Jesus fucking christ, I keep looking up, waiting for the gathering storm to hit and wipe us all off the face of this fucking planet...
Here's a phone number:
202-879-1866. You're gonna need it.
From the WaPo, by Colbert King:
It was on Sept. 20, 2004, that D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith Retchin sentenced Magbie, a quadriplegic since an accident at age 4, to 10 days in the D.C. jail. His crime? Possession of marijuana.
...
Looking down from her bench, Retchin saw a first-time offender. He controlled his wheelchair with a mouth-operated device. He could breathe only with a battery-controlled pulmonary pacemaker. At night he needed the assistance of a respirator. He could have been sentenced to home detention, where he would have had round-the-clock attention. Instead, Retchin, apparently upset when Magbie refused to swear off weed, which helped him get through a miserable existence, sent him to that taxpayer-supported hellhole near the Anacostia River known as the D.C. jail.
...
Five days after falling into the hands of the D.C. government, Magbie was dead....
Crossposted at my community blog,
My Left Wing
...
... He died a horrible death. It was preventable. But nobody in the system cared.
There were, Walden said, many parts to the failure to take Magbie's health seriously. "Certainly the tracheostomy accident [Magbie's tracheostomy was misaligned, shoved back in, and not tied to maintain a correct position] could have been prevented and happened while being monitored.
"His pneumonia [noted during the initial jail examination] was essentially undiagnosed and untreated. Despite the early X-ray and the sputum production, no one sent a sputum specimen and started treatment. All this was complicated by his nutritional status." (Magbie weighed 130 pounds at jail intake on Monday, Sept. 20. Five days later, at his autopsy exam, he weighed 90 pounds).
"He had been in the emergency room on day one [rushed from the jail to Greater Southeast and returned the next day] and had fluid and sugar deficits noted. No one cared that he wasn't eating or measured his fluid intake after."
Although Magbie needed a respirator and made that fact known on his first day at the jail, he was never given one during his five days in custody. "There were no physicians consult nor pulmonary consult performed while in the jail. He was monitored by license practical nurses. No RN [registered nurse] or PA [physician's assistant] or doctor followed him or was even consulted about" drastic changes in his condition.
Read the rest of the article at WaPo Online. If you can fucking STAND it.
This is one of those days for me; you know, the kind when it's all you can do just to refrain from going nuclear on the first person who pisses you off, because you're so over-fucking-whelmed by all the outrageous, despicable, horrifying things going on in the world.
I can't go nuclear. My blast radius is so fucking wide right now, I'd damage Oregon. And I like Oregon.