Sheriff Joe Just Cost Us Another $9 Million

His parents knew it was true. They knew that their son – their mentally disabled son – wasn’t a violent person. He didn’t have a mean streak in him. He had never been arrested, and he had never hurt anyone. That’s what made it so hard to understand how he died – and why he died.

When they buried him in August 2001, all they really knew was where he died. He was already brain dead when paramedics took him from the central intake area of Madison Street Jail to Phoenix Memorial Hospital in the early morning hours of August 7. He never regained consciousness at the hospital, and two days later, he was pronounced dead.

Turns out, he wasn’t in jail because he was a criminal or because he had broken a law. He was in jail because Phoenix police officers thought the confused and paranoid young man would get help there. After all, the jail has an infirmary; it has one of the best “psych wards” in Arizona; it has medical personnel on duty; and doctors are on call 24-7. Police convinced his parents that it was the best thing to do. They gave his folks a number to call in the morning so they could pick up their son.

As Carol and Charles Agster Sr. slept that night, their son was dying in a restraint chair, surrounded by nine detention officers and a registered nurse.

The first news stories said he died from an overdose of methamphetamines – that his heart gave out because he was high on drugs, and that his death was a tragic “accident.”
And that’s the same story Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s people told the jury in the wrongful death case brought by Agster’s parents.

But something else had to happen that night to convince the jury to award Agster’s family an astonishing $9 million – the highest single judgment in a spate of judgments that have been awarded because of people dying in Sheriff Joe’s jail.

The judgment, which was awarded on March 24, was made against the jail system, the county’s medical department and the sheriff. It will be paid by insurance companies and the taxpayers of Maricopa County.
The question is: What actually happened that night?

The answer, as you’ll see, is both frightening and shocking.

The jury decided that not only was Charles Agster killed by excessive force and gross indifference, but that county officials faked documents in an attempt to cover their tracks.

The $9 million judgment was the jury’s way of saying that even Sheriff Joe and his underlings must adhere to the letter of the law.

CHARLES AGSTER WAS 33 YEARS OLD, PHYSICALLY. MENTALLY, HE WAS 12 TO 15. HIS PARENTS KNEW SHORTLY AFTER HIS BIRTH AT ST. JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL THAT THE YOUNGEST OF THEIR FOUR CHILDREN WAS DIFFERENT.

By age 3, Charles Agster was getting help with his lagging speech development, and his parents came to realize that he was mentally disabled. He never did get very big. At the most, he was 5-foot-5-inches tall and 128 pounds.

His handicap made it impossible for him to finish high school, but he was a hard worker at the minimum-wage jobs he’d found – busing tables, pushing wheelchairs at the airport, clerking at Wal-Mart.

Everyone would remember him not only as a hard worker, but also as a sensitive and loving son. As they said many times at the funeral, “He never hurt a soul.”

He lived with his parents for most of his life, and then moved in with a girlfriend who was suffering a serious illness. Charles helped take care of her. But in early 2001, they broke up and he moved back home, depressed. His parents worried that he was drinking too much. In July, he scared his parents with an irrational and paranoid episode during which he believed that people were coming to kill him. He eventually admitted to his parents that he’d experimented with methamphetamines. He promised to straighten up, and, during the next month, his parents saw progress – he seemed to be getting his life back on track.

Then came the evening of August 6, 2001, a Monday. It would be the last night of Charles Agster’s life.

Agster was helping his father install a security door when the paranoia returned. He had tried meth again. His mother suggested that this would be a good time to go to St. Luke’s Behavioral Health Center. Her son agreed, insisting that they leave immediately. It was 10:30 p.m.

On the way, Agster asked his parents to stop at a Circle K so he could get a beer. It didn’t seem like an outrageous request, considering that he might spend weeks in the hospital. So they stopped. He went into the convenience store and came back with a beer. He got into the car and they continued on their way. Then he asked them to stop again so he could get a cigarette. Again, his parents thought it couldn’t hurt to placate his anxiety.

They parked near the door of the Circle K. Charles went inside, came outside to smoke, and then went back inside again. His parents would later testify that he never accosted or threatened anyone, nor had he tried to steal anything. They said they’d kept calling him back to the car, but he wouldn’t come. Nonetheless, they were sure he would eventually get into the car on his own. Although he was fearful, he was calm.

But when Agster wouldn’t leave the store, the security guard called the Phoenix Police Department. Four officers arrived at 11:10 p.m. Another squad car arrived a few minutes later.
Carol and Charles Agster Sr. explained the situation to the officers, noting that they’d been on their way to St. Luke’s. They figured that the officers would help them get their son back into the car so they could head to the hospital. But that’s not what happened.

The first officers who went inside the Circle K found Agster so fearful and paranoid that he didn’t recognize them as officers, and he kept asking them to call the police. He was clinging to the coffee machine.

A couple minutes later, police dragged a screaming Agster from the store. His parents say the officers shoved him onto the pavement, cuffed his hands behind his back, and bound his legs with a rope. As Agster was pushed into the squad car, he begged his mother to ride with him. Meanwhile, his frightened parents were told by an officer that their son would “get help” at the jail – he would get medication to calm him down and counseling from a medical doctor. They said it was the best thing.

Two Phoenix officers then drove Agster to the Madison Street Jail, which is located at Madison and First streets in Downtown Phoenix. By the time they’d arrived, Agster was so panicked that they had to pry him out of the squad car and carry him into the “Phoenix room,” an intake area used only by city police officers. They laid him on the floor, where Agster mumbled and asked for a cigarette. By this time, he was calming down.

ANY TIME A PERSON IS BROUGHT INTO THE JAIL, THE FIRST THING THAT HAPPENS IS A NURSE DETERMINES WHETHER THE PERSON IS “ACCEPTABLE” FOR JAIL, OR WHETHER HE OR SHE SHOULD BE GIVEN MEDICAL TREATMENT. The Madison Street Jail policy is clear: Those who show signs of bizarre behavior or mental illness, or those who are suicide risks, are to be referred to the psychiatric staff for evaluation and treatment.

At approximately 11:45 p.m., Betty J. Lewis, a jail nurse, came into the Phoenix room to assess Charles Agster. She was informed that Agster was a “918,” which is police lingo for a person exhibiting crazy behavior.

That much was obvious – he was paranoid and frightened. In fact, in the “Pre-Booking Assessment-Medical Clearance Report” that she filled out at the time, Lewis noted that Agster had the lowest level of consciousness a patient could have. He “demonstrated paranoid behavior,” she wrote on the form. She also noted that he’d been en route to the psych hospital in the middle of the night, and he didn’t know where he was or what time it was.

The record shows that at that moment, she had at least 10 reasons to refer Agster for medical care, rather than accept him into the jail. Five of those reasons were in Lewis’ own handwriting. However, instead of sending him out for psychiatric evaluation, she accepted him into the jail and ordered that he be placed in the jail’s restraint chair. Her order was timed 11:55 p.m. At that moment, Charles Agster was just 14 minutes from being brain dead.

AT LEAST TWO JAILERS THAT NIGHT QUESTIONED THE NURSE’S DECISION TO ACCEPT CHARLES AGSTER INTO THE JAIL. DETENTION OFFICER KATHERINA BROKSCHMIDT WOULD LATER TESTIFY: “I Personally don’t think that she should have taken him… in the state that he was in.” Officer Susan Fisher saw immediately that Agster’s skin was gray. “I had a funny feeling,” she testified. “I didn’t know he was going to die, but I just… I just had a funny feeling.”

Agster, who was still fully restrained, was now in a total state of terror. He wedged himself under a table and clung to its supports. It took several police officers to extricate him from the table. Eventually, they pulled him out and laid him on the floor, handing him over to the jailers.

A detention officer placed a “spit hood” over Agster’s head – a gray mesh hood with a drawstring that covers the head and looks eerily like the hoods worn by inmates facing execution. Four officers replaced the police restraints with handcuffs. They carried Agster, face-down, through the hallway and forced him into the restraint chair. The metal chair, which has been likened to a “medieval torture chamber,” is angled so that the person sits at a backward slant. His legs were strapped to the bottom of the chair, and, according to court records, Officer Baruch Reusch shoved his knee into Agster’s stomach. Two other officers ordered Reusch to stop kneeing him. Meanwhile, another officer bent Agster’s head backward over the chair.

WITH HIS LEGS SECURE, FIVE JAIL GUARDS PUSHED AGSTER FORWARD AT THE WAIST, FORCING HIS FACE INTO HIS KNEES, SO THEY COULD REMOVE THE HANDCUFFS AND STRAP HIS ARMS TO THE CHAIR. HE WAS HELD IN THAT position, which can cut off a person’s air supply, for 1 minute and 47 seconds. (Officer Laura Sodeman later testified that she saw no reason for them to hold Agster down that long.) When they brought him back to a sitting position, he was moaning, and drifting in and out of consciousness.

By then, some of the women being held in a nearby cell were screaming at the officers, imploring them to stop. “You’re killing him!” they yelled. They were told to “shut the f— up.” One woman was on the phone with her mother, and told her, “I’ve got to hang up; they’re killing this guy.”

In addition, someone tried to use the payphone in the holding cell to call 9-1-1, but couldn’t get through. Two of those women later testified in the case, saying they saw the jailers and the nurse laughing as Charles Agster was forced into the restraint chair. On the video record of that night, an inmate in the background draws her finger across her throat in a sign of death.

For a few minutes, Charles Agster sat in the chair alone, not moving, barely breathing. It wasn’t until 12:09 a.m., according to the video record, that Lewis, the nurse, came to check on him. Almost immediately, Officer Brokschmidt noted that Agster was “pale and his eyes were rolling to the back of his head.” She told the nurse that she thought Agster was “seizing,” and another guard chimed in that he wasn’t breathing. Officer Leah Compton noted that Agster was not moving and that his color was bad.

Lewis responded that Agster was not having a seizure, and she checked his pulse. She said it was weak. Then she noticed that his color was deteriorating, and a pallor was setting in. She didn’t have a stethoscope, but pinched the bridge of his nose three times, finding that his response was “minimal.” One of the guards then waved an ammonia-soaked rag under Agster’s nose – a surefire way to revive anyone – but Agster failed to respond to the noxious fumes. By this time, Agster was completely unconscious.

Next, Lewis reached up under the hood and touched Agster’s eyelashes. He didn’t respond. She poked his cornea. He didn’t respond. She performed a sternal rub, where the knuckle is ground into the sternum, causing enough pain to bring almost anyone around. He didn’t respond. By this time, Brokschmidt had checked Agster’s carotid pulse and reported that she felt only one beat every three to four seconds. Someone then tried the powerful ammonia towel again, but nothing was reviving Charles Agster.

That’s when Lewis asked someone to fetch her stethoscope. But by the time she put it to his chest, she realized that Agster had no pulse and that he wasn’t breathing.

As attorney Michael Manning would later say: “Incredibly, nurse Lewis performed yet another test, in which she had Charles’ arm unrestrained, raised it above his head, and allowed it to fall onto his face. Charles, likely completely apneic and pulseless at this point, failed to respond.”

In all, Lewis spent at least four minutes performing 15 “pain stimuli” tests. She finally told someone to call the paramedics while she ordered Agster to be carried, restraint chair and all, down to the nurse’s station. There, the guards unbuckled him and laid him on his back on the concrete floor.

“Despite the fact that all [who were] present knew Charles had been in respiratory and cardiac distress for a dangerously long period of time, and despite the fact that nurse Lewis knew Charles was not breathing and did not have a pulse, neither the medical staff nor the jail staff began cardiopulmonary resuscitation until nearly four minutes after they removed Charles from the restraint chair, and at least 10 minutes after they knew he was in serious medical distress,” Manning would tell the court.

Lewis later filled out a form claiming that she had ordered the paramedics to be called at 12:10 a.m., which would be just one minute after she first went to check on Agster. However, the record at the Phoenix Fire Department shows that the 9-1-1 call wasn’t placed from the jail until 12:18 a.m.

Paramedics from the PFD arrived at 12:23 a.m. and spent 18 minutes trying to revive the young man. They rushed him to Phoenix Memorial Hospital, where he remained in a deep vegetative state until August 9, at which point his family removed him from life support.

In his autopsy report, Dr. Philip Keen, the chief medical examiner, determined the cause of death to be “positional asphyxia due to restraint.” In other words, the jailers suffocated Charles Agster as they held him down in the restraint chair.

An internal investigation by the sheriff’s office called the death an “accident.”

THE WAY SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO AND HIS JAILERS RECOUNT THE DEATH OF CHARLES AGSTER IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE EVIDENCE THAT WAS PRESENTED IN COURT. THEY COUNTERED THAT IT WASN’T THE NURSE AND the officers who were responsible for Charles Agster’s death – it was everyone else.

It was Agster’s fault for being high on meth. Again and again they repeated their mantra: “No Meth, No Death.” According to their testimony, Agster didn’t die from abuse or asphyxiation, but from “methamphetamine-induced excited delirium” caused by having 17 times the therapeutic level of meth in his system. Attorney Michael Wolver, who represented the correctional health system, argued that Agster was so “severely poisoned” by the time he arrived at the jail, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him from dying.

It also was the fault of Carol and Charles Agster Sr., the aging parents, and their “poor decision-making.” On the way to the rehab center that night, they stopped at a Circle K so their son could buy a beer, an appeasement Wolver characterized as “unbelievable.” They let police take their son away to jail; they had to be lax for their child to be on drugs in the first place.

Attorney Brian Kaven, representing the sheriff’s office, told the jury they shouldn’t reward these bad decisions by making Carol and Charles Agster Sr. “fabulously, fabulously wealthy.” (Carol Agster says she plans to give all of her money to charity, and almost immediately, she made a $50,000 gift to Life Teen. She also made large contributions to the family’s church, as well as Aglow, a spiritual, Bible-based community outreach program. Charles Agster Sr. says he’s going to share his money with his surviving children.)

In addition to blaming Agster and his parents, the sheriff’s department claimed it was the fault of the Phoenix police officers, who manhandled Agster en route to the jail. Lawyers argued that the jailers were much kinder to Agster than the police had been. In fact, he noted that one county detention officer was sickened by the way police had mishandled the young man.

In the end, according to the sheriff’s department, it was the fault of everyone but the sheriff’s people. One after another, the seven attorneys representing the defendants repeated the same theme: “They did absolutely nothing wrong.” Well, the jury didn’t buy it.

The lawsuit charged that crimes were committed against Agster under both state and federal law. The state crimes were for “wrongful death.” Jurors were not allowed to award punitive damages meant to punish the wrongdoing, but they could assess a percentage of blame, depending on how they interpreted the evidence. After deliberation, they assessed 50 percent of the blame on the sheriff, the jailers and nurse Lewis, and the other half on Agster, his parents and whoever sold him the meth. They awarded $2 million on the state claim – the Agsters got half of that.

The other $8 million came from the federal claim that the jailers and Lewis had violated Agster’s constitutional rights by using excessive force. Of that, $6 million was for actual damages and $2 million was a punitive award against Lewis.

In the end, though, what really concerned the jury was how blatantly the jailers had tried to fake the records to cover up their mistakes.

“We caught them red-handed,” says attorney Michael Manning, who represented the Agsters. “You could just watch the jury, rolling their eyes, shaking their heads, they were just overwhelmed with the crap they saw [as the evidence in the case was presented].”

According to the court records, several documents were backdated, altered or created to cover up how Agster had died. Among the most outlandish examples is a questionnaire that Agster allegedly filled out while in jail, answering questions about his health. Although he gives “no response” to almost all of the 27 questions, he did answer “yes” to the question asking if he’d been told how to request medical care. The form is dated 18:34 (or 6:34 p.m.) on August 7, 2001. By that time, Charles Agster had already been brain dead at Phoenix Memorial Hospital for nearly 18 hours. “They tried to cover their tracks, but they weren’t very good at it,” Manning says.

SHE’S ONE OF THE SEVEN WOMEN WHO SAT ON THE JURY – ALONG WITH FIVE MEN – AND SHE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT THE “DISTURBING” TRIAL THAT TOOK UP TWO MONTHS OF HER LIFE. BUT SHE DOESN’T WANT her name used. “I’m afraid of repercussions from the sheriff’s office,” she explains.

After what she saw in the courtroom, she worries that if anyone in her family ever got into trouble, things would be bad for them in jail. (This isn’t the first time a juror in a suit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio has expressed such concerns to PHOENIX magazine.)

But she wants to talk because she wants people to know what went on inside that jail and what shameful things happened afterward. When she starts talking about the “really horrific” things that stick with her, the first thing she mentions is “phonying up the documents.”

“Everybody got up there [on the stand], they were very self-righteous, and they were lying. We caught them lying, and that didn’t seem to bother anyone,” she says. In all, according to the court records, six separate documents were doctored to give a false account of Agster’s death.

Hours after Agster was brain dead, Lewis, the nurse, said Agster had been “beating his head against the floor” in the Phoenix room, making it look as though he’d been violent. However, there is no evidence of any head beating – not from the notes of that night or from the video that showed him cowering on the floor. In fact, in her initial interview with sheriff’s investigators immediately after the incident, Lewis denied there was any such behavior.

What’s more, Lewis’ original assessment of Agster was that he wasn’t suicidal. Her initial notes read, “I’m able to contract for safety,” which means she got him to promise he wouldn’t hurt himself – a standard system the jail uses with disturbed inmates. The jury was told that when jailers later realized they needed a justification for putting Agster in the restraint chair, Sergeant Michael Wilkins created a document that read: “Inmate would not contract for safety with R.N. Lewis. Placed in restraint chair for inmate’s own safety.”

Sergeant Wilkins testified that he filled out that form and dated it at the time he wrote it, 15 minutes after midnight on August 7. As it turns out, there are two problems with that document: First, it contains a booking number that doesn’t exist, and second, a videotape of the jail at that time shows that Sergeant Wilkins wasn’t writing notes.

A second booking number was created for Charles Agster hours after he’d been taken to the hospital by paramedics. This booking number was used on a fake form that supposedly had Agster answering questions about his health 18 hours after he was already brain dead. Officer Eric Nulph signed a document that purports to be “code notes” on the progression of care for Agster from 10 minutes to 55 minutes after midnight. It reads, “All entries were written by [Officer] Nulph.”

But on the stand, he admitted that nurse Fran McNichols had him sign the document, even though he hadn’t written it. It was never determined who it was that wrote the document, or when it was actually written.
In addition, Nurse McNichols created a false entry in a chart claiming Dr. Kevin Hoffert “ordered” the chairing of Charles Agster on August 7 over the phone at five minutes after midnight.

Dr. Hoffert testified that he was never called about the chairing of Agster, and never spoke to anyone that night about approving a chairing, even though a doctor’s approval is required by the jail’s own policies.
The original autopsy report on October 24, 2001, by Dr. Philip E. Keen lists the cause of death as “positional asphyxia due to restraint.” But on August 22, 2003, after visits from attorneys representing the sheriff’s office and the health department, Dr. Keen changed his autopsy report to say that Agster did not die from positional asphyxia.

“The lies ran right through everyone, all the way to the coroner. [They] ran rampant,” the juror tells PHOENIX magazine.

She says the jury was ultimately convinced of the truth because they saw what happened that night. “All you had to do is watch the video,” she says. “You could see what happened. This kid wasn’t doing anything – why was he even in that chair?”

She was particularly upset because it appeared that “nobody cared” that a young man was dying. They moved painfully slow that night in three ways: in deciding that Agster was dying, in calling the paramedics and in starting CPR. On the stand, all nine detention officers and supervisors involved in Agster’s death admitted they believed he was mentally disabled and was showing bizarre behavior. Most of them suspected he was on drugs. Yet none of them tried to calm him down.

Instead, they strapped him to a chair. What’s more, according to the juror, none of the defendants thought they should have done anything differently. They all declared they would not change their procedures because of Agster’s death. Lieutenant Kristine Kemper even testified that she would not have called the paramedics any sooner.

Even though the jail has specific procedures that should have prevented Agster’s death, the jailers all professed ignorance. “They didn’t appear to know the rules and procedures,” the juror says. “Nobody made them read them, and if they did, I’m not sure they’d understand what they read. One jailer, who had been on the job for years, testified she didn’t even know how to call 9-1-1. How do you not know how to do that?”

If the jailers had followed the county’s own rules, they never would have put Charles Agster in a restraint chair.

Based on the rules, Agster shouldn’t have been accepted into the jail in the first place, but instead should have been referred to the psych unit. The written policy of the jail states: “All inmates who present a history of mental illness, suicide attempts, show signs of a developmental disability or exhibit any type of bizarre behavior, will be referred to the psychiatric staff for evaluation and possible treatment and intervention.” (This, apparently, is why Phoenix PD officers thought Agster would get “help” if they took him to the jail.)

In addition, the county’s “use of restraint” policy also should have steered jailers away from putting Agster in a restraint chair – the most severe restraint at the disposal of jailers.

According to the first page of a two-page policy, which is signed by both healthcare officials and the chief of the Sheriff’s Custody Operations Bureau: “Restraints will only be used when other less restrictive methods (i.e., counseling, isolation/transition room, medications) are perceived to be ineffective or inappropriate. Restraints shall never be used for punitive or disciplinary reasons.”

The policy also specifies that a medical or psychiatric doctor must order restraints. (Lewis didn’t have the authority to order the restraint chair in the first place.)

But testimony in this trial revealed that the policy was being ignored almost nightly at the county jail. Jailers admitted it was “a regular thing” to put sick or uncooperative inmates in a chair for up to six hours. Officers testified that they did it as often as 13 times a night.

ALTHOUGH TESTIMONY FROM THE JAILERS WAS DISTURBING, THE JUROR SAYS THINGS ONLY GOT WORSE WHEN THE ATTORNEYS STARTED TALKING – AND CONTINUED TO STRETCH THE TRUTH. FOR INSTANCE, attorneys for the sheriff and other defendants claimed the eyewitnesses from the jail (the women who were screaming) couldn’t see what was going on, so their testimony should be ignored.

“But we watched the video, and you could see the women had a great view – a better view than the video camera,” the juror says. She remembers attorneys arguing that Agster wasn’t really mentally disabled, even though their own internal investigation had determined that he was. She says the jury watched those attorneys twist point after point until they had lost all credibility. “We talked about them in the jury room, how if we ever needed an attorney, we wouldn’t hire them,” she recalls.

But the least believable of all, she adds, was Sheriff Joe himself. “The only one we didn’t have trouble giving money against was the sheriff,” she says. Jurors were concerned about giving a big award against working-class people like the jailers, and thus awarded just a token $1 against each of them. They all agreed, however, that the policies of Sheriff Joe Arpaio were ultimately responsible for the death of Charles Agster.
As the juror explains: “The sheriff was asked if he knew about policies and procedures, and he said he didn’t. ‘I have people that do that,’ he said. The Sun City crowd loves the guy, the press loves him and everybody’s afraid to say, ‘What a jerk.’ Nobody looks at the consequences of what he does. I’d like to tell people what kind of shady operation he runs. I’d like to tell them about all the false documents and about all these deaths. I don’t think a lot of people know. People need to know what this guy is about, because he’s scary.”

Next in line for the jurors’ disdain was Lewis, the nurse. “She was incredible,” the juror remembers. “When we got in the jury room and went through our notes, we counted all the times we caught her in lies. She thought she was very important and she [thought she was] right – nobody knew anything but her. She was never believable. Her knowledge as a nurse was questionable. And she didn’t care. She took all that time to give him tests to see if he was ‘faking.’ We couldn’t believe somebody would think a person turning gray and not reacting was faking it. The jury thought it was stupid – who doesn’t react to ammonia?”

Jack MacIntyre, director of intergovernmental relations for the sheriff’s office, called the jury’s decisions “bizarre,” but said he doesn’t see them laying blame on the sheriff’s office. “They liked what the sheriff’s staff did because they gave just $1 against each of them,” he says. He also saw nothing in the judgment to give credence to the argument that records had been falsified, and he stressed that the restraint chair was not to blame. “I don’t think the chair does anything,” he says. “The real problem was Charles Agster’s drug use and becoming ‘overly excited’ – not a ‘small black plastic chair with leather restraints.’”

INMATES DYING IN SHERIFF JOE’S JAIL IS AN ONGOING STORY. OVER THE PAST DECADE, THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE HAS REPEATEDLY BEEN WARNED BY EVERYONE FROM AN INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP TO THEIR own experts (hired at taxpayer expense) to the federal government that there’s a “pattern of excessive force” at the central jail.

Their own experts have told them plainly that if the “terrible conditions and inadequacies” were not fixed, the county would face “very expensive litigation.” Very expensive litigation is another way of saying “people will continue to die.”

Among the most specific complaints are these:

• Restraint chairs are used “promiscuously”; they’re overused on sick inmates, and often used as a first resort, rather than a last resort.
• Restraint chairs create “extreme levels of excitement and agitation” – a condition that can be particularly dangerous to inmates who are on drugs.

According to the county’s experts, “The best recommendation is that the restraint chairs be removed from any use associated with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office jail.”
But instead of doing away with the chairs, jailers use them with great frequency. And, so far, there’s been no admission from the sheriff’s office that the tragic death of Charles Agster has made them rethink their policies.

It’s brought a second letter of “serious concern” from Amnesty International, the international human rights group. While Sheriff Joe tries to dismiss group members as left-wing conspirators, Amnesty International has earned widespread respect for speaking out against the inhumane treatment of prisoners.

In 1997, the group sent a delegation to Phoenix after the jailhouse death of Scott Norberg – a young man whose story is extremely similar to that of Charles Agster. Both were 33, both were arrested for minor infractions, both were on drugs, both died in a restraint chair, both cases led to millions of dollars for their families – $8.25 million for Norberg’s family and $9 million for Agster’s.

The Amnesty review came after the U.S. Department of Justice had already issued a condemning report in March 1996. It found “unconstitutional conditions at the jail” with respect to excessive force by detention officers and “deliberate indifference to inmates’ serious medical needs.”

Despite those warnings, history keeps repeating itself in Sheriff Joe’s jail. Charles Agster is neither the first, nor the last, to die there. Since that August night in 2001 when Agster lost his life, at least five more people have died – one of them a woman, one of them in a restraint chair.

Attorney Michael Manning, who successfully sued the sheriff in both the Norberg and Agster cases, is already planning suits for most of those deaths.

Turns out, those cases hint at even larger judgments against Sheriff Joe – judgments that ultimately will be paid by the taxpayers of Maricopa County.