Corrections Officer Found Guilty in Death in a Rikers Island Solitary Cell
by Vaidya Gullapalli
Ramon Echavarria with a picture of his son, Jason, who died on Rikers Island in 2012. Photo: Howard Simmons, NY Daily News
On
December 17, a federal jury found a former corrections officer on New
York’s Rikers Island guilty of deliberately ignoring the medical needs
of a man who died in 2012 while being held in solitary confinement.
Terrence Pendergrass was a captain and the supervising corrections
officer on duty when Jason Echevarria, a pre-trial detainee with a
history of mental illness, ingested a highly caustic detergent. For
hours before he died, Echevarria pleaded for help from multiple
corrections officers and civilian staff.
The
verdict comes at a time when Rikers Island has been under fire for
staff negligence and brutality in both the press and a major
investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Against this backdrop,
the trial and conviction of Pendergrass happened quietly and quickly but
becomes a part of a conversation about the accountability of uniformed
officers and the brutalization of people in the criminal justice system.
Terrence
Pendergrass was convicted in federal district court in Manhattan of
“deprivation of rights under color of law,” a federal law that penalizes
agents of the government acting in their official capacity for
violating a person’s rights. The right in question was that of a person
held in a jail or prison to be provided medical care when he was in
serious need of it.
Pendergrass
was the supervising officer on duty when Echevarria told officers that
he had swallowed detergent used for cleaning cells, and needed to see a
doctor. He was found guilty of “deliberate indifference” to Echevarria’s
medical needs, resulting in Echevarria’s serious physical injury and
eventual death. Under ordinary circumstances, ignoring the sick and the
dying is not defined as a crime. But staff in prisons and jails – where
incarcerated people are not free to move as they choose, not free to
call a doctor, not free to go to an emergency room – have a
responsibility to ensure that the people in custody receive medical
attention when they need it.
As the New York Times
reported, this was the first time in ten years that the U. S. Attorney
for the Southern District of New York had prosecuted a corrections
officer under this statute. Pendergrass faces up to ten years in federal
prison.
Life and Death in Custody
The
trial, which took place over a week and a half at the Thurgood Marshall
courthouse in Lower Manhattan, offered a bleak image of what life is
like on Rikers Island, especially for individuals with psychiatric
disabilities.
On
August 18th, 2012, the day he died, Jason Echevarria was one of the
thousands of people held on Rikers Island in pre-trial detention. Like
thousands of others held in the island’s jails, Jason Echevarria had
documented mental health needs, including bipolar disorder. He
reportedly had attempted suicide more than once while at Rikers. He was
placed in solitary confinement for “infractions” he committed –
violations of jail rules. Because of his mental health needs, his
solitary confinement was in MHAUII, the Mental Health Assessment Unit
for Infracted Inmates.
MHAUII
was specifically designated for the punitive segregation of men with
mental illness at Rikers Island. Late last year, after concerns about
conditions, MHAUII was officially shut down, though the building is
still in use and the two units that came to replace it are still for the
punitive segregation of the mentally ill. (The corrections staff who
testified in court last week were hard-pressed to answer the question of
whether MHAUII was still open or closed, or explain what has replaced
it.)
In
MHAUII, Echevarria was in his cell round the clock except for the
single hour a day he sometimes could leave for recreation or a shower.
All food, medication, or anything else he might need was given to him
through a slot in his door. On August 17th,
he “held his slot,” jamming his mattress into the opening for two and a
half hours so that a corrections officer had to go over and address the
problem. In the government’s narrative, this incident created a motive
for Terrence Pendergrass to ignore Jason Echevarria the next day. While
an incident like this would normally have been punished with yet another
“‘write-up”, Echevarria did not receive one. A corrections officer
testified that on another occasion, when he had urged Pendegrass to
punish someone with an infraction, Pendergrass had said, “There are ways
to get back at inmates besides infractions.”
The
following day, a toilet overflowed and the entire housing area was
flooded with raw sewage. Echevarria asked for a “soap ball,” as packets
of detergent used to clean the hallways and cells are commonly known. A
corrections officer, in violation of protocol, gave him one or more
packets. For cleaning purposes, each of these packets is supposed to be
diluted in three gallons of water. It was unclear whether staff and the
people incarcerated were in the habit of using the detergent without
water, or if this was sheer carelessness on the part of the officer who
gave the soap ball to Echevarria.
The
medical examiner who conducted the autopsy and testified as an expert
witness at trial described the detergent Echevarria ingested as more
caustic than household bleach. He explained that when Echevarria
swallowed the detergent it began to “liquefy” all the human tissue with
which it came in contact, causing chemical burns to Echevarria’s mouth,
tongue, throat, larynx, epiglottis, digestive tract, esophagus, airways,
and stomach lining. The examiner provided extensive evidence of the
body reacting to its various injuries, and the many hours that must have
passed between Echevarria’s immediate injuries and his death.
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