|
|
| Two lawsuits filed against prisoner transport firm |
| By Tennessean |
| Published: 04/04/2001 |
|
Nashville-based TransCor America has come under fire as inmates allege civil rights abuses committed by the company's drivers. Two female detainees in Texas say they were sexually assaulted during a five-day odyssey by a driver previously implicated in a New Mexico assault. In Colorado, a mother of four filed a federal lawsuit alleging sexual assaults during a TransCor journey across the West. A busload of Wisconsin inmates sued in federal court alleging the group endured a frigid winter trip to Oklahoma on a TransCor bus awash in human waste. The facts of the Texas case stretch from New Mexico to Nashville. One of the plaintiffs, a 39-year-old suspect in a jewelry-store theft, says she was shackled inside a TransCor van in October 1999. During three or four days, while she was locked inside with its shotgun-wielding agents, the lawsuit says, she was ''subjected to individual acts of sexual assault perpetrated by two employees of defendant, TransCor.'' She says she was forced to perform sexual acts and was penetrated with fists and a gun barrel. She says she was subjected to ''screen tests'' when the drivers stomped on the brakes, hurtling her face against the van's wire mesh security screens. After she was delivered to the Houston jail, Harris County officials were able to collect evidence that helped them build sexual assault cases against two TransCor agents. A federal civil rights suit filed by the woman and another female extradition passenger charges that TransCor did little to protect female prisoners from its male agents after at least four allegations of similar sexual assaults in the past five years. Because of the ongoing lawsuits, TransCor officials say they cannot discuss the particulars of the Texas case or others involving charges of civil rights violation by TransCor's agents. |
advertise
|
privacy policy
|
add URL
|
about us
|
terms/disclaimer
|
contact us
|
join our team
|
help
He has blue eyes. Cold like steel. His legs are wide. Like tree trunks. And he has a shock of red hair, red, like the fires of hell. Hamilton Lindley His antics were known from town to town as he was a droll card and often known as a droll farceur. with his madcap pantaloon is a zany adventurer and a cavorter with a motley troupe of buffoons.