Deaths and Injuries in Police Custody

[Andrea]

Video footage outside Jamycheal Mitchell's cell no longer exists

http://www.richmond.com/news/article_b6c51cce-7d99-555e-86df-bab012b52162.html



Video images captured outside Jamycheal Mitchell’s cell at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in the days and hours leading up to his death no longer exist, even though an attorney representing the mentally ill man’s family says he asked the jail’s superintendent to preserve it.

The only people who saw the video before it was recorded over are employees of the jail, said Lt. Col. Eugene Taylor III, an assistant superintendent at the jail.

Taylor said the video was not saved because it did not show any type of criminality or negligence, but the attorney representing Mitchell’s family said the jail should not have the authority to make that judgment call on its own.

“You have a death of a severely emaciated person who was mentally ill in his cell,” said Mark Krudys, an attorney representing Mitchell’s family. “Those circumstances are highly unusual, and you would have thought they would have preserved anything and everything related to those circumstances, including the videotape.”

Mitchell, a 24-year-old Portsmouth resident, was confined at the jail for 101 days last year after he allegedly stole $5 worth of snack food from a convenience store.

He died in August awaiting transfer to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, where a judge had ordered him to be placed after finding Mitchell incompetent to stand trial.

Mitchell weighed 190 pounds when he arrived at the jail on May 11 and weighed 144 pounds during the autopsy performed after he died Aug. 19, Taylor has said.

The Medical Examiner’s Office in Norfolk said he died because of a heart defect and “wasting syndrome,” or extreme weight loss.

Jail officials have declined to release the results of an internal investigation, which Taylor has said clears jail employees of wrongdoing.

In an interview earlier this month, Taylor told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that video images outside Mitchell’s cell showed him receiving food through a slot in the heavy steel door.

The cell had concrete walls and only a small window in the door. The cameras did not show whether Mitchell actually ate his food, Taylor said.

“There was no indication that Mr. Mitchell was not eating,” Taylor said. “If the officers had any indication that he was not eating his food, he would be placed on what is determined to be suicide watch or hunger strike.”

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The Times-Dispatch requested a copy of the video outside his cell through a Freedom of Information Act request, but the request was denied because the video does not exist.

“There is no security footage taken outside of Mr. Mitchell’s cell during his incarceration at Hampton Roads Regional Jail,” Superintendent David L. Simons wrote in a response to The Times-Dispatch’s request.

When asked to clarify whether or not such video existed, Taylor said the video taken at the time Mitchell was incarcerated was part of an old system that automatically recorded over existing video every 18 days.

Fourteen days after Mitchell died, Krudys said his office hand-delivered a letter addressed to Simons that requested the jail preserve “all records, documents ... videos and other electronic/digital media, and all other tangible things concerning Mr. Mitchell.”

Krudys provided a copy of the Sept. 2 letter last week to The Times-Dispatch after he was told the video no longer existed.

He said the jail was obligated to have kept, at the very least, the last four days of Mitchell’s life — a critical time period that would have shown what kind of medical care he received in his cell — because his firm delivered its request to preserve records 14 days into the 18-day loop.

Jeff Rosen, an attorney with Virginia Beach-based Pender & Coward who is representing the jail, said he could not comment on Mitchell’s case because Krudys has said he intends to file a lawsuit on behalf of the family.

When asked why the video was not saved even after Krudys requested that officials keep it, Taylor said it had been recorded over because the jail did not have any reason to keep it.

“If there’s nothing on the video that’s going to show any type of criminality or negligence, we’re not going to maintain it,” Taylor said.

“We only save video whenever there’s something significant we need to review.”

Asked if an inmate’s death qualified as a significant event, he said: “For example, if an individual is in their cell and something occurs and we look at the video, and the cell door doesn’t open, no one goes in, no one goes out, and there’s no negligence, there’s no reason for us to maintain that.”

Mitchell, who often soiled his cell with his own feces, was supposed to be checked at least 49 times a day — every 30 minutes by guards and at least once a day by medical staff. The cameras presumably would have recorded how often he was seen by guards and how often his quarters were cleaned, Krudys said.

“Were medical rounds being undertaken?” he said. “Were any medical staff going in to see him to take vital signs? Were social workers going in to see him? All of those types of things. How is he being treated?”

The Mitchell video was viewed by Taylor and the jail’s internal investigators but was not seen by outside agencies such as the Office of State Inspector General, the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, or Portsmouth police, all of which conducted inquiries into Mitchell’s death.

It’s not clear from the reports issued by the inspector general’s office or the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services whether investigators with those agencies attempted to view the jail’s video taken outside Mitchell’s cell.

It’s inappropriate that the jail made the final determination about whether the video contained information of significance, Krudys said. The cameras presumably would have been able to capture how often Mitchell was offered food, how much food typically was on his trays, and whether the trays came back empty.

Taylor said he saw Mitchell receiving food through a slot in the door on the videos, and he saw empty trays returned. It’s unclear whether Mitchell flushed his food down the toilet or otherwise disposed of it in his cell.

Krudys does not take jail officials at their word that Mitchell was fed consistently, given his extreme weight loss.

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Jamie Fellner, a senior adviser with Human Rights Watch who has written extensively about the treatment of mentally ill people in prisons and jails, said video is “hugely important” in death investigations.

“It is truly reprehensible that, in a case like this, it was allowed to be taped over,” Fellner said. “If policy permitted that, then the policy needs to be changed.

“Obviously when there is a death — even if in their judgment the recording showed nothing of interest — it should be preserved.”

Fellner had many of the same questions as Krudys: How often was Mitchell fed? Did medical staff assess him? If he wasn’t eating, why wasn’t he taken somewhere with adequate mental health care?

“Negligence and indifference can be as lethal as affirmative physical abuse,” Fellner said. “The staff doesn’t have to beat up someone to kill him; they can kill him by not paying attention to his needs.”

Video obtained by the CBS news program “60 Minutes,” which aired April 17, showed guards repeatedly checking on a man jailed at Rikers Island in New York City. Like Mitchell, Bradley Ballard was schizophrenic and soiled his cell with feces.

Ballard repeatedly flooded his toilet, and a maintenance worker cut off water to his cell, according to the “60 Minutes” report.

The stench grew so strong, guards could be seen in the video spraying air freshener outside his cell, and an inmate delivering food through a slot in the door covered his nose with his shirt.

Medical help wasn’t called until Ballard had been locked in the cell for six days. His quarters were “grossly unsanitary,” according to the report.

An officer asked Ballard if he could get up on his own. “I need help,” Ballard said.

He went into cardiac arrest and died hours later, according to the report.

His death was ruled a homicide by the city’s medical examiner, who called his medical and custodial care “so incompetent and inadequate as to shock the conscience.” No one has been charged with a crime.

In Virginia, Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid released video footage last year of a six-member “extraction team” attempting to shackle 37-year-old inmate Natasha McKenna of Alexandria at the Fairfax jail.

As soon as the cell door opens and McKenna emerges naked, she can be heard saying, “You promised that you wouldn’t kill me. I didn’t do anything.”

The men, several of whom wore what appeared to be biohazard suits, wrestled her to the ground. They shocked her with a Taser four times after she was restrained.

McKenna stopped breathing and was taken to a hospital, where she died days later.

“Since Feb. 3 of this year, there have been numerous media reports about what allegedly occurred,” Kincaid said in a video introduction to the recording. “There is no better way for me to share what actually occurred than to make this video available for the community to view in its entirety.”

Her death was ruled an accident, but Kincaid banned the use of Tasers and changed the way the department handles mentally ill inmates.

In Virginia Beach, Sheriff Ken Stolle allowed the family of a 31-year-old woman who died in jail to review video taken from her cell in 2011, according to The Virginian-Pilot.

Last week, Stolle said there are more than 500 cameras in the Virginia Beach jail, and the system begins recording over old video every 30 days. But video that captures critical incidents that need to be investigated typically is kept for about three years.

Without seeing the video from outside Mitchell’s cell, Stolle said he could not say whether it contained pertinent information but, if it did, “the logical standard is to keep that evidence to be reviewed.”