foam out of my eyes, I wiped my forehead against the nearest thing, which was a guard's leg, who was standing to the side of me ... and I heard him yelp when the chemical burned through his pants."

Mijal's action seems to have angered the guard. "Then he took a cloth and put it over my face," he writes in his ACLU complaint. "Then he put his hand on the cloth and with his finger found my left eye socket and rubbed the poison in my eye, forcing my eyelid up.... Then he lifted the cloth and put another pad of thick cloth over my mouth and gagged me. I couldn't breathe at all, because of the pain and the fear.... I was in immense agony.