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

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

"We would dispute that account," says Jim Harms, Public Information Officer for the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. He claims that the deputies were simply following procedures and that the activists shouldn't have expected to see their lawyer so quickly upon arriving at the jail. He also says that the officers used a standard use-of-force progression on Mijal, that he struggled with the guards and refused to be restrained, and that he was pepper-sprayed just so the deputies could get him into the chair. As for Mijal being pepper-sprayed while restrained, hooded, poked in the eye, and gagged, "There is nothing in the report or the follow-up review to show that actually happened," says Harms.

"If you've ever seen the film Brazil it's like a scene from the torture chamber," says Robert Smith. An activist with Art and Revolution in San Francisco, Smith was arrested along with Mijal and backs up his claims. "He's being held down, he's got a bag over his face, there's people in riot gear all around him. This is after being pepper-sprayed. I'd never seen human beings doing something like that to other human beings."

Efforts are under way to restrict or ban use of the chair. This past August, a Knox County, Tennessee, judge ruled that the confession of robbery suspect E.B. "Boyd" Collier was involuntary and illegal because it came while he was confined in a restraining chair during his five-hour interrogation. "While such a chair may be useful, it can easily cross the line as a coercive force," wrote Criminal Court Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz.

A March 1996 Department of Justice investigation of the Maricopa County Jails in Arizona found that the sheriff's department used stun guns on prisoners while they were confined in restraint chairs, including one case where jail staff used a stun gun against a prisoner's testicles. According to Amnesty International, one inmate, Richard Post, was forced into a restraint chair in a manner that is "reported to have caused compression of his spine and nerve damage to his spinal cord and neck, resulting in significant loss of upper body mobility." In August 1999, Maricopa County agreed to pay Post $800,000 to settle his claims that jail guards had used excessive force against him.

In 1997, jail officials told Amnesty International that the jail system owned sixteen chairs and that it had used them about 600 times in the past six months. The Maricopa County Jails have since altered their restraint policy and now say they no longer use the chairs for punishment. A Department of Justice lawsuit against the jail system was dropped in June 1998.

Alleged misuse of the restraint chair led the U.S. Department of Justice to file a 1996 lawsuit against Iberia Parish Jail in Louisiana, claiming that the jail deputies, as a matter of course, subjected inmates to "cruel and unusual punishment and physical and mental torture" by confining them to restraint chairs for hours and forcing them to sit in their own excrement. One inmate was allegedly held in the chair for eight days, another for forty-three hours. In a pretrial settlement, the jail authorities agreed to stop using the restraint chair.