New York Lawyers for the mother of a mentally ill man who died in 2010 while being forcibly removed from his cell in a Nashville, Tennessee, prison asked a federal court Friday for a new civil trial against prison officials.
The inmate, Charles Jason Toll, 33, suffocated while being removed from his cell by a team of corrections officers at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The officers, wearing riot gear, handcuffed, shackled and carried Toll to a dark outdoor recreation yard. On a prison video, Toll could be heard saying, “I can’t breathe,” at least 12 times.
The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide and concluded, along with an independent forensic medical expert, that Toll died from force applied while he was in restraints during the cell removal.
His death and the practice of forcibly removing prisoners from their cells, a procedure known as cell extraction, were the subject of an article in The New York Times in July.
No disciplinary action was taken against the officers involved in the extraction, and no criminal charges were filed. But last year, a jury in a lawsuit brought by Toll’s mother, Jane Luna, found three defendants — Ricky J. Bell, the warden at the time; James Horton, the captain who led the cell extraction; and Gaelan Doss, a corrections officer — free of liability in the death.
On Friday, lawyers for Luna filed a motion asking the US District Court in Nashville to set aside the verdict and reverse a previous order denying a new trial.
Jeff Roberts, one of the lawyers for Luna, said the motion was based on the resignation letter of an officer, William Amonette, suggesting that the internal investigation into the death was incomplete. In the letter, obtained by The Times and included in the July article, Amonette, who videotaped the cell extraction, wrote that he had been treated badly at the prison “ever since I asked questions in your office about the witnesses in the Charles Toll case that were not spoken to by Internal Affairs.”
“I cannot work somewhere where asking questions or trying to do what is right is punished,” Amonette wrote.
Roberts said that although the defence team had requested Amonette’s personnel file and all communications referring to Toll’s death during the discovery process, the letter was not included in the material produced by the state attorney general’s office before the trial.
The motion, Roberts said, claims “that there’s newly discovered evidence and that fraud was committed, that they withheld a crucial piece of evidence.”
“This clearly would have changed the way we would have worked the entire case,” he said.
The Tennessee Department of Correction said it was unaware of the motion and could not comment.
The attorney general’s office said that all of the personnel documents that the prison had turned over were given to Luna’s legal team, but it added that since it did not keep copies, “it cannot confirm that the resignation letter was part of the production.”
