In 2008 in South Carolina's 'Lee Correctional Prison' inmate Jerome Laudman, a mentally ill inmate, was stripped naked and placed in a cold cell for 11 days. With no way to protect himself from the cold, Laudman's body temperature was forcibly reduced to 80.6 degrees. He was transferred to a hospital where he was pronounced dead from cardiac arrhythmia, which is common with hypothermia victims.
His family sued, and what can only be described as a miracle, South Carolina State Circuit Judge Michael Baxley agreed with the family and issued a 45-page order finding the Department of Corrections had violated the rights of Laudman and other inmates with serious mental illness.
The South Carolina state police, SLED, which often covers for wrongdoing in the state, handed the case over to the FBI and DOJ lawyers, who have yet to do anything. The FBI can do little, when the FBI also uses cold cell torture.
Judge Baxley ordered South Carolina to make changes in their treatment of the mentally ill, but due to the high cost of compliance, some $30 million dollars, Governor Haley decided to appeal the case rather than taking action to stop the killing of inmates.
This story is ongoing and developing, but here are some articles on the Laudman murder:
On April 13, 2014, The Post and Courier newspaper, in Charleston, SC, published an article on the horrific conditions mentally ill inmates face in South Carolina's jails and prisons. Quoting:
The case exposed numerous stories of mentally ill inmates being gassed, locked in solitary confinement for years at a time, denied effective treatment and caged naked, alone and cold in makeshift crisis cells littered with rotten food, feces and other filth. Prison officials have argued that these were extreme "outlier" cases, troubling but anecdotal evidence that wasn't representative of the system as a whole.
