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| Ex-Inmate Wins $8 In Lawsuit |
| By Fort Smith Times Record |
| Published: 07/03/2003 |
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Jamie Martine gets $8 for time spent in the Sebastian County (Ark.) jail's 'rubber room,' a federal judge ruled June 25. U.S. District Judge Robert Dawson, following the recommendation of a federal magistrate who heard Martine's case, ordered that Martine receive $8 in damages for the eight days he spent in the jail's rubber-lined room. Martine, former owner of Working Man Construction in Fort Smith, was arrested on charges of terrorist threatening. After his release from jail, he sued a handful of jail officials and administrators in U.S. District Court in Fort Smith. Dawson's ruling included the finding that Mike Conger, the jail administrator, and Georgia Brown, a shift supervisor, were at fault for ordering Martine into the room. That, too, was the finding of U.S. Magistrate Judge Beverly Stites Jones, who heard Martine's testimony in her court and made a surprise visit to the jail afterward. Martine, in protest of his treatment at the jail, embarked on a hunger strike. In response, jail officials ordered him to be held in the rubber room. 'Martine has shown that jail officials had no legitimate reason to consign him to living quarters without bedding, toiletries, access to the outside world through media or mail, and without reading or writing materials while dressed in a smock,' Jones stated in her recommendation to Dawson. The jail claimed Martine was placed in the cell because an inmate who launches a hunger strike is seen as a threat to his own life and must be viewed constantly by surveillance camera. Martine and other inmates testified that as many as five men occupied the 8-foot-by-10-foot cell at times. The cell had one toilet and no bedding materials. |
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