Homeless Man Murdered By New York City Government Was in Rigor Mortis

I’ve written earlier about this case. See “New York City Government Kills Man For Sleeping In Stairwell” to get up to speed. In brief, a homeless, mentally ill man was arrested for sleeping in a stairwell and thrown in jail to await trial (!) and since the solitary confinement cell he was dumped in was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (over 38 degrees Celsius) he died in the cell with nobody noticing.

Now to turns out that the victim was already in rigor mortis when his corpse was noticed in its cell. Rigor mortis generally doesn’t start to set in until several hours after death, taking 12-24 hours to set in fully, then reversing after 72 hours. (Rigor mortis is the condition in which the corpse becomes extremely stiff.) That means he may have been dead for longer before his demise was discovered than previously asserted by “the authorities” (the people in power).

Still not a peep from the local media- and not just the establishment media but, shamefully, the “alternative” media too [1]- about the culpability of police for arresting a helpless, destitute, mentally ill homeless man for the “crime” of sleeping in a stairwell of a public housing project (warehouse for poor people) instead of moving him along or taking him to a homeless shelter. Still not a peep about the even more culpable judge who set BAIL for the man, at $2,500, which was the same as setting no bail, meaning the judge effectively sentenced the man to an indeterminate jail time until the case would be resolved (which unless the man immediately pled guilty could drag on for months- there have been people imprisoned at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex, for years awaiting resolution of their cases). So the judge imposed a punishment on a defendant (whose crime was sleeping in a stairwell, officially “disorderly conduct,” a catch-all the police use to arrest people for anything they don’t like- absurdly, here sleep is “disorderly”) before any conviction. Imprisoned for sleeping where sleeping isn’t allowed. Well, that’ll teach the mentally ill to shape up and act right! Get a job and rent an exorbitantly expensive apartment, you bum!

The unrealism of the tacit demands placed on people, even mentally ill people, in the brutal, dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all economic system of the U.S., is matched by the cruelty revealed in this case. The cruelty is not an accidental byproduct, or an endless series of “lapses.” Nor it is merely an inevitable result of “human nature,” “man’s inhumanity to man,” the classic fallback alibi of cruel systems, in cluding the American one. Cruelty is in fact part of the structure of the social/political/economic structure. A ruthless economic system needs a callous and cruel enforcement system, which it has in spades. In a normal human society, sleeping wouldn’t be a crime just because someone is homeless and mentally ill. Police wouldn’t arrest people for such a “crime.” And a judge that threw a man in jail for such a “crime” would be removed from the bench.

In the U.S., none of this is even seen as unusual, much less wrong. The only issue here is why the man was allowed to die in his cell, and nobody noticed. Only the jail guards are subject to rebuke, for dereliction of duty. They allowed a public relations problem for their masters to arise.

Particular cases like this, which are NOT aberrations but rather ubiquitous and continuous, put the lie to U.S. propaganda that America is the “freest nation in the world.” This permanent propaganda campaign, a founding edifice of the U.S. ideological system going all the way back to the rebellion against the British crown, has been so effective that not only do most Americans believe it, but apparently people all over the world believe it. The facts belie it.

And even some people who should know better believe it. For example, Noam Chomsky, about as scathing a critic of U.S. imperialism (although he doesn’t use the word “imperialism,” generally) as there is, over the years has repeatedly asserted in speeches that the U.S. is “the freest country in the world.” It’s an assertion he makes without offering evidence- assertion without evidence being a practice he excoriates others for, ironically. (The speeches are on youtube.com.)

1] And the most prominent dissident American media organ, the television and Internet broadcaster Democracy Now! (democracynow.org), which does much excellent and vital work, is based in New York City. It reported the death in the same narrow framework as the ruling class media did.