Action News Jax investigates JSO's use of force behind bars

An Action News Jax investigation reveals the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office uses restraint chairs in half of all cases where a corrections officer uses force on an inmate.

The agency also uses the controversial restraint chairs three times as often as a larger Florida agency.

We've spent the last nine months digging for answers, after a schizophrenic inmate with no prior arrest record died hours after he was taken into custody.

Reports show that Jacksonville corrections officers used a Taser to stun father of two Paul Testa and strapped him into a restraint chair on Dec. 21, 2015. That’s when he stopped breathing.

His 19-year-old son Christian Testa said he’d just taken his father to the grocery store the day before.

“’I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Like it was normal. I didn’t expect anything to happen, honestly. I went by there the next day and the house was empty,” said Christian Testa in an exclusive interview with Action News Jax.

Testa was arrested when his neighbor Guy Merrill said he jumped his family’s fence into their yard with their dogs, armed with a sharpened wooden spear.

“Psycho. We don’t even know him,” said Merrill.

Hours after Paul Testa’s arrest, a judge dropped the charges, saying he needed help, not jail.

Paul Testa never got that help.

JSO death investigation documents said Paul Testa started fighting with corrections officers after that court appearance, even trying to grab one officer’s Taser.

In the report, one officer told investigators he saw Paul Testa “struggling and breathing heavily.”

After Paul Testa was strapped in, officers said he stopped breathing.

Christian Testa said when he got to the hospital, his father was brain dead, but was still shackled to the bed with armed JSO officers on either side.

“My dad was in the bed, choked out so bad that his eyes were popping out of his head. I mean, I knew right there that he was gone,” said Christian Testa.

After months of emails with JSO about what the agency would and would not release, Action News Jax submitted a public records request for every report of force within the jail that involved a restraint chair in 2014 and 2015.

Six months and nearly $1,851 later, we got 267 reports, totaling 2,079 pages.

Those reports reveal that out of all the instances when a JSO corrections officer used force on an inmate, half involved inmates being strapped into a restraint chair.

In the Orange County Jail system, which houses more than twice as many inmates, corrections officers used restraint chairs 87 times in 2014 and 2015.

That means JSO used the chair more than three times as often as Orange County.

Fourteen percent of JSO inmates who were strapped into a restraint chair were stunned first.

“I just don’t understand why they would need to use something like that, on top of a Taser. I mean, you’re getting electrocuted, then you’re getting tied down,” said Christian Testa. “This is something that was cruel and unusual.”

The Florida Department of Corrections doesn’t use restraint chairs in state prisons.

Neither does the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

“The restraint chair can be classified, in my opinion, as time out on steroids,” said Action News Jax Crime and Safety Expert Ken Jefferson.

Jefferson started his decades-long JSO career as a corrections officer in 1986, when the chairs weren’t used.

“We had to rely on restraining the individual ourselves with handcuffs and shackles,” said Jefferson.

The jail has 13 restraint chairs.

“What comes to mind is two things: One, are these inmates coming in and acting out more frequently than others? Or two, is our tolerance level so low that JSO is just not going to put up with it, they’re going to put them in the restraint chair, let them sit there… until they calm down and remove them?” said Jefferson.

The use of force reports show corrections officers regularly face violent situations. Inmates threaten, claw, and throw bodily fluids at them.

“If you have that particular item available and you’ve got an uncooperative, violent person, I say, ‘Why not use it?’” said Jefferson.

The medical examiner listed Paul Testa’s cause of death as excited delirium syndrome.

It’s a diagnosis not recognized by the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association. You won’t find it in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders either.

Who recognizes excited delirium? Medical examiners and law enforcement.

It’s a question printed on every JSO inmate use of force report.

“He was just swept under the rug. I wouldn’t have even gotten any information from JSO if I wouldn’t have gotten a lawyer,” said Christian Testa. “It feels like something was just ripped away. I didn’t get to say goodbye. There was no warning. It feels like something is empty.”

The teen has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against JSO.

“He was a great man who didn’t deserve this. And it’s trying to be put where people don’t know about it. And it needs to come to light,” said Christian Testa.

JSO declined numerous requests for an interview about its use of the chair and the results of our investigation.

The agency sent a statement on Friday evening from Director of Corrections Mike Bruno, which reads:

A facility is much more dynamic than just a snapshot of a daily population. One must be very careful when using this as a data point to reference bed counts <em>for the entire systems of both Sheriffs' offices</em>, not just one facility of ours and all facilities of another. That is not apples to apples. Our average daily population this year has been 3277 inmates, system wide. In 2014 we had 137 Prostraint chair uses at the Pre-Trial Detention Facility. In 2015 there were 130  uses of the chair at the PTDF. The number of reports will not correlate to the number of times the chair is used, as there can be multiple reports from multiple officers involved in a one-time use of the chair. We cannot speak to the accuracy of another agency's data.

Recognizing that corrections is a very dynamic system, we can't "armchair quarterback" what another facility or corrections operation does. We follow policy. We document our use and each incident is reviewed both during and after. Each individual placed in a chair is medically screened initially and periodically. They are monitored throughout the time they are in the chair. Use of the Prostraint chair in appropriate cases is intended to—and does—prevent injuries to both officers and inmates.  The case involving Paul Testa is currently in active litigation; we will confine any further comment regarding that case to the court proceedings."

The agency’s policy on using restraints said inmates must be checked on every 15 minutes while in restraint chairs and the chairs must not be used as a form of punishment.

Neither the State Attorney’s Office nor the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated Testa’s death.

This is not the first time a local inmate has become unresponsive while strapped into a restraint chair.

In 2013, a Clay County 19-year-old inmate suffocated in the chair after corrections officers pepper sprayed him and placed what’s called a spit hood over his head to prevent him from spitting at officers.

Daniel Linsinbigler Jr.'s family were given a $2.2 million settlement in 2014.

The Clay County Sheriff’s Office documents show its pepper spray protocol changed after the teen’s death, but not its restraint chair protocol.

Update: After Action News Jax’s story aired on Monday, JSO provided us with the total number of times a restraint chair was used in across its entire jail system. In 2014 and 2015, corrections officers reported using the restraint chair 272 times. The average inmate population for those two years system wide was 3,452. For comparison, Orange County’s jail system had an average inmate population of 2,864 inmates during that same time period and its corrections officers reported using the chair 87 times.

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