By Eyal Press, The New Yorker, August 16, 2021
In July, 2016, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Baton Rouge to protest the death of Alton Sterling, a Black man who was shot by a police officer after being pinned to the ground outside a convenience store, where he had been selling compact disks. Although the protests were largely peaceful, officers in full riot gear dispersed the crowds and made more than a hundred and fifty arrests. A coalition of advocates, including the A.C.L.U. of Louisiana, filed a lawsuit accusing the Baton Rouge Police Department of infringing on the protesters’ First Amendment rights. A year later, Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, who had served as a legal observer during some of the protests, co-authored a report cataloguing degrading conditions at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a local jail where the demonstrators were detained. Protesters were crammed into filthy, overcrowded holding cells and denied water and toilet paper. Some were pepper-sprayed. Others were strip-searched in front of strangers. In multiple instances, injured protesters received no medical attention. The abuse did not result in any deaths, but the pattern of humiliation and coercion witnessed in the jail led Armstrong to wonder what happened when no legal observers were around.
In 2018, with support from the Promise of Justice Initiative, an advocacy organization based in New Orleans, Armstrong co-wrote another report, “Dying in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison,” which documented twenty-five deaths that had occurred in the facility between 2012 and 2016. The dead spanned several generations. Tyrin Colbert, a seventeen-year-old, was choked to death by a cellmate while crying out for help. Paul Cleveland, a Navy veteran in his seventies, died of severe heart problems, after staff allegedly left him naked on the floor of his cell; like many men described in the report, he suffered from an array of medical and mental-health issues. Nearly two-thirds of those who died were Black. Most strikingly, nearly ninety per cent of them—twenty-two men—had not been convicted of the charges that had led to their imprisonment. They were pretrial detainees, still awaiting their day in court—a situation that often happens because people cannot afford to post bail.
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