INMATE SERVING TIME FOR MISDEMEANOR STRANGLED BY A SERIAL MURDERER IN UNSAFE FLORIDA JAIL

A notorious murderer conducts a brutal jailhouse toilet paper strangulation on another inmate with his goal being to avoid spending his life in jail for second degree murder charges by gaining access to death row. That's smart. The killer was in jail for murdering his girlfriend by strangulation in the same method used in the jailhouse killing. And the man he murdered? The victim was merely serving time on a reduced charged of misdemeanor trespass.

Pinellas Jail for a long night's sleep

Why would any jail in America place a prisoner serving time for trespass with a known murderer? If a primary goal of the Pinellas County Jail is safety then those accused or convcited of violent crimes would always be segregated from those accused or convicted of nonviolent crimes. The answer is the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department which controls the jail just doesn't give a damn about the inmates entrusted to the prison by local Judges.

As this Blog has noted the Pinellas County jail fails to protect and provide for the state and federal prisoners who are often housed there. The jail is not safe, the food is deplorable, the conditions are overcrowded. Based on these facts Florida Judges should be demanding that the conditions in Pinellas jail be corrected immediately.

Press reports note that even after the prisoner yelled out that he'd done another murder just like the one he was in for, it took seven minutes or so for officers to respond to the victim who might have been saved with faster action and that another man was severely injured recently during the process of transporting prisoners.

As Americans we have a right to expect that a primary priority of our prison system be safety. Yet Clearwater criminal defense attorneys in Florida know that ignoring prisoner rights is not unusual for the Tampa Bay criminal justice system; therefore one wonders how many more needless deaths will result due to the fundamental failure of Florida jails to provide for prisoner safety.