Prisoners denied medical attention in Ramsey County Jails

For RNC coverage, the mainstream media has been a joke. I have been relying on the excellent link roundups of citizen and blogger journalism by Krista at Thinkery. She is on day five now, and has a very comprehensive set of links to locally-based sites such as The Uptake, the Minnesota Independent, and others.

Blogs that reach a national audience that have provided detailed coverage include Pam's House Blend, where we have coverage of the speeches, of LGBT issues, and of what is going on in a militarized St Paul.

Glenn Greenwald who began blogging at Unclaimed Territory is now at Salon.com. He is a constitutional law expert and former civil right litigator, and his perspective on events is informed by the research he did for his books on the Patriot Act and the Bush legacy.

FireDogLake also cover the complete RNC, both inside and outsidie, and Jane Hamsher and Lindsay Beyerstein have been especially focused on the issues of police intimidation. All of them have been in the center of events, interviewing eyewitnesses, providing video, and especially important, providing historical and national context to these stories.

Most disturbing have been the posts by Dr. Kirk James Murphy, MD, who has been providing medical assistance at events like these for years. His latest post about how prisoners are being treated in the Ramsey County and St Paul jails. As he points out, unfortunately, this is no aberration but on a par of treatment of prisoners in the U.S. in general, and political prisoners in particular.
Here's are some of the events he has documented:

Jason was tased seven times on the street, while completely unresisting. We just heard from him-he's still pulling copper out of his hip from the taser gun, has a long, deep laceration in his leg that is still untreated, was beaten up badly and has a black eye, a hurt mouth and many lacerations, but says he's doing great. Elliot Hughes, a sweet, nineteen year old who came to our day camp, was badly beaten when the cops knocked him off his bicycle. They stepped on his chest, and he was coughing blood all night but received no medical treatment. The guards were calling him ‘Princess' and making homophobic remarks. We heard from Jason that last night, Elliot was making noises to protest not receiving any food for more than twelve hours. Twelve officers entered his cell. Screams were heard for over five minutes. He was tasered three times, maced, and beaten, then removed and the men were told he was being taken to a restraint chair.

[Starhawk]

To put it bluntly, uniformed "law" enforcement in St. Paul and Ramsey County:

* torture with electroshock weapons (Tasers)
* torture with chemical weapons
* stomp on a young man's chest
* cruelly (perhaps fatally) deny medical care to a victim spitting up blood (the fancy medical name is hemoptysis) from thoracic trauma
* respond to calls for food with torture by beating, Taser, and chemical weapons: the same chemical weapons known to cause respiratory arrest and death in victims with pulmonary disease. "Spitting up blood" is a symptom of pulmonary disease so severe as to require emergency medical evaluation.
* then tie up the victim in "restraint chairs" known to exacerbate pre-existing breathing difficulties in some victims of thoracic trauma.

The Ramsey County Jail officials did this in plain earshot of other detainees: that's a pretty strong sign they don't see anything to hide. Which—when one's been doing the same thing over and over for years—is a common assumption.