The Cruel Jailhouse Death of Jamycheal Mitchell

September 3rd, 2015

Awake Goy

This weekend I was given a glimpse into the heart and soul of a cop apologist, and my god was it ugly. Crack the mirror ugly. These people are our neighbors, our coworkers, sometimes even our friends and family members, and they are literally the worst people in the world.

All right, they may only be the second worst people in the world. Whether they get first or second place depends on if you think the Nazis who planned, ordered, and carried out the mass murder of millions of people during WWII are the worst or whether you think that honor belongs to the millions of everyday Germans who supported these atrocities because “the law is the law,” and actively participated in genocide by ratting out their neighbors who were members of targeted groups or bravely worked to protect these groups and to undermine Nazi rule. If you think Nazis are a trite, overused example, insert whatever mass murder carried out by government agents and actively supported and enabled by almost an entire country’s population that you wish.

This banality of evil was in full display on this post about the death of 24-year-old Jamycheal Mitchell, who was found dead in a jail cell in Portsmouth, Virginia on August 19^th. Mitchell, who had a history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had been in jail since April for stealing a Snickers bar, a 2-liter Mountain Dew, and a Zebra cake from a 7-11, merchandise worth at most $5. On May 21^st, Mitchell was found incompetent to stand trial and ordered to be transferred to Eastern State Hospital for inpatient treatment, however no beds were available, so he stayed in jail until his death. An aunt, Roxanne Adams, states that she contacted the hospital, and “people there said they didn’t know anything about the request or not having bed availability.”

From the Guardian:

Adams said medics at the jail told her Mitchell refused to take medication for his conditions. Before his arrest her nephew was on prescriptions for the antipsychotic drugs Prolixin and Zyprexin, and the mood stabiliser Depakote, according to Adams. She said prison officials then prescribed him the antipsychotic drug Haldol and Cogentin, which is intended to reduce the side-effects of the other medication, but he refused to take the drugs.

Adams said prison officials said her nephew had also been declining to eat. She said she saw Mitchell in court in recent weeks and estimated that he had lost 65 pounds since being detained. “He was extremely emaciated,” said Adams.

Results from an autopsy are still pending, however senior prison officials such as Natasha Perry, the master jail officer at the Hampton Roads regional jail in Portsmouth, have already stated, “As of right now it is deemed ‘natural causes’, and that it was not suspicious. Portsmouth police are currently investigating.

“His body failed,” said Roxanne Adams, Mitchell’s aunt. “It is extraordinary. The person I saw deceased was not even the same person.” Adams, who is a registered nurse, said Mitchell had practically no muscle mass left by the time of his death.

A previously perfectly healthy young person wastes away and dies in prison over the course of four months. Nothing to see here, folks! Not suspicious at all. At least not to the police apologist scum who commented on the Facebook post mentioned earlier in this article.

Unfortunately, many of the cop apologist comments on the post were deleted after it was made known that their many comments were helping to boost the visibility of the post and that the story was even trending on Facebook at the time.

Thankfully there are still enough comments left to provide a good representation of the twisted inner workings of the deviant cop apologist mind.

Let’s go over her points:

So society failed this man whose mental illness was so severe that he was declared disabled and unable to work, and of whom a prison psychologist said, “his thought processes were so confused that only snippets of his sentences could be understood, the rest were mumbled statements that made no rational sense.” Totally tracking with her on that one.

Yes, he shoplifted and then spent four months in jail. Over $5. Call me crazy, but that somehow seems unreasonable.

He couldn’t be transferred to a mental institution because there were no beds available. Well, not so fast on that one. According to his aunt the facility never received the request. It’s also unclear who was actually supposed to coordinate the transfer: “when asked which state agency was ultimately responsible for ensuring Mitchell was transferred to the hospital, the court clerk said: ‘It’s hard to tell who’s responsible for it.’”

Mitchell refused medication and food so prison officials had no choice but to respect his wishes and let him die. Wait, WTF?! This is where the train totally leaves the tracks. While it may be debatable whether someone who has been declared too mentally ill to stand trial can then be deemed competent to make appropriate decisions about their medical care, the question remains, why was an obviously ill and physically deteriorating inmate allowed to literally rot in his jail cell and die? The physical signs and symptoms of starvation would have been eminently clear, necessitating transfer to a regular hospital for medical treatment.

We’ll never know why Mitchell stopped eating. He had a psychotic mental illness, so there is no telling where he thought he was or what he thought was in the food, or if he were merely too severely depressed and anxious about being incarcerated to have an appetite. We do know it’s patently unnatural for a human being to allow himself to starve to death, and that it’s a damn long process to die that way. According to this article about hunger strikes, “in 1981, it took the ten Irish Republican hunger strikers (who were drinking water) from 46 to 73 days to die in Britain’s Maze Prison outside Belfast.”

The prison officials who had been charged with this man’s care while he was in their custody completely abdicated their responsibility, acting as if they were following advance directives executed by a sane and legally competent person, which Mitchell clearly was not. Even if Mitchell had been competent to make such decisions, why allow him to die slowly in his jail cell, rather than in a hospital under medical observation, where trained staff would have been able to intervene should he decide to accept care, and his family could be with him to say goodbye? Let’s be clear — Jamycheal Mitchell died because no one who was in a position to help him gave enough of a damn to do anything about it. Unfortunately we’ve seen more than one example of this callous indifference to jail inmates recently.

Then there’s this psycho:

We don’t know what Mitchell’s family situation was like. However, it seems grasping and insensitive to blame his family given that it’s a well-known fact that mentally ill adults often don’t have adequate supports from their families and society. Even a wealthy politician like Creigh Deeds was unable to secure appropriate in-patient treatment for his son, Gus, who nearly stabbed the senior Deeds to death, before fatally shooting himself in 2013. I don’t mention this case to make it seem like mentally ill persons are dangerous; They usually aren’t. I mentioned the Deeds case to highlight how unlikely it is that families of more modest means and without political connections would be able to fare any better.

Katherine continues to demonstrate her love of lawful behavior (for everyone except cops) and the milk of human kindness she has for the less fortunate among us :