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When Asthma in Jail Becomes a Death Sentence:
Growing up, Matt Santana and Savion Hall were inseparable. The two met in middle school while hanging out with mutual friends in Midland, a West Texas oil town. After realizing they lived on the same block, Hall, a year younger than Santana, started sleeping over so they could play video games late into the night. As they got older, Hall and Santana remained dear friends, often turning to each other for help. Santana, who suffers from anxiety, says Hall sometimes spent hours by his side helping calm him down. "He would stay with me until I felt better, whether it was just driving around, listening to music or talking," he says. When Hall had asthma attacks, Santana would make sure he got his breathing treatments, which included inhalers and nebulizers, sometimes taking him to the hospital three or four times a month. The two looked out for each other. "It was special having a friend like that since childhood," Santana says. "I was hoping we would grow old together."
Then Hall was arrested and taken to the Midland County jail last summer. Court records show that he was accused of failing to wear a GPS monitor and testing positive for amphetamines—violations of the probation agreement he'd signed with the local district attorney's office to resolve a drug possession charge earlier that year. Nearly three weeks after Hall entered lockup for the alleged probation violations, jail doctors shipped him to a local hospital due to breathing problems and low oxygen levels, according to a report filed with the Texas Attorney General's office.
Friends say Hall's asthma attacks were frequent and severe enough that they learned to recognize the wheezing and heaving as signs that he needed immediate treatment. But by the time Hall arrived at the hospital from the jail, his condition had deteriorated to the point that medical staff had to resuscitate him. Santana, who saw Hall in the hospital, says his friend showed little brain activity and suffered back-to-back seizures before his family decided to take him off life support eight days later, on July 19, 2019. He was 30 years old. (Hall's family declined to comment for this story.)
Seemingly preventable in-custody deaths like Hall's are common. But while allegations of medical neglect proliferate in lockupsacrossTexas and the rest of the country, rarely do they result in criminal charges. Hall's case is different. Following a Texas Rangers probe, a Midland County grand jury this summer indicted six jail nurses on charges of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and knowingly falsifying records for Hall's breathing treatments.
Midland County initially reported that Hall died from "natural causes," the most common cause of death reported by jails in Texas. Nearly 800 in-custody deaths since 2005—slightly more than half of all jail deaths recorded in the state during that time—were attributed to natural causes, according to data compiled by the Texas Justice Initiative. But in recent years, lawsuits, Texas Rangers reports, and newspaper investigations have shown many of those to be preventable tragedies that appear to result from negligence on the part of jail staff. Still, justice for families and accountability for those responsible is elusive.
Local jails in Texas, which mostly hold pretrial detainees who haven't been convicted, have been required to report all deaths in custody to the state since 2009.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 03 2020, @04:34AM (7 children)
Do you think taking the profit motive away is enough? It will help, but the problems are deeper than that.
One of the worst problems is that the system is all too willing to put on a big show to give the appearance of justice and "crime doesn't pay". They have shown that they don't care nearly enough whether the right person is being punished. To scare the people into staying obedient, they absolutely have imprisoned for life and even executed the wrongly accused. When more evidence surfaces later, what do they do? Bury it. They'd rather keep an innocent person locked away than admit they were wrong. It's sick. They think admitting to a mistake and apologizing is weak, and will do damn near anything to avoid that. And to look tough and competent when faced with a heinous crime, they want to hang someone, anyone really. Yeah, they will frame whoever looks frameable, just to score points. For lesser crimes, they will exaggerate the offenses, again because they think it plays well with the public. Keep the public scared that there is all this crime even though there isn't.
One of the most prominent cases of this reckless and unfair imposition of punishment is that of Joe Bryan, once a principal of a high school in Texas. His wife was murdered while he was out of town. The law accused him of doing it, hoked up some CSI style evidence, and put him away for 33 years. He had an airtight alibi, and they dismissed it. https://www.propublica.org/article/33-years-after-dubious-evidence-helped-convict-him-joe-bryan-has-been-released-on-parole [propublica.org]
That is the chief reason why I do not support the death penalty. Too much chance that the "justice" system will railroad some innocent person, in yet another fake show of justice being done. Execution, of course, too conveniently silences the accused and convicted, permanently.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Thursday September 03 2020, @08:58AM (6 children)
It's not just the jails and police, it goes a lot further than that. Further down in the story they mention that a mental health patient "arrived at the jail having already told police she’d taken 10 Xanax pills and suffered from depression, post-traumatic stress, and bipolar disorder [...] wearing a hospital bracelet" where the jail staff said she "had no history of mental illness [...] hadn’t recently been hospitalized". This is a mental health issue, she should never have been handed over to the police and jailed where, unsupervised in her cell, she killed herself. Having the police as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff doesn't work, you need to put safety fences at the top of the cliff.
And that's where the "defund the police" crowd have got it only half right. It's not "defund the police", it's "take the portion of the budget they use to buy military weapons and equipment and spend it on social services so they don't have to buy military weapons in the first place". For examples of how this works in practice, look at how countries like Sweden deal with it, they actually spend quite a bit on social services to prevent problems from occurring in the first place because they realise that addressing at the problem at the source is far more effective than turning your police into stormtroopers when the problems get out of hand later on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rcamera on Thursday September 03 2020, @02:21PM (5 children)
really? i was under the impression that the "defund the police" crowd was calling for that money to be spent on social services since the beginning... not just reduce military equipment, but reduce police headcount as well. on the other side of that, we now have freed up some budget to increase social-worker, animal-control, emt, etc headcount. the police shouldn't be called because there's a bat in someone's house - that's animal control's job. but when there's no animal control department, it becomes a defacto police job. medical emergency? police are dispatched as defacto emt to help the 1 certified emt that shows up. police have an important job - we should let them focus on it, and not throw non-police work at them.
another thing that would help is taking the guns away from most cops. sure - you can have your rifle in the car when you pull someone over, but there's no need to have your hand on your glock when pulling someone over for touching the double-yellow line. a police officer's job should be to deescalate situations, not scare people into doing something stupider than they've already done.
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(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 03 2020, @03:21PM (3 children)
Anyone who calls for defunding the police is LITERALLY calling for the following: Defund - prevent from continuing to receive funds. That means the police receive 0 funding. NOT reduced funding. Not partial funding. COMPLETE and UTTER REMOVAL from receiving ANY funds (usually public funds). The claim otherwise or to redefine a VERY clear definition is stupid, it's wrong, it's misleading, and I'm quite frankly, tired of it.
If you think it's still valid to claim defunding means only partial removal of funding, then You're either too stupid to be a leader/voice or you have an evil ulterior motive. Society doesn't work without law enforcement.
(Score: 4, Informative) by rcamera on Thursday September 03 2020, @04:09PM (2 children)
look up the difference between "defund police" and "abolish police", and get back to me on that. there have also been calls to "abolish", but that's not what we're talking about here champ.
google-fu too hard for you?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeVilla on Thursday September 03 2020, @10:42PM (1 child)
So ... make the police force unpaid volunteers? I know it works for some fire departments. But I suspect that people who consider the police corrupt now will shocked to see how bad it can get.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 05 2020, @02:43PM
No, destroy the police force and recreate it as an organization that upholds righteousness and serves the people rather than a disgustingly corrupt group of enforcers for the rich.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday September 04 2020, @07:45AM
It's problematic in that it's a very ambiguous term, in particular it opens the gates for hardliners to claim it means "abolish the police". The sentiment is right but the marketing isn't so good. Maybe "demilitarise the police" would be a better term, it doesn't quite cover the same ground but it's much harder for hardliners to turn into a strawman.
Other than that I agree with you, it's crazy the stuff the police in the US are expected to deal with. Some years ago a neighbour had an injured squirrel that had probably been struck by a car, she called 911 to report it and ten minutes later a cop turned up unholstering his gun and asking where the critter was. That was literally the response.