Fred Grimm: Two more added to Florida prisons’ sadistic legacy

[Judi Lynn]

Fred Grimm: Two more added to Florida prisons’ sadistic legacy
10/09/2014 9:38 AM
| Updated: 10/09/2014 10:16 AM

What a ghastly continuum we’ve countenanced in our state penal institutions.

Just this week came news of two more highly suspicious killings in Florida lock-ups – 89 years apart. Two more unsettling deaths to be added to a long and sadistic legacy: a 15-year-old inmate at the Dozier School for Boys whose skull was bashed back in 1925 and a 36-year-old mother, who died with signs of “blunt force trauma” in her cell Oct. 1 at Lowell Correctional Institution.

For more than a century, it has been as if beatings, torture, rape, terror, killings, cover-ups were official state policy, ignored by law enforcement and shrugged off by politicians. For the last few months, the Herald and the Tampa Bay Times have been writing about two disparate outrages along these lines.

But maybe not. Maybe these recurring injustices are all part of the same, long festering scandal.

My colleague Julie Brown has written about the brutal deaths of several prisoners in the state system over the last few years, including that of Darren Rainey, a 50-year-old mentally ill inmate who died after he was locked in a scalding shower at Dade Correctional Institution in 2012 and Randall Jordan-Aparo, 27, who died after he was doused in aerosol chemicals at Franklin Correctional Institution in 2010.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/fred-grimm/article2632733.html#storylink=cpy

[Judi Lynn]

1. Yesterday: Inmate reports threats by guard, turns up dead

Inmate reports threats by guard, turns up dead
By Julie K. Brown and Mary Ellen Klas -
[e-mail]

10/07/2014 7:26 PM
| Updated: 10/08/2014 9:20 PM

Latandra Ellington had weathered some of Lowell Correctional Institution’s harshest and most primitive realities, and was just seven months shy of freedom — and being reunited with her four young children.

But on Sept. 21, Ellington wrote a chilling letter to her aunt telling her she feared she wouldn’t make it out alive. One of the officers at the prison — she identified him as “Sgt. Q” — had threatened to beat and kill her, she wrote.

“He was gone (sic) beat me to death and mess me like a dog,’’ she wrote. “He was all in my face Sqt. Q then he grab his radio and said he was gone bust me in my head with it...’’

Ten days later, on Oct. 1, Ellington, 36, was dead. Corrections officials said Ellington, who had been serving 22 months for grand theft, was in confinement — separated from the general population — at the time of her death because the agency had taken her family’s concerns about the alleged threats “seriously.’’

Still, with no answers about how the death happened, the family hired an attorney and paid for a private autopsy. The autopsy, their lawyer said Monday, showed that Ellington suffered blunt-force trauma to her abdomen consistent with being punched and kicked in the stomach.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article2564576.html#storylink=cpy

[atreides1]

2. Corrections officers, police officers

A fine line between the two groups! They both love the authority they are allowed and they know that they are a protected class!


Prosecutors won't charge them and grand juries won't indict them...

[blkmusclmachine]

3. ^This.^

License to kill.