Author: admin

A brutal beating by four guards inside Florida’s largest women’s prison has left a woman with a history of mental illness paralyzed for life, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit offers the first concrete allegations of what inmates have described as a vicious attack by correctional officers on Cheryl Weimar, a 51-year-old inmate at the state’s Lowell Correctional Institution who has been hospitalized since Aug. 21.

On Aug. 21, Weimar complained to a guard that she couldn’t clean toilets because of pain from a pre-existing hip condition. This led to a confrontation with four Lowell correctional officers. Weimar, who has a history of mental illness, tried to declare a psychological emergency. Under department policy, the guards should have called for medical personnel.

Instead, the lawsuit alleges, the guards slammed her to the ground and began beating her. At least one guard elbowed the back of her neck, the suit says. Guards then dragged Weimar “like a rag doll” to an area not covered by surveillance cameras and continued beating her nearly to death.

“This malicious and sadistic beating of the defenseless Plaintiff Cheryl Weimar by the four John Doe Defendants caused Plaintiff Cheryl Weimar to suffer life-threatening and permanent injuries, including a broken neck. She is now a quadriplegic and has lost the ability to use her arms and legs.”

The lawsuit’s narrative lines up with accounts by other Lowell inmates that leaked out of the prison in the hours after the attack. According to the suit, she is now hospitalized with a breathing tube.

State officials have released almost no information on the attack or Weimar’s condition. The Miami Herald reports that the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) has blocked Weimar’s attorney and her husband from taking pictures of her injuries. 

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FLDE) and the FDOC Office of the Inspector General are both investigating the incident. FDOC Secretary Mark Inch said in a statement several days after the attack that the guards involved had been reassigned to jobs that do not involve contact with inmates while the investigation is pending.

Weimar’s beating is the latest and most serious of several incidents that have put a spotlight on Florida’s overcrowded, understaffed prison system generally and Lowell specifically. 

In July, three correctional officers at Lake Correctional Institution, a state prison deep in the Florida panhandle, were arrested and charged with battery and filing false reports after cell phone video leaked by an inmate showed them viciously beating another inmate.

Last August, the Justice Department launched a civil rights investigation into pervasive misconduct and sexual assaults by correctional staff at Lowell. A 2015 Miami Herald investigation found numerous accusations of assaults, retaliation, filthy conditions, inadequate healthcare, and suspicious deaths at the prison, as well as “an inadequate number of cameras,” which allows guards to hide brutality.

Democratic Florida state Rep. Dianne Hart, who has visited several Florida prisons over the past several weeks, travelled to Lowell last Sunday to interview inmates and see the conditions for herself.

Hart says inmates were only being given one small bar of soap, about the same size as those found in hotels, to last them a week. There were also shortages of sanitary napkins and tampons, despite the recent enactment of a law in Florida, the Dignity Act, to improve the conditions for incarcerated women.

“The way that they treat them is hardly with any dignity or respect,” Hart says.

Florida’s state-run prisons also lack air conditioning, subjecting inmates to sweltering heat and humidity. Hart says she heard numerous complaints about a correctional officer who turns off fans to retaliate against inmates.

For the last several years, bipartisan group of Florida lawmakers have been trying to pass legislation to reduce the state’s prison population, which is the third largest in the U.S. However, the number of inmates has more or less remained stable, hovering around 97,000, while staff shortages and poor conditions continue to plague the prison system.

“This isn’t rocket science,” says Florida Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, one of the legislators pushing the state to overhaul its criminal justice system. “We are a prison system that’s overstuffed and under-guarded, and that is a lethal combination of policies.”

Dignity Florida, a group of formerly incarcerated women, is demanding the state fire the guards involved in Weimar’s beating, a request that Hart echoes.

Hart’s former brother-in-law, Carlton Hart, was allegedly beaten by guards inside another Florida prison a month ago. Hart says the beating left her former brother-law with a broken jaw, nose, and cheekbone, as well as a shattered eye socket. He was transferred to another facility for surgery and is currently recovering while his jaw is wired shut.

“I don’t know what to tell you, but this is a culture in Florida that has gone on for 45, 50 years,” Hart says. “How do we expect them to change overnight without somebody really putting their foot down on them? They’ve got to. When a guard does something, they need to be fired.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/32t5yHR
via IFTTT

A union-encouraged police slowdown of arrests in New York City is backfiring; police officers are doing less work and making fewer arrests, but crime continues to drop.

The reason for the arrest slowdown? Officers are in a snit that one of their brothers in blue was held accountable for misconduct on the job.

Officer Daniel Pantaleo was recently fired five years after he was captured on video choking Eric Garner, an unnecessarily violent confrontation partly fueled by the belief that Garner was selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. Garner subsequently died and the coroner’s report put the blame on Pantaleo’s chokehold.

But, of course, any level of accountability among police officers is just shocking to the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), whose president called for a no-confidence vote against Mayor Bill de Blasio (which is the equivalent of pouring a bucket of water into the ocean) and Police Commissioner James O’Neill.

Slightly less formally, PBA Chief Patrick Lynch told New York Police Department (NYPD) officers to “proceed with the utmost caution when answering calls,” which apparently was not a suggestion that they don’t get unnecessarily aggressive or violent, but rather a suggestion that they arrest fewer people in an unofficial work slowdown.

The New York Post reports that’s exactly what happened. Calling it the “Pantaleo Effect,” New York City saw a plunge in arrests—a drop of 27 percent in mid-August when compared to last year at the same time. Criminal summons (citations) dropped 29 percent during that same period.

The Post piece is written with an emphasis on these poor heroes in blue being cautious and worried because they no longer feel they have the backing of City Hall or the police department and won’t be protected if something bad happens. And the story presents the plunge in arrests as something New Yorkers should be deeply concerned about.

The problem, though, is that as these arrests are declining, the city continues to see crime levels largely dropping. According to the NYPD’s CompStat crime data, crimes are dropping in almost all areas, particularly violent crimes. When compared to this same time last year, major crimes—which encompasses murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and auto theft—dropped 7.6 percent in the last week, and 2.7 percent in the last 28 days. Overall, major crimes in New York are down 3.7 percent at this point in 2019 when compared to 2018.

Despite the PBA trying to encourage New Yorkers to be fearful of less police coverage, they are not actually in increased danger due to this informal slowdown.

And this isn’t the first time that these calls for a police slowdown have highlighted that New York actually has a problem with overenforcement. Back in December 2014, after two officers were killed in the line of duty—and after outrage by citizens boiled over again after a grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo—NYPD officers slowed down arrests. Petty crime enforcement came to a near standstill.

A study years later analyzing that slowdown in 2014–2015 found that major crime actually dropped in the Big Apple during that time frame, just as it’s doing right now. And it threw into question whether New York’s philosophy of “broken windows policing”—relentlessly enforcing petty laws to discourage more severe crimes—actually accomplished anything.

In other words, the data show that New Yorkers should not be cowering in fear in their homes simply because NYPD cops aren’t citing or arresting as many people as usual.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2PT0ScO
via IFTTT

Maybe Beto O’Rourke, the long-shot presidential hopeful (polling in the low single digits), didn’t get the memo about soft-pedaling gun control advocacy as “common sense” proposals, or maybe he’s making a desperate move to revive his faltering bid for the Democratic nomination. Either way, he announced over the weekend that under a hypothetical O’Rourke administration, “Americans who own AR-15s, AK-47s, will have to sell them to the government.”

Like prohibitionists of the past, O’Rourke has yet to come up with a credible scheme for getting people who oppose restrictive laws to obey them. But in his open call for confiscation of so-called “assault weapons”—semiautomatic rifles classified largely according to cosmetic characteristics—O’Rourke isn’t alone.

“The newest purity test for Democrats is whether to mandate assault weapons buybacks,” The Washington Post reported recently—with “buybacks” a popular euphemism for compensated confiscation. Donkey party potentates including Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) share Beto’s taste for imposing a new form of prohibition.

Maybe that’s a winning formula for harvesting votes, but it’s terrible as policies go, unless they really want to make the government look thoroughly impotent. Similar bans, restrictions, and confiscations have been tried before, with minimal success.

“More than a year after New Jersey imposed the toughest assault-weapons law in the country, the law is proving difficult if not impossible to enforce,” reported The New York Times in 1991. “Only four military-style weapons have been turned in to the State Police and another 14 were confiscated.” Police also knew “the whereabouts of fewer than 2,000 other guns”—out of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 privately owned weapons in the state.

Note that New Jersey officials threatened resisters with felony prosecutions and got mass defiance in return. By contrast, O’Rourke says that “individuals who fail to participate in the mandatory buyback of assault weapons will be fined.” Where stiff prison sentences failed, fines seem unlikely to overcome opposition.

Honestly, New Jersey’s gun confiscation was easy to defy because the state had no gun registration requirement—officials had no idea as to who owned what. Compliance, then, was on the honor system.

Registration also does not exist in most of the U.S., and it’s far too late to bring it in.

Registration is a policy that works only when it appears innocuous. If people know that you want to seize their property, and then you ask them to itemize the soon-to-be-forbidden items on a list, the effort doesn’t go so well.

When, preliminary to introducing restrictions on semiautomatic rifles, California made the attempt to register them, “only about 7,000 weapons of an estimated 300,000 in private hands in the state have been registered,” The New York Times reported in 1990. “This non-compliance has virtually nullified the first step of a March 1989 law that set the pattern for similar attempts to limit ownership of assault rifles in other states and in Washington.”

More recently, Connecticut’s 2014 effort to register so-called “assault weapons” met with an estimated 15 percent compliance rate. Soon after, New York had to be sued before it released figures revealing less than 5 percent compliance with a similar registration law.

“There is some evidence from a number of countries over a substantial time period that roughly a sixth of guns will find their way into the registration system,” wrote Gary Mauser, of Canada’s Simon Fraser University, in 2007.

Mauser’s insights are interesting since he wrote in the context of Canada’s efforts to implement a national gun registry. That registry was more successful than most—it may ultimately have included half of the guns that were supposed to have been registered, though with “an error rate that remains embarrassingly high,” Mauser noted. But that registration rate came at high cost. From an initial projected cost of C$2 million in 1995, the price tag soared close to C$2 billion by 2004. The registry was dumped in 2012.

Quebec has since implemented its own gun registry. As of January 2019 compliance stood at less than 20 percent of what was registered under the much-spurned national registry.

All this is to say that gun registration is almost impossible to implement because gun owners don’t trust politicians to leave them alone.

Feeding such suspicion is the fact that politicians have tipped their hands, revealing that they do, in fact, have restrictive intentions. But without registration of items—like guns—that governments want to seize, such restrictions are impossible to implement.

So, what the hell is the point?

The point, almost certainly, is for political hopefuls like O’Rourke and his rivals to gin up their bases by playing to people’s fears. No, not rational fear of violent crime—crime has been declining since the early 1990s. Instead, politicians play off fears of relatively rare but disturbing mass attacks that are resistant to solutions but have people clamoring for government to “do something.”

That “doing something” can include lashing out at political and cultural enemies—largely conservative and suburban or rural gun owners in this case—seems to be a plus in this politically polarized country. Demonizing the enemy excites a party’s core voters about smashing their foes at the polls.

But while weaponizing laws against political opponents may buy votes among the faithful in the short term, it delegitimizes laws and their enforcers in the eyes of their targets. That further reduces any possibility of compliance with laws that already have a history of being honored only in the breach. When the dust settles, the government ends up looking weak and the law pointless. And the country will be more divided than ever.

Maybe O’Rourke and his colleagues will eventually be able to turn their gun confiscation wishes into law, but history is very clear that most people will defy the prohibition.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/32z272B
via IFTTT