Brutality Canada

Medical neglect and abuse at Toronto's Don Jail endangers man's Life

The following reports are from Tim Rourke in Toronto. This situation is not unusual in that fair city.-ed

I am sure you have all been waiting with bated breath to find out what happened in court Wednesday.

We got most of the regular Daughton crew out to the court that afternoon, but nothing happened. Courtroom #507, reserved for this trial, was instead closed. The lawyer wasn't around. The court staff were their usual helpfull selves. The guy who had shared a cell with Bill was getting really freaked. He kept trying to ask the clerk at the window where he was going to be tried. "Ask Pam," she sneered. They have all gotten to know Daughton's case and his wife.

Our feeling of dread increased until, after an hour, the crown finally appeared and invited us into another courtroom. This crown is a good, impartial, straight up guy. Judge Newton had mandated him as the prosecutor for the case, to stop the cops and the staff from stalling it by changing crown prosecutors constantly.

He called Pam aside and explained what had happened. Judge Newton's mother had died and she would be unavailable today.

The lawyer arrived. Then they brought Bill up. He looked bad. His clothes hang on him like sacks. He has lost 53 pounds in the 73 days he has been in there. They still haven't even given him a sling for his arm. His hand looked discolored to me. To me, it seemed like he was starting to really lose his marbles. He had difficulty understanding what was going on around him. He had difficulty getting to his feet.

The judge in this court could not deal with this case because judge Newton "was seized of it." The sympathetic judge who had been our asset was now our liability. Daughton is going to sit in the Don for a few more weeks at least, simply because of the bureacratic process of courts. The defense and the prosecution both agreed on probation. The judge issued the third order from the bench to the Don to provide Bill Daughton with proper medical care. After some chasing after the court staff, they set a new date of March 16th. To insure that everything goes off smoothly on that date, one of these video testimonies would be taken from Bill on March 7th, so that he has to endure one less round trip in one of those little cages. They must be horrible when you are his size with a broken shoulder. Yet they still insist on handcuffing him.

The lawyer is finally getting it that his client is going to lose his arm and likely his life if he doesn't get some help pretty soon. It would help if he would actually listen to his client, and to his family and friends. At least he is agressive enough. He will not take any nonsense from any cop or court flunky.

That is a big asset considering how we got into this mess. Once a justice of the Peace denies bail and issues the "DO," the detention order, you are in. You have to go to superior court to get a bail review, which is a wait of more than a month. Most JP's will only wait so long for you to find a lawyer to argue for bail. The lawyer Bill had stuck his head in the door of the courtrom, said "Oh, no. This crown doesn't like me," and quit. Some lawyer.

So, the Daughton clan wandered down to its old gathering place at Druxy's to smoke cigarettes, get over our shock, and plan what to do next. All our efforts have gotten Bill nothing at all. The Don jail has repeatedly lied to us and to the lawyer about what sort of accomodations they were making for Billy's condition. They said that they were giving him his proper medications. No, they weren't. They said they were moving him to a hospital. No, they didn't. Bill made things even worse by not saying that he was not in fact getting these things because he did not want to upset Pam. They still haven't even given him a sling to keep the bones from moving. The breaks are floating free and causing more damage all the time. The jail staff are insolent and unresponsive whenever we call the Don.

We had been focussing on making sure he got out on the 21st because it semed so futile to try to get medical help for him. That might have been a mistake. Bill is really going downhill and it is not entirely sure he will be out on the 16th. The cops still haven't provided the prosecutor with the 'disclosure;' the evidence they will use against him in court.

The plans for the campaign to get proper care for Bill started to be laid at the roomer's rights meeting on Thursday. There will be a demonstration at the Don jail. We are going to start over again what we should not have dropped,a campaign to identify those responsible for the medical service in the Don and make them do their jobs. We now have some more people in the Daughton camp, with new talents and contacts. We have some people who want to paint placards. We just need a bullhorn from somewhere. And of course, lots of warm bodies.

People are still e-mailing me asking whether to send support leters. Yes, send letters of solidarity to me. Ask for my snail mail address. Send letters to Bill at the Don jail, to keep his morale up.

William Daughton
3C south,
Toronto Don Jail
550 Gerard St E.,
Toronto ON M4M-1X6

Phone the Don Jail at 416-325-8600

We have drawn up a petition with six demands. You might want to frame your support letters around them, so we can add your letter to the petition. It reads;

          We, the undersigned, demand that all those bearing responsibility for the matter act immediately to end the torture by denial of medical care that is being inflicted upon William Daughton at the Toronto Don Jail. Specifically, that;

1) His broken shoulder be immobilized by a sling.
2) He be given a properly heated cell by himself.
3) All medications and devices prescribed by his doctor be provided to him.
4) That he be transported to a hospital so that his shoulder can be x-rayed and an appropriate course of action determined.
5) That if it is determined that there is danger of permanent injury by delaying his hospitalization further, that he be hospitalized and court proceedings delayed.
6) That all employees of the correctional service desist from insulting and lying to those who are working to assist Mr. Daughton.

I will keep people informed as our plans develop. This is not going to end with Bill Daughton. The cretins responsible for this outrage will never have a chance to do this to another human being.

As for the 55 division police who were arrested, who Pam thinks were the same people who assaulted Bill; there isn't much in the news about it but we are getting some information from various sources. It seems that one of these cops has shown up in court to plead guilty to running a sophisticated car theft ring. He is now in jail. The RCMP caught him. RCMP hate local police precisely because of this type of thing. As always with this kind of thing, there is scant mention of it in the media.

If this is indeed the cop Pam is talking about then it is a huge plus for Bill if he lasts another three weeks.

It is also worth mentioning here that recently some guards at my Alma Mater of East Detention Center in Scarborough have been charged with assaulting a prisoner. This is why I am so concerned about Bill Daughton. Like him, I have sat in a jail with broken bones after being railroaded at a bail hearing. At least they were nice enough to send me to Scarborough general to get a cast put on it.

Perhaps some of the Don jails employees will end up being charged over their treatment of Bill.

But understand this; if he doesn't get medical care soon he is going to die. That is what they want to do to him. The police at 55 division have various reasons to want to do him in this way. There is nothing anyone could have done about Edmund Yu or Otto Vass. But we have a chance to stop them before they finish off Bill Daughton. We should do everything we can.

Update

Thursday, March 15, 2001

This is probably the last Daughton update. He has made it. Unless something totally bizarre happens on Friday, he will be out of jail. The defense and prosecution both agree on two years probation.

Daughton wants probation anyway, because he thinks this will allow him to access some counselling services he would like. Otherwise he would have to pay $160 an hour for these shrinks.

There is no need for anybody to go down to College Park court on Friday. In fact it might be counterproductive. The lawyer has thrown some sort of temper tantrum and threatened to walk out if people show up at court. Also if Bill talks to me again, which sort of holds up progress. Of course,one of Bill Daughton's main problems all along has been his lawyers. The history of this case is a real argument in favor of Shakespeare's advice about what to do with all the lawyers.

Bill is in much better shape since he started getting real pain killers instead of imaginary ones, and a few other meds that he should have been getting all along. His dangerous blood pressure has gone down because he is not fighting the pain all the time anymore. One new problem; Bill is getting pain in his legs. Humphries thinks that this is due to pinched nerves in his back. The big question now is whether he is going to recover fully from all this.

After weeks of promising to get the shoulder operated on, they took him to a hospital for consultations with a friend of Dr. Klar's. A comparison of the x-ray they took with the x-ray Daughton's own doctor took before the surgery shows that the shoulder is indeed broken, not merely dislocated, and that the injury was caused by the police when they arrested him.

But then they sent him back to the Don and booked him for non-emergency surgery. He is on a waiting list a month long. He will be out of jail by then and will have had his own doctor perform the operation. So they have succeeded in another of their aims, which was to avoid the strain on their budget of having to keep two guards posted at a hospital door for three weeks.

Pam is out of the hospital and recovering well at home from her appendix surgery. Max the dog is being looked after.

Now, what are the lessons of all this? One thing I wish I had realised a lot earlier is that Dr. Humphries, the senior medical consultant to the ministry of correction services, is part of the solution and not part of the problem. I think he now fully understands that he can't trust a word that the medical staff at the Don tell him. He needs to rely on family and supporters of incarcerated patients to find out what is and is not getting done.

Looking beyond the Daughton situation to future cases, it is clear that the main way to protect inmates in lockups is through the medical staff. The creeps who run these places like to have qualified doctors like Klar and Clarke, who buy into their "They are in our world, we own them" cult. If we can get their medical licenses revoked, and move M.D.s and R.N.s into the jails who are willing to advocate for their patients, then we take away the guard's power to torture and we begin to build the evidence with which to put them behind bars themselves.

This process is already under way in the jail system. Several of the other prisoners I have talked to in there, who have come in beaten half to death by the arresting police officers, tell me that guards are taking pictures of their injuries and keeping records of which cops are doing this stuff. So here is another lesson; the guards in the jails are not all psychotic. A lot of them do not like what goes on. They have enough sense to see that humane treatment of prisoners makes their jobs safer and less unpleasant.

But what works in advocating for jailed people? It does not seem that anything really works. We had some success in easing Daughton's situation in jail by constantly exposing the lies of the jail doctors. But we were not, with the utmost effort, able to bring about what was really needed; to get Daughton into an emergency operating room and operated on by his own doctor.

The behavior of these wierdos at the Don reminds one of that of a wife-battering husband. They know that what they are doing is unacceptable to society but they are convinced it is their right. Their whole self-identity is tied to it. They will try to conceal their crimes or deceive people who are looking into what is going on, but in the end they will never change their ways no matter what the consequences to themselves. This is why they seem afraid of exposure but will still concede as little as they possibly can. The only thing that will work is to take their victims away from them.

One thing that shows how deeply rooted the problem is in the "correctional" system; the superindendant of the Don jail, Carl DeGrandis, is one of the people Bill Daughton cites in his account of his training school experiences. Imagine how Bill feels about that. And he was superintendant at the Metro East Detention Center when I was there. He ignored my written complaints about some things.

There is now the fragile embryo of a working group to support people who are being mistreated in jail. How should this group proceed? We should continue to visit these people in jail and take their telephone calls. One thing that is very important is to help these people find the right lawyers at the start. We report what is going on to people who can do something about it, and we find out exactly who can and will do something about it. We act as a feedback mechanism, to show these people when their directions are not being carried out, and they are being lied to.

This is a somewhat labor intensive undertaking. We have to be able to identify and get to people who are under threat in there, before crap lawyers get hold of them, and even before a detention order is signed. There have been a few people reading these "updates" who have expressed an interest in this kind of volunteer work. There have even been a lawyer or two offering help. Daughton himself, when he gets out of jail, gets his surgery done, and is well and thinking rationally again, will likely be a strong asset.

It will be great to be able to finally piece together the full story of how he was handled by police and the jail. I would especially like to understand this drive all over eastern Toronto in a police cruiser the night he was arrested, apparently looking for a hospital that would treat him.

Daughton now has a good civil suit for "pain and suffering." But that is not going to deter the cops or the people at the Don, who caused it, from continuing to inflict pain and suffering on more people who don't deserve it. Only taking their power away will do that. Klar is the one to start with. Then, as we get more people involved, and get better eyes and ears in that institution, we can start clearing out the other sadists.

Tim R.

"If you have come here to help, please go away.
If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together."
-Lila Watson