The News & Observer has the wrenching details of a man killed by the North Carolina prison system.
Michael Anthony Kerr spent the last five days of his life handcuffed in a prison cell, unresponsive, off his mental health medicine, and lying in his feces and urine. An hour or two before the former Army sergeant died, officials at Alexander Correctional Institution put him into a wheelchair and drove him 2-1/2 hours east to a prison hospital in Raleigh.
When Kerr, 53, arrived at Central Prison, his body was cold.
Somewhere between Taylorsville and Raleigh, as the prison vehicle passed emergency rooms at eight hospitals, Kerr died of dehydration.
“They treated him like a dog,” said Brenda Liles, his sister.
Most dogs are treated far better. The state failed Kerr time and time again. His death came after more than a month in solitary confinement. We tend think that people who end up with long prison terms and who then spend long stretches in solitary, are violent sociopaths who are beyond redemption. It would be easy to think that about Kerr, who was serving a 31-year sentence after a series of larceny convictions, capped by an incident in which he fired several rounds into a home.
But read a bit more and the story gets more complicated. This was a man who had been broken by grief.
[For more of this story, written by Radley Balko, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...-how-we-incarcerate/]
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