Just when you think you’ve plumbed the depths of the criminal justice system’s horrors, Texas comes through with something worse. In this case, 396th State District Judge George Gallagher decided to use a defendant’s high-voltage stun belt to enforce decorum in the absence of security concerns.
In Tarrant County, Tex., defendants are sometimes strapped with a stun belt around their legs. The devices are used to deliver a shock in the event the person gets violent or attempts to escape.
But in the case of Terry Lee Morris, the device was used as punishment for refusing to answer a judge’s questions properly during his 2016 trial on charges of soliciting sexual performance from a 15-year-old girl, according to an appeals court. In fact, the judge shocked Morris three times, sending thousands of volts coursing through his body. It scared him so much that Morris never returned for the remainder of his trial and almost all of his sentencing hearing.
Each shock could have caused permanent physical injury to Morris; no wonder the experience had psychological effects.
The stun belt works in some ways like a shock collar used to train dogs. Activated by a button on a remote control, the stun belt delivers an eight-second, 50,000-volt shock to the person wearing it, which immobilizes him so that bailiffs can swiftly neutralize any security threats. When activated, the stun belt can cause the person to seize, suffer heart irregularities, urinate or defecate and suffer possibly crippling anxiety as a result of fear of the shocks.
The stun belt can also be very painful. When Montgomery County, Md., purchased three of the devices in 1998, a sheriff’s sergeant who was jolted as part of his training described the feeling to The Washington Post like this: “If you had nine-inch nails and you tried to rip my sides out and then you put a heat lamp on me.”
Under the Sixth Amendment, defendants have a right to be present at trial and confront witnesses against them. Morris appealed his conviction—and 60-year sentence—to El Paso’s Eighth Court of Appeals on that basis. The appeals court agreed with Morris that the gratuitous shocks that inspired his absence violated his constitutional rights. The justices reversed his conviction, ordering a new trial.
“While the trial court’s frustration with an obstreperous defendant is understandable, the judge’s disproportionate response is not. We do not believe that trial judges can use stun belts to enforce decorum,” Justice Yvonne T. Rodriguez said of Gallagher’s actions in the court’s opinion. “A stun belt is a device meant to ensure physical safety; it is not an operant conditioning collar meant to punish a defendant until he obeys a judge’s whim. This Court cannot sit idly by and say nothing when a judge turns a court of law into a Skinner Box, electrocuting a defendant until he provides the judge with behavior he likes.”
Unfortunately, Judge Gallagher will also preside over Morris’s retrial.
Stun belts have been in the use since the early 1990s, but were never envisioned as anything but a deterrent or a safety measure.
“Never before have we seen any behavior like this, nor do we hope to ever see such behavior again,” Rodriguez wrote of Gallagher’s actions. “As the circumstances of this case perfectly illustrate, the potential for abuse in the absence of an explicit prohibition on nonsecurity use of stun belts exists and must be deterred. We must speak out against it, lest we allow practices like these to affront the very dignity of the proceedings we seek to protect and lead our courts to drift from justice into barbarism.”
As the appeals court noted, there’s not much precedent on the proper deployment of stun belts because it’s rarely been necessary to correct judges’ course on their use.