Man Says He Was Tortured in County Jail

Alleging he was stripped naked and strapped to a special chair for five hours at the Ventura County Jail, an Oxnard man plans to serve a lawsuit on deputies today charging that they violated his civil rights.

Kurt Von Colln, 38, alleges he suffered humiliation, a broken ankle and excruciating pain when sheriff’s deputies restrained him last year.

Sheriff’s records show Von Colln had been arrested for public intoxication and put into the drunk tank, where he yelled, banged his fists on the wall, stripped off his own clothes and exposed himself to jail staff, said sheriff’s counsel Alan Wisotsky.

“He became confrontational, he took an aggressive stance when they went into his cell, and they took him to the ground,” Wisotsky said.

Von Colln was strapped into a Pro-Straint chair, and his health was immediately checked by a nurse, then rechecked every 15 minutes or so, Wisotsky said.

“This is a medically designed chair. It’s not to be used for discipline but for prisoners who are a danger to themselves and others, in accordance with strict guidelines,” he said.

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There is no record that Von Colln complained of pain or of a broken ankle, Wisotsky said. “This information, I think, puts a much different spin onto the accusations in the complaint,” he added.

However, attorney Sonia Mercado said she plans to serve a copy of Von Colln’s suit at 11 a.m. today on officials at sheriff’s headquarters in Ventura.

“This cannot go on. We’re not in the 16th century,” Mercado said. “We cannot look at China and Latin America and say, ‘You can’t treat people this way,’ when it’s going on here too.”

The Pro-Straint chair, manufactured by a Beaverton, Ore., firm called AedecInternational, is designed to be a humane alternative to more forceful means of restraining dangerous inmates.

Aedec representatives could not be reached for comment Monday.

The Sheriff’s Department bought several such chairs for each of its facilities, said spokesman Capt. Mark Ball.

“We began using them quite a few years ago because of the health risks that were presented with hogtying inmates,” he said.

Wisotsky said he will try to obtain sheriff’s records and other court papers pertaining to Von Colln’s case and “determine if there’s any truth to the accusations.”

Filed last month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the suit says that Von Colln crashed his bicycle on May 28, 1996, hit his head on the ground and was knocked unconscious.

This, Von Colln’s suit contends, is what happened next:

He woke up in a holding cell at the Ventura County Jail with no memory of being arrested.

Von Colln demanded repeatedly to know why he had been arrested, what he was being held for.

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But deputies, after refusing to answer the questions for more than an hour, pulled him from his cell, stripped him naked and strapped him into a “black chair,” the suit says.

“While sitting shackled, he was exposed to be seen by other deputies and police officers and was ridiculed, laughed at, tortured and humiliated,” the suit contends.

Deputies “bent plaintiff’s arms behind his back and made taunting and threatening statements such as, ‘We’ll take a picture for your mother.’ ”

Refused access to a toilet, Von Colln defecated and urinated on himself while in the chair, but deputies left him in place, while other inmates told him “not to complain or it would be worse,” the suit maintains.

When he pleaded to be released, deputies repeatedly tightened his shackles, eventually breaking his ankle, the suit says. Von Colln was certain his ankle had not been injured in the crash and was healthy when he first woke up in jail, Mercado said.

The suit contends that when he complained about the pain, they tightened the ankle restraints more.

Finally, deputies wheeled him to a bathroom and made him “clean up the mess” with his bare hands.

Then they freed him and let him shower before releasing him without filing any charges, saying, “There will be no record of this,” according to the suit.

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Other lawsuits have surfaced around the country in recent months, telling of mentally ill jail and prison inmates strapped into “the black chair” for hours at a time as a form of punishment or torture.

Some, kept from using bathrooms, complained of open sores caused by sitting in their own waste for hours.

Tennessee inmates filed a 1994 lawsuit alleging that time in the chair damaged their blood vessels.

One Utah inmate died in March after being shackled in an Aedec restraint chair.

Michael Valent was a schizophrenic man serving 15 years to life in the Utah State Prison at Draper for stabbing his grandmother to death.

He had been a quiet, courteous inmate, said Ross Anderson, a Salt Lake City attorney representing Valent’s mother.

One day, he sat in his cell with a pillowcase over his head--something he occasionally did due to his illness, Anderson said.

Prison guards ordered him several times to remove the pillowcase, even though he was not threatening to harm himself or anyone else, according to the lawsuit. When he refused, they phoned the prison psychiatrist at home, who ordered that Valent be pulled from his cell, stripped naked, and strapped into a restraint chair, the suit contends.

Sixteen hours later, they removed him from the chair, and he later died as a result of blood clots in his lungs that the suit alleges were caused by his confinement in the chair.

Other Utah inmates have complained of being strapped to the black chair for up to two days, forced to urinate through a catheter and defecate through a hole in the seat.

“[Valent] died as a result of a pulmonary embolism,” said Anderson. “The medical examiners ruled it a homicide.”

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Such alleged misuse of a restraint chair violates standards laid down by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, said spokesman Michael Wolke.

While restraint chairs are a relatively common tool for keeping mentally ill inmates from hurting themselves or others, they should be used only under supervision of a doctor, and inmates’ well-being should be checked every 15 minutes, said Wolke.

The commission would investigate Von Colln’s complaints if the Ventura County Jail took part in the panel’s voluntary accreditation program, but it does not.

However, the Utah State Prison at Draper is accredited by the commission.

“There shouldn’t be an injury like that [broken ankle] coming out of use of a restraint,” said Wolke, whose group is an offshoot of the American Medical Assn. that monitors care and treatment of ill inmates. “There shouldn’t be any harm done to the individual while he’s in the restraint.”