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 MICHAEL
VALENT
1968-1997
Michael Valent a young man
and one of the thousands and thousands of mentally ill people being held
in our American prisons. His imprisonment ended in murder by Utah State
prison staff, and covered up by state officials. His death came has a
result of constant denial of hishuman rights.
Angie Armstrong and Annie,
her partner, work very hard in their small animal grooming business in
Salt Lake City. Life has not been easy for either one of them. Their walls
are covered with pictures of their children as they call them, animals
they have been grooming for many years. "Many of our children have
died because we have been doing this job for such a long time,” says
Angie.
As they ask me to sit down,
I realized Angie’s face looked familiar to me, I had just seen it
in the Geraldo tape done about Michael's murder. I had just viewed at
my home. Angie’s eyes look just like Michael's eyes with the same
deep brown color and an overwhelming sadness. Annie said, "we have
gone through hell with this thing with Michael.”
The pictures of Michael, his
mother Angie carries in her wallet are of a handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed
young man and a picture of a classic young boy taken possibly as a school
picture. Annie said, "Michael loved to fish and we always had a great
time fishing.”
Michael Valent was raised by
his mother in a poor hard-working family, as a young adult he started
showing signs of major mental illness, and like most low income families
without medical insurance, had little if any treatment. In his late twenties
he was accused of killing his Grandmother during one of his delusional
episodes. He was put in a mental hospital and then prison where his medications
were poorly handled and he often didn't receive them.
In 1997 29 year-old schizophrenic
inmate Michael Valent was stripped naked and strapped to a restraining
chair by a swat team in riot gear. This was done because he refused to
take a pillowcase off his head. He kept the pillowcase over his head because
it kept the 24-hour a day electric light, and the noise of clanging metal
doors, and the screaming of other prisoners and guards at bay. He also
had not been given his medications that helped keep the voices and confusion
he heard and felt away. The prison guards say shortly after he was released
from the torture chair some sixteen hours later, Valent collapsed and
died from a blood clot that blocked an artery to his heart. Angie, his
mother, was told by other inmates that Michael was dead and the guards
dragged him into the shower to wash off feces he had been sitting naked
in for hours.
The coroner pronounced Michael’s
death homocide, but no one was ever convicted of murder because the prisons
have few people to monitor what is happening now and has always happened
in prisons in the United States of America and all over the world.
The chilling incident made
national news only because it happened to be videotaped. Director of the
Utah Department of Corrections, Lane McCotter, who defended use of the
chair, which was developed years earlier in Iran, resigned in the ensuing
firestorm which put the restraining chair in the basement and replaced
it with a restraining board. McCotter had also been fired from a prison
in Texas for erasing tapes showing torture in a prison there and has many
other accusations against him.
Gary Deland and Lane McCotter
both past directors of the Utah State Prison, partners and both from Utah
were hired by a private prison company and have since been hired by the
Bush Administration, namely Attorney General Ashcroft. They were paid
hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild Iraqi prisons and trained
guards in the Abu Ghaib prison.
After I spoke to Michaels mother
I went home and Goggled Lane McCotter on the computer and was amazed that
Michael’s story is being told in every newspaper in the world. I
called his mother and told her what I had found. She said, "it is
like he has come back to make sure this will not happen to any one else.”
If only that were true Michael would not have died in vane.
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