Brickbat: Breathe It In

Curtis Doughty, a former corrections officer at Henry County Jail in Indiana, pleaded guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law and received a two-year probation sentence for shooting an inmate in the back with a pepper ball. During a cell pod search, inmates were moved into a holding area in the recreation yard and ordered to sit on the floor facing the wall. Doughty, a member of the Sheriff's Emergency Response Team, was tasked with watching over the inmates. When one inmate turned his head away from the wall, Doughty, without warning, shot his pepper ball gun at point blank range into the inmate's spine, injuring him. "Congratulations, you all inhale that now," Doughty then told the other inmates, referencing the pepper ball gas.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

And you thought sending people to El Salvador was bad.

[mad.casual]

Sounds mostly peaceful to me.

[Sometimes a Great Notion]

"He who smelt it, dealt it", didn't work as a defense?

[diver64]

WTF? Note the "former corrections officer". Even the prison staff and his union couldn't tell him "your on your own, jackass" fast enough.

[mad.casual]

Luigi Mangione fatally shoots an insurance CEO in the back and is cheered as a hero. Curtis Doughty shoots an inmate in the back with a non-lethal round, obliquely following orders (Otherwise, why issue the shotgun and pepper ball rounds?) and apparently doing no permanent damage, and loses his job.

3 guesses as to the most important distinction between them.

More seriously, I want to know what, exactly, was the infraction here. He was handed a gun and told to do a job. Was he supposed to issue one warning before shooting? Allow 6 feet of separation before shooting? Wait until they'd turned 90-degrees to the wall? This isn't to defend Doughty any more than to defend any given inmate who didn't know not to shoot someone in the back. I'm just curious as to what point it becomes/became OK for officers to discipline inmates for disobedience. Because if Reason has taught me anything over the past couple years, it's that zero punishment for any acts, even violent ones, is totally on the table and, when punishing your enemies, any justification no matter how capricious, ineffective, or even nonsensically paradoxical, will do.

[Don't look at me! (I’ll post my list if you post yours)]

What color was everyone’s skin? That’s a major factor.

[the-machine]

Im not sure we've been reading the same publication, mad.casual.

[the-machine]

I'm a little bit confused here. First of all, you're reading a Brick Bat, which is explicitly about government doing bad things and Luigi isn't the government... Second of all, who at Reason has ever praised that guy or what he did or tried to justify it somehow?

[Speaking for normal people]

The time I spent on this is time wasted from something that matters,that I can do something about, that isn't utterly nebulous

[the-machine]

Replied to wrong comment, oops