by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Officer
Regina Tasca Goes ‘Rogue’

After Daniel
Chong was arrested in a federal drug raid, he wasn’t taken to Gitmo.
Instead, the Feds thoughtfully arranged to bring Gitmo to him, nearly
torturing him to death in the process.

Chong,
a senior at the University of California-San Diego, was one of nine
people swept up in an April 21 narcotics raid by the Drug Enforcement
Administration. After his arrest he spent four hours handcuffed
in a cell before being questioned. One of the agents who questioned
Chong described him as someone who was “in the wrong place
at the wrong time.”

Following
the interrogation, the student was told that he would be released
and provided with paperwork to sign. He was then handcuffed and
put into a five-by-ten-foot detention cell, where he
was held for five days in conditions that qualify as torture
under any rational reading of either domestic or international law.

The DEA’s story
was that Chong was simply “forgotten.” A likelier explanation
is that he was ignored, or even singled out for deliberate abuse.
Chong shouted and screamed for help, kicking against the heavy door
of his cell. Although his hands were cuffed, he managed to tear
a small fragment from his jacket, which he shoved under the door
in an effort to get the attention of his jailers.

Since Chong
had no difficulty hearing conversations and other sounds outside
his cell, there’s no reason to doubt that his pleas were heard,
and simply disregarded.

After being
left alone, handcuffed, in complete darkness, Chong began to hallucinate.
Fearing that he might die in captivity, he shattered his eyeglasses
and used broken shards to carve the words “Sorry, mother”
into his arm.

Although Chong
has admitted he had gone to a friend’s house to commemorate “4/20,”
an unofficial observance celebrating recreational marijuana use,
he was not charged with a narcotics offense. Through its prohibition
enforcement action, DEA managed to create conditions in which Chong
ingested substances much worse for him than marijuana. Left for
several days without food or water to sustain him, Chong made a
futile attempt to trigger an overhead fire sprinkler, and then eventually
drank his own urine. Tormented by the insistent protests of an empty
stomach, he consumed a small amount of a white, powdery substance
that was found to be methamphetamine.

By the time
two agents “discovered” him, Chong was literally pleading
for his captors to kill him. He was hospitalized for acute dehydration,
renal failure, a perforated esophagus, and severe cramps. He had
shed 15 pounds. He has never received an apology.

If a dog had
been subjected to treatment similar to the abuse inflicted on Daniel
Chong, those responsible would face felony
charges. Thanks to the spurious principle of “supremacy
clause immunity,” there is no measurable likelihood that
the people who nearly tortured Chong to death will face criminal
charges. It’s quite likely they will never be identified.

It’s not just
the Feds employed by the DEA – an
agency best described as the CIA’s slow-witted sibling – who
enjoy this privilege.

No criminal
charges have been filed against the Lee County, Florida Sheriff’s
Deputies responsible for the torture death of Cleveland
resident Nick Christie. The emotionally disturbed 62-year-old
man was detained
for several days in March 2009 after his frantic wife Joyce
made the fatal mistake of calling the police for “help.”

Mr. Christie,
who had recently been prescribed a potent anti-depressant called
Lexapro, suddenly left his home in Cleveland to visit family in
Ft. Myers. When he arrived at his brother’s house, Christie’s behavior
became dangerously erratic.

Acting on the
tragically misguided assumption that requesting police intervention
is a good idea, Joyce called the Lee County Sheriff’s Department
to ask them to find Nick and get him to a hospital. After deputies
found the retired boilermaker, they arrested him on trespassing
charges.

Over the next
43 hours, Christie was repeatedly shackled in a restraint chair,
hooded, and attacked
with military-grade pepper spray. The chemical assault was so
intense that it left other inmates gagging on the fumes. Christie,
who suffered from respiratory and heart disease, pleaded with deputies
to remove the spit mask because he couldn’t breathe. One inmate
described how Nick turned “purple and almost blue” as
he suffocated.

When medical
personnel arrived to check on Christie, they were overwhelmed by
the pepper spray residue. The victim died of heart failure two days
after his arrest. The death was ruled a homicide – but the State
Attorney’s office insisted that there is no evidence of criminal
wrongdoing on the part of the deputies who tortured Nicholas Christie
to death.

The same blanket
immunity from prosecution shields the members of the thugscrum –at
least ten and as many as fifteen officers – from Fresno, California,
who beat, pepper-sprayed, and repeatedly tasered a man named Raul
Rosas.

The police
had arrived at Rosas’s residence on June 6 of last year in response
to an unspecified “domestic disturbance.” When the police
arrived, Rosas took refuge in the bathroom. One of the officers
kicked open the front door and dragged out the unarmed man, who
was immediately hit with a dose of pepper spray. The chemical weapon
attack was a prelude to a full-scale onslaught: Witnesses reported
hearing the sounds of a taser being used for at least eight to ten
minutes.

After hog-tying
Rosas, the assailants earned extra points for creative sadism by
using a garden hose to drown him as he pleaded for water – a crude
but effective simulacrum of waterboarding. This
atrocity was witnessed by Rosas’s horrified children and several
neighbors, who repeatedly warned that the victim was suffocating.
“After some time had passed, [Rosas] had clear spit bubbles
coming out of his mouth,” recounts a lawsuit filed by the victim’s
family. “Witnesses observed [his] lips turn purple.”

When one of
the witnesses told the cops they were killing Rosas, one of them
sneeringly insisted that the victim was “faking it.” Eventually
one of the officers felt for a pulse and found nothing. None of
the officers involved in this torture-murder has ever been publicly
identified, much less subjected to prosecution or administrative
punishment.

Given the foregoing
cases, it could be said that Pennsylvania resident Derena Marie
Madison was comparatively fortunate: Although she was physically
abused and humiliated, she wasn’t killed or severely injured.

At about 2:30
a.m. on February 3, 2011, Pennsylvania State Troopers Chad Weaver
and Michael Zampogna pulled over a vehicle driven by Jamie Cornell,
who was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. After
Cornell was taken into custody, the troopers threatened to have
the vehicle towed. This prompted Madison,
who was a passenger, to exit the car in protest. This gave the troopers
an excuse to arrest her for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

Shackled at
the wrists and ankles, Madison was taken to a nearby State Police
barracks, where she was chained to a bench with her hands cuffed
behind her back. Without provocation, Weaver hit Madison with two
blasts of pepper spray to her face. None of the other officers intervened.

Still trussed
with handcuffs and leg shackles, Madison was unable to wipe the
pepper spray residue from her face. In response to her pleas for
help, several troopers – whom she couldn’t identify, because she
was blinded from the pepper spray — carried her downstairs and
outside the barracks. After being thrown to the snowy ground and
doused with a large quantity of water, Madison blacked out. When
she regained consciousness, she quickly realized that one or more
of the assailants had urinated on her head, face, and neck.

Taken back
to inside the barracks, Madison was chained to the bench again and
briefly held before being released without receiving medical attention.
Eleven days later, she was formally charged with public drunkness
and disorderly conduct, and eventually found guilty on both charges.

Responding
to Miss Madison’s lawsuit,
the State Troopers didn’t contest her account; instead, they claimed
that their actions were taken pursuant to their duties, and therefore
they were protected by “sovereign immunity,” maintaining
that “subduing persons is one of the acts law enforcement officers
are employed to perform [and that] officers are also permitted to
use force, if necessary, in the commission of their duties.”

Although the
State Troopers described Madison as an “out-of-control person,”
there is no evidence that she did anything other than express her
displeasure over the prospect of being abandoned once Cornell’s
vehicle had been towed away.

Displaying
an honesty uncommon among those in his profession, U.S. District
Judge Gary L. Lancaster rejected the “sovereign immunity”
claim. Repeatedly assaulting a handcuffed woman with pepper spray
and urinating on her serves “no legitimate law enforcement
purpose,” but indicates a “personal motivation, rather
than intent to serve the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” This
raises the troubling possibility that behavior of this kind could
be considered appropriate if it were “authorized” as a
matter of official policy.

A similar possibility
was raised by a federal ruling in the case of Niagara, New York
resident Ryan
S. Smith, who was tortured into providing a DNA sample to police.

Smith, a repeat
offender, was suspected of involvement in a July 2006 home invasion
and kidnapping. When three of the suspects took one of the hostages
to another home, Smith allegedly remained behind to guard two small
children, who had been bound and gagged. While there, the suspect
helped himself to a soda, apparently unaware that by doing so he
would leave behind potentially incriminating DNA evidence.

The residual
DNA from the soda can was eventually matched by the FBI’s
Combined DNA System (CODIS) with a sample previously taken from
Smith. In August 2008, Niagara County Court Judge Sara Sheldon Sperrazza
issued an order requiring Smith to provide a DNA sample via a painless
swab of his inner cheek. Smith didn’t object, and the sample was
taken without difficulty.

At this point,
the story becomes complicated by professional incompetence. The
Niagara Falls Police sent the sample to the wrong lab, where it
was opened and contaminated.

The investigators
went back to Judge Sperrazza for a second order, which — unlike
the first one – was granted ex parte. This means that Smith’s
defense counsel was not informed or consulted. Smith refused to
provide a second DNA sample.

This prompted
the police to consult with the County District Attorney’s office
to learn how much force they could employ to compel Smith to provide
potentially self-incriminating evidence – a question that should
be foreclosed by the Fifth Amendment.

As Detective
Lt. William Thomson would later testify, Assistant Niagara County
D.A. Doreen M. Hoffmann, who is presiding over the prosecution of
Ryan Smith, instructed the police that “we could use the minimum
force that was necessary” to force the suspect to submit to a DNA
test.

That formulation
is a tautology, since it authorizes the use of any amount of
force needed to extract the sample. As long as the police were
reasonably careful in calibrating the duress the applied, they could
continue escalating the level of force until it broke the suspect;
wherever they end up would obviously be the “minimum” necessary
to accomplish their objectives.

Smith was brought
in handcuffs to the police station and informed that the investigators
had been authorized to use physical force. Although nobody intended
to harm him, Smith was told, the sample was going to be surrendered;
it was just a question of how much he wanted to endure before it
was. Smith still refused to comply.

At this point,
the police were implicitly authorized to use any method of “pain
compliance” they considered appropriate. They could have waterboarded
Smith, subjected him to “stress positions,” locked him
in a small cell with an insect – in short, they could have employed
any of the methods recently extolled
by CIA torture supervisor Jose Rodriguez in his recent 60 Minutes
interview.

The police
elected to use a taser in “drive stun” mode in order to
force Smith to cough up the DNA sample. On the basis of that evidence
– which was extracted through torture, albeit of a comparatively
mild variety, Smith was hit with a 24-count criminal indictment.
He was also charged with “criminal contempt of court” for forcing
his interrogators to torture him.

When Smith’s
defense counsel filed a motion to suppress the evidence based on
Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections, the same Judge who issued
the ex parte orders produced a ruling validating the use
of taser torture as means of forcing compliance, as long as it’s
not done “maliciously” or to “excess.”

Judge Sperrazza
is “the first judge in western civilization to say you can use a
Taser to enforce a court order,” complained
Patrick Balkin, Smith’s defense counsel. He
also pointed out that the precedent could inspire other practical
applications of electro-shock “pain compliance”: “They have
now given the Niagara Falls police discretion to Taser anybody anytime
they think it’s reasonable. [Sperrazza’s] decision says you can
enforce a court order by force. If you extrapolate that, we no longer
have to have child support hearings; you can just Taser the parent.”

In a lawsuit
filed against the City of Niagara Falls, Smith alleged that he was
“tortured into unconsciousness” by repeated Taser charges. The police
investigators insist that they were much gentler in the application
of electro-shock trauma, but their testimony regarding the number
and duration of shocks is mutually self-contradictory (as well as
inconsistent with the record kept by the Taser unit itself).

Smith was
eventually convicted of nearly two dozen offenses. Last March, the
New York State Supreme Court overturned Smith’s conviction and ordered
a new trial, ruling that the use of a taser to compel the prisoner
to surrender a DNA sample was “excessive force.” At the
time, Smith “posed no immediate threat to the safety of himself
or officers, nor did he attempt to evade the officers by flight,”
recounts the decision. Smith “was handcuffed, seated on the
floor, and surrounded by three patrol officers and two detectives….
[He] did not threaten, fight with, or physically resist the officers
at any time; rather, he simply refused to open his mouth to allow
the officers to obtain a buccal swab.”

This
is not to say that the ruling foreclosed the future use of taser
torture as a police interrogation method. The court suggested that
the police could have arrested Smith for “criminal contempt,”
and then obtained “judicial approval to use physical force
if necessary to extract the DNA sample.”

On this construction,
torture is acceptable as long as it’s committed pursuant to a court
order. This would be something akin to a
“torture warrant” of the kind suggested by Alan Dershowitz.

That proposal
was offered by Dershowtiz a decade ago as a way of addressing a
“ticking bomb” scenario involving a hidden nuclear weapon;
the New York Supreme Court’s standard would authorize the use of
judicially sanctioned torture as an instrument of prosecutorial
convenience.

“Criminal means,
once tolerated, are soon preferred,” warned Edmund Burke, a maxim
abundantly vindicated by the near-ubiquity of torture as a law enforcement
tactic in contemporary America.

Reprinted
with permission from Pro
Libertate.

May
5, 2012

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program.

Copyright
© 2012 William Norman Grigg

The
Best of William Norman Grigg