Who Killed Charles Leo Daniel?

New Testimony & Records Released by La Resistencia & UW Ctr for Human Rights Provide an Answer

La Resistencia, UW Ctr for Human Rights Show Detention Killed Mr. Daniel

• La Resistencia IG Livestream with Maru, Prof. Godoy announcing results of government records review: Mr. Daniel spent the second-longest amount of time in solitary confinement in the entire ICE system since 2018. More than 811 days.

• NWDC Conditions Research Update: Charles Leo Daniel’s Death at NWDC in Context, University of Washington Center for Human Rights (Mar. 15, 2024)

• “Endless Nightmare: Torture and Inhuman Treatment in Solitary Confinement in US Immigration Detention,” Physicians for Human Rights, Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School (Feb. 2024)

• Nina Shapiro, ‘Man died at WA detention site was in solitary for years, researchers say,’ The Seattle Times (Mar. 15, 2024)

How Solitary Tortures and Kills

• Spencer Woodman, “ICE’s Use of Solitary Confinement ‘Only Increasing’ Under Biden,” The Intercept (Feb. 6, 2024)

• Andrea Castillo, “ICE kept a California immigrant in solitary confinement for two years, study finds,” The Los Angeles Times (Feb. 6, 2024)

• Felipe De Jesús Hernández, “Extrajudicial Segregation: Challenging Solitary Confinement in Immigration Prisons,” 137 Harv. L. Rev. 175 (2024)

• Expert Declaration of Dr. Pablo Stewart in Romero v. CoreCivic, No. 4:20-cv-00158-CDL (M.D. Ga. filed Feb. 8, 2023) (“There is an overwhelming scientific and legal consensus that segregation is uniquely harmful and poses a significant risk of serious psychological harm.”)

• Parmar, et al., “Mapping factors associated with deaths in immigration detention in the United States, 2011-2018: A thematic analysis,” The Lancet (Aug. 8, 2021)

• Madi Bolanos, “USC Study Identifies System-Wide Failures Related To Deaths in ICE Facilities,” KVPR-NPR (Sept. 3, 2021)

• Jessica Sandoval, “How Solitary Confinement Contributes to the Mental Health Crisis,” National Association on Mental Illness (Mar. 17, 2023)

• Strong, et al., “The body in isolation: the physical health impacts of solitary confinement,” PLoS One (Oct. 9, 2020)

• Gill, et al., “Solitary Confinement in Prison Systems and Future Psychopathological Effects,” Nov. 20, 2023)

• Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment, Menocal v. The GEO Group, Inc., No. 1:14-cv-02887-JLK-MEH, ECF 380 at 18 (D. Colo. Oct. 18, 2022):

  • “To describe the potential effects of segregation, Plaintiffs submitted the expert opinions of Dr. Stuart Grassian, and GEO submitted those of Dr. Jeffrey Kropf. See Grassian Report, ECF No. 336-21; Kropf Report, ECF No. 339-20. According to Dr. Grassian’s Report, solitary confinement “imposes a devastating triad of emotional and neuropsychiatric deprivations: social isolation, a barren perceptual environment, and deprivation of meaningful mental activity.” Grassian Report, ECF No. 336-21 at 11. His Report explains that, even in the first days of solitary confinement, suicide is much more common than in the general population and people often develop “severe panic attacks, marked by intense fear, dread of impending death, and with somatic manifestations that include tachycardia (racing pulse), diaphoresis (intense sweating), shortness of breath, and tremulousness.” Id. at 11-12. Dr. Grassian specifically testified that the imposition of 72 hours in segregation can cause psychological damage. See, e.g., Grassian Dep. 216:2-5, ECF No. 336-3 (“[T]here are individuals who become quite ill quite quickly, and other individuals who can tolerate three days of solitary confinement with less[] damage being done.”).”

Who’s Responsible?

• Declaration of Dr. Ada Rivera, Dawson v. Asher, No. 2:20-cv-00409-JLR-MAT (W.D. Wash. filed Mar. 18, 2020)

• Testimony of Dr. Ada Rivera, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Prison Safety During Coronavirus Pandemic (Jun. 2, 2020)

• GEO Group Newsletter listing Dr. Ada Rivera as VP Chief Medical Officer for the company

• State v. Daniel, 137 Wash. App. 1041 (Wash. App. 2007)

POSIWID

• La Resistencia, The System Explained

• “There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”

• Leigh Hopper, “ICE violated its own internal medical standards, potentially contributing to deaths of mostly healthy men,” USC Keck School of Medicine (Jul. 12, 2021)

• Freddy Martinez & Nick Schwellenbach, ‘DHS’s Secret Reports on ICE Detention,’ Project on Government Oversight (Aug. 21, 2023)

• GAO-23-106350, Immigration Detention: ICE Can Improve Oversight and Management, Government Accountability Office (Jan. 2023)

• Angélica Cházaro, “Due Process Deportations,” 98 NYU L. Rev. 407 (2023)

• Opinion No. 49/2020 concerning Fernando Aguirre-Urbina (United States of America) UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Council, Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (Oct. 2. 2020), secured by Prof. Alejandra Gonza of Global Rights Advocacy

• Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism, semiotext(e) intervention series 21 (2018)

  • “Confinement” (p80-95)

    • “. . . confinement and gratuitous violence are examples of exclusionary processes that result in civil and actual death. In other words, in the first three instances of the parasitic state and predatory credit system must keep people alive in order to extract from them; in the latter two instances it must confine and kill to maintain the current racial order.

    • “As we move to the fourth and fifth techniques of parasitic governance—confinement and gratuitous violence—we reach the point at which political economy fails as a lens through which to analyze racial dynamics in the United States. Although the concept of the prison-industrial complex draws attention to the industries that benefit from the prison boom of the last several decades—including the construction companies contracted to build the prisons, the companies contracted to supply food and commissary items, the predatory phone and video companies contracted to provide communication services, and private prison companies such as GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (which has recently rebranded itself as CoreCivic)—the profit motive itself is not sufficient in explaining the phenomenon of racialized mass incarceration.”

    • p.85 - “. . .black Americans were simultaneously constructed as deserving of punishment. The conversion of poverty into a personal moral failure was intimately tied to the construction of black Americans as disposable and subject to mass incarceration. Antiblack racism, and not merely the profit motive, is at the heart of mass incarceration. Thus, the title of this book, Carceral Capitalism, is not an attempt to posit carcerality as an effect of capitalism, but to think about the carceral continuum alongside and in conjunction with the dynamics of late capitalism.”

    • p.86 “. . . global capitalism’s condition of possibility was black enslavement—a legacy that continues to this day in modified iterations.”

    • p.88 “In this book I hold that black racialization proceeds by way of a logic of disposability and a logic of exploitability.”

    • p.92 “. . . whiteness as a category is, in part, maintained by ritualized violence against black people and white consumption of spectacularized images of antiblack violence. . . . the truth does nothing to bring about justice.”