What about prisons in the USA??

[forgethell]

You think Guantanamo or Abu Gharib is bad? Check this out!! I can't say that I often agree with Phyllis Schlafly or other columnists on http://www.Townhall.com , but for once she's making sense!!!

"I want to go to trial on Monday; I've been locked up for nearly eight years," declared Charles Thomas Sell. "The federal court has no evidence, they have no witnesses. I want my trial one week from today. I am not incompetent in any way, shape or form."

....



Prison officials tried to drug Sell, allegedly to make him fit for trial, and lower courts ruled in favor of mandatory drugging of this non-convicted, non-dangerous, nonviolent prisoner.

....


The forced medication was designed to correct Sell's attitude toward the government. Sell seemed to think the government was out to get him, and the government wanted to drug him to get him to change his mind

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/phyllisschlafly/ps20041213.shtml

[tk2kewl]

1. Can some one please stop this ride? I want to get off.

:wtf:

[jeff30997]

2. Reminds me of the Stalinist Soviet Union.

[noonwitch]

3. Some US prisons are deplorable

The US population, for the most part, feels it's what the inmates deserve. At least until one of their beloved ends up behind bars.

Some prisons aren't bad-the one Martha Stewart is in doesn't seem too bad, and the ones the Watergate guys went to in Kentucky had a golf course (not Liddy, he did hard time). In Michigan, the men's prisons are much better than the women's, although this is changing from the Engler days, when he kept Rep. Conyers from visiting with inmates and the US Justice department from investigating human rights' violations of female inmates (rape at the hands of male guards).

[forgethell]

6. It's not the damn prisons;

it's not that they do hard time in them. It's that this guy has been 8 years without a trial. And that they are trying to drug him.

[necso]

4. Insanity defined as not agreeing with the government is so,

so... Soviet.

"Treason" is also widely used by the neocons in the same way.

Welcome to your future. Language is a weapon, and the neocons can "dream up something much, much worse" (than a few labels) for those that oppose them.

But I know nothing of this case first hand. And I trust this author (Phyllis Schlafly) not at all.

(Edited to add last sentence -- which really goes without saying.)

[forgethell]

7. Well, your last statement

may well be true. But PS is rather conservative, and pro-government, hrd-line and punitive. So if she's upset and telling about it, then I see no reasonn to doubt that it's true. She may have a different solution to the problem than you or me.

[Xithras]

5. There are some SERIOUS details missing here

This article is slightly misleading and leaves out some very key details and includes a few of his outright lies without counter.

Tom Sell is a member of the CCC, a Missouri white supremacist and segregationist group that has a long history of fighting against racial equality in the St. Louis area. He was originally arrested for Medicaid billing fraud and was offered a plea bargain within two months. He turned it down and his bail was revoked after he was accused of threatening witnesses. After he was thrown back into jail, both he and his wife attempted to hire another couple to murder the FBI agent who arrested him AND the federal witness who had implicated him. That couple went to the police, and an undercover sting resulted in more than 6 hours of audio tape that repeatedly implicated him in the murder-for-hire scheme. His wife has already been convicted ans sentenced for her part in the plan, and has since turned states-witness and confessed the whole crime.

Whether or not he is insane, and whether or not he should be drugged, is another story that I won't go into here, but the presentation of Dr. Sell as some poor innocent citizen who was wrongfully imprisoned by his evil, brainwashing government is patently false. Mr. Sell is a pro-Confederate racist who believes that the United States' "occupation" of the south is illegal and that they have no authority to enforce their laws on him. With a background like that, it is entirely possible that he DOES have some kind of persecution complex and that he may see this all as an elaborate attempt by his nations "occupiers" to eliminate him. That kind of seperation from reality could be quite easily diagnosed as a paranoid delusion, which would justify treatment before trial.

The picture changes slightly when you have all the facts, doesn't it?

[forgethell]

8. Indeed it does, and

explains a lot. Thank you for the information.

Still - racist, or not, violent or not, the man is entitled to a trial.

[Xithras]

9. Here's why he hasn't had a trial yet...

If he is indeed paranoid delusional then he has an active mental disorder, and most people here would agree that people with untreated and active mental disorders aren't fit to defend themselves in a trial. Even if the government gave in an tried him, he could simply have any conviction overturned later by stating that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial or to give consent to proceed with the trial without treatment.

Most of this stuff is pretty standard fare. If you have a mental disorder and are accused of a serious crime, the odds are pretty good that you will be remanded to an institution for treatment until you are competent enough to stand trial. That was the governments original intention, but one aspect of his treatment required him to take certain drugs that are routinely given to schizophrenic patients. Sell challenged their ability to do that, and the case spent years in court as the two sides fought out the legalities of forced treatments for mental illness in prisoners (to say that Sell has never had his day in court is incorrect...he has had a LOT of days in court, just not for the original charge yet). It's been appealed by both sides so many times, adding on months every time, that between his mental treatment and his appeals, the trial has been delayed for years.

So today they are in a stalemate: The Federal government doesn't want to proceed with a trial because there is a very large chance that Dr. Sell is mentally incompetent, cannot legally grant the right to proceed with trial, and therefore cannot be convicted under current federal law. Mr. Sell, on the other hand, states that he wants to be tried today but refuses to take part in any treatments for any mental illness, declaring that he is "healthy" (most people with delusional mental illnesses believe they are perfectly normal).

I feel sorry for the judges in this case...it's definitely a tough call.

[forgethell]

10. Yeah, thanks for the info. n/t