from George Mallinckrodt
George's Note: I knew Harold Hempstead from when I was still
working in the psychiatric ward at Dade CI. He was housed in J3 - steps away
from my old office and where Darren Rainey was killed. Concerned about inmate
abuse, he told me how guards, thinking he wasn't listening as he did custodial
chores, amused themselves with the latest torment they perpetrated on mentally
ill patients.
Many know that I took steps to bring Rainey's killer to
justice after a former coworker called two days after his scalding death and
blurted out, "THEY KILLED HIM!" But my efforts pale in comparison to
Harold's ongoing campaign inside the FL DOC. I am awed by his courage and
tenacity.
I worry about Harold given the ability of the DOC to get rid
of people who have the temerity to question their cover-up philosophy. It's my
hope this added publicity will protect him somewhat. Please take the time to
sign the petition below to protect Harold Hempstead. It is no exaggeration to
say that he is at risk daily of being murdered while he is still in the control
of the Florida Department of Corrections.
The inmate who exposed Florida prisons’ culture of cruelty
BY JULIE K. BROWN
Harold Hempstead is a man with two conflicting narratives.
One is a criminal past that sent him to prison for life. The other, a
courageous pursuit of justice that has shaken the corrupt and crumbling
foundation of Florida’s prison system.
Hempstead didn’t set out to be a hero and, perhaps to some
people, he isn’t a hero at all. But it is likely that no one would have ever
known about the death of a mentally ill inmate named Darren Rainey, or about
the systemic culture of physical and mental abuse of inmates in Florida
prisons, had it not been for Hempstead.
Hempstead’s steadfast determination to expose the monstrous
acts he says he witnessed ultimately brought about an overhaul of the agency,
the firings of top corrections officials and officers, federal arrests and an
ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Hempstead did all this from a prison cell — and in spite of
threats, intimidation and a haunting fear that one day he would suffer “an
accident” and never wake up.
“What he did took real courage,” said Malcolm Tomlin, a
retired Florida corrections officer and prison minister who led Bible studies
with Hempstead at Dade Correctional Institution.
“He saw something was wrong and he took a stand. … He was
blackballed with the officers. That will go with him wherever he is sent. But
he did what was right.”
Hempstead reached out to the Miami Herald — ultimately
maintaining a correspondence and engaging in regular phone calls, one as as
recently as Friday — after authorities ignored his pleas to investigate the
death of Rainey.
The convicted burglar didn’t always do the right thing. At
the age of 13, Hempstead was already stealing and getting into trouble on the
streets of St. Petersburg, where he grew up the youngest of three siblings.
While still at 16th Street Middle School in St. Petersburg, he was recruited by
detectives, who paid him handsomely to give them tips that helped them solve
crimes, according to confidential police reports obtained by the Herald with
Hempstead’s permission.
By his early 20s, however, he had started to fall out of
favor with police, some of whom tried to arrest him a couple of times, not
knowing that he was engaged in intelligence gathering for another detective
squad. One time, he was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, but the
charge was dropped after the cops accepted his explanation that he was playing
a role, setting up a drug dealer, the records show.
But it was a dog named Molly that really led to his undoing.
In 1999, police investigating a rash of burglaries in his
neighborhood found the dead German shepherd’s ashes in a stolen urn, along with
about $200,000 in pilfered loot stashed in a U-Haul at his home. He was charged
with 38 burglaries.
Though he had no history of violence, the judge, calling him
“a despicable human being,” sentenced him to 165 years in prison. He was just
22 when he entered the Florida prison system.
Pinellas County Circuit Judge Brandt Downey III, accused
prior to that of tainting jurors, was later defrocked in a pornography scandal.
For all intents and purposes, time has no meaning for Hempstead,
who is now 39. He unsuccessfully appealed his sentence, and sued or filed
hand-written motions against the police, the judge, the prosecutor and even his
own lawyer.
Over the past 15 years, Hempstead has developed a deep
religious faith and now worships and reads the Bible daily. He has enrolled in
dozens of correspondence courses, earning certifications in everything from
paralegal work to mopping up hazardous materials. Eventually, in 2010, he was
trusted enough to move freely about the confinement units — a more restrictive
form of incarceration than general population — as an orderly at Dade
Correctional Institution south of Homestead.
The facility, set amid farm stands and alligator swamps on
the edge of the Florida Everglades, has been described — even by staff and
officers who work there —as a squalid, un-airconditioned, putrid hell. Up until
late last year, the roofs, the plumbing and the electrical systems were
deteriorated, and the kitchen was so filled with rodent droppings and infested with
roaches that it flunked several health inspections and was designated a health
hazard during an audit last year.
“In many housing units, it was not possible to turn showers
and faucets off completely, but in one dorm the drain was so clogged that water
ran out on the housing floor. In D housing unit, there was a broken light
fixture hanging from the ceiling above an occupied bunk,” auditors found, among
other hazards listed in the report.
Hempstead had already seen the inside of almost half of
Florida’s 49 state-run prisons, and to him, Dade really wasn’t any worse than
the others.
By that time, he said, he was used to seeing horrible things
in Florida prisons: inmates being starved, beaten, sexually assaulted, mentally
tortured by officers and gassed for no reason. Officers putting laxatives in
inmates’ food, urinating on their clothing and toothbrushes and paying inmates
to attack other inmates. Sick inmates begging for medical care, only to be told
they were faking. Even basic necessities like soap and toilet paper were often
rationed to make their lives more miserable.
But at Dade, while working in the TCU, or transitional care
unit that houses mentally ill inmates, he said he witnessed officers punish and
torture prisoners who were the most vulnerable — those who were so sick they
had no control over their faculties.
Hempstead grew up around mental illness. His father, an
alcoholic, died when he was 7, and he and his brother and sister were raised by
their mother, who was committed to psychiatric hospitals off and on for as long
as a year.
“I did want to help my mom out with the issues she had,
going in and out of hospitals. She would tell me about the things that happened
to her, being tied down and stuck with needles. As a child I couldn’t help my
mom out and I wanted to,” Hempstead said.
He tried helping some of the inmates at Dade, slipping them
food or arranging to get prisoners a mattress when they had none. But, in many
instances, there was really nothing he could do without being punished himself,
so he did what he was ordered to do — even if it meant throwing a bucket of
chemicals on an inmate to get him to behave.
Then, in January 2012, the guards came up with an even more
creative and sinister way to torture prisoners in the mental health unit:
placing them in scalding hot showers to control them.
“Then it hit me,” Hempstead recalled. “It felt like 1,000
pounds of sadness fell on me. It overtook me. I was in my cell crying. I just
couldn’t take it anymore.”
Taunted and tormented
On June 23, 2012, Darren Rainey, a 5-foot-6 inmate, was
handcuffed by officers. Rainey, 50, had been at Dade only a few months and was
serving a two-year term for drug possession.
Rainey, a Muslim with whom the Christian Hempstead had
little in common and scant contact, suffered from severe schizophrenia. On that
evening, on the pretext that Rainey had misbehaved by defecating in his cell,
two officers, Cornelius Thompson and Roland Clarke, the latter a 6-foot-4,
300-pound former college football lineman, led him to a 12-by-3 shower stall.
They threw him a bar of soap, locked the door, then turned
on the water, which was cranked up to more than 180 degrees. According to
Hempstead and other inmates interviewed by the Herald over the past year, the
officers laughed and taunted Rainey as he begged for forgiveness, gasping for
air in the scalding steam. They then left, and when they returned nearly two
hours later, Rainey was dead, with pieces of his skin floating in the water.
Inmates would later say they were ordered by officers to
clean up the shower with bleach, throw away the fragments of his skin and never
speak about what happened or, they were told, they, too, would face the same
fate as Rainey.
“The shower treatment,” as it was called, was used by
officers on other inmates, Hempstead explained in one of many interviews with
the Herald. It was first used to control inmate Daniel Geiger, who chattered
incessantly, annoying officers. The guards sometimes purposefully placed him in
a cell next to another inmate they wanted to punish.
“Geiger was the loudest inmate in the unit. He was 110
pounds and constantly being deprived of food. I would have thought if anyone
would have collapsed and died it would have been him,” Hempstead said.
He recalled that one of the inmates suggested putting Geiger
into the shower to shut him up, and it worked.
“He kept screaming, ‘It’s hot, get me out of here!’ Then,
after 10 or 20 minutes, he stopped yelling. I think they put him in there three
or four times,” Hempstead said.
As the orderly who served inmates their food trays,
Hempstead saw how the officers devised a system for depriving prisoners of
food, sometimes for weeks. They came up with names for this treatment, possibly
inspired by football terminology.
“A two-point conversion meant no lunch or dinner for two
days. A six-point conversion was no lunch or dinner on Fridays, Saturdays and
Sundays.”
Some inmates dropped so much weight that Hempstead said one
guard — a sergeant since promoted to lieutenant — would proudly announce
“Welcome to Auschwitz,” when someone new came into the unit.
Hempstead said hungry inmates would break sprinklers just so
they would be charged criminally with vandalism and be transported to the Dade
County Jail — where they would finally be fed.
“It was definitely evil. There were times when they were
laughing as they were starving inmates. A lot of it was hard to deal with,” he
said.
Although the autopsies give another cause, Hempstead
believes two deaths that occurred while he was working in the TCU could be
attributed to the punitive lack of feeding.
“You know, I made a lot of mistakes in my life, but nothing
I did resulted in somebody dying,” he said.
Hempstead was initially apprehensive about reporting what he
saw. At first, he quietly confided in the doctors and nurses who worked for
Corizon, the private healthcare company contracted by the state to provide
medical and psychiatric care for inmates.
But it soon became apparent as the months went by that they
would do nothing.
“I threatened the doctors, told them, ‘If you don’t do this,
I’m going to get your license.’ They took an oath. I just wanted them to report
it, but they wouldn’t,” Hempstead said.
The corrections officers grew bolder and began other abusive
tactics on the inmates. Sometimes, they would place a violent inmate in the
same cell with a smaller prisoner they wanted to punish and walk away, allowing
the brutal inmate to beat or sexually assault the other inmate, Hempstead said.
In December 2012, Hempstead was transferred out of Dade
Correctional to another prison, and it was then that he began in earnest to
report what was happening at the prison.
At one prison, he spoke to a psychiatric counselor.
“I told her what they were doing and she looked at me like I
was telling her a story out of a horror movie. A week later, she said, ‘We’re
going to talk about something else.’ She didn’t want to talk about Dade
anymore,” Hempstead said.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, other inmates who had
been transferred out of Dade were also reporting what happened. Their
complaints to the Department of Corrections also went unheeded.
Dade’s former warden, Jerry Cummings, in an interview last
year, admitted he heard that inmates in the mental health unit weren’t being
fed, but said he couldn’t do anything about it because he couldn’t prove it.
The cameras in the unit, he said, only captured the guards
giving the inmates trays; it was not discernible whether the trays had food on
them, he said. In prison parlance, an empty tray is known as an air tray.
“I would walk in there and the inmates would beg for food,
for soap, for a toothbrush,” Cummings said. “The officers held all the power
and if they didn’t want to feed them, they wouldn’t feed them.”
Records show that Hempstead wrote dozens of letters and
complaints about the abuse throughout 2013, sending them to the Department of
Corrections, to Miami-Dade police, to the Miami-Dade medical examiner and to
the office of Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle, which
inexplicably returned them, telling him to write to the state attorney in
Pinellas County, where Hempstead was convicted. All the crimes he alleged
happened were in Miami-Dade, not Pinellas.
He wrote to Gov. Rick Scott, who took office in 2011
pledging to slash $1 billion out of the Department of Corrections, the state’s
largest agency. Scott’s office forwarded Hempstead’s complaints to Jeffery
Beasley, the DOC’s inspector general. They were all returned to Hempstead with
no action, for various reasons. Among them: that he filed the wrong form or
that his grievance didn’t affect him personally.
“I had written a dozen or more letters, with maps of the
shower, maps of the TCU. I sent them to the medical examiner and Miami-Dade
police, but nothing happened,” Hempstead recalled.
For two years, Rainey’s case languished in the case files of
Miami-Dade police, who were entrusted with investigating it; and with the
Department of Corrections, whose inspector general’s office suspended its
investigation four months after his death, in October 2012, with no action.
It appeared that Rainey’s death would be written off as just
another in-custody death, likely the result of natural causes. Rainey’s
brother, Andre Chapman, who lives in Tampa, said the only thing he was told
about his brother’s death was that he suffered a heart attack.
“If someone put you or I in a scalding shower like that, I
think we might die of a heart attack, too,” said Chapman’s attorney, Milton C.
Grimes.
Hempstead, meanwhile, was shuffled around the prison system,
and with each stop, it seemed the officers knew about him and his crusade. They
made it clear they wanted him to shut up.
“It started with them searching me and ransacking my cell,”
he said. At the prison system’s Reception and Medical Center, north of
Gainesville, one officer reminded him how officers at the prison used to kick
the gold teeth out of inmates’ mouths — and said they used to bury other
inmates in the rec yard.
“He said, ‘You know, people can just die here. Some people
die from luck.’ I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘It would be luck for
us, not luck for them.’’’
Hempstead was sent back to Dade in June 2013 — a year after
Rainey’s death. Clarke — one of the officers who forced Rainey into the shower
— was in charge of his dorm.
“He started calling me his dog, and he was bragging about
beating the Rainey rap,” Hempstead said.
Then one day, in April 2014, Hempstead enlisted a friend on
the inside of the prison to call the Miami Herald. In order for a reporter to
interview Hempstead, he was told he needed to write the Herald, giving its
representative permission to visit him.
The first letter he wrote to the Herald was seized by the
officers. At 3 o’clock in the morning, Hempstead said he was led into a control
room, where the guards forced him on the floor and interrogated him for more
than an hour, demanding to know why he was writing to a journalist. They vowed
to throw him in solitary confinement — forever, if necessary, unless he kept
quiet.
“My biggest fear was going to confinement because I had seen
plenty of things that they did to inmates in confinement. It’s easy for them to
put medicine in your food; you can O.D. an inmate. I worked there and knew all
their tricks,” Hempstead said.
He was scared but pressed on. An interview with the Herald
was finally arranged, then abruptly canceled by the DOC. It was rescheduled. By
then, a reporter had started digging, and submitting public records requests to
the police, the medical examiner and the prison agency.
Hempstead was also submitting public records requests from
behind bars. He ordered reports from the police, the prison system and other
agencies.
On May 23, 2014, the Herald published the first in what
would be a series of stories about Rainey and other suspicious deaths and
assaults of inmates in Florida prisons.
Over the past year, the agency’s secretary was replaced,
wardens and corrections officers were fired, the FBI made arrests, the state
Legislature called for hearings, and the governor and new secretary, Julie
Jones, enacted reforms. Partly due to prodding by a civil lawsuit filed by
Disability Rights Florida, Dade’s transitional care unit has been renovated,
complete with new surveillance cameras, TVs and a wall mural.
Despite all that’s been done, Rainey’s case remains open,
his autopsy is still filed away in the medical examiner’s office and his family
hasn’t been told how and why he died.
To this day, no one from the Department of Corrections has
interviewed Hempstead about Rainey. In a statement Friday, the agency said it
continues to cooperate with other law enforcement agencies investigating the
case.
“In my opinion, because Rainey was black, poor and mentally
ill, to a lot of people his life had no significance,” Hempstead said recently.
“But to me, if we have that opinion on the value of life, and if staff thinks
they can get away with killing inmates, then they are going to get away with
anything.’’
Miami Harold
These days, corrections officers and some inmates call
Hempstead “Miami Harold,’’ owing to his frequent talks with Herald journalists.
His friends and family continue to refer to him as Joey, his middle name.
Because Florida has no parole, he must serve at least 85
percent of his sentence, despite an exemplary record behind bars that has
shaved a few years off his sentence. He is not scheduled to be released until
2161, nearly a century and a half from now.
Like Hempstead, some 60 percent of Florida’s 100,000 inmates
are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Florida is second only to Louisiana
among states with the largest number of inmates serving life for nonviolent
crimes, according to a 2013 analysis of state and federal statistics by the
American Civil Liberties Union.
At the time Hempstead was sentenced in 2000, Judge Downey
told him: “I hope you die in prison.”
“The problem with Mr. Hempstead is he thought he was smarter
than everybody else,” said Downey, now retired and living in Indiana. “He was
arrogant, abrasive, sort of an ‘I know better than you’ kind of person.”
The prosecutor, Pat Siracusa, recalls that, at the time,
Hempstead’s case was one of the biggest burglary trials in Pinellas County. It
involved more than 80 witnesses and 350 pieces of evidence. Hempstead was
accused of being the mastermind behind a burglary ring that stole everything
from deer antlers to gold watches.
At trial, his accomplice testified that Hempstead taught him
everything, right down to picking out which residences to break into, how to
get in and how to get out undetected.
“He hit neighborhoods he was familiar with, places where he
had cut lawns,” Siracusa said of Hempstead. “It was a lot of stuff and a lot of
lives that were disrupted.”
Hempstead insists he didn’t break into homes, but
acknowledges he fenced stolen goods. The accomplice who fingered him served no
time in prison.
One of the victims, Jeff Fineran, said he had about $7,000
worth of property stolen, though he managed to have some of it returned. He
recalls wanting Hempstead to get a stiff sentence, but was surprised at just
how harsh it was.
“He didn’t take somebody’s life,” Fineran said. “I think he
should have a long sentence but not where he won’t ever have a free breath of
air. Forgive and forget. All I can do is pray for him.”
Siracusa, who is now a judge, remains convinced that
Hempstead deserves to be behind bars. But he declined to comment on whether,
had he been the judge, he would have imposed a 165-year sentence.
Bob Dillinger, who has been public defender in Pinellas
County since 1997, doesn’t recall the case, but he did remember Hempstead’s
judge. Dillinger once attempted to have Downey removed from 200 cases because
the judge made derogatory comments about a defendant to a jury.
Downey later acknowledged his comments in that case were
improper and sent letters of apology to the six jurors who decided the case in
1999.
Downey, a 17-year veteran of the bench, continued to
generate controversy, including accusations that he made improper utterances
toward female litigators. And in 2005, after a virus infected the courthouse
computer system, technicians tracked the problem down to Downey, who had been
using his office laptop to look at pornography.
He retired a year later as part of what was essentially a
plea deal brokered with the Judicial Qualifications Commission that was
approved by the Florida Supreme Court.
The judge’s comments from the bench in Hempstead’s case
should have been enough to grant him a new sentencing, said Jeff Weiner, a
Miami criminal defense attorney and former president of the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
“That judge made comments that were completely inappropriate
and out of context to the crime that he committed,” Weiner said.
‘Protective management’
Hempstead is now housed at Columbia Correctional Institution
in north-central Florida, one of the state’s toughest prisons. State
corrections officials call his status “protective management.” He believes that
is a misnomer, and that protective management is one of the most dangerous
places in a prison.
“I’ve been through just about everything you can be
subjected to in prison just short of being killed,” said Hempstead. He spends
most of his days in a 12-by-10 cell with no air conditioning.
After his most recent transfer out of Dade — for his own
safety, after the Herald quoted him by name, with his permission — he lost all
the privileges he enjoyed while working as an orderly.
Hempstead is now linked to “a high-profile investigation,”
and has limited privileges. He is allowed to go to chapel two hours a week and
has access to gym equipment. Still, in the summer, when temperatures climb to
90 degrees or more, inmates sleep on the concrete floor, along with rodents and
insects.
The others in protective management include some of the most
vicious inmates at Columbia, some of them placed there after they were accused
of beating or sexually assaulting other inmates.
“I just thought, what kind of a place did they send me to?
It seemed like a killing ground of inmate violence,” Hempstead said.
He has filed a lawsuit — the latest in a series of long,
handwritten court pleadings over the years — seeking release into the general
prison population, saying that he has been traumatized by all the violence he
has witnessed in Florida prisons.
“What rationale is there that he gets a longer sentence than
most people who commit murder?” asked Howard Finkelstein, Broward County’s
chief public defender.
“The interests of all people in Florida have been served by
this man by revealing the horrors and violence of both corrections officers and
inmates. Because of him, we are the better for it.”
PRISON IMPROVEMENTS
Since Harold Hempstead revealed details of the death of
Darren Rainey, a series of changes have occurred, including:
1) Corrections officers in the mental health ward at Dade
Correctional have been reassigned. The two officers most directly involved in
putting Rainey in the scalding shower have left the agency. The warden and
assistant warden were forced to retire.
2) The U.S. Justice Department initiated an investigation
into Rainey's death.
3) The head of the prison system, then-Secretary Michael
Crews, instituted crisis-intervention training for corrections officers, two
new centers to help inmates re-enter society and new policies aimed at
improving accountability among officers.
4) Crews turned 82 inmate death investigations over to the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and FDLE was assigned to handle most
future in-custody death investigations.
5) Crews created an “inmate mortality database" to
publicly account for the deaths of Florida inmates.
6) Crews ordered a department-wide audit of use of force
against inmates, which had doubled over the past five years.
7) Crews summarily fired over 32 corrections officers
involved in excessive force against inmates.
8) Dade Correctional's mental health unit was renovated to
include high-tech cameras with audio, televisions and murals. An ombudsman was
assigned to oversee patient treatment and care.
9) Crews retired, and his replacement, Julie Jones, was
given a mandate to overhaul the agency.
10) Jones rebid of the agency’s healthcare contracts.
11) Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order calling for an
independent audit of the entire prison system, focusing on staffing,
organization and ways to improve safety, security and the rehabilitation of
inmates.
12) New surveillance camera systems were ordered installed
throughout the prison system, and Jones has proposed putting air conditioning
in all facilities.
