Torturing Tourists With Food Products

I wish this behavior were confined to the libertarian hellhole of Florida the way it used to be confined to libertarian hellholes like Chile, but it's not.

Digby:

No this isn't a story from North Korea or Pinochet's Chile. I swear:

It has been two and half years since 62-year old Nick Christie was tortured and pepper-sprayed to death by police at the Lee County Jail. Although the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the law enforcement officers who kept him strapped naked to a chair and then pepper sprayed him until he died have not been charged in his death.

On January 20, 2010, the Injury Board’s National News Desk reported that Nick Christie’s wife, Joyce Christie, and her son, were planning to file a federal lawsuit because the police violated her husband’s constitutional rights. The article describes what allegedly happened when Christie was arrested for trespassing:

Christie, 62, was arrested last March after traveling from Ohio to Fort Myers while suffering, what his widow describes as a mental breakdown. Arrested twice for disorderly conduct and trespassing, Nick Christie was pepper sprayed ten times over the course of his 43-hour custody.

Suffering from emphysema, COPD, back and heart problems, the jail staff said his medical files were not available or immediately sought at the time of his arrest. But DiCello says Christie gave his medical history and list of medications to the jail days earlier during his first encounter with law enforcement.

His medication list was found in the back pocket of his pants when Christie’s personal effects were returned to his widow.

Sometime between the time he was arrested on March 27, 2009 around 2:00 p.m., and March 31 at1:23 p.m. when he was pronounced dead, Christie had been sprayed with ten blasts of pepper spray, also known as OC (Oleo-resin Capsicum), which is a derivative of cayenne pepper.

The officers involved in the incident say that Christie was “combative, despite the fact he was restrained in a chair so he allegedly wouldn’t spit at his jailers.” However, other inmates on the cell block tell a different story. They say that there was excessive use of pepper spray, his whole head was turning purple, he was gasping for air and was telling the officers that he couldn’t breathe and that he had a heart condition. (source: Injury Board)

According to the medical examiner, the death was a homicide caused by the stress that the restraints and repeated use of pepper spray placed on his heart. However, the State Attorney’s office decided there was no wrongdoing, therefore the officers involved in the incident were never charged in the homicide.

Clearly they tortured the man to death. I just don't see any other way of looking at this.

But we don't have a problem with that in our country, particularly when the victims refuse to "stop resisting" the robotic mantra used by cops all over the country to excuse beating, spraying with chemicals and electrocuting citizens. The mentally ill, foreigners and inebriated have a particularly hard time since they can't immediately absorb their "orders" to immediately comply from the police. Doing it when they are already in custody is unfortunately not all that unprecedented.

Every American had better hope they never get sick, particularly both mentally and physically, and find themselves in the hands of the authorities. There's a chance they won't come out of it alive. I'd prefer they just shoot me down immediately rather than pepper spray me to death. But that's just me.