Darren Rainey was serving two years for drug possession.
Given how inmates are abused in America, perhaps lethal injection isn’t so much cruel and unusual as it is a welcome relief from our prison system.
There’s a terrifying story in today’s Miami Herald detailing treatment of Florida’s psychiatric ward inmates. Yes, hard to believe but Florida does have psychiatrists.
Americans are often comforted by our leaders who insist this country does not torture. But the ACLU, Amnesty International and the American Council of Churches think otherwise, and are now demanding that Obama’s Justice Department investigate the death, let’s call it murder, of a 50-year-old mentally ill prisoner named Darren Rainey.
Witnesses inside Florida’s Dade Correctional Institution’s psychiatric ward told the Miami Herald that Rainey, serving a two year sentence for drug possession, probably self medication, was handcuffed for defecating in his cell, dragged to a stall where the shower was turned on and left screaming for several hours underneath a scalding spray of 180-degree water.
The next day, Rainey was found with “chunks” of his skin peeled off. After he was taken to the infirmary, nurses reported that his temperature was so high a thermometer could not measure it. He later died.
The article profiles Mark Joiner, an inmate who witnessed Rainey’s murder:
Another inmate, identified by Joiner as Josh Allen, had told him shortly before Rainey’s death that he, too, had been placed in the shower. “He told me he could hardly breathe,” Joiner said. The inmate then proceeded to describe how the guards laughed and joked, saying “Is it hot enough for you?”
Rainey is now dead. He was a mentally ill black man serving a two-year sentence for narcotics possession. Today’s story is a tough read with descriptions of floors soaked in urine, littered with human excrement, and prisoners forced to chow down food fortified with insect protein.
This is the stuff of Third World nations, not the imperial powerhouse Americans fancy themselves to be as we expend billions overseas promoting our special brand of democracy. If this is what America’s vision of “freedom” is we should keep it for ourselves and stop trying to share it with the rest of the world.