For years America's "toughest sheriff" has used his sick pink underwear scheme to belittle prisoners, have a laugh, and make money. If you go to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's website, you'll find a long list of shit you can buy that is pink themed, including weapons. Har har. But the pink undies cease to be funny when your deputies forcibly try to put them on a mentally ill person who doesn't get the joke.
The underwear has become the target of criticism by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considering the case of a mentally ill man who mistakenly viewed officers' efforts to forcibly clothe him as a rape attempt...
Joel Robbins, the attorney representing Vogel's estate, said the use of pink underwear has long been a source of amusement for some members of the public. But it's not funny when a mentally ill man who believes he is going to be raped has officers forcing pink underwear on him, Robbins said.
"That's where it loses its humor value," Robbins said. FoxNews Latino
In its ruling yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Arpaio's nearly 20-year practice of forcing inmates to wear pink underwear is "a punishment without legal justification." In the 2-1 ruling, the Court also sided with critics who maintain the color was intended to tarnish the prisoners' sense of their own masculinity:
When a color of such symbolic significance is selected for jail underwear, it is difficult to believe that the choice of color was random. The County offers no penalogical reason, indeed no explanation whatsoever for its jail's odd choice. Given the cultural context, it is a fair inference that the color is chosen to symbolize a loss of masculine identity and power, to stigmatize the male prisoners as feminine. Think Progress
That ruling, by the way, was written by Reagan-appointee Judge John Noonan. The prisoner in question, Eric Vogel, was clearly mentally ill, which deputies must have known when they arrested him in 2001 after he had broken into a house, yelled at the police to kill him, and demanded to speak to the President. Still, at the jail deputies stripped Vogel and forcibly put him in pink underwear -- as he struggled and shouted that he was being raped.
After Vogel refused to [put on the pink underwear], he was held down by four officers while a fifth stripped him naked and forced the pink undergarments on him. Think Progress
Vogel joins a growing list of inmates who have been beaten, tortured, and even killed while in Arpaio's custody, as we saw last year with the death of
Marty Atencio, a 44-year-old Latino Gulf War veteran who died just hours after the
Department of Justice accused the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office of routinely violating the rights of Hispanics. While Atencio was being held in Arpaio's "safe cell," he was pushed down, choked, punched, and beaten by at least eight deputies.
Atencio had been taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in critical condition with injuries from the fight. Doctors later determined he had been shocked at least four times with a Taser. TPM
Marty was brain dead, and his family made the decision to take him off life-support. Although Eric Vogel did not die immediately from his jail encounter, Arpaio's boys in beige, say Vogel's family, should be held responsible for what happened next. A month after his arrest in 2001, Vogel and his mother were in a minor car accident:
When the officer handling the accident told Vogel that he might be jailed on a warrant stemming from his previous struggle to wear jail clothes, Vogel ran several miles from the scene back to his home. He died the next day, and medical examiners concluded the cause was cardiac arrhythmia. FoxNews Latino
Vogel's survivors filed a lawsuit against Arpaio, and a 2010 verdict sided with the Sheriff. However, at the trial Vogel's attorneys were prohibited from calling Vogel's sister to testify about her brother's paranoia and psychosis, as well as how the jail experience affected his state of mind. The 2010 ruling was effectively overturned yesterday and a new trial was ordered.
Vogel's family and their attorneys will have a long line to wait in, as Sheriff Arpaio is easily the most sued law official in the nation -- to date costing taxpayers of Maricopa County more than $50 million for his illegal and unethical activities.
There's only one perckerhead I want to see in Tent City, sitting there in his pink underwear.