DOC Questions
October 8th, 2014 by flanewsAnother Florida prison inmate has died and the Department is being called out by high profile attorneys. As Matt Galka tells us, critics are condemning the hush-hush culture of the Department of Corrections.
This brutal video showing Florida prison guards beating 14 year old Martin Lee Anderson to death outraged the country. The same attorneys who forced the release of the tape and got the state to settle for $5 million are now taking on another inmate death.
36 year old Latandra Ellington was found dead at Lowell Correctional in Ocala on October 1st.
“Her aunt gets on the phone with a prison official and they say “we’re going to make sure she’s protected, 18 hours later she’s dead,” said attorney Ben Crump.
She had sent letters to her aunt about a week earlier saying she feared for her life, and an officer had threatened to beat her. An independent autopsy appears to show she was roughed up.
“Abdominal hemmhoraging from his examination that had to have been caused by kicking or punching,” said attorney Daryl Parks.
The Department didn’t answer specific questions about the letter, instead they released a statement.
DOC says they took Ellington’s concerns seriously and now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating. The concern from the attorneys is the prison culture. They asked the federal department of justice to intervene because they’re worried about evidence disappearing. The NAACP is alos involved.
“We’ve heard about it, we’ve seen it, and they are constantly dying, dying, dying, you speak to the culture,” said Dale Landry with the NAACP.
George Malinkrodt used to work in the same Florida prison where an inmate was burned alive in a shower. He says the prison guards can work around cameras and work around the system.
“So many of my cases were sabotaged by guards, and no one would do anything about it,” said Mallinkrodt.
Ellington had been serving time for filing fake tax returns. She had seven months left on her sentence. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is now investigating more than 100 prison deaths, including Latandra Ellington’s.
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