Like It Never Happened, No Charges Filed For Darren Rainey’s Death

June 23, 2016 (Fault Lines) — On June 22, 2012, Darren Rainey was dragged by prison guards into a locked shower stall at the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida City, Florida. Rainey, a 50-year-old mentally ill inmate, was then sprayed full blast with 180 degree water for hours through a hose. He screamed for help as he choked on the steam, his skin peeled from his body, and he eventually dropped dead in that filthy, scalding chamber.

And to this day, no one has been charged with a crime, let alone held accountable for Rainey’s death. The Miami Herald reports on the fourth anniversary of Rainey’s death at Dade Correctional:

While Rainey’s death has led to some reforms in the treatment of the mentally ill in Florida prisons, the prison system remains dangerously understaffed and rife with violence, as evidenced by recent riots and turmoil at Franklin Correctional Institution in north-central Florida.

…

Rainey, who was sentenced to a two-year term for cocaine possession, suffered from severe schizophrenia and had been in prison for four months when he was locked in a shower chamber specially rigged to deliver 180-degree water through a hose from a neighboring janitorial closet. Prisoners said that corrections officers Cornelius Thompson and Roland Clarke and others on the shift that night ridiculed Rainey as he kicked the locked door and begged to be let out. They left him there for between 1 1/2 and two hours, according to various staff reports. At some point he collapsed, falling face-up onto the drain.

If true, what Thompson, Clarke, and their confederates did to Rainey is sadistic and should shake the foundations of even the most stoic. And what prompted this brutality? Rainey supposedly defecated in his cell and refused to clean it up. That is all, folks.

It would be difficult for us to find a scenario that would be more antithetical to the aphorism of “Let the punishment fit the crime.” After Rainey’s body was removed, a fellow inmate was tasked with the stall’s “clean up,” and was handed some Clorox so that he could remove chunks of Rainey’s skin from floor. So far, this account of Rainey’s death may sound like prosecutor’s statement to a jury during Thompson and Clarke’s hypothetical trials, but to describe it any other way would be to run the risk of a discourse that may be considered euphemistic.

Reports indicate that Rainey’s death is a symptom of the across-the-board dysfunction within the Florida Department of Corrections, especially when it comes to the mentally ill. Even its jails have been described as “the asylums of the new millennium,” where people are held pending trial and are presumed (at least in theory) innocent of any charges filed by the state.

With regards to inmates like Rainey, who have pled/been found guilty and are doing their time while paying their debt to society, they are still entitled to basic human rights protections and to be spared from random acts of violence coming from prison guards.

Correctional facilities are required to provide inmates suffering from serious mental illness (e.g., Rainey) with psychiatric care, as per the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision of Estelle v. Gamble, where the Court held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes cruel and unusual punishment contravening the Eighth Amendment.”

Those who think otherwise should appeal to their self-interest: had Rainey survived and been allowed to complete his sentence, he likely would have been released back into society. One can only imagine in what state his mental faculties would be after enduring such repeated abuse at the hands of correctional officers.

The attempted cover-up by prison officials of the circumstances of Rainey’s death began early, and it took the efforts of an inmate from Dade Correctional to bring this case to light. Harold Hempstead was an orderly who was there the night Rainey was dragged into the shower. When he agreed to be quoted by the Miami Herald as to what happened to Rainey, we can imagine what happened next: he lost all of his privileges, was harassed and intimidated, and was transferred to one of Florida’s most notorious prisons under the guise of “protective management:”

After he was threatened by corrections officers for reporting what he saw, Hempstead was placed in protective management and moved around the system. In recent weeks, he was transferred to Okeechobee Correctional Institution, where he has been denied the opportunity to speak by phone to his family or to the Herald. In letters to the newspaper, he said he was isolated because his life was threatened. A person with knowledge of the prison system confirmed a threat to his well-being had been received and was being investigated. The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, the contents of which were leaked to the Herald, says that Rainey died from complications of schizophrenia, heart disease and “confinement” in the shower.

If the psychiatric counselor at Dade Correctional can be met with intimidation when she tried to expose the abuse (which purportedly included starving inmates as form of punishment) at the prison, what chance did a convicted burglar like Hempstead have as a whistleblower? Rainey nonetheless stood his ground and filed his grievance with the Department of Corrections, which at least opened an investigation.

It’s only prisoners of authoritarian regimes abroad who encounter a Niagara of abuse and torture when they are locked up, right? It’s cases like Rainey’s that should hit our collective conscience like a kick in the face and make us take notice of what is being done inside our jails and prisons.

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