Monsters

Friday 23 December 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized

My Fox Tampa Bay on the outright torture and murder of an Ohio man by Lee County, FL deputies:

“This photo is a picture of a man who is strapped to a chair naked inside a jail for hours with a hood over his face. That evokes thoughts of being tortured,” says Cleveland-based lawyer Nick DiCello who represents the Christie family.

The photo, which was obtained by FOX 13’s investigative unit, was taken in the final hours of Christie’s life.

The District 21 Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide because he had been restrained and sprayed with pepper sprayed by law enforcement officers. But to this day, nobody has ever been charged with a crime, and the Lee County State Attorney cleared the sheriff’s office of any wrong doing.

What. The. Fuck.

The police take a 62 year old man, strip him naked, restrain him forcefully to a chair, gag him, then pepper spray him repeatedly over the course of 2 full days until he dies, and the DA has cleared them of any wrongdoing?

Fucking seriously? Not even some bullshit sacrificial lamb charge of negligent homicide?

But it gets better.

Tom DePolis spent more than 30 years in law enforcement at the Tampa Police Department and Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. He’s seen first-hand the effects of pepper spray and knows its limitations. He can see no reason for deputies to repeatedly pepper spray Nick Christie since he was already in custody.

“The purpose is to temporarily incapacitate someone — temporarily, that’s the key word, so you can restrain them,” says DePolis.

Monshay Gibbs was a deputy trainee at the jail at the time. In a video deposition, she testified that she thought the way Nick Christie was treated was excessive.

Excessive? That’s it? The police torturing and beating a restrained man to death while in custody can only be described by a deputy as “excessive?” How about murder? Monstrous? Torture? Or any of the thousands of more apt words to describe this act of pure brutality?

And yet some want to claim that most cops are good, and that it’s just a few bad apples scattered about. Well where the fuck were they during this 2 day period of a man being detained, restrained, and tortured to death while in police custody? And surely any good cop who had witnessed these things would have described the act as more than simply excessive.

A good cop would have stopped this bullshit immediately and placed the offending deputies under arrest (you know, like they would have done if they had been witness to you or I doing the exact same thing). A good cop would have used every available platform to expose what had been done by the offending officers. But that didn’t happen. Because there are so few good cops that over a two day period not one could be found to protect this man from being savagely tortured and killed. Not even inside of a police station.

2011-12-23  »  madlibertarianguy