Fresh Loaf

Georgia prison officials finally have been sanctioned by a federal judge, six years after teenage inmate Damon Lee’s death and nearly five years after CL’s Mara Shalhoup’s horrifying story drew attention to the case.

U.S. District Court Judge W. Louis Sands found prison officials in contempt of court in the lawsuit brought by Lee’s mother, Johnnie Kitchen. And he said he’d tell the jury that prison officials “deliberately violated” Lee’s rights.

Publishing this heart-wrenching story was one of my proudest moments at CL, although the tale is so sickening that even the most hardened newsman would wish it never happened. Lee, convicted of trying to steal a car and given a ridiculously harsh sentence, was isolated in a cell with a much larger inmate with a history of violence. And it gets worse …

Here’s the intro to Mara’s story:

On the night of Oct. 27, 1996, Damon Tyrone Lee — barely 17 and moments into one of his worst-ever decisions — was placed in a patrol car and driven to the Ware County jail. The trip marked the beginning of the end of Lee’s abbreviated life. He would leave jail for prison, be transferred from one correctional hellhole to the next, and pass his last five years behind bars.

In his order, an obviously angry Sands said prison officials “cannot or refuse to produce key information that they are charged by law” to keep, and that prison officials wouldn’t identify those officials responsible for placing Lee in a cell with Leon Murphy. Here’s Bill Rankin’s story today on the ruling.

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