Medical: October 2008 Archives

San Diego City Beat reports on a lawsuit filed by the family of Ramel Henderson, who died in police custody May 29, 2007:

Prior to 1998, it was widely held that prone restraint significantly compromised a person’s ability to take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, based on studies by King County (Seattle) Medical Examiner Donald Raey. Raey was an expert witness in a 1997 lawsuit against San Diego County, filed by the family of Daniel Price, who died after being hogtied and left on his stomach by Sheriff’s deputies. To refute Raey’s testimony, the county hired a team of UCSD researchers to study oxygen intake in people who were hogtied. The team concluded that while their study subjects found breathing more difficult, they were still able to take in enough oxygen. On the witness stand, Raey agreed that the study was valid; largely for that reason, the court ruled in favor of the defendants. On Jan. 14, 1998, the county issued a press release: “LEGAL VICTORY LIKELY TO HAVE NATIONAL IMPACT: ‘Positional Asphyxia’ Not Linked to Use of Hogtie to Restrain Suspect.”

There was one problem: The study didn’t—and couldn’t—replicate real-world conditions. Participants were all healthy males of normal weight who had no pre-existing medical conditions. The people most likely to die while being restrained tend to be—like Price and Henderson—overweight (Henderson was 5-foot-6, 199 pounds), under the influence of drugs and have a pre-existing heart condition.

San Diego City Beat reports on a lawsuit filed by the family of Ramel Henderson, who died in police custody May 29, 2007:

John Peters, expert witness and former police officer who now heads the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, said it would be impossible to replicate in a lab what happens to a person physiologically during an altercation with police.

“Universities, medical doctors—any of us—can’t just go out and, say, go to the California state prison in Soledad and say to the volunteers, ‘We’re going to give you coke and ramp you up, and then you’re going to wrestle with some guys, and we’re going to hogtie you and, oh, by the way, you might die, but it’s in the interest of research,’” Peters said. “That isn’t permitted under any of the ethical guidelines. So what the courts have generally done is they’ve said, ‘OK we have to go with the existing research—we can’t go with what should have been or what could have been.

San Diego City Beat reports on a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who died in police custody:

On May 29, 2007, Ramel Henderson, then 51, lost consciousness while San Diego Police officers attempted to put him in what’s known as “maximum restraint,” where a subject is handcuffed and placed on his stomach while officers bind the person’s ankles and then attach the ankle cuff to a waist cord.  Henderson never regained consciousness and died several hours later at Paradise Valley Hospital in National City.

At issue is the amount of time Henderson was left lying on his stomach while handcuffed. For the past two decades, law-enforcement, civil-rights and medical experts have debated, and never quite agreed, whether prone restraint compromises a person’s ability to breathe to the point of being lethal (one training expert advises that anytime a person is handcuffed face-down, an officer on scene should hold his or her breath as a way to determine when the subject should be rolled onto his side so he can get a good breath).