COMMENTARY
Indifference to inmate abuse will cost all of us
By Robert M. Rees
Moderator of 'Olelo Television's "Counterpoint" and Hawai'i Public Radio's "Talk of the Islands"
For a moment, think the unthinkable: Imagine your son or daughter falls prey to the drug-laden hazards of coming of age in America and winds up doing hard time at Halawa or OCCC.
This prospect isn't farfetched. As a country, we have caught up with the record-setting incarceration rates of the former Soviet Union. There are now more than 2 million inmates in our nation's prisons and jails, and right-wing populist movements are clamoring for more. Most of those incarcerated, and an estimated 85 percent of the 5,541 inmates under the jurisdiction of Hawai'i, are in need of therapy for drug or alcohol abuse.
In the event that your son or daughter joins this expanding group of confined addicts, you should be able to hope for a drug-free, safe environment where rehabilitation is possible.
Instead, our prisons are factories for recidivism from which hard cases emerge, if not on a slab, then on a treadmill to oblivion. Prisoners complain that it's far more likely for a "clean" inmate to become addicted than for an addicted inmate to come out "clean."
Because of crowding and a silent bureaucracy, lack of regard for the lives of inmates is de rigueur. If, as the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, the Eighth Amendment's mandate against cruel and unusual punishment "draws its meanings from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society," then it must be said that Hawai'i is devolving.
One indicator is the story of our system's grotesque indifference to the life and death of inmate Antonio Revera at the hands of a wilding mob of prison employees.
Equally telling is that the trial for the only person charged with wrongdoing in his death ended in a hung jury and mistrial on Feb. 28. As state Deputy Public Defender William Jameson pointed out at the start of the trial, so many prison employees had been in contact with Revera just before his death that there was reasonable doubt as to who or what actually caused him to die.
Revera, who was serving 10 years for rape and kidnapping, was an apparently psychotic and certainly violent inmate. On April 23, 1998, while being removed from his cell, he bit the hand of a corrections officer. In the era of HIV infection, it was an especially heinous attack.
Revera already had been "taken down hard" and subdued by an extraction team when a second team of six officers arrived.
What followed was what the city prosecutor's office later characterized as a "scuffle."
An obviously injured Revera was taken to the medical unit. On the way in, his head was "accidentally" banged against a doorway. He was put into restraints and sedated with a "Halawa Cocktail," a mixture of Haldol (an old-fashioned antipsychotic drug) and Benadryl (a sleep-inducing antihistamine).
It was at this point, with seven officers and two nurses in attendance, that officer Brian Freitas entered the medical unit. Freitas maintains he lifted Revera's head to allow nurses to clean up the vomit on the concrete table. He says he gently pushed Revera's head back onto the table a few times when the semi-comatose inmate appeared to be stirring.
Left for dead
Another version of events in the medical unit, the one adopted by the prosecutor's office, emerged a few days later. In it, Freitas grabbed Revera by the hair and repeatedly slammed his head onto the concrete table.
Whatever happened on the way to, or in, the medical unit, it was severe enough to kill the 26-year-old Revera. He was taken back to his cell and remained motionless for an hour. He turned blue. A nurse later testified that the death was discovered only when she visited his cell at 8:10 p.m., tried to draw blood and realized he had no pulse.
Immediately afterward, then-Director of Public Safety Keith Kaneshiro was led to believe by officers and nurses that "nothing happened." Kaneshiro told the press Revera had beaten himself to death by banging his own head against the walls of his cell.
This official version had the advantage of exonerating the system from any part in Revera's death. It also explained — because "nothing happened" — why not one of the 15 or so officers and nurses who had been in contact with Revera just before his death intervened on his behalf.
However, the official version had a fatal flaw. The autopsy and further tests eventually revealed that Revera's badly swollen brain resulted from wounds just inflicted. Knowing that at least this part of the truth would come out, two of the corrections officers who had said "nothing happened" came forward to lay the blame on Freitas. Others followed.
It was at this point that yet a third version of events emerged from inside the prison. This version maintained that Freitas was being set up to take the fall for everybody. According to this variation on a theme, not just Freitas but the extraction teams contributed to Revera's death.
No challenges
The prosecutor's office chose to follow a minimalist approach, one that struck some observers as being about as close as possible to exorcising the incident while not tainting more than one person. It was determined that Freitas alone would be charged. And the charge would be man-slaughter.
In spite of their initial insistence that nothing happened, and subsequent contrary assertions against Freitas, no polygraphs were administered to any of the nine witnesses who had been in the medical unit. Explained City Prosecutor Peter Carlisle, "These tests aren't admissible, and for good reason."
The prosecutor's office did administer a lie-detector test to an officer who went before a grand jury to describe what had happened in a way that implicated not only Freitas but the others. This officer, referred to as a crossover witness, failed the lie-detector test, and his testimony was discounted.
He was the only one who lost his job as a result of the incident. Freitas was terminated six days after the incident, for "chronic lateness." The officers and nurses in the medical unit were sent back to work and awarded clean records based on deferred acceptance of guilty pleas.
The manslaughter case against Freitas went to trial in January. On Feb. 28, the jury indicated it could not reach a verdict, and Circuit Judge Sandra Simms declared a mistrial. It turned out the jury favored acquittal by 11-to-1, and only 7-to-5 to convict on the lesser charge of second-degree assault.
As Deputy Public Defender Jameson later explained it, "The central factual and legal issue in this case was whether or not the defendant caused the death of Antonio Revera by striking his head forcefully against the cement bed. On this issue, the testimony of the state's own witnesses raised reasonable doubt."
The jury could not believe the witnesses, for good reason. One of the nurses who had claimed she did not report any misconduct on Freitas' part because his actions "did not appear to be that serious" changed her story to testify that one of the blows administered by Freitas was a nine on a scale of one to 10.
Assault denied
This remarkable institutional indifference is not confined to the deaths of prisoners. The case of an inmate known as Tom C is, unfortunately, typical of what we call rehabilitation.
When Tom C attempted to leave the United Samoan Organization (USO) — a violent and drug-related gang he had joined while in prison — the Department of Public Safety on two occasions knowingly placed him into situations where the USO could take retribution.
On one occasion, during a period when cell doors were open in the general-population module, members of the USO identified by the Department of Public Safety as a bona-fide security threat group entered his cell. "You no like get high with the USOs?" they asked. "What you, one cop?" They forced crystal methamphetamine, or "ice," into Tom C's mouth and nostrils.
To date, the prison administration has adopted the "nothing happened" defense. It has denied the assault ever happened, even though similar assaults by the USO are on record.
For example, inmate Victoriano Ortiz filed suit against the state in April for failure to protect him against assault by USO members who, while under the supervision of several guards at a private facility in Arizona housing Hawai'i inmates, had been drinking a prison-made alcoholic concoction called swipe.
Indifference accepted
The peculiar thing about this pattern of indifference, denial and coverup is that everybody is aware of it. Only last year, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a District Court of Hawai'i ruling that three top-level Hawai'i prison administrators — the ones running the places where your son or daughter might do hard time — actually conspired to silence a prison doctor who was speaking out against prison brutality.
The Department of Public Safety has yet to take any action against the three officials.
There are few signs of change for the better. The administration of Gov. Linda Lingle is reportedly looking at the possibility of a new therapeutic prison facility. The outcome will depend on the views of the just-arriving director of the Department of Public Safety, John F. Peyton.
In addition, Hawai'i's Act 161 of 2002, though left mostly unfunded, at least theoretically allows nonviolent drug users to go into treatment rather than prison. Act 161 was based on California's Proposition 36, an apparently successful and cost-effective program approved by 61 percent of that state's voters in 2000.
We can be encouraged also that Attorney General Mark Bennett is aggressively pursuing the alleged sexual assaults on a female inmate by the warden of Maui Community Correctional Center.
Most of us in Hawai'i are generally content with an "out of sight, out of mind" system that reflects our own "nothing happened" indifference — at least until the prison system literally strikes home.
This indifference will come back to bite us. As Hawai'i's interim director of the Department of Public Safety, James Propotnick, recently observed to The Advertiser: "A lot of people ... forget that 95 percent (of inmates) are going to be on the streets again someday."
