Save the Holy Headland: DANIEL GEIGER STARVED REPEATEDLY TORTURED BY FDC

DANIEL

GEIGER

STARVED AND REPEATEDLY TORTURED BY FDC – DEAD IN CUSTODY –

7 Nov. 2016

I first heard about Daniel Geiger from Harold Hempstead, the ‘Caged Crusader’ of Florida. He made a strong impression in my mind. Daniel Geiger was the first one to be tortured at Dade – or at least, I should say, the first one to be tortured in the special shower.

Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, USA, has within its wire perimeter a ‘mental hospital’ known as the Transitional Care Unit. In this hospital within a prison, human rights abuses including starvation, and torture have been practiced systematically, as witnessed and testified to by various people, including former prison-psychotherapist George Mallinckrodt who worked at the’ TCU’.

Daniel Geiger { J42951} was a severely disturbed prisoner who was not getting the medical help he desperately needed. His state was such that he never stopped yelling. He had already been subjected to the guard’s ‘Three Point Conversion’ game, whereby a prisoner is deprived of lunch and dinner for three days. Some prisoners were only being fed two days a week under this regime, which the guards themselves dubbed ‘Auschwitz’. A fellow prisoner played a vital role in publicizing this information and I will be quoting from the evidence submitted by Harold Hempstead in this article.

Daniel Geiger was the person for whom the ‘shower-treatment’ was invented. This is the same shower-treatment that killed Darren Rainey, another severely disturbed convict in care of the Transitional Care Unit.

These bare facts about Daniel Geiger were taken from the Florida Department of Corrections (F.D.C.) website:

Name: Daniel Marcus Geiger; D.C. number: J42951; race: white; sex: male; hair-color: brown; eye-color: blue; height: 5'11''; weight: 125; release date: DECEASED; birth date: 04/15/1976; custody: close.

Current prison sentence history: Offense date: 12/26/2009; Offense: L/L MOLEST V <12 12="" 18="" date:="" entence="" nbsp="" off="" sentence="" span="">11/16/2010; County: DUVAL; Case number: 1001487; Prison sentence length: 25Y 0M 0D

Incarceration history: Date In-custody: 01/06/2011; Date Out-of-Custody: 11/07/2016.

Because Daniel Geiger was convicted of a sexual offence against a minor, the FDC website refers you to Florida’s list of Sexual Offenders and Predators (which gives the information that Daniel Geiger’s weight was 179 lbs.) Daniel Geiger was convicted under Florida Statute 800.04 which means that he either touched, or forced or enticed a child to touch him in a sexual manner. Here’s the relevant section of the statute:

“(5) LEWD OR LASCIVIOUS MOLESTATION.—

(a) A person who intentionally touches in a lewd or lascivious manner the breasts, genitals, genital area, or buttocks, or the clothing covering them, of a person less than 16 years of age, or forces or entices a person under 16 years of age to so touch the perpetrator, commits lewd or lascivious molestation.

(b) An offender 18 years of age or older who commits lewd or lascivious molestation against a victim less than 12 years of age commits a life felony, punishable as provided in s. 775.082(3)(a)4.”

If we assume that Daniel Geiger was given a fair trial and found guilty on good evidence, which I have no reason to doubt, then it was of course right that he was detained as a ward of the state. I have no problem with the state of Florida locking up child-molesters for long periods of time. I know nothing of his case, only the charge and the resulting detention.

Another source of information we have about Daniel Geiger is his photograph. The human face holds a wealth of information as its purpose is to communicate. When I look at the photograph of Daniel Geiger I see a man tormented and suffering a private hell. There’s a story in that face and it’s not a happy one. One side of his face looks like he’s trying to be tough, while the other looks like nothing other than an extremely unhappy child. It’s hard to look into the face of Daniel Geiger and feel nothing. It seems he was a deeply disturbed person, convicted of a terrible crime and sent down for a quarter of a century. In a house for the criminally insane, he was known as the most troubled.

Let’s now quote from a sworn affidavit by Harold Hempstead, who was working as a prisoner/orderly in the TCU at Dade prison in Florida when the tortures and murder occurred...... (This document was signed on 5^th May 2016 and was published on the Save The Holy Headland blogspot on 22^nd May under the title ‘Harold Hempstead Evidence Darren Rainey Florida Shower Murder Dade Correctional Institution 23 June 2012’. I have substituted the letter Z for the name of a convict. This affidavit perfectly describes the murder of Darren Rainey in state custody and is a vital piece of evidence that should be widely read – not least by the U.S. Department of Justice and the other arms of law-enforcement which are failing to take effective action to bring justice in this case.)

“The Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) houses some of their most severe mentally disabled inmates in the Dade Correctional Institution Transitional Care Unit (TCU). The Westside TCU has 3 wings and 12 showers. The shower in Wing J3 next to Cell 201 was the only shower with 2 showerheads in it prior to June 26, 2012. The showerhead on the sidewall of that shower was a PVC pipe in the wall that was hooked to a PVC pipe in the closet next to the shower. That PVC pipe was connected to a hose which was connected to a commercial sink. The commercial sink had hot and cold water knobs. The hot water knob was marked “H” for “hot” and color coded red; the cold water knob was mark “C” for “cold” and color coded blue. The construction of this shower, and the fact that the temperature in this shower exceeded 180 degrees violated the environmental health and safety manual.

Ofc. Roland Clark was assigned to work wing J3 on the 4:00pm till 12:00am shift. Part of Ofc. Clark’s work assignment was showering 2 to 4 dozen inmate patients every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Ofc. Clark had approximately 20 months experience with showering inmate patients prior to January 2012.

In or around January 2012, inmate Daniel Geiger (J42951) was moved into Wing J3. Geiger was considered to be the loudest inmate in the TCU. Geigers’ schizophrenia caused him to yell and make noise constantly. His presence in Wing J3 made it hard for other inmates to live and sleep in Wing J3. Geiger’s constant yelling also caused Ofc. Clark to get in trouble with his superiors because of the constant noise coming from his wing (J3).

In or around January 2012, inmate Z told Ofc. Clark that Geiger would stop yelling if Geiger was placed in the shower next to J3-201, and the water was turned on full hot. Z told Ofc. Clark to tell Geiger that the only way he could get out the shower was to stop yelling, and making noise and to stay quiet once he was taken out the shower. Ofc. Clark tried Z’s recommendation and it worked.

When Ofc. Clark seen that the shower treatment worked as a punishing devise, he from thereforth used it on the most severe mentally disabled inmates in the TCU that refused to comply with his orders.”

It is made chillingly clear in this excerpt from Harold Hempstead’s affidavit, that the unit where Daniel Geiger was incarcerated, ostensibly a refuge of help for the most disturbed of the inmates, had degenerated into a place of casual brutality, torture and murder.

In June 2016 I published an interview I’d conducted with Harold Hempstead entitled ‘Harold Hempstead, Murder Witness Talks To The Limpet’. In this, as elsewhere, he mentions the guards’ systematic practice of starving inmates, which he believes contributed to the deaths of more than one prisoner. Unlike a typical British prison, where meals are usually taken in communal areas, many American inmates are fed in their cells. This makes it very easy, in a criminally under-regulated penal system, for the guards to simply withhold meals from the particular inmates they select for starvation. Daniel Geiger was one such selected to starve. Records show his weight at the start of his detention as being 179lbs, which is just over 12 ¾ stone. However, when New Yorker journalist Eyal Press spoke to Daniel Geiger’s mother, Mrs Debra Geiger, she reported that in 2012, her son had told her that his weight was down to 105lbs (7 ½ stone). Between then and November 2016, when he died in the custody of the state of Florida, he only managed to gain another 20lbs in weight. Mrs Geiger also reported that she’d not been permitted to visit or telephone her son for four years and that he had been given medication to which he was allergic. On finally setting eyes on him in February 2016, she described the skeletal figure as being “at death’s door.” Within nine months he had passed through that door.

Tragically, Debra Geiger found her son changed almost beyond recognition. Daniel however was so far gone at that point that he failed to recognize his own mother altogether. Another journalist tells of a different side of him though, describing him as lucid in conversation, even when apparently undergoing a breakdown. Her conclusion was that he was bipolar. It makes perfect sense that a man who would act in an apparently psychotic manner towards the guards who tormented him, was still capable of rational interaction when approached with some degree of humanity.

Whatever the exact nature of Daniel Geiger’s mental and emotional condition, he was a ward of the state and therefore in law, the care of his health was the responsibility of the state.

The neglect that kept Daniel Geiger on a regime of dangerously miss-prescribed medication, the deliberate, long-term starvation, the repeated torture in a chamber of super-heated steam that finally killed another prisoner – this was how the Florida Department of Corrections discharged its duty of care towards one of its most disturbed inmates. Daniel Geiger died on 7^th November 2016.

From Craig Patrick's Money, Power, Politics:
With footage from a prison interview with Harold Hempstead,
discussing Florida prison guard's practice of starving the inmates,
plus the murder of Darren Rainey

Democracy Now! May 11, 2016 -
Whistleblower Exposes Abuse of Mentally Ill in Florida Prison