Judge OKs forced feeding of prisoner
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – The Corrections Department has obtained a court order allowing it to force-feed a state prison inmate if he carries out his threat to participate in hunger strikes. Convicted killer Curtis Braxton and three other inmates took part in a 13-day hunger strike at Dallas state prison that ended last month after the state sued for permission to force-feed the inmates. Prison officials said as many as eight prisoners were involved in the protest that involved commissary prices and other issues.
Braxton, 27, has vowed to stage more hunger strikes, leading Commonwealth Court Senior Judge Jim Flaherty to grant an injunction Wednesday permitting him to be involuntarily fed and hydrated with a tube if necessary in the future. The other three said they would not participate in future hunger strikes, so Flaherty ruled injunctions were not justified in those cases.
“A preliminary injunction will either cause Braxton’s health to be preserved by allowing him to be force-fed or by encouraging him to eat under the threat of being force-fed,” Flaherty wrote.
Braxton gave guards at the Dallas state prison a note that read, “I’ll be on another hunger strike by the end of the month, this is going to be an ongoing process every month you think you and your guards are going to do what yall want to do and get away with it your crazy!”
The other three inmates are Antonio Howard, 28, Jose R. Laguer, 29, and Hassan M. Mayhew, 25. Howard, Mayhew and Braxton are serving murder sentences and Laguer was convicted of drug offenses, according to prison records.
Luzerne County assistant public defender Virginia Murtha Cowley, who represents the four, said Thursday that Flaherty’s ruling is fair.
“They said that the guards were using racial slurs, they said that it was cold. One of them said it took a long time to get an appointment with the dentist,” she said.
Dallas state prison spokesman Kenneth Burnett said four other inmates also were part of the hunger strike, but they were not among those that the Corrections Department wanted to force-feed.
Braxton’s case file includes handwritten affidavits by other inmates who said they witnessed guards taunting him about an apparent fight he had with guards and deny him privileges such as exercise time and showers.
In his own three-page statement, Braxton claimed guards assaulted him and called him a derogatory racial epithet. He said he feared for his safety.
The Corrections Department said Braxton was transferred Tuesday from the Dallas state prison to the Forest state prison.
In a separate ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson ordered Cowley to research Braxton’s claims and file a court petition within a month if warranted.
A 1990 Commonwealth Court ruling first authorized the forced feeding of inmates. The case involved a convicted murderer, Joseph Kallinger, who was admitted to a mental hospital for trying to starve himself to death after seeing a vision of Jesus in a toilet bowl.
The court ruled that the orderly administration of the prison system overrode Kallinger’s privacy rights, and that letting him die could trigger copycat hunger strikes and possibly prison riots.