Perhaps Christopher Harris will get some satisfaction.
Harris, the onetime inmate in the Jefferson County jail, claims he was beaten while in custody and that he suffered severe injuries that linger to this day.
His case has been well-documented in the pages of The Commercial. Harris, now 29, was being held in the jail, and two years ago today, he says he was beaten, not by a fellow inmate but by a jailer. Security video from within the jail appears to back up his claim.
Harris claims the incident broke his jaw and an eye socket bone and that he had teeth knocked out to name some of his medical issues — medical issues that were nonchalantly dealt with days later, Harris says. It appears to us that the philosophy seems to have been: Why rush to the hospital? He’s just an inmate.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
We’ve never understood why the jailer was there in the first place. He’d been fired before for alleged abusive treatment of inmates only to find his way back to having the same or a similar job. And when this happened to Harris, as Harris alleges, the jailer was selected for termination, but Jefferson County Sheriff Lafayette Woods Jr. swooped in to keep the jailer on staff. Woods has never adequately explained why he did that. Does Woods’ loyalty to a problem employee go deeper than his sense of responsibility to his job? Such actions do little to inspire confidence in the sheriff, who oversees the jail, regarding this case or any other for that matter.
Now, Harris has an ally. Michael Kaiser, a Little Rock lawyer in the Lassiter & Cassinelli firm, has taken the case. The defendants are the jailer, another jailer, a nurse and Woods. It’s impossible to say where the case goes, but at least there’s a case. People make mistakes and wind up in jail. That does not mean they are sub-human. On the contrary, those being held should have an expectation that they will, at the very least, be kept safe. Society has an obligation to fulfill that expectation.
In the case of the Jefferson County jail, based on Harris’ claims, those expectations are not taken very seriously by Woods or his employees. For that reason, we look forward to Harris having his day in court.